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L. Ron Obama and the Church of ProgressivismPosted By Bruce Thornton On April 16, 2015 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments The HBO documentary about Scientology, “Going Clear,” is a must-see. Not so much because it exposes Scientology as a moneymaking, totalitarian cult, something most people already have known for 50 years. More useful is the film’s description of Scientology’s ideas, techniques, and tactics, for they bear an eerie resemblance to contemporary Progressive belief and practice.The first dimension of Scientology, as its name suggests, is scientism. This is the notion that human identity and behavior both individually...

As they rush to file their taxes by April 15, Americans are rightfully frustrated with the complexity of the 74,608-page-long federal tax code. The federal tax code is 187 times longer than it was a century ago, according to Wolters Kluwer, CCH, which has analyzed the federal tax code since 1913. Amazingly, in the first 26 years of the federal income tax, the tax code only grew from 400 to 504 pages. Even through President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the tax code was well under 1,000 pages. Changes during World War II made the length of the tax code balloon...

Senator Marco Rubio kicked off his campaign for President this week with an unexpected generational throw down. "This election is a generational choice about what kind of country we will be," Rubio said Monday night as he kicked off his bid for the White House. …"Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday," Rubio said. "Yesterday is over -- and we're never going back." I should be offended as I’m quite sure Marco’s speech was – in addition to being part of the Republican War on Women - an...

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." –Author Tom Clancy The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us. Yet no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private. Indeed, as I point...

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee said Thursday on CNN that he's running for the Democratic nomination for president, just a week after announcing he formed an exploratory committee, his most definitive statement he's made toward formalizing a 2016 campaign. "Yes, that's why I'm running. Because I feel strong about where we're going as a country," Chafee told CNN's "New Day" on Thursday, when asked why he's been so critical of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Chafee was asked by CNN's John Berman in the context of having not formally declared his presidential campaign. Chafee spokeswoman Debbie Rich said Chafee did...

Iowa State University researchers reported in 2007 that chimpanzees near Fongoli in Senegal were using tools, including spears, to hunt. The team also noted in that initial study that females of the species were the ones crafting most of the weapons. However, the small sample size of that initial study led some scientists to question the conclusions of the research. Over the last eight years, investigators have documented more than 300 hunts utilizing spears and other instruments for hunting. Males make up 60 percent of the chimpanzees in the study group, yet they undertook just 40 percent of the hunting...

Social Security numbers (SSNs) were given to 541,000 illegal aliens, according to Carolyn Colvin, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA). In a March 12 letter, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) had asked SSA: “How many individuals have applied for SSNs as a result of the June 15, 2012, memorandum issued by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano entitled ‘Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children'?”

WASHINGTON – To the surprise of, well, no one, former U.S. senator and secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it official this week – she intends to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. That decision is not news. The real story is that some potential rivals are looking at the race despite facing overwhelming odds, giving new meaning in the view of some observers to the old Alexander Pope stanza “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Clinton, who has been on the national scene since her husband, former President Bill Clinton, captured the White House 23...

In his State-of-the-Union address, president Obama again confirmed that “saving the climate” remains one of his top priorities. Yet an official December 2014 confab in Lima, Peru didn't really conclude anything -- certainly no binding Protocol to limit emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) -- but it "kicked the can down the road" to the next international gabfest in Paris, scheduled for 2015.

According to a new Rasmussen poll, nearly six in 10 voters believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next president. But perception is not reality, as an MSNBC poll seems to indicate.The poll, which appeared on the MSNBC website on Tuesday morning, shows that 86% of MSNBC readers who responded would not vote for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election. Only 13% responded in the affirmative and a mere 2% said “maybe.”The poll, while not scientific, strongly suggests that progressives do not prefer to have a baggage-laden career politician as their party’s standard bearer in 2016. 

Hillary Clinton seeks $2B to end big money politics [WTH?] The Clinton Foundation said late Wednesday that it will continue to accept donations from foreign governments during Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, despite concerns that such gifts will create a conflict of interest for the Democratic front-runner. The foundation's board said that donations directly to the foundation would only be allowed from six governments — Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. However, other governments could continue to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a subsidiary program that encourages donors to match contributions from others to tackle...

The Democratic Party supports legal abortion until the baby is born, according to Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. When asked if abortion should be legal until the moment of birth, she answered that the decision should be left to the mom and her doctor, adding, "Period. End of story." Wasserman Schultz's answer came three times. First in response to a question by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and two more times during Tuesday CNN and Fox News interviews. On April 8, the same day Paul announced he's running for president, he responded to a reporter's question about abortion exceptions...

"What's a gyrocopter?" quote of the day.

Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours. It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the...

Really? Another story about bakeries and cakes and who will or won’t bake what without the feds crashing your business? Apparently so. At Right Wing News, Warner Todd Huston has been tracking the story of an Arizona pastor, Joshua Feuerstein, who has been concerned over trends where Christians seem to be exclusively targeted for action if they assert their rights to Freedom of Religion, specifically in the case of so called “gay wedding cakes.” To prove his point, he contacted a “gay bakery” (though how this is defined is a bit hazy) owned by Sharon Haller and asked them...

William Rivers Pitt is unemployed and doing nothing except jotting in the middle of the lily white New Hampshire woods in a cabin purchased by mommy so he can waste away the rest of his life in utter boredom with his family. As the nonproductive member of a family of wealthy lawyers his task is to merely collect trust fund payments and simply exist. And yet Pitt turns the utter nothingness of his sad life into a virtue by staring at his own navel as you can see in his ode to nothingness, A day in the life. So...

You know the old saying: You can fly the candidate into Tuzla with her daughter under a hail of non-existent sniper fire, but you can’t take the Tuzla out of the candidate. Perhaps sensing that she needs a resumé enhancement, Hillary Clinton returned to fabulism on the campaign trail eight years after the Tuzla Dash, telling Iowans that all of her grandparents came to the US as immigrants. As BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski painstakingly details, she’s only 25% correct. Kaczynski picked up on this part of her stump speech about just plain folks working, emphasis mine: We are turning down...

Ahead of a major gathering of Republican presidential hopefuls in New Hampshire later this week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has put some distance between himself and the rest of the field, leading by 10 points against his nearest competitor in a new poll on the Granite State. Mr. Walker is the top presidential choice for 24 percent of GOP primary voters, according to the poll out Wednesday from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. Next was Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at 14 percent, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky at 12 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 10...

Robert Frost famously said that a liberal is someone "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." You might want to put a picture of Mary Anne Weaver next to that quote. Weaver appeared on today's Morning Joe to discuss her New York Times Magazine cover article "Her Majesty's Jihadists." On the one hand, Weaver paints a striking portrait of the radicalization of young Muslims in the UK, reporting for example that there are more British jihadists than there are Muslims serving in the British military. But when asked what could be done about the problem, did Weaver...

A professionally shot video of Barack Obama from 1995 has recently surfaced.  Shot at the Cambridge, Mass. Public Library, the video captures a skinny, youthful Obama promoting his then newly released memoir, Dreams from My Father. In this hour-long presentation, Obama openly talks about his relationship with his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist and pornographer.  Perhaps more importantly, Obama gives us a much clearer picture of who he was in 1995, on the cusp of his political career, than we had seen before.  Some observations: The Obama of 1995 was not a very good speaker.  He had a...