And for those of us that have done the homework we have a pretty good idea why Obama won’t do it.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
ObamaCare redefines full time job as 30 hours a week!
That will fix that pesky unemployment number!
This is pathetic.
A little-known section in the Obamacare health reform law defines “full-time” work as averaging only 30 hours per week, a definition that will affect some employers who utilize part-time workers to trim the cost of complying with the Obamacare rule that says businesses with 50 or more workers must provide health insurance or pay a fine.
“The term ‘full-time employee’ means, with respect to any month, an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week,” section 1513 of the law reads. (Scroll down to section 4, paragraph A.)
That section, known as the employer mandate, requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees.
In other words, a business must provide insurance if it has 50 or more employees working an average of just 30 hours per week, which is 10 hours per week fewer than the traditional 40-hour work week.
If an employer has 50 or more “full-time employees” and does not offer health insurance, it must pay a penalty per employee for each month it does not offer coverage.
The obscure provision recently reemerged in regulations issued by the IRS for how employers must account for which workers are full-time and which ones are not.
Under these standards, published in September, employers can choose a “look-back” period of between 3 and 12 months to measure if an employee has worked an average of 30 hours per week.
If an employee has worked 30 hours per week during this time, the person would count as a full-time employee for at least the next six months, regardless of how much they work, thus preventing employers from cutting hours to avoid the mandate.
In other words, an employer calculates the hours an employee works during at least a three-month period, determining if they employee has worked 30 hours or more per week on average.
If the employee meets the 30-hour threshold, they are counted as full-time for at least six months. If the employer has at least 50 such employees, he must provide them with health insurance or pay a fine.
The IRS regulations do not apply to seasonal or temporary workers, only to regular employees.
Obama Lied: White House knew Benghazi was a coordinated terror attack as it happened (video)
The “it was the video” concocted story was a manufactured lie for political reasons that we explained previously HERE.
Emails from the administration are being leaked and it is now clear that members of the Obama Administration and likely members of the intelligence community have turned against Obama and his concocted story. Obama scolded Governor Romney in the debate how he resented having his truthfulness questioned when it comes to national security.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.
The emails, obtained by Reuters from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks.
The brief emails also show how U.S. diplomats described the attack, even as it was still under way, to Washington.
U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Benghazi assault, which President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials ultimately acknowledged was a “terrorist” attack carried out by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or sympathizers.
Administration spokesmen, including White House spokesman Jay Carney, citing an unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film.
While officials did mention the possible involvement of “extremists,” they did not lay blame on any specific militant groups or possible links to al Qaeda or its affiliates until intelligence officials publicly alleged that on September 28.
There were indications that extremists with possible al Qaeda connections were involved, but also evidence that the attacks could have erupted spontaneously, they said, adding that government experts wanted to be cautious about pointing fingers prematurely.
U.S. intelligence officials have emphasized since shortly after the attack that early intelligence reporting about the attack was mixed.
Spokesmen for the White House and State Department had no immediate response to requests for comments on the emails.
MISSIVES FROM LIBYA
The records obtained by Reuters consist of three emails dispatched by the State Department’s Operations Center to multiple government offices, including addresses at the White House, Pentagon, intelligence community and FBI, on the afternoon of September 11.
The first email, timed at 4:05 p.m. Washington time – or 10:05 p.m. Benghazi time, 20-30 minutes after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission allegedly began – carried the subject line “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack” and the notation “SBU”, meaning “Sensitive But Unclassified.”
The text said the State Department’s regional security office had reported that the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was “under attack. Embassy in Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.”
The message continued: “Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four … personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support.”
A second email, headed “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi” and timed 4:54 p.m. Washington time, said that the Embassy in Tripoli had reported that “the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi had stopped and the compound had been cleared.” It said a “response team” was at the site attempting to locate missing personnel.
A third email, also marked SBU and sent at 6:07 p.m. Washington time, carried the subject line: “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.”
The message reported: “Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.”
While some information identifying recipients of this message was redacted from copies of the messages obtained by Reuters, a government source said that one of the addresses to which the message was sent was the White House Situation Room, the president’s secure command post.
Other addressees included intelligence and military units as well as one used by the FBI command center, the source said.
It was not known what other messages were received by agencies in Washington from Libya that day about who might have been behind the attacks.
Intelligence experts caution that initial reports from the scene of any attack or disaster are often inaccurate.
By the morning of September 12, the day after the Benghazi attack, Reuters reported that there were indications that members of both Ansar al-Sharia, a militia based in the Benghazi area, and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate of al Qaeda’s faltering central command, may have been involved in organizing the attacks.
One U.S. intelligence official said that during the first classified briefing about Benghazi given to members of Congress, officials “carefully laid out the full range of sparsely available information, relying on the best analysis available at the time.”
The official added, however, that the initial analysis of the attack that was presented to legislators was mixed.
“Briefers said extremists were involved in attacks that appeared spontaneous, there may have been a variety of motivating factors, and possible links to groups such as (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al-Sharia) were being looked at closely,” the official said.
Related:
Everything you need to know about how Obama lied about the embassy attacks in two minutes (video) – LINK
White House Timeline Video of Lies About Embassy Attacks – LINK
Editor’s Thoughts on the Romney/Obama Foreign Policy Debate – UPDATED
UPDATE – About that Apology Tour…..
Complete transcript fact-check of the debate – LINK
Frank Luntz Reaction From Undecided Voters Immediately After Final Presidential Debate – LINK
Hi all. I live blogged it while I was listening to it on the radio. I will outline my thoughts and clean it up later as I am dead tired.
I had three initial observations.
1- Obama is trying to posture Romney by talking down to him.
2- On some issues such as Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood neither of them is willing to say what needs to be said about the leadership and our strategy there. It is the elephant in the room that they are both dancing around.
3 – Obama’s strategy is smart as a matter of rhetoric: Find every slight inconsistency in every statement Romney has ever made on these issues over the last few years and make a mountain out of it…. thus distracting people from the “its because of the video” lie and other lies coming from this administration (like fast and furious and other issues). Of course as time goes on the situation on the ground changes and thus what Obama’s critics say will change in light of that…. so 100% statement consistency over the course of several years would show foolishness and Romney should have said so.
Romney was smart to ding Obama on skipping Israel on his apology tour. Obama, responds by talking about about what he did much later, not even addressing the apology tour. Of course what he did much later doesn’t help the bad message that Obama sent when he did that as it set an attitude that shaped what has happened in the middle east since. I think that to the uninformed Obama won. Obama’s narrative on the middle east was such utter nonsense and so easily demonstrated so and Romney really failed to capitalize on that. I think that Romney went in with a strategy of being agreeable and safe, but is THAT the kind of leadership we are looking for?
And Obama takes credit for the Iron Dome missile defense shield in Israel when he and his party opposed this technology from minute one?
On Mubarak and Egypt:
Leave him there or side with him? First of all let’s be clear, the people especially women and Christians were better under Mubarak. Muslim Brotherhood is seeking out political enemies and crucifying them, using armored vehicles against Christians etc.
When we worked with Britain and The Vatican to undermine the communists in Eastern Europe we cultivated that resistance over the course of years. We knew who they are and we were ready for the big push when the time came.
But in the so called “Arab Spring” we didn’t know who we are helping and the Muslim Brotherhood played the State Department and the White House like a Stradivarius.
And after it became obvious that we were helping the bad guys who were talking peace and democracy and never meant it this White House was committed and wouldn’t change course…probably for political reasons…or worse.
Obama worked to set up a narrative or vision of his policy in the middle east, of course it was wishful thinking and a total coverup of the evils that are going on there as perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood whom Obama helped bring to power. Romney was weaker on the battle of the narratives. I sorta wish we had Newt tonight because this would have been such a one sided blowout if he was there.
Also, foreign policy debates like this require boldness and the ability to construct/deconstruct a narrative expertly. What if you face a situation like the old Iran/Iraq war when it served global interests to make sure that neither side won that war? Or what if you have the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda vs Assad in Syria and a “bait & bleed” strategy serves interests best? Sometimes there are no good answers and the options are “terrible and “more terrible”.
