Today gun control bills failed on a vote of 54 to 46 with 60 votes needed to pass. Once again those who pioneered the vision of a super majority for certain votes in the Senate have shown their wisdom.
Why did the bills fail in a bipartisan vote? In a nutshell, they were just bad bills.
The Feinstein bill was drafted years ago and is targeted squarely at innocent citizens and not criminals. Of course Senator Feinstein had made it clear that disarming citizens was her intent. No one was surprised that her bill failed.
The Manchin-Toomey bill had many flaws. The most politically damaging was that it was drafted on Senator Manchin’s boat in secret. The American people are weary of ginormous bills that do not go through the regular hearings and mark-up process. Such a lack of transparency is inexcusable in a representative republic. After the Obamacare debacle, the American people were not willing to trust another bill drafted in such a way.
Manchin-Toomey had language that lead to data-mining of gun owners. The ACLU opposed the bill on privacy grounds and the language put into the bill to prevent the information collected to make a back door gun registry lacked teeth and did not deserve to be taken seriously. Some evidence suggests that the Obama Administration is already illegally using data-mining methods to make a secret gun owner registry:
Missouri Democrat political appointees illegally hand over all CCW information of citizens in the state to the Social Security Administration and the ATF and lied about it until caught – LINK
Manchin-Toomey was overly complex making technical compliance by civilians difficult:
In short, bills that are a bureaucratic nightmare for innocent citizens get lawmakers tossed out of office.
If the Democratic Leadership in the Senate and in the Administration weren’t so driven to decrease the power and stature of the National Rifle Association the American people could have gotten a common sense bill that is worthy of support, but as is too often the case the recent school shooting created a “crisis” that was used to try to push a political agenda rather than a common sense one.
The NRA is powerful because it has millions upon millions of members and because the NRA stays on the side of the law and our history. The NRA reached out to the Obama Administration and the Senate leadership to craft a bill that would tighten up the current background check system and remedy the lack of enforcement of those laws, but the Democrats simply were not interested.
President Obama’s angry speech after the vote was yet another empty display of political histrionics that is all too common in today’s neo-orwellian political world. Some of the reaction on Twitter was as follows:
The Tyranny of Exquisitely Apt Adjectives. – Jonah Goldberg
Laws are supposed to exist for the benefit, protection & security of our citizens–not to help those who violate them. – Laura Ingraham
Obama’s concern #4thechildren is touching. Where is that concern 4thekids under Kermit Gosnell’s care? – Yours Truly
Obama is carrying on as if he is the only one who cares #4thechildren. Really does anyone fall for such bombastic rhetoric any more? – Yours Truly
In watching this video you see almost every long debunked far left Democrat fallacy in the book, which he presents to students as fact.
Spreading his kind of racial animus is a tactic right out of the Frankfurt School of Marxism (communism). The goal, according to Frankfurt School teachings, is to spread cultural marxism via conflict theory. Pit people against each other via any difference that can be exploited; white vs black, rich vs poor, management vs labor, men vs women, urban vs suburban etc – in order to keep them fighting while the Marxists build an all powerful leviathan state in the name of “bringing people together”.
A wise man once said, “Only a fool fights in a burning house”. The left keeps people fighting while they loot the burning house.
What is seen in this video is not as unusual to see in class as one might think. When I sat in class I didn’t let teachers get away with it. I helped publish a student newspaper and made it very clear that what is said in class is game for publication. That helped professors to behave themselves, at least while I was watching.
A professor at the University of Southern California (USC) appears to have used a fall semester 2012 political science class to deliver sustained and angered attacks on Republicans, who he characterized as old, white, racist, and “losers.”
In a 15 min. video secretly captured by USC student Tyler Talgo, political science Professor Darry Sragow also appears to endorse the illegal suppression of Republican votes.
“You lose their information on the election in the mail,” he suggested when a student asked him how to keep Republicans from voting. “I mean there is lots of ways to do it [SIC].”
A teaching assistant (TA), who also appeared to work for the university, then seemed to suggest Black Panthers could be placed at polling stations to intimidate Republican voters.
Rather than rebuking the TA, Sragow appeared to confirm the suggestion.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You can do that.”
Neither a spokesperson for USC, or professor Sragow, responded to multiple requests from Campus Reform seeking comment.
While endorsing illegal techniques Sragow also accused the GOP of suppressing Democratic votes by supporting laws requiring voter I.D.
“Republicans are trying to prevent people of color and people of lower income from voting by requiring voter I.D.” he said.
The left has a long history of trotting out victims; those who will gladly use the victim card as a device to put politics over morality and truth in order to push an agenda most good people would otherwise never accept.
After observing how the far left politicized 9/11 this writer decided that he would never be intimidated into silence again by such underhanded tactics.
What politicization you ask? There are many examples, but the one that stands above the rest are the “four 9/11 widows” who claimed to speak for all 9/11 victims. These political operatives, often called the Jersey Girls, behaved as celebrities while engaging in the most histrionic demagoguery against President Bush. I remember one of them saying (paraphrasing):
It was President Bush’s fault that so many died on 9/11 because when we were under attack he was reading to school children. That’s where he was on the morning of 9/11.
These four women, opposed very vocally and often ridiculously, every action President Bush took to protect the nation and when called to back up their statements they would attack you for daring to be so insensitive to their victim-hood, as if these four political hacks were infallible.
The whole point of “the victim card” is to use the grief to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding. After the Jersey Girls wore out “their 15 minutes” with their antics Pulizer Prize winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz undressed the Jersey Girls in her famous piece in the Wall Street Journal.
A prominent Marxist once made the point clearly:
Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice. We repudiate all morality which proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas which are outside the class conception. In our opinion, morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class war.
And this brings us to former Member of Congress Gabby Giffords who had this to say in a recent op-ed piece she wrote:
What they will do is create one fair system for all gun buyers, instead of the giant loophole we have now. Right now, we have one system where responsible gun owners take a background check — my husband, Mark, took one just last month, and it took 5 minutes and 36 seconds. I remember waiting a lot longer than that for the subway to take me to my office when I lived in New York City! And then we have a second system for those who don’t want to take a background check. Those people — criminals, or people suffering from mental illness, like the young man who shot me — can buy as many guns as they want on the Internet or at a gun show, no questions asked.
That doesn’t make sense. We know how to fix it — by establishing a universal background check system. And yet some of our elected officials are not listening. Some even say this legislation shouldn’t get a vote in the United States Congress.
Giffords clearly states that the young man who shot her, Jarrod Loughner, did not go through a back ground check. That is not true. Loughner most certainly did pass a back ground check and she well knows it, as it has been widely reported.
Giffords is lying and pointing this out is critically important for several reasons. Everyone who buys firearm from an exhibitor at a gun show goes through a back ground check. Private sales between collectors at gun shows who are not licensed dealers are rare. Instances of private collectors selling guns to genuine criminals are so rare that it is not able to be statistically measured reliably.
The first elephant in the room that Giffords is lying about and helping to paint a false picture of to help conceal is this – what she is calling a “universal back-ground check” is in reality a civilian gun registration scheme. A way to know what honest civilians has what guns, so that the database can be used to data-mine those people for political purposes, up to and including eventual confiscation. Such people tend to be the political enemies of far left Democrats. See ATF Seeks ‘Massive’ Database of Gun Owner’s Personal Info: ‘Assets, Relatives, Associates and More’.
One newspaper printed such a list in New York solely for the purpose of smearing gun owners, violating their privacy and endangering them. Quite simply, there is no reason to believe that such data will not be abused. The Patriot Act has strong provisions against the abuse of the tools it granted government, but we have all seen what has happened in its application.
The second elephant in the room that Giffords is concealing is just why Jarrod Loughner was able to pass the back ground check and buy the handgun that he used.
The case of Jarrod Loughner is especially egregious as he had multiple contacts with university police and the sheriff’s department. The police reports show that they knew Loughner was dangerously mentally ill. Arizona has the law in place to have people forcibly evaluated and all police and/or the sheriff had to do was dial a 1-800 number to get it done. The sheriff’s department did not do so because Loughner’s mother is a supervisor in the county parks department. That same sheriff, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, fellow Democrat and friend of Gabby Giffords, publicly blamed Rush Limbaughand Sarah Palin for the shooting.
If Sheriff Dupnik had simply done his job and used the tools the law gave him, Loughner would have been entered in to the national instant check system and would have failed his back ground check. He would also have had a real chance to gettreatment for his severe mental incapacity.
If Giffords is genuinely concerned about the quality of back ground checks, where is her critique of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who is as responsible for her terrible injuries as anyone? Where is her critique of the Obama Administration who is failing to enforce the back ground check system we have now? It stopped 70,000 ineligible people from getting guns, over 15,000 of which were felons trying to trick the system, and guess how many the Obama Administration prosecuted for trying to get a gun – 44.
Instead, Giffords is a willing participant in what is nothing more than a political attack on 80 million innocent gun owners, most of whom oppose what President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership is doing. Giffords can be sure that the vast majority of those 80 million gun owners, Americans, including this very writer, prayed for her speedy recovery again and again.
Today some of the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims were taken to Capital Hill on the taxpayers dollar to lobby members of Congress to pass this registration scheme. Parents of victims who were not fooled and do not support the gun registration scheme were not invited to speak. Are their dead children somehow less precious? Why are they denied the same opportunity to speak to Congress?
UPDATE – Missouri Democrat political appointees illegally hand over all CCW information of citizens in the state to the Social Security Administration and the ATF and lied about it until caught – LINK.
The left says that they do not want to take away guns from citizens. Fine, if you don’t want to take them than you don’t need to know what I have.
The left has always opposed putting mental health records in the current instant background check system called NICS (a system that the NRA pioneered and the left opposed).
