There is an all out war being waged against Arizona for daring to stop illegal aliens from terrorizing the state. When you have a situation where states and cities are refusing to do business with companies that reside in Arizona, it effects the entire economy of the United States, not just Arizona.

The idiots behind this war should be run out of town on a rail. These are elected officials that are deliberately attacking the economy of a state without understanding the nations implications. Highland Park school officials should be the first to go.

Highland Park High School officials amid national media scrutiny today released a letter that it sent to parents that states that its decision to cancel a girls’ basketball team’s trip to Arizona “is not a political statement regarding the State of Arizona’s recently enacted legislation regarding immigration.”
School District 113 Supt. George Fornero, who has declined to comment on the issue, released the letter today to quell controversy after former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin ridiculed the district in a public speech in Rosemont Wednesday.

Fornero wrote that, because the district contains a diverse student population, “we cannot commit at this time to playing at a venue where some of our students’ safety or liberty might be placed at risk because of state immigration law.”

The district does not yet know the make-up of its varsity team, which has not been selected for the next school year, officials said. The trip to compete in a basketball tournament in Scottsdale, Ariz., was scheduled for December.

Sue Hebson, assistant superintendent, also wrote in an e-mailed response to questions: “Since undocumented students may be participating on any of our extracurricular teams, we need to ensure that all of our students can travel safely, especially in the United States. This is not a theoretical issue to us, it is intensely practical.”

Fornero in his letter also clarified that the basketball team has not qualified for a national championship tournament. “Rather they were striving to find a venue for next season that would stretch them and serve to unify the group as a team.”

He also stated: “While I am sure that with a complex issue such as this, reasonable people can disagree on a decision, it is essential that the community understand that our primary motivation is to show care and concern for all of our students. Ensuring equality for all is a fundamental value for District 113.”

It just keeps getting better. This is what Massa gets for dissing Obama. He should have just played the game, been a good little Obamatron and voted yes on health care reform. But no. Massa had to be a rebel.

The allegations surrounding the New York Democrat date back at least a year, and involve “a pattern of behavior and physical harassment,” according to one source. The new claims of alleged groping contradict statements by Massa, who resigned his office on Monday after it became public that he was the subject of a House ethics committee investigation for possible harassment.

Massa had said that the allegations were limited to his use of “salty language” with his staff. He apologized for making some inappropriate comments and argued he was being unfairly vilified. Days later, Massa accused the White House and Democratic congressional leaders of trying to oust him from office to improve their chances of passing health care reform legislation. Massa could not be reached for comment Tuesday, and no one answered the phone at his home in New York or his campaign office. Staff at his former congressional offices declined to relay messages to him and said they did not know how to reach him.

According to two sources familiar with the probe, Massa’s former deputy chief of staff Ron Hikel provided the information about the staffers’ allegations to the House ethics committee three weeks ago. Hikel had earlier sought advice from Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office about brewing internal complaints, the sources said, and had been urged to report the allegations to the committee.

Hikel, reached at his home Tuesday, declined to comment on the ethics investigation.

Also on Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed Massa’s charges of a conspiracy to force him from office as “silly and ridiculous” in an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America. He urged looking at Massa’s erratic and changing statements about why he was resigning office.

“Last week, he, on Wednesday, was having a recurrence of cancer. On Thursday, he was guilty of using salty language. On Friday, we learned he’s before the Ethics Committee to be investigated on charges of sexual harassment,”Gibbs said. “So, look, I think, clearly, his actions appear to be in the appropriate venue in the Ethics Committees to look at, but we’re focused not on crazy allegations but instead on making this system work for the American people rather than work for insurance companies.”

At the end of a rough couple of weeks, some good news for the Obama administration: falling unemployment

I had to get this article from The Guardian UK because the American media doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the fact that Obama is clearly in over his head. Ed.

It might not sound like much, but a surprise dip in the US unemployment rate is the best piece of news the White House and Democrats have had for a long time. With official figures showing the headline rate of unemployment falling below the 10% mark to 9.7%, the economy is no longer just supplying bad headlines.

