Dr. Coburn sent the following letter to the RNC and DNC today asking them to reject public  financing for their respective 2012 party conventions.

Dr. Coburn writes:

“Can we agree once and for all the party is over when it comes to travel and meetings paid for by the taxpayers?”

“If you agree, I would urge you to reject the millions of dollars of public financing for your 2012 party convention provided by the federal government through the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (PECF) and to return the money to the federal government.”

“These events will be weeklong parties paid for by taxpayers, much like the highly maligned GSA conference in Las Vegas.  At a time when confidence in Washington has dropped to all time lows and the federal debt is growing by more than $1 trillion a year, we need more than election year rhetoric and political posturing.  Taxpayers expect leadership demonstrated by action.”

“Surely our parties will respond by saying this money was given by taxpayers voluntarily for this purpose when they filed their tax returns. No one disputes that you are legally allowed to use these funds, but some may question whether using them this way is best for the country. To demonstrate that both of our parties are committed to fiscal discipline, it would be a great act of statesmanship to return these funds.”

                                                                                                           May 17, 2012

The Hon. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz – Chair
Democratic National Committee
430 South Capitol Street, SE
Washington, DC  20003

Reince Priebus – Chairman
Republican National Committee
310 1st Street, SE
Washington, DC  20003

Dear Chairman Priebus & Chair Wasserman-Schulz:
            
In Washington it is difficult to find any area of agreement these days, so I was encouraged both political parties issued statements this week calling for serious limits on government junkets and meetings paid for with taxpayer funds.

While the outlandishness of the GSA conference in Las Vegas continues to captivate headlines, years of oversight has revealed travel and meetings paid for by the government has become an expected perk and leisure.

Can we agree once and for all the party is over when it comes to travel and meetings paid for by the taxpayers?

If you agree, I would urge you to reject the millions of dollars of public financing for your 2012 party convention provided by the federal government through the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (PECF) and to return the money to the federal government.

The Republicans and Democrats each received a $17.7 million check from taxpayers through the PECF to pay for the costs of political conventions in Tampa, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina. 

These events will be weeklong parties paid for by taxpayers, much like the highly maligned GSA conference in Las Vegas.  At a time when confidence in Washington has dropped to all time lows and the federal debt is growing by more than $1 trillion a year, we need more than election year rhetoric and political posturing.  Taxpayers expect leadership demonstrated by action.

Surely our parties will respond by saying this money was given by taxpayers voluntarily for this purpose when they filed their tax returns. No one disputes that you are legally allowed to use these funds, but some may question whether using them this way is best for the country. To demonstrate that both of our parties are committed to fiscal discipline, it would be a great act of statesmanship to return these funds.

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), federal law places relatively few restrictions on how PECF convention funds are spent as long as purchases are lawful and are used to defray expenses incurred with respect to a presidential nominating convention.[1]  Besides funding the event itself, the money is used to pay for entertainment, catering, transportation, hotel costs, production of candidate biographical films, and a variety of other expenses.

For example, in 2008, it is likely then that taxpayers covered the Democrats bill at the Ritz Carlton and six-figure cost for housing convention staff and the Republican bill for $32,250 bill for speech coaching services at their convention.[2]

The $15.6 trillion debt cannot be eliminated over night. But refusing PECF funds for the political conventions will show strong leadership to getting our budget crisis in control. The nation’s taxpayers are waiting to see this type of leadership in Washington.

I look forward to your response. 

Sincerely,

Tom Coburn, M.D.

U.S. Senator

Breitbart.com has an interesting story on Oklahoma’s own U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (now of Massachusetts).

Shelly Lowe, executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program (HUNAP), told Breitbart News yesterday that Warren had not, to her knowledge, participated in the program’s events while Warren was a professor at Harvard.

Last week, Warren explained that she had listed herself as Native American “in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.” However, she had not been involved in HUNAP, the most obvious avenue for meeting fellow Native American faculty and students.

