Great new video from Senator Cruz:

Here are the top Tweets of the week that have been retweeted by Rampart Media followers:

Michelle Antoinette Obama: The WH Is NO LONGER The ‘Peoples House’ It Is ONLY Our Invited Guests “House” - via Ironicsurrealism.com

At a “workshop” for the film 42 in the State Dining Room of the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama told the assembled guests that “this is your house, too”.
.......
The White House is currently not allowing the public to tour or access the White House. Only invited guests are allowed inside.


Army Training Instructor Lists Evangelism, Catholicism, US Christian Identity, Islamophobia As Religious Extremism [Image] - via Ironicsurrealism.com

A U.S. Army training instructor listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism along with Al Qaeda and Hamas during a briefing with an Army Reserve unit based in Pennsylvania, Fox News has learned.


Activist Demands Other Publications Drop 'Illegal Immigrant' After AP - via Breitbart.com

After the Associated Press on Tuesday decided to drop the term "illegal immigrant" and expunge it from its style guide (used by nearly every journalist), activists then immediately began to demand other publications follow suit.

Jose Antonio Vargas, the illegal immigrant who has gained publicity in recent years after he revealed that he did not have citizenship or legal status, tweeted, "You're next, @nytimes, @latimes, @washingtonpost, @WSJ. No human being is illegal."


Report: Authorities stop less than half of all illegal border crossings - via TheBlaze.com

A sophisticated airborne radar system developed to track Taliban fighters planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan has found a new use along the U.S. border withMexico, where it has revealed gaps in security.

Operated from a Predator surveillance drone, the radar system has collected evidence that Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer than half of the foreign migrants and smugglers who had illegally crossed into a 150-square-mile stretch of southern Arizona. [...]


Slate Features Duck Genitals Scientist Defending Her Study - via NewsBusters.org

Most Americans would agree that a federal study -- burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by the way -- on duck penises is not exactly a high priority when we need to get our fiscal house in order. But Patricia Brennan would disagree with you, and she took to the liberal online journal Slate to do so last Tuesday.

Wait, did I mention that Brennan has a vested interest in defending the study of duck dongs? She's a research professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst receiving federal money for the study?

And Now the video:

“We know our economy’s stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages. But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. Tonight, let’s declare that, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty — and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.”

Oh! The horror! The horror I say! Barack Obama's demagoguery knows no bounds. This is just the latest example of emotional rhetoric from the Campaigner in Chief. Let's look at some Obama kryptonite, i.e. data.

Mark Perry, a University of Michigan economics professor and writer for the American Enterprise Institute, looked at the most recent information available on minimum wage workers from the Bureau of Labor Statitstics. This is what he found: 

1. In 2011, 99.4% of full time workers earned more than the minimum wage.
2. 98.3% of hourly workers earned more than the minimum wage. 
3. Only 3.25% of workers over 25 were earning the minimum wage.
4. 77.2% of teenage workers made more than the minimum wage.
   

Obama makes it sound like there are so many people barely getting by on the minimum wage when the evidence shows that almost 100% of workers make more than the minimum wage. My goodness, almost 80% of teenage workers make more than the minimum wage....

But what about the last part of Obama's statement that implies that raising the minimum wage would pull people out of poverty? For information on that, we turn to a study by Joseph J. Sabia and Richard V. Burkhauser from the Southern Economic Journal . This study was conducted when politicians (Obama included) wanted the federal minimum wage to be raised to $9.50 an hour. This is what they concluded:

"Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey (CPS), we find no evidence that minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 lowered state poverty rates. Moreover, we find that the newly proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, like the last increase from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, is not well targeted to the working poor. Only 11.3% of workers who will gain from an increase in the federal minimum wage to $9.50 per hour live in poor households, an even smaller share than was the case with the last federal minimum wage increase (15.8%). Of those who will gain, 63.2% are second or third earners living in households with incomes twice the poverty line, and 42.3% live in households with incomes three times the poverty line, well above $50,233, the income of the median household in 2007.3"

Let's break this down. Consider an economy with 100 workers in which the minimum wage was raised from to $9.50 an hour (I know Obama just wants to raise it to $9 an hour but I'd wager that these stats would still be pretty accurate).  Using the above information:

• 11 people would benefit
• Of these 11 people,  6 people  are second or third earners in a household with incomes twice the poverty line
• 4 people would live in households with incomes three times the poverty level (above $50,233).

And that my friends leaves us with 1 person. One person out of 100 would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage in a household that is not above the poverty line. And that is assuming that this person still gets to keep their job. The study also found that:

"....we estimate that nearly 1.3 million jobs will be lost if the federal minimum wage is increased to
$9.50 per hour, including 168,000 jobs currently held by the working poor."

Once again we have liberal do-gooder policy hurting the very people that they claim to represent. 

