The elite media has been largely dishonest in reporting on this issue in order to attack President Trump.
1 – The elite media says that family separation and incarceration of illegal migrant minors started under President Trump because of his zero tolerance policy. This is not the case and they well know it. For example, the Washington Post March 11, 2015 under Obama, wrote about this very issue:
2 – The truth about family separation. The elite media leaves out all of the important details which bring clarity to this issue. The vast majority of Central American children who show up at the border are unaccompanied by their parents. The Border Patrol says that up to 85%, nearly 207,000 children from 2007 -2015 were unaccompanied when apprehended at the border; meaning that that an overwhelming number show up already separated from their family.
Parents can be detained until trial, but children can only be detained for 20 days because of the 1997 court ruling Flores v. Reno, at which time children are moved to a non-detention like facility or placed with any relatives that can be found in the United States, hence they are “separated from their parents”. Such has been the case long before Trump was President.
3 – Media reports of Trump backing down on “family separation” are wildly misleading. What they are not telling you is that Trump’s executive order states that the few minor border crossers who enter with parents must stay with their parents for as long as it takes, thus ending the separation, however, an executive order cannot supersede current law so this executive order will almost certainly be overturned by the courts.
4 – The conditions in which many illegal migrant children were held were much worse under Obama while Democrats and the elite media kept it quiet. The main reason for this is that more suitable and luxurious dorm like accommodations were not built up yet as they are today.
If you want to see some of the conditions that these children were held while Obama was president you can see for yourself HERE.
5 – President Obama said the same thing when he was in office that Trump is saying today. He also prosecuted many illegal border crossers:
Wow. Obama really did agree with @realDonaldTrump on Immigration.
Please show this to all your friends because the media lies about this, especially on CNN, are outrageous:
1 – A SPY is someone who is sent in to infiltrate and inform surreptitiously and is often paid to do so – this is what they did to Trump.
2 – An INFORMANT is someone who was already there and would approach the FBI (for example) and inform as to what he had seen voluntarily.
Quote:
…leaders of our institutions aren’t above engaging in spying. John Brennan spied on the legislative branch and lied about it to the American people. James Clapper spied on the American people through a domestic surveillance program and lied about it to Congress. Although the Obama administration never tweeted nasty attacks on journalists, it did spy on and prosecute them. It’s completely plausible that those in the upper echelon of law enforcement saw Trump as a threat, then used wobbly evidence as the pretext to investigate his campaign. If not, it’ll be good to clear their names.
“FBI used informant to investigate Russia ties to campaign, not to spy, as Trump claims,” read a truly sillyNew York Times headline last week. You can call it whatever makes you happy, but in the real world the act of furtively gathering information about someone else is called “spying.”
The Washington Postreported, for instance, that the informant was surreptitiously seeking information by “seeking out and meeting three different Trump campaign officials.” The spy, according to the piece, had contacts with the CIA. This is unprecedented.
I have a question for you. Keeping in mind ethics rules and laws about conflicts of interest:
1 – What if a certain lawyer who represented largest tax cheat in history, billionaire Marc Rich, saw to it that the Clintons were given large contributions in exchange for giving Rich a pardon on Bill Clinton’s last day in office?
2 – What if that same lawyer represented and defended John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, and is also Hillary’s campaign chairman and kept him out of jail when he was investigated for crimes? Podesta even bragged about how said lawyer saved him from prison. Indeed what if said lawyer became one of John Podesta’s closest friends?
3 – What if that same lawyer, was then appointed Assistant Attorney General of the United States?
4 – What if this same lawyer was put in charge of investigating the illegal IRS targeting of conservative groups and after evidence destroyed, and subpoenas violated, and the IRS top brass plead the 5th, simply decided that no one did anything wrong?
7 – What if this same lawyer, after the FBI reopened the investigation because of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin hiding aforementioned illegal emails on their home computer under a folder marked “Life Insurance,” wrote a letter to Democrats in Congress assuring them that it would be “over” quickly and efficiently?
That one lawyer is Peter Kadzik and if you ask any Democrat they are certain to tell you that all of this was just a mere coincidence. What do you think?
The former top IT official to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pleaded the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination – 90 times — in a federal court-ordered deposition on Oct. 24.
John Bentel, the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat, the office that handles information technology for the Office of the Secretary of State, was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to answer questions under oath to the lawyers at the government watchdog group Judicial Watch.
In his Aug. 19 order, Judge Sullivan wrote, “The Court is persuaded that Mr. Bentel should be deposed because the record in this case appears to contradict his sworn testimony before the [House Select] Benghazi Committee…. Specifically, Mr. Bentel testified that he was not aware that Secretary Clinton’s email account was housed on a private server until media reports in 2015…. However, several emails indicate Mr. Bentel knew about the private server as early as 2009.”
