The Final Five: June 21, 2012

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Tonight's Crazy Story:
Woman Made Cab Driver Wait While She Robbed a Store
A Florida woman called a cab to take her to a convenience store, and asked the driver to wait while she ran inside. The cab driver, worried that she was trying to beat the fare, summoned a police officer, who arrived just as she returned from robbing the store.

Topic One: Fast & Furious
The DOJ's Fast & Furious rationale is falling apart: "For those who keep a constant wary eye on the left's never-ending war on our 2nd-Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the increasingly fishy smell emanating from Washington led to connecting the dots back to the year-earlier revelations in the liberal media that weapons being used in Mexican crimes were traceable back to American sources more than 90% of the time. That false meme had spread quickly through the major liberal media, along with calls for stricter gun control laws in this country by...guess who! How about our president, our secretary of state, our attorney general, and other notable Democrats, for starters?"

Invoking executive privilege puts the Obama campaign in a tough place: "The answers to his critics’ questions could have broad implications for Obama five months before voters decide whether to grant him a second term. The expected protracted legal dispute has the potential to embarrass and distract the White House during the heart of the reelection campaign. Obama’s assertion of privilege quickly became fodder for his political opponents, who have latched onto the Fast and Furious scandal to accuse the president of trying to avoid congressional scrutiny. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Obama on Wednesday asking for more detail on the exact scope of the privilege that Obama invoked."

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine adds: "This election is, above all else, about the economy. But the fact that Obama is now on record as officially seeking to conceal documents relating to a significant scandal will add to his discomfort."

Time for a Laugh:
"Our space probe, Voyager 1, launched back in 1977, is 11 billion miles in space. It's on the verge of leaving our solar system on its mission to find other civilizations to try and borrow money from."
-Jay Leno

Topic Two: The Hostile Environment
Obama hostile to job creators: "Here in Virginia, we see the effects of these policies every day. It’s clear to me that Mr. Obama is no friend to small business. From higher taxes to environmental regulatory overreach to new health care mandates, this administration has impaired the ability of businesses to survive, let alone grow and hire new employees. Consider Obamacare: Additional taxes on investment income and an increase in Medicare payroll taxes will impose a significant burden on small businesses."

"Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning. Taking effect in 2014, the employer mandate will require small businesses with more than 50 employees to pay a $2,000 fine per employee should they fail to offer health care deemed appropriate by Mr. Obama’s bureaucrats in Washington. At a time of record-level unemployment, these job-killing policies just don’t make any sense. They drive up the costs of hiring new employees at a moment when we simply cannot afford it."

"Most crushing of all, however, is the uncertainty that the president’s policies produce. Every week he seems to come up with new burdens to place on job creators. How are we to know which regulations and requirements come next? How can the state plan for future energy development when Mr. Obama won’t even consider allowing exploration of our offshore oil resources? In order to make proper investments in our businesses and our employees, we need less government and gimmicks, and more common sense and clarity."

Debt Watch:
$15,777,954,587,181.97
( As of Wednesday, June 20, 2012 )

Change: -$6,722,031,929
Your share as a citizen: $50,459.08
Share per household: $138,117.19
Debt since Obama inauguration: $5,151,077,538,269

Topic Three: ObamaCare in Action
Want to see what our healthcare system will look like if we do not get ObamaCare off the books? Just look at other nations that have tried similar approaches. Canada's single-payer healthcare system (which Obama said the Affordable Care Act is a middle step on our way to) has instituted rationing, at a large economic cost: "According to a new study by Canada's Fraser Institute, surgical waitlists are costing the nation about $1 billion each year in lost productivity. The average Canadian can now expect to wait 9.5 weeks for treatment with a medical specialist, this number up from 9.3 weeks last year. While most stories report on the personal pain of waiting for care, Fraser's new report "The Private Cost of Public Queues," breaks ground in assigning a specific monetary value to the Canadian economy's loss each year due to the rationing in its single-payer healthcare system. Based on a 2011 Statistics Canada finding, the study makes the assumption that 11% of patients "were adversely affected by their wait for non-emergency surgery." Dividing the cost individually, health rationing for Canada's 941,321 patients seeking specialized surgery came out to $3,500 per patient in lost wage hours."

