01/31/16

Your handy, dandy Trump vs. Cruz comparison chart! [UPDATED]

Newly updated and presented without comment for your consideration.

Simply click each policy or issue to read the back-story.

Policy or Issue	Trump	Cruz
In 2013, supported Amnesty for all 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S.	Yes	No
In 2000, supported an Assault Weapons Ban	Yes	No
In 2015, supported “touchback” Amnesty for every illegal alien in the U.S.	Yes	No
In 2000, supported Partial-Birth Abortion	Yes	No
In 2015, lied to gun media about his past support for an Assault Weapons Ban	Yes	No
Supports seizure of private property by the government using Eminent Domain (Kelo)	Yes	No
Supports Mitch McConnell’s habitual lies to constituents and fellow GOP Senators	Yes	No
Currently courting and being courted by GOP establishment	Yes	No
Currently supports crony capitalism: billions in taxpayer ethanol subsidies	Yes	No
In 2000, supported Extended Waiting Periods to Acquire Firearms	Yes	No
Amount of debt owed to bankers	Many billions	$1 million
Amount donated to the bogus Clinton “Foundation”	$100,000	0
Spends virtually every waking moment on social media	Yes	No
Has registered as a Republican, Democrat, Independent, Republican and “No Party”	Yes	No
Has personally insulted nearly every potential running mate	Yes	No
Endorsed by GOPe icon Bob Dole, who thought Ronald Reagan was “too fringe”	Yes	No
Number of bankruptcies declared by firms he led	4	0
Amount of debt defaulted on	$4.7 billion	$0.00
Number of times married	3	1
Number of “birther” conspiracy theories circulated	2	0
Praised/endorsed Communist for Mayor of New York	Yes	No
Appears to shift his position on important issues literally overnight	?	No
A guy so stable, sober and poised that you want his finger on the button	?	Yep

As I’ve said repeatedly:

I would vote for Donald Trump over the Democrat nominee in the event he is the GOP candidate. Because I would vote for a Sesame Street character over the Democrat. But remember: you will get what you pay for.

01/31/16

How a Balanced Budget Amendment Would Give the Federal Government Lawful Power Over Whatever They Want.

By Publius Huldah

Does our existing Constitution permit the federal government to spend money on whatever they want?

No! It contains precise limits on federal spending.

Federal spending is limited by the enumerated powers delegated to the federal government. If you go through the Constitution and highlight all the powers delegated to Congress and the President, you will get a complete list of the objects on which Congress is permitted to spend money. Here’s the list:

The Census (Art. I, §2, cl. 3)
Publishing the Journals of the House and Senate (Art. I, §5, cl. 3)
Salaries of Senators and Representatives (Art. I, § 6, cl. 1)
Salaries of civil officers of the United States (Art. I, §6, cl. 2 & Art. II, §1, cl. 7)
Pay the Debts (Art. I, §8, cl. 1 & Art. VI, cl.1)
Pay tax collectors (Art. I, §8, cl.1)
Regulate commerce with foreign Nations, among the several States, and with Indian Tribes (Art. I, §8, cl.3)
Immigration office (Art. I, §8, cl.4)
The mint (Art. I, §8, cl. 5)
Attorney General to handle the small amount of authorized federal litigation involving the national government (e.g., Art. I, §8, cls. 6 & 10)
Post offices & post roads (Art. I, §8, cl. 7)
Patent & copyright office (Art. I, §8, cl. 8)
Federal courts (Art. I, §8, cl. 9 & Art. III, §1)
Military and Militia (Art. I, §8, cls. 11-16)
Since Congress has general legislative authority over the federal enclaves listed in Art. I, §8, next to last clause, Congress has broad spending authority over the tiny geographical areas listed in this clause.
The President’s entertainment expenses for foreign dignitaries (Art. II, §3); and
Since Congress had general legislative authority over the Western Territory before it was broken up into States, Congress could appropriate funds for the US Marshalls, federal judges, and the like for that Territory (Art. IV, §3, cl. 2).

That’s what Congress is authorized by our Constitution to spend money on. Did I leave anything out? Take a few minutes and, armed with a highlighter, read carefully through the Constitution and see for yourself.