The shooters mother was trying to get her son committed against his will and the political left stopped it from happening.
In the case of James Holmes and Jarrod Loughner, they had contacts with police and the police knew they were dangerously mentally ill and they refused to call it in. All of the laws in the world are useless when the police fail to utilize them.
[Editor’s Note: In the case of Jarrod Loughner who committed the Gabby Giffords shooting, Loughner had multiple contacts with university police and the sheriff’s department. The police reports show that they knew Loughner was dangerously mentally ill. Arizona has the law in place to have people forcibly evaluated. All they had to do was dial a 1-800 number to get it done. The sheriff’s department did not do so because Loughner’s mother is a supervisor in the county parks department. That same sheriff is the one who came out to blame Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin for the shooting.]
Speaking of background checks, How about the Obama Administration enforce the back ground check system we have now. It stopped 70,000 ineligible people from getting guns, over 15,000 of which were felons trying to trick the system, and guess how many the Obama Administration prosecuted for trying to get a gun – 44.
Obama lets 15,000 felons WALK and then says he needs to restrict you and me? Give me a break.
The simple truth is this, Joe crack head with a .25 or an untreated paranoid schizophrenic with a stolen gun is not a threat to a leviathan state, good people with the ability to defend their freedom with effective means are.
The IRS estimates that the cheapest Obamacare approved health plan available in 2016 (to avoid the penalty) will cost $20,000.
In bold face below is the administration’s response to this study and what they say is just plain dishonest. Why?
The Obama Administration is trying to confuse people on cost vs price. A small percentage of Americans will have their skyrocketing health insurance premiums partially subsidized by the government, but while that may bring down the price of the premium, the actual cost of the premiums and the rising cost of the claims due to the taxes and regulations still skyrockets.
In this case price does not equal cost. For example: If your son goes to the store to buy a Hot Wheels car that costs $3.00 and your son only has $2.00, if you give him the extra dollar to pay for it, the cost of the toy car is still $3.00.
The idea of the subsidy making insurance affordable is also misleading because those who will be able to qualify to get help paying their premiums, will still not be able to afford their portion of the insurance premium because the cost of the insurance will be so high – subsidized or not.
This very writer’s employer subsidized health insurance premium went from about $30.00 a month to $267.00 and I make too much money to qualify for a subsidy. The poor simply cannot afford to pay it.
The other misleading statement from the Obama Administration is that some people can go on the state insurance exchange and get the state exchange to pay for part of their insurance premium. Setting aside the cost does not equal price fact we explained above, many states are not participating in the exchange. Why? Because after the first three years of Obamacare the states have to pay the subsidized portion of the rising premiums themselves which state after state has made very clear will bankrupt them (assuming that the poor would have the money to sign up and pay for their part of the estimated $20,000 per year premium).
Medical claims costs — the biggest driver of health insurance premiums — will jump an average 32 percent for Americans’ individual policies under President Obama’s overhaul, according to a study by the nation’s leading group of financial risk analysts.
The report could turn into a big headache for the Obama administration at a time when many parts of the country remain skeptical about the Affordable Care Act. The estimates were recently released by the Society of Actuaries to its members.
While some states will see medical claims costs per person decline, the report concluded the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers.
The disparities are striking. By 2017, the estimated increase would be 62 percent for California, about 80 percent for Ohio, more than 20 percent for Florida and 67 percent for Maryland. Much of the reason for the higher claims costs is that sicker people are expected to join the pool, the report said.
The report did not make similar estimates for employer plans, the mainstay for workers and their families. That’s because the primary impact of Obama’s law is on people who don’t have coverage through their jobs.
The administration questions the design of the study, saying it focused only on one piece of the puzzle and ignored cost relief strategies in the law such as tax credits to help people afford premiums and special payments to insurers who attract an outsize share of the sick. The study also doesn’t take into account the potential price-cutting effect of competition in new state insurance markets that will go live on Oct. 1, administration officials said.
“It’s misleading to look at only some of the provisions of the law because, taken together, the law will reduce costs,” said Health and Human Services spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt.
But a prominent national expert, recently retired Medicare chief actuary Rick Foster, said the report does “a credible job” of estimating potential enrollment and costs under the law, “without trying to tilt the answers in any particular direction.”
[Editor’s Note – This post is about the propaganda technique described, we are not interested in having a “gay marriage” thread and any comments trying to make it so may be deleted at the Editor’s discretion.]
The left uses the tactic seen in this video endlessly. They try to redefine and/or justify something based on a rare exception and not the pattern, the ideal or the principle. Such as, 80 million gun owners should have their guns taken away because of the actions of a few untreated schizophrenics.
How about a 60,000 page tax code to allow the government to pick winners and losers in the economy, enabling massive corruption and job killing regulations, all because “a few people are too rich”?
In the case of the video below, marriage has no ideal and cannot be about procreation or a contract to raise children well because an elderly couple who marries is unlikely to have children.
Truth is in fact a long series of sub-truths that create a narrative or “paint an accurate picture”. When many of those sub-truths are omitted the crumbs of truth that are left are manipulated to paint the desired false picture. When your child throws a ball in the house and knocks over a lamp, breaking it, and the child tells you that the lamp fell over – sure the lamp did fall over, but he is still lying by omission and deception. This is the type of lie President Obama and the the elite media use constantly to manipulate the public. Consequently, anyone who engages in such a dishonest tactic has torn up the “civility card”.
I ask you, why are two sisters who group up and decide to live together not entitled to inheritance rights and such the same as married people? So married couples and perhaps lesbians should get this but not sisters? This is not an argument for gay marriage, it is an argument for fixing the tax law, abolishing estate taxes altogether because they are so unfair, and a simple tax code that works for people no matter if they are married, straight, gay, or even just sisters.
The tax code argument for gay marriage is an argument about a crappy tax code, not for gay marriage. I say keep our eye on the ball, the tax code is a behemoth disaster and a tool for the corrupt. Toss it out and replace it.
The ideology is Marxism disguised as racism and/or “multi-culturalism”.
The nonsense exposed in this video is crammed down student and teacher’s throats at almost very public school and university, and if you think it isn’t being done at your local public school, you are wrong.
What is seen in this video is exactly the cultural Marxism taught by the Frankfurt School of Marxism (communism)….and, in the case of Wisconsin, they used money that was earmarked for special needs children to pay for it.
Senator McCain said that members of his own party that are concerned about “Drone Strike” policy are “wacko birds” while insisting that no innocent Americans are going to be killed with drones.
The problem is that innocent Americans have already been killed, namely the 16 year old AMERICAN son of a terror suspect. The Obama Administration flippantly said “the kid chose the wrong father” when critiqued. President Obama asserted that he has the power to lock up Americans indefinitely or even kill us, his administration has even made cracks about the “kill list“.
Senator Rand Paul “I will speak until I can speak no more”
When questioned about some of these extra constitutional powers they said, “trust us” because they would give people on such target lists “administrative due process” which is something that the Obama Administration made up out of this air and essentially means that even when it comes to Americans not engaged in combat, but are merely viewed as a terror threat, the Administration can act as judge, jury and executioner.
Keep in mind that all of what we just told you are facts that are not in dispute.
This made some civil libertarians in both parties nervous for good cause. So members of the House and Senate started asking questions about how the Administration sees the limits of this power and in every case the Obama Administration would use lawyerly rhetorical slight of hand to avoid answering simple questions about the limits of such a policy.
Over and over Senators such as Rand Paul would ask simple questions, so would Senator Ted Cruz, only to get the run around. After weeks of rhetorical gymnastics and Senator Rand Paul’s epic filibuster the Obama Administration, suffering public humiliation on the issue, finally answered a straight question with a straight answer.
Why can we not just “trust them”?
Keep in mind that the Obama Administration willingly and knowingly sent guns to Mexican Drug Cartels in an effort to blame the subsequent loss of life (hundreds killed including an American border agent) with those guns on American gun owners and use the subsequent bloodshed as an excuse to attack the 2nd Amendment. The administration was outed by their own federal agents.
This is the same President and his administration that have been caught in lie after lie after lie in their cover up of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi. President Obama still refuses to let Congress have any access to the survivors of the attack.
While Rand Paul was having his epic filibuster on the Senate floor with the help of Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Ut.), John Barrasso (Wyo.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), John Cornyn (Tex.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), John Thune (S.D.), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.). Sens.Ted Cruz (Tex.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Tim Scott (S.C.) made their first speaking appearances on the Senate floor. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also voiced their support.
Senator Mark Kirk, made his first appearance on the Senate floor after having a stroke, he did not speak but he brought Rand Paul an apple and a thermos full of of tea (the same refreshment that Jimmy Stewart used in his famous film about a Senate filibuster).
From the House Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) Justin Amash (Mich.), Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Doug LaMalfa (Calif.), Garland “Andy” Barr (Ky.), Trey Radel (Fla.), Michael Burgess (Tex.), Jim Bridenstine (Okla.), Raul R. Labrador (Idaho), Keith Rothfus (Pa.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Bill Huizenga (Mich.), Richard Hudson (N.C.) and David Schweikert (Ariz.) all came over to the Senate floor to show their support.
While Senator Rand Paul was engaging in his epic filibuster to fight for your rights under the Constitution, John McCain was having dinner with President Obama. The problem is not that Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Justin Amash are “wacko birds”, the problem is that John McCain doesn’t get Barack Obama.
So let me get this straight. When a police officer pulls over a car with possible illegal aliens in it he cannot ask certain questions because liberals say it’s racism. But liberals want gun owners to be registered, fingerprinted and data-based up and down, as well as having our names and addresses printed in the paper.
Who is preferred and who is treated as the non-citizen?
So let me get this straight. When a policeman pulls over a car with possible illegal aliens in it, he cannot ask certain questions because liberals say it’s racism. But liberals want gun owners to be registered, fingerprinted, and data-based up and down, as well as having our names and addresses printed in the paper.
