Obama Exploring Tighter Gun Control Laws Through Executive Order, Bypassing Congress…

The Obama administration is exploring tighter regulation on gun policy that can be secured through an executive order, bypassing congressional approval, officials have confirmed.

The potential crackdown has prompted concern among gun rights groups in the ongoing debate surrounding gun control and Second Amendment rights.

Administration officials said talk of executive orders or agency action are being considered, amidst its crossfire over regulations with a Republican-dominated House.

The Department of Justice held a meeting on Tuesday – the first in what is expected to be a series – to explore how the administration might be able to rule by decree.

Before the meeting, officials said topics of discussion would range from encouraging more thorough background checks and more efficient data-sharing.

An administration official told Fox News: ‘The purpose of these discussions is to be a productive exchange of good ideas from folks across the spectrum. We think that’s a good place to start.’

The news follows a report last month by the Washington Post in which President Obama is quoted saying his administration was working on gun control ‘under the radar’.

The comment was reportedly made during a private meeting with his staff on March 30.

However, the prospect of the White House fulfilling an agenda behind closed doors has sparked an outcry among opponents of tighter gun control.

Gun Owners of America Director Larry Pratt told Fox News: ‘There’s a lot going on under that radar. They’ve shown us how much they are prepared to do through regulation.’

Pratt referred to a proposal from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in which dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas would be required to report multiple sales to the same person of certain kinds of rifles.

A study released by the ATF in January that examined restricting certain shotguns from being imported to the U.S. has been heavily denounced by the National Rifle Association. The write-up is based on a 1968 law that restricts imports of firearms to those used for ‘sporting purposes’.

Another proposal by longtime Senate gun control advocate Frank Lautenberg bans high-capacity ammunition clips, like the one that left Giffords wounded.

A bill introduced earlier this month by New York Representative McCarthy would impose stricter penalties on states that fail to enter the names of people prohibited from buying guns into a national database. It would also require background checks for all gun sales, including at gun shows.

McCarthy spokesman Shams Tarek said President Obama has yet to endorse her proposal.

‘That’s just something we haven’t heard the president say anything about,’ Tarek said, adding the Obama administration is ‘very, very much in listening mode’.

In March, the President addressed his concerns over gun violence to the Arizona Daily Star, supporting more thorough background checks.

While stressing his support of an individual’s right to bear arms, as protected in the Second Amendment, he defended his stance, stating ‘there’s more we can to to prevent gun violence’.

Gun-rights activists are criticising the efforts, citing a study released by the FBI in September that showed gun sales were up in 2009, while violent crimes of all types declined by 5.3 per cent.

Figures from the National Instant Background Check System (NICS) showed 14million guns were sold in 2009, the biggest year since the system began recording data in 1998.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said enforcement of current gun control laws should be of primary concern.

Arulanandam told Fox News: ‘The American public does not support gun control… What the American public wants is for criminals to be punished for their mistakes.’

From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392132/Obama-eyeing-gun-control-radar.html#ixzz1NrdK04iZ

How Obama “Honored” Fallen Soldiers on Memorial Day – By Playing His Record 70th Round of Golf

After sitting and chewing on some gum (Nicrorette?) during the Joplin Memorial service yesterday, Obama decided to honor the fallen soldiers this Memorial Day by playing a record 70th round of golf.

Mark Knoller of CBS reports on this via Twitter:

Maybe what presidents like most about golf courses, they get to drive a golf cart. (and at Camp David.)

Last Monday at about this time he was on his way to Moneygall, Ireland to raise a pint to his Irish heritage.

Pres Obama is playing 90-degree golf at Ft. Belvoir in Va. It’s his 70th golf outing as president; his 18th at Belvoir.

It may be hot. 91° the current reading in DC. But not too hot for some presidential golf.

FORE!! His golfing buddies included junior White House staffer Ben Finkenbinder, White House Trip Director Marvin Nicholson, and Energy Department staffer David Katz. What? No Reggie Love?

From:  http://www.fireandreamitchell.com/2011/05/30/how-obama-honored-the-fallen-on-memorial-day-by-playing-his-record-70th-round-of-golf/

 

Thank You, Obama! Canada’s Economy Expanding at Twice the Rate of U.S.

Canada’s economy expanded at a 3.9% annualized pace in January through March, the fastest clip in a year and more than double the rate in the U.S., as businesses replenished inventories and boosted investment spending and exports rose while consumer and government spending stalled, Statistics Canada said Monday.

Gross domestic product growth was marginally below the consensus call of 4%, and also undershot the Bank of Canada’s 4.2% forecast.

GDP growth accelerated from a downwardly revised 3.1% …

From:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576355170933584418.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Remember When Obama Said He’d Go “Line By Line” Through the Federal Budget, “To Make Sure We’re Not Spending Unwisely”?

The Senate’s top watchdog on government waste, in a new report Thursday, said taxpayer money has gone to fund such programs as Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole, testing shrimp’s exercise ability on a treadmill and a laundry-folding robot, all funded by the National Science Foundation.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he identified more than $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF, ranging from questionable studies to exorbitant operating costs, and in some cases duplication by the science agency of operations performed by other agencies.

