The resounding shockwave came within moments of the beginning:

[…]… In two weeks, I will send this Congress a budget filled with ideas that are practical, not partisan. And in the months ahead, I’ll crisscross the country making a case for those ideas….

“In two weeks, I will send this Congress a budget“… If true, this would represent the first time in his entire presidency when President Obama would have submitted a federal budget proposal by the statutorily required deadline.
The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the President to submit his budget request for the upcoming fiscal year no later than the first Monday of February.  He never does.  Last year’s Obama budget arrived April 10th 2014.
[…] “filled with ideas that are practical, not partisan”… In addition to six consecutive years of missed budget proposal deadlines, you also have six years of almost every DEMOCRAT in congress voting against the proposals (again and again) contained within the late budgets.   A cynic might well remember the last federal budget signed into law was signed in September of 2007, yes, NEARING EIGHT FULL YEARS AGO.
Beginning in 2008 Senator -then President- Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have used continuing resolutions (CR’s) to fund government while raising the debt ceiling.  I wonder what changed this year?
Oh yeah,

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Waaaay back in 2009 when the official policy and advisory team of President Obama was introduced to the world there were a few people who said, essentially: “wow, look at this group, he’s putting kids in charge“; because he was.
While I think it is safe to say most people recognize President Obama is just merely a figurehead representation of an entire presidential office that is in way over their head, it is still appropriate to hold the Chief Executive accountable for all his staff’s decisions.

If you look back to the key positions filled by the Chicago Team of professional agitators and leftists you find names like: Samantha Power (wife of Cass Sustein and now U.N Ambassador), Denis McDonough (now chief of staff), Tony Blinkin, Ben Rhodes, Dan Pfieffer and other inexperienced immature professional leftists who are profoundly in-over-their-heads.
This college frat house mentality extends toward other names like Tommy “dude” Vietor and throughout the State Dept with Patrick Kennedy, and Marie Harf etc. Almost everywhere you look you see childish immaturity playing out as a key component of the past six years of Obama policy advancement. The 2010 WikiLeaks/State Dept. cable leaks yet another stark reminder amid a litany of other childish examples. (more…)

If you’ve been with us for a while, and you know about the 2010 Rivkin Project, you are able to see the profound confirmation to our 2011 analysis contained within this message from President Obama.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Europe must do more to better integrate its Muslim communities, and not “simply respond with a hammer”, US President Barack Obama said Friday in the wake of last week’s terror attacks in France.

“Our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populations – they feel themselves to be Americans,” Obama told a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

“There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case. And that’s probably the greatest danger that Europe faces… it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.”

Understand the Rivkin Project HERE

This is not a Saturday Night Live sketch, this is real [I cannot stop laughing]. This has to be the ultimate representative optic of all things liberal and ridiculous.
In an effort to repair the optics stemming from the White House skipping the French “unity rally”, someone, somewhere, probably Secretary Kerry himself, thought it would be a great idea to take James Taylor to France to sing “you’ve got a friend” publicly, on stage, with Secretary Kerry – as the liberal audience/media look on swooningly….
I just cannot stop laughing. This is too funny to even be embarrassed. Watch:

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With the movie “Selma” seemingly shut out from Oscar Nominations -except best picture- the Reverend Al Sharpton has an opportunity to exploit his most recent antagonism.
Many people might remember the controversy over the Sony Entertainment hacked and leaked emails which showed some tongue-in-cheek snark toward President Obama.
The presidential advisor on race issues, Al Sharpton, compared the Sony Executives to formerly labeled racist LA Clippers owner, Donald Sterling; then demanded a meeting with the Hollywood executives to lay down his expectations for improvement.  They acquiesced:

[December 18th, 2014] (Reuters) – Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton on Thursday did not call for Co-Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal to step down over racially insensitive emails, despite expectations that he might seek her resignation.

The private emails, leaked through a massive hacking attack on Sony Corp, included joking remarks related to U.S. President Barack Obama and his taste in movies. (more…)

Sharyl Attkisson has provided some new information on the closed door Benghazi Select Committee hearings and investigative inquiry.

Including the following from Trey Gowdy:

[…]  “The committee is continuing its probe into all aspects of Benghazi and is currently focused on ensuring access to all first-hand accounts from those on the ground that night. This process will be ongoing and in some respects must remain classified.”–Benghazi Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.

We took a lot of fire -following the Benghazi Brief– when we explained why this would be the case.  The risks of sunlight are essentially equal to both Republicans -who approved the program(s) basic goals via intelligence oversight- and Democrats alike.
Apparently we were correct.

A new batch of emails show how IRS official Lois Lerner intentionally tried to stop inquiry about the IRS Targeting scheme back in April of 2012, and how the IRS was seeking to block congressional inquiry into the activity of the prior two years.
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, including a series of emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner to then-Tax Exempt and Government Entities (TE/GE) Division Deputy Director Joseph H. Grant strongly objecting to his planned visit to the IRS Cincinnati office “smack dab in the middle” of congressional inquiries into the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Lerner also expresses concerns about a pending investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) into the IRS’s handing of Tea Party applications. (more…)

Credit where credit is due. The messaging from the White House about why they haven’t called the terrorist attacks “Islamic Terrorism” must have been a top priority in the past 48 hours. As noted in this shift expressed by Josh Earnest. The question was posed:

“The leader of France, your ally in this effort, has put a name on this ideology, which he calls radical Islam,” noted NPR’s Mara Liasson. “You have bent over backwards to not ever say that. There must be a reason.”

Josh Earnest Responds: “The first is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it. (more…)

Both President Obama and Francois Hollande have refused to connect the terrorism in the U.S., France, Australia, Canada and North Africa to Islamic Extremism.  This cognitive disconnect they continue to exhibit exists despite the terrorists themselves clearly proclaiming their intents and motives.
(Via Vocativ) A new video released by an official ISIS forum shows Amedy Coulibaly, the 32-year-old terrorist who murdered four men during the Hyper Cacher siege in Paris, declaring his loyalty to the Islamic State.

“I’m a soldier of the Caliphate [ISIS] since the beginning,” Coulibaly says in the video. “Our group was coordinated before the attack. France is a legitimate target because [of] what they are doing to us.”
Coulibaly explains how he helped the Kouachi brothers prepare for the attack: “We did a few things together and a few things separately to maximize the impact. I helped them by giving them a few thousand euros to buy what they needed.” (more…)

People keep asking: why won’t the Obama administration admit the terror threat is specifically from Islamic extremists? The reason is simple.  They won’t admit it because once the problem is defined, they become responsible for an action plan to address it.  The administration does not want to address it, ergo as long as the threat can be obfuscated, no-one will be expected to do anything specific.
Hence, when Kelly File guest host Martha MacCallum confronts State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf about why the White House won’t openly say that radical Islam specifically is a major threat to the world – Harf avoids the specifics.

Harf told MacCallum that Islamic extremism is “not the only kind of extremism we face,” though when pressed to name other examples of troubling extremism, she simply said people all over the world want to kill each other for a “variety of causes.”