Laura Ingraham's Blog Post on Obama's Lack of Concern about the Fiscal Cliff

Spending cuts? What spending cuts?

Obama, who hasn't met with Speaker of the House John Boehner in almost two weeks, instead sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to discuss the fiscal cliff with House Republicans. But Boehner came out of meeting saying that there had been "no substantial progress", and it was clear the White House needed to get serious. According to Boehner, President Obama has still refused to say how he would rein in spending on entitlements.

But there's no need to take Boehner's word for it: The New York Times is reporting that President Obama has been talking a lot about tax cuts, but has been moving away from spending cuts. Candidate Obama kept talking about a "balanced approach", but apparently that didn't even last a month. How many promises does Obama have to break before Congressional Republicans and voters learn to stop trusting him?

Millions of Americans are extremely worried about the upcoming fiscal cliff. One person certainly isn't: Barack Obama. Apparently, President Obama has scheduled a $4 million dollar vacation that could begin as early at December 17th! On taxpayer dime, of course. So to summarize, President Obama (who supposedly cares about cutting spending) isn't talking about spending, is taking a vacation during fiscal cliff negotiations, and is doing so by spending taxpayer money!

Never before in the history of this country has ignorance been so expensive

Five New ObamaCare Taxes

Coming January 1

Katie Pavlich
News Editor, Townhall

Although some of the "fiscal cliff" taxes can be avoided through a deal made in Congress, new ObamaCare taxes are guaranteed to kick in on January 1, amounting to $268 billion tax hike. From Americans for Tax Reform:

The Obamacare Medical Device Tax – a $20 billion tax increase:  Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year.  In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will increase the cost of your health care – making everything from pacemakers to prosthetics more expensive.

The Obamacare “Special Needs Kids Tax” – a $13 billion tax increase:  The 30-35 million Americans who use a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family’s basic medical needs will face a new government cap of $2,500 (currently the accounts are unlimited under federal law, though employers are allowed to set a cap).

There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children.  There are several million families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education. This Obamacare tax provision will limit the options available to these families.

The Obamacare Surtax on Investment Income – a $123 billion tax increase:  This is a new, 3.8 percentage point surtax on investment income earned in households making at least $250,000 ($200,000 single).  This would result in the following top tax rates on investment income:

The table above also incorporates the scheduled hike in the capital gains rate from 15 to 20 percent, and the scheduled hike in dividends rate from 15 to 39.6 percent.

The Obamacare “Haircut” for Medical Itemized Deductions – a $15.2 billion tax increase: Currently, those Americans facing high medical expenses are allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI).  This tax increase imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. By limiting this deduction, Obamacare widens the net of taxable income for the sickest Americans.  This tax provision will most harm near retirees and those with modest incomes but high medical bills.

The Obamacare Medicare Payroll Tax Hike -- an $86.8 billion tax increase:  The Medicare payroll tax is currently 2.9 percent on all wages and self-employment profits.  Under this tax hike, wages and profits exceeding $200,000 ($250,000 in the case of married couples) will face a 3.8 percent rate instead. This is a direct marginal income tax hike on small business owners, who are liable for self-employment tax in most cases. The table below compares current law vs. the Obamacare Medicare Payroll Tax Hike:

Not only will these taxes hit people in the wallet, but they will also have a negative long term effect on employment and the medical device industry.

Not only does this tax increase costs on companies, it also increases costs on hospitals, doctors and people in need of medical treatment that requires medical devices to be used. As a consequence of this, biomedical or medical device engineering firms are already laying off workers who develop crucial medical products due to the "unforeseen" costs, or in other words, the costs of ObamaCare. Not to mention, the more money these companies pay to the government, the less money they have to invest in research and development.

With this new medical device tax, students who pay large sums of money to get degrees in the field of biomedical engineering, just like doctors, will no longer see the benefits of going into the field and therefore, we will have a shortage of engineers developing new medical device technology. The medical device tax is a death sentence for American medical innovation.

This is only the beginning, the entire ObamaCare legislation kicks on by 2014 with many more tax hikes to come.

Isn't placing black people and women above reproach the "real" racism and sexism?

Bernard Goldberg

When the Ends Justify the Meanness

Those old, angry, white Republican guys are at it again.  They just can’t control their worst instincts.  They see a black face and they go nuts.

Now they’re going after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, not because she went on five Sunday news shows and told a fairy tale about why four Americans were killed in Benghazi, but simply because she’s a black woman.

At least that’s the story some liberals in the worlds of politics and media have come up with to counter GOP opposition to Ms. Rice, whom President Obama will almost certainly nominate to be the next Secretary of State.

Ninety-seven Republicans in the House recently signed a letter telling President Obama that, “Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi affair.”  They want him to pick somebody else.  In the Senate, John McCain and Lindsey Graham are leading the effort to block her nomination.

This has riled many sensitive liberals who see in this opposition the twin devils — racism and sexism.  Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, a Democrat from Ohio and the next chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus told reporters that, “It is a shame that anytime something goes wrong, they [Republicans] pick on women and minorities.”

And a magazine called The Week chimed in, opining that, “Republicans are trying to take the newly re-elected Obama down a peg by getting ‘Rice’s scalp.’ But in the end, Republicans will only compound their problems with women and minority voters if [Senator John] McCain filibusters Obama’s black, female ambassador over this ‘absurd’ criticism.”

TheGrio, an NBC News Web site aimed at African-Americans, ran a story that said, “The Republicans really need to lay off UN Ambassador Susan Rice.  The image of a party of angry old white dudes going after an accomplished black woman will not give them the image makeover they need.”

And the Washington Post went even further, with an editorial that read in part:  “Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman?  The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts.  What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.”

This is especially nasty.  After the mandatory, “we can’t know their hearts,” the Post says in essence, maybe we can’t but we know that those Republicans are white, that they’re male and that a lot of them came from states that had slaves way more than 100 years ago – and that’s all we need to know to convince us that they’re racists.  The Post should be ashamed but we all know nobody responsible for that smarmy editorial will feel the least bit guilty.

