Fred Lucas's blog

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that if elected president, he would defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, and steer those federal funds toward adoptive services.

“I would like to defund Planned Parenthood,” Gingrich said at a presidential forum on Monday in Myrtle Beach, S.C., sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “I want to take all of that money and put it directly into adoption services to give young women the choice of life, not the culture of death.”

[Editor's note: Mark Levin touted this story in his first half-hour Friday night.]

President Barack Obama said at a fundraiser held in a private residence in Washington, D.C., on Thursday evening that the $447 billion American Jobs Act he has proposed will create 1.9 million American jobs—which works out to a cost of about $235,263 per job.

“It’s estimated that the American Jobs Act would add two percentage points to the GDP, and add as many as 1.9 million jobs, and bring the unemployment rate down by a full percentage point,” Obama said, according to the official White House transcript of his remarks.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) pointed to Solyndra, the bankrupt solar panel company that received $535 million from the federal stimulus act, as an example of President Barack Obama’s unsuccessful attempt to pick winners and losers in the economy.

Solyndra had never shown a profit, yet it received millions of taxpayer dollars. “So this is something that needs to be looked into,” Bachmann said at a news conference following President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress.

President Barack Obama’s uncle, facing deportation for being in the country illegally, will not be treated differently than anyone else under U.S. laws, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told CNSNews.com on Thursday.

“I would refer you to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. It will be handled like any other immigration case,” Carney said.

The U.S. Department of Labor told CNSNews.com in a written statement on Wednesday that it will enforce the federal wage laws on behalf of anyone working in the United States “regardless of their immigration status.” The statement was in response to a written question from CNSNews.com.

The written statement backed up a video statement that Labor Secretary Hilda Solis made to CNSNews.com on Monday in which she indicated that “partnership” agreements she had signed that day with a group of Latin American countries will obligate the U.S. government to protect the working conditions for both “documented and undocumented” migrant laborers here in the United States. (See earlier story.)

President Barack Obama attacked the Republican presidential candidates Monday as part of a taxpayer-funded bus tour that the White House insists is not campaign-related.

The president’s three-day bus tour through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois is supposed to focus on jobs. But during a town hall meeting in Cannon Falls, Minn., Obama mentioned last Thursday’s Republican debate in Ames, Iowa, and he criticized the candidates for saying they would not accept any deficit-reduction deal that includes tax increases.

At least one person in the White House knew about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gun-running operation three months before weapons from the botched sting were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

That’s what a high-ranking ATF official told Congress on Tuesday. 

President Barack Obama said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) – the president best known for establishing a welfare and regulatory state in America – was “fiscally conservative,” in response to a question about how to keep the economy going.

Obama was referring to spending-cut measures Roosevelt took in the middle of the New Deal that lasted from 1933 to 1940.

While President Barack Obama has not presented a specific alternative to Republican plans for reducing spending in the lead up to a vote on raising the debt ceiling, the White House has issued a formal veto threat to the “Cut, Cap and Balance,” plan that is expected to pass the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

“If the president were presented this bill for signature, he would veto it,” said a statement from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

President Barack Obama says America does not need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and he once again blamed much of the fiscal problem on Bush-era tax cuts.

“We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs,” Obama told reporters at his Friday news conference. “The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs -- and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices.” 

Conservative women’s groups see a double standard in the reaction--or lack of it--from the media and liberal feminists to President Barack Obama using terms such as “cute” to describe Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, but said they are not offended by his language.

However, the National Organization of Women has been mute on the matter.

NOW President Terry O’Neill, says spokeswoman Latoya Veal, did not have time to comment on the matter.

Joseph E. diGenova, former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said today it would be a crime for Rep. Anthony Weiner (D.-N.Y.) to file a complaint with the police claiming his Twitter account had been hacked if he knew it had not been hacked.

Last Friday, a Tweet that included a lewd photograph was sent from Weiner’s Twitter account to a 21-year-old woman in Seattle, whom the 46-year-old congressman followed on Twitter. Weiner issued a statement saying that his Twitter account had been hacked and that someone had sent the lewd photograph to the woman as a prank. Thus far, Weiner has not indicated that he has filed a complaint about the alleged hacking incident with any law enforcement agency.

“If he in fact filed a complaint claiming he had been hacked, when in fact he had not been, that would be making a false statement to either local police authorities or federal officials. That would be a crime,” diGenova told CNSNews.com, pointing to 18 U.S.C. 1001 as the relevant statute.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz denounced Republicans last week for believing illegal immigration “should in fact be a crime.” “I think the president was clearly articulating that his position – the Democratic position – is that we need comprehensive immigration reform,” said Wasserman Schultz, a U.S. House member from Florida at a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on May 26.

“We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy and this is not only a reality but a necessity. And that it would be harmful – the Republican solution that I’ve seen in the last three years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries and that in fact it should be a crime and we should arrested them all.”

The comment has drawn attention among conservative commentators and bloggers. During the comments, the chairwoman referred to legislation in 2006 by then Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Mich.) that would increase border enforcement and make illegal immigration a criminal offense instead of a civil matter.

Lawmakers from both parties are calling for a fix to prevent tax cheating companies from getting federal contracts in light of a government investigation that found $24 billion in stimulus act funds went to companies owing $757 million in unpaid taxes.

“Average Americans are likely wondering why we gave such a huge amount of federal money to tax cheats when our national debt is more than $14 trillion,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said in a statement. “That $24 billion went to such people looks like we are rewarding people for potentially criminal behavior.”

The report by the Government Accountability Office on money from the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act going to tax delinquent firms did not name any specific companies, but it gave general examples of firms with delinquent taxes receiving tax dollars.

President Barack Obama has made an unprecedented demand on Israel, Jewish leaders said Thursday, after the president called for Israel to redraw its borders to where they were in 1967 before the Six Day War. One rabbi said Obama was, in essence, asking for "ethnic cleansing" of thousands of Jewish families.

One gained the reputation as “Dr. Death” for his political tactics. He is joined by political operatives who worked for Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, and Jerry Brown, and lent their know-how to the unsuccessful campaign to legalize marijuana in California.

These political operatives have launched a campaign to discredit House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

The Obama administration gave corporate giant General Electric—the parent company of NBC--$24.9 million in grants from the $787-billion economic “stimulus” law President Barack Obama signed in February 2009, according to records posted by the administration at Recovery.gov.