The primary reason given for Obama supporters wanting to see Romney dead is the fear that he will take away food stamps.
Watson rightly notes that:
“If the tables were turned and conservatives were making death threats against Obama in these numbers, it would be a national news story. Indeed, the mere act of hanging empty chairs from trees as a reference to Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech was hyped by the media as a deadly sign that conservatives were out to lynch black people if Obama won.
However, the major networks have remained completely silent on the disturbing trend of Obama supporters threatening to resort to violence if their candidate fails to secure a second term.”
These Twitter accounts are genuine, they are not fakes. Many of them have thousands of previous tweets.
Here are some more assassination Tweets during and after the debate:
- “If Romney win this election, he might as well wear a shirt that says “Assassinate Me Bitch”.
- “Yall ready to assasinate romney?”
- “Somebody needs to asassinate This mofo Romney.”
- “Romney make me wanna hop through the tv & just assasinate his ass.”
- “I aint gone lie… Food stamps the shit! I mite assasinate romney my damn self if he get elected!”
- “If romney get elected i hope a nigga assasinate his bitchass.
- “No birth control???? Lol rlly Romney the american population is going to overflow and then we’ll have to resort to murder and you’ll be #1.”
- “At this point in time I am completely prepared to MURDER ROMNEY MYSELF!”
- “If Romney win, IM GOING TO JAIL FOR MURDER cuz imma whack his bitch ass ASAP.”
- “If Mitt Romney wins, which I doubt, someone should assassinate him before he ruins the lives of our generation & our children.”
- “IF ROMNEY GETS ELECTED AND TAKES AWAY MY FOOD STAMPS IMA SEND SOMEONE TO MURDER HIS ASS.”
The above are just a selection of scores and scores of threats to assassinate Romney that have exploded on Twitter over the last 12 hours. These are threats on Twitter alone. Imagine the threats posted to Facebook or any other social networks.
Presidential candidates supposedly have the protection of the U.S. Secret Service. Let’s make sure the Secret Service is looking into these death threats against Mitt Romney. Arrests should be made.
More than a dozen Twitter accounts that were used as a medium to publicly threaten Gov. Mitt Romney’s life after the second presidential debate remain active, nearly two weeks later. This news comes after the Secret Service told The Weekly Standard that they were “aware” of these threats on Romney’s life.
Obama administration officials have insisted that their decision to grant states waivers to redefine work requirements for welfare recipients would not “gut” the landmark 1996 welfare reform law. But a new report from the Congressional Research Service obtained by the Washington Examiner suggests that the administration’s suspension of a separate welfare work requirement has already helped explode the number of able-bodied Americans on food stamps.
In addition to the broader work requirement that has become a contentious issue in the presidential race, the 1996 welfare reform law included a separate rule encouraging able-bodied adults without dependents to work by limiting the amount of time they could receive food stamps. President Obama suspended that rule when he signed his economic stimulus legislation into law, and the number of these adults on food stamps doubled, from 1.9 million in 2008 to 3.9 million in 2010, according to the CRS report, issued in the form of a memo to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
“This report once again confirms that President Obama has severely gutted the welfare work requirements that Americans have overwhelmingly supported since President Clinton signed them into law,” Cantor said in an emailed statement. “It’s time to reinstate these common-sense measures, and focus on creating job growth for those in need.”
Under the rule adopted in 1996, food stamps for able-bodied adults without dependents were limited to three months in a 36-month period unless the participant in the program “works at least 20 hours a week; participates in an employment and training program for at least 20 hours per week; or participates in a (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) ‘workfare’ program for at least 20 hours per week.”
Obama’s economic stimulus legislation suspended the rule for all states starting April 2009. Delaware continued to enforce the rule anyway, along with New York City and parts of Colorado, South Dakota, and Texas. This suspension expired at the end of the 2010 fiscal year (Sept. 30, 2010) and Congress rebuffed Obama’s requests to extend it in his fiscal years 2011 and 2012 budgets. However, Obama used his regulatory authority to effectively extend the waivers to nearly all states over the past two years. (The law grants the executive the authority to do this in states where the unemployment rate is above 10 percent or there’s a “lack of sufficient jobs.”)