Congress is to appropriate funds to carry out this handful of delegated powers; and it is to pay the bills with receipts from taxes. ¹

Pursuant to Article I, §9, clause 7, the federal government is to periodically publish a Statement and Account of Receipts and Expenditures. Citizens could use this Statement and Account – which would be so short that everyone would have time to read it – to monitor the spending of their public servants.

So that’s how our existing Constitution limits federal spending:

If it’s on the list of enumerated powers, Congress may lawfully spend money on it.
But if it’s not on the list, Congress usurps powers not delegated when it appropriates money for it.

It was unconstitutional spending and unconstitutional promises (Social Security, Medicare, etc., etc., etc.) which got us a national debt of almost $19 trillion, plus a hundred trillion or so in unfunded liabilities.

Since the Constitution delegates to Congress only limited and narrowly defined authority to spend money; the Constitution doesn’t provide for a budget.

We never had a federal budget until Congress passed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. By this time, the Progressives controlled both political parties and the federal government.

The Progressives wanted a federal budget because they wanted to spend money on objects which were not on the list of delegated powers.

A balanced budget amendment (BBA) would substitute a budget for the enumerated powers, and thus would legalize the current practice where Congress spends money on whatever they or the President put in the budget.

The result of a BBA is to legalize spending which is now unconstitutional – it changes the constitutional standard for spending from whether the object is on the list of enumerated powers to a limit on the total amount of spending.

And to add insult to injury, the limits on spending are fictitious because they can be waived whenever Congress ² votes to waive them.

And because a BBA would permit Congress to lawfully spend money on whatever is put in the budget, the powers of the federal government would be lawfully increased to include whatever THEY decide to put in the budget.

So a BBA would fundamentally transform our Constitution from one of enumerated powers only to one of general and unlimited powers – because the federal government would then be authorized by the Constitution to exercise power over ANY object they decide to put into the budget.

You must read proposed amendments and understand how they change our Constitution before you support them.

All federal and State officials take an oath to support the federal Constitution (Art. VI, clause 3). When people in Congress appropriate funds for objects not listed in the Constitution; and when State officials accept federal funds for objects not listed, they violate their oath to support the Constitution. According to the PEW Report, federal funds provided an average of 30% of the States’ revenue for FY 2013. Look up your State HERE. Were those federal funds used to implement unconstitutional federal programs in your State?

Power over education, medical care, agriculture, state and local law enforcement, environment, etc., is not delegated to the federal government: those powers are reserved by the States or the People. Congress spends on objects for which it has no constitutional authority; and bribes States with federal funds to induce them to implement unconstitutional federal programs. It was the unconstitutional spending which gave us this crushing $19 Trillion debt.

How do we go about downsizing the federal government to its constitutional limits?

We stop the unconstitutional and frivolous spending one can read about all over the internet.

We begin the shutdown of unconstitutional federal departments and agencies by selecting for immediate closure those which serve no useful purpose or cause actual harm such as the Departments of Energy, Education, Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency. ³

Other unconstitutional federal departments and agencies must be dismantled and their functions returned to the States or The People.

An orderly phase-out is required of those unconstitutional federal programs in which Citizens were forced to participate – such as social security and Medicare – so that the rug is not pulled out from American Citizens who became dependent. The phase-out could be funded by sales of unconstitutionally held federal lands.

The federal government is obligated (Art. I, §8, cl. 11-16) to provide for service related injuries suffered by our Veterans.

The Constitution delegates to Congress the power to appropriate funds for “post Roads” (Art. I, §8, cl. 7). While there may be room for argument as to what is included within the term, “post Road”; clearly, some federal involvement in road building is authorized by our Constitution. State dependence on federal highway funds might be reduced by eliminating or reducing federal fuel taxes, and the substitution of fuel taxes collected by individual States. And there is nothing immoral about toll roads.

Since our Constitution was written to delegate to the federal government only the few and defined powers enumerated in the Constitution, we don’t have to change the Constitution to rein in federal spending. The Constitution isn’t the problem – ignoring it is the problem. Let us begin to enforce the Constitution we have.