Amidst all the talk about tea parties and a Republican resurgence, the economy and the jobs market remain the most pressing issues in the minds of voters, even more than terrorism, healthcare or even the government budget deficit. Until the economy turns around, the political fate of both Obama and the Democrats remains dangerously uncertain.

Obama had bad luck in one sense. While the weakening economy and collapsing housing market undoubtedly helped Obama win the 2008 presidential election, because of the time lags involved the rise in unemployment continued throughout his first year in office – identifying his administration with a grim job market.

So a fall in the headline rate, especially getting it below the eye-catching 10% level, is the sort of news Obama and the Democrats need if they want to convince voters that things are improving and the economy is back on track. If the past is any guide, it will take several months of continuing falls for that idea of recovery to seep through into the American consciousness, and there might still be time for that to happen before the 2010 midterm elections in November. Time is running out.

Away from the headline figure the jobs statistics aren’t all that great – in fact, the number of jobs in the economy actually fell by a fraction (that’s still 20,000 jobs, given the size of the US market), thanks to a different measurement, hence the fall in the unemployment rate despite the fall in actual jobs.

This sort of news will have to keep coming to help the Democrats. There has been other good news, with the fourth quarter of 2009 showing robust growth and even manufacturing is looking perky. The Economist, for one, isn’t convinced, calling this a “jobless recovery” and pointing out that 15 million Americans remain out of work. There’s a long way left to go, especially in housing and construction. Whether a full-blown recovery will happen in time to save the Democrats in November is unlikely but not impossible.

It was just a short time ago that democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were making fun of the tea baggers. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart were taking great pride of making an obvious sexual connection to the tea baggers. Now the tea party movement is taking hold and will be a major influence in the upcoming November elections. Its not so funny now, is it Nancy Pelosi? Ed.

Nashville, Tennessee (CNN) — A grassroots movement that exploded last year is now working on its underpinnings as what’s being billed as the first national Tea Party convention gets under way.

The convention started off with fireworks Thursday night as former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado used his kickoff speech to slam President Obama.

“People who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama,” Tancredo said to cheers Thursday night.

A spokesman for the Tea Party Nation, the group that organized the convention, said Tancredo’s speech may have provided some red meat but termed it problematic.

“It doesn’t further the dialogue,” said Mark Skoda, a businessman and founder of the Memphis Tea Party, who is also serving as spokesman for the convention.

Contrary to Tancredo’s remarks, the Tea Party is not about “name-calling,” said Rand Paul, whose campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky is supported by the Tea Party.

“There are politicians who have gone into the movement and tried to become part of the movement,” he said on CNN’s American Morning.”But really the movement is about individual people.”

The activists are mostly concerned about the “fiscal insolvency of our nation,” he said. “We have to do something, and it’s not going to come from the career politicians.”

Speeches are not the focus of the convention. Panels, sessions and workshops are the bread and butter of this event. Among the sessions scheduled for Friday are ones on how to conduct voter registration drives and where to find conservative votes, women in politics, how to organize a Tea Party group, how to involve youth in the conservative movement, grassroots “on the ground,” how to unite state Tea Party groups, technology in the Tea Party movement and why Christians must engage.

“This convention is a way to galvanize the conservative movement in a way that the general rallies do not,” said Skoda, leading a panel on technology in the movement.

Organizers hope the three-day event will help strengthen the anti-big-government movement. On its Web site, Tea Party Nation says the event is “aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation for the purpose of networking and supporting the movement’s multiple organizations’ principal goals.”

Organizers told CNN that they’ll announce at a news conference Friday afternoon a set of “first principles” for candidates seeking support from the movement. Skoda refused to term the principles a “litmus test,” but said candidates would have to adhere to the principles to be eligible for Tea Party fundraising and support.

The principles include fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, states’ rights and national security.

There has been pushback against the convention and its organizers from both outsiders and some in the movement because of the Tea Party Nation’s for-profit status and because the price of entry attendees have paid for access to the workshops and seminars being held through Saturday.

Red State blogger Erick Erickson wrote that while he has good things to say about some groups within the Tea Party, “this national Tea Party convention smells scammy.”

Mark Meckler said he and Jenny Beth Martin, co-founders of the Tea Party Patriots, aren’t participating in the convention because “it wasn’t the kind of grassroots organization that we are, so we declined to participate.”