Who is preferred and who is treated as the non-citizen?
And junk science it is. This “study” (see below) is filled with very bogus cliché in the book. This “study” , like all too many writings from radicalized academics, is filled with opinion presented as fact, including but not limited too: small government activists are racists, leftists are “future oriented” modern and “progressive” while conservatives are backwards and “in the past”.
The left is future oriented? As if centralized government control of society and the economy is somehow a new concept? On the contrary that idea is as old as the idea of government itself. The vast majority of man throughout history has lived under such rule.
The idea that rights come from God and cannot be usurped by government, government should be limited by rules and separation of powers, and where the minority is protected from the whims of the majority by law are new concepts and the United States was the first country in the history of the world to be founded upon those ideas; so if anything it is American conservatism that is modern, and those who favor a leviathan state, whatever the spin used to sell it, the dinosaur form of government.
The “study” also says that the left values separation of powers. Anyone skilled in politics is already laughing at this one. It is the Democratic Leader in the Senate who is asking President Obama to violate separation of powers by legislating via executive order and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling illegally. It is the left that ignores the limits placed in Article I, Section 8, as well as the 9th and 10th Amendments as well as the 5th Amendment clause about not taking property without just compensation and that is just for starters.
This is far from the first time an “academic study” ended up being nothing more than a vehicle for politically motivated slander. The IU School of Journalism published this study comparing Bill O’Reilly to the Nazi’s using laughable “fast and loose” terms and tactics. These attacks from radicalized academia are used to justify the kind of hate that we saw when far left groups attacked a charity that helps rape victims for the terrible crime of letting Bill O’Reilly raise money for them.
The report issued this week by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., is titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.”
The center — part of the institution where men and women are molded into Army officers — posted the report Tuesday. It lumps limited government activists with three movements it identifies as “a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement.”
The West Point center typically focuses reports on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists attempting to gain power in Asia, the Middle East and Africa through violence.
But its latest study turns inward and paints a broad brush of people it considers “far right.”
It says anti-federalists “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.”
The report also draws a link between the mainstream conservative movement and the violent “far right,” and describes liberals as “future oriented” and conservatives as living in the past.
“While liberal worldviews are future- or progressive -oriented, conservative perspectives are more past-oriented, and in general, are interested in preserving the status quo.” the report says. “The far right represents a more extreme version of conservatism, as its political vision is usually justified by the aspiration to restore or preserve values and practices that are part of the idealized historical heritage of the nation or ethnic community.”
The report adds: “While far-right groups’ ideology is designed to exclude minorities and foreigners, the liberal-democratic system is designed to emphasize civil rights, minority rights and the balance of power.”
The report says there were 350 “attacks initiated by far-right groups/individuals” in 2011.
Details about what makes an attack a “far right” action are not clear in the report, which was written by Arie Perliger, who directs the center’s terrorism studies and teaches social sciences at West Point.
A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.
“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”
As we lectured about Why Republicans Lost in the last election, conservatives need to engage the culture war to reinforce the ideals the country was founded upon. There are so many “low information voters” who vote on the basis of who looks the best on TV, who tells the best joke or “who looks cooler” that giving up on the culture war is to never win another election again. The left will do anything to make traditionalists and conservatives look like jerks while portraying leftists with the morals of an ally cat such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards as the paragons of virtue.
For those of you who look at the title and have a knee jerk reaction “this is just conspiracy stuff” we assure you that we are the farthest thing from the Alex Jones types. With that said we would remind readers that people are prosecuted in court for conspiracy to do all sorts of illegal things every day, and in the case of white collar corruption working together with politicians the conspiracies to avoid paying taxes or enrich donors with taxpayer dollars are elaborate and often go on for years before being discovered.
Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov participated in a documentary on how the Soviets targeted Hollywood, non-profits and education to undermine American culture. Civil rights groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Alliance Defense Fund are inundated with cases of universities and public schools that have progressive secular leftists administrators who actively seek out to persecute and fire or remove from school teachers and students who refuse to tote the far left ideological line. This very writer survived multiple attempts at persecution when attending Indiana University.
If you have even the slightest doubt as to just how big this problem is we encourage you to follow this link on our Academic Misconduct category and look through at least a couple of pages listing just a few of these incidents to get the idea of what you have been missing.
Here is a link to the editor’s old college blog with eight short videos documenting how the campus administrations actively conspired to grossly violate the civil rights of both students and teachers. In the video below at the Missouri State University a far left teacher ordered a Christian student to have a homosexual experience and write about it – and the persecution didn’t stop there – the academic department and the university administration actively persecuted her and dug in their heals defending their action until it went to federal court.
So what does all this have to do with the Father of the Year?
Bill Clinton was chosen by the Fathers Day Council to be the Father of the Year. Hmm what would poor Monica Lewinsky’s father think about that, or Juanita Broaddricks, or Elizabeth ward Gracen’s, Dolly Kyle Browning’s, Paul Jones’s, Kathleen Willey’s, and the rest of the fathers of the women Bill Clinton abused, assaulted and sexually harassed?
Smelling a rat I pulled up the list of who has won this Father of the Year award, for which they issue several per year, and you guessed it, for the most part it is a who’s who of leftist luminaries and members of Democrat presidential administrations.
The list includes, in 2007 Senator John Edwards, who as the time was fathering a love child with his mistress while his sweet wife Elizabeth was dying of cancer.
Other far left luminaries include NBC’s activist leftist Sunday morning talk host David Gregory, ABC’s version of the same in George Stephanopoulos, far left former Congressman Ron Klein, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill after he wrote a largely discredited Bush bashing book, Mark Shriver of the Kennedy clan, Hulk Hogan (who just made a sex tape with his best friend’s wife – way to go Dad! But I am sure he made a big donation). CNN’s Larry King, Mayor Bloomberg, Frank Rich (friend of Bill Clinton and the largest tax cheat in history who was pardoned by Clinton), Wolf Blitzer, Bobby Kennedy, NBC’s Brian Williams, former Democrat Senator Chuck Robb (who was having an affair with Tai Collins) and… well I think you are starting to get the picture.
The last two conservatives to get on of these awards were Donald Trump in 2005 (who was working for NBC and wasn’t politically active before Obama) and General Norman Schwarzkopf in 1991 who had just won the Gulf War and wasn’t politically active until the following year.
The last conservative political figures who were handed the award who weren’t otherwise mega-celebs outside of politics were conservative political writer Fred Barnes in 1994 (they had to pick someone because of the Republican revolution in 94) and Dan Quayle in 1989.
The elite media does a lousy job reporting the civil rights violations that happen almost every day in our public schools. Civil rights organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Alliance Defense Fund, the Rutherford Institute, the Student Press Law Center, and more have so many complaints of abuse that they have have no hope of acting upon them all.
We report on a few of the most outrageous cases here, and we spend a lot of time on this issue, but in truth we barely scratch the surface of the problem, as the problem is just that that big.
Bureaucrats, and unfortunately that includes some school administrators seem to have the ability to make the most outrageous behavior sound reasonable. Even now the school principal insists that the school was within its rights (to stick their hands in a boys underwear, not tell the parents, and take the 4th Amendment and toss it out the window) to conduct the strip search. I suspect that the courts are going to give the school a rude awakening. But even so, the administrators won’t be punished, the tax payer will just have to pay the damages and the administrators will just go on violating students.
Notice what national news outlet is reporting this story?
Parents’ outrage as school strip searches a 10-year-old boy to find a ‘stolen’ $20 bill that was actually in the cafeteria
North Carolina parents are outraged after an assistant principal strip-searched a 10-year-old boy to find a $20 bill the student didn’t even have.
Union Elementary School assistant principal Teresa Holmes is named in a complaint filed against the school, alleging that she made a young boy strip down to his underwear.
She suspected fifth-grader Justin Cox of having the missing $20 and when he didn’t turn it over she demanded he remove his socks, shoes, pants, and shirt so that a manual search could be done.
Holmes defended herself, saying that other students and faculty had said that the money was missing and that Cox had dived under a table for it.
Holmes told Cox he ‘he left her no choice and that she had to search him,’ according to court records.
She then told him she was ‘within her legal rights to do so.’
The complaint against Holmes states that Cox was deprived of his constitutional rights barring unreasonable search and seizure.
According to court documents, Cox had gone under a lunch table after money a passing girl had dropped. Holmes returned the cash to the girl, and afterwards was told that there was still $20 missing.
When confronted, Cox told her he didn’t have it.
Ordered into her office with a custodian to act as a witness, Holmes went so far as to put her fingers inside the waistband of his underwear and run her fingers on his bare torso.
She explained she had the authority to search him ‘because teachers and students thought Justin had the money.’
But another teacher came into the office to announce that the money was ‘miraculously’ found on the cafeteria floor.
Now keep in mind that we were promised that the government would eventually make a profit in the deal just as we did when Reagan fixed the S&L crisis. We aren’t even getting cheaper cars out of the deal, unless of course you consider the government subsidized Chevy Volt that nobody wants and the taxpayers are took a shellacking on.
GM would have been fine if the government just stayed out of it, they would have reorganized with creditor protection form the courts just like every other company has who has gone through this process legitimately. Of course if that happened GM would have broke the over-reaching union who gives hundreds of millions in campaign money to Democrats. Anyone want a Twinkie?
The American taxpayers stand to lose billions as General Motors today announced a plan to buy back 40 percent of the company owned by the federal government.
“The Detroit automaker said it will purchase 200 million shares of GM stock held by Treasury for $5.5 billion — or $27.50 per share — nearly $2 above the stock’s closing price on Tuesday,” the Detriot News reports.
