The Last Chance Of Freedom

It's becoming increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction, and unfortunately the media has a strong bias. They spin stories to make conservatives look bad and will go to great lengths to avoid reporting on the good that comes from conservative policies. There are a few shining lights in the media landscape-brave conservative outlets that report the truth and offer a different perspective. We must support conservative outlets like this one and ensure that our voices are heard.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Barack Obama’s top 10 most outrageous Big Labor paybacks

In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” then-presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote: “I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way.”
After Big Labor spent nearly $1 billion to get President Obama and his forced-unionism allies elected in 2008, Obama did not disappoint.
Here is a breakdown of the top 10 most outrageous Big Labor paybacks of the Obama administration:
1. Hiding union boss expenditures. Obama started his term strong. Shortly after getting elected, Obama appointed forced-unionism partisan Hilda Solis to run the Department of Labor. Solis, in combination with numerous Obama executive orders, promptly rolled back any (albeit modest) progress in union boss transparency and disclosure that had been made the prior eight years. Now it is even more difficult for workers to know where their forced dues dollars are being spent.
2. Neutering the watchdog. Obama’s first budget slashed funding for the Office of Labor and Management Standards (OLMS), the federal agency that enforces union disclosure laws. It’s one of the few areas of the budget that Obama has proposed cutting.
3. Fox guarding the henhouse. Obama appointed union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that administers and enforces federal labor law. Becker was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate because of bipartisan opposition to his nomination. Obama appointed him to the NLRB via recess appointment.

UN Warns Of 'Catastrophic' Rise In European Youth Unemployment If Greece Left The Eurozone

The UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned of a "catastrophic" rise in unemployment, especially among the young, if debt-wracked Greece were to leave the eurozone or if the bloc were to split.
"It would be a catastrophe for the European youth," Ekkehard Ernst, a senior economist at the body told the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung .
Unemployment in crisis-hit Spain would rise to 27.7pc by 2014, the ILO economist calculated, with jobless rates among 15-24 year-olds rising to 51.3pc. Portugal would also suffer a crippling rise in unemployment, AFP reported.
In Germany, Europe's top economy, which is currently enjoying unemployment rates near record lows, close to one-in-10 would be without a job by 2014.
"The average unemployment rate in the 17 eurozone member states would rise to 13pc," Mr Ernst told the paper.
The situation would be even worse if the single currency zone were to break up completely, cautioned the economist.
In this event, unemployment in Germany would shoot up to 11.3pc by 2014 and stay around this level. France would see its jobless rate spike to 17pc and more than one-in-three Spaniards would be without a job.
Again, the young would be worst hit, said Mr Ernst. If the euro were to crash, youth unemployment would rise to 34pc in France, 38pc in Italy and an eye-watering 59pc in Spain.

Weidmann resignation report turns up heat on ECB's Draghi

German central bank chief Jens Weidmann's reported threat to resign has piled pressure on European Central Bank President Mario Draghi to assuage his opposition to a new bond-buying plan without tying it up in so many knots it is rendered ineffective.
A Bundesbank spokesman declined to comment on Friday on a report in the mass circulation Bild newspaper that Weidmann, who has stressed his opposition to the strategy, had considered resigning several times in recent weeks but had been dissuaded by the German government.
Draghi is skipping this weekend's Jackson Hole policymakers' retreat to try to forge agreement. The Italian will have little time to celebrate his 65th birthday on Monday as he tries to seal a deal before a September 6 ECB policy meeting.
The ECB is preparing to ease painful borrowing costs in Spain and Italy, in the teeth of Bundesbank opposition, to buy the euro zone governments time to negotiate legal and political hurdles to a longer-term response to the euro zone crisis.
"Opposition from Weidmann and reservations from some other Council members will mean that ECB bond purchases would be highly conditional, be focused on the short end and would not aim to bring yields down quite as much as Italy and Spain might like to see," said Berenberg economist Holger Schmieding.
Securing majority support for a plan Weidmann can live with represents the biggest balancing act Draghi has faced since he took over the ECB presidency on November 1 last year.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/31/us-eurozone-ecb-idUSBRE87U09N20120831

