HOW HOPE AND CHANGE GAVE WAY TO SPYING ON THE PRESS

May 22nd, 2013

THE DAILY BEAST

How Hope and Change Gave Way to Spying

on the Press

by Kirsten Powers May 21, 2013

Much of the Fourth Estate shrugged when the Obama administration attacked Fox News, writes Kirsten Powers. But now it’s coming for them, too.

First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay, we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?

130520-doj-james-rosen-tease — James Rosen (Fox News, via Media Matters)

Turns out it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video.

Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.

It’s instructive to go back to the dawn of Hope and Change. It was 2009, and the new administration decided it was appropriate to use the prestige of the White House to viciously attack a news organization—Fox News—and the journalists who work there. Remember, President Obama had barely been in office and had enjoyed the most laudatory press of any new president in modern history. Yet even one outlet that allowed dissent or criticism of the president was one too many. This should have been a red flag to everyone, regardless of what they thought of Fox News. The math was simple: if the administration would abuse its power to try and intimidate one media outlet, what made anyone think they weren’t next?

President Obama went after Fox News in this 2009 interview with CNBC.

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Big Government, Conservatism, Corruption/Crime, Democrats, Liberalism, Media, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Left, Transparency | No Comments »

WHAT HURTS THE MOST ABOUT BENGHAZI

May 21st, 2013

AMERICAN T HINKER

May 20, 2013

What Hurts the Most about Benghazi

By Karin McQuillan The author served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, is a retired psychotherapist and a regular contributor to American Thinker.

I can’t look my old liberal friends in the eye after Benghazi. Most partisan disagreements are forgivable, and I try hard not to lose dear friends over politics. Benghazi is different. Benghazi isn’t political for me. Benghazi is about Americans fighting jihadis for their lives and being abandoned to die by politicians. It is about Obama and Clinton calculating what the headlines would look like if they tried to save them or if they did nothing. They chose nothing, and they almost got away with it.

David Gelernter points out on Powerlineblog.com that,

It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate-but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today…?

So how do I look my friends in the eye?

This is the question that haunts me. Do Democrats – not the party leaders, not mainstream journalists whose job depends on Democratic Party loyalty – would ordinary, real people, all those regular Democrat voters – would they care if they did pay attention? That is the heart of my curiosity. Because I care so viscerally about Americans serving our country being betrayed for political gain. There’s something truly awful about Obama and Hillary sacrificing men’s lives because attempting to protect them would be inconvenient to his election campaign, to her political ambition.

Surely ordinary Democrats understand that underlings don’t decide to withhold military or emergency assistance to 34 Americans under attack from jihadis on 9/11?

I’d like to understand. Do Democrat voters truly think these actions by a President and Secretary of State are not important? I know we are different on many questions of war and peace and diplomacy. But this is a small, human story. A handful of men, attacked by Islamists, fighting for their lives, abandoned for election politics. We don’t do that in America and pretend it’s okay, do we? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arab Winter, Benghazi Terrorist Attack, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Military, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Corruption, Radical Islam, Technology | No Comments »

THE ARAB COLLAPSE – RALPH PETERS

May 21st, 2013

The Arab collapse

By RALPH PETERS

Last Updated: 11:32 PM, May 19, 2013

Posted: 10:47 PM, May 19, 2013

The Arab Spring has unleashed the Arab Collapse. Everybody still standing in the region is picking the flesh of the helpless. The Islamist cancer proved more virulent than Arabs themselves expected, while dying regimes behave with unrestrained ruthlessness.

And our diplomats still think everyone can be cajoled into harmony.

We’re witnessing a titanic event, the crack-up of a long-tottering civilization. Arab societies grew so corrupt and stagnant that violent upheaval became inevitable. That’s what we’re seeing in Syria and Iraq — two names, one struggle — and will find elsewhere tomorrow.

We can’t stop it, we can’t fix it, and we don’t understand it. But we can stay out of it.