At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate.

“There is little, if any, obvious scientific benefit to some NSF projects, such as a YouTube rap video, a review of event ticket prices on stubhub.com, a ‘robot hoedown and rodeo,’ or a virtual recreation of the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair,” Mr. Coburn said in a letter to taxpayers he wrote introducing the 73-page report, documented by more than 350 footnotes.

In one instance NSF employees, in their spare time, engaged in a Jell-O wrestling contest at the agency’s McMurdo research station at the South Pole. In another case, the agency paid $559,681 to test sick shrimp’s metabolism, which one researcher said was “the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill.”

Mr. Coburn’s report noted that the researchers found sick shrimp “did not perform as well and did not recover as well from exercise as healthy shrimp.”

An NSF spokeswoman said agency officials have a “gold-standard approach to peer review” for the projects they spend money on.

“While no agency is without flaws, NSF has been diligent about addressing concerns from members of Congress about workforce and grant management issues, and NSF’s excellent record of tracking down waste and prosecuting wrongdoing is apparent from Sen. Coburn’s report,” said Dana Topousis, the spokeswoman. “We believe that no other funding agency in the world comes close to NSF for giving taxpayers the best return on their investment.”

The agency has an annual budget of $6.9 billion, and accounts for about one-fifth of all national taxpayer-funded research at colleges and universities.

Mr. Coburn, in his report, said audits of NSF show it regularly fails to meet management goals. One 2005 audit found almost half of the reports the agency is required to file were submitted either late or not at all.

From:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/26/tax-dollars-shrimp-treadmills-jell-o-wrestling/

Mychal Massie: Is Obama Slowly Cracking Up?

At a time when many Americans can barely afford Burger King and a movie, Obama boasts of spending a billion dollars on his re-election campaign. Questioned at a recent appearance about the spiraling fuel costs, Obama said, “Get used to it” and with an insouciant grin and chortle, he told another person at the event, who complained about the effect high fuel prices were having on his family, to “get a more fuel-efficient car.”

The Obamas behave as if they were sharecroppers living in a trailer and hit the Powerball, but instead of getting new tires for their trailer and a new pickup truck, they moved to Washington.  And instead of making possum pie, with goats and chickens in the front yard, they’re spending and living large at taxpayer expense opulent vacations, gala balls, resplendent dinners and exclusive command performances at the White House, grand date nights, golf, basketball, more golf, exclusive resorts and still more golf.

Expensive, ill-fitting and ill-chosen wigs and fashions hardly befit the first lady of the United States.  The Obamas have behaved in every way but presidential which is why it’s so offensive when we hear Obama say, in order “to restore fiscal responsibility, we all need to share in the sacrifice but we don’t have to sacrifice the America we believe in.”

The American people have been sacrificing; it is he and his family who are behaving as if they’ve never had two nickels to rub together and now, having hit the mother lode, they’re going to spend away their feelings of inadequacy at the taxpayers’ expense.

Obama continues to exhibit behavior that, at best, can be described as mobocratic and, at worst, reveals a deeply damaged individual. In a February 2010 column, I asked, “Is Obama unraveling?” I wrote that it was beginning to appear the growing mistrust of him and contempt for his policies was beginning to have a destabilizing effect on him.

At that time, I wrote that not having things go one’s way can be a bitter pill, but reasonable people don’t behave as he was behaving. He had insulted Republicans at their luncheon, where he had been an invited guest. I had speculated that was, in part, what had led him to falsely accuse Supreme Court justices before Congress, the nation and the world, during the 2010 State of the Union address.

It appeared, at that time, as if he were “fraying around the emotional edges.” That behavior has not abated it has become more pronounced. While addressing the nation, after being forced to explain the validity of his unilateral aggression with Libya, America witnessed a petulant individual scowling and scolding the public for daring to insist he explain his actions.

But during an afternoon speech to address the budget/debt, he took his scornful, unstable despotic behavior to depths that should give the nation cause for concern.  Displaying a dark psychopathy more representative of an episode of “The Tudors” television series, he invited Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to sit in the front row during his speech and then proceeded to berate both Ryan and Ryan’s budget-cutting plan. Even liberal Democrats were put off by the act. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough questioned the sanity of Obama’s actions.

Today, criticism is coming from all sides. A senior Democrat lawmaker said, “I have been very disappointed in [Obama], to the point where I’m embarrassed that I endorsed him. It’s so bad that some of us are thinking, is there some way we can replace him? How do you get rid of this guy?” (“Democrats’ Disgust with Obama,” The Daily Beast, April 15, 2011)

Steve McCann wrote: Obama’s speech “was chock full of lies, deceit and crass fear-mongering. It must be said that [he] is the most dishonest, deceitful and mendacious person in a position of power I have ever witnessed” (“The Mendacity of Barack Obama,” AmericanThinker.com, April 15, 2011).

