05/8/15

Why They Must Destroy Ben Carson

Black conservative Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is everything Barack Obama is not. That’s why he has to be destroyed.

In a desperate move, The Washington Post ran a more than 2,500-word article on Sunday warning Carson to stop criticizing Obama.

What were Carson’s crimes?

He offered “a conservative critique of U.S. health-care and spending policies, while standing a few feet from President Obama.”
“In the ensuing months and years, Carson’s attacks grew sharper—deriding Obama’s signature health-care law as the ‘worst thing to have happened in this nation since slavery’ and, in the pages of GQ, likening Obama to a ‘psychopath.’ Carson’s 2014 book, ‘One Nation,’ assails a decline of moral values in America and its government.”

Can you imagine anyone having the audacity to talk about moral decline in America under “America’s First Gay President,” as Newsweek described Obama?

The GQ attack on Carson was titled, “What If Sarah Palin Were a Brain Surgeon?” It was an outright smear of the black conservative.

The Post said, “For many young African Americans who grew up seeing Carson as the embodiment of black achievement—a poor inner-city boy who became one of the world’s most accomplished neurosurgeons—his emergence as a conservative hero and unabashed critic of the United States’ first black president has been jarring.”

The paper went on: “Carson’s personal accomplishments—and the work he has done to help black communities—still garner respect and pride among African Americans. Yet, while he has been a conservative for as long as he has been famous, many worry that he risks eroding his legacy in their community and transforming himself into a fringe political figure.”

Who are the “many?” The paper didn’t say. But some of them write for the Post.

We are told that the author of the piece, Robert Samuels, is a national political reporter who focuses on the intersection of politics, policy and people, and who previously covered social issues in the District of Columbia. The young man is quickly learning what it means to be a Post reporter. You have to protect Obama and attack his critics, especially if they’re black.

On the Web, the story ran under the headline, “As Ben Carson bashes Obama, many blacks see a hero’s legacy fade.” The hard copy edition carried the headline, “Admirers of Carson find his criticism of Obama troubling.” It ran in the Idaho Statesman under the headline, “As Obama bashing deepens, Ben Carson sees legacy fade.”

The message is that blacks in general—and Carson in particular—should not criticize Obama if they want favorable coverage from the Post.

The only admirer, Rev. Frank Reid of Bethel AME Church in Baltimore, was quoted as saying he found Carson’s conservatism “astounding.” Reid said, “But before we turn on the brother, we have to hear him out. As shocking as some of the things he’s said are, I would rather have a discussion than attack someone who has done respectful work.”

Rev. Frank Reid has a web page disclosing that as a “community leader,” he had such figures as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Imam Wallace Dean Muhammad “to speak at or visit the churches he has pastored.” Reid is not shy about appearing in public with these “brothers,” many of whom have reputations as racial agitators.

But Carson will have to be dealt with in private before Reid and the others actually “turn on the brother.”

Carson understands he’s a target. During his presidential announcement, he mentioned that he plays pool with his wife, Candy, and that he usually beats her. He cautioned, “I should be careful. There’s media here and their headline will be, ‘Carson Admits He Beats His Wife.’”

Carson’s legacy includes the Carson Scholars Fund, a program that awards students with high levels of academic excellence and community service with $1,000 college scholarships. In total, more than 6,700 scholarships have been awarded across the country.

Carson’s mother, who divorced Carson’s father because he was a bigamist, required that he turn off the television and read two books a week. In the book, America the Beautiful, Carson said, “I didn’t hate Mother, but in the beginning, I sure hated reading those books. After a while, however, I actually began to look forward to them, because they afforded me escape from our everyday poverty. There in the city, books about nature captivated me. My reading ability increased. I began to imagine myself as a great explorer or scientist or doctor. I learned things no one else around me knew. Every single day my knowledge of our world expanded, which excited me to no end.”

As a result, another part of his legacy is the Ben Carson Reading Project, responsible for over 120 reading rooms in schools across the country. He has explained that “…we work so hard to put our Reading Rooms particularly in inner city schools because I recognize that 70% – 80% of high school dropouts are functionally illiterate. If we can nip that in the bud and can get them interested reading in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade you are going to have a positive effect on that downstream.”

For his success in life, Carson credits his mother and several “mentors, inspirers, and influencers,” that he discusses in a chapter of his book called, Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence. Carson openly credits those who helped make him a success. These include:

William Jaeck, his fifth grade science teacher
Frank McCotter, his high school biology teacher
Lemuel Doakes, his band director
Aubrey Tompkins, the choir director at the church he attended while going to Yale

Carson describes Tompkins as his mentor, father figure, and teacher of spiritual values.

Obama’s father was absent from his life as well. However, we have known since 2008, when he was running for his first term as president, that Obama grew up under the influence of communist Frank Marshall Davis, picked by his grandfather to be a father figure. Obama never disavowed Davis and in fact covered up this person’s involvement in his life, describing him merely as “Frank.” That way, people would not find out that he had been influenced by a black communist who was so extreme he even faulted “European shoes” for making his feet hurt.