So there it is:  If you criticize Susan Rice for putting out false information – possibly to protect the president who was busy telling voters that thanks to him al-Qaeda had been decimated – you’re a racist.  Never mind that there is not so much as a shred of evidence to support the allegation.  In cases like this, facts don’t matter.  Opponents are bigots simply because they’re white and come from the South. The ends justify the meanness.

But this isn’t only about Susan Rice.  This is a sordid lesson in how liberals use race and sex to smear their opponents and render them illegitimate.

So, if you ever opposed, say, President Obama for just about anything, it couldn’t be an honest disagreement over policy – not as far as those good white liberals are concerned. It must be because you’re a bigot.  You think Eric Holder is doing a lousy job.  That proves just one thing.  You hate him because he’s black.

Former Newsweek White House correspondent and current MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe said as much, telling Chris Matthews that John McCain is leading a “witch hunt” against “these people of color, let’s face it around this president, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, now Susan Rice.”  When Matthews asked, “You’re saying that McCain is being driven by racial prejudice here?” Wolffe said, “There is no other way to look at this.”

Actually there is another way to look at this.  Why not accept that McCain and the others oppose Susan Rice because they disagree with what she did, and that her skin color has nothing to do with anything?  Why not accept that, since there is no evidence that any of them are racists?

Criticism of white politicians is perfectly legitimate, of course.  Just ask George W. Bush or any other Republican who has ever run for president.  But the same rules apparently don’t apply to African American public officials – if they’re liberal African American officials.  Liberal elites can say whatever they want about Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, and (soon-to-be former) Congressman Allen West.  They’re black conservatives, which means they’re fair game.  It’s perfectly permissible to call them Uncle Toms, house Negroes and the like.  But utter a discouraging word about a black liberal and you’re in for a heap of trouble

Black liberals must be protected.  Their honesty and their competence cannot be questioned.  No criticism, no matter how reasonable and legitimate, is permitted.  And so, their detractors must be slandered as racists. Liberal African American officials – especially those of the highest rank — can’t be held accountable precisely because they’re African Americans.  You get the impression that simply being a black liberal is a kind of get out of jail free card? Oops, is that racist?

Is this what the most important movement of the 20th century — the great Civil Rights Movement — has come to?

To their everlasting credit, liberals were on the right side of the civil rights struggle.  So it isn’t difficult to understand their belief that racism lurks just beneath the surface, even in today’s America.  But what they seem not to understand is that racism is an ugly thing even when it’s the soft kind, pedaled by supposedly well-meaning white liberals who are too eager to look the other way when black politicians – like every other kind of politician – get into trouble of their own making.  Calling critics bigots is not progress.  It’s not even liberal.

Even Russia got it right!

Russian Newspaper: Obama Was Re-Elected by "Illiterate Society"

By Katie Pavlich

11/26/2012

Russian newspaper Pravda is blaming President Obama's re-election on an "illiterate society" who voted for him.

Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.

After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.

Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.

The editorial even mention's President Obama's Fast and Furious scandal. 

Any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis . O'bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like "fast and furious" and there is still no sign of ending it.  He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia.  Obama's fools and Stalin's fools share the same drink of illusion.

Remember, this op-ed was written by someone who knows communism first hand. While I don't agree Putin is an example of pure freedom, I can't say I disagree with the editorial's main points about giving into Obama's cult of personality while ignoring his long list of failures and his collectivist, central control, big government political philosophy.

The epitome of our illiterate society...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio&feature=player_embedded

Drinking the drink of illusion indeed. What happens when there isn't any more money to pay for Obama phones? Or food stamps? Etc. Etc. Etc.

36 Obama aides owe $833,970 in back taxes – media silent

Maybe the pink slime media is too caught up in Mitt Romney’s 12 year old tax returns or something. They sure don’t seem to care about the fact that *36* Obama aides owe a grand total of nearly a million in back taxes. $833,970 in back taxes is owed to the government by Obama’s government lackey aides.

This story was originally posted by ABC back in January, yet no followup by them, or any other propaganda media outfit has come in the wake of Obama’s smear against Romney. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence? But this isn’t limited to the 36 Obama aides. At the EPA for example, 413 people owe more than $19 million in back taxes! Nineteen Fricken Million dollars!

At the FDIC, 185 employees owe more than $3 million; and five people at the U.S. Tax Court owe $62,508. I demand to see all these people’s tax returns for the last 12 years! You see this is why Democrats are so eager to raise taxes, they don’t pay them anyway!

Will "Cultural Hegemony" cause the overthrow of our democracy?

Is Gramsci’s Theory for Overthrowing America Being Realized?

Written on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 by David L. Goetsch

In view of Barack Obama’s re-election, consider the following quote from Stanislav Mishin, writing in PRAVDA—the state newspaper of Russia: “It must be said that, like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple—excuse me dear reader—I meant people.”  Is it possible that outsiders who are steeped in what Marxism really looks like can see what Americans cannot?

Most Americans have heard of Karl Marx and his plan for overthrowing democratic governments through armed revolts of the workers.  But few Americans have heard of Antonio Gramsci.  This is too bad because Gramsci is the communist philosopher who developed a theory specifically for overthrowing America.  Gramsci thought that overthrowing the United States through an armed revolt of indigenous workers was unrealistic.  He theorized that a better approach would be to undermine the culture and morality of America so that our country would destroy itself from within.

His plan was for intellectual elites to take control of colleges, universities, public schools, and the government and to use their control to destroy the America of our Founders in the name of progressivism.  Sound familiar? Gramsci called his theory “cultural hegemony.”  As I consider the re-election of Barack Obama and think about the cultural and moral changes that have occurred in America in just the short span of my lifetime, I have to wonder if we are seeing the realization of Gramsci’s theory.  This column explains just a few of the main tenets of his theory.

