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GOVERNOR WRONG TO HAVE FLAG LOWERED TO HALF STAFF FOR CELEBRITIES NJLawman.com-Police and Law Enforcement News Thursday, February 16, 2012 Yesterday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ordered all New Jersey State and American flags to be lowered to half staff on Saturday in honor of Entertainer Whitney Houston who passed away this week. Last year, the governor did the same for Clarence Clemmons, the saxophone player for the E Street Band. In January, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett ordered the state flag to half staff for three days in honor of Penn State Football Coach Joe Paterno when he passed. We...

(CBS News) J.C. Penney is trying to rebuild its customer base with help from a new spokeswoman, Ellen DeGeneres. But a group called One Million Moms is accusing the company of "jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon." DeGeneres responded to the group on her TV show Wednesday, saying, "I'm happy about (being the spokesperson) J.C. Penney is happy about it. But there's this group called One Million Moms that is not happy about it. And normally I try not to pay attention to my haters, but this time I'd like to talk about it because my haters are my motivators. This...

Barack Obama joins Open Government Partnership for group photo Rich Shulman writes I don't know much about diplomatic protocols, but I would guess that waving during the group photo is something to avoid.

LONDON – It was all going so well. But when the time came for President Obama to deliver his toast to Queen Elizabeth Tuesday night, the meticulously planned state dinner at Buckingham Palace turned, well, awkward. As Obama began wrapping up his remarks, he put down his notecards and picked up his glass. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stand with me and raise your glasses as I propose a toast,” the president said, as the guests stood up. “To her majesty the Queen.” At this point, the band queued up “God Save the Queen.” But Obama wasn’t quite finished yet. So...

President Obama’s lack of experience with royalty was on full display today in England as he mistakenly began a toast to the Queen of England at the wrong time, resulting in “God Save the Queen” blaring over his words and no one getting to drink what was in their cups. Awkward.“And now I propose a toast to the Queen,” President Obama began in London today, but only got as far as “To the vitality of the special relationship” before “God Save the Queen” cut him off. He kept reading the toast, however, and finally raised his glass to her. No...

The biggest moment any singer can ask for: "The Star Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. And Christina Aguilera messed up the lyrics. At about 51 seconds in, as she was about to sing the fourth line ("O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming"), she accidentally sang a hybrid of the second line: "What so proudly we watched, at the twilight's last streaming."

Our 111th congress, in its lame duck session, has given America a Christmas present in the way of repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law. Signing the repeal into law, President Obama said he’s “never been prouder.” From my point of view, I’m feeling increasingly like a minority in our country. Not because I’m black, but because I am a Christian. As a Christian, I believe in the truth of traditional morality as transmitted to us through our biblical sources. And I believe, along with George Washington, who stated clearly in his farewell address to the nation, that religion...

I was just watching Hannity out here on the West Coast. Hannity had said to Bob Beckel that the polls were devastating for the Dems and Bob Beckel said, and I'm paraphrasing, "These (welfare and entitlement) programs that the Democrats have pushed...we thought we were doing the right thing but we actually have created generations of dependency, and now we have to admit that they have not worked and that they were mistakes." Hannity looked like he was in a state of shock when he heard Beckel say this and he responded that it was one of the most honest...

After her sterling public image took on some tarnish from her recent vacation to Spain, the White House announced that first lady Michelle Obama will appear with Laura Bush for Sept. 11 observances in Pennsylvania. The deft public relations move by the administration will place the two popular first ladies side-by-side for the first time since the 2008 inauguration. (Snip) An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll after the Spain trip found just 50 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of the first lady, down 14 percent from the same poll in April.

-- On June 25, 2010, Vice President Biden was visiting a custard shop outside Milwaukee when the shop manager told him his dessert would be on the house if he lowered taxes. "Don't worry, it's on us," the manager said. "Lower our taxes and we'll call it even." Biden replied: "Why don't you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?" -- On May 6, 2010, Vice President Biden said in an address to the European Parliament in Belgium that Brussels could be the "capital of the free world." The comment came at the top of a...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House has been deeply involved in the effort to staunch the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from the start but may have made a mistake by failing to communicate effectively about its efforts, Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday. "I think if there's any mistake made (it's) that we haven't communicated clearly enough what the president has done on this oil spill from the beginning," Biden said in the transcript of an interview with PBS' Charlie Rose television show. "We were there the first day, the first morning after that well ... blew and...

At first, it was Rush Limbaugh who tagged the gusher in the Gulf "Obama's Katrina" -- but now two lions of the left are warning the White House that the administration's handing of the environmental catastrophe is inflicting long-term political damage. James Carville, a stalwart Obama defender -- and Louisiana native -- and MSNBC's Chris Mathews both voiced concerns about the president's handling of the spill, and Obama's decision to allow BP to take the lead on plugging the pipe, which has been pouring oil into the sea for a month. Their statements came on a day when the press...

