CNN Anderson Cooper Exposes Obama & Bill Ayers

CNN showed how Obama and Ayers' "paths repeatedly crossed" as members of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Project, where for seven years, "Bill Ayers and Obama, among many others, worked on funding for education projects, including some experiments supported by Ayers." In another sound bite, National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz characterized how this funding worked: "Instead of giving money directly to schools, they gave men to what they called external partners, and these external partners were often pretty radical community organizer groups."

Ayers and Obama were board members for the Woods Fund, another foundation which donated money to liberal groups: "Among its recipients -- Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church, where Obama attended, and a children and family justice center where Ayers' wife worked."

Poll: Romney Opens 10-Point Lead Among Key Independent Voters

◼ New poll results are delivering positive news for Republicans, including one survey showing that presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has opened up a double-digit lead over President Barack Obama among independent voters. - Newsmax

◼ A Politico/George Washington University poll has Romney with a razor-thin lead over Obama among all likely voters, 48 percent to 47 percent. A similar poll in February had Obama ahead by 9 percentage points.

But among voters who identified themselves as independents, Romney garnered 48 percent of the vote to Obama’s 38 percent.

Romney also has a 6-point lead among respondents who said they are “extremely likely” to vote in November.

The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children.

◼ All Fall Down - Victor Davis Hanson/PJM

...Those with capital—slurred as one-percenters, fat cats, and corporate jet owners unless hit up for Obama campaign donations—are not hiring or buying. Maybe they think oncoming Obamacare will smash them. Maybe they see on the Obama horizon rampant inflation, debt cancellation, or higher taxes as planned liberal remedies for our endless borrowing. Maybe these shrugging Atlases see that fossil fuel energy is not pursued on federal lands, but needless new regulations are implemented.

Whatever the reason, they hesitate—only sorta buying here, kinda hiring there. And the result of millions of these collective hesitancies is an ossified Europeanized economy, run by technocrats without private sector experience and exempt from the sacrifice they demand of others, as they desperately try to borrow and grow the government to ensure a permanent lease on power...

Sarkozy voted out in France; Socialist Party candidate wins presidency

◼ Part of Hollande’s platform includes initiatives that sound like they were scripted as porn for die-hard Keynesians, including what sounds like a Buffett Rule on steroids - HotAir

Hollande has promised more government spending and higher taxes — including a 75-percent income tax on the rich — and wants to re-negotiate a European treaty on trimming budgets to avoid more debt crises of the kind facing Greece. That would complicate relations with Germany’s Angela Merkel, who championed the treaty alongside Sarkozy.

Hollande also pledged to lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 (which Sarkozy had raised from 60 to 62) and to add 60,000 employees to France’s public education system. And yet the budget, according to another of Hollande’s campaign promises, will be balanced by 2017.
What’s French for “good luck with that”?

GENERAL: OBAMA KNEW BIN LADEN HIDEOUT SINCE SUMMER 2010

◼ General Jack Keane (Retired), the former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, told Mike Huckabee tonight that Barack Obama knew about Osama Bin Laden’s hideout since the summer of 2010. - Breitbart
◼ Top General: Obama Knew About OBL’s Hideout in Abbottabad Since Summer of 2010 – Refused to Act Until May - Gateway Pundit

This follows the news from yesterday that the Obama Administration ◼ drafted a memo to protect the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden would have failed.

“We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”

◼ Investigative reporters are supposed to be the ones keeping an eye on the government. Instead, it turns out, it's the other way around. - Peter Suderman/Reason Magazine

...The public is generally unaware of how essential nominally classified information is to coverage of diplomatic and strategic news. As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.

So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to....”