On the Forbes.com blog, Peter Ferrara points out that the first five years of the Obama Administration have been the worst five years since the Great Depression. Here's a summary:

• 3 million fewer Americans working since January 2008 even though the working age population has increased by 12 million
• If the labor force participation rate would have been in December 2012 what it was in 2008, the unemployment rate would have been 11.4%
• Black unemployment- 13.8%
• Hispanic unemployment- 9.6%
• Teenage unemployment- 23.4%
• Black teenage unemployment- 37.8%
• U6 unemployment rate (people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time work and others marginally attached to the workforce)- 14.4%
• Median household income down 9%
• Commodity price index rose 20%
• 31% increase in the poverty rate to 49.7 million Americans
• 80% increase in food stamp participation to 47.7 million Americans
• The economy has grown on average at 0.6%
• Federal spending has increased by 41%

I'll let these pictures speak for themselves:

_James Pethokoukis, writing on the blog of American Enterprise, broke down the June jobs numbers.  Here are some of the main points:

• We have had 41 straight months of unemployment over 8%. This is the longest it has been since the Great Depression.
• If the labor force participation rate was the same today as it was when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.5% (Even if you take into consideration the LFP rate should be declining because of age. )
• If you include people marginally attached to the workforce, plus part-time workers, the unemployment rate would be 14.9%
• The average time spent unemployed went up to 39.9 weeks.
• Job growth during Obama's first three years averaging 75,000 per month. During Reagan's first three years, job growth averaged 273,000 per month

With all of this in mind, let's revisit the Obama Administration's chart showing where we should be unemployment-wise since the passing of the stimulus bill. It would be funny if so many Americans weren't out of work.

By now much has been written and said about the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare but I'm still going to throw my two cents worth out there 

Instead of focusing on this decision from a political perspective, I want to focus on it from a Constitutional perspective. How did the Justices reach the decision that the penalty for not purchasing health insurance was Constitutional?

(WARNING: The following information might cause uncontrollable laughing and/or crying, face-palming, and/or fits of rage)

For the logic and arguments used in the ruling, I turned to the Chicago-Kent University's Supreme Court Media website, Oyez.org. Link here.

The High Court was faced with four questions, but I am only going to focus on two:

1. Is the suit brought by respondents to challenge the minimum coverage provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act barred by the Anti-Injunction Act, 2 U.S.C. 7421(a)?  (The Anti-Injunction Act essentially states that someone must first pay a tax in order to challenge it in court. First, the Supremes had to determine whether the penalty for not having health insurance was indeed a tax. If it was, then no one would have standing to challenge it because it has not been assessed yet on anyone.)  
2. Does Congress have power under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, specifically under the Commerce Clause or the Taxing and Spending Clause, to require most Americans to purchase health insurance?
   
   

Here is where the legal gymnastics begin and the Constitution and common sense end. The first question is answered:

"The justices unanimously agreed that the Anti-Injunction Act did not bar the suit. Congress did not intend that the payment for non-compliance with the Individual Mandate be a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act."

Ok. So, the Court unanimously said that the penalty for not complying with the Individual Mandate was not a tax based on Congress "not intending" it to be. Congress could have said that it was a tax, but they did not. Therefore, the Court reasoned, that the Anti-Injunction Act did not come into play because the penalty is not a tax.

Let's stop right here. After reading this, you would think that the second question could now be answered. If Congress did not declare the penalty as a tax, then Congress does not have the authority under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to enact the Individual Mandate. How did the Court respond?

"Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, concluded that the Individual Mandate penalty is a tax for the purposes of the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause and is a valid exercise of Congressional authority."

Confused? In a matter of moments, the Court contradicted itself. Now they are claiming that it IS a tax and is justified under the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause. Riiiight............ Let's put it in even more simplistic terms so the Democrats can understand:

The Obamacare penalty is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. 
The Obamacare penalty is a tax and is a valid under the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause.

I could see Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan making an absurd claim like this. After all, they are radical leftist judicial activists with no respect for our Constitution or rule of law. But John Roberts? What the hell was he thinking? 

The dissenting Justices pointed out the flaw in this thinking.

"As part of a jointly written dissenting opinion, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito disagreed, arguing that because Congress characterized the payment as a penalty, to instead characterize it as a tax would amount to rewriting the Act."

Hmmmmm. Congress did not characterize the payment as a tax. Congress. Did. Not. Characterize. The. Payment. As. A. Tax. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, from the same people who said the penalty IS a tax! 

This begs the question: Why didn't the five anti-Constitutionalist Justices declare it a tax it when determining if the Obamacare challengers had standing under the Anti-Injunction Act? The challenge would have ended there and Obamacare would have been upheld. My theory is that they wanted/had to get to the second question. They wanted so badly to set the precedent  that Congress has the authority to tax inactivity,  they were willing to make idiots of themselves to do so. The Anti-Injunction Act had to be gotten around in order to get to what they really wanted to rule on. What better way do this than to simply say  that it's not a tax and therefore the Anti-Injunction Act doesn't apply?

RIP Constitution