Hot Air explains how Solicitor General Elena Kagan muffed her argument in front of the Supreme Court on the Citizens United v. FEC case: In fact, the crux of the case was the issue of limiting expenditures as an expression of political speech, not contributions. Kagan started off her argument by misconstruing the issue and then offering a factually incorrect reading of precedent. Both Scalia and Kennedy objected to it before Kagan even had time to get the argument completed, although as the transcript notes, she didn’t pay much attention to them. Transcript below: ORAL ARGUMENT OF ELENA KAGAN ON...

Confessed terrorist Faisal Shahzad was removed from the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list sometime after Barack Obama came into office. CBS reported:

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned. Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC...

President Obama mouths the incorrect lyrics to our national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." (White House Correspondents' Dinner)

NEW ORLEANS -- Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who has come under fire for his lavish spending, told GOP activists Saturday that he has taken responsibility for his "mistakes" and is now ready to "move on." In a speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Steele alluded to the controversy sparked by his committee paying a nearly $2,000 bill at a sex-themed nightclub in Los Angeles that led to at least one state party chairman calling for his resignation. "Now I'll be the first to admit I've made mistakes and it's been incumbent on me to take responsibility, shoulder...

For Kevin Garn, it's been 25 years of hiding, of paying big money for "secrecy," of presenting himself as a devoted public servant, twice rising to the status of House Majority Leader in the Utah Legislature. In the same 25 years, Cheryl Maher has been plagued by substance abuse and mental illness, even as she served in leadership roles in the LDS Church -- as did Garn, a former bishop. This week, it all came out: In 1985, Garn, then 30 and married, and Maher, a 15-year-old who worked for him, took off their clothes and climbed into a hot...

The tsunami of political devastation known as Barack Obama continues to wreak havoc abroad, both for American interests specifically and the cause of freedom and democracy generally (the two are often, happily, one and the same). The disastrous consequences are most clearly visible in the case of Vladimir Putin's Russia. First Obama visited Russia and displayed craven weakness before his KGB counterparts in the Kremlin. He barely even paid lip service to American values, crushing the spirits of Russia's democracy movement leaders, and his unilateral reversal of the Bush missile defense plan for Eastern Europe led only to more posturing...

By | Published: Between you and me, Toyota really messed this one up. The company long known for its meticulous quality and, by extension, its meticulous customer care drove completely off the rails in recent years, churning out ever larger production batches, ever faster, even as quality control declined inversely. That led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles across a slew of Toyota brands. The company did this — and this is where the customer care part gets really murky — only after the failure of what appears to be a Machiavellian effort to silence its customers’...

Too little, too late mia culpa. BTW we have an actual copy of McCain's original certificate of live birth. Medial Elites coming to grips about helping elect the worst President(pretender) in HISTORY. "be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office." Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33237.html#ixzz0gtd2o3xO

This sentence, deep in the Washington Post’s coverage of the health-care summit, made me shake my head and be glad I’m not a congressional Democrat: The White House's best hope — perhaps its only hope — is that Obama can use a masterful performance during the six-hour appearance to "stiffen the spine" of congressional Democrats, one senior official said, persuading them to pass health-care legislation using the mechanism known as reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 rather than 60 votes to prevail in the Senate. Great, they’ve ordered up another “masterful performance.” I expect copper prices to rise...

... Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable. Other drug industry...

Since 1941, Captain America has been one of the most popular comic book characters around. The fictional super-patriot fought Nazis during World War II, took on those who burned the American flag during the Vietnam era, and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for Marvel Comics along the way. Now, the appearance that he is taking on the Tea Party Movement in a storyline about investigating white supremacists has forced Marvel to apologize for the comic hero. Issue 602 of the comic features Captain America investigating a right-wing anti-government militia group called "the Watchdogs". Hoping to infiltrate the group,...

A sign created by a poster at Free Republic, and then recreated in a Captain America comic, has led Marvel to admit a mistake. *updated "It looks like Marvel Comic's Captain America is throwing his mighty shield at the Tea Party Movement. Warner Todd Huston wrote on his Publius forum blog that the super-powered soldier who fought the Nazis in WWII observes with disdain Americans who are seemingly compared to Tea Party Movement protesters of today:"In preparation for the infiltration, Marvel Comics depicts the two super heroes out of costume and observing from a rooftop a street filled with what...

"Where Mr. Houston is correct is in our accidently identifying in one of the held up signs, the group as being a part of the Tea Party instead of a generic protest group. That’s something that we need to apologize for and own up to, because it’s just one of those stupid mistakes that happened through a series of stupid incidents. " According to to Mr. Quesada, the book was ready to go to printer, but the panel in question had a group of protesters handling signs with no words on them, so the editor asked the letterer to "fudge...