Mitt had a few good moments, but not enough to warrant a sweeping win:
Obama’s crack “The Cold War is Over” may sound cute, but someone forgot to tell Putin
On a side note – I am watching a video of Sarah Palin’s post debate analysis and she has this thing nailed pretty well. I want to know who is advising her because she has been hitting home-runs for about the last 20 months on this stuff.
My worst fear with Mitt Romney is that he may have failed into the Bill Kristol/State Department false narrative which I wrote about HERE:
There are/were many in the State Department, elite media and some in the Republican Party who have totally bought into the propaganda from the Muslim Brotherhood–that they want peace, free elections, and so forth–when anyone who studies their history going back to WWII knows very well what their agenda is. Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard, as well as some on the famed internet Republican Security Council, fell for the “Arab Spring” false narrative. How quickly we forget history. The Mullah’s in Iran spoke to the Carter Administration about freedom, democracy and social justice; look at what they did as soon as they got into power. The same goes for what happened in Lebanon, and then Gaza when they had elections. Now look at the disaster that is Egypt and Libya, and yet some Republicans continue to say we should help Syrian rebels with arms, which would essentially be handing Syria as well to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda.
Republicans would love to see a genuine democratic, pro-western revolution in the Muslim world as we had in Eastern Europe, but today many forget that it took years of cooperation between Reagan, Thatcher, and the Vatican to cultivate pro-western forces and influences in secret right under the communist’s nose. We were ready to come in with monetary, logistical and other support when those forces made a major push. We knew very well who it was we were supporting, and we had an overall strategic concept in mind. Many Republicans jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon because they bought the pie in the sky narrative from the State Department and they really wanted to believe it. Why? Because the false narrative targeted the freedom loving sensitivities of most Republicans perfectly. In short, they selected tidbits of truth, omitted others, and made a false reality that fit ever so perfectly into an ideological box.
I am concerned because Dan Senor is Mitt Romney’s chief foreign policy adviser and Kristol is one of Senor’s mentors, but that is as far as I can go with my concern’s with Senor because the sins of the mentor do not necessarily fall on the student and I have no idea what Senor is telling Romney. In my opinion, based on what I saw tonight, it is clear that Niall Ferguson has a much more objective and more intelligent view on middle east policy.
Here is a fact check of the debate from Chris Wallace:
..
Obama’s Green Energy ‘Stimulus’ Paid Workers For Playing Games, Watching Movies (video)
This is infuriating but not a surprise. Here is the story of LG Chem, they bosses take the government money, pay themselves, make a donation to the Democrats. And when the money runs out they close the doors.
California official who under-reported unemployment stats is an Obama campaign donor
The games going on are just so…so… Chicago.
That 7.8% number will be revised way up after the election. Read the story at the Daily Caller HERE.
U.S. unemployment fell to 7.8% in September. But that doesn’t mean the other 92.2% of adults are working.
The unemployment rate only measures people who have searched for jobs in the last four weeks, while millions of other out-of-work Americans aren’t included.
Continue reading HERE.
North Carolina Registers Over 583 Democrat Votes Over the Age of 112
Barry Secrest at Examiner:
There are obviously verifiable vote fraud problems in North Carolina.
In 2010 those problems surfaced meaningfully as indicated in the below voter fraud post from an earlier Charlotte Conservative Examiner article:
Perhaps in an effort to promote North Carolina as one of the healthiest States in the Nation, this latest voter twist comes to us from Susan Myrick of the Civitas Institute in North Carolina–not to be confused with Rep. Sue Myrick of NC who is unrelated. In a radio interview with local WBT Anchor Tara Servatious, Susan reports that she has been keeping track of the number of votes in North Carolina of individuals over the age of 110 years and apparently we have quite a few, over 410 of the 110 year olds–to be exact– actually voted via absentee ballot on October the 28th. Yes indeed, now it would appear that good ole NC has the market cornered on the Centenarian vote.
At latest count, Susan has garnered a total Absentee Ballot vote of over 2,660 people over the age of 110. Someone contact the Guiness Book and warm up the Ford, the Fountain of Youth exists and its right here in lovely NC. It’s no wonder people are moving here in droves–maybe the use of tobacco isn’t such a bad thing after all? But, on a more serious note, with all of the irregularities going on all over the place, we can now begin to wonder about a few things.
Apparently those ultra-healthy seniors over 110 have aged and are now astoundingly over 112 years old, and are still able to make it to the polls ahead of time.
According to a post originally from the Silence Dogood political blog report, there were at least 758 individuals over the age of 112 who had either risen from their respective graves, or otherwise, to vote once again for the Democrats in charge, who might apparently have also guaranteed them an ever-lasting vote for life and beyond.
In visiting the political tracking site, we later found the same story in evidence, except the number of centenarian voters had increased measurably to 832 voters over the age of 112. Of these voters, over 70% were slated as Democrats, with a diminutive 25% counted as Republicans. The rest were unaffiliated.
When peering a little more deeply at the numbers we find that an astounding 2,374 people between the ages of 94 and 100 have already voted in the NC election to date. While an even more astounding 832 votes came from those individuals aged 112. However, according to the Guinness book of world records, the oldest living person in the world, at present, lives in Japan and is 114 years old. It would seem obvious that, according to the NC vote registry, this old fellow might be nudged aside in the near future, especially considering the crop of spry 112 year-olds seemingly alive and well in the old North State.
In fact, two of the 112 year aged voters were mail-in ballots from overseas; ostensibly vacationing to escape the now bitterly polarized political contest, and who can blame them?
Foreign Policy Debate Tonight
Voices Without A Vote (video)
Decorated Military Officer Fired for Teaching Accurate Course About Islam
Obama won’t win any wars behaving this way… and neither will his appointed cronies.
In the Spring of this year, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley was condemned by the Joints Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and relieved of teaching duties at Joint Forces Staff College for teaching a course judged to be offensive to Islam.
The course he taught, Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism, was an elective course that Lt. Col. Dooley’s superiors judged as presenting Islam in a negative way. His superiors were persuaded to come to this conclusion after receiving an October 2011 letter in which 57 Muslim organizations claimed to be offended by the course.
The fact that Lt. Col. Dooley is a highly decorated combat veteran with nearly 20 years of service under his belt apparently held little or no sway with the JCS. As a matter of fact, JCS Chairman General Martin Dempsey “personally attacked” Lt. Col. Dooley on C-Span on May 10, 2012, during a Pentagon News Conference.
Yet the craziest part of all this is that “the course content, the guest speakers, and the method of instruction” for the course was all approved by the the Joint Forces Staff College “years ago.”
Former CIA agent Claire M. Lopez commented on the state of things: “All US military Combatant Commands, Services, the National Guard Bureau, and Joint Chiefs are under Dempsey’s Muslim Brotherhood-dictated order to ensure that henceforth, no US military course will ever again teach truth about Islam that the jihadist enemy finds offensive (or just too informative).”
Bruce Springsteen: Runs a fake farm to avoid paying taxes
Posted by Kate Dalzell
Singer and liberal activist Bruce Springsteen is well … a man of the people.
“He stands up for the little guy. A regular blue-collar Joe. A union man. A bona fide working-class hero.
And, when he’s not busy being all that… he’s a tax-dodging liberal hypocrite worth over $200 million who pretends to be a farmer to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on his property taxes that would have otherwise funded the welfare programs he pretends to care about.”
Frank Seabrook:
That’s right. Mr. “Union Man, Blue Collar” Springsteen is a total fraud, as I explain in my brand-new book Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers.Recall that Springsteen actively campaigned for Obama in 2008, hosting free concerts that attracted tens of thousands of people in key battleground states. Springsteen’s song, “The Rising,” became a campaign staple for Obama’s speech venues and culminated in him playing for Obama’s Inauguration. And this time around, the White House plans on using the aging rocker’s new politically-motivated track, “We Take Care of Our Own,” to warm up crowds as the re-election bid kicks into high gear.