Though the weakening of the economy would have led to an increase in food stamp usage with or without a waiver, the doubling of the use of food stamps by the able-bodied population without dependents exceeded the 43 percent increase in food stamp usage among the broader population over the same 2008 to 2010 time frame. This gives more weight to the idea that the waiver fueled the food stamp growth among the population it affected, beyond where it would have been even in a weak economy.
The CRS report does not have data for the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years.
This is a national embarrassment, but for some reason there seems to be little outrage on the part of the American people – and even less among our so-called congressional “watchdogs.”
I have no problem with helping those truly in need, but just about every time I visit my local grocer, I see people in line with items that the taxpayers should not be forced to pay for. What is worse is that I more often than not see these people walk out into the parking lot and load their loot into vehicles that still have dealer drive-off tags on them.
Of course, private charities and food banks would go a long way toward eliminating this waste and fraud, but something inside me says they are probably going to be harassed out of existence by government.
After all, the welfare nanny state does not like private competition.
But it’s not just the poor and the middle class who are getting poorer under the Obama administration. Nearly four years of the POS steering the ship of state, even the rich have gotten poorer — as shown in U.S. Census Bureau data.
The Census Bureau’s annual report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” says that 46.2 million Americans (15% of the U.S. population) lived in poverty in 2011. In fact, the number of poor Americans had increased for three consecutive years (2009-2011).
As noted by Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge, that led Wharton economist Justin Wolfers to comment that “The rich just keep getting richer.”
But Wolfers and other liberal pundits are wrong. Durden points out that if we look at the Census data of wealth dispersion by percentile, the data actually show “that both the household income of the … wealthiest 95th percentile, as well as the income spread between the 95th and 10th percentile, over the past 5 years has actually been going down. In fact, the average income of the richest disclosed percentile is $186,000, or the lowest since 1999. [...]the wealth of the top percentile has been not only flat but modestly declining for 12 years.”
It may be that the rich are getting richer if what one means by “the rich” are the top 5% or top 1% or, most likely still, the top 0.1% or top o.00001%. Durden concludes that “the number of people truly getting richer in the current economy, is more and more limited to a few hundred people,” which is another way of saying 99% or 99.9% of Americans are getting screwed.
That, in turn, means that for all of Conservatives’ labeling Obama as “socialist,” he really isn’t one. Unless, of course, what is meant by “socialism” is the corrupt brand of “socialism” of the former Soviet Union and other Marxist-socialist countries, where everyone lives in poverty except for the supreme leader and the political elite of the Communist Party.
This is an expansion on our Dave’s post yesterday evening, “Sunday Night Shocker,” about the cover-story of the newest edition of the very liberal Newsweek magazine, calling for President Obama the POS in the White House to “hit the road.”
The article’s author is 48-year-old Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a columnist for Newsweek since 2011. In 2004, he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Among his areas of specialty are economic history, hyperinflation and the bond markets. In 2008, Ferguson was an adviser to John McCain and had NOT voted for Obama. Therefore Ferguson’s urging the POS to “hit the road” is not a surprise. The significance, rather, is the fact that Ferguson’s essay is published in the über liberal Newsweek.
Ferguson’s main objection to four more years of the POS is the economy. Here are excerpts from the article. Enjoy!
Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.
[...] In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.
[...] But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.
In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.
Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.
Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration.
Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.
His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.
And even that figure understates the real debt burden. The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap”—is $222 trillion.
The president’s supporters will, of course, say that the poor performance of the economy can’t be blamed on him. [...] Yet surely we can legitimately blame the president for the political mistakes of the past four years. After all, it’s the president’s job to run the executive branch effectively—to lead the nation. And here is where his failure has been greatest.
[...] It is five years since the financial crisis began, but the central problems—excessive financial concentration and excessive financial leverage—have not been addressed.
Today a mere 10 too-big-to-fail financial institutions are responsible for three quarters of total financial assets under management in the United States. Yet the country’s largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new “Basel III” accords governing bank capital adequacy.