Endnotes:

¹ Our original Constitution authorized only excise taxes & tariffs on imports (Art. I, §8, clause 1), with any shortfall being made up by an apportioned assessment on the States based on population (Art. I, §2, clause 3).

² Compact for America’s (CFA) version of a BBA permits spending limits to be waived whenever Congress and 26 States agree. CFA’s version also authorizes Congress to impose a national sales tax and a national value added tax in addition to keeping the income tax! See THIS Paper.

³ George Washington’s Cabinet had four members: Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of Treasury, and Attorney General.

01/31/16

USA Transnational Report – January 30, 2016, Campaign 2016 Kicks Off

USA Transnational Report

rouhani

Join us for a Saturday morning 8 AM political discussion to kick off your weekend! We’ll be talking about the United States, elections, and events around the world…

Topics addressed

Campaign 2016 Kicks off – Iowa, Candidates, Debate, and the Media
Fox’s Open Border Policy
We Spy, They spy, Everybody Spies – U.S. & U.K. Spied on Israel for 20 years… and vice versa
Middle East Update

& more . . .

Call-in #: 855-853-5227

You can listen to USA Transnational Report live on JJ McCartney’s Nightside Radio Studios and on Red State Talk Radio.

You can subscribe to USA Transnational Report podcast on iTunes here.

You can also subscribe to our podcast with Podbean, here.

All previously recorded shows are available here, at the links above, or through Spreaker.

01/31/16

CNN Stages Town Hall to Boost Clinton Candidacy

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Who ever heard of a presidential primary debate or town hall meeting opening with a kiss on the cheek between the moderator and the frontrunner? It’s safe to say that didn’t happen between Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. And not just because he didn’t show up for Thursday night’s debate in Iowa.

But if you tuned in to the January 25 CNN Democratic town hall, you would have seen that kiss between the moderator Chris Cuomo, and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. And that was just for starters. The event featured softball after softball question in a continuous love-in for the candidates, but especially so for Mrs. Clinton. This was a far cry from the December CNN Republican debate.

Of course, the Cuomo family has a history of favoring Clinton. Chris Cuomo’s brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, recently helped introduce the former New York senator when she received a gun control award named after his father, Mario Cuomo, who had also served as New York governor. Governor Cuomo has also endorsed her presidential run.

So, with a moderator ready to play favorites, CNN abandoned all sense of objectivity.

“Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on Monday drew their sharpest contrasts yet in hard-hitting final pitches to Iowa voters as the competitive race to win the first in the nation caucuses enters its last week,” reported CNN on January 26. It doesn’t report that it had stacked the deck.

“Secretary Sanders—or, Clinton, sorry,” said student Brett Rosengren as he was about to ask the final question of the night. “I can see why they gave you this question,” he continued. “I just wanted to know which of our previous presidents has inspired you most and why.” Why they gave you this question? Who was the “they” he was referring to?

Rosengren later said that he had posed the question himself, and submitted it to CNN. But it was CNN that chose his question, and it was CNN who directed that it should be asked of Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Martin O’Malley.

So CNN arranged easy questions for Hillary Clinton? What type, exactly, of town hall was this? This was, in reality, a stage-managed and produced love-in for Mrs. Clinton.

This is typical of how the left-wing, mainstream media abandon all impartiality and allow Democrats to answer supposedly spontaneous questions using teleprompters with predetermined answers. It’s reminiscent of the time that Democrat National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught reading an answer to a question off of a teleprompter during an appearance on MSNBC, when she butchered the world “misled” as “myzled” while on camera.

The orchestrated nature of these town halls, debates, and other appearances by the Democratic candidates exposes how the media have already made their choice for this year’s presidential election. All that is left is to ensure Hillary Clinton’s victory with as much endless cheerleading media promotion as possible, while ignoring her scandal-plagued career.

“Sec. Clinton, when you’re elected the next president of the United States, what will you say to Republican voters?” asked a member of the audience. Mrs. Clinton then led into an answer about how she wants “to be the president for everyone.”