McCann continued: “[His] performance was the culmination of four years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call [him] what he is in the bluntest of terms: a liar and a fraud. That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation [against] those who oppose his radical agenda only add to his audacity. It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by sycophants around him.”

With these being among the kinder rebukes being directed at Obama, and with people becoming less intimidated by his willingness to use race as a bludgeon, with falling poll numbers in every meaningful category and an increasingly aggressive tea-party opposition how much longer before he cracks completely?

The coming months of political life are not going to be pleasant for Obama.  Possessed by a self-perceived palatine mindset, that in his mind places him above criticism, how long before he cracks in public?  Can America risk a man with a documented track record of lying and misrepresenting truth as a basic way of life, who is becoming increasingly more contumelious?

Mychal Massie is chairman of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives-Project 21 a conservative black think tank located in Washington, D.C. He was recognized as the 2008 Conservative Man of the Year by the Conservative Party of Suffolk County, N.Y.  He is a nationally recognized political activist, pundit and columnist. He has appeared on Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NBC, Comcast Cable and talk radio programming nationwide.  A former self-employed business owner of more than 30 years, Massie can be followed at mychal-massie.com.

From:  http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=288657#ixzz1Jxz2lPuD 

Michelle Obama Invites Rapper Who Writes About Killing Cops, Burning George Bush, to Speak at White Houses Poetry Reading

First Lady Michelle Obama has scheduled a poetry evening for Wednesday, and she’s invited several poets, including a successful Chicago poet and rapper, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA “Common.”

However, Lynn is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush.

Back in 2003, First Lady Laura Bush held a poetry evening, and she invited several poets to reprise the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Although none of those poets had urged violence against a president, Bush canceled the event after left-of-center poets protested and threatened to disrupt the event.

Here’s a sample of Common’s work, transcribed from a 2007 video with 837,613 viewers on YouTube. By the way, ‘Uzi’ is slang for a compact machine gun:

A Letter to the Law

Dem boy wanna talk… [indistinguishable]

Whatcha gon do if ya got one gun?

I sing a song for the hero unsung

with faces on the mural of the revolution

No looking back cos’ in back is what’s done

Tell the preacher, god got more than one son

Tell the law, my Uzi weighs a ton

I walk like a warrior,

from them I won’t run

On the streets, they try to beat us like a drum

In Cincinnati, another brother hung

A guinea won’t see the sun

with his family stung

They want us to hold justice

but you handed me none

The same they did to Kobe and Michael Jackson

make them the main attraction

Turn around and attack them

Black gem in the rough

You’re rugged enough

Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch

Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun

I got the black strap to make the cops run

They watching me, I’m watching them

Them dick boys got a lock of cock in them

My people on the block got a lot of pok* in them

and when we roll together

we be rocking them to sleep

No time for that, because there’s things to be done

Stay true to what I do so the youth dream come

from project building

Seeing a fiend being hung

With that happening, why they messing with Saddam?

Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button

Killing over oil and grease

no weapons of destruction

How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one

The government’s a g-unit and they might buck young black people

Black people In the urban area one

I hold up a peace sign, but I carry a gun.

Peace, ya’ll.”

The First Lady’s office did not return a call from TheDC.

From:  http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/09/burn-a-bush-michelle-obama-invites-rapper-common-to-a-poetry-reading/

Obama Administration Wants to Tax Automobile Drivers By the Mile

The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.

The plan is a part of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act, an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly.

The White House, however, said the bill is only an early draft that was not formally circulated within the administration.

News of the draft follows a March Congressional Budget Office report that supported the idea of taxing drivers based on miles driven.

Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations.

The CBO report was requested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has proposed taxing cars by the mile as a way to increase federal highway revenues.

The proposal seems to follow up on that idea in section 2218 of the draft bill. That section would create, within the Federal Highway Administration, a Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office. It would be tasked with creating a “study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems.”

The department seemed to be aware of the need to prepare the public for what would likely be a controversial change to the way highway funds are collected. For example, the office is called on to serve a public-relations function, as the draft says it should “increase public awareness regarding the need for an alternative funding source for surface transportation programs and provide information on possible approaches.”

The draft bill says the “study framework” for the project and a public awareness communications plan should be established within two years of creating the office, and that field tests should begin within four years.

The office would be required to consider four factors in field trials: the capability of states to enforce payment, the reliability of technology, administrative costs and “user acceptance.” The draft does not specify where field trials should begin.

The new office would be funded a total of $300 million through fiscal 2017 for the project.

From:  http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/159397-obama-floats-plan-to-tax-cars-by-the-mile

Same Obama Bullshit, Different Day: Obama Won’t Release Osama Death Photo

In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday’s “60 Minutes” conducted today, President Obama said he won’t release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death.

“It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool,” said the president.

“We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies,” Mr. Obama added. “The fact of the matter is, this is somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received.”

The president said he had discussed the issue with his intelligence team, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and that they agree with the decision. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Mr. Obama made the decision today.

From:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20059739-503544.html?tag=breakingnews