Christie's big test: who will he pick to replace Sen. Lautenberg?

The odd couple

Big Government   "The death Monday of NJ Sen. Frank Lautenberg presen
ts Gov. Chris Christie with a host of difficult choices. This being New Jersey, of course, it is even more complicated as state law appears to be in conflict. It is unclear if a special election to fill the seat would occur this year, during the state's general election this November, or in the election next year. The implications of each affect Christie's calculus on this, his first big, national political test."

It's a lot more complicated than you might think; Whom he picks to replace Lautenberg will speak volumes. "Whom Christie selects to take Lautenberg’s seat in the interim will both affect and be affected by these considerations. ....
...."So let’s do a bit of old-fashioned speculating, and take a look at a few possible picks and what each could/would mean this year and beyond."

Real 'Bombshell' Is That Reporters More Experienced Than ABC's Trey Hardin Already Had to Know What He Revealed

And now, pray for Darrell Issa because he will be destroyed by Democrats.

Newsbusters  "In what some have described as a "bombshell" statement, ABC News Political analyst Trey Hardin said something on Monday morning any reporter with any kind of meaningful inside connections in Washington should have known, but apparently wouldn't dare say or write: "I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that there are people very close to this president that not only knew what the IRS were doing but authorized it."
"Martin continued: "It simply just does not happen at an agency level like that without political advisers likely in the West Wing certainly connected to the president’s ongoing campaign organization that didn’t know about it." Again, Kerry Picket at Breitbart News, released hearing testimony previous obtained (bolds are mine):"....  Read more.

War of words escalates between Issa and White House  "The pushback from the White House, in the person of David Plouffe, was a vicious smear of Issa that was debunked 20 years ago:
....

"Still, Plouffe's outrageous comments take the prize for lowest blow of the week. It appears that the White House has decided to get in the gutter to hit back against criticism of their handling of the IRS scandal and I'm sure Republicans won't be far behind in the race to the bottom."

Issa gets the Chicago treatment: Plouffe Suggests Issa May be a Criminal

White House Dossier "The kerfuffle over House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s calling White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a liar is nothing compared to the ugly Chicago, Alinskyite politics that reared its head in response.

Plouffe

"The very president who was supposed to be above something as pedestrian as politics has shown once again that he is in fact the ugliest practitioner of it since Richard Nixon.
" “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today,” tweeted David Plouffe Sunday in response to news that Issa had called into question Carney’s honesty."

...."This is effectively Obama roughing up his chief antagonist on Capitol Hill in the most coarse and malignant manner. It’s a sure signal to other White House allies, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, to begin trying to destroy Issa.
"And it’s a desecration of Obama’s office. Then again, that’s nothing much new.
"But more interestingly, it may be a sign that the White House is much more gravely concerned about Issa than it lets on."

Free Bradley Manning at Meade

Blackfive "Not actually giving away free samples, just whining that treason is not important enough to lock someone up for. Friend of UJ and the site "the One-Eyed Jack" took one for the team and drove through the gaggle of dirty, nasty, patchouli-smelling hippies  to give us this report."

All in all, it seemed like much ado about nothing. There seemed to be one cop for every two protestors, and other than the Code Pink folks (in their trademark pink tops/shorts, etc), there seemed to be left wing radicals of almost every stripe (based on the signs I saw). The protestors did cause the powers that be to spend a ton of money, though…

"UJ: I think they look great on the other side of the fence. Too bad it is not in with Bradley. I'm kidding, I wholeheartedly support the right of the ass-clowns to conduct buffonery in support of traitors. It's the American way." 

U.S. publishes details of missile base Israel wanted kept secret

This president is a foreign policy disaster!
McClatchy  ""If an enemy of Israel wanted to launch an attack against a facility, this would give him an easy how-to guide. This type of information is closely guarded and its release can jeopardize the entire facility," said an Israeli military official who commented on the publication of the proposal but declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the facility. He declined to say whether plans for the facility have been altered as a result of the disclosure.           

" "This is more than worrying, it is shocking," he said."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/03/192895/us-publishes-details-of-missile.html#.Ua0-qUAa6lg#storylink=cpy

Another urban legend: Muslims exempted from ObamaCare

This came to me today and the text contained these claims:

ObamaCare allows the establishment of Dhimmitude and Sharia Muslim diktat in the United States. Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance, and also from the penalty tax for being uninsured. Islam considers insurance to be "gambling", "risk-taking", and "usury" and is thus banned. Muslims are specifically granted exemption based on this.

How convenient. 
      So I, as a Christian, will have crippling IRS liens placed against all of my assets, including real estate, cattle, and even accounts receivable, and will face hard prison time because I refuse to buy insurance or pay the penalty tax. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan will have no such penalty and will have 100% of his health insurance needs paid for by the de facto government insurance. Non-Muslims will be paying a tax to subsidize Muslims.. This is Dhimmitude.

Oddly enough, posts like this usually say the story was checked against Snopes and this one even included the link to their site. But when the site was checked, the Snopes report totally rejected this story. Yet that did not stop the original source from telling us to forward this on to as many people as we can.  See the Snopes report yourself where they label the rumor as false.