And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers.
[...] The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.[...] barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output.
The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.
Meanwhile, the fiscal train wreck has already initiated a process of steep cuts in the defense budget, at a time when it is very far from clear that the world has become a safer place—least of all in the Middle East.
For me the president’s greatest failure has been not to think through the implications of these challenges to American power. Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.
[...] Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security. Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”
The real crime is that the assassination program destroys potentially crucial intelligence (as well as antagonizing locals) every time a drone strikes. It symbolizes the administration’s decision to abandon counterinsurgency in favor of a narrow counterterrorism. What that means in practice is the abandonment not only of Iraq but soon of Afghanistan too. Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama’s foreign policy.
America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement. Small wonder 46 percent of Americans—and 63 percent of Chinese—believe that China already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or eventually will.
[...] Now Obama is going head-to-head with his nemesis: a politician who believes more in content than in form, more in reform than in rhetoric. In the past days much has been written about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. I know, like, and admire Paul Ryan. For me, the point about him is simple. He is one of only a handful of politicians in Washington who is truly sincere about addressing this country’s fiscal crisis.
Over the past few years Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” has evolved, but the essential points are clear: replace Medicare with a voucher program for those now under 55 (not current or imminent recipients), turn Medicaid and food stamps into block grants for the states, and—crucially—simplify the tax code and lower tax rates to try to inject some supply-side life back into the U.S. private sector. Ryan is not preaching austerity. He is preaching growth. And though Reagan-era veterans like David Stockman may have their doubts, they underestimate Ryan’s mastery of this subject. There is literally no one in Washington who understands the challenges of fiscal reform better.
[...] I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.
It remains to be seen if the American public is ready to embrace the radical overhaul of the nation’s finances that Ryan proposes. The public mood is deeply ambivalent. The president’s approval rating is down to 49 percent. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is at minus 28 (down from minus 13 in May). But Obama is still narrowly ahead of Romney in the polls as far as the popular vote is concerned (50.8 to 48.2) and comfortably ahead in the Electoral College. The pollsters say that Paul Ryan’s nomination is not a game changer; indeed, he is a high-risk choice for Romney because so many people feel nervous about the reforms Ryan proposes.
But one thing is clear. Ryan psychs Obama out. This has been apparent ever since the White House went on the offensive against Ryan in the spring of last year. And the reason he psychs him out is that, unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country.
Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.
The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.
Or they can opt for real change: the kind of change that will end four years of economic underperformance, stop the terrifying accumulation of debt, and reestablish a secure fiscal foundation for American national security. [...]
Despite the endless food stamp/EBT propaganda and PSAs starring Michelle Obama moaning about parents getting involved in good food choices,many American children receive their first two meals of the day at school, ending the day with a fast food/takeout meal for dinner.
The website Fitflex.com discussing a recent study published “Physiology and Behavior” notes, ” What we eat influences how we act and feel. Besides supplying the vital energy and nutrients essential to life, food helps to regulate behavior by the way it affects certain chemicals active in the nervous system. These behaviors range from mental alertness to pain perception….
…. those consuming a high-carb dietshowed increased insulin levels. Insulin is known to induce drowsiness, explaining why you may feel sleepy after a meal containing a high sugar content. “
Every school district in the country has federally-subsidized free and reduced price food programs. The guidelines take from the Seattle School District website, children living in multi-generational households grossing over $5,000 a month qualify.
The menus are carefully planned to meet government-approved nutritional targets with carbs and diabetesin mind. This chart looks woefully short on protein and heavy on starchy carbs; but, it meets the government target.
As many as half of U.S. households are recipients of government benefits.
Phil Izzo reports for the Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2012, that recent Census Bureau data show 49.1% of the U.S. population live in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011. Many likely received more than one.
The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008. The increase in recent years is likely due in large part to the lingering effects of the recession.
