White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

Only Congress can vote on whether or not to raise taxes. This is a clear, clear, clear, violation of the Constitution! 

He got the ball rolling with Obamacare becoming worse when they allowed him to set another precedent by decreeing amnesty. 

People... we are now officially on the slippery slope.

Breaking News Megyn Kelly

One nice thing about a de facto dictatorship is that it is easy to raise revenue, since you don’t have to fuss with getting tax bills through Congress. You can simply jack up taxes by executive decree. If people complain that they are already overtaxed and that the money confiscated by the government is mostly being wasted, you can smirk, “What are you going to do about it?” Watch Obama to see how it’s done:

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed Monday that President Obama is “very interested” in the idea of raising taxes through unilateral executive action.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

“The president certainly has not indicated any reticence in using his executive authority to try and advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans,” Earnest said in response to a question about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calling on Obama to raise more than $100 billion in taxes through IRS executive action.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

Even by Josh Earnest’s standards, the lie that this would benefit the middle class is insolent in the extreme. Modern liberalism is an alliance of the liberal elite and the welfare class, who have teamed up to enslave the middle class, if not loot it out of existence.

Raising taxes will typically be spun as closing loopholes for rich corporations. But in the end corporations don’t pay any taxes. They pass on this expense to largely middle class consumers.

Adding extra salt to the wounds, here’s why the government needs even more money, despite its record revenues:

[Obama’s unilateral and unconstitutional] immigration actions, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will raise federal deficits by $8.8 billion over the next ten years.

These “immigration actions” consist of illegally importing millions from the Third World to take our jobs and displace us from our country. Obama will fund this treason by raising our taxes, in direct violation of the Constitution, which leaves this power to Congress.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

Did climate change spark 2011 Syrian uprising?

Right out of the Al Gore's playbook. And what came out of the Syrian uprising... ISIS.

"We're not saying the drought caused the war," said Richard Seager. 

Then he goes on to  give a litany of reasons why it did.

Marie Harf press conference 2:00pm today:

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A new study has said that a record drought, stoked by ongoing manmade climate change that ravaged Syria in 2006-2010 may have sparked the 2011 Syrian uprising.

Researchers say the drought, the worst ever recorded in the region, destroyed agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to cities, where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011. The conflict has since evolved into a complex multinational war that has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced millions.

The study was published in the leading journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We're not saying the drought caused the war," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who coauthored the study. "We're saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region."

A growing body of research suggests that extreme weather, including high temperatures and droughts, increases the chances of violence, from individual attacks to full-scale wars. Some researchers project that manmade global warming will heighten future conflicts, or argue that it may already be doing so. And recent journalistic accounts and other reports have linked warfare in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in part to environmental issues, especially lack of water. The new study, combining climate, social and economic data, is perhaps the first to look closely and quantitatively at these questions in relation to a current war.

The recent drought affected the so-called Fertile Crescent, spanning parts of Turkey and much of Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started some 12,000 years ago. The region has always seen natural weather swings. But using existing studies and their own research, the authors showed that since 1900, the area has undergone warming of 1 to 1.2 degrees Centigrade (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit), and about a 10 percent reduction in wet-season precipitation. They showed that the trend matches neatly with models of human-influenced global warming, and thus cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. Second, higher temperatures have increased evaporation of moisture from soils during the usually hot summers, giving any dry year a one-two punch. The region saw substantial droughts in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s. However, 2006-10 was easily the worst and longest since reliable recordkeeping began. The researchers concluded that an episode of this severity and length would have been unlikely without the long-term changes.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the entire Mediterranean, and attributed at least part of it to manmade warming; this includes an earlier study from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that the already violent Mideast will dry more in coming decades as human-induced warming proceeds.

The study's authors say Syria was made especially vulnerable by other factors, including sheer population growth-from 4 million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. Also, the ruling al-Assad family encouraged water-intensive export crops like cotton. Illegal drilling of irrigation wells dramatically depleted groundwater that might have provided reserves during dry years, said coauthor Shahrzad Mohtadi, a graduate student at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs who did the economic and social components of the research.

The drought's effects were immediate. Agricultural production, typically a quarter of the country's gross domestic product, plummeted by a third. In the hard-hit northeast, livestock herds were practically all obliterated; cereal prices doubled; and nutrition-related diseases among children saw dramatic increases. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to the peripheries of cities that were already strained by influxes of refugees from the ongoing war in next-door Iraq. In these chaotic instant suburbs, the Assad regime did little to help people with employment or services, said Mohtadi. It was largely in these areas that the uprising began.