Warren, who is the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican Scott Brown, claims that she has a great-great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee. That claim has yet to be substantiated by evidence beyond family lore, and Warren herself has no formal tribal membership.

She had listed herself as Native American in the 1980s, but stopped doing so in the mid-1990s, claiming that she never encountered others with similar backgrounds: “Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.”

HUNAP is a visible presence at Harvard, a university whose 17th-century charter dedicates the school “to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.”

Click here to read more from Breitbart News.

Between things like Anita Dunn’s professed love for Mao Tse-Tung and the not-controversy surrounding the president’s new campaign slogan (“Forward!”), we suspect White House staffers are getting tired of responding to questions about whether the Obama administration employs at least a few communist-sympathizing officials.

Rick Bookstaber, who currently serves on President Obama’s Financial
Stability Oversight Council, may have just kicked off another round of
these questions.

Writing on his personal blog Monday, Boosktaber posted a refutation of conservative author Tucker Carlson’s claim that, by repeatedly singling out the “wealthy,” Democrats are waging “class warfare.”
 
“There is little that matches the artfulness of the rich in waving off criticism of the widening income gap as ‘class warfare,’” Bookstaber writes. “And there is little that matches the gullibility of the rest in following along.”
 
“I am not picking sides in this war,” he added, “but I believe such a war is justifiable, and indeed ultimately inevitable.”

Click here to read more from The Blaze.

By now, most have heard of the Obama campaign’s new slogan, “Forward,” and the dubious scrubbing of all references to the Marxist origins of the motto on its Wikipedia entry. Glenn Beck went into the detail on GBTV.com and The Blaze has the video.

During his Thursday evening broadcast, Glenn Beck reviewed the roots of President Obama’s leftwing ideology and those who have served as his inspiration — from far-left radical Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers and his father, Tom. Beck’s clip is featured and the information that follows on the president’s new slogan is, we daresay, outrageous.

But what then is so significant about the slogan, “Forward” and why would the left, in one instance, purposely choose a word that is code-speak among Marxists and then go out of its way to hide all reference to that fact later?

That question remains unanswered, but circulating the Internet are a myriad Soviet and Maoist propaganda posters that provide hard-hitting insight into just how meaningful the “forward” saying truly is. Take a walk down Communist lane as Stalin, Lenin and Mao blast “forward” for victory. The pertinent text has been translated to English and is featured in the captions below each image.

Yes, Tulsa Today warned you as early as May 2008 in this writer’s story titled, "Obama fails the first questions," but for those that are still in doubt … Click here to watch Glenn Beck discusses Obama’s mentors as they move “forward” in achieving their goals. He notes how little is truly known about the president and how little vetting was done by the mainstream media when he first came on the scene.

Authors Don Rassler, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Liam Collins, Muhammad al-Obaidi, Nelly Lahoud have compiled a report of 17 de-classified documents captured during the raid that ended Osama Bin Ladin. 

The report is a study of the documents captured during the Abbottabad
raid and released to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC). They consist
of electronic letters or draft letters, totaling 175 pages in the
original Arabic and 197 pages in the English translation. The earliest
is dated September 2006 and the latest April 2011.  

These internal al-Qa`ida communications were authored by several  leaders, most prominently Usama bin Ladin.  In contrast to his public statements that focused on the injustice of those he believed to be the “enemies” of Muslims, namely corrupt “apostate” Muslim rulers and their Western “overseers,” the focus of Bin Ladin’s private letters is Muslims’ suffering at the hands of his jihadi “brothers”. He is at pain advising them to abort domestic attacks that cause Muslim civilian casualties and focus on the United States, “our desired goal.”

Bin Ladin’s frustration with regional jihadi groups and his seeming inability to exercise control over their actions and public statements is the most compelling story to be told on the basis of the 17 de-classified documents. “Letters from Abbottabad” is an initial exploration and contextualization of 17 documents that will be the grist for future academic debate and discussion. 

Click here for Combating Terrorism Center’s web site with document links for both the original and English Translations.