Gingrich: I was wrong to endorse Scozzafava By Eric Zimmermann - 02/01/10 03:42 PM ET Newt Gingrich says he regrets endorsing Dede Scozzafava in the hotly contested primary for the NY-23 congressional district in November. Scozzafava was criticized by many national Republicans for being too liberal. She eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, who eeked out a victory. "She turned out to be a huge disappointment, and she turned out not to be frankly a loyal Republican," Gingrich told an interviewer in New Hampshire this weekend. The former speaker added that conservatives who criticized his...

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” that he has “no doubt” the race for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat was winnable by Democrat Martha Coakley, but the White House was informed of her political peril too late. Couric, who was in Washington for the State of the Union address, asked Emanuel how “a master political operative” could have let Massachusetts go “down in flames for the Democrats?” “I, was here at the White House,” Emanuel replied. “As soon as it was brought to my attention, or...

Republican Scott Brown has been running ads in Massachusetts where he is out driving around in his old pickup truck while campaigning for US Senator something Marcia Martha Coakley refuses to do. On Sunday Barack Obama slammed Scott Brown and his truck several times in his Bush-bashing campaign speech for Martha Coakley. Maybe Barack Obama didn’t notice that Scott Brown’s truck is a GM truck.

(Boston) Outspoken chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has not held back on his feelings on the Massachusetts special election Senate race, and today is no different. Inside the gymnasium awaiting President Obama's remarks at a rally for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Rep. Frank tells FOX News' Carl Cameron about Coakley's campaign so far: "She let it become a personality contest and that was a mistake. Some of us complained about it and we think it's turned around." Previously Rep. Frank said a win by Republican State Senator Scott Brown in this race would...

Two terrorist attacks on American soil within les s than sixty days. Administration officials declare that “the system worked” after the Christmas day attack, only to be contradicted by the President days later. The President notes on December 29th that the Christmas day attack was carried out by merely an “isolated extremist,” but then declares on January 7 that “we are at war,” and that we must stay “one step ahead of a nimble adversary," in complete contradiction of his Homeland Security Secretary and his own previous remarks. Oh, my –how does America’s liberal media explain it all away? One...

Are you positively giddy over the prospect of Scott Brown winning in the upcoming Massachusetts special election? Are you currently supporting Scott Brown through time, money or both? Do you believe that limited government policy over the past thirty years failed, leading us to ever growing government? Are you partial to the Tea Party movement? If you have answered yes to all these questions then allow me to prove to you that your support for Scott Brown is a contradiction to everything you believe in and will hurt this country more than any rubber stamp liberal. Living in Massachusetts the...

/snip/It's just a typo, and in fact, the DNI fixed it on its webpage shortly after sending reporters the statement. But it's an awkward slip-up on the same day the White House admitted that a typo prevented the State Department from realizing it had granted a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. (Someone spelled his name wrong during a search.)

President Obama came back to work this week after leaving the Presidency for his Hawaiian holiday vacation. Hawaii proved to be a restful retreat for the President, his team and the White House press corps who all took time off from their regular duties to enjoy the Hawaiian sun and ignore their responsibilities. But after 10 days of tropical silence, this week there is a sudden flurry of security reviews, media statements, ass-covering and more misstatements coming out of Washington from the Obama Administration. But we still don’t know why the State Department didn’t revoke the visa of a man...

Richard Nixon had advertising executive H.R. Haldeman; Ronald Reagan had image master Mike Deaver; Barack Obama has public relations guru David Axelrod.All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency. I don’t know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.(The Oval Office, December 29, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)(AP Photo by Chris Carlson, December 31,...

The outrage continues to build over a report from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's department that warned of the danger of right-wing "extremists," and she raised eyebrows again this week when she suggested that the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is under fire for what critics see as a string of gaffes, with a small but vocal group of conservatives calling for her to step down. The outrage continues to build over a report from her department that warned of the danger of right-wing "extremists," and singled out returning war veterans...

Upheaval in the media world continued in 2009, with 15,000 newspaper jobs lost, some glossy magazines killed and Washington bureaus either cut back or shuttered completely. And yet, online outlets sprouted — a few beefing up the ranks in D.C. — while more journalists embraced Twitter, blogs and platforms that don’t require ink on paper. While a number of this year’s more noticeable media blunders occurred through simple carelessness, some could be also considered growing pains in adjusting to changes in the media, such as reporters jumping the gun on Twitter, experimenting in video, cutting-and-pasting text from a blog or...

A day before Sen. Ben Nelson (D - NE) voted for the passage of the Senate's version of the health care reform bill, the Nebraska Senator appeared confident before reporters that his vote would not hurt him back in Nebraska. Last week, The Washington Times asked him what he expected from his constituents, when he returned home after the Senate recessed for Christmas.: "Well, two types[of constituents]. Those who are saying very positive things about this legislation and those that have the opposite point of view. There’s nothing new about that."