When the US is in the Middle East, the Arabs want us out. When we’re out, they want us in. But our purported Arab (and Turkish) allies consistently agree that Uncle Sam should pay the party bill, while they take home all the presents.

Yes, Syria’s humanitarian crisis is appalling. And no, I don’t like to see innocents dying or suffering. But the calls from the region for American action are nakedly cynical.

Turkey has the largest military in NATO after our own, but cries “helpless” crocodile tears over Syrian refugees — while dreaming of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire upon their ruined lives. Our Saudi “friends” spent decades building the most-sophisticated military arsenal in the Middle East, apart from Israel. Now the Saudis wring their hands over Syria’s misery — but won’t intervene directly to stop the killing.

The Saudi position is always “You and him fight!” As long ago as Desert Storm, Saudis joked about renting the American army and our bumpkin gullibility. (Try to find one US officer who’s worked with the Saudis and doesn’t hate their guts. . .) Now they want Washington to spend our blood and treasure to open the mosques of Damascus to their Wahhabi cult. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arab Winter, England, Europe, Foreign Policy, France, History, International Affairs, Iran, Iraq - Surge, Middle East, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey | No Comments »

HOW I LEARNED ABOUT THE CHICAGO WAY

May 20th, 2013

www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0519-20130519,0,1395725.column

chicagotribune.com

IRS scandal a reminder of how I learned about The Chicago Way

John Kass

May 19, 2013

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: This was Chicago. And for a business owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and somebody from government could destroy you.

The Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration — the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target tea party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan politics.

But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It’s bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.

It’s even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.

It is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and whether we can keep it.

And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.

Because if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the federal leviathan, there’s one place you start:

You start in Chicago.

My father and uncle ran a small business, a supermarket on the South Side. Uncle George worked in the front, my father in the butcher shop in the back. My uncle had been a teacher. My father had plowed his fields with a mule.

They were immigrants who came here from Greece with nothing in their pockets but a determination to work, and the belief that here, in America, no other power could roll in with tanks and put their boots on the necks of their children.

My father and uncle, like the rest of the family, valued education and books and free political debate. And so at large extended family Sundays, we’d all sit around the dinner table, many uncles and aunts and cousins, young and old.

There were conservatives and socialists, Roosevelt Democrats and Reagan Republicans and a few bewildered, equivocal moderates in between, everyone squabbling, laughing, telling stories. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

GRADUATES, YOUR AMBITION IS THE PROBLEM

May 19th, 2013

May 8, 2013

Roger Pilon: Graduates, Your Ambition Is

the Problem

Obama’s commencement speech at Ohio State on Sunday would have perplexed the Founders.

By ROGER PILON

Mr. Pilon is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies.

Civic education in America took a hit on Sunday when President Obama, giving the commencement address at The Ohio State University, chose citizenship as his theme. The country’s Founders trusted citizens with “awesome authority,” he told the assembled graduates. Really?

Actually, the Founders distrusted us, at least in our collective capacity. That’s why they wrote a Constitution that set clear limits on what we, as citizens, could do through government..

Mr. Obama seems never to appreciate that essential point about the American political order. As with his countless speeches that lead ultimately to an expression of the president’s belief in the unbounded power of government to do good, he began in Columbus with an insight that we can all pretty much embrace, at least in the abstract. Citizenship, Mr. Obama said, is “the idea at the heart of our founding—that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities—to ourselves, to one another, and to future generations.”

Well enough. But then he took that insight to lengths the Founders would never have imagined. Reading “citizenship” as standing for the many ways we can selflessly “serve our country,” the president said that “sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time—one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition.” And “we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share, as one American family.”

Not for nothing did he invoke the family, that elemental social unit in which we truly are responsible to one another and to future generations—by law, by custom, and, ideally, in our hearts. But only metaphorically is America a family, its members bound by tendrils of intimacy and affection. Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Big Business, Economy, Education, Obama | No Comments »

OBAMA’S UNITED NATIONS BACKDOOR TO GUN CONTROL

May 19th, 2013

April 15, 2013

Obama’s United Nations Backdoor to Gun Control

Luckily, the Constitution gives the Senate exclusive power to ratify, or block, the Arms Trade Treaty.