However, the break even price — the price that GM would need to pay for each share in order to pay back the money the government put in to the company —was $53 a share. That number has now risen dramatically.
“As a result of GM’s buy back, the government has recovered about $28.6 billion of its $49.5 billion GM bailout, which means it will most likely lose billions when selling its remaining shares,” MLive.com reports. “The government would need to sell its remaining shares at a price of $69.72 to break even. That’s up more than $15 from earlier this year, when the U.S. Treasury would have to sell its 500 million remaining shares at about $53 per share.”
The U.S. Treasury initially owned nearly 61 percent of GM as part of the auto bailout, which forced the automaker and crosstown rival Chrysler through a government-backed bankruptcy.
The Obama administration completely exited Chrysler last year after recovering $11.2 billion of its $12.5 billion bailout to the Auburn Hills-based automaker.
Liberal activists stopped new laws in Connecticut that could have helped Adam Lanza get the mental help he needed…..
[Political Arena Editor’s Note: Before we get onto the the disturbing details, this very writer has a great deal of experience in helping treating a schizophrenic. I have pretty much seen it all. As well as read the articles, dealt with good doctors and as well as the bad ones who just “don’t get it”. I have dealt with the insurance issues, legal issues and the social issues of it. As much as any non MD can be I am an expert.
With that said, I was lucky in that most of the time mine wanted treatment because she was getting the “Clive Barker” treatment behind her eyes and that scared her. Some patients resist treatment which is a mistake. The legal system must back parents up and help the patient even if it is against their wishes. D.J. Jaffe has a GREAT editorial about changes in the law that can help such patients – LINK ]
There is little doubt that not only was Adam Lanza partially autistic, (Asperger’s syndrome – this disorder has no history of causing violence), he also suffered from extreme depression and/or schizophrenic disorder as he fits the profile like a glove.
What is schizophrenia?
It is not multiple personality disorder as is so often shown on television. Schizophrenia acts to change how your brain perceives what the five senses tell it. The signals to the brain intermix the schizophrenic’s perception of reality with ones own imagination and even memories such as what one has seen in a movie.
What the schizophrenic sees, feels, and hears sometimes becomes a jumble. At other times one can hallucinate and/or hear voices. Those with schizophrenia have a hard time relating with others because they misperceive the nonverbal cues that are so crucial in interpersonal communication. If the disorder is pronounced enough the direct verbal cues may also be misperceived.
The mind tries to make order out of the chaos. The mind does not wish to accept their condition so the schizophrenic invents elaborate conspiracies to attempt to rationalize and make order out of the chaos they are perceiving. Since schizophrenic events are often accompanied with a cognitive skills impact the conspiracies do not seem too outlandish to one so affected.
Most normal people can look at a problem of moderate complexity and come to the same conclusion. The schizophrenic will come to a different, completely irrational conclusion, and if you don’t agree with them YOU must be crazy, because to them it is so obvious. For Example:
Three plus seven is 18 and I can prove it by counting the clouds outside. If you can’t see that than you are either an effing idiot or a liar.
The unfortunate truth is that for those so affected such as Jarrod Loughner, who perpetrated the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, in his schizophrenic mind he had to shoot Giffords and her party because reason demanded it.
In more severe cases the schizophrenic may hear voices, see people who aren’t there and have conversations with them that are as real to them as can be. For some schizophrenics the life they live behind their own eyes is like a Clive Barker horror movie that they can never escape from without treatment.
Those who get the help can usually be treated with the proper medication. Those who do not usually try to self medicate with drugs or alcohol to try to cope.
To compound the problem, there are a great many family doctors who simply “don’t get” schizophrenia and I have personally encountered a staff psychiatrist at a hospital who could not comprehend the condition. Why? Largely because of “Normalcy Bias”. In a nutshell, those with “Normalcy Bias” apply their ability to reason to everyone else and assume that simply because the person with the bias can make out the situation with relative ease, that the schizophrenic patient must also, so therefore the patient is just lying, or acting out for attention etc. They will ask things like, “Well if you heard things then how come you don’t now” and “you are all better now you faker?” Those with schizophrenia and associated conditions have episodes where the problem is much worse, and much better. Stress can bring about a psychotic episode even over the effects of medication.
As in the case of Jarrod Loughner, the signs were there, lots of people including parents, teachers, administrators and even police saw them and yet, no one took the appropriate action.
The UK Daily Mail published a quite complete bio of Adam Lanza that shows that he fit the profile of someone with a schizophrenic or similar disorder. Here are excerpts:
Crazed killer Adam Lanza was a ‘ticking time bomb’ who suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and was painfully shy and awkward, former classmates said yesterday.
Last night, a troubling portrait began to emerge of the ‘Goth’ loner, who dressed all in black and was obsessed with video games.
Goth like “death music” with theses about rejection, suicide, and the horrors of the world seem appealing to schizophrenics as in some ways it is how they perceive their own world. Some video games are popular with schizophrenics because in them they can have some control over their reality and create dramatic scenarios , again, in which unlike in the real world, they have some control.
Others say Lanza used to be a mild-mannered student in high school, making the honor roll, and living with his mother, Nancy Lanza, who in turn loved playing dice games and decorating their upscale home for the holidays.
‘No one is surprised. He always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he didn’t really connect with our high school, with our town.’
Another former school friend, Jamie Crespo, 19, said: ‘He used to hang with the freaks, guys who dressed in trench coats.’
Other students remember him walking through school dressed in black, carrying a black briefcase.
Family friends said Lanza’s problems started to escalate when his parents divorced in 2008 after 18 years together.
His father Peter, a wealthy executive for General Electric, who is believed to earn $1 million a year, moved out of the family home in 2006, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.
One of Lanza’s former classmates spoke of his ‘noticeable decline’ after his parents’ divorce. ‘He was a loner at school and hyper intelligent,’ he said. ‘But in recent years he disappeared off the radar.
‘The word is that he was badly affected when his parents split and that might be what pushed him over the edge.’
‘He was always weird but the divorce affected him. He was arguing with his mother. He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.’
In several press accounts, Adam Lanza went from a typical Asperger’s kid, to a dark, more disturbed, more isolated troubled young man. This is typical of those with schizophrenia because it tends to manifest itself after puberty. Stress tends to bring on more psychotic events and makes the condition worse.
A relative to the family said that Adam Lanza was ‘obviously not well,’ adding that he often seemed troubled.
Lanza’s aunt, Marsha Lanza, said her nephew was raised by kind, nurturing parents who would not have hesitated to seek mental help for him if he needed it.
Everyone hesitated including mom and dad. As is so often the case, parents and some relatives just won’t see it. Some are shamed into inaction, some are just too proud to admit that “their offspring is schizo” because of the stigma. Some are simply in denial. “Oh he just had a bad day”, “but he only does that sometimes”, “the stressful situation made him do it”, “no really he is better now (until the next psychotic episode)”, “but what can I do”, “it’s just kids being kids” and “every kid now a days acts strange” are typical rationalities.
How long did mom (who is now dead sadly) hesitate?
Less than a week before her son would launch his horrifying attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, Nancy Lanza knew “she was losing him” and that “he was getting worse.”
A drinking buddy of Lanza told The Daily News that her son Adam had long been troubled and rarely came up in conversation.
“She just looked down at the glass and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m worried I’m losing him,’” said the bar pal, who did not wish to be named, of the ominous conversation at the bar My Place in Newtown, Conn.
“She said it was getting worse. She was having trouble reaching him.”
Adam, who the coroner’s office said Sunday shot Nancy Lanza, 54, several times in the head before unleashing a nightmarish attack that killed 20 schoolchildren and six others Friday, was prone to hurting himself, the drinking buddy said.
“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”
Self mutilation such as cutting and burning actually provide temporary relief to those having psychotic events of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Criminal Psychologist Dr. Alan Lipman:The FACT is that every One of these episodes Is proceeded by an undiagnosed mental illness:
Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims’ families worship.
“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Flashman told FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”
Off the cuff, I do not think this update is true. If it is where is the court petition and where is the attorney? I do think that it is entirely possible that she discussed doing this at one point. However, if Connecticut had an AOT law such as “Laura’s Law” Nancy Lanza would have been able to get Adam Lanza the help he needed with little difficulty. But who is it who actively resists such laws? Read below.
Far Left Groups Defeated Connecticut Mental Health Protection Laws Just Months Before Shooting (Via Jim Hoft):
Here’s a fact you might not know – Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a type of “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as “involuntary outpatient treatment”). There’s no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventative institutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as “first episode psychosis”).
AOT laws vary state-by-state, and often bear the name of a person murdered by an untreated mentally ill person (“Kendra’s Law” in New York, “Laura’s Law” in California, etc.).
Most states have laws and even a 1-800 mental health hotline and free clinics to help those who are mentally ill. Arizona had such laws and facilities, but not even the local police called the number after they determined that Jarod Loughner had troubles perceiving reality. Loughner, like Lanza should have been forcibly evaluated. If evaluated, Jarrod Loughner would not have been able to buy the weapon that he bought to do his terrible deed as his evaluation would have been reported to the proper authorities.
We have gun laws that work pretty well, but no system works unless the people on the ground take action to put those laws and resources into action.
Those who engage in “Normalcy Bias” when it comes to mental illness have plenty of cover in leftist academia (also via Jim Hoft):
For Your Country posted this back after schizophrenic Jared Loughner went on his shooting rampage in Arizona that left several people dead and US Rep. Gabby Giffords seriously wounded.
It actually very hard to force people with severe mental diseases to be treated because of a range of reforms pushed by progressives starting in the 60′s:
Ronald David Laing, a Scottish Psychiatrist, In the 60′s put forth the foundation of the Anti-Psychiatry movement. He maintained that schizophrenia was “a theory not a fact”. The popularity of Laing’s theories is blamed for decline in students entering the psychology profession.
