Yes, Bob Woodward is doing a journalist’s job here, reporting from a non-partisan perspective, but of course, since the people on the left side of the political equation don’t like to hear the truth (liberal propaganda is their version of “the news”), die hard lefties couldn’t help but become enraged.

The White House sure is…

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Read the entire article here.

From Townhall.com:

A day after fumbling a predictable and straightforward question posed by Mitt Romney last week — are Americans better off than they were four years ago — the Obama campaign provided a response on Monday that it said would be hammered home during the Democratic convention here this week: “Absolutely.” The focus on the campaign’s handling of the question, after halting and contradictory responses from Democrats on Sunday, complicated the White House’s effort to begin striking a set of themes the president intends to highlight here and carry through the general election.

“Absolutely.” Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter has gone so far as to assert that “by any measure” voters are in better shape today than they were four years ago. Really? Let’s consult the raw data:

Unemployment: 7.8% then, 8.3% now

Median income: $54,983 then, $50,964 now

Gas prices: $1.85 per gallon then, $3.78 now

National debt: $10.6 trillion then, $15.9 trillion now (with the debt hitting the magic $16 Trillion mark tonight, appropriately)

Half of all Americans are now considered “poor” or “low income.”

One out of every six Americans is living in poverty — an increase of millions since Obama took office.

Food stamp usage has increased by 45 percent under this president.

Average family health care premium costs have increased to roughly $15,000 per year.

Ah, the videos…

The entire Townhall.com article, written by their political editor, Guy Benson, is here.

I wasn’t planning to post a second time today, and then I ran into this idiocy.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) told a recent gathering of the Women’s Political Committee that the spirits of suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul spoke to her at the White House.

Pelosi said she heard them say: “At last we have a seat at the table”.

A video recently posted on Youtube shows Pelosi speaking in May describing her first meeting with President Bush in the White House after becoming part of the Democratic House leadership.

In the video Pelosi says, “He’s (Bush) saying something to the effect of we’re so glad to welcome you here, congratulations and I know you’ll probably have some different things to say about what is going on–which is correct. But, as he was saying this, he was fading and this other thing was happening to me.”

“My chair was getting crowded in,” said Pelosi. “I swear this happened, never happened before, it never happened since.”

“My chair was getting crowded in and I couldn’t figure out what it was, it was like this,” she said.

“And then I realized Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, you name it, they were all in that chair, they were,” said Pelosi. “More than I named and I could hear them say: ‘At last we have a seat at the table.’ And then they were gone.”

The video appears in the linked article, as it wouldn’t embed properly, herein, for some reason.

UNbeLIEVable! Only from the lips of a loony liberal.

Naturally, all the liberals who see this video will nod sagely, swoon and believe every word Pelosi says.

Idiots…

By “him”, I mean Eric Holder, that snake-in-the-grass…

I mean why bother to hold him in “contempt” of Congress if they’re not going to do anything about it?

Despite voting to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress, there’s little House Republicans can do in the short term to compel him to turn over documents — unless it wanted to revisit a long-dormant power and arrest him.

The thought is shocking, and conjures up a Hollywood-ready standoff scene between House police and the FBI agents who protect the attorney general. It’s a dramatic and unlikely possibility not least because Congress doesn’t even have a jail any longer. But in theory it could happen.

Republicans say it’s not even under consideration, with House Speaker John A. Boehner’s spokesman flatly ruling it out.

I can see if we were discussing the president, joke though he is for that office, arresting him would be nearly as much of a national embarrassment as it is having him as POTUS, arresting ANY president would be kind of, well, degrading, but arresting Holder?

C’mon, Holder taking a perp walk on CNN would do him, and the right thinkers among us, some good. He’d have gotten what he deserves, we right thinkers would see justice done.

But the process, known as inherent contempt, is well-established by precedent, has been confirmed by multiple Supreme Court rulings, and is available to any Congress willing to force such a confrontation.

“The House is scared to death to use the inherent contempt power,” said Mort Rosenberg, a fellow at the Constitution Project and author of “When Congress Comes Calling.” “They’re scared to death because the courts have said … the way the contempt power is used is unseemly. It’s not that it’s unconstitutional, because it’s been upheld by four Supreme Court decisions, but unseemly to have somebody go arrest the attorney general.”