As of early 2011, 15% of people lived in a household that received food stamps, 26% had someone enrolled in Medicaid and 2% had a member receiving unemployment benefits. But even without the effects of the recession, there would be a larger reliance on government. The Census data show that 16% of the population lives in a household where at least one member receives Social Security and 15% receive or live with someone who gets Medicare. There is likely a lot of overlap, since Social Security and Medicare tend to go hand in hand, but those percentages also are likely to increase as the Baby Boom generation ages.
With increased government spending comes the need to pay for it, and if taxes aren’t going to increase that means deficits. Nearly three-quarters of Americans blame the U.S. budget deficit on spending too much money on federal programs, according to a Gallup poll last year, but when the conversation turns to which programs to cut, the majorities are harder to find. For example, 56% of respondents oppose making significant changes to Social Security or Medicare.
The more people who receive benefits, the harder it’s going to be to make cuts, and it’s never popular to raise taxes. In some respects that argues for letting a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that is set to automatically hit in 2013 take effect. There’s just one problem: the Congressional Budget Office says it would sink the economy into recession. Letting the 2013 provisions come into force would be like dealing with a weight problem by cutting off your right arm.
And so, a long-term, well-planned diet is the only solution.
But where are the political leaders who are statesmen, instead of mere self-serving politicians, to tackle this?
Michigan is the 8th largest state in the USA. Arabic is not among the state’s 10 largest reported ancestries of German (22.9%), Irish (12%), English (10.6%), Polish (9.1%), French/French Canadian (7%), Dutch (5.2%), Italian (4.9%), American (4.8%),
Scottish (2.5%), or Swedish (1.7%).
Out of Michigan’s total population of nearly 10 million (9,883, 640), only about 300,000 people (3.03%) are Arabic, who trace their descent from the Middle East.
The city of Dearborn (Michigan’s 8th largest city), however, has a sizeable Arab community. 33.4% of Dearborn’s total population of 97,775 in 2000 were Arabic, comprised of Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac and Lebanese who had immigrated into Dearborn for jobs in the auto industry in the 1920s, along with more recent Yemenis and Iraqis.
Dearborn is the same city where in 2010, four Christians were arrested at the Arab-American Festival for distributing copies of the Gospel of John. The missionaries were peaceful, not violating any law, and were acting fully within our Constitution rights as U.S. citizens. Despite that, within a matter of three minutes, eight Dearborn police officers descended with lightning speed to surround and arrest the evangelists.
Thankfully, the Thomas More Law Center came to the defense of the Christians. On May 26, 2011, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the city and police of Dearborn had violated the evangelists’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
But that court ruling hasn’t stopped Creeping Sharia — the increasing incursion of Islam — into America, and into Michigan in particular.
To begin with, despite the fact that America is up to our national eyeballs in debt, the federal government has been “resettling” tens of thousands of mainly Muslim refugees, many from Africa’s Somalia, into the United States in the past few years. That federal policy places great strains on local and state governments because it is they who bear the costs when those refugees are “resettled” in their communities. Obama exacerbates the problem withhis plan to let in some 80,000 mainly Muslim refugees in fiscal year 2011. (Read more about this here.)
Now an e-mail forwarded to the Fellowship by our Anon alerts us to the following:
Muslim men are allowed to have as many as 4 wives. Many Muslims have immigrated into the U.S. with their multiple wives. But the U.S. does not allow multi marriages, so the man lists one wife as his, and signs the other wives as his “extended family” on welfare and other free government programs!
In Michigan when you call the Public Assistance office you are told to Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Spanish, or Press 3 for Arabic! Every time you add a new language to an American program it requires an additional number of persons fluent in that language to process those persons who refuse to learn English in order to live here at an additional cost to the taxpayer. Why are we even allowing persons to immigrate here who cannot provide for themselves, and putting them in our welfare system?
This seems to have happened clandestinely, for, as far as I know, no public announcement, or opportunity to vote on this was offered to the American people.
I followed up on that e-mail and checked it out of myself. You can as well:
Muslims at best comprise only 3.03% of Michigan’s population, but the state government is bending over backward to provide special Arabic-language publications to make it easier for them to assess welfare benefits. All at the taxpayer’s expense.
Obama lemmings (h/t our beloved moxielouise!)