Gramsci admonished college professors and the leftwing media to refer to communist dictators as “Chairmen,” “Leaders,” and “Presidents,” but never as “dictators.”  This type of rhetorical misdirection would soften the views of the public at large to communist leaders.  The communist tyrant, Mao, was always referred to in the media and by leftwing professors as “Chairman Mao.” Castro is still referred to as “Premier” or “political leader,” but never as “communist dictator.”  Even Joseph Stalin, a dictator who exterminated 30 million of his own people, was referred to fondly as “Uncle Joe” or respectfully as “Premier.”

Another tenet of Gramsci’s theory was gradualism.  He knew how Americans would react to armed insurrection by indigenous workers or anyone else.  Consequently, Gramsci recommended a slow transition first to socialism and then to communism.  The transition to socialism would be done under the guise of saving jobs during times of economic recession.  The government would take control of businesses or even whole business sectors to rescue them from bankruptcy.  Sound familiar?

Another of Gramsci’s strategies was to promote the United Nations as the best hope for world peace and a one-world government.  Once the United Nations was firmly established, the next step would be to ensure control of the body by communist nations and their surrogates. This meant getting communist China established in a seat on the United Nations Security Council and giving voice to all of the smaller nations around the world that are either controlled or heavily influenced by communist nations such as China.  Again this should sound familiar.

Marx missed the boat concerning how to overthrow America, but Gramsci appears to have hit the mark.  Well before Barack Obama was elected the first time, America was well down the road in implementing the various tenets of Gramsci’s theory.  But under the Obama administration the process has speeded up.

Read more: http://patriotupdate.com/articles/is-gramscis-theory-for-overthrowing-america-being-realized#ixzz2DFur1WSa

Another uplifting message for Conservatives with actionable items...

November 21, 2012

...And Then a Miracle Occurs.

By James Lewis

 

So American voters can be bought cheaply and fraudulently, with ObamaPhones and Obama's promises: free medical care forever, withdrawing from the world, regular scapegoating of the productive people, reverse-racism, the works.  America is now Chicago, run by a mob alliance of the radical left, the rich who can buy access to Obama, and zillions of mind-numbed robots.

I never thought I'd see it.

Te rest of the world is catching on to what just happened, except for the Europeans, who live in utter denial (being liberals).  China caught on long ago.  The former Soviet colonies are shaking in their boots.  Japan is working with South Korea to develop nuclear weapons, and to buy peace from the Chinese, who can keep a rein on North Korea.  It looks like Europe, in the shape of Frau Merkel, will buy Russian protection by making themselves completely dependent on Russian oil and gas.  And the Middle East will be taken over by what Obama calls "organic revolutions" -- meaning sadistic throwback regimes that put women into mental and physical prisons, to be used and abused by men, on Allah's direct instructions.  As the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick wrote the other day, Obama's policy is plain to see: it is pro-jihadist.

That's the real story of Benghazi: Ambassador Stevens was running Libyan arms to the jihadi rebels in Syria.

The United States' good cop on the beat is withdrawing from crucial parts of the world to pay for Obama's vote-buying schemes in the U.S.  This is the most selfish, greedy, corrupt,  and socially destructive administration on record.

And yet.  And yet.

Conservatives I know are living in mourning.  They forget about "And yet."

Look at the "And yets" in our history alone.

• Valley Forge.
• Gettysburg.
• The Kaiser's near-victory in WWI.
• The Soviet threat.
• Hitler.

I know a Holocaust survivor who believed that he and his wife survived when all the chances were against them.  Ninety percent of Jews died in his part of Europe.  He and his family survived.  They had no reason to hope, but they did it anyway.  And then a miracle occurred.

I am not a religious believer, but every religious person has a capacity to hope in the face of things turning bad.  It's why religious faith has survived as long as it has.  If you want an in-the-news example, look at the Pravda pictures of Vladimir Putin, autocratic thug, kneeling down to the patriarch of Moscow, the pope of Russian Orthodoxy.  And having his picture taken as a photo op, to increase his popularity among Russians.

In China, Christianity is spreading.  Around the world it is spreading as fast as the Saudi poison of Wahhabi fundamentalism.

I normally try to think, "What is to be done?"  Today I'm thinking, "So what if we lose this election, or even the direction of the country?"

A famous cartoon shows two lab-coated scientists standing at a blackboard with equations scribbled on it.

The top ones are okay.  The bottom one is unbelievable.  Then there's a gap in the middle with a cloud saying, "And then a miracle occurs."  The scientists scratch their heads, and one guy says, "I think you need to be a little more explicit in Step 2."

Step 2 is the Unknown Unknowns, a phrase that deserves to enter the lexicon of politics and history.  What gets you in the end is the Unknown Unknowns.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin plotted a Marxist revolution in Russia, and with the active help of the German General Staff in WWI, he was able to pull it off.  Millions of Russians and neighboring peoples died.

Today, Lenin's fervent admirer, Vladimir Putin, is kneeling in Moscow with the patriarch.

It's the Unknown Unknowns.

The best-laid schemes o' mice and men
gang aft agley
...as the Scottish poet Bobbie Burns sang.

What should conservatives do, while waiting for the U.U.s to show up, as they surely will?

Here are my suggestions. Please add your own.

1. Think long-term.  Even if we win next time, we have not done nearly enough to work and think long-term.  That is how the radical left gained control of the media, the universities, and now the biggest power position in the world.

2. Study civilization -- not just Anglo-American conservatism, but the instinctive conservatism we find in Confucius, India, Russia, the Middle East, Europe.  Conservatism has been discovered many times in history.  With this web we can bond with passionate, democratic conservatives around the world.  The left is now in open alliance with jihadists, and we are the target.  How many instinctive conservatives around the world see that danger and don't want any part of the left-jihadist paradise?  International conservatism must aim to spread around the web, to "reconquer the organs of propaganda," as old fascist Karl used to preach.

Why was Confucius a conservative?  His first rule was "First, the rectification of names."  What does that mean?  Since revolutionary forces are always trying to pull things down, Philosopher Kung thought that we must return to the real meaning of words.  So "hos and bitches" should be called "irresponsible young women."  The toxic drug crazes should be called what they are.  A wave of corruption that has now reached into the military should be called what it is.  First is the rectification of names.