By JOHN BOLTON AND JOHN YOO

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a scholar at AEI

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: But the new treaty also demands domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” The treaty’s Article 5 requires nations to “establish and maintain a national control system,” including a “national control list.” Article 10 requires signatories “to regulate brokering” of conventional arms. The treaty offers no guarantee for individual rights, but instead only declares it is “mindful” of the “legitimate trade and lawful ownership” of arms for”recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities.” Not a word about the right to possess guns for a broader individual right of self-defense.

The attempt to advance gun control through the Arms Trade Treaty might surprise average Americans, but not liberals, who have been long frustrated by the Constitution’s limits on government. Gun-control statutes, like any others, have to survive both the House and the Senate, then win presidential approval. It is far easier to advance an agenda through treaties, unwritten international law and even “norms” delivered by an amorphous “international community.”

Even before his most ambitious gun-control proposals were falling by the wayside, President Obama was turning for help to the United Nations. On April 2, the United States led 154 nations to approve the Arms Trade Treaty in the U.N. General Assembly. While much of the treaty governs the international sale of conventional weapons, its regulation of small arms would provide American gun-control advocates with a new tool for restricting rights. Yet because the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate give its advice and consent to any treaty, Second Amendment supporters still have a political route to stop the administration.

Associated Press

General Assembly building at the United Nations.

Like many international schemes, this treaty has seemingly benign motives. It seeks to “eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and to prevent their diversion to the illicit market,” where they are used in civil wars and human-rights disasters. The treaty calls for rigorous export controls on heavy conventional weapons, such as tanks, missiles, artillery, helicopters and warships.

Yet, as with many utopian devices, the treaty fails the test of enforcement. Some of the world’s largest arms traffickers either voted against the agreement or abstained. The U.S., quite rightly, already has the world’s most serious export controls in place, while nations such as North Korea, Syria, Iran, Russia and China will continue to traffic in arms with abandon. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Big Government, Government Regulation, Gun Control, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, One World Government, U.N. | No Comments »

CIA WOMEN WHO HUNTED BIN LADEN

May 19th, 2013

CIA women who hunted bin Laden in the spotlight; TV documentary reveals inside story
By Rowan Scarborough-

The Washington Times

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Follow @roscarborough

A sisterhood of female CIA analysts who became somewhat obsessed with al Qaeda.

The look at those who hunted Osama bin Laden begins with the sisterhood — a collection of female CIA analysts who became somewhat obsessed with al Qaeda and its leader.
They now are talking on camera for the HBO documentary “Manhunt,” which debuted Wednesday night, two years after the terrorist mastermind was killed and weeks after another jihadist attack on America at the Boston Marathon.

The film, which HBO is showing throughout May, is not about the raid that killed bin Laden but the inside story of the CIA’s bin Laden hunters — their frustrations, guilt, joy and, for one, a violent death.

“The night of the raid, I just had this gut feeling that there was a deeper, darker, richer story other than just the story of the raid itself,” said Greg Barker, a journalist and the director of “Manhunt.” “It’s about an intelligence story that spoke to the decisions made in secret inside our government that led us to Abbottabad.”

Appearing on camera are Susan Hasler, who edited the daily intelligence brief to the president; Cindy Storer, who tracked bin Laden after the CIA opened a special off-site base; Nada Bakos, who ended up focusing on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the most ruthless al Qaeda killer in Iraq; and Jennifer Matthews, who appears hauntingly only in photographs.

“Manhunt” is stark, devoid of voice-over narration or final judgment. Viewers who want condemnation of the CIA for not stopping the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. or for conducting “enhanced interrogations” of senior al Qaeda members will not find it here.

