This could get awfully interesting.

Edward Klein, author of the yet-to-be-released unauthorized biography of President Obama, titled “The Amateur,” has now specifically named the man who allegedly bribed Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, with a $150,000 payment to stop speaking publicly.

Klein, making an appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show (via the Daily Caller), said, “Well, what happened is that after ABC’s Brian Ross broadcast the video tapes of the Rev. Wright ‘God damning America’ and slamming whites and slamming Jews and America, he was contacted by one of Obama’s closest personal friends – a guy who travels on Obama’s plane, who plays basketball with him, who goes on vacation with him.” Klein continued to out the briber, saying, “His name is Dr. Eric Whitaker. Dr. Whitaker is the vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center and he’s a member of Obama’s very tight inner circle. And he sent an email to a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ.”

President Barack Obama’s April fundraising total dropped almost 20 percent from the $53 million scored in March, falling to only $43.6 million.

That jarring drop helps explain why Obama has curbed his criticism of Wall Street donors, and increased his efforts to spur donations from gay supporters.

On May 9, he announced his support for single-sex marriage, boosting donations from gay-friendly donors in Hollywood and New York.

That marriage decision will likely boost his May fundraising, but has already damaged his support among critical swing-voting independents, according to several polls.

The Republican Senate Budget Committee released a chart Wednesday afternoon showing that governments in the United States spend more money per person than those in Portugal, Italy, Greece, or Spain.

According to the graphic, data from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook show that in 2011 the United States (at the federal, state and local levels) spent $20,000 per person, considerably more than Portugal’s $10,200, Greece $12,500, Spain’s $13,100, and Italy’s $16,900 — all four of which are countries with large deficits that currently face, or are already in the midst of, another recession.

A spokesman for Senate Budget Committee Republican staff told The Daily Caller that the need for a budget is reaching a fever pitch.

“Time for TRUTH” seems like a cliché. Perhaps it is a cliché, at least in government. Lots of well-meaning men and women dedicate many hours of service to the United States government. Yet somewhere along the way TRUTH became a nice thought but an unattainable goal, and somehow America started a downhill spiral on a road with no return.

Entrenched in the gutters of “it simply can’t be done,” many representatives of the people insist that clarity, accountability, and accessibility (of bills, for example) are simply too hard to obtain. “Status quo with a minutia of meaningful exertion,” is the mentality that permeates the parliament.

Day upon day, year upon year turn into decade after decade with closets that have not been cleaned and habits that have not been honed. Instead of revitalization and renewal, the republic became the reciprocal for intrigue and IOUs. Instead of active involvement and interaction, deliberation and petition, democracy became the dungeon of denial and isolation, silence and apathy.

he Obama administration is threatening to veto a $643 billion defense authorization bill due to be debated in the U.S. House this week. Its objections range from missile defense at home to the president’s authority to conduct policy abroad.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a policy statement Wednesday, outlining eight pages of administration objections arising from the National Defense Authorization Bill for fiscal year 2013.

It says President Obama’s “senior advisors” recommend that he veto the bill, H.R. 4310, if its cumulative effects “impede the ability of the Administration to execute the new defense strategy and to properly direct scarce resources.”

An Important change is happening in the presidential race — the belief that Mitt Romney could actually win is spreading. There is a growing confidence among his supporters, and the polls are starting to pick up a shift in his favor.

There is another indicator, however, and it is far more reliable. The left-leaning media is getting hysterical, launching over-the-top attacks on Romney and moving to protect President Obama as they see the public turning away from their man.

A CNN anchor compared Romney’s statement that “marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman” to George Wallace’s statement in 1963 that he favored “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

For five years, America’s most expensive fighter jets have been poisoning their pilots and crew. On Tuesday, the Defense Secretary finally stepped in — restricting the flights of the F-22 Raptor, and ordering the Air Force to begin an “expedited installation” of an automatic backup oxygen system for the entire fleet of Raptors, Pentagon spokesman George Little tells reporters. But Panetta is allowing the stealthy dogfighter to keep flying — for now.

The new oxygen systems will undergo flight tests through November, with installation beginning in December and proceeding in January 2013 at a rate of 10 planes per month. Additionally, the Air Force will have to fly its Raptors near a “proximate landing location” to make sure that pilots can land quickly if their planes’ oxygen systems begin to fail. And the Air Force will both work with the Navy and NASA to figure out the Raptor’s mysterious engineering flaw — whose root cause the Pentagon still does not know — and must now give Panetta monthly reports on its progress.

“There’s no margin for error here,” Little’s colleague, Navy Capt. John Kirby, said. “Safety is a zero-sum game.”

But Panetta isn’t grounding any of the planes in the Raptor fleet — a step the Air Force took twice last year after pilots reported disorientation and other symptoms of “hypoxia,” a condition indicating a lack of oxygen. “The secretary believes that this is the prudent course right now,” Kirby told Danger Room. Ongoing flights “allow us to continue to examine the aircraft closely and to try to figure out what happened. There’s a troubleshooting process that’s going on right now, so the aircraft being in operation assists in that process.”

House Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday teed up another debt-ceiling brawl, announcing that Republicans will insist on the same kinds of demands that Democrats claim brought the country close to its first-ever default last summer.

The speaker, in an address in Washington Tuesday afternoon, said that when it comes time to vote on a debt-ceiling increase, he’ll once again call for “cuts and reforms” greater than the amount of that increase.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Boehner said. “This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance.”

That fight could happen by early 2013, potentially during a frantic post-election lame-duck session of Congress.

Former President George W. Bush said Tuesday that the Arab Spring is “the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet Communism.”

“These are extraordinary times in the history of freedom,” Bush said in a speech in Washington, D.C., sponsored by his presidential foundation, the George W. Bush Institute.

“In the Arab Spring we have seen the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism,” Bush said. “Great change has come to a region where many thought impossible.

“The idea that Arab people are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever,” Bush said. “Yet we’ve also seen instability, uncertainty, and the revenge of brutal rulers. The collapse of an old order can unleash resentments and power struggles that a new order is not yet prepared to handle.”

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn told The Daily Caller in a video interview that the federal government is in the “midst of committing murder to our republic” and predicted that the U.S. faces a financial meltdown in 2-5 years.

“I wanted people in this book, in ‘The Debt Bomb’ to be able to see what’s coming,” Coburn said on Capitol Hill, referring to his book. “In 2022, less than 10 years from now, unless we make major changes that everybody’s saying they know has to be made but none of the politicians have the courage to make, the entire federal budget will be made of only three things: interest, Medicare and Social Security, nothing else.”

“It’s very honorable to speak honestly to the American public about what the problems are. It is dishonorable to lie to them about it not being. Talk to any politician up here, they all know Medicare’s in trouble, they’ll say it privately so tell me, when you will speak something privately but not talk about it publicly, what’s that say about your integrity? That you just really want to win an election rather than fix our country.”