3. Read Rules for Radicals, the war manual of the radical left.

4. Anchor our media in permanent power on the web.  Do not pay money to the corrupt forces in the world.  

You can tell who they are if you just use your eyes and ears.

5. Protect children; protect women.  Shine out with our positive values.

6. Wherever possible, practice free speech and open debate.

7. Use humor and truth to reveal the corruptocrats of the other side.

You can add half a dozen more goals.

When Obama got elected with O-phones to welfare mothers, with the promise of free medical care to moronic liberals, and with a platform of "voting for revenge" he made his mark in history. Conservatives should never fall for his scam again.

We have been around for a long time, long before the rise of Marxism, when different kinds of demagogy ruled the mobs of the day.  It isn't just Philosopher Kung in China who emphasized family values, social order and hard work, loyalty, and truth-telling.  Those values are in the Bible; they governed Rome until it went into decline.  Conservatism comes and goes, just as corruption does.  It is a basic human urge to live a life that is stable, that brings up healthy children, that is honest in one's dealing with others, that supports free speech and thought.  The thought of Confucius was pretty much kidnapped by the imperial bureaucracy in China.  It became the doctrine of the imperial state.

That process of rise and decay happens over and over again in human history.  Each time, conservatives preserved the jewel of their basic beliefs and practices while mobs went running around the streets of Rome and Athens, Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

I'm not a believer in miracles, but I believe that the Obamanistas have no idea how to run a domestic or a foreign policy.  Conservative ideas must spread and spread through the web, and our first big battle will be to preserve the liberty of the web.

There is work to do.

Work is healing.

There is a future to win

 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/and_then_a_miracle_occurs.html#ixzz2Crpt5zkY

I found some calm and solace in this

I can't imagine anyone as saddened by the outcome of the November 6 election results as I.  I'm sure there are many however.  Lately, my saddness has turned to anger. I'm afraid the next stage may be rage if this administration continues with its arrogance, dishonety and blatant disregard for anything decent. 

No matter what the scandal or dispicable, repulsive, anti-American behavior - Benghazi, Fast & Furious, EPA secret emails, suspicions of voter fraud and suppression, repulsive ads produced and aired by the left wing moveon.org, lies about Al Qaeda on the decline, class warfare, race warfare, secret deals with Russians, embracing the Muslim Brotherhood, failure by democrats to side with Israel, sympathy towards Hamas and Palestinians, failure to stop Iran's race to nuclear armament - no one is held accountable. 

The treasonous Liberal media enables this adminsitration to slide by without proper scrutiny and accountability.  Democrats predictably scream racism, sexisim whenever conservatives question anyone associated with this administration who happens to be either female, or black...or, God forbid, both!  Anyway.  I truly found some peace in this article by Erick Erickson of RedState. 

I will probably read it often as days go by, as we face the fiscal cliff, as Obama continues to escape accountability for the deaths of four brave Americans, as conservatives are continously crucufied by the liberal news organziations, as our Christian belief faces a constant stream of attacks by the secular left wingers. If you are in the same place I am, I hope you too can find some calm and solace in this message.

 

RS EDITOR OF REDSTATE

I Believe and Am Thankful

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  November 20th, 2012 at 03:23 PM

Marco Rubio is getting beaten up by the press for not decisively and convincingly saying he thinks the world is billions of years old. It has become the new litmus test in the media. Believing what was believed to be literally true for a few thousand years is now nutty. Christian homeschool kids, often taught that the world is not as old as some believe and who routinely kick the rear ends of the ivy prep kids in academics, are considered stupid.

Truth be told, I think the world is billions of years old, but I have no doubt God created it. I believe the same word that many interpret as “days” in Genesis can also honestly be interpreted as “phases,” which I do. But I don’t doubt there were six phases of creation and then a seventh of rest. I certainly don’t have a problem with people who think the world was created in six 24 hour days. For all any of us know, it could have been. God said “Let there be light,” and I think the result was a big bang. I think that God set evolution in motion and over time we have changed and evolved by His own design and plan.
But I’d be foolish to think I actually know it for sure.

This is just what I believe and I know for certain I could be wrong. I reject evolution for the sake of evolution and reject that life on this planet, let alone the existence of this universe, is some random act. I reject that we are little better than the animals we evolved from because I reject that we evolved from anything other than God’s own mind. We were created in his image. We did not evolve into it. The only people certain in their belief on this matter are those who accept theory as fact and Truth as mythology.

The difference between the atheist and secular set on the left and even the right is that while they and I can think the Earth is billions of years old and they and I can think there was a big bang starting it all, we really do not know for sure and they absolutely do not know what came before the big bang. But I do

But let’s not stop there. Because once every Christian politician in the country has answered that question, the secular set will just move on. Let me move on first.

Yes, I believe there was an Adam and I believe there was an Eve.

Yes, I believe there were two cities named Sodom and Gomorrah and yes I do believe they were destroyed for rampant sin including deviating from God’s intentions sexually.

Yes, I believe there was a man named Noah who spent 100 years building a giant boat and I do believe there was a great flood and the survivors of which were all on that boat.

And yes, I do believe there was a man named Jonah who was swallowed up by a great big fish and survived.

Above all those things, I do believe God came down to Earth in the form of Jesus

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead

I absolutely believe it. I absolutely believe if by that time a person has not chosen Christ, he will end up in a very bad place. I believe in Heaven and Hell and the battle that rages between the two on a higher plane than we can often see.

Meanwhile, these secularists and atheists cannot even be honest about when life begins.
✻ ✻ ✻
Many of the things I believe are miracles. Many of the things I believe have come to pass. Christ told us that those who were with him would be opposed by this world. The secularists of this world, I believe, can embrace fully contradictory things like support for gay rights and the advance of Islam into the Western World, because those things come from this world, not from Christ. The left is perfectly capable of contradiction and hypocrisy because they believe in nothing so much as themselves and the things of this world. Therefore, to them, there can be no contradiction and no hypocrisy in their world unless it comes from those who fail to meet the standards set by the faith of so many Christians.

