Liberal WatchDog Group Calls for Investigation of White House Use of Personal Email Accounts to Communicate with Lobbyists; Staffers often Meet Up with Lobbyists at Nearby Cafe

A liberal watchdog has called for an investigation into whether White House employees are using personal e-mail accounts to contact lobbyists in violation of federal law.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to House Oversight Committee chairman Ed Towns (D-N.Y.) and ranking member Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) Monday asking them to initiate an investigation into whether White House employees used personal e-mail accounts to contact lobbyists in violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA). 

The letter also takes White House staff to task for meeting with lobbyists in nearby coffee shops instead of in the White House, where the meetings would be recorded in the White House visitor logs.

“By having off-the-record meetings and e-mail exchanges with lobbyists, the White House is attempting [to] reap the benefits of conversations and interactions with knowledgeable lobbyists while publicly promoting the belief that the White House maintains a discreet distance from those very same lobbyists,” CREW executive director Melanie Sloan writes.

The letter came in response to allegations first reported by the New York Times last week. According to the report, lobbyists routinely get e-mails from White House staff members’ personal accounts rather than official accounts that can eventually become public record. As part of a settlement with CREW over missing Bush administration e-mails, the White House assured the watchdog that its system prevents employees from accessing personal e-mail accounts.

for full article: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/106261-watchdog-wants-investigation-of-white-house-emails

Rep. Stark (D-Ca) Needs to Learn that his Constituents are his EMPLOYER

Obama Not “Left Enough” for the Left, So Sayeth Garofalo

Kagan Manipulated Data in Partial Birth Abortion Reports: A Possible Smoking Gun if True?

Shannen Coffin was a deputy attorney general during the Bush administration, and was charged with defending the federal partial-birth abortion act in court. At National Review, he writes that documents released by the Clinton White House show Elena Kagan’s “willingness to manipulate medical science to fit the Democratic party’s political agenda on the hot-button issue of abortion.” The account, if it is true, is a shocking one.

A key event in the politics of partial-birth abortion was a report by a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ organization. That report included this statement, which the Supreme Court found highly persuasive in striking down Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban:

see full article: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026643.php

Kagan Could Not Answer if Law Telling Americans What to Eat would be Constitutional

“STOP SPENDING”; November 2nd is a Big day!

“I want this government to stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! STOP SPENDING! That’s what we want! Stop spending,” Rick Santelli yelled from the floor of the Chicago Board of Traders.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/06/28/stop_spending_cnbcs_santelli_warns_liesman_november_2nd_is_the_day.html

The New American Dream

Kagan: OK for Law to Ban Books— the Government Won’t Enforce It !!

The Anatomy of a Failing Presidency

From the INBOX of today’s email:

An article attributed to a “Dr. Hunt”, whoever that may be, said to be a writer for American Thinker and to work at the NIH.  No matter, the content is brilliant and spot-on.  The quotations added at the end add to complement the article.

 

Anatomy of a Failing Presidency

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we’ve seen several failed presidencies–led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait– they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What’s going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn’t have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn’t connect with us. He doesn’t have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don’t align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It’s not so much that he’s a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task–all contributory of course. It’s that he’s not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn’t command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don’t add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don’t make sense and don’t correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we’ve been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he’s dissed just about every one of us–financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: “For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn’t give me enough time; if only I’d had a second term, I could have offended you too.”
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state–staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there’s always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.
Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”
“When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.” – James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
“The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.” – Tacitus
“A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn’t own.” – Unknown

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

NRA Urges Board to Stay Quiet on Kagan Confirmation

     Is this the example of the National Rifle Association’s quid pro quo?

NRA tells board members they’re not to speak out or testify against Kagan’s SCOTUS nomination.  Is this part of  the deal they cut for getting their carve-out of the “DISCLOSE ACT” bill?

http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/06/27/nra-issues-gag-order-to-its-board-members-on-elena-kagan/