Kenneth Kesey, wrote “One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest” based in part on Laing’s thinking (and his own intensive use of drugs). “Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.” The Book,play, and later the movie, portrayed a anti-psychiatry philosophy leading to a public displeasure with residential mental facilities resulting in further deinstitutionalization policies.
As a result of Laing, Kennedy, Kesey and public efforts to transform the mental health care system to be more humane, to characterize mentally ill people as “Just thinking differently”, and characterizing mental health care as some form of evil, we now have a system that makes it virtually impossible to get folks like Loughner the care they need.
Deinstitutionalization policies driven by “do good” liberals and the federal government put focus on limited bad acts. Kesey wrote a story based on his LSD induced observations in one VA mental hospital. Once his story was put into film, his small example falsely characterized the bulk of mental health care as dehumanizing and made it impossible to force the Loughners of the world to get treatment.
Critics will focus on gun control after today’s school massacre. The focus should be on failed liberal policies that excuse rather than assist extremely dysfunctional individuals.
We here at Political Arena are the last to look for government to offer up solutions, but in the case of the mentally ill, most do not have insurance and need state assistance for treatment. Only by education and treatment on a level comparable to that which has been used to combat AIDS will this problem get seriously better.
But What About Guns
Israeli Teacher Protecting Children
[Editor’s Note – While not every teacher in Israel carries a rifle, military personnel, reservists, and those with a gun license may carry a weapon openly in Israel. Israel provides armed security for most of its institutions including schools.]
While there is no question that those who are bent on destruction will often find a way to do so with or without access to firearms, sometimes access to guns, in this case stolen guns from a relative, amplifies the damage a disturbed person can cause.
It is important to examine the big picture. In Switzerland and Israel where guns are everywhere there is very little gun crime and very few mass shootings, but in areas of Europe that have gun control laws that essentially turn the citizens into mere subjects, according to studies by Dr. John R. Lott and others, per capita they have about the same number of deaths via mass shooting as the United States does. In states areas where more citizens carry guns legally there are drops in crime and gun violence in almost every instance. Put simply, criminals and those with ill intent prefer helpless unarmed victims.
In fact, it seems that the Aurora, Colorado Cinemark shooter, aside from being schizophrenic, targeted that particular theater because it had signs up announcing that it was a “Gun Free Zone”.
UPDATE– When Adam Lanza discovered that armed responders were on the scene, that is when the rampage ended – “We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that, decided to take his own life,” Mr. Malloy said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Dana Loesch has put together a handy list of sourced and credible statistics about gun crime in general. Notice how violent crime, according to government and academic sources, is much higher in areas where citizens are restricted from using firearms for self defense.
Those with a knee jerk reaction may blame the guns, but do they credit guns with the killing of Osama bin Laden or do they credit the Navy Seals? There is clearly a double standard at play here, and in the case of politicians who know better, the double standard is an agenda driven one.
That agenda is parroted by a liberal elite media which not only focuses on the guns due to their statist ideology, that agenda is also what results in that same elite media not reporting cases where armed citizens prevented mass shooting such as the case of Appalachian Law School, and just two days ago an armed citizen stopped a mall shooting in Portland. When the deranged gunman saw the armed citizen he took cover and then took his own life. When heroic Sandy Brook School principal Dawn Hochsprung lunged at Adam Lanza, she deserved to have the right to lunge at him with something better than a ball point pen.
Many critics are being nakedly political by blaming the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA trains every police firearms instructor and almost every civilian firearms safety instructor in the country. The NRA runs the largest firearm safety program for kids in the country and teaches in many schools. The NRA is also the most powerful political lobby in Washington DC.
Blaming the NRA for this tragedy is like blaming anti-drug war groups for substance abuse and drug overdoses. It really does not get much more irrational than that.
As reported by the Daily Mail, Florida restaurant owner John Metz says he will offset the costs of Obamacare by “adding a five percent surcharge to customers’ bills and will reduce his employees’ hours.”
Obamacare is so filled with senseless mandates, bureaucratic overhead and taxes that it has already driven up the cost of family health insurance by $2,500 a year and this will just get worse as more of Obamacare is implemented.
Obamacare requires businesses or franchises with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker over 30 workers.
The program mandates that only employees working more than 30 hours a week are covered under their employers health insurance plan, chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are already considering reduced worker hours.
“Obviously, I’d love to cover all our employees under that insurance,” said Metz.
“But to pay $5,000 per employee would cost us $175,000 per restaurant and unfortunately, most of our restaurants don’t make $175,000 a year. I can’t afford it.”
Democrat campaign operatives had tried to paint those businesses reacting to as just a few actors disgruntled by the election and tried to fool people into believing that Obamacare makes healthcare more affordable.
A new web site called The Daily Job Cuts is attempting to catalogue the layoffs and business closings and even though they are making a worthy full time effort to list them all, they are still only able to report a fraction of the actual job losses.
In the last month:
Aside from the evil Papa Johns, Democrat political operatives need to be prepared to also ‘boycott’ these companies who are laying off thousands of people due to Obamacare and associated taxes: Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, Burger King, McDonald’s, Longhorn Steakhouse……
…..Google, Martha Stewart Living, Pepsi, PayPal, Groupon, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Kraft Foods, Lockheed Martin, Sears, Lexmark, Yahoo!, Dupont, Boeing, Bristol-Myers, Cummins, Smithfield Foods, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NBC/Universal, American Airlines, United Continental Holdings, JC Penney, Wausau Paper, Procter & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Pierce Manufacturing, Panasonic, Xerox, Citigroup, Atlantic City Casinos, Majestic Star Casino, RIM (Blackberry), Vestas Wind Systems, Utah American Energy, Turkey Point Nuclear Plant FL, United Technologies, Gamesa Energy, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors, Stryker Corp (A big Obama Donor), First Solar, Solel Solar Systems, LuLu Publishing, New Energy Corp, Supervalue (Albertson’s), Dana Corp, American Coal, Gamestop, Commercial Appeal, Patriot Coal, Archer-Daniels-Midland, SAS, CIGNA, 169 Shaws Supermarkets, Judson University, ATI Career Training Centers, …
But boycotting these companies may be tough if you get sick or injured:
Nebraska Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Aveo Oncology, Kaiser Permanente, St Jude Medical, Lawrence & Memorial Hospital, St Lukes Cornwall Hospital, Emanuel Medical Center, GE Healthcare, WPS Health Insurance, Lower Bucks Hospital, United Blood Services Gulf Region, NY Center for Hospice/Palliative Care, CVPH Medical Center, Ameridose, Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY, San Diego Hospice, Glens Falls Hospital NY, Wake Forest Baptist Medical NC, Southwest Vermont Health Care, St Mary’s of Michigan Hospital, Orlando Health (hospitals), Carney Hospital, Good Samaritan Hospital, Englewood Hospital, LSU’s 7 Hospitals, Westchester Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, UMass Memorial Medical Center, NCH Healthcare System, Peace Health, Northwest Community Healthcare, Cooley Dickinson Hospital, E.J. Noble Hospital, Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley, St. Joseph Hospital, St. Josepth Hospital East, Community Memorial Health System, Danbury Hospital, New Milford Hospital, Marian Regional Medical Center, Inland Hospital, Lawrence General Hospital, Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center, St Vincent Health System (hospital), Mercy Health Partners’ Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Jordan Hospital, Brattleboro Retreat (psychiatric hospital), CVPH Medical Center Pittsburg, Western Maryland Regional Medical Center (hospital), Cook Medical.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to boycott Hostess or the closings of 10 Boston area Upper Crust Pizzas, or the 200 Gamestop outlets. All are closing. There are so many closures that we just don’t have the space…
MORE:
Abbott Labs, Activision, Adventist Health, Airlines SAS, AMD, American Cotton Growers, Arcelor Mittal, American Independence Museum, Ameridose, American Airlines, American Coal, Atlantic Lottery Corporation, Assc Milk Producers, Aveo Oncology, Bankia, Bechtel Power Corp, Bigpoint Games, Boston Scientific, Brake Parts, Brattleboro Retreat,
Career Education, Cigna, Commerzbank, Consol Energy in W.V., Covidien, Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY, CVPH, DEP in Tallahassee FL, DuPont, Eagle-Tribune, Emanuel Medical Center, Energizer Holdings, Ericsson, Exide Tech, First Energy, Gameforge Berlin, GenOn Energy Inc, Groupon, GT Advanced Tech, Harris’ Broadcast, Hawker Beechcraft, Hill Rom,
Hills Holdings. HMX Group, Iberia Airlines, ICM of Colwich, ING, Juniper Networks, Kinetic Concepts, Kratos Defense Security, Lightyear Network Solutions, Lonza, Majestic Star Casino, Major Wind Company, Medtronic, Mills Manufacturing NC, Momentive Inc, Monitor Group, Montco Behavioral Health, NBC, Nebraska Medical Center, Neovia Logistics Services, New Energy, Ormet, Panasonic, PayPal, Penn Refrigeration, Penske Logistics, Pepsi, Philips Electronics, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Research in Motion, Rheem Manufacturing, Sentry Foods, Shaw’s Supermarket, Shawano Foundry WI, Smith & Nephew, Smithfield Packing Co., Southeastern Container, SpaceX, SRA Intl Inc, St. Jude Medical, Sulake, Sun Media, TE Connectivity, TECO Coal Corporation, The Providence Journal Co, TMX Group Ltd., Turbocare, Oce North America, UBS, US Cellular, Volvo Trucks Pulaski County, West Ridge Mine, Westinghouse, World Media Enterprises Inc, WPS Health Insurance, Wright Patterson AFB, Wyodak Coal Mine, Yakima Reg Med Ctr Washington.
Special thanks to C. Steven Tucker for helping me to build this list.