There is no difference between the believer and the atheist “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. It’s just that only the believer is held, in the secular world, to account because only the believer embraces the standards of the faith.

Meanwhile, we believers are just passing through.

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

Take the miracle of Jonah. The secularists of this world would have us believe that no man could ever be swallowed by a giant fish and survive. They would be right. That would be precisely the point. No man could and yet it happened. It is one of the many miracles of the Bible.

These very same people who mock and scoff at Christian belief and ridicule our profession of faith will more than likely one day suffer tragedy in their lives. A loved one may fall ill or be dying. They themselves may fall ill or into poverty or on other hard times. They will, at that time, after science has failed them and their self-defined reason has left them, seek out a miracle whether they understand it as such or not.

But up to and even during that time, they will go right on denying the rest of us the right to believe in miracles.

If you do not believe in the miraculous, you are not a Christian; it is as simple as that.
  ✻ ✻ ✻

Christians in politics must understand these things.

There was once a time when most everyone in public life professed a faith in the things of the Bible. That time is more and more becoming unacceptable to those who shape the news. These secularists have made a concerted effort to turn the world hostile to that faith and belief and have allied themselves with weak theologians to turn young Christians into more worldly, secularly focused milquetoast weepers worshiping an effeminate Christ who only hugs kids and cries, but does not fight, does not take sides, and is accommodationist to the world and its amorality and increasing immorality because, dude, he hung out with prostitutes and cried about another dude dying. They want to define the Christ they prefer to believe in, rather than believe the Christ that is.

All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.

Christians must still believe. Christians must still engage the political process. There can be no sitting on the sidelines in the fight between Heaven and Hell and that fight takes place as much in the political arena as it does in the homeless shelter or the pulpit. Even now in the 21st century after the birth of Christ, there is still true Good and there is still true Evil and there is still true Truth.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

Christians can eschew partisan sides, but they must not eschew God’s side. They must not eschew Truth. Unfortunately, some within the center-right coalition and the left, as it expands within the Democratic Party, increasingly make that party hostile to matters of faith and Christ and have eagerly embraced a moral relativism that teaches the only real choice is embracing abortion, tolerating the subversion of marriage to a secular culture, and embracing a social gospel that has objectively made more and more dependent on government while relegating the Church and its mission to the margins.

Young Christians who have decided their path is to avoid the political fights that implicate the beliefs of their faith and old Christians who have grown weary of the fight must still fight and must still pick a side whether they think they must or not. The world continues to be at war with Christ and increasingly that fight takes place in the political arena. From Health and Human Services regulations to ridicule of believing politicians to Democratic Convention attendees opposing the inclusion merely of the word “God” in the Democratic Party platform, we are seeing that fight from the higher plane come down to eye level.

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” “Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”

I am thankful because I believe. I know that my Redeemer lives. I know he provides for me even in hard and dark times. I feel sorry for those who put their faith in this world. It will only ever ultimately let them down as this world only ever ends in death. That’s the reality of life. Even when the left wins in politics — even after 2008 when the left controlled both the White House and Congress — they were angry. They are angry now as are some in the center-right coalition perpetually kindled waiting for a breeze to turn them into an inferno. Too many of them do not possess the peace that transcends all understanding because they do not believe in that which will one day come and are openly hostile to it. They choose to turn political discourse in this country against the one true faith as well they attempt to shame and embarrass Christians for believing in God’s own Word.

My prayer for you this year is that you not be angry. Many of you are because of the outcome of the November election. I encourage you to be happy warriors still. Be joyful and of good cheer because ultimately we who travel together home to eternity may not know when the last day is, but we know that on that last day we win because Christ wins.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

For all of that and for all of you who make up the community of RedState, for my family and friends, and for all the front page editors here at RedState I am very thankful this Thanksgiving.

Have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving Holiday.

Visual Impact

Study: MSNBC is Pretty Much Pure Propaganda at This Point

Guy Benson
Political Editor, Townhall.com

Nov 20, 2012 10:56 AM EST

The Obama campaign and cable "news" network MSNBC shared more than a mere slogan this presidential cycle.  Neither entity had a single negative thing to say about the incumbent president over the closing week of the campaign.  By definition, it was Team Obama's job to portray the president in a unflinchingly favorable light -- but what exactly is the NBC-owned channel's mission statement?  Fox News is often accused of being a little more than a right-wing spin machine, particularly during its opinion programming.

Fox's overall coverage of the campaign tilted heavily in favor of Mitt Romney during the home stretch, with some "fair and balanced" negative coverage of the Republican and positive reporting about the president sprinkled in for good measure.  MSNBC went the full Pravda.  Via Pew Research:

Not a single MSNBC story about Mitt Romney was positive -- not one.  Meanwhile, zero segments about the president were negative. Allahpundit reaches into the word bag and grabs an entirely appropriate description of Pew's data reflected graph above: "Indistinguishable from propaganda."  He also notes that the Benghazi controversy was in full swing over this time period, indicating that MSNBC couldn't find anything critical to say about the Obama administration, even regarding its disgraceful handling of a preventable terrorist attack that claimed the lives of four American diplomats.  

As I reported yesterday, the MSNBC crew is now accusing critics on this front of engaging in "conspiracy" theorizing.  In short, the network has essentially given up trying to even pretend to anything other than a house organ of the professional left.  At what point are they no longer considered a news outlet?  I'll leave you with this chart from Pew, demonstrating that overall media coverage of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney moved in opposite directions in the week directly preceding the election.  Surprise:
 

 

What's more, Obama received substantially more coverage than Romney during this time frame (80 percent to 62 percent).  So the incumbent enjoyed increased and more positive coverage as voters finalized their decisions; his challenger was mentioned less, but when he was covered, those mentions were twice as likely to be negative than positive.  Whining about media bias is a useless enterprise for conservatives.  