~snipBruce Springsteen pays over $138,000 a year in taxes for his three-acre home in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He owns another 200 adjoining acres. But because he has a part-time farmer come and grow a few tomatoes (organic, of course) and has horses, his tax bill on the remaining 200 acres is just $4,639 bucks. Do the math. By being a fake farmer, the working-class zero Springsteen is making a mint by robbing New Jersey of the antipoverty program funds he says they desperately need.
“I think it is unfair to our other property taxpayers that if you are a fake farmer, and that you don’t legitimately farm, that you are getting a property tax break and forcing your neighbor to pick up your tab,” said state senator Jennifer Beck. “That was not the intent of the law. It’s a violation of the public trust.” When Fox 5 New York reporter Barbara Nevins Taylor asked a lawyer for the trust that owns Springsteen’s land to comment on the Boss’s lucrative fake-farming tax breaks, predictably, the lawyer had no comment.
The tax loophole comes from the New Jersey’s Farmland Assessment Act of 1964. Originally the provision was created to help preserve agriculture in New Jersey. To qualify for the tax break, landowners must own at least five acres of land and produce just $500 a year in goods in order to qualify. Anyone who can meet those minimum standards can reduce their farmland tax bills by an astounding 98 percent.
Rick Santelli: Obama “Created 5 Million Jobs” is a lie because he didn’t count the job losses (video)
Rick Santelli – “If I only count my income and none of what I spend I am a rich man….”
Watch people lie about the political debate they never saw (video)
I write a great deal about the desire of people to comply with elite media narratives and the desire to make what you WANT to believe into “reality”. The desire to fit to that narrative or belief is so overwhelming that people will lie at the drop of a hat as we see in this video:
[Note – for more on this subject click HERE.]
And if you think this is staged, aside from this link HERE watch this video:
AWESOME: 13-Year-Old Jenny Gives Report Cards to Obama and Romney (video) – UPDATE: A Liberal Responds (and so does the editor)
I am shocked at how good this is.
A leftist, Mimi Tackaberry, responded, so we included a little fact check of our own. Enjoy.
Dear Jenny,
First let me commend you on your poise and on getting involved in politics at your very young age. If you are like most 13 year olds, your world view and values are formed in the context of your family. If you are intellectually curious your early perspective will likely evolve. A few years ago Jonathan Krohn at age 14 was the darling of Fox News and now 4 years later he’s rethought many of his conservative positions.
[Political Arena Editor Responds:
Indeed John Krohn has moved on some of his positions, but keep in mind that liberal teachers union employees sought out to cram those views at him as well.
With that said, Artur Davis, who spoke for Obama at the 2008 Democrat Convention, spoke at the 2012 convention for Romney. In fact there is a long list of playwrites, Hollywood stars such as Ron Silver, James Woods, Gary Graham, Kelsey Grammer, Stacy Dash and Dennis Miller, and liberal activists such as David Horowitz who have switched to become conservatives]
The recent death of those 4 Americans in Benghazi was horrible indeed. But President Obama has spent almost 4 years fulfilling his campaign promises –to end the war in Iraq and schedule our troops to leave Afghanistan. He’s rallied world support for sanctions against Iran, created good will and all-important cooperation. Most of the civilized world commends his leadership and only Pakistan hopes that Romney wins (I guess they’re still bummed that our President killed Bin Laden right next to their military academy).
[Political Arena Editor Responds:
What nonsense. President Obama watched via our overhead drones in the situation room as our embassy staff was slaughtered and it was Obama that gave the stand down orders to stop CIA and military help. The emails saying so have been leaked by his own intelligence community:
Obama spent four years fulfilling his campaign promises??? Oh really? Here are five pages of broken promises via Factcheck.org:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/rulings/promise-broken/
And here are 13 minutes of broken promises on video:
By the way the Taliban is re-surging in Afghanistan and by advocating leaving you are dooming the women of Afghanistan to a fate worse than death. Also, the Muslim world hates us more now than when Obama took office:
read it.]
Gov. Romney has no foreign policy experience but he’s surrounded himself with many of the same advisers who gave us the Bush war. Not one American life was lost when the people of Libya overthrew the dictator Qaddafi. Over 4000 Americans lost their lives in Bush’s war.
[Political Arena Editor Responds:
Wrong, our embassy staff was slaughtered by the very same people Obama has been arming, namely Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Qadaffi, Mubarak, Asaad, and The King of Jordan are/were all in favor of keeping the peace agreement with Israel. Obama has been arming people who have vowed to kill us in order to help them overthrow those governments and they are in the process of being replaced with Sharia Supremacist governments via the Muslim Brotherhood. The PUBLIC slaughter of political enemies and subjugation of women has already started where they have taken control.
Yes indeed, lives were lost in Iraq, but while it has problems, at least it is a functioning democratic government and not a Muslim Brotherhood one.]
Jenny I’m afraid Bain is not like your dad’s business where he does well if he takes care of his customers. Bain did start some companies, like Staples, but then Romney moved Bain on to a new business model – called leverage buyouts, which means you buy a company with a low down payment, and then the company is saddled with the debt of the balance of the purchase price. Your question should be “how would being good at leverage buyouts make Romney good at being President of the United States?”
[Political Arena Editor Responds:
FACT: Mitt Romney left Bain Capital to run the Olympics in 1999. When the leverage buy outs and such that the Democrats are putting in TV commercials started happening the man in charge of Bain was and is President Obama’s largest campaign money bundler:
Read it.]
Let’s talk about 5 years from now when your rights as a woman could be vastly curtailed. Do you plan to have a career? Romney does not support the legislation signed by Obama for equal pay for women and he supports the Blunt Amendment giving employers the right to withhold contraception from your (future) health plan – for any reason. So dig a deeper. You have a promising future ahead of you, unless…
[Political Arena Editor Responds:
The legislation that Obama signed does not guarantee equal pay for women, rather the bill is carefully designed to hand the trial lawyers lobby a boatload of money via lawsuits that are almost unprovable.
Lets talk about women’s rights. Real rights, you know, Like the First Amendment.
What Obama is trying to do is use the government to FORCE churches and church institutions to pay for not just contraception, but abortions and abortion inducing drugs. This is not only a violation of freedom of religion, but it also obliterates any notion of “Separation of Church and State”.
Also, President Obama threw a film maker in jail illegally and without bond for making a film criticizing Islam and its treatment of women among other things. He also is supporting action in the United Nations to make it a crime to criticize Islam. What about free speech? How will women speak out against bad treatment?
Also about birth control, anyone can buy it at the store for between $4 and $9 a month. Do you really want the government to creep in your bedroom either by way of buying your birth control or forcing someone else to pay for it for you?
Does President Obama support equal rights for women? Perhaps one indicator is that he pays women on his campaign and White House Staff less than men. The same goes for Democrats in Congress, they pay women less:
Obama White House Pays Women 18% Less… and His 2008 Campaign Did too….
Female Democrat Senators Pay Female Staffers Less than Men…. Much Less!
And the Democrats assault on women doesn’t end there. The Obamacare IPAB rationing panel has targeted women’s health care screenings for rationing again, while fully admitting that the result will be more dead women from breast and cervical cancer:
https://politicalarena.org/2012/10/03/obamacare-panel-targeting-womens-health-screenings-again/
In fact, here are some examples of how Democrats treat women:
Watch the videos.]
Obama Administration Sending Guns to Al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood in Syria
This is not the first time the Obama Administration has helped these groups with arms. He helped them take over Egypt and he helped them take over parts of Libya – VIDEO (Megynn Kelley and Marc Thiessen from AEI). The Muslim Brotherhood is the most organized group in Syria at the moment.
As this very writer said March 11th:
The situation is portrayed as a crazed dictator indiscriminately slaughtering his own people who want democracy – and that description is a load nonsense if their ever was one. We were told the exact same thing about Libya and Egypt, and as soon as we helped the Muslim Brotherhood take over the freedom crowd vanished instantly. The Muslim Brotherhood is now murdering Christians in Egypt, murdering black Africans in Libya, imposing Sharia Law and abusing women. The now Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egypt is sabre rattling at Israel
The dictators in the Middle East kept the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Qaeda’s at bay. Mubarak was critical to maintaining the Israeli/Egyptian Peace Treaty and many of the worlds terror groups want to replace the Arab dictators with Sharia inspired regimes.