In contrast to Tompkins, Davis was an atheist. Davis was also a pedophile and pornographer.

The chapter of Carson’s book on mentors is preceded by a quotation from historian Henry Brooke Adams: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

America’s survival may depend on ending Obama’s influence on this nation sooner rather than later. We know the story. After being mentored by Davis, Obama went off to college and, by his own admission, associated with the Marxist professors and went to socialist conferences. This was not surprising. After all, he had been “schooled” by Davis on the horrors of white racism and the need to fight the oppressors. Davis had told young Obama that black people “have reason to hate.”

Obama has performed as he was taught, leaving a legacy of strife and division. Nevertheless, he is the hero to the liberal media and Carson is the villain.

The American people would never have voted for Obama if the media had told the truth about the influences on his life.

By contrast, we know the truth about how Carson, as a medical doctor, saved lives and how he has saved many others through his humanitarian work. He truly did “Think Big” and by doing so has made a tremendous positive difference.

In his own way, Obama was also a big thinker. The irony is that he has clearly made things worse for the blacks he purports to be concerned about. It is another indication that Obama is truly not a “brother” to his people. Instead, he has made them into cannon fodder for the revolution.

03/6/15

Media Cheerleading for Obamacare Victory at Supreme Court

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While the media continue to spin the King v. Burwell case as an existential threat to President Obama’s signature health care legislation, we at Accuracy in Media continue to expose how flawed those supposed “reforms” have been. Yet the media blindly and obstinately defend Obamacare as an administration success. A recent Washington Post editorial even suggests that the Supreme Court, which heard arguments for this case on March 4, should avoid tearing “apart a law that has slowly but surely found its footing.”

The idea that Obamacare—a job-killing law that is unaffordable and unworkable, coupled with more than 20,000 pages of added regulations causing perverse effects on the marketplace—has “surely found its footing” is part of a false narrative created jointly by pro-administration advocates and a media willing to justify the burdensome restrictions this has placed on the American people.

Now, we are being actively sold another false bill of goods: that the dispute over subsidies, and whether state or federal exchanges should be used for subsidies, threatens the many Americans who signed up for coverage under Obamacare. “Don’t be bamboozled by talk of disaster,” writes Betsy McCaughey for the New York Post. “Senate Republican leaders indicated on Monday that they’ll be ready to provide financial assistance to ‘help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period.’”

Yet Slate’s Eric Posner writes that “If the plaintiffs win, then most low-income people will drop out of the market because they cannot afford insurance without the subsidies.” In addition, Posner continues, “Only the sickest people will stay in, which will cause insurance companies to raise prices for everyone, causing more people to drop out and potentially throwing the insurance market into a spiral of death.”

Also, the media keep repeating that these six words, “an exchange established by the state,” were somehow thrown into the bill by mistake, or that it really meant something else. Except, according to Michael Carvin, attorney for the plaintiffs, the health care law contains “words limiting subsidies to ‘an exchange established by the state’ … 11 times,” reports NPR.

On March 4 Paul Kane devoted an entire Washington Post article to the idea that “Congress can sometimes be sloppy.” “If that’s the case, how did Congress end up writing such an ambiguous provision?” he asks. “And why hasn’t anyone on Capitol Hill fixed it?”

While D.C. politics are currently too fractious to fix this patently flawed law, “Losing in court will force the president to finally negotiate changes to his expensive, unworkable health law,” argues McCaughey. If the plaintiffs succeed, “Suddenly, the politically impossible—compromise on ObamaCare—will become politically inevitable.”

In fact, the law has already been altered on numerous occasions. While the standard line has been that the Republicans in the House have tried to repeal Obamacare more than 40 times, it has actually been altered at least 47 times, according to The Galen Institute. Of those, at least 28 were changes “that President Obama has made unilaterally, 17 that Congress has passed and the president has signed, and 2 by the Supreme Court.”

Currently, the Health and Human Services Secretary has signaled that the administration “does not have a backup plan to help those who could lose their insurance,” according to US News and World Report.

On Wednesday, the same day King v. Burwell was being argued at the Supreme Court, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell introduced the subject, saying, “At issue is whether states that rely on the federal health care exchange can provide subsidies to make it more affordable. If the court rules against the White House, eight million people could lose their coverage and premiums for millions more would skyrocket, making the plan basically unsustainable.”

Mitchell’s “facts” are highly dubious. Eight million people could lose their coverage? This appears to be based on a RAND study which estimates, “that 8 million people would become uninsured, and many others would see their health premiums spike,” according to US News and World Report.

The administration claims that 11.4 million people are signed up for private health care under Obamacare, which they claim proves that Obamacare is “working,” and a success.

But Avik Roy, who has been writing about this for Forbes, pointed out that “once you unravel the spin, what the latest numbers show is that the pace of enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges has slowed down by more than half. If previous trends hold, Obamacare exchanges have enrolled roughly 5 million previously uninsured individuals: a far cry from 11.4 million.”