In England, doctors are putting elderly patients on "death pathways" in order to free up hospital beds: "NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday. Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly. He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country. It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent. It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours."

Tweet of the Day:
Andy Levy (@andylevy): As usual, the worst part of twitter going down is all the tweets about twitter going down.

Topic Four: Gun Control
Congressional candidate Samuel Wurzelbacher, also known as 'Joe the Plumber', is in the middle of another controversy, this time about an ad opposing gun control. You can view the ad here. While I have some criticisms of the ad, I have no problem with the supposedly controversial statements he makes regarding gun control. The Huffington Post claims he says that gun control caused the holocaust. Had he made that claim, he would have been wrong; an evil dictator and his followers caused the holocaust. However, Wurzelbacher does claim that gun control made it easier for Hitler's government to round up the Jews and the other groups, and it left those groups unable to adequately defend themselves.

Need more proof? Look at America's violent crime statistics. As gun ownership has increased, violent crime has decreased. "Gun-control advocates are noticeably silent when crime rates decline. Their multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts are designed to manufacture mass anxiety that every gun owner is a potential killer. The statistics show otherwise. ... “This is not a one-year anomaly, but a steady decline in the FBI’s violent-crime rates,” said Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association. “It would be disingenuous for anyone to not credit increased self-defense laws to account for this decline.”

It should come as no surprise that a list of the cities with the highest crime rates also serves as a list of cities with strict gun control laws. Washington, D.C., has unrivaled gun control, and its crime statistics bear that out. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, three other cities with strict gun control, also come near the top of the crime list.

Food for Thought - A Quote from our Founders
"A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal."
-John Adams

Topic Five: Klavan and Obama
Andrew Klavan writes a satirical piece explaining that he opposes Obama because of his skin color: "As far as I’m concerned there are only two plausible reasons to oppose President Obama: either because he’s clearly the worst president in American history, or because he’s black. For me, it’s because he’s black."

"Oh, I know, some of you are suspicious. You think that secretly I dislike Obama because he’s increased the federal debt by nearly five trillion dollars and given us our highest deficits since 1946 and yet has made not one serious proposal to reform the entitlements that are clearly causing the problem. But no, so help me, I just happen to be put off by the whole brown epidermis thing. It gets to me."

"Some on the left have unleashed wild accusations that I harbor a primal animosity toward Obama’s shredding of the Constitution, or his opposition to the ideals of the American founding. They think I look at Obama’s membership in a European-style socialist party (about which he lied) or his close relationship with anti-American terrorist William Ayers (about which he lied) or his twenty year tutelage under the racist, anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright (about which he almost certainly lied) or the several attempts at government encroachments so overweening that they have been struck down 9-0 by a normally divided Supreme Court — and see all that as evidence that this president is less committed to the American project than any leader of this continent since King George. Wrong! I’m just not down with this whole African-American business. I mean, the guy’s all, like, dark and stuff. What’s that about?"

http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/06/remaining-merits-cases-in-plain-english-2/

Tomorrow in History
June 22, 1944 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill, into law.

Grab Bag - Interesting and Important Stories to Conclude Your Evening:
Teacher who threatened arrest for criticizing Obama will keep job

Shocker: Obama runs campaign deficit

Judge tells man to stay away from casinos

The pattern of lies in Obama's biography

'Fortnight for Freedom' begins today

The 'doing fine' private sector shouldering majority of lost job openings

Is a Romney landslide on the way?

June becomes even worse for the unions

Ben Howe covers the Twitter outage

Kids sing 'God Bless the USA'; libs tell them to 'burn in hell'

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