In a massive security breach, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently posted online its airport screening procedures manual, including some of the most closely guarded secrets regarding special rules for diplomats and CIA and law enforcement officers. In a massive security breach, the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) inadvertently posted online its entire airport screening procedures manual, including some of the most closely guarded secrets regarding special rules for diplomats and CIA and law enforcement officers. The most sensitive parts of the 93-page Standard Operating Procedures were apparently redacted in a way that computer savvy individuals easily overcame. -snip-

According to POLITICO, Obama’s fans in the Beltway are shocked, shocked that he and his White House minions scapegoat White House General Counsel Greg Craig for Obama’s failed promise to close Guantanamo in one year. The closing of Guantanamo – as Obama’s critics have long predicted – ain’t gonna happen, because there’s no place else to put the hardcore terrorists currently housed there. When Obama announced his dubious executive order closing Guantanamo by January 2010, the Kool-Aid drinkers were ecstatic. “See?” they said, “This is why we elected him. We were so right.” No, they were so wrong. It was...

"(Japan Prime Minister) Hatoyama Vs.Obama -- The Scandal That Nobody Will Report" (由紀夫 vs オ�マ「書�れ�るスキャンダル�）Reporters at the weekly Shukan Bunshun news magazine here in Tokyo, Japan have written a rather caustic report about President Obama's 23 hours in Tokyo last week, from a frank Japanese perspective, exclusively in the Japanese language, and released to the newstands just now. In that sense this is more or less an *FR Exclusive*. A number of eye-opening claims, pieces of information and details emerge about Obama's brief stay in Japan as part of his disastrous Asian trip--over and above the very controversial, near-"dogeza"...

Officials tell ABC News so far, they found 700 mistaken Congressional districts out of more than 130,000 stimulus grants. On Monday night, ABC reported on errors found on the website set up by the White House to track the number of jobs created or saved by the economic stimulus program. The website was riddled with reports of jobs in places that didn't even exist. That report prompted anger on Capitol Hill, and defensiveness at the White House. On Tuesday night's broadcast, ABC's Chief Congressional Correspondent Jon Karl took another look at the stimulus confusion (link) LINK White House Vows to...

From Article Some of the president's critics are giving him a hard time, and it's true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog,...

So much of an idiot, in fact, that according to Tapper’s source, at least one Japanese paper isn’t running the photo out of embarrassment. This tool actually groveled himself into a minor international incident. The good news for O-bots? It wasn’t unprecedented. Nixon evidently made a modest bow to Hirohito in the early 70s. The bad news? “Obama’s handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush’s back-rub of Merkel. “Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first...

Politico: A senior administration official said President Barack Obama was simply observing protocol when he bowed to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko upon arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Saturday.

Bad enough that Obama bowed down to another head of state yesterday. Even worse, he did not bother to learn how one bows in Japan, and just winged it. I agree with Scott Johnson, Steve Gilbert, Andrew Malcom, and many others that the President of the United States should not be bowing before any head of state. But unlike these astute observers, I actually know a little something about the art of the bow in Japan, having lived in Japan four different times on a resident visa, taught East Asian Studies at Harvard, and counseled many hundreds of American, European,...

As the war between the White House and Fox News escalates, it might be insightful to take a look back and see the path which led to Thursday’s attempt by the White House to completely shut off Fox News. The first skirmish was back in August, when people were complaining about having received unwanted emails from the White House...

The Obama administration was elated a month ago when the Russian president said sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program could become "inevitable." Washington's reaction may have been significantly premature. Dmitry Medvedev's words were seen as a major Kremlin shift and one that would buttress U.S. attempts to combine renewed negotiations with Tehran and a united front that threatened Iran with punishing global sanctions for failure to come clean about its nuclear ambitions. The United States, Britain, France and Germany believe Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon behind the cover of what Tehran says is a program designed...

Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, today urged President Obama to move with "deliberate speed" on a decision to increase troops in Afghanistan as his generals have requested, saying that to disregard their advice would be an "error of historic proportions." McCain said on CNN's State of the Union that Obama should back General Stanley McChrystal's proposal for an increase of 40,000 troops and resist a "half measure" aimed at placating political opponents of deeper U.S. involvement. " McChrystal, the top general in Afghanistan, warned last month that the conflict would likely end in...

Our new research shows no evidence of a Keynesian 'multiplier' effect. There is evidence that tax cuts boost growth. The global recession and financial crisis have refocused attention on government stimulus packages. These packages typically emphasize spending, predicated on the view that the expenditure "multipliers" are greater than one—so that gross domestic product expands by more than government spending itself. Stimulus packages typically also feature tax reductions, designed partly to boost consumer demand (by raising disposable income) and partly to stimulate work effort, production and investment (by lowering rates).