And what about the 40 million uninsured we were told about during the dishonest selling of Obamacare? This month marks five years since the so-called Affordable Care Act became law.

While pundits argue over the success of Obamacare, and whether those six words—“an exchange established by the state”—were a mistake, or should be disregarded because they supposedly contradict the overall intent of the law, the decision should come down to this: It’s not just the plain-language meaning of the law, which is very clear. The law wouldn’t have passed without including that language. It was not a mistake, or a drafting error. Then-Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska called it a “deal breaker,” according to Politico in 2010, two months before it became law.

In other words, without that incentive for the states to set up exchanges, he wouldn’t vote for it. The evidence is clear, as laid out in this American Spectator article, no longer available on their website.

And don’t forget Jonathan Gruber. He was one of the architects of Obamacare, and a close adviser to President Obama. He received millions of taxpayer dollars, from various states and the federal government. Gruber is the person who said that passing Obamacare depended “on the stupidity of the American voter,” and that it was “written in a tortured way” in order to deceive the voters about all the taxes they would have to pay. Regarding the subsidies being paid only to state exchanges, Gruber said that was “to squeeze the states to do it [to set up exchanges].”

One must ask also whether a family of four earning more than $90,000 per year should actually be subsidized by the government, or whether this is just a hook to get more and more people receiving government aid, and tie them to the political party most generously doling out these “discounts.” In this case, that would be the Democratic Party.

Mortimer Zuckerman, writing for The Wall Street Journal has also connected employers’ preference for part-time over full-time employees to the perverse effects of this law.

Betsy McCaughey is one of the few members of the media focusing on the positive outcomes that could result from plaintiffs winning this case—instead of claiming that disaster will strike. She argues these include benefits such as “relief for about 250,000 businesses” and “a system that lets people buy the health plans they want and work the hours they want.”

These potential benefits can only be understood in the light of the actual provisions of the law. If states agreed to establish exchanges, receiving in exchange subsidies for those signing up, “with the subsidies come something very important: the taxes and the penalties under the employer mandate penalty. So when 37 states decided not to set up exchanges, the administration tried to fix it with a rule, through the IRS, that subsidies would be issued in all 50 states, plus the employer mandate penalty,” asserted Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma Attorney General on Fox’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. He is one of the attorneys general fighting to limit the damage from Obamacare.

Many pundits read into Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s remarks during oral arguments that a ruling against the White House position would result in states being effectively coerced into setting up exchanges, invoking a federalism argument. This was a hopeful sign to those wanting to see Obamacare survive. But Attorney General Pruitt pointed out in a Wall Street Journal column that states “are not children who must be protected by the federal government from making choices.” He said that when Oklahoma chose not to set up a state exchange, the state “knew the consequences of its decision but was not coerced into cooperating with implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” and still wouldn’t be.

Obamacare, except in a very few cases, has been an unmitigated disaster—no matter how Obama, the Democrats and the media try to sell it otherwise.

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.

01/6/15

Ten Upgrades for Your House Using Linear Actuators

Linear actuators are devices that can operate, produce and deliver a progressive oscillatory or un-directional short stroke motion. The force developed by electromagnetism in the actuator produces a motion. Actuators move things using motion control products at home and are able to simplify work and access.

TV Stands

TV lifts that are programmable and are controlled by remote involve a short stroke of linear actuators. This aims at simplifying life and makes you live comfortably every day.

Window Openers

According to linear actuators shop, actuators provide highly effective options and offer both electric and manual window opening. It gives accessibility to places where it is hard to reach windows, such as casement windows.

Security Systems

Through short strokes produced by the electromagnetic field in actuators, rotary motion is able to turn CCTV cameras and radars used in homes for security purposes.

Electric Convertible Beds

Beds are fitted with a unique motor system that provides high force on the bed. This gives a wide range of conditions and accessories for the bed user.

Door Openers

When installed, automatic doors for various places such as toilets and bathrooms with actuators help simplify work and safety in houses. The doors are fitted with actuators and are able to lock automatically. This also helps people access their homes on smart phones for safety.

Kitchen Cabinets

With actuators fitted in them, kitchen cabinets have more storage and ease of access is possible by use of these actuators. Actuators are fitted in them to ensure easy movement of the drawers and to simplify work.

Adjustable Seats

Reclination in seats is a pure product of actuators. Such seats give comfort to people who use them. Actuators here are used to enhance movement and change of position to suit the user.

Storage Wracks

This is used especially in kitchens for storage of working tools and utensils. Here more compartments are made using actuators which enhances proper space ratio in relation to amount stored.

Height Adjustable Tables

Through motion produced by linear actuators, working tables are formed which are height adjustable to suit various functions such as drawing tables, dining tables and kitchen tables.

Lifting Equipment

Actuators are helpful with automation for disabled people. In wheel chairs and climbers, linear actuators find extensive use and are very important for the disabled community.