Now President Obama is arming the Middle East to the gills, including modern M1 battle tanks to Egypt in spite of the fact that the new authorities are engaging in Taliban like behavior such as attacking peaceful Coptic Christians with armored military vehicles.
If our entire policy is designed to undermine Israel’s security it explains why Obama was not interested in helping the Iranian freedom movement.
There has been every indication, as Prof. Niall Ferguson (video) pointed out as the Egyptian protests began in early 2011, that the so called “Arab Spring” is being coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
With all of this information now known so publicly, advocacy of Syrian intervention is not only irrational, it aids our enemies and Israel’s enemies in the middle-east.
Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria
October 15, 2012 6:03 pmBy DAVID E. SANGER / The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.
That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.
“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.
The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.
The assessment of the arms flows comes at a crucial time for Mr. Obama, in the closing weeks of the election campaign with two debates looming that will focus on his foreign policy record. But it also calls into question the Syria strategy laid out by Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger.
In a speech at the Virginia Military Institute last Monday, Mr. Romney said he would ensure that rebel groups “who share our values” would “obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.” That suggests he would approve the transfer of weapons like antiaircraft and antitank systems that are much more potent than any the United States has been willing to put into rebel hands so far, precisely because American officials cannot be certain who will ultimately be using them.
But Mr. Romney stopped short of saying that he would have the United States provide those arms directly, and his aides said he would instead rely on Arab allies to do it. That would leave him, like Mr. Obama, with little direct control over the distribution of the arms.
American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia. The officials, voicing frustration, say there is no central clearinghouse for the shipments, and no effective way of vetting the groups that ultimately receive them.
Those problems were central concerns for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, when he traveled secretly to Turkey last month, officials said.
The C.I.A. has not commented on Mr. Petraeus’s trip, made to a region he knows well from his days as the Army general in charge of Central Command, which is responsible for all American military operations in the Middle East. Officials of countries in the region say that Mr. Petraeus has been deeply involved in trying to steer the supply effort, though American officials dispute that assertion.
One Middle Eastern diplomat who has dealt extensively with the C.I.A. on the issue said that Mr. Petraeus’s goal was to oversee the process of “vetting, and then shaping, an opposition that the U.S. thinks it can work with.” According to American and Arab officials, the C.I.A. has sent officers to Turkey to help direct the aid, but the agency has been hampered by a lack of good intelligence about many rebel figures and factions.
Another Middle Eastern diplomat whose government has supported the Syrian rebels said his country’s political leadership was discouraged by the lack of organization and the ineffectiveness of the disjointed Syrian opposition movement, and had raised its concerns with American officials. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing delicate intelligence issues, said the various rebel groups had failed to assemble a clear military plan, lacked a coherent blueprint for governing Syria afterward if the Assad government fell, and quarreled too often among themselves, undercutting their military and political effectiveness.
“We haven’t seen anyone step up to take a leadership role for what happens after Assad,” the diplomat said. “There’s not much of anything that’s encouraging. We should have lowered our expectations.”
The disorganization is strengthening the hand of Islamic extremist groups in Syria, some with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda, he said: “The longer this goes on, the more likely those groups will gain strength.”
American officials worry that, should Mr. Assad be ousted, Syria could erupt afterward into a new conflict over control of the country, in which the more hard-line Islamic groups would be the best armed. That depends on what happens in the arms bazaar that has been feeding the rebel groups. In several towns along the Turkey-Syria border, rebel commanders can be found seeking weapons and meeting with shadowy intermediaries, in a chaotic atmosphere where the true identities and affiliations of any party can be extremely difficult to ascertain.
Late last month in the Turkish border town of Antakya, at least two men who had recently been in Syria said they had seen Islamist rebels buying weapons in large quantities and then burying them in caches, to be used after the collapse of the Assad government. But it was impossible to verify these accounts, and other rebels derided the reports as wildly implausible.
Moreover, the rebels often adapt their language and appearance in ways they hope will appeal to those distributing weapons. For instance, many rebels have grown the long, scraggly beards favored by hard-line Salafi Muslims after hearing that Qatar was more inclined to give weapons to Islamists.
The Saudis and Qataris are themselves relying on intermediaries — some of them Lebanese — who have struggled to make sense of the complex affiliations of the rebels they deal with.
“We’re trying to improve the process,” said one Arab official involved in the effort to provide small arms to the rebels. “It is a very complex situation in Syria, but we are learning.”
Robert F. Worth and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Mississippi NAACP leader sent to prison for forging absentee ballots
Via the Daily Caller:
While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme.
In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.
Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.
“This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” Judge Webster said.
Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.
In the trial, forensic scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes containing absentee ballots.
UK Newspaper: Obama web site is illegally set up to take foreign donations
So illegal…
Obama campaign DID violate federal election law by allowing foreign donors to funnel in cash via its website
PUBLISHED: 11:20 EST, 21 October 2012
A British citizen has revealed that he was able to donate to Obama’s re-election campaign proving that at least one illegal foreign contribution has been accepted and casting suspicion on where millions of dollars may have come from.
Chris Walker, who lives near London, made two $5 dollar donations to the President’s campaign this month.
When he tried to donate to Mitt Romney’s campaign, the donation was rejected on the grounds that Mr Walker is a foreign citizen.
It is against the law for candidates to accept money from those living outside the U.S. Mr Walker told the New York Post that when he made the donation, he typed in his English address but used Arkansas for his state and ZIP code 12345 – of Schenectady, New York.
It was also revealed that last month the President’s campaign earned $130,867 from donors who did not register a ZIP code and a further $2 million when ZIP codes were only partially filled out.
Romney took $2,450 from donors without a ZIP code and $2,500 from those with incomplete information.
The latest report on foreign influences in American elections by the conservative Government Accountability Institute (GAI) has raised further questions over whether the Obama campaign has violated federal election law by allowing foreign credit card transactions on its website.
In a 109-page report entitled ‘America the Vulnerable: Are Foreign and Fraudulent Online Campaign Contributions Influencing U.S. Elections?, several major security vulnerabilities on the part of the Obama campaign are detailed.
‘As FBI surveillance tapes have previously shown, foreign governments understand and are eager to exploit the weaknesses of American campaigns,’ the report states.
‘This combined with the Internet’s ability to dis-intermediate campaign contributions on a mass scale, as well as outmoded and lax Federal Election Commission rules, make U.S. elections vulnerable to foreign influence.’
Bill Whittle: Why Voting for Mitt Romney is the Only Moral Choice (video)
Maybe, but is he trustworthy?
Obama Administration prevents military from talking to Congress about embassy killings.
This is likely unprecedented. A president has never, so far in my research, prevented the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee in Congress from asking a member of the military direct questions. This is stonewalling.
Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, a California Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, stopped short Saturday of calling President Obama a liar. But he says the administration is keeping the American people in the dark when it comes to the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
McKeon tells Fox News’ “America’s News Headquarters” he doesn’t know why the Obama administration is dodging questions and blocking the efforts of some lawmakers to get answers.
“They ought to just tell everything they know,” says McKeon. “When there is a cover-up, it’s always worse than the incident itself. They ought to just come clean and tell us what happened. Admit that mistakes were made and make corrections for the future because this is just going to be a deeper and bigger hole they’re digging.”
To add more fuel to the fire, a spokesman for McKeon tells Fox News that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta office stepped in and prevented four senior military officers from answering McKeon’s questions concerning security at the consulate, effectively blocking the investigation. McKeon’s spokesman calls this “nearly unprecedented.”
While on Fox, McKeon acknowledged that he has questioned “senior commanders” within the military about the Benghazi terror attacks and says they’re stonewalling.
“Essentially what I wanted to know was had they or anyone in their command warned the State Department of any problem that they had in Libya or had offered any help,” says McKeon.
The congressman went on to say he gave those commanders 24 hours to respond. On Friday, they did saying they would not and could not respond in a timely manner. McKeon says just thinking Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Benghazi without adequate protection “sickens him.”
How stupid do Democrats think women are? (video)
Priceless…..