“The real story inside the CIA, the long struggle against al Qaeda, wasn’t really appreciated, not just by the general public but within the government itself,” Mr. Barker said. “I felt it was a largely untold story.”

Al Qaeda was first thought to be a financing arm run by a young Saudi named bin Laden. But after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the CIA realized that al Qaeda was much more — and at war with the U.S.

“All of a sudden it just hit me that this was a bureaucracy,” Ms. Storer said.

“Manhunt” follows some of the reporting of author Peter Bergen, who taped an interview with bin Laden in a cave in 1997. A crew member speaks of bin Laden’s “dead fish” handshake. Bin Laden declares war on the U.S., and his henchmen fly planes into buildings four years later. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Intelligence, International Affairs, Radical Islam, Terrorism, Women's Issues | No Comments »

VIDEO – PENNSYLVANIA REPRESENTATIVE KELLY QUESTIONS IRS HEADS

May 18th, 2013

Posted in Big Government, Congress, IRS, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Videos | No Comments »

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS STRIKES AGAIN !

May 16th, 2013

Klein: Obamacare’s empress strikes again

May 15, 2013 |

Philip Klein

Senior Editorial Writer

The Washington Examiner

Popular in Opinion

According to the Washington Post, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law.”

In 2010, shortly after President Obama’s health care legislation was signed into law, I dubbed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the “Empress of Obamacare” for the vast new powers she inherited. Reading through the text of the law, I counted more than 2,500 references to the secretary of HHS, of which more than 700 referred to instances in which she “shall” do something and more than 200 cases in which she “may” take regulatory action.

Back then, it was scary enough that any individual would have so many arbitrary powers — from determining what type of insurance every American must purchase to deciding which insurers could sell policies on new government-run exchanges at what price. But in the intervening three years, it’s become even more alarming, because Sebelius has demonstrated a continued pattern of intimidation and abuse of her office.

With a nation digesting news that the IRS targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny and that the Department of Justice obtained phone records of Associated Press journalists, the past week has brought plenty of reminders about the nature of government power.

In the midst of these stories, the Washington Post reported that Sebelius “has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Big Business, Big Government, Healthcare, Medical/Drugs, Medicare/Medicaid, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Seniors | No Comments »

CAIR USES RADICALS TO FUNDRAISE

May 16th, 2013

Published on #1 News Site on the Threat of Radical Islam (http://www.clarionproject.org)

CAIR Books Radicals for Fundraising

Banquets

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is using Islamist radicals to raise money throughout the country, according to a Clarion Project review of their fundraising banquets. CAIR calls itself “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group,” but has been labeled a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity by the federal government and attacks the integrity of its moderate Muslim rivals.

The Cincinatti and Columbus, OH chapters of CAIR turned to Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a cleric with indisputable credentials as a radical Islamist, for their fundraisers. He has been recorded saying “America is the most wicked government on the face of the planet Earth” and “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”

In 1995, Wahhaj was named as a possible co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Commenting afterwards in a sermon, Wahhaj said, “I’m not frightened by no list, by no government! I thank Allah. I’m honored that they thought enough of me to put me on a list.”

The Chicago chapter of CAIR had some fundraising help from keynote speaker Zaid Shakir, Safaa Zarzour and Kifah Mustafa.

Shakir’s radicalism has been documented in detail by the Clarion Project. This includes preaching that Hezbollah’s bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon was not a terrorist attack, justifying attacks on U.S. soldiers and expressing a hope to see America governed by Sharia law. Safaa Zarzour has served as the Secretary-General of the Islamic Society of North America, another unindicted co-conspirator labeled as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity.

Kifah Mustapha is designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation. He is listed among “individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” The Palestine Committee was set up by the Brotherhood to support Hamas in the U.S. Mustapha’s mosque has extensive links to the Brotherhood and he sang in a band that performed pro-Hamas songs. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arab Winter, Muslim Brotherhood, National Defense, Radical Islam, Terrorism | No Comments »