It's a fact of life that isn't going away any time soon.  Republican politicians should recognize this reality and plan accordingly.  But it's also preposterous for people to continue to claim that this bias doesn't exist.  Sure, improved polling and the Sandy photo-ops goosed Obama's numbers in the chart above, but that doesn't explain the sharp negative turn of the Romney coverage.  The media is generally populated by liberal Democrats who wanted Obama to win.  

Whether it's deliberate or subconscious,  this mentality slants coverage.  The American people understand this more than ever -- which is why it's inaccurate to pin Romney's loss on slanted journalism.  It was a contributing factor, of course, but there were many bigger issues at play.  That said, a 2011 UCLA study has posited that media bias increases Democrats' popular vote total by eight to ten percentage points in any given election season.  

That might sound extreme, but ask yourself this question:  If a Republican incumbent were facing roughly eight percent unemployment, and much higher "real" unemployment -- all while adding more than $5 trillion to the national debt and breaking virtually every major promise he'd made during his previous campaign, would this election have even been close?  Probably not.  

He'd have long since been declared a failure, and the resulting coverage would have been a build-up to the coronation of his opponent.  Benghazi and its cover-up would have been a massive, eleventh-hour feeding frenzy; a final nail in the coffin.  But Democrats preside over a different media climate, so forward to four more year we go

Thank God for Lindsey Graham and John McCain

Lindsey Graham: White House Neglected Ambassador's Security, Manipulated Facts of Death

Sunday, 18 Nov 2012 03:24 PM

By Amy Woods

Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday accused the White House of purposefully manipulating the “political narrative” of the terrorist attack in Benghazi to make President Obama look good two months before the election.

Graham, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, the official who first addressed the issue publicly, had no business speaking about it but was chosen because Rice was “politically compliant.”

“Why would you choose someone who had nothing to do with Benghazi to tell us about Benghazi?” he asked. “That’s kind of odd. She was the most politically compliant person they could find. I don’t know what she knew, but I know that the story she told was misleading.”

Graham said he believes the administration would — and did — mislead Americans on the issue of national security “to prevent him [Obama] from looking bad.”

“I think it’s very odd that the storyline they chose omitted al-Qaida, which would help the president enormously, and I don’t buy it,” he said. “And I don’t but the intel community did a great job. I like [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Mike Rogers and [California Sen.] Dianne Feinstein, but to say the intelligence community did a good job — what about the months before this attack?”

Graham then launched a verbal assault on Obama for failing to heed multiple warnings by U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the Sept. 11 assault, about the lack of security at the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

“I blame the president more than anybody else,” he said. “Susan Rice is a bit player here. I blame the president for making this a death trap. I blame the president for not having assets available to help these people for eight hours.”

© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Careful what you wish for

A Pyrrhic Victory for America’s Youth

By Scott W. Atlas

November 12, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Dancing in Chicago, young voters gleefully celebrated President Obama’s victory. Indeed, voters younger than 30 may well have changed the outcome of the race. They represented 19 percent of all voters, even more than they did in 2008, and they favored President Obama by 60 to 37 percent, according to exit polling.

One college student asked me, “What exactly are they so excited about?”

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating their job prospects. Under this administration, unemployment of younger Americans and recent college graduates is not very different from the scandalous unemployment rates of youth in failing European countries whose misguided economic policies are creating a nearly jobless generation.

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating the increasing tax burdens awaiting the lucky few of them — mainly those who have studied hard and long and spent a great deal on both the direct and indirect (from delayed entry into the work force) costs of advanced education — who will finally attain lucrative jobs.

And presumably, they aren’t celebrating the changes in health care for themselves and their future children directly caused by the now inexorable progression of their president’s signature legislation. The list of unwelcome changes is long:

Many people will not be able to choose their doctor, as millions will lose their current insurance plan and, along with it, their doctors.

Private insurance companies, squeezed dry by the limits Obamacare places on their profit margins, will disappear, even though most doctors accept private insurance and it is proven to result in superior medical outcomes.

Even young, healthy people will be forced to buy expensive health coverage, because Obamacare requires expansive coverage of high-cost care. Consumers will no longer be able to buy less comprehensive, lower-cost insurance, such as high-deductible plans with health-savings accounts, even if that insurance would make the most sense for them.

Millions of Americans will be shifted into Medicaid, insurance that pays doctors and hospitals so little that the needed care will simply not be available — as proven again and again in the U.S. (where fewer and fewer doctors provide care to Medicaid and Medicare recipients, specifically because of low reimbursement rates), as well as in other countries dominated by government insurance.

Parents and grandparents will lose access to the very medical technology and drugs that have revolutionized health care in the past half century; these will become less available to Medicare beneficiaries because of cuts by the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

There will be fewer high-paying careers in the medical-technology industry: Obamacare’s misguided medical-device tax (on revenues, not just profits) is already destroying high-paying jobs for Americans and moving them overseas. More than 400,000 high-paying American jobs of the very sort young people seek are at risk because companies in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and elsewhere are already eliminating jobs specifically because of Obamacare’s onerous taxes.

Our reelected president, so jubilantly cheered by young voters last week, has completely failed to address what is the single most important problem in America’s health care: the total cost burden on U.S. taxpayers. With Obamacare, one of the greatest intergenerational financial transfers in history, America’s younger generation will bear the burden of unsustainable, ever-expanding entitlements.

Presumably, the young voters who approved of the past four years and chose this year to follow the path set forth by President Obama know exactly what’s in store.

Well, I say go for it, keep on dancing, but watch out when the music stops.

— Scott W. Atlas, M.D. is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of the recently published book In Excellent Health: Setting the Record Straight on America’s Health Care.