Altruism and Totalitarianism
[Editor’s Note – With this column we are very excited to welcome a truly wonderful mind in the form of Kate Dalzell to Political Arena. In this column Dalzell takes apart an all to common false narrative, a subject that is on our mind as of late.]
by Kate Dalzell
I have recently heard altruism defined as: a selfless and benevolent service to others and simply the rent we pay for living on this planet. While I am sure Joel Osteen and several other milquetoast pastors would nod their heads in mutual agreement the truth is it is an evil that I’ve personally witnessed creeping it’s way into the church and planting itself deeply into the spiritual lives of most Christians I interact with these days.
The problem is this altruist root of selflessness that lies at the core of all totalitarian systems, past, present, and future is that it is nothing more than a spiritual supplement. It offers outward reflection, a false humility, without the benefit of renewal or change that comes from a transformed life found in Christ. It is the religion of cults, atheists, Marxists, and all other totalitarian forms of worship. Altruism is the moral code at the base of all of these false religions, political systems and economies that have infiltrated not just our nation but, sadly, our church. It views human beings as objects of sacrifice, having no right to exist apart from service to others.
This is a lie from the pit of hell.
The truth is that the healthiest and most thriving nations are those made up of selfish, high regard for self, exceptional individuals that give and serve out of a charitable and humble heart, whereas the most stressed, and sometimes deadly, societies are founded on brutal and oppressive altruist premises. It is creating a disease so profuse in our culture that if not uprooted and destroyed, make no mistake, it will reduce Americans into second class citizens. Not only will blind atheists and evil Marxists be guilty of allowing this but so will the ignorant Christian.
Nathaniel Branden on altruism:
“Instead of the goodwill and mutual respect engendered by recognition of individual rights, altruism as a moral commandment produces only fear and hostility among human beings. It forces them to accept the role of victim or executioner and leaves them no standard of justice, no way to know what they can demand and what they must surrender. In order for human beings to accept self-sacrifice as a moral ideal, they have to remain ignorant of the concept of rational selfishness. Moralists have commonly declared or implied that our basic alternative is to sacrifice others to ourselves (which they call “egoism”) or to sacrifice ourselves to others (“altruism”). This is equivalent to declaring that our basic choice is between being a sadist or a masochist. Just as healthy sex consists of the exchange of pleasure, not pain, so healthy relationships of any kind consist of the exchange of values, not sacrifices.”
We must agree to put this out of our camp now!
NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin 2009 – It’s Money & Power, Not Education (video)
It speaks for itself.
You will never see this picture in the press
This is what happens frequently to Israeli soldiers:
Notice the certainty in the provocation and how secure the provocateur feels because he knows that Tsahal (IDF) will not touch him. Surroun
Filming the scene are journalists and left-wing activists eagerly waiting for the soldier to act, ready to capture any perceived misstep in order to use it to damn the IDF. Powerless but resolute, the soldier stands in the face of this provocation with restraint and dignity.
Wild Bill gets hate mail from a militant Islamist (video)
Priceless.
WOW: Romney Jokes at Al Smith Dinner
You just have to watch..
False Narratives, Group Think, & Ideological Boxes.
Editorial by Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton
People like to believe in the veracity of their own perceptions; literally they want to believe what they believe is in fact true. That has always been a fact of life, and this writer isn’t going to change it. However, what has changed is that our culture and society no longer reinforces practices, ideas and daily rituals that helped to keep that particular problem in check, making Americans better critical thinkers, and gave Americans a special collective wisdom.
Years ago Professor Christopher Lasch penned an article in Harpers titled “The Lost Art of Argument” where he lamented the so called “objective journalism” (which is anything but) model (from Walter Lippmann) as a tool for elites to set agendas and control the conversation on main street. The power of the elite media narrative is difficult to overstate, as it is much like group think. Everyone wants to be included and accepted, and if you stand out against such group narratives some will resent it. Most people do not realize just how easily they are persuaded by manufactured group narratives. Allow me to demonstrate with a few examples of popular group think narratives that many people still believe.
“Gravitas”. For those who are politically aware, and were so before the 2000 election, the word gravitas conjures up an image of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Why? Dr. Thomas Sowell explained it well:
RUSH LIMBAUGH has been having some fun lately, playing back recordings of politicians and media people, who have been repeating the word “gravitas” like parrots, day after day. Before Dick Cheney was announced as Governor George W. Bush’s choice for vice presidential candidate, practically nobody used the word. Now everybody and his brother seems to be using it.
The political spin is that Governor Bush lacks “gravitas” — weight — and that Dick Cheney was picked in an effort to supply what the governor lacks.
In other words, the fact that Bush picked somebody solid for his running mate has been turned into something negative by the spinmeisters. The fact that media liberals echo the very same word, again and again, shows their partisan loyalties — and their lack of originality.
How many people believe that “former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is ignorant”?
Perhaps some of you who are reading this very piece continue to buy into this false narrative. Just so you realize how much you have been effected I will pose the following: did you know that in her infamous interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson ABC had edited out portions of her substantive answers to make her look ignorant? Did you know that ABC did this again in her interview with Barbara Walters. Remember when Charlie Gibson asked her a question about the Bush Doctrine that “Palin got all wrong”? Well, depending on what political historian you talk to there are five or six Bush Doctrines of which Governor Palin and Charlie Gibson each described one accurately. Atlantic Monthly, a left-wing political magazine, went back and did an exhausting review of her time as governor and concluded that she did a great job and pointed out how she was an innovative and competent executive. Odds are that people who buy into the false narrative that Palin is ignorant don’t know any of this.
“Republicans want to gut Social Security.”
The truth is that Reagan (Republican) saved the program with key reforms without decreasing benefits. It was President Clinton (Democrat) who increased the tax on Social Security benefits on the middle class which amounted to a benefit cut. It was George W. Bush (Republican) who tried to get at least a part of Social Security put into individual growth accounts so that Congress couldn’t spend your money (Democrats in Congress stopped him), and it was President Obama (Democrat) who has kept up a Social Security payroll contribution cut that is blowing an even bigger whole in the program. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that.
“Republicans want to get rid of Medicare.”
I regularly encounter uninformed voters who buy into this particular false narrative. It was Democrats, with Obamacare, who gutted $716 billion (over 10 years) from an already in trouble Medicare program without a single Republican vote. It was Republicans who added the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part-D) which is not only popular, but gives seniors a choice of plans. This was accomplished at 40% under budget because the program was designed so well. One current Republican idea is to redesign the other parts of Medicare to work in a way that is similar to Medicare Part-D, so that it too can be more efficient and save money to help rescue the program. Democrats say no. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that (gee I am getting repetitive).
“Democrats want to tax the rich.”
This is perhaps the biggest false narrative of all. The Democratic Party leadership has never been interested in taxing the very rich. They have been “taxing the rich” for 50 years. Is it just a coincidence that they just happened to keep missing the target? President Obama gave the speech at Google, which paid 2.4% federal tax on 3.1 billion in income. In that speech he trashed the Chamber of Commerce for fighting against raising the tax on most small businesses which actually employ people from 35.5% to 39.9% . In the 2008 elections President Obama railed against Wall Street, but not only did he take more money from Wall Street and “the big banks” and such, but as if to add insult, their executives became the who’s who of those running his administration (LINK – LINK). Keep in mind that CNN once said Obama attacks private equity at 6am and is fundraising with private equity at 6pm. Wall Street and the big banks made more under three years of Obama than they did under eight years of Bush. His Treasury Secretary says that taxes on small businesses must rise so that government doesn’t shrink, and Obama’s new health care taxes target you, not just the rich. All of the stimulus and spending and so forth all in the name of the poor sounded nice, but look who got rich. Odds are that people who buy into this narrative know none of this (really there is a point to this).
Such false narratives are not merely myths that people fall into, they become emotionally invested in them, to the point where some people will say anything to support them:
MORE – Watch people lie about the political debate they never saw – VIDEO
False narratives rely on three crutches:
1 – The first is the selective promotion of key facts, combined with the suppression and/or omission of key fundamental truths. The use of a key fact that is partially true, when inserted into the false narrative, creates clear disconnects from the fundamental truths of the situation or event.