During his deposition on Monday, Bentel was asked such questions as whether Hillary Clinton was “paying his legal fees, offered him employment, or other financial incentives,” said Judicial Watch in a press release. There were over 90 questions and Bentel answered, “On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights.”
This was some time ago, so to recap for those not familiar with the story; most of the lawsuits over Trump University have gone no where. One judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was very aggressive in his rulings against Trump. So much so that Trump and his lawyers cried foul.
Trump also pointed out, rather inartfully, that the judge had done fund raising for La Raza Lawyers. La Raza means literally “the race” and their members have advocated for an open southern us border (but not for on open Southern Mexican border). A group that would be diametrically opposed to Trump’s advocated policy of controlled immigration.
In this Chicago Tribune article Carloyn Curiel, a former producer at ABC News, is quoted in defense of her cousin Gonzalo Curiel. She has flown in Air Force One, knows President Clinton and send her praise to Hillary and her campaign chairman John Podesta in this email below.
Now is this direct evidence of certain bias on the bench, of course not, but WikiLeaks emails have shown us in detail that many lawyers, foundations, mega-corps, government officials, academia, and members of the elite media are certainly one big happy family who tosses ethics out the window to help out the Clinton’s.
Do you ever wonder why there is, all too often, not much difference in policy between Bush/Clinton/Obama?
We all saw Hillary in the last debate, as well as Democrat for decades blast Wall Street, say that the gravy train is over, that they are going to clamp down on excesses and reign in the big money influence of Banks and Wall Street, only to watch as both Democrats and Republicans make the gravy train even larger? Well, you are about to catch a glimpse at just why that is.
Micheal Froman is an executive at CitiGroup and his company in part received massive bailouts form the tax payers after the mortgage collapse. So why is he picking, with almost 100% accuracy, who should be in Obama’s cabinet and who should be in many of the deputy positions as well?
In these emails (one & two) CitiGroup’s Micheal Froman sends Hillary for President campaign manager and former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff, John Podesta, an attached list of who he thinks should fill the major government positions. This is from the first page:
As you can see the list is something beyond prescient.
A careful look at Micheal Froman shows a revolving door from various positions on the Democratic Party, Wall Street and back again. In short, there is no line between the political leadership and in Wall Street/International Mega-Corps etc.
So the next time that a Democrat tells you that they are going to tax the rich, now you understand why they have been “taxing the rich” for the last 50 years and somehow managed to repeatedly miss the target.
A CIA panel Wednesday cleared agency officials of any wrongdoing when they accessed the computers of a Senate committee investigating the agency’s involvement in torture. The finding ended a yearlong dispute marked by angry accusations of “hacking” and criminal misconduct.
Instead, the panel — whose members were appointed by CIA Director John Brennan — faulted the agency’s own outgoing inspector general for suggesting in a report that there may have been grounds to discipline five officials at the agency.
The findings by the so-called CIA accountability board drew sharp objections from some Senate staffers who were involved in the torture report, citing it as yet another example of the CIA’s own inability to police itself.
Despicable. The IRS was punished in its budget for using their power as a political weapon, so their retaliation is to not take calls from tax payers, starting with the elderly and disabled.
In its annual Report to Congress today, the office of the National Taxpayer Advocate outlined a series of Internal Revenue Service failures. In the “Access to the IRS” section, the report details the trouble taxpayers face reaching the right person in order to meet their tax obligations:
“The IRS does not answer the phone at local offices and has even removed the option it once provided for taxpayers, including the elderly and disabled, to leave a message.”
Until 2013, taxpayers — including the elderly and disabled — were allowed to leave a voicemail requesting an in-person appointment. But now, elderly and disabled taxpayers attempting to navigate the automated helpline maze are asked to email the IRS to set up an appointment. The automated message instructs as follows:
“If you are disabled or elderly and require special accommodations for service, please email us at…”
But this leaves many taxpayers in the dark. As the report states:
“Demographic research data show only 57 percent of adults over age 65 use the Internet compared with 87 percent of all adults. According to 2010 Census data, only 41 percent of those with a non-severe disability use the Internet and only 22 percent of those with a severe disability age 65 and older use the Internet. For those without Internet access, the only viable ways to reach the IRS are by phone, or in person.”
