The cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence of “Julia”

Today’s buzz surrounds the rollout of yet another composite character from the imagination of Barack Obama, this one named “Julia.”  Julia represents the arc of a life under the beneficent care of Barack Obama’s policies.  Interestingly, at every stage of Julia’s life, a government program exists to shield her from life’s woes.  And just as interestingly, Julia never gets the bill for all of this government hand-holding.

Let’s present a more realistic view of Julia’s life:

    3 years old – Julia gets a new-and-improved Head Start, which a new HHS study shows won’t do anything for her anyway.

Obamateurism of the Day

We’ve criticized Barack Obama and his White House staff on many occasions for their poor research skills, but there hasn’t been any incident quite as embarrassing as the gaffe made in Obama’s proclamation on Tuesday to commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month. The proclamation listed several prominent Jewish Americans, including Gertrude Stein, a well-known American artist of the early-to-mid-twentieth century:

    Their history of unbroken perseverance and their belief in tomorrow’s promise offers a lesson not only to Jewish Americans, but to all Americans. From Aaron Copland to Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein to Justice Louis Brandeis.

Algemeiner, the self-proclaimed [see update] “fastest growing Jewish newspaper in America,” pointed out that the inclusion of Stein in that list was appalling — since she was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and an apologist for the puppet Vichy regime in France during the war.  The same day that Obama signed and published the order, Alan Dershowitz had blasted the Metropolitan Museum for covering up Stein’s collaboration with the Nazis in France and cheerleading for Hitler (via Breitbart):

    Stein, a “racial” Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered.  The exhibit says “remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact.”  It adds that “Bernard Fay, a close friend…and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them.”  That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened.  Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason:  Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.

China: We’ll let Chen, er, study abroad

Both China and the US acted overnight to bring an embarrassing string of incidents with dissident Chen Guangcheng to a rapid conclusion.  Beijing announced earlier that they would look favorably on a request from Chen to “study abroad,” which would rid them of the international focus on their repressive regime that suddenly erupted this week:

Say, you know who else wouldn’t get Osama bin Laden now?

Barack Obama and his campaign have accused Mitt Romney of lacking the fortitude to take out Osama bin Laden in the kind of raid Obama ordered a year ago.  Thanks to a new agreement Obama signed with Hamid Karzai, the Daily Caller reports, Romney wouldn’t even get the chance.  The new agreement signed on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s demise would forbid exactly the kind of raid that Obama ordered, one originating from Afghanistan into Pakistan:

    President Barack Obama has promised not to attack Pakistan-based al-Qaida leaders or fighters from bases inside Afghanistan.

    The surprising commitment effectively bars Obama and his successors from launching another nighttime helicopter raid like the one that that killed Osama bin Laden. That raid has proven to be Obama’s primary foreign-policy success because it killed bin Laden, scooped up much intelligence data and shocked Pakistan.
That’s not the only option Obama has taken off the table in the new agreement, either:
Obama’s commitment will also end the use of secretive drone-attacks from Afghanistan. Those attacks have killed hundreds of al-Qaida leaders since the mid-2000s. They’ve also been very popular with U.S voters, and usually have had tacit Pakistan approval.
 The unadvertised provision is buried in the deal that Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Obama signed with much campaign-style fanfare May 1 in Kabul. It could provide a legal shield for Pakistani-based al-Qaida’s leaders, front-line fighters, terrorism-planners, allied terror-leaders, funders, terror bases and terror training-grounds.

Democrats worried about Warren in Massachusetts

Are Democrats about to lose the Senate seat held by the Kennedys since before I was born … again?  According to the Boston Herald’s Joe Battenfeld, a number of Democrats in Massachusetts are aghast over Elizabeth Warren’s faceplant on her claims to Native American heritage, and now worry about whether her campaign has completely derailed:

    Elizabeth Warren’s stumbling efforts to douse the firestorm surrounding her claims of being a Native American minority have raised concerns among local and national Democrats who are questioning her campaign’s competence.

    “There’s nobody watching this that doesn’t think she’s in big trouble,” one well-known Massachusetts Democrat said.

    Joe Trippi, a prominent national Democratic consultant, told the Herald that while Warren has time to recover, the campaign should have anticipated this issue would surface.

    “The problem is they weren’t ready for something they should have been ahead of,” Trippi said.

Political analyst Larry Sabato is more blunt:

    “This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

    Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

Local TV report out of Indiana highlights potential for billions of dollars of tax fraud by illegal immigrants

An investigative report from Indiana television station WTHR highlights what they call a “loophole” in the tax code which may be costing tax payers billions by enabling illegal immigrants to claim tax credits for children not even living in the U.S. I’ve embedded the video package below, but for those of you at work there is a good write-up on their site as well. Did I say “potential”?

Each spring, at tax preparation offices all across the nation, many illegal immigrants are now eagerly filing tax returns to take advantage of a tax loophole, using their ITIN numbers to get huge refunds from the IRS.

The loophole is called the Additional Child Tax Credit. It’s a fully-refundable credit of up to $1000 per child, and it’s meant to help working families who have children living at home.

But 13 Investigates has found many undocumented workers are claiming the tax credit for kids who live in Mexico – lots of kids in Mexico.

“We’ve seen sometimes 10 or 12 dependents, most times nieces and nephews, on these tax forms,” the whistleblower told Eyewitness News. “The more you put on there, the more you get back.”

Mourdock up 10 over Lugar, 48/38, four days before Indiana primary

  Indystar calls this latest poll result a “dramatic slide,” and is it ever. Incumbent Senator Dick Lugar led the race in the last iteration of the Howey/DePauw poll by seven points. Today, he’s trailing by ten, and Lugar has only four days to turn it around:

The Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll, conducted by two prominent Republican and Democratic pollsters, shows Mourdock with a 48 percent to 38 percent lead over Lugar. …

The poll shows a dramatic slide for Lugar, who in his last election in 2006 won with more than 80 percent of the vote after Democrats considered him so unbeatable that they didn’t field a candidate against him.

Only about a month ago, a Howey/DePauw Battleground poll showed Lugar leading Mourdock 42 percent to 35 percent.

When voters who were not solid in their support for a candidate yet and were merely leaning in one direction or the other are removed, Mourdock is still leading 43 percent to 35 percent over Lugar.

Just a month ago, the Howey/DePauw survey was good enough to get analysts believing that Lugar could hold serve on Tuesday:

U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar is in the most precarious position of his political career since autumn 1974 when he unsuccessfully challenged Democratic incumbent Birch Bayh. A Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll released today reveals Lugar with a 42-35% lead over Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, with the two evenly splitting the vote among the 72% of primary voters identifying with the GOP. It has prompted HPI to move this race into “tossup” from “Leans Lugar.”

The poll by Republican pollster Christine Matthews of Bellwether Research and Democrat pollster Fred Yang of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, was conducted March 26-28 of 503 likely Republican primary voters and March 26 -27 of 503 likely Indiana general election voters. It has a +/-4.5% margin of error.