Politicians are masters of this. The second Obama/Romney debate is a classic example. In the debate section on the brutal slaughter of Americans at our consulate in Libya, the administration knowingly put out a false narrative that our people were killed by a flash mob upset by a video on YouTube. The White House created this deception because it was caught in a “Mission Accomplished” moment from having created a false narrative which stated that because Usama bin Laden was out of the picture, Al-Qaeda was beaten (The truth is that Al-Qaeda’s umbrella organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been actively helped by this Administration) . When caught, the White House tried to rewrite history, and focused on a key assertion–that Obama used the word terror in one speech describing the attack, as if that somehow dismantles two weeks of willing deception.
2 – Delivery of the few selected facts delivered with an attitude (an emotional trigger) that creates the false narrative.
A good example of this comes from a piece I read in the Washington Post some years ago. The article stated there had been documented misuses of the Patriot Act in order to wrongly access the private information of innocent citizens, and the Attorney General refused to state whether he would press criminal charges. This sounds quite ominous doesn’t it? Thirteen paragraphs later we learn that the error rate had been about 1.5%, comprised of honest mistakes, and all were caught by the internal Justice Department Inspector General whose job it is to find and correct errors. Consider the entirety of the pertinent facts, remove the emotionally charged delivery, and the message is quite different from the headline, would you not agree? Most newspaper editors know that the majority of readers never get passed the fifth paragraph in a newspaper piece. This type of deception is known as attitude change propaganda. Attitude change propaganda is not produced by accident. [Note – today reported abuses of the Patriot Act are higher. We are aware of this, so please do not blow up our inbox – Editor]
3 – Repetition. Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie”.
This is why truth itself can become an enemy to some, and why those telling the truth are often disregarded, maligned and ridiculed. Once again we can look to the Washington Post for an example. Remember the Valerie Plame story? Remember when the White House outed a CIA Agent because her husband, Joe Wilson, had written a letter saying that President Bush made false claims in a speech? Well there was one problem; this entire story was based on a small stack of lies, and virtually none of the narrative that was repeated over and over in the Washington Post and the elite media was true, and the Post well knew it. This very writer wrote a 40 page article on the Washington Posts’ coverage of this story. Day after day, on page one, the Post repeated Joe Wilson’s lies and perpetuated the false narrative, while at times even on the very same day on the editorial page or buried in the paper, they would tell the truth about what was going on and explain how the evidence clearly showed that Wilson lied about nearly every aspect of his story.
I have been pretty tough on the left in this article because deception and propaganda is fully endorsed by many leftist/progressive thinkers such as Mao, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Goebbels, nearly all writers from the Frankfurt School, and Saul Alinsky. The progressive leadership in this country uses lies as a tool for calculated aggression.
This is not to say that the American right is free of the problems of false narratives, group think, and ideological boxes either.
There are/were many in the State Department, elite media and some in the Republican Party who have totally bought into the propaganda from the Muslim Brotherhood–that they want peace, free elections, and so forth–when anyone who studies their history going back to WWII knows very well what their agenda is. Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard, as well as some on the famed internet Republican Security Council, fell for the “Arab Spring” false narrative. How quickly we forget history. The Mullah’s in Iran spoke to the Carter Administration about freedom, democracy and social justice; look at what they did as soon as they got into power. The same goes for what happened in Lebanon, and then Gaza when they had elections. Now look at the disaster that is Egypt and Libya, and yet some Republicans continue to say we should help Syrian rebels with arms, which would essentially be handing Syria as well to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda.
Republicans would love to see a genuine democratic, pro-western revolution in the Muslim world as we had in Eastern Europe, but today many forget that it took years of cooperation between Reagan, Thatcher, and the Vatican to cultivate pro-western forces and influences in secret right under the communist’s nose. We were ready to come in with monetary, logistical and other support when those forces made a major push. We knew very well who it was we were supporting, and we had an overall strategic concept in mind. Many Republicans jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon because they bought the pie in the sky narrative from the State Department and they really wanted to believe it. Why? Because the false narrative targeted the freedom loving sensitivities of most Republicans perfectly. In short, they selected tidbits of truth, omitted others, and made a false reality that fit ever so perfectly into an ideological box.
Some so called “neo-cons” (by their critics) of the GOP may like to shape reality into something neat and tidy, but they aren’t the only ones. Many Ron Paul supporters are just as guilty of this. They argue that the U.S. should adopt some form of neo-isolationism. While it is clear that for the sake of finances we need to have a foreign policy that is less flamboyant, trade still needs to be protected with a serious Navy; the diplomatic credibility of the United States must still be backed up with military capability. If you want to see an economic collapse like the world has never witnessed, park the US Navy at home and it won’t take long. Many Ron Paul supporters say that “neo-cons” are “chicken-hawks” who have never served in the armed forces, and who would never send their sons to die “in some Middle East hell hole” (their words not mine). While it is true that some who may be labled as neo-cons have never served, the truth is that many who agree with at least some of that policy have served and have family who are serving.
Another example of taking reality and manipulating it is the often heard claim from Ron Paul supporters that militant Islamists attack us because of our foreign policy, and the argument that if it wasn’t for “neo-cons” we would not get attacked. When I run into people who say this I ask them, “Militant Islamists attack and kill Hindus in India. What is it about Hindu foreign policy that makes Islamists do this? How about the Buddhists who lived in Afghanistan? In Afghanistan the Islamists ran the Buddhists out and blew up their monasteries and artifacts. What about the Islamists in Southern Thailand who like to kill school teachers who dare to educate little girls? When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt with the aid of the Obama Administration, what is it that Coptic Christians did to cause the Muslim Brotherhood to attack them with armored vehicles? This is usually about that time where I start getting called all sorts of colorful names. The most experienced Middle-Eastern war correspondent says that those who believe the “its because of our policy” argument are fooling themselves.
We are experiencing a wholesale breakdown of critical thinking in this country and most of the learned academics I know have confided this to me directly. I have noticed this myself in my studies. How did this happen? Professor Lasch was rather fond of the old fashioned “partisan press” that we used to have before the “Lippmann Objective Model”. In those days each town had two or more newspapers, each with its own partisan or philosophical viewpoint. Each day citizens would read them all and discuss the arguments of the day at the local barber shop, soda shop, or even at work. There is no better exercise for creating an informed, thinking electorate. Today we live in an electronic society where people can just push a button and anything that puts them out of their comfort zone vanishes instantly.
We have an elite media that too often behaves as state-run apparatchiks, and we have a public university system that states openly that “A debate is something we are highly disinterested in. This is not something our university would want on our campus”. As a result we have educated people, and even professors, who strive for ideological conformity. We have a major university whose administrators reportedly “forged an agreement to conceal sexual attacks” against children, and we have a Climategate scandal in which professors from multiple universities were caught in their own emails actively conspiring to pervert the peer review process and smear anyone who would challenge the global warming alarmist orthodoxy.
American society has become a place where people get beyond offended when told that they are wrong. We have teachers who too often cannot understand the difference between being presented an inconvenient truth that scuttles their narrative and a personal attack. We have people who refuse to take the argument of another seriously, so any truths another may have will not be accepted or even considered. Truth has become the new hate speech.
This must stop.
The sting in any rebuke is the truth – Ben Franklin.
[Editor’s Note – For a short video followup on this story click HERE – you won’t regret it.]
White House Timeline Video of Lies About Embassy Attacks
CIA: We Said Benghazi Was a Militant Attack From Day One – LINK
This is just unacceptable.
Karl Rove’s group pounces with this video:
Fox News Report Timeline:
Libya Timeline – Look at the Flag:
UPDATE – The Timeline October 24:
Glenn Beck: They’re lying
Romney Campaign Gloves Come Off: Obama Lies
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton – No one wants to have to call out their president as a liar, even if one didn’t vote for him, but after last night’s performance filled with instance after instance where he doubled down on untruths that anyone could unravel in minutes using an internet search engine or looking up facts at government web sites, President Obama left no room for continued benefit of a doubt. If anyone doubted Rudy Giuliani and Phyllis Schlafley when they called out Barack Obama as a Saul Alinsky inspired Chicago style politician all remaining doubts should have evaporated after last night. Not so long ago under President Clinton we were uncomfortable with lies even about sex, now we see lies laid out as a tool for calculated aggression and no one in the elite media bats an eye.