On its helplines, the IRS is required to provide taxpayers the option to speak with a live person. But as the report states, the IRS won’t even answer questions about what lines are considered helplines:
“TAS [Taxpayer Advocate Service] twice inquired of the IRS in a formal information request whether it considers the 3709 lines to be ‘helplines’ for the purpose of § 3705(d) of RRA 98, which would require them to have an option to speak with a live person. TAS also asked what lines the IRS does consider to be helplines. Twice, the IRS declined to answer these questions.”
Last night’s presidential address on decreeing that millions of illegal aliens can stay here in violation of the law contained a deep deceit, buried in words that were, on the surface, true. President Obama’s rhetoric left the impression that at last, illegal immigrants would “pay their fair share.” From the official transcript:
We expect that those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded. So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes — you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is. (snip) (emphasis added)
…millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time.
The problem with this rhetoric is that very few illegal immigrants make enough money to actually pay taxes. Instead, their “fair share” will amount to a substantial gift from American citizen and legal immigrant taxpayers who have played by the rules.
…the vast majority of undocumented aliens don’t make enough in income to have a net income-tax liability. As I note in Forbes, a 2006 analysis by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, concludes that “we can be virtually certain that illegal immigrants earned less than $24,000 per year, on average, probably much less.” That amounts to around $29,000 in 2014 dollars, well below the threshold where an American has a net income-tax liability.
Not only will they not pay income taxes, many are likely to get a check from the IRS, thanks to the Orwellian-named Earned Income Tax Credit, which send a gift from taxpayers to low income families.
…once illegal immigrants are enrolled in the tax system, they’re would be entitled to EITC payments
The payments may be huge, and will rise each year.
According to the Internal Revenue Service, two parents with three or more children would receive up to $6,143 in 2014 if they earn less than $46,997.
A family with two kids, and an income of $20,000, would receive $14,590 in taxpayer funds this year alone. Parents who earn less than the threshold would get $3,305 if they have one child, and $5,460 if they have two children.
The EITC program is already poorly monitored and may be subject to large amounts of fraud, according to critics.
Another study says that 47 percent of legal and illegal immigrants and their children are classified as living in poverty or in near-poverty, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reduced annual immigration.
In addition, the Social Security trust fund will lose billions. Roy explains:
…many illegals have fake Social Security numbers that their employers use to pay payroll taxes on their behalf. Century estimates that “about $6 billion in annual payroll taxes are allocated to non-existent Social Security accounts. . . .
Instead of subsidizing Social Security, these illegals will now be in a position to claim benefits, likely far in excess of what they will pay into the system.
The first person President Obama is in conflict with is President Obama who has stated no less than 22 times himself that the action he took tonight was illegal and unconstitutional. We have posted a transcript of each one below at the bottom of this post, but here is some of the video so you can see for yourself courtesy of the Washington Post fact Checker who called Obama’s action “a royal flip flop:
With the White House poised to grant executive amnesty any day now despite the American people’s staunch opposition, on Sunday President Obama was asked about the many, many statements he made in the past about his inability to unilaterally change or ignore immigration law. His response was astonishingly brazen: “Actually, my position hasn’t changed. When I was talking to the advocates, their interest was in me, through executive action, duplicating the legislation that was stalled in Congress.”
This is a flagrant untruth: “In fact, most of the questions that were posed to the president over the past several years were about the very thing that he is expected to announce within a matter of days,” reportedThe New York Times. “[T]he questions actually specifically addressed the sorts of actions that he is contemplating now,” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker agreed, awarding President Obama the rare “Upside-Down Pinocchio,” which signifies “a major-league flip-flop.” Even FactCheck.orgpiled on.
