By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution
In damage control on multiple fronts, the White House on Tuesday struggled to contain a series of escalating scandals that likely will test President Obama's willingness to hold administration officials accountable.
The Department of Agriculture is out to sign up the world for food stamps, and you don't even have to live in the United States. The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.
Eat fewer apples, strawberries and grapes, and more corn, onions and pineapples, and you'll protect yourself and your children from "toxic" pesticides, according to the Environmental Working Group's 2013 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce.
Responding to complaints that food stamps are widely spent on junk food and that the Agriculture Department makes no attempt to even track, much less restrict, what kind of food is being purchased, a Pennsylvania Republican will introduce legislation Friday called the SNAP Transparency Act to create an online, searchable database that uses bar codes to break down how many taxpayer dollars in food stamps are spent on each individual product, from Kit Kat bars to whole milk.
If an Environmental Protection Agency workers went on a spending spree, investigators will find out soon.
It was among the more obscure programs tucked into the 2009 stimulus law, a $145 million Agriculture Department effort to buy easements from landowners to help restore natural floodplains.
The government is duplicating some efforts to boost wind energy and sometimes fails to assess whether billions of dollars in grants and loans are really needed, the Government Accountability Office reported Thursday.
A lawyer for a New Mexico meat plant says it is only three weeks from becoming the first in the United States since 2007 to slaughter horses.
House Republicans on Tuesday accused federal agencies of failing to prepare for the automatic sequester cuts, saying they had two years to get ready but instead the administration spent time on "scare tactics."
Young children have been suspended recently from the nation's public schools for brandishing a toy bubble-blowing gun, for pointing their fingers in a gunlike matter or for mentioning a toy Nerf gun in casual conversation. The latest uber-caution can be found in Baltimore, where a second-grader was suspended after his teacher determined that he nibbled a strawberry Pop-Tart into a gun shape.
Kenilworth Market, a bulletproof junk-food emporium just inside Washington, D.C.'s eastern border, sells ski masks in the dead of summer. Its clerks steadily hawk "loosies," or illegal single-sale cigarettes.
Barack Obama went to some big towns in his campaigns and gave some big talk. He vowed to go line-by-line through the federal budget to identify and cut waste. The big talk, it turns out, wasn't worth the teleprompter it was printed on.
The White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling tours of the president's home for the foreseeable future as the sequester spending cuts begin to bite and the administration makes good on its warnings of painful decisions.
The sequester cuts are now officially in place, but many government agencies appear to be hiring freely anyway.
Animal rights groups are bracing for the federal government to license the first horse-meat slaughter plant in the U.S. since 2007, criticizing the Obama administration Friday for moving ahead with the application process.