UPDATE – White House Libya lies timeline – LINK
While most elite media outlets did not bother to take the time to fact check most of Obama’s statements in the debate, they did check a few and what we have below from the Romney Campaign is just the tip of the iceberg of the lies that were told last night.
President Obama’s Five Worst Lies & Exaggerations From The Second Presidential Debate
NUMBER 1: President Obama Falsely Claimed He Immediately Characterized The Attacks In Benghazi As Terrorism:
President Obama: “The Day After The Attack, Governor, I Stood In The Rose Garden, And I Told The American People And The World That We Are Going To Find Out Exactly What Happened, That This Was An Act Of Terror.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker: “What Did Obama Say In The Rose Garden A Day After The Attack In Libya? … He Did Not Say ‘Terrorism’…” “What did Obama say in the Rose Garden a day after the attack in Libya? ‘No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation,’ he said. But he did not say ‘terrorism’—and it took the administration days to concede that that it an ‘act of terrorism’ that appears unrelated to initial reports of anger at a video that defamed the prophet Muhammad.” (Glenn Kessler, “Fact Check: Libya Attack,” The Washington Post, 10/16/12)
Politico’s Mike Allen, On President Obama’s Rose Garden Remarks: “He Makes A Reference To 9/11 And He Says, Very Generally, We Will Not Let Acts Of Terror Go Unpunished.” ALLEN: “There’s going to be a bunch of fact checks, but just to do a fact check here. … And I’m looking at the transcript of that White House event the day after and he started by referring to them as selfless acts, which is casted very differently than the sort of very planned action that we now have. Later toward the end, he makes a reference to 9/11 and he says, very generally, we will not let acts of terror go unpunished. So that’s going to be an arguable point.” (Presidential Debate Wrap-Up, Politico Live, 10/16/12)
CNN’s Candy Crowley Admitted Mitt Romney “Was Right In The Main.” CROWLEY: “And I think actually, because right after that, I did turn around and say but you are totally correct that they spent two weeks telling us that this was about a tape and that there was this riot outside the Benghazi consulate, which there wasn’t. So he was right in the main, I just think he picked the wrong word. They’re going to parse and we all know what the definition of ‘is’ is, but, you know, in the end, I think John’s probably right.” (CNN’s “Debate Night In America,” 10/16/12)
NUMBER 2: President Obama Repeated His False Attack About A $5 Trillion Tax Cut:
President Obama: “It Costs About $5 Trillion.” OBAMA: “Look, the cost of lowering rates for everybody across the board 20 percent, along with what he also wants to do in terms of eliminating the estate tax, along what he wants to do in terms of corporates changes in the tax code — it costs about $5 trillion.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter: “Okay, Stipulated, It Won’t Be Near $5 Trillion…” BURNETT: “Right. So you’re saying if you lower them by 20% you get a $5 trillion tab, right?” CUTTER: “It’s a $5 trillion tab.” BURNETT: “But then when you close deductions it’s not going to be anywhere near $5 trillion. That’s our analysis.” CUTTER: “Well, okay, stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion, but it’s also not going to be the sum of $5 trillion in the loopholes that he’s going to close.” (CNN, 10/4/12)
FactCheck.org: “Obama Accused Romney Of Proposing A $5 Trillion Tax Cut. Not True.” “Obama accused Romney of proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. Not true. Romney proposes to offset his rate cuts and promises he won’t add to the deficit.” (Brooks Jackson, “Dubious Denver Debate Declarations.” FactCheck.org, 10/4/12)
ABC’s Jon Karl, On President Obama’s $5 Trillion Claim: “Mostly Fiction.” KARL: “Okay, so, the big thing there, and he came back to it several times, is Governor Romney has a $5 trillion tax cut plan. I rate that mostly fiction.” (ABC’s “Your Voice: 2012Presidential Debates,” 10/3/12)
The Associated Press: “Obama’s Claim That Romney Wants To Cut Taxes By $5 Trillion Doesn’t Add Up.” “Obama’s claim that Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion doesn’t add up. Presumably, Obama was talking about the effect of Romney’s tax plan over 10 years, which is common in Washington. But Obama’s math doesn’t take into account Romney’s entire plan.” (Calvin Woodward, “FACT CHECK: Presidential Debate Missteps,” The Associated Press, 10/3/12)
NUMBER 3: President Obama Claimed Mitt Romney’s Private Sector Experience Involved Outsourcing – A Claim Repeatedly Debunked By Fact Checkers:
President Obama: “As I Already Indicated, In The Private Sector, Governor Romney’s Company Invested In What Were Called Pioneers Of Outsourcing.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
FactCheck.org: “We Found No Evidence To Support The Claim That Romney — While He Was Still Running Bain Capital — Shipped American Jobs Overseas.” “But after reviewing numerous corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, contemporary news accounts, company histories and press releases, and the evidence offered by both the Obama and Romney campaigns, we found no evidence to support the claim that Romney — while he was still running Bain Capital — shipped American jobs overseas.” (Robert Farley and Eugene Kiely, “Obama’s ‘Outsourcer’ Overreach,” FactCheck.org, 6/29/12)
The Washington Post, On An Obama Outsourcing Ad: “On Just About Every Level, This Ad Is Misleading, Unfair And Untrue…” “The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of ‘corporate raider’ to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.” (Glenn Kessler, “4 Pinocchios For Obama’s Newest Anti-Romney Ad,” The Washington Post, 6/21/12)
The Washington Post: “Obama Never Mentions Another Washington Post Article, One That Detailed How He Has Not Been Able To Fulfill Many Of His Campaign Promises In 2008 To Stem The Outflow Of American Jobs…” (Glenn Kessler, “Fact Check: Pioneers Of Outsourcing,” The Washington Post, 10/16/12)
NUMBER 4: President Obama Claimed He Cut Taxes For The Middle Class – But Didn’t Mention His Policies Are Threatening To Hike Taxes By $4,000:
President Obama: “My Philosophy On Taxes Has Been Simple, And That Is, I Want To Give Middle-Class Families, And Folks Who Are Striving To Get In The Middle Class, Some Relief…” OBAMA: “My philosophy on taxes has been simple, and that is, I want to give middle-class families, and folks who are striving to get in the middle class, some relief, because they have been hit hard over the last decade, over the last 15, over the last 20 years.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
President Obama Has Already Raised Taxes On Nearly 5 Million Middle-Class Americans In Obamacare. (“Payments Of Penalties For Being Uninsured Under The Affordable Care Act,” Congressional Budget Office, 9/12)
- An Analysis By The Congressional Budget Office Found That “Nearly 80 Percent Of Those Who’ll Face” Obamacare’s Mandate Tax Are In The Middle Class. “Nonetheless, in his first campaign for the White House, Obama pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000. And the budget office analysis found that nearly 80 percent of those who’ll face the penalty would be making up to or less than five times the federal poverty level.” (“Tax Penalty To Hit Nearly 6M Uninsured People,” The Associated Press, 9/19/12)
American Enterprise Institute Has Calculated That The Annual Cost Of President Obama’s Current And Looming Debt Burden Amounts To $4,000 Per Year In Higher Taxes On The Middle Class. “In a new paper, AEI’s Matt Jensen looks at the real annual cost of servicing the debt for households at various levels of income — including a potentially higher tax burden. As the table below illustrates, a household making between $100,000 and $200,000 a year could find its tax liability higher by roughly $2,400 every year. Over ten years, that works out to $24,000. And when you add in the debt already accrued the past four years under President Obama (the second table), that’s another $1,600 a year. So now we are now talking about $4,000 a year, $40,000 over ten years.” (James Pethokoukis, “Study: Obama’s Big Budget Deficits Could Mean A $4,000 A Year Middle-Class Tax Hike,” American Enterprise Institute, 10/2/12)
NUMBER 5: President Obama Falsely Claimed He Has Increased Energy Production On Public Lands:
President Obama: “We Have Increased Oil Production To The Highest Levels In 16 Years. Natural Gas Production Is The Highest It Has Been In Decades.” OBAMA: “The most important thing we can do is to make sure we control our own energy. Here is what I have done since I was president, we have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years. Natural gas production is the highest it has been in decades.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
- President Obama: “We’ve Opened Up Public Lands. We’re Actually Drilling More On Public Lands Than In The Previous Administration.” ROMNEY: “As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production is down 9 percent. Why? Because the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands and in federal waters.” OBAMA: “Candy, there’s no doubt that world demand’s gone up. But our production is going up, and we’re using oil more efficiently. And very little of what Governor Romney just said is true. We’ve opened up public lands. We’re actually drilling more on public lands than in the previous administration.” (President Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, Hempstead, NY, 10/16/12)
The Washington Post: “Contrary To President Obama’s Assertions,” Oil Production “On Public Land Is Down 14 Percent And Production Of Gas On Public Land Is Down 9 Percent.” “Is Gov. Mitt Romney telling the truth when he says oil and gas production is down on public land? Contrary to President Obama’s assertions, Romney’s telling the truth when he says, ‘Production of oil on public land is down 14 percent and production of gas on public land is down 9 percent.’ That’s because energy production on federal lands is down compared to 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration.” (Juliet Eilperin, “The Truth About Oil And Gas Production On Public Land,” The Washington Post, 10/16/12)
ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “It Is True That Those Drilling Leases And Permits Are Down Under President Obama.” KARL: “But on this issue of oil and gas drilling, Governor Romney said that oil and gas drilling is down by 50% on public lands. That is not exactly true but it’s not far off. In fact, we looked at the numbers and oil drilling permits on public land dropped by 37% in the first two years of the Obama administration, 42% in terms of leases for natural gas. So the numbers weren’t exactly right, but it is true that those drilling leases and permits are down under President Obama.” (ABC’s Presidential Debate Coverage, 10/16/12)
Editor – So many lies and misrepresentations in the debate we couldn’t keep up with them…
UPDATE – Romney was right and Candy Crawley and Obama were both wrong, Obama did NOT call it a terror attack in his Rose Garden statement. Obama’s full statement is in the first comment below. Here is CNN almost sorda kinda apologizing:
Romney got the better of Obama performance wise for about the first hour, but Obama made a comeback in the last 30 minutes or so. Obama was playing a nasty class warfare card that just wasn’t sincere and didn’t fly.