That’s why it’s been more than 75 years since either chamber has used the option though it used to be somewhat common.

The House on Thursday voted 255-67 to hold Mr. Holder in criminal contempt, and 258-95 to pursue a case against him in the courts.

But those votes do little to break the impasse over his refusal to turn over documents the House is seeking in an investigation into Fast and Furious, a botched gun-walking operation. The House issued subpoenas for the documents last year but President Obama last week asserted executive privilege in withholding them.

A court case will take time, meaning there’s little immediate effect of the two contempt votes.

A court case will take time, right, like until sometime after the November elections.

So the contempt vote is about as worthless as, “I dare you to cross this line….okay, I dare you to cross this one…. now this one…”

A precedent has now been set. Perhaps they can call it the “Sticks and Stones” Precedent. It’s similar to that scene in Team America where they threaten Kim Jong Il with a letter of “strong condemnation” if he doesn’t give up his nuclear weapons ambitions.

What a bunch of spineless wastes of skin we have in the GOP these days, and they’re our alternative to the anti-America far left that has assumed control of the Democratic Party?

Are we in trouble, or what!?

We’ve been getting Roger Simon’s Pajama’s Media in the Hard Astarboard in box every day, and I have found it to be a daily must-read.

Today, Mr. Simon had rather an intriguing take on the effect on our nation it has when a liar is at the helm.

How many lies does a man have to tell before we can call him a liar?

The Ancient Romans said only one, when they gave us the legal dictum Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

That was a pretty stringent requirement. Most of us are not George Washington and one wonders if even George was perfect in his honesty, the cherry tree fable notwithstanding.

However…

Barack Obama is another matter. According to Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith (normally a loyal member of the administration’s media claque), no less than thirty-eight documented falsehoods in the president’s memoir Dreams from My Father were revealed by David Maraniss’s new book Barack Obama: The Story.

What’s interesting about those falsehoods (can we call them lies?) is that they were unprovoked. We are used to presidential lies, most notably from Nixon and Clinton, but we know full well why those men were lying. In fact, in their cases it was obvious. In Obama’s, we do not.

Why was he lying? Self-aggrandizement? To sell books? For political purposes? Dreams from My Father was written before Obama supposedly had presidential ambitions. Or was there a hint, dare I say it, of pathology?

Great analysis of an ongoing threat to the future of our country, posed by our Liar-In-Chief.

Read the entire article here.

From PJ Media:

(Legal Editor Note: Not long ago, the Left had a monopoly on rallies and protests. Republicans and conservatives, more enamored with scholars instead of brawlers, shunned displays of political muscle in the streets. That’s all changed. A few months ago, Attorney General Eric Holder went to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, to announce an aggressive attack on state election integrity measures like Voter ID. This election-year strategy is designed to stoke the leftist base but risks alienating everyone else. To greet Holder that day were hundreds of citizens at a rally sponsored by True the Vote.

I will never forget the disoriented look on Holder’s face as he emerged from the black SUV to the large crowd of people who came out to confront him. “Signs? Bullhorns? Multitudes? And they aren’t here to support me?” — that was the look.

ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief delivered a powerful speech that day, and PJ Media has finally been able to obtain it and publish it.)

Something like this was long overdue for complete access by the public. It doesn’t shock those of us who know just how far the left will sink to spread their paracommunist disease through our political system to our social, education, economic systems and even our family lives, but those who do not believe such a malevolent force could exist in our society should be informed as to just how wrong they are.

I speak from the heart and I speak plain, so if I offend some of you I’m sorry. But it’s an honor to be here today, especially to be at the LBJ Library, the father of the Great Society, the father of the social programs and the welfare state, and then the dissolution of the black family and our communities.

When LBJ signed in the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he said: “We’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 40 years.” And that needs to be said. People need to understand that. That’s the legacy that Holder brings here with him tonight by holding his speech here. It’s not just about coming here to talk about voting rights. It’s to talk about how they’ve taken race and turned it in to something that is unrecognizable.

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the heart of the civil rights movement. I could have walked to the 16th Street Baptist Church that was bombed during the civil rights era. And I have to tell you, the racism that I experienced, the evilness that came at me, it wasn’t from Birmingham, Alabama. It was from when I moved to the liberal north, and I got to see how things really were, and part of that was working with ACORN.