Campaign for Obama, get college credit

A public university in Colorado may have violated state law by offering students course credit if they volunteered with President Obama’s re-election campaign. A blog post on the Adams State University website billed the opportunity as a “12 week long organizing internship for the Obama Campaign.”
Both the blog post and the course are now gone. The course was canceled due to lack of interest, according to the university. The blog post was taken down earlier this week after a conservative student blog, Campus Reform, reported on it.
The course may have been in violation of the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act, which prohibits the use of public resources toward “campaigns involving the nomination, retention, or election of any person to any public office.” Oliver Darcy, the editor at Campus Reform who first reported the story, said the course struck him as a likely violation of state law.
“They are definitely using a few professors at least to help these students with the campaign process, so I don’t understand how it doesn’t use public resources for campaign purposes,” he said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
A spokesperson for the university said the blog post was mistaken about the nature of the course, and that students would have been allowed to volunteer with any campaign.
“This is an independent study course that would be available to any student in any campaign,” said Julie Waechter, a spokesperson for ASU, in an interview with TheDC News Foundation.
Waechter declined to give the name of the employee who authorized the course. Dodie Day, the administrator who posted the blog entry, declined to comment.

An Economist At China's State Council Sees A Crisis Coming

Li Zoujun, an economist at the Development Research Centre of the State Council, recently made a report, presumably at an internal meeting, which predicted that China could face an economic crisis in 2013.

The full report in Chinese can be read here. We are not going attempt to summarise the whole report as it is quite lengthy, except that for some of his rationale for his somewhat apocalyptic predictions. Majority of what he said does not seem very surprising. The only surprising thing about such a report is just that it is made by someone from the State Council who said it, not any Westerners or Western media who were allegedly talking down China.

The causes of this economic crisis are, first of all, a burst of real estate bubble and local government debts crisis.

The second is external, namely that hot money and capital inflow over the past few years fuelled the bubble within China (then he blames “foreigners who short China”). As capital might flow the other way when the economy slows, it will cause troubles for Chinese government in dealing with it.

The third is political: as this year is pretty much the final year for the current government’s term, its job in the remaining months would be to hope that everything is stable. But let’s say the economy get pass the leadership transition without any troubles, the next leadership will face two choices: either to sustain the bubble for now and create a bigger problem in 2015 /16, or let the bubble got bust. Of which, he endorses the second choice.

Louisiana Teachers' Union Calls Black School Choice Group 'Pro-KKK'

On Thursday, in the shadow of the hurricane barreling down on the region, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, a large teachers' union, launched an attack on the state's chapter of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a nonprofit organization working to improve black educational achievement through education reform and school choice. On its official Twitter account, the teachers' union ludicrously alleged that BAEO supports a "pro KKK curriculum," and sent out the statement to various followers.
The presumed basis for the attack seems to be that one of the 119 private schools that accept vouchers in Louisiana uses a Bob Jones University Press textbook which, while stopping short of praising the Klan, casts its birth in a more positive light of "fighting the decline in morality."
While whitewashing the KKK is certainly abhorrent, one wonders if the LFT similarly fights the use of the historically debunked The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn as a public school textbook throughout many states. Many parents in the U.S. would find use of The People's History no less odious than the Bob Jones book, especially in light of the FBI's release of files on Zinn that cites an informant confirming Zinn's membership in the Communist Party.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/louisiana_teachers_union_calls_black_school_choice_group_pro-kkk.html#ixzz257P0SrVL

Romney in convention speech: ‘Centerpiece’ of Obama campaign ‘attacking success’

Mitt Romney accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president Thursday night and offered a strong argument against President Barack Obama by saying that the “centerpiece of the president’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success.”
“Is it any wonder that someone who attacks success has led the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression?” Romney said to the crowd here at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, ending the three day-long convention. “In America, we celebrate success, we don’t apologize for it.”
The former Massachusetts governor, who paraded into the convention arena to Kid Rock’s song “Born Free,” referenced the late astronaut Neil Armstrong and declared “that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.”
He opened up about his religion and his family, tearing up briefly as he described how his dad gave his mom a rose everyday, “which he put on her bedside table.”
“That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died — she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose,” Romney said with tears in his eyes.
He made a point of praising the women leaders of the Republican Party today who addressed the convention, something he said his mother would have enjoyed seeing.
“I wish she could have been here at the convention and heard leaders like Gov. Mary Fallin, Gov. Nikki Haley, Gov. Susana Martinez, Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” he said.

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