In the video below Mark Levin very gently takes apart Dr. Teresa Gilarducci. She works for George Soros now, but before that she was an econ professor at Notre Dame. She was also on President Clinton’s Social Security task force.
When she was at Notre Dame I debated her when I was an undergrad in front of an audience, as I was the only one between IU and Notre Dame who would take the partial privatization position point of view on Social Security. Her incredible hypocrisy, that Levin exposes so well in the video below, showed itself in true form in my debate with her as well. Her “logic” is entirely political, circular and based largely on denial and misdirection. She is sweet, attractive and charming, and well knows it as she uses that as a weapon in her arsenal.
Dr. Gilarducci thought she was going to be debating a “college republican” undergrad, what she got is a former radio talk show host who passed the state exams and used to sell retirement and insurance products.
I will not outline the entire debate, but in short I did two things.
First: I outlined the Galveston Plan which has worked wonders as a legal exception to Social Security. I also pointed out the government managed, but partially privatized retirement plan that Members of Congress have which has been a great success through thick and thin. Such a plan would serve as a good model to grow at least a small percentage of Social Security to at least attempt to have a growth to pre-fund our retirement benefits.
All she would say about these partially privatized plans is that the retirees wouldn’t get the money and even though retired Members of Congress and some in Galveston were already getting great benefits now she insisted that soon that money would vanish because only government transfer payments can be trusted. She kept saying again and again, “Until you go to get your money at retirement and it’s not there.”
Ironically in the video below, the type of plan she insisted could never work because the “greedsters” in the private sector would steal it all, is the exact same plan that she has for herself for her own retirement by her own admission.
Second: Dr. Gilarducci had written some good papers on 401K reform. She argued that too much of the 401K investment is in the employers own stock, so if the employer goes under said employee looses a lot of their retirement. As a fix she proposed that 401K laws be changed to require diversity of investment to more reliably pre-fund such retirement plans. Social Security has much the same problem as all of the eggs are in one basket, there is no diversity of investment and people’s retirement’s are not pre-funded.
So I used her own words and arguments on how to have a reliable and secure 401k, but replaced the term “401k” with “Social Security”. I used those near verbatim arguments to make most of my case.
All through the debate she insisted that (what she didn’t realize were her own arguments in her own published work) were just bad arguments from a young undergrad who just didn’t know better and that is how she treated me……until the end when I dropped the bomb that many of the arguments she so cutely poo-poohed were actually her own published work. She was floored.
During my last few shows, including as recently as yesterday, I have alerted you to Obama’s desire to nationalize your 401-k plan and eliminate your mortgage interest deduction.
Some background on the former. Back in October 2008, I got word that Professor Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School had testified before Rep. George Miller’s committee in support of a plan to nationalize private pension plans — in particular, 401-k plans. I not only spoke about it on my show back then, but we tracked down the professor and I conducted the first interview on talk radio. I will discuss this at more length on my program this evening, but I thought you might want to be among the first to listen to that interview again. Please pass it along to as many people as you can. See below.
No one in the GOP is even defending themselves much less making a fight of it (please correct us if I we are wrong).
Robert Davi
Famed actor Robert Davi said recently that he believes that elements in the establishment GOP and the Democratic Leadership are in a conspiracy to bring the country down. It is nonsense like this that make him correct.
It is nonsense like this that will finally push those who care about good policy to form a new party to replace the Republican Party because its brand is damaged and it’s establishment doesn’t seem to even really believe what it preaches.
I bet many in the GOP wishes they had Newt Gingrich right about now to make the case.
A new poll from CNN/ORC shows that President Obama remains Teflon despite the fact that he designed the upcoming fiscal cliff to speculation. Even though Obama insisted on massive defense cuts and huge tax increases as the two alternative parts of the fiscal cliff, the American public will apparently blame Republicans if the fiscal cliff isn’t stopped. A full 45% of respondents said they would blame Congressional Republicans – even though the Democrats control the Senate – while just 34% would blame President Obama.
The public, by and large, sees Republicans as obstructionist. That’s due to a combination of messaging failure on the part of the GOP — nothing new, in that they seem incapable of explaining the simple fact that low tax rates, particularly on job creators, spur economic growth and thereby raise tax revenues — and a media concerned only with saving its flailing president. The Republicans’ mixed messaging on the fiscal cliff has been astounding to watch. They signed off on the sequester, which put a fiscal gun to their heads, forcing them to choose between raising taxes partially or watching tax rates skyrocket and defense get slashed. Then they turned around and complained about the gun being put to their heads. Now, they’re standing for the principle that we need more tax revenue, but it can’t be raised by raising rates. No wonder the public is confused.
Poll numbers like this could be the reason that Republicans are looking to cave on tax increases, or ending tax deductions. 25% of the country says that the nation would undergo a crisis if we hit the fiscal cliff; 44% expect major problems. 25% say that it would cause minor problems. A full 77% of the public believes the fiscal cliff would hurt them personally.
Republicans have done such a poor job of informing the public about why taxes shouldn’t be increased that even Republicans, by a margin of 52%-44%, say they want both spending cuts and tax increases. An unbelievable 56% of Americans say they want high taxes on higher income earners, despite the fact that higher income earners pay a vastly disproportionate share of all tax revenue.
The elite media film reviews of the film remake of Red Dawn speak volumes of just who and what is in the elite media. The hostility is so great that they couldn’t help but reveal their collectivist politics in the reviews.
Did the idea of communists in America offend them? Not in the least. Did the idea of some American’s becoming sympathizers with and aiding the invading communists in the film make them even flinch? Nope.
What made the elite media positively furious? The idea of traditional Americans, including an active duty US Marine and three retired Marines, gearing up to act as an insurgent force to make the invading communists regret trying to gain a foothold in the United States.
In fact, so indoctrinated into the radical left are so many in the elite media including these film critics, that they present the exact same false narrative that communists throughout history have treated domestic dissidents who would dare oppose them; they present them or accuse them of being mentally ill.
“Better dead than Red Dawn,” sneered the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley, who called the film “sick and silly.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times labeled it “rabidly inflammatory,” “incorrigibly gung-ho,” and “a virulently alarmist fable.” Bob Thomas of the Associated Press condemned its “bathos” as “unrelenting.” Perhaps these were the honest assessments of dispassionate reviewers….
The makers of Red Dawn, complained Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, “spent too much time playing to the rabid anti-Commies.” You know: The movie must be awful because those icky conservatives approve of it. Even today, many liberals resort to knee-jerk denunciations: “Its guiding ideology is actually fascism,” wrote David Plotz of Slate in 2008.
That was then. This is the response the “Red Dawn” remake is getting from movie critics.
The Chicago Reader calls it a “Tea Party wet dream.” Time Magazine says “both movies play like hokey advertisements for the National Rifle Association, injected with high school pep rally enthusiasm.”
The Washington Post’s review says the film will be “red meat for tea party patriots,” as if Obama voters would rather allow an invading force take over rather than fight back.
Well film critics, we cannot speak for “all Obama voters”, but in your case the constant overt hostility you have shown over the years to American Exceptionalism leaves little doubt as to whose side you would end up aiding…just as Ronald Reagan knew all so well:
[Editor’s Note – I have seen the film, and even though it is not as good as the original, it is fun and worth the cost of a few tickets and popcorn. The biggest flaw in the film is that the film creators didn’t take a little more time to develop the characters to a point where you really cared about them. People make a story and stories are not as interesting when you don’t have a certain intimacy or identity with the characters.]
UPDATE:
Kate Dalzell comments – Goodness, what will these children think of next. Seriously, anything that has the slightest hint of pro-America or American exceptionalism throws these reprobates into a fear-based frenzy. Since they cannot self-govern, anything that opposes that which protects them from having to do so will induce such a tremendous amount of fear that they feel they must project, as a weapon, in order to maintain their therapeutic state.
Kimberly Saunders comments – Who wouldn’t like an America kicks ass over bad guys movie? I’d call it unAmerican and mentally ill if you didn’t like it.
It is interesting to see how those not influenced by our elite media and our union controlled public schools view American politics.
It reminds me of my Eastern European friends I went to college with who told me that American News Media read like Communist propaganda. Those who are from Europe and Russia know very well what how a Marxist and a Communist behave, but unlike too many Americans, they are not afraid to call it what it is [except several foreign professors I had who would say this privately, but were very clear that if they told the truth about this it would be the end of their teaching career as American universities are heavens for radicalized ideologues who cannot function in the private sector – Editor].
Russian columnist Xavier Lerma asks how can Americans be so foolish as to elect a communist like Obama again, how can they not see that he says one thing and does the opposite, don’t they read history in America?
Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.
After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.
Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.
Putin said regarding the military [militarization is what the author meant as Russian is his first language],
Well, any normal individual understands that as true but [American style] liberalism is a psychosis . O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
Xavier Lerma Continues to show that Obama is “repeating the Soviet mistake” by comparing what Obama is doing with what the Russian government now admits was their mistake:
“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”
President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don’t they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.
In a nutshell. President Obama has been working with the new Islamist leader in Turkey to supply light and heavy weapons to Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood for the purpose of overthrowing the secularist leaning rulers in the Middle-East.
Notice only the rulers that want to maintain peace with Israel are targeted for overthrow by Obama/Turkey/MB.
Some of those weapons were used in the embassy attacks on Sept. 11, 2012 where our people were killed.
Welcome to what is likely the biggest scandal in the history of the United States.
We are sorry to say that we are not surprised by this. Rumors among global security web sites have been suggesting this is what might be going on for some time now and the evidence is coming in.
This post is long, but the evidence is clear. We will start in February 2011 and take you through the story piece by piece and when we are done, there is only one conclusion left to make. See for yourself.