And that’s why I’m here today, to let you know what you guys are up against. This is not just something that has come out recently. This is something that started in the ’90s when Bill Clinton was in office. Not many people realize this, but ACORN helped get Bill Clinton elected, and the National Voter Registration Act was Clinton’s gift to ACORN.

And so for 10 years, ACORN and its sister organization Project Vote were going around the country and forcing Section 7 of the NVRA, which is the part about registering voters in public assistance agencies. They coordinated openly with the Clinton Justice Department during the ’90s, and during that time they had voter registrations coming out of these public assistance offices in the millions. This was their demographic.

Imagine a government, a federal mandate targeting a certain demographic. What if we were to say that by federal law you have to register people in churches and gun stores across the country? You don’t think liberals would lose their mind?

They are targeting their demographic, the people that are getting them elected, and this Obama gravy train has gotten out of control. We have more people on public assistance and welfare and unemployment than ever before, and they are coordinating to get Obama elected.

I have proof that Obama and Project Vote and ACORN were coordinating illegally in 2008 to get Obama elected. Do you not think that they would do the same thing in 2012 to get this man put back in office?

If there is proof that the Department of Justice ignored an ACORN investigation because they knew it would lead right to the White House, do you not think they would try to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests that show collusion between Project Vote, who has been pushing this project for years, and now the DOJ has all of a sudden started back filing lawsuits across the country under Section 7 violations.

This is a coordinated effort by ACORN and its people to push the same agenda that they’ve been doing for 20 years. We have the proof, we can connect the dots. They’ve been contacting the Department of Justice up until 2004 to force them to file lawsuits; even when Bush was in office and Antonio Gonzales was the Attorney General, they were still trying to get them to collude with them and to work.

So now, now, when they publicly acknowledge working with the Department of Justice in those previous administrations, why are they denying it and hiding it now? Could it be because it’s illegal collusion? Could it be because they’re trying to work to get Obama elected?

These are the questions we need to ask. We have — and I say “we” because there are people I’m working with — over 55,000 documents that could indict some of these people from ACORN and Project Vote, the same people that are out there right now meddling around in New York with Occupy Wall Street and across the country.

Why won’t Darrell Issa and his people call for a congressional investigation of ACORN when there are enough documents to bury these people? Why won’t we get them to take the stand?

We need you guys to step up and do this. I am today calling for two things: one, a Congressional investigation into the activities of ACORN and Project Vote, the Obama administration, and its relation to the Department of Justice in these Section 7 lawsuits across the country; and two, I am calling on you guys to help me with this, to not only call for Holder’s resignation but his impeachment.

I am so tired of race being a dividing factor in our communities. I grew up poor in Birmingham, Alabama, and I will tell you, in the black community they don’t have a lot of opportunities, there’s not a lot of banks, so where are you going to get your check cashed at? The liquor store, or you go to a check cashing place.

You can’t do anything without an ID in the black community. Sometimes they won’t even let you use your debit card unless they can verify you are who you are, because they lose money on fraudulent purchases every year. These are the realities of being poor and being black in America. Why is Sharpton ignoring this? He knows exactly what I’m talking about, but he’s a professional race-baiter. He smells that 8mm camera film and he comes running out there and he pulls out that platinum race card.

I’m tired of the platinum race card, and that’s why I’m here today — to let you know it’s a lie, it’s something they have used to divide this country, and we have got to get together and stop it. And the only way we can do that is to unite our voices and call for these investigations, and to let people know that we are tired of this race card and we’re not going to put up with that in 2012.

Every black voter in America who has been hoodwinked by the Democrats needs to read that one line of Lindon Baines Johnson’s: When LBJ signed in the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he said: “We’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 40 years.”

Disgusting!

If a Muslim takes an oath of office with his hand on The Bible rather than on a Koran, one supposes that his oath is non-binding, doesn’t one?

That would include the part about protecting and defending the Constitution.

This is an interesting and perhaps revealing video, sort of a montage, titled Obama Admits He’s A Muslim.

It pretty much speaks for itself.

Hard Astarboard has always been, and always will, be a blog that stands beside Israel.

That said;

This video speaks for itself.

Yeah, Barack Hussein terrorist sympathizing, lying miscarriage of a president Obama has their back, alright…