On November 6, the world became a much more dangerous place

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com          

Along Comes Hamas By Andrew C. McCarthy November 17, 2012 4:00 A.M. The day of reckoning is here. For over 30 years, the United States government and the institutions that drive public opinion have made like Susan Rice when it comes to the ideological threat that Islamic supremacists pose to freedom, fabricating reasons to remain in denial. Thus inured, the American people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of America-bashing Islamists. The attraction would not be hard to understand if we were not so ideology-averse — GOP strategists having made Obama’s radicalism a subject nearly as off-limits as Islamic supremacism, helpfully leaving the Left to fill the canvas with their portrait of Mitt Romney: “Where Gordon Gekko Meets Michael Vick.” The president is a movement leftist who sees in our society a condemnable legacy of racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that cries out for “fundamental change.” That is not meaningfully different from the Islamist perspective of America: The Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed mandate to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage” is, in effect, a cognate summons to “fundamental change,” even allowing that Islamists are driven to statism by sharia rather than Marxism. The Brotherhood’s American mouthpiece, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, brags that the president nabbed 85 percent of the Muslim vote on November 6 — larger even than Obama’s lopsided share of the Hispanic vote, which has GOP strategists hyperventilating. You wouldn’t want to take CAIR claims at face value, but their ardor for Obama, like the Brotherhood’s, is palpable. And as we’ve seen for four years, it is not an unrequited love. So along comes Hamas. Just days before the presidential election, the terrorist organization — begotten by the Brotherhood and serving as its Palestinian branch — spearheaded an Islamist offensive, firing in just a few days over 120 rockets into the Jewish state from its home base in Gaza. You may not have heard about it until a few days after the election. Like Iran’s act of war in shooting at a U.S. drone in international waters, it signaled a further dangerous unraveling of the Middle East that undercut the media narrative of Obama as foreign-policy chess master, so it was tucked under the rug. But it could not be ignored forever, for it is not just another spike in the ever-thrumming Gaza border skirmish. It is the renewal of an unending war — an existential one for Israel, which is expected to fight “proportionately,” with both hands tied behind its back, yet blithely accept, as the international community has, the barbaric Islamist claim that nothing short of Israel’s destruction will be satisfactory. By its own declaration, Hamas will be at war with Israel until the latter’s demise. Toward that end, the jihad has now been taken to population centers such as Tel Aviv. As of this writing, the Israeli death toll stands at three, kept low only by the crudeness of the jihadist weapons and tactics. By the calculation of terrorism analyst Ryan Mauro, the onslaught begun last week brought the yearly total of missile attacks on Israel to about 700. That is, while the Obama administration has been facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and soon Syria — with Obama drawing ever closer to Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even as Erdogan champions and funds Hamas — Gaza’s jihadists have been emboldened to step up their terror campaign. And it is not just Gaza’s jihadists. Understand: This is not Hamas’s war of extermination against Israel. It is Islam’s. And yes, for the millionth time, there are various ways of interpreting Islam, but the Islam that matters in the Middle East, the Islam that animates tens of millions of Muslims, is Islamic supremacism. Israel, the canary in the West’s coal mine, is not besieged by an eccentric doctrine weaved by Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Jihadist terrorists are just the point of the ideological spear. Recent polling shows that four in five Egyptians (i.e., about 60 million people) believe the Camp David Accords — the treaty that has kept peace between Egypt and Israel for 30 years — should be dissolved. It is the same four out of five Egyptians that, given the chance, voted to put Islamists in control of their government. Just as Muslims have chosen to empower Islamists in Turkey, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tunisia, as well as in Lebanon and Libya to a lesser but still consequential extent. The jihad against Israel “isn’t a matter of individuals, not a matter of community. It is a matter of a nation. The Arab nation, the Islamic nation.” So exclaimed Egyptian prime minister Hisham Qandil on Thursday in Gaza. He had been sent there to show solidarity with Hamas by Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood leader Egyptians elected as their president. “We are all behind you,” Qandil continued — behind “the struggling nation . . . that is presenting its children as heroes every day.” This is how the Middle East’s Muslims see the situation. They are not Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, and so on. They are the ummah, the “Islamic nation.” For them, Gaza is not a regional dustup over parochial grievances. It is a civilizational struggle to be fought to the finish — the finish being when the enemy is vanquished. We used to fight wars that way, too. The fact that we’ve decided total victory by force of arms is a quaint concept does not mean everybody else has. Islamists define victory in the Middle East as the annihilation of Israel. That is the ambition of the region, not just of Hamas. Our government’s decades-old claim that the aggression results from a “perversion of Islam” weaved by a fringe of “violent extremists” is dangerously delusional. Delusion, of course, is nothing new. For 30 years, ever since the Carter administration hailed Ayatollah Khomeini as a “saint,” willful blindness has been the order of the day. It induced the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to insist that Islam was a “religion of peace” even as scripture-citing Islamists repeatedly mass-murdered Americans. But Barack Obama is something else again. This president has supplanted conscious avoidance of our enemies’ ideology with empathy. Our government no longer just ignores Islamist goals; it affirmatively empowers Islamist factions. It has been only eleven days, but we’re already seeing the wages of November 6. The world has become a much more dangerous place, and not just for Israelis. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books. Permalink

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Oh, We Forgot to Tell You . . .

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com

By Victor Davis Hanson

November 15, 2012 12:00 A.M.

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and so on) wins reelection, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency, and Hurricane Katrina.

Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their reelection wins. They believe that they are invincible and that their public approval is permanent rather than fickle.

The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term?

Coincidentally, right after the election we heard that Iran had attacked a U.S. drone in international waters.

Coincidentally, we just learned that new food-stamp numbers were “delayed” and that millions more became new recipients in the months before the election.

Coincidentally, we now gather that the federal relief effort following Hurricane Sandy was not so smooth, even as New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Barack Obama high-fived it. Instead, in Katrina-like fashion, tens of thousands are still without power or shelter two weeks after the storm.

Coincidentally, we now learn that Obama’s plan of letting tax rates increase for the “fat cat” 2 percent who make over $250,000 a year would not even add enough new revenue to cover 10 percent of the annual deficit. How he would get the other 90 percent in cuts, we are never told.