"Rapid demographic change encourages instability," say the authors. "Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with preexisting acute vulnerability."

Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley who studies climate and conflict, said the study is "the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence." Hsiang said this is not the first time the region has faced the issue: research by other scientists has suggested that the Akkadian Empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,200 years ago, likely collapsed during a multi-year drought.

Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who studies climate and agriculture, said, "There were many things going on in the region and world at that time, such as high global food prices and the beginning of the Arab Spring, that could have also increased the likelihood of civil conflict." But, he said, the study is "consistent with a large body of statistical evidence linking changes in climate to conflict."

The study's lead author is climatologist Colin Kelley, who did the work while working on his PhD. at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; he is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was also coauthored by climate scientists Mark Cane and Yochanan Kushnir, also of Lamont-Doherty.

Did climate change spark 2011 Syrian uprising?

Baskin Robbins lost a good employee

Baskin Robbins lost a good employee

Onward Christian soldiers: US filmmaker, self-styled revolutionary trains faithful to fight ISIS

We've all seen it. 

Christians routinely rounded up like sheep, kneeling obediently, waiting to have their head cut off. 

Wouldn't it feel gratifying to read this headline:

Christians swarm Mosul killing Jhadi John and 162 ISIS's terrorists  

Well, finally this guy is trying to make it happen.

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American training Iraqi army to fight ISIS speaks out

Just 12 miles north of the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul, an American filmmaker and self-styled revolutionary is running a boot camp for Christians willing and able to fight for their lives and faith against the murderous Islamic terror organization.

Matthew VanDyke, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who escaped a Libyan prison after going there to help overthrow Col. Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, is helping to train hundreds of long-persecuted Assyrian Christians in everything from firearms to close quarters combat. VanDyke, who founded the security contracting firm company Sons of Liberty (SOLI), is working with an unnamed U.S. military veteran to get the Christian conscripts who range in age from 18 to 60 or older, ready to take on the ominous black clad army that lies dug in to Iraq's second-largest city just over the horizon. Earlier this week, the first battalion of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU) graduated from the boot camp.

"They need to demonstrate that they can maintain and be responsible for their own security to encourage their people to stay – or else, within a couple of generations, there won’t be any Christians left in Iraq."

- Matthew VanDyke

“It’s designed to help local sectarian forces in local communities facing threats of terrorism, insurgency or oppressive regimes to be able to defend themselves,” VanDyke told FoxNews.com from a base in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, where he hopes to help train 2,000 men. “It’s the step where the international community has failed or is moving too slow.”

The Assyrians, sometimes called Syriac Christians, belong to a variety of Christian sects and are a stateless ethnic group. One of the oldest civilizations from ancient Mesopotamia, they have their own culture, language and heritage sharply distinct from that of Arabian or Kurdish people. They speak a near-extinct language connected to Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and remain stateless – over the years enduring immense persecution and land expropriations.

While the Kurds have proven a worthy adversary of ISIS, with their battle-hardened Peshmerga pushing back the terrorist army in cities and villages throughout northern Iraq and Syria, the Christians and other religious minorities including the Yazidis have been slaughtered, starved and sent fleeing throughout the region since ISIS broke from Al Qaeda and began establishing a so-called caliphate in the region a year ago. Iraq's Christian population, which numbered 1.5 million in 2004, has dwindled in the face of the ISIS onslaught while, VanDyke charges, the world has stood by. 

“The international system has failed [Christian] communities around the world in recent years," said VanDyke, a 35-year-old Baltimore native who obtained a master's degree from Georgetown University's vaunted Walsh School of Foreign ServiCe before embarking on a mercurial career that has seen him film and fight throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. "Christianity is about to be wiped out in Iraq.

“They are down to less than 400,000. Many of those who have left will never return," he continued. "They need to demonstrate that they can maintain and be responsible for their own security to encourage their people to stay – or else, within a couple of generations, there won’t be any Christians left in Iraq. This is their last chance.”

In December, the Assyrian Democratic Movement – the primary political party of Assyrians in Iraq – announced the development of the NPU, a militia made up mostly Christian volunteers. VanDyke said the Christians realized they had to fight for themselves when ISIS began a major assault on Christian-held areas of Iraq such as the Nineveh Plains last year and the Peshmerga withdrew without telling them.