UPDATE V – Center for Security Policy releases video verifying what Political Arena has said for months:
UPDATE VI – Catherine Herridge from Fox News verifies what we have said for months. Obama is shipping arms to Jihadists (the Muslim Brotherhood) in Syria …with the cooperation of Turkey.
UPDATE VII – Ambassador John Bolton: If Benghazi was an operation to send weapons to Jihadists I’m outraged.
Let us start from February 2011 as the story begins there.
It is important to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood has made serious inroads into both political parties and the State Department. In February 2011 a few conservative stalwarts such as Bill Kristol were touting the spin from the Muslim Brotherhood. He and several others actively resisted the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was radical at all and went so far as to deny that they wanted a global caliphate. Of course anyone who looked at the history of the Muslim Brotherhood knew that Kristol was engaging in wishful thinking.
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.
More serious scholars at the time called out what was obvious just as we did again and again. Here is Prof. Niall Ferguson from February 2011:
As we reported earlier the Obama Administration even went so far as to say that the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular democratic movement:
Remember when the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said that the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular organization? – LINK. The DNI was mocked by many including Niall Ferguson (and Mark Stein below) for this preposterous testimony. It is like he swallowed the propaganda on the Brotherhood’s English web site and regurgitated it as gospel [just as the State Department has].
Then Obama came out and said that the Muslim Brotherhood should be a part of the new Egyptian Government.
The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.
The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said. But by even setting conditions for the involvement of such nonsecular groups, the administration took a surprise step in the midst of the crisis that has enveloped Egypt for the last week.
So Thursday, after the train has left the station, here comes the New York Times to play catch up:
CAIRO — In post-revolutionary Egypt, where hope and confusion collide in the daily struggle to build a new nation, religion has emerged as a powerful political force, following an uprising that was based on secular ideals. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group once banned by the state, is at the forefront, transformed into a tacit partner with the military government that many fear will thwart fundamental changes.
It is also clear that the young, educated secular activists who initially propelled the nonideological revolution are no longer the driving political force — at least not at the moment.
As the best organized and most extensive opposition movement in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to have an edge in the contest for influence. But what surprises many is its link to a military that vilified it.
“There is evidence the Brotherhood struck some kind of a deal with the military early on,” said Elijah Zarwan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “It makes sense if you are the military — you want stability and people off the street. The Brotherhood is one address where you can go to get 100,000 people off the street.”
There is a battle consuming Egypt about the direction of its revolution, and the military council that is now running the country is sending contradictory signals. On Wednesday, the council endorsed a plan to outlaw demonstrations and sit-ins.[Yup real democratic – Iran & Lebanon here we come – Editor] Then, a few hours later, the public prosecutor announced that the former interior minister and other security officials would be charged in the killings of hundreds during the protests.
Egyptians are searching for signs of clarity in such declarations, hoping to discern the direction of a state led by a secretive military council brought to power by a revolution based on demands for democracy, rule of law and an end to corruption.
“We are all worried,” said Amr Koura, 55, a television producer, reflecting the opinions of the secular minority. “The young people have no control of the revolution anymore. It was evident in the last few weeks when you saw a lot of bearded people taking charge. The youth are gone.”
And while those who believed the spin from the State Department were saying that those who had concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over the country “have been proven wrong” (see video below), we were reporting that this was a disaster and that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the process of taking over Egypt and this was a huge threat to middle-east peace.
What happened to all of these freedom loving democrats that the government kept telling us about?
Political Arena Oct 11, 2011: Libya’s transitional leader says Islamic Sharia law will be the “basic source” of all law.
Political Arena October 22, 2011: Former head of CIA “bin Laden Unit”: Libyan rebels are like the Taliban. We also said once again that this entire strategic concept looks like a play to isolate Israel.
Political Arena Feb 13th: Obama proposes $800 million in aid for the Muslim Brotherhood. The appropriation was killed in Congress.
As predicted from minute one by this site and clear thinking professionals the Muslim Brotherhood took control of Egypt and announced that Jerusalem would soon be Egypt’s capital. We went on record saying that this looks like Israel is in the process of being surrounded. Political Arena from June 24:
Remember that President Obama helped oust the pro-American Egyptian government and called it “The Arab Spring”. Well now it is done and as predicted by myself, Dr. Niall Ferguson and so many others as far back as February of last year.
Watch this video from February of 2011 and look and see how this disastrous chain of events has come about just as conservatives feared. Notice what Ferguson said about a Muslim Brotherhood regime that would be aggressive towards Israel in order to unite radicalized masses under the banner of external aggression.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Al-Qaeda and they are involved in raising money for jihadists here in the United States. The motto for the Muslim Brotherhood is:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
For a host of reasons this writer believes that this a part of a deliberate plan by the Obama Administration to undermine Israel’s security and ability to defend itself. Why?
1 – Polls of the Egyptian Street showed that almost 70% wanted Sharia Law and war with Israel. The administration denied these polls. The election results showed that these polls were accurate.
2 – The administration has radicalized antisemites such as Samantha Power and Robert Malley in prominent positions in the State Department.
4 – Any student of global security full well knows that the previous pro-American government in Egypt that Obama helped to remove from power was the lynch pin for Middle-East peace. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that was signed by the previous government. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it clear that the treaty is shredded.
5 – President Obama’s attitude and other acts of disrespect have shown that there is a hostility towards Israel. So much so that even as far back in 2009 only 6% if Israelis saw President Obama and “pro-Israel”. See details HERE.
Political Arena July 24th: Obama Administration reverses on Jerusalem being the capital of Israel (video)
Even while this was going on, others finally started to call out the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in the State Department. Political Arena July 26th:
Andrew C. McCarthy has two very informative articles on this issue that should be read before anyone can have a truly informed opinion on this issue:
Questions about Huma Abedin: A State Department adviser has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood – LINK
Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties: Michele Bachmann has every right to ask questions – LINK
Note: Frank Gaffney and John Bolton also agree – LINK and the Center for Security Policy has a piece on this issue HERE.
Democrat stalwarts including Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) appear on a short documentary film claiming that the Obama Administration is orchestrating a dramatic change in our relationship with Israel.
UPDATE IV – Islamist radicals welcomed in Obama White House; moderates shunned – LINK
September 11th 2012: Ambassador Chris Stevens and our people at the consulate in Benghazi are killed by a mob of heavily armed Al-Qaeda terrorists an hour after the Turkish Ambassador leaves. We now know from leaked government emails that the administration knew in real time that this was a coordinated attack. We also had a drone flying overhead.
The administration invents a lie that this was a mob protest upset about an internet video that virtually nobody watched. One report said that the video had all of 17 views at the time of the attack:
Political Arena October 9th: Everything you need to know about how Obama lied about the embassy attacks in two minutes (video)
Political Arena October 10th: Rep Gowdy Goes Ballistic on Ambassador Rice and Obama Administration over Lies About Benghazi Murders (Congressional hearing videos)
Political Arena October 11th: Mother of slain State Department official: I am sick of being lied to…. (video)
Political Arena October 14th: Brigitte Gabriel, General McInerney, Commander Lippold & Gary Bersten on Benghazi-Gate /w Judge Jeanine Pirro (video)
Political Arena October 14th: Bob Beckel and The Five Blast Obama Admin for Lying About Embassy Attacks (video)
Political Arena October 14th: Will Obama Throw Hillary Under the Bus?
Political Arena October 17th: Romney Campaign Gloves Come Off: Obama Lies
Political Arena October 17th: White House Timeline Video of Lies About Embassy Attacks
Political Arena October 20th: Obama Administration prevents military from talking to Congress about embassy killings.
Political Arena October 23th: Obama Lied. White House knew Benghazi was a coordinated terror attack as it happened (video)
John McCain on the now discovered emails that proved that the administration knew in real time that this was a coordinated attack. Notice that McCain mentions how Ambassador Stevens was meeting with the Turkish Ambassador just hours before. This video is worth watching – VIDEO.
The Obama Administration armed Libyan rebels against Qaddafi and we knew who they were because many of these fighters were fighting us in Iraq:
BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.
The data come largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when American forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. The raid’s target was an insurgent cell believed to be responsible for smuggling the vast majority of foreign fighters into Iraq.
Michael Rubin – Time to Kill Libya’s Iraq-Era Foreign Fighters?
Huffington Post: Anti-American Extremists Among Libyan Rebels U.S. Has Vowed To Protect.
CNN– US Intel believes some Benghazi attackers tied to al Qaeda in Iraq:
U.S. intelligence believes that assailants connected to al Qaeda in Iraq were among the core group that attacked the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, a U.S. government official told CNN.
That would represent the second al Qaeda affiliate associated with the deadly September 11 attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Previously, intelligence officials said there were signs of connections to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African wing of the terror group.
The revelation that members of al Qaeda in Iraq are suspected of involvement in the Libya attack comes at a time when there is a growing number of fighters from that group also taking part in the Syrian civil war.
Clinton tells London conference that UN security council resolution 1973 over-rode absolute prohibition of arms to Libya
Hillary Clinton has paved the way for the United States to arm the Libyan rebels by declaring that the recent UN security council resolution relaxed an arms embargo on the country.
As Libya’s opposition leaders called for the international community to arm them, the secretary of state indicated that the US was considering whether to meet their demands when she talked of a “work in progress”.
The US indicated on Monday night that it had not ruled out arming the rebels, though it was assumed this would take some time because of a UN arms embargo which applies to all sides in Libya.
But Clinton made clear that UN security council resolution 1973, which allowed military strikes against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, relaxed the embargo. Speaking after the conference on Libya in London, Clinton said: “It is our interpretation that [resolution] 1973 amended or overrode the absolute prohibition of arms to anyone in Libya so that there could be legitimate transfer of arms if a country were to choose to do that. We have not made that decision at this time.”