Truth or Fiction gives us more background here:
There is a provision for a religious conscience exemption in the HR-3590 health care bill that was signed into law by President Obama but there is no Muslim restriction against the purchase of health insurance.

Members of some religious organizations may claim a Religious Conscience Exemption if their sects meet the conditions by having a health care sharing ministry that is exempt from taxation under section 501(a).   For more please click here for finding on the HR-3590.

Health insurance and life Insurance are two different products. According to the Islam online web site, there are a variety of views of  religious restrictions toward life insurance and investing because it is looked upon as gambling but no evidence was found of any restrictions toward Muslims purchasing medical, home owners and automobile policies.

 

FactCheck states:

Finally, the e-mail repeats one other claim we’ve debunked before. It says that "I … will face hard prison time because I refuse to buy insurance or pay the penalty tax." This is false. The House version of the bill left open the possibility of criminal penalties for deliberately evading a tax for not having health insurance, but the Senate version did not, nor did the final law.

Further research.
Please check any stories like this out before forwarding them on. Rumors of this type make many opponents of this president's policies look exactly like the low-information voters who put him into office for another four years. We have to be better than those people. TD

Major Democratic donors flock to Christie

New Jersey On-Line "Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.
"The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros*, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley."
*Uh-oh. Emphasis added.

Meanwhile...

 

IRS: Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family

CNS News  "Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS."The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan."
Via Drudge.

Survey shows that up to 2/3 of uninsured don't know if they'll buy insurance   " "I was really shocked that 64 percent [of uninsured adults] said they haven't decided if they will purchase insurance by the Jan. 1 deadline," Adams said. "I was definitely surprised by the high number of people who really have no clue what they're going to do next year."

" "We don't want these consumers to miss this key deadline," she said, adding that new heath-care exchanges under Obamacare will begin accepting applications for insurance in less than four months. "They're going to potentially go without health care for the entire year." "
....
"Obamacare is so complex, so confusing, that "educating" the public about its benefits and penalties probably won't do much good.  The first some of these people will hear about the Obamacare individual mandate is when they get a registered letter from the IRS telling them they owe the tax for not buying insurance. Or imagine the shoclk for some when they get the  letter from their insurance company telling them the policy they've carried for years has inadequate coverage under the new law and they will have to buy a more expensive plan.
"America is in for a kick in the nether regions next year and most are totally unaware of it." Read more:

Updated: Thanks for this, you low-information voters

http://terrellaftermath.com/

William Kristol: A Low Dishonest Administration  "It is depressing. We the people reelected Barack Obama. We’re stuck with him for three and a half more years. That’s three and a half more years of dissembling about his administration’s scandals, blocking the repeal of Obamacare, and pursuing a foreign policy of weakness and retreat. That’s not just depressing. It’s dangerous."

The Decline of the Obama Presidency/ "The easiest way to end a war is to lose it".

red Barnes in the Wall Street Journal.

"Congressional Republicans neither trust nor fear the president. And Democrats on Capitol Hill, to whom Mr. Obama has never been close, have grown leery of him. In the Senate, Democrats complain privately about his interference with the biggest domestic policy matter of 2013, immigration reform. His effect, the senators believe, can only be to weaken the fragile bipartisan coalition for reform and make passage of major legislation more perilous.

"The Obama breakdown was not caused by the trio of scandals—IRS, Justice Department, Benghazi—now confronting the president. The decline preceded them. It's the result of what Mr. Obama did in his first term, during the campaign and in the two months following his re-election. But the scandals have worsened his plight and made recovery next to impossible.".... 

"There's not a single member of either party [in Congress] who fears paying a political price for not falling in line with the President, making it even more difficult to get members to cast difficult votes."

Victor Davis Hanson; Our Make No Mistake About It/ Let Me Be Perfectly Clear President  "To get things done, first-person pronouns breed to show both concern and control where there is often neither: I just appointed my new team that reports to me about my concerns that I share with advisors of mine. In the world of rhetoric, the more “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine” appear in the abstract, the more we suspect that the over-referenced speaker has been usually absent in the concrete. There is no “us” or “we” or “our” in Washington these days — although lots of “they” and “them,” the existential enemies of “I” and “me.”"

''''

"The War on Terror cannot go on forever, and so it will not. Who won and who lost, we do not yet know, but apparently someone must have. Obama “ended two wars,” but how and under what conditions we are not told. (The easiest way to end a war is to lose it, as George Orwell once said: Ask France about May 1940. )" Apparently this president is our own Jubilation T. Cornpone.

We do nothing as Muslims eradicate the last vestiges of Christians and Jews from nation after nation

Infidel Bloggers Alliance

Muslims set fire to a Copt Christian church in Cairo. 

"We are witnesses to murder, and our governments are accomplices. The relentless destruction of the last remnants of the Middle East’s Judeo-Christian civilization is well under way. And we are silent.
"Captives of political correctness, our governments cater to radical immigrant tantrums as our leaders contort the truth to deny the existence of Islamist terrorism. Meanwhile, our Middle Eastern “allies” and foes alike eradicate thousands of years of Jewish and Christian heritage. Our diplomats treat the persecution as a minor embarrassment, best ignored.".... Full Article