With a vote
of 368-60, the House on Thursday wholeheartedly approved of Obama's request for extra funding for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The $96.7 billion bill includes $44 billion for
operations, maintenance and military personnel for the two wars and $26
billion to replace planes and equipment.
Not only did the bill
easily pass, it came without any timelines or benchmarks that the
Democrats have insisted upon in past supplemental requests made by the
Bush Administration. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey,
D-Wis., had included a list of conditions to be met within a year's time
when he outlined the bill earlier this month, but House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, D-Calif., took them out.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif.,
leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus, threw up her hands when asked why
Democrats backed the bill.
In his
commencement address at Arizona State University on May 13, President
Obama said that, "building a body of work…is about the daily labor, the
many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up to a
lasting legacy."
As he attempts to fulfill his legacy, let’s look
at eighteen hard and soft positions belonging to Barack Obama and his
administration to evaluate whether -- so far -- the results are good or
bad for the country.
The White House has
posted the personal financial disclosure reports for Obama, and here are
some interesting tidbits.
Obama's report shows evidence that he
and the first lady trust the government with their money. The couple has
somewhere between $1 million and $5 million invested in Treasury bills.
In the category of It's Never Too Early to Seek New Supporters,
the forms show that Obama in January struck a $500,000 advance deal with
Crown Publishing Group for an abridged version of his best-seller,
"Dreams From My Father," aimed at "middle grade or young adult readers." When the book comes out, Obama will rack up more in royalties: 15% of
the hardcover sales price and 10% of the paperback price.
It's
hard to figure out net worth from these forms because they only ask for
broad ranges when reporting value of assets and debts. But the Obamas
tax day filing had showed they paid $855,323 in taxes on a combined
income of $2,656,902.
Forcing An Eligibility Decision
Bob Unruh
reports that an Ohio State University associate professor who includes
election law among his specialties says there is a logical legal
strategy to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the issue of
Barack Obama's eligibility to be president.
Daniel Tokaji
confirmed the thesis of a "First Impressions" column he'd written for
the Michigan Law Review that a lawsuit in a state court probably would
have the best chance at success in obtaining a decision.
WorldNetDaily.com has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's
occupancy in the Oval Office based on questions over his "natural born
citizen" status. The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No
Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States,
at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to
the Office of President."
Some of the lawsuits question whether
he actually was born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the
country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at
the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under
the law at the time.
Update:
-- I'm the paralegal who theorized from legal precedent that the U.S.
Supreme Court could address an apolitical question, thus getting around
the Political Questions Doctrine. That question happens to be #4
in Orly Taitz's current petition, and requests an authoritative
definition of Article II's Natural Born Citizen. Only
being a paralegal, I insisted Bob Unruh contact Prof. Daniel Tokaji.
It turned out to be a good article, except for Unruh completely
misquoting me for something I never said. T hat is the one sentence
about Obama not being a citizen, and circumstantial evidence.
The letter I wrote to the Supreme Court summarizes my theory, with most
of the serious jurisprudence between the lines. I posted it at
my legal blog.
Good news . . . H.R. 1503
requiring all presidential candidates submit certified birth data has
one co-sponsor. It should have one-hundred, but progress in noted
none-the-less.
Leonard A. Daneman (paralegalnm)
ACORN: Follow The Money
Wade and Dale Rathke are the
founders of Citizens Consulting, Inc.
(CCI), and they are incredible
organizers. And it was Wade's vision that allowed ACORN to progress to
kind of where it is today. Recently, board members discovered that there
is a lot of money missing.
Now, what the board did at that point of time was that,
once the full board found out about it, they immediately moved to
terminate Wade and Dale, replace them with the two women that were interviewed
by Glen Beck -- Karen and Marcel -- in order to
try to set the record straight and get to the bottom of what happened to
the money.
CCI is the
financial nerve center for ACORN and all of its 250+ entities. If
you really want to try to follow the money, that's why we requested a
forensic examination and financial audit of CCI.
If you're in one
of these organizations and you apply for federal dollars or any kind of
dollars, the money goes there first.
If a a philanthropist wanted
to write a grant for a
local chapter of ACORN, the local ACORN chapter
couldn't get the grant. The grant would be funneled through its
web of organizations to CCI's New Orleans office -- located in an old
funeral home.
Monies are are dispersed from CCI.
CCI says
that they pay a small administrative fee, but the problem is, is without
an audit, no one knows if CCI gets 1 percent, 50 percent, 90
percent -- no one knows.