UK Telegraph: Libya: US sends armed drones to shield rebels
Dismissing concerns over possible links between Libyan rebels and al Qaeda, the Obama administration has notified Congress it is providing $25 million in nonlethal aid to the rebels’ effort to drive Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s regime from power.
“The president’s proposed actions would provide urgently needed nonlethal assistance to support efforts to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in Libya,” said Joseph E. Macmanus, acting assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, in an April 15 letter. A copy of the letter, sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was obtained by The Washington Times.
The new authorization for assistance would cover “vehicles, fuel trucks and fuel bladders, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, and non-secure radios,” according to a memorandum attached to the letter.
Lethal aid would be classified and not in a public notification to Congress. You can be certain they received armed aid as France and Senator John McCain have confirmed it.
France’s admission Wednesday that it provided weapons to Libyan rebels renews debate on the legality and wisdom of arming rebels in conflicts whose outcome is unpredictable.
France revealed Wednesday that its forces parachuted weapons to Libya’s rebels earlier this month, making it the first NATO country to disclose that it provided arms to rebel forces and renewing debate on the merits of such action.
The ambiguous wording of UN Resolution 1973, which authorized foreign intervention in Libya, has led to clashing interpretations of what is allowed under the guise of protecting civilians. There is no consensus on whether arming the rebels is permissible under the resolution’s guidelines. According to NATO, France is the only country to provide weapons, the Associated Press reported.
Remember that it was NATO that allegedly took the lead in planning the Libyan operation. If anyone would like to argue that France “went rogue” and did this without the support of the rest of NATO we would like to see them make such a case.
McCain Claims U.S. Armed Libya Rebels To Make Case For Arming Syrians:
And then Joe Biden let it slip that we were giving military and other aid, including training, to Syrian rebels. Gotta love Vice President Biden as he has a habit of saying just a little too much:
But Biden’s admission was not the first and his claim that these forces are not radicalized extremists is more cover.
CNN August 1st – Obama authorized covert support for Syrian rebels:
President Barack Obama has signed a covert directive authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, U.S. officials told CNN on Wednesday.
The secret order, referred to as an intelligence “finding,” allows for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies.
It was unclear when the president signed the authorization for Syria, but the sources said it was within the past several months.
Political Arena August 8th: Muslim Brotherhood has Three Battalions Fighting in Syria (via Times of Israel).
Political Arena October 21st – Obama Administration Sending Guns to Al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood in Syria:
Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria
By DAVID E. SANGER / The New York Times
WASHINGTON — 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.
Rianovosti (Russia) – Syrian Rebels Have US Stinger Missiles – Russian General:
Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime are now armed with man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) including US-made Stingers, Russia’s top military commander said on Wednesday.
Russia has “reliable evidence” that the rebels have the weapons, “including US-made Stingers,” but “who delivered them, we need to look into,” Army Headquarters General Nikolai Makarov said.
NBC news reported in August the rebels had been supplied with unspecified MANPADS, possibly initiated by Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Qatar which have repeatedly called for lending military support to the Syrian opposition.
US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said she could not confirm whether the rebels had been supplied with such missiles, and maintained the United States was against the uncontrolled spread of MANPADS.
The Hill – Syrian rebels have US-made stinger missiles:
Russia’s top general said Wednesday that the Syrian opposition has received shoulder-launched missiles, including stinger missiles made in the United States.
Russian chief of staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov said the missiles were a “serious matter,” although he added that he did not know where the weapons had come from.
Russia, an arms supplier to Syria, has backed Syrian President Bashar Assad throughout the conflict, and Moscow has stymied U.S. efforts in the U.N. Security Council to take stronger measures against Assad.
All of the dots are here and much of the evidence has been leaked to the press by the intelligence community which seems to have rebelled against the Obama Administration. We weren’t the only ones connecting the dots for this stomach turning conclusion.
Frank Gaffney (Bio) in the Washington Times – The real reason behind Benghazigate:
Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?
President Obama’s once seemingly unstoppable march toward re-election hit what he might call “bumps in the road” in Benghazi, Libya, late on Sept. 11, 2012. It might be more accurate to describe the effect of the well-planned and -executed, military-style attack on a diplomatic facility there as the political equivalent of a devastating improvised explosive device on the myth of the unassailability of the Obama record as commander in chief.
Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.
The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.
One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.
What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.
Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”
We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”
It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.
What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.
Fox News – Obama Admin. Was Likely Running Arms To Islamic Jihadists Through Benghazi: Watch the video report HERE.
Clair Lopez (Bio) – Arms Flow to Syria May Be Behind Benghazi Cover-Up
And now even Glenn Beck, who put this very good video together explaining it in very clear terms:
Conclusion: Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood will now control several countries and will have it’s own oil revenue. Jordan is next.
Commenting on “arms to Syria” on a panel on BBCF TV Arabic, Professor Walid Phares, a Terrorism advisor to the US Congress and the author of ‘The Coming Revolution’ said “weapons are flowing to Syria under the watch of the international community. Libya’s Islamists and Jihadists are shipping arms and ammunitions to Syria’s Jihadi networks via Turkey. Lately a ship names ‘Intisar’ unloaded aid but also weapons to Syria’s Islamist networks. We don’t know if these weapons ended in the haands of the Free Syria Army or in the hands of Jihadi militias. At the same time, Hezbollah is sending fighters to assist the Syrian intelligence and special forces in their suppressive actions against Syria’s uprising. Add to it that Iran’s regime is also supporting Assad’s regime via Iraq. The current US Administration knows about the shipments into Syria and is allowing it to happen. That is different from a US strategic move to arm and train the democratic elements of the Syrian opposition. This could happen under the next Administration, if Mitt Romney wins the election.”
UPDATE II – Newly appointed “Libya Investigators” are known Islamic sympathizers with ties to CAIR. The Blaze:
Is the man the Obama administration appointed on October 4 as key investigator for the terror attacks in Benghazi an Islamist-sympathizer? According to recently published reports, the new chairman of a State Department’s “Accountability Review Board,” which is heading the federal investigation into the Benghazi terror attacks, has been accused of being an “apologist for Islamic terrorism who has a cozy relationship with Iran.”
What’s more, the man in question — former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering — has documented ties with the controversial group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR, of course, is a documented Muslim Brotherhood affiliate and was named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial — the largest terror-funding trial in U.S. history.
To make matters worse, Pickering is also co-chairman of the board of George Soros’ International Crisis Group who has ties to other Islamic organizations as well, including the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been described as pro-Iran “front group.”
NIAC lost what Matthew Vadum at FrontPageMag describes as ”an important defamation case in federal court last month in which it unsuccessfully argued the group was not a tool of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Pickering, who is a member of NIAC’s advisory board, formerly served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (1997 to 2000). He was featured in a report “Rise of the Iran Lobby,” by former CIA officer Clare M. Lopez, who was recently featured on the Glenn Beck Program to discuss the motivations behind the terror-attacks on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi.
Pickering’s Islamic-connections came to light after a report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism was published, exposing what it called the “scores” of established, radical Islamists who met with senior administration officials over the course of hundreds of White House visits.
UPDATE III – Hillary tells father of Navy Slain Seal “We will have that film maker arrested”. Wow the lies are just stunning. The callousness is amazing.
That’s not all. The Hill is reporting that when House Oversight Committee Chair Darryl Issa released some of the diplomatic cables from Libya proving that they were asking for help with their security concerns the Obama Administration accused Issa of releasing the names of secret operatives in an attempt to smear him. The Obama Administration had publicly published the names of the same people in a press release in December of 2011.
UPDATE IV – Islamist radicals welcomed in Obama White House; moderates shunned – LINK
UPDATE V – Center for Security Policy releases video verifying:
UPDATE VI – Catherine Herridge from Fox News verifies what we have said for months. Obama is shipping arms to Jihadists (the Muslim Brotherhood) in Syria …with the cooperation of Turkey.
UPDATE VII – Ambassador John Bolton: If Benghazi was an operation to send weapons to Jihadists I’m outraged.
I was just notified that if I want to keep my current health insurance with Blue Cross/Blue Shield my premiums will go up by a factor of 12.27. So much for being able to keep my current insurance.
I have a special needs child. If any readers have wondered why this web site has been so outspoken about Obamacare it is because everything that we have warned about it has the virtue of being true.
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:
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.
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.]
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.
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)
UPDATE – Clinton now says that the blame lies in “The Fog of War“. The circumstances and reasons below show that to be just plain false. In the comments below several US Senators are calling foul as well.
Political Arena Editor:
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Dan Rather gets it spot on. Here is why. When we look at the decisions down the line:
1 – The decision to not use Marines or Blackwater private mercenaries (who the administration shuns) for security and use locals (who sold them out) was a political decision not a security one.
2 – The building did not meet the minimum standards for physical security for an embassy was a political decision, because there are standard procedures that the State Department follows for the kinds of physical security all our embassies and consulates have and it takes a political decision to over ride them. Our building was penetrated by Al-Qaeda in 10 minutes and our sensitive documents were taken because the staff had no time to destroy them.
3 – The embassy was not fortified for the anniversary of 9/11. It should have been, In fact when the people on the ground asked for more security repeatedly the answer was no, when it was a no brainer that more security was needed. Our State Department Security is not capable of this level of incompetence so a political decision is almost certainly responsible.
4 – Embassy staff requested more security both physical and muscle and the answer was to have some security taken away, but the remaining security did have their danger pay increased as the Administration was aware that they were in more danger. Their efforts to get more security been going on for months so the odds of the problem being a mere security oversight is near impossible.
5 – The use of embassy funds to buy Chevy Volts. Would anyone like to argue that this was not a political decision?
6. Sending Ambassador Susan Rice out on the Sunday Shows to lie about the nature of the attack four days after the attack when people already knew better was a political decision certainly hand picked by the White House.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 