Organizers say some 600 people have paid $549 each to attend the convention and that the event is sold out. But they add that tickets costing $349 are still available for Saturday night’s banquet, where former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will give the convention’s keynote address.

Neither convention organizers nor a spokeswoman for Palin would confirm reports that she’s getting paid around $100,000 for her keynote appearance.

“I will not benefit financially from speaking at this event,” Palin said in a statement this week. “Any compensation for my appearance will go right back to the cause.”

Sherry Phillips, who along with her husband, Nashville attorney Judson Phillips, founded Tea Party Nation, said earlier this week in a message to supporters that “we fully expect to break even at this event. We may even make a few thousand dollars to cover local operating costs of TPN.”

Phillips also fired back at her critics, saying, “We never did this to make us rich or famous. Quite the contrary, we are patriots who love our country, our members and the people who are coming to Nashville to attend this great event.”

can you imagine this scenario? Here we are in 2010, in a country that has been completely overrun by the politicians, the lazy and inept, and completely ignored by the working class.

Unemployment has been at 5.4 percent for a decade, and when unemployment doubles to ten percent, the government cannot survive. This is how incredibly dependent the government has become on our tax dollars.

Welfare, unions, taking care of those that refuse to work, these are the things that have become more important to our elected officials. Meanwhile, the lines at the hands of the government grow larger. The people that are willing to work are now out of work, and our fearless leader seems to think that a new entitlement like free health care is the answer to all of America’s woes.

The government, stymied by the colossal failure of our fearless leader, can do nothing more than think of new ways to screw the taxpaying, working American out of more of his earnings.

All the while the fearless leader is busy one year after taking office, blaming the previous administration and the republicans for stopping his “economic revival.”

People that oppose the fearless leader are labeled. Hate mongers. Racists. Tea Baggers. The list goes on and on.

An elite class of people are now running the country. These people seem to disregard our wishes and our demands.

When a government becomes so dependent on our income that they cannot survive a five percent dip in that income, something is horribly wrong with the machine.

The time to act is now. Stand up and be counted. Ed

Brain Surgeon, rocket scientist, comedian and Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.

Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.

The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room.

“There was a lot of frustration in there,” said a Democratic senator who declined to be identified.

“People were hot,” another Democratic senator said.

Democratic senators are frustrated that the White House hasn’t done more to win over the public on health care reform and other aspects of its ambitious agenda — and angry that, in the wake of Scott Brown’s win in the Massachusetts Senate race, the White House hasn’t done more to chart a course for getting a health care bill to the president’s desk.

In his public session with the senators Wednesday, Obama urged them to “finish the job” on health care but did not lay out a path for doing so. That uncertainty appeared to trigger Franken’s wrath, and the sources in the room said he laid out his concerns much more directly than any senator did in the earlier public session.

The private session was set up in a panel format, with Axelrod joined at the front of the room by Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine and Democratic strategist Paul Begala.

A Democratic source said that Franken directed his criticism solely at Axelrod.

“It was all about leadership and health care and what the plan was going to be,” the source said.

Franken — a comedian turned liberal talk show host — vowed to keep a relatively low profile when he arrived in the Senate over the summer after a protracted legal battle with former GOP Sen. Norm Coleman. But he has developed a reputation among his colleagues as one of the more aggressive personalities on the Hill.

Last November, after Tennessee Republican Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander authored an op-ed in a local paper defending their opposition to a Franken amendment, Franken confronted both men on the floor — and grew particularly irritated with Corker.

He lashed out at Corker and a staff member in a follow-up meeting about the matter, several people said. Franken also clashed with South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in GOP leadership, last month in a scathing speech during the health care debate, and staffers have reported other run-ins.

The White House, the Democratic National Committee and Franken’s office all declined to speak on the record about Wednesday’s session. Begala did not respond to a request for comment.

Get a load of this CNN headline. As if all Obama has to do is say “You will bow and meet with me” and after a year of being ignored by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Obama, the republicans will just line up like sheep and meet with him.

This will probably backfire on the democrats. People do not want Obama’s health care reform. So when they realize in November that the rightards were responsible for stopping health care reform, they will vote republican. JD.