Romney reversed his position on Comprehensive Immigration Reform (remember how he demagogued and misrepresented Rick Perry on this issue?) which I predicted he would do long ago and his answer on Syria was almost a joke.
Obama engaged in a systematic, Alinsky inspired and very deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, especially when it comes to energy policy, healthcare and taxes. Of course Romney was correct on the general idea on Libya but fell into a trap on semantics instead of focusing on how the administration lied about this issue for two weeks and was as caught as caught could be. Obama’s campaign already admitted on national television that the $5 billion dollar tax cut talking point Obama used in the debate really isn’t accurate, but again they used it tonight.
The lies (and misrepresentations with a tiny kernel of truth) were so voluminous that it would take this writer all night long to catalog them and I have to be out the door in seven hours….so no point by point fact check will be posted tonight. If any reader has a specific question I will be happy to answer it. The documentation to demonstrate President Obama’s flamboyant dishonesty is cataloged on this very web site.
Obama Pays Women Less – via yours truly in my old college blog in 2008:
and
and just now in The Daily Caller:
The most powerful moment in the debate was Romney going large in his description of the last four years:
Below is my live blog:
Chuck Norton – I have to say that Romney’s college job answer is a total home run. He looks in charge, calm, confident and ready.
Chuck Norton – Obama looks good, he sounds assertive, but wow the misrepresentation starts already. The fact checkers have dinged Obama on his “Mitt Wants Detroit to go bankrupt” line before.
Chuck Norton – Taxing the wealthy doesn’t give anyone a job, it chases wealth away when they try to avoid the tax.
Chuck Norton – Romney, including those who dropped out of the workforce the U3 would be 10.7%. Romney explains bankruptcy reorganization.
Chuck Norton – Jobs are created and lost all the time, but adding 5 million jobs when 10 million are what is needed to break even with people losing jobs and coming into the workforce puts the number into perspective.
Chuck Norton – They doubled fuel standards on cars… and now we see these tiny FIAT’s on the road and the emissions devices have raised car prices to out of the world. Chevy Volts cost over $100,000 more than GM is selling them for.
Chuck Norton – Romney explains the difference between private land energy production and production on federal land which Obama has been trying to bring to a screeching halt.
Chuck Norton – Wow, who looks presidential folks. I expected Obama to come back hard but this is so one sided it is unbelievable. (But Obama made a comeback in this area near the end).
Chuck Norton – We are drilling more now because of oil permits approved under Bush that are now coming online that Obama couldn’t stop…. but look at what Obama did stop.
Oil imports are down because the economy has slowed overall demand.
Chuck Norton – The oil leases were yanked because when they looked at what it would take to get through the EPA to actually drill and concluded it would not be profitable so they paid for the lease and concluded with today’s EPA it would be a money loser or too much of a risk to actually try and drill.
Chuck Norton – Wow, if the fact checkers are honest Obama is going to get hammered.
Chuck Norton – Food prices up, gas prices up, insurance prices up family income down $4,000
Chuck Norton – Romney, NO TAX on your savings. Wow that is smart, that is very smart and it encourages middle and low income people to get involved in saving and investing which would be great to help recapitalize the country.
Chuck Norton – Obama want to continue the Bush tax cuts for small businesses??? Since when?
Chuck Norton – Obama’s 97% of small businesses number includes small businesses on paper and ones that do not have more than 1 employee. The vast majority of small businesses that actually employ ten or more people are going to get whacked by the $200k number.
Chuck Norton Wow, Obama’s campaign already admitted that the $5 trillion dollar number he just spouted wasn’t true. Folks this is surreal.
Chuck Norton – Fact checkers are going to cream Obama’s earlier coal and oil production claims. Coal workers are blasting Obama already – Miners Fight Back Against Obama TV Ad: “Absolute Lies”
Chuck Norton – Of course the numbers adds up – Romney
Chuck Norton – Well Obama, first of all your campaign pays women less and so do Democrats in congress when it comes to their staffs….. big opportunity here for Romney.
Chuck Norton – Romney is getting upset and needs to calm don a bit.
Chuck Norton – Obama says that it is ROMNEY who wants people in Washington deciding women’s health decisions.. WHAT –
ObamaCare Panel Targeting Women’s Health Screenings…Again – LINKChuck Norton – Great answer on how Romney differentiates himself from GW Bush.
Chuck Norton – Romney pounds on the broken promises….
Chuck Norton – I have to admit, the BS Obama is putting out sounds good…. …. wow I really hope the fact checkers pay close attention.
Chuck Norton – Romney just reversed himself on “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” that he blasted Rick Perry on in the primary.
Chuck Norton – Libya question – Obama pivots to general national security and the specific question asked to him was not answered.
Chuck Norton – Romney hits Obama for skipping the intelligence briefing the next day and going to a Las Vegas fund raiser.
Chuck Norton – Second Amendment question – Who will tackle it and who will dance.
Chuck Norton – Romney hits Obama on Fast & Furious – about time.
Chuck Norton – Romney was not bold enough on the second amendment follow up
Chuck Norton – Romney: Canada tax rate 15% America 35% where would you rather start a business. Regulations up four times.
Chuck Norton- Obama’s advanced manufacturing answer was a good one. He doesn’t mean any of this because his regulatory war on business is a huge job killer.
Chuck Norton- Wow it was surreal; the misrepresentation of facts has been stunning. While both sides had factual deficits Obama was so dishonest it was amazing.
Mocking Obama Ads Taking Toll
Saul Alinsky, the greatest smear artist of the modern age, said that nothing beats ridicule when it comes to political slander, but in truth, informed ridicule is far more effective. When you can ridicule someone and the mockery is based in truths that are at least directionally accurate, it can be enough to turn any brand into a sour note for many people.
Political Arena 