Later, moderator Cuomo asked, “It makes them [Republicans] feel that, well, Secretary Clinton doesn’t like us. Why would she work with us?” Clinton’s answer devolved into a pronouncement that she would give Republicans “bear hugs whether they like it or not.”

CNN’s treatment of Sanders was equally superficial at times, with Cuomo asking him, “Do you think you are up to the whole job [of president]?” But Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks makes a strong case from the left that Sanders got much rougher treatment than Hillary.

It is Cuomo, and CNN, who are not up to the job of vetting the Democratic presidential candidates. However, the softballs from CNN were in sharp contrast to the hardball questions for the earlier Republican debate, with questions designed to cause the candidates to attack each other’s platforms. CNN queried the Republican candidates with questions that sometimes sounded more like accusations than debate openers.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Donald Trump in December, “Is the best way to make America great again to isolate it from much of the rest of the world?”

“Governor [Jeb] Bush, you called Mr. Trump ‘unhinged’ when he proposed banning non-American Muslims from the United States,” Blitzer also asked. “Why is that unhinged?”

In contrast, CNN dealt very gingerly with two Clinton scandals: Benghazi and her mishandling of classified materials on her unsecured email server.

The Benghazi scandal poses a major obstacle to Hillary Clinton’s election. Yet, instead of a cutting question delineating the high stakes, Mrs. Clinton was asked by an audience member, “So, how are you planning on dealing with that [Benghazi issue] going forward, not only in the general election, but also if you became president working with Congress?”

This carefully phrased softball gave Mrs. Clinton an opening to blame Republicans for keeping the Benghazi issue alive. What is keeping the issue alive, however, is Mrs. Clinton’s and the administration’s stonewalling, preventing justice for the victims and accountability for an administration that blamed the attack on a YouTube video.

In her answer Clinton claimed that Democrats didn’t make the death of hundreds of American soldiers in Beirut (during the Reagan administration) a partisan issue, and that she had “put together an independent board to tell me as secretary of state what I needed to know and what we could do to fix it.”

The Accountability Review Board appointed by Clinton was far from independent, and failed to interview Secretary Clinton herself—despite her role in the administration’s decision to aid the al-Qaeda linked rebels in Libya, stymie the truce talks with Muammar Qaddafi, and refuse to properly secure the U.S. Special Mission Compound. In addition, she shares the responsibility for the dereliction of duty on the night of the attacks by failing to send available military assets to assist those who were fighting the jihadists, and for the decision to blame a YouTube video for the terror attack.

Yet even a question challenging Mrs. Clinton’s honesty was reworded as a question about supporter enthusiasm. “It feels like there is [sic] a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders,” asked audience member Taylor Gipple. “And, I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest, but I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

“Clinton tried to play the issue of millennials flocking to Sanders as a good thing, saying any kind of involvement in the election process is positive, but the truth is her campaign is starting to panic over a drop in poll numbers and Sanders’ domination in early states,” observed Katie Pavlich for Townhall on January 26.

Clinton’s email scandal has been one long drip, drip, drip of scandal exposing lie after lie. She took this opportunity to spin a number of the same falsehoods at the town hall. Cuomo asked Clinton about the timing of her apology for EmailGate, saying, “Yes, you apologized, but only when you needed to, not when you first could have. Fair criticism?”

Mrs. Clinton responded by falsely claiming, once again, that her unsecure server was set up so that she could conveniently use a single device. But, she insisted, “I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what—nothing that I did was wrong.” That must be why the FBI has two ongoing investigations: one into her server and the other regarding possible public corruption.

Clinton should be apologizing not for the timing of her previous apology, but for allowing classified material, including Top Secret and Special Access Programs (SAP), on her private server where it was a sitting duck for hackers, and a genuine national security risk. And whether or not the material was marked classified at the time—which is how she defends herself—it was wrong and illegal.

But if mainstream media wishes were votes, Clinton would already have the presidency—no questions asked. There is a rotten double standard at CNN, and the rest of the mainstream media, which continue to ask hard-hitting questions of Republicans the likes of which they wouldn’t dare ask members of their favored party.