“Some people woke up and looked outside and there was ISIS in their backyard, so they don’t trust anyone else but their own defense and nor should they,” VanDyke said. “They’ve had women kidnapped; their homes have been taken from them in the fight with ISIS.”

However, bringing this Christian group together and training them to take up arms has been something of a political challenge. VanDyke said that the minority faction was persistently denied requests by the Iraqi Central Government and Peshmerga to form their own force, so they began training covertly. With a nascent force now established and ready to fight the common enemy, any opposition from the Iraqi or Kurdish governments has dropped.

Klado Ramzi, an Iraqi Christian who serves on the NPU Leadership Committee, told FoxNews.com that the group's goals go beyond just protecting its people and territory from ISIS, but include acquiring the long-term capability of defending itself.

“We have had roots in Iraq for thousands and thousands of years," Ramzi said. "It is very important that we protect our language, our being. We respect all people in Iraq, but we refuse to be part of the fighting between Kurds and Arabs. We want to be independent and we need our own system of security for the NPU area.”

The Assyrian fighters supply their own weapons at the camp, which VanDyke began covertly in December. In addition to basic military training, VanDyke and his associates are helping leaders within the Christian communities forge international diplomatic connections, including with the U.S. State Department. Sons of Liberty bills itself as a full-service military training, consulting, support and security firm that seeks to “enable those abandoned by the international community to take action in defense of themselves and their people.”

In 2013, VanDyke released his first documentary, entitled “Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution” with his own money and the goal of encouraging international support for Syrian rebels in the ongoing civil war. The film won more than 50 awards and has been shown at educational institutions and events around the world sponsored by organizations such as Amnesty International. His second documentary, “Point and Shoot,” which used footage VanDyke shot from 2007-2011, while motorcycling around the Middle East and North Africa as well as while in Libya.

His latest project, Sons of Liberty, relies on donations to provide training and aid, one reason he is no longer conducting the camp in secret. VanDyke said his goal is to redefine the security contracting industry "by challenging the mercenary model that has dominated it throughout history, by providing services and assistance for free to those in the greatest need of them." In addition to funding, he seeks skilled ex-military operators and security contractors who can donate their skills to help train the Assyrians.

In its violent quest to take over cities and land, ISIS has intentionally persecuted religious minorities – kidnapping, murdering, raping, enslaving and torturing Christians. Just this week, Syrian activists said as many as 200 Christians had been abducted, including women and the elderly, from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria. The U.S. State Department condemned the attacks, and stated that hundreds more are trapped in villages besieged by ISIS operatives.

For now, VanDyke – who fought alongside rebels in Syrian more than a year ago, believes going into Syria is just too dangerous.

“The problem there is the level of betrayal,” he said. “There is a very high likelihood for anyone who goes there of being sold to militants by the very people you’re there to help and protect.”

Onward Christian soldiers: US filmmaker, self-styled revolutionary trains faithful to fight ISIS

I'm no De Niro fan...but

Robert De Niro pays IRS $6.4 million after he's slapped with massive tax lien and says the government's been billing the WRONG ADDRESS

Legendary actor says delinquency notices regarding his 2013 taxes were sent to the wrong address

His reps said Thursday 'he had a check for the full amount [$6,410,449.20] hand delivered to the IRS this morning'

A lien from the IRS serves as a notice to creditors that the U.S. government has a right to you property 

By Josh Gardner For Dailymail.com

Published: 21:18 EST, 26 February 2015 | Updated: 21:27 EST, 26 February 2015

Hollywood living legend Robet De Niro made headlines Thursday with the news he owed the IRS an astounding $6.4 million in back taxes.

However, the news appear to have come as a surprise to De Niro--who's worth a reported $200 million--as much as to his fans.

According to the 71-year-old's reps, he never saw the notices sent to him by Uncle Sam.

De Niro's reps said Thursday 'he had a check for the full amount [$6,410,449.20] hand delivered to the IRS this morning' after news broke that he'd 

The delinquency notices were 'sent to an old address,' De Niro's people told the Smoking Gun, 'he had a check for the full amount hand delivered to the IRS this morning.'

The IRS lodged the complaint against the actor three months ago, according to Smoking Gun.

The lien was first noticed by the folks at FamousTaxLiens.com.

It lists De Niro's residence as a Tribeca condominium he helped develop along with his partners.

However, lending some believability to his claim, De Niro has many residences including a $125,000 per month rental--one of New York's priciest--overlooking Central Park. 

I'm no De Niro fan...but