Coincidentally, we now learn that the vaunted DREAM Act would at most cover only about 10 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants. As part of the bargain, does Obama have a post-election Un-DREAM Act to deport the other 80 percent who do not qualify since either they just recently arrived in America, are not working, are not in school or the military, are on public assistance, or have a criminal record?

Coincidentally, now that the election is over, the scandal over the killings of Americans in Libya seems warranted because of the abject failure to heed pleas for more security before the attack and assistance during it. And the scandal is about more than just the cover-up of fabricating an absurd myth of protesters mad over a two-month-old video — just happening to show up on the anniversary of 9/11 with machine guns and rockets.

The real post-election mystery is why we ever had a consulate in Benghazi in the first place, when most nations had long ago pulled their embassies out of war-torn Libya altogether.

Why, about a mile from the consulate, did we have a large CIA-staffed “annex” that seems to have been busy with all sorts of things other than providing adequate security for our nearby diplomats?

Before the election, the media were not interested in figuring out what Ambassador Christopher Stevens actually was doing in Benghazi, what so many CIA people and military contractors were up to, and what was the relationship of our large presence in Libya to Turkey, insurgents in Syria, and the scattered Qaddafi arms depots.

But the strangest “coincidentally” of all is the bizarre resignation of American hero General David Petraeus from the CIA just three days after the election — apparently due to a long-investigated extramarital affair with a sort of court biographer and her spat with a woman she perceived as a romantic rival.

If the affair was haphazardly hushed up for about a year, how exactly did Petraeus become confirmed as CIA director, a position that allows no secrets, much less an entire secret life?

How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction?

Coincidentally, if it is true that Petraeus can no longer testify as CIA director to the House and Senate intelligence committees about the ignored requests of CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi for more help, can he as a private citizen testify more freely, without the burdens of CIA directorship and pre-election politics?

It has been less than two weeks since the election, and Obama seems no exception to the old rule that for administrations that manage to survive their second terms, almost none seem to enjoy them.
The sudden release of all sorts of suppressed news and “new” facts right after the election creates public cynicism.

The hushed-up, fragmentary account of the now-unfolding facts of the Libyan disaster contributes to further disbelief.

The sudden implosion of Petraeus — whose seemingly unimpeachable character appears so at odds with reports of sexual indiscretion, a lack of candor, and White House backstage election intrigue — adds genuine public furor.

The resulting mix is toxic, and it may tax even the formidable Chicago-style survival skills of Obama and the fealty of the so far dutiful media.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2012 Tribune Media Services

47 State Petitions to Secede from the Union

Please, go to the Whitehouse website http://wh.gov/9ycZ , create an account (takes minutes) and sign the Pennsylvania petition to secced from the Union. 

Petitions seeking White House approval to ‘secede’ now come from 47 states

Conservatives have voted more than 375,000 times since Election Day to pick up their marbles and go home. That’s how many virtual signatures appeared Monday night, as clocks in Washington, D.C. chimed midnight, on petitions asking President Barack Obama’s administration to allow 47 of the 50 U.S. states to secede from the country.

A petition from an Arlington, Texas man, launched Nov. 9 via the Obama White House website’s “We the People”  tool, had more than 58,000 signatures. That’s more than twice the 25,000 it had Monday morning, a number required to trigger an automatic White House review, according to the administration’s own published rules. (RELATED: Texas petition reaches 25,000 signatures, triggering White House review)

A similar petition from a Louisiana native crossed the 25,000 threshold as Monday drew to a close on the East Coast.

Launched Nov. 7, the day after Obama won re-election, the Pelican State’s spark set off an Internet-driven cascade of disaffected tea partiers and other conservatives looking — as one petition organizer told The Daily Caller via a “direct message” on Twitter — “just to do something, anything, to show we’re not going away quietly.”

It’s not clear whether, or to what extent, individuals are signing more than one petition. The White House’s online rules do not prohibit Americans from signing a petition that would not affect states where they live.

The complete list of states with open petitions includes: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Nine states’ “We the People” entries include multiple competing petitions, The Daily Caller determined. California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin are each represented by at least two petitions. TheDC was able to locate three for Pennsylvania.

The only three states that lack secession petitions are Maine, Vermont and Washington. (RELATED: White House website deluged with secession petitions)

According to the White House, petitions have 30 days to gather 25,000 signatures before the administration will automatically review them. One at least one occasion, however, President Obama responded to a petition that collected only 12,240 signatures: a request for the White House’s beer recipe.

All for show?

White House website petitions are largely a symbolic measure. Serious observers don’t expect the federal government to allow any state to withdraw from the U.S. on the basis of electronic “yes” votes from — in Louisiana’s case — less than one-half of one percent of residents.

Any realistic effort to turn 50 states into 49 would have to originate from a state’s government — not from the White House or its website. And the U.S. Constitution is silent on the legality of any state declaring itself independent.

The Civil War, of course, saw several such efforts, the last one by North Carolina in 1861.

But Middlebury College in Vermont — ironically one of the few states not involved in the current website politicking — held nationwide secessionist meetings in 2006 and 2007, drawing delegations from at least ten states. One Vermont group, the “Second Vermont Republic,” says its goal is “to extricate Vermont peacefully from the United States as soon as possible.”

In a 2006 case, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it’s illegal for the state to secede from the U.S., blocking a ballot initiative’s organizers from putting their measure to a vote in that year’s elections.

Texans, however, raise more threats of secession than Americans anywhere else, because an urban myth holds that the Republic of Texas retained the option of withdrawing from the U.S. when it joined the Union in 1845.

While Texas has no special power to leave the United States, it may have an option no other state can boast: In the resolution that Texas passed authorizing the U.S. to annex its territory, it specifically spelled out how Texas could be divided into as many as five separate territories. Each one, the agreement read, would be “entitled to admission” as a new U.S. state.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry asking what would happen if Texas, subdivided into five states, were suddenly entitled to 10 U.S. Senators instead of two.