President Obama is once again trying to mislead Americans, but he can’t run from what he’s said over and over (and over) again. Not only are Americans not stupid – they can read:
“I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with [the president] trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.” (3/31/08)
“We’ve got a government designed by the Founders so that there’d be checks and balances. You don’t want a president who’s too powerful or a Congress that’s too powerful or a court that’s too powerful. Everybody’s got their own role. Congress’s job is to pass legislation. The president can veto it or he can sign it. … I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.” (5/19/08)
“Comprehensive reform, that’s how we’re going to solve this problem. … Anybody who tells you it’s going to be easy or that I can wave a magic wand and make it happen hasn’t been paying attention to how this town works.” (5/5/10)
“[T]here are those in the immigrants’ rights community who have argued passionately that we should simply provide those who are [here] illegally with legal status, or at least ignore the laws on the books and put an end to deportation until we have better laws. … I believe such an indiscriminate approach would be both unwise and unfair. It would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision. And this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration. And it would also ignore the millions of people around the world who are waiting in line to come here legally. Ultimately, our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.” (7/1/10)
“I do have an obligation to make sure that I am following some of the rules. I can’t simply ignore laws that are out there. I’ve got to work to make sure that they are changed.” (10/14/10)
“I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the Executive Branch to make it happen. I’m committed to making it happen, but I’ve got to have some partners to do it. … The main thing we have to do to stop deportations is to change the laws. … [T]he most important thing that we can do is to change the law because the way the system works – again, I just want to repeat, I’m president, I’m not king. If Congress has laws on the books that says that people who are here who are not documented have to be deported, then I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources, to focus on people who are really causing problems as a opposed to families who are just trying to work and support themselves. But there’s a limit to the discretion that I can show because I am obliged to execute the law. That’s what the Executive Branch means. I can’t just make the laws up by myself. So the most important thing that we can do is focus on changing the underlying laws.” (10/25/10)
“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the President, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job. But I can advocate for changes in the law so that we have a country that is both respectful of the law but also continues to be a great nation of immigrants. … With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed …. [W]e’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.” (3/28/11)
“I can’t solve this problem by myself. … [W]e’re going to have to have bipartisan support in order to make it happen. … I can’t do it by myself. We’re going to have to change the laws in Congress, but I’m confident we can make it happen.” (4/20/11)
“I know some here wish that I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how democracy works. See, democracy is hard. But it’s right. Changing our laws means doing the hard work of changing minds and changing votes, one by one.” (4/29/11)
“Sometimes when I talk to immigration advocates, they wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how a democracy works. What we really need to do is to keep up the fight to pass genuine, comprehensive reform. That is the ultimate solution to this problem. That’s what I’m committed to doing.” (5/10/11)
“I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books …. Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.” (7/25/11)
“So what we’ve tried to do is within the constraints of the laws on the books, we’ve tried to be as fair, humane, just as we can, recognizing, though, that the laws themselves need to be changed. … The most important thing for your viewers and listeners and readers to understand is that in order to change our laws, we’ve got to get it through the House of Representatives, which is currently controlled by Republicans, and we’ve got to get 60 votes in the Senate. … Administratively, we can’t ignore the law. … I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. We are doing everything we can administratively. But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce. And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true. … We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it. And if all the attention is focused away from the legislative process, then that is going to lead to a constant dead-end. We have to recognize how the system works, and then apply pressure to those places where votes can be gotten and, ultimately, we can get this thing solved.” (9/28/11)
In June 2012, President Obama unilaterally granted deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), allowing “eligible individuals who do not present a risk to national security or public safety … to request temporary relief from deportation proceedings and apply for work authorization.” He then argued that he had already done everything he could legally do on his own:
“Now, what I’ve always said is, as the head of the executive branch, there’s a limit to what I can do. Part of the reason that deportations went up was Congress put a whole lot of money into it, and when you have a lot of resources and a lot more agents involved, then there are going to be higher numbers. What we’ve said is, let’s make sure that you’re not misdirecting those resources. But we’re still going to, ultimately, have to change the laws in order to avoid some of the heartbreaking stories that you see coming up occasionally. And that’s why this continues to be a top priority of mine. … And we will continue to make sure that how we enforce is done as fairly and justly as possible. But until we have a law in place that provides a pathway for legalization and/or citizenship for the folks in question, we’re going to continue to be bound by the law. … And so part of the challenge as President is constantly saying, ‘what authorities do I have?’” (9/20/12)
“We are a nation of immigrants. … But we’re also a nation of laws. So what I’ve said is, we need to fix a broken immigration system. And I’ve done everything that I can on my own[.]” (10/16/12)
“I’m not a king. I am the head of the executive branch of government. I’m required to follow the law. And that’s what we’ve done. But what I’ve also said is, let’s make sure that we’re applying the law in a way that takes into account people’s humanity. That’s the reason that we moved forward on deferred action. Within the confines of the law we said, we have some discretion in terms of how we apply this law.” (1/30/13)
“I’m not a king. You know, my job as the head of the executive branch ultimately is to carry out the law. And, you know, when it comes to enforcement of our immigration laws, we’ve got some discretion. We can prioritize what we do. But we can’t simply ignore the law. When it comes to the dreamers, we were able to identify that group and say, ‘These folks are generally not a risk. They’re not involved in crime. … And so let’s prioritize our enforcement resources.’ But to sort through all the possible cases of everybody who might have a sympathetic story to tell is very difficult to do. This is why we need comprehensive immigration reform. To make sure that once and for all, in a way that is, you know, ratified by Congress, we can say that there is a pathway to citizenship for people who are staying out of trouble, who are trying to do the right thing, who’ve put down roots here. … My job is to carry out the law. And so Congress gives us a whole bunch of resources. They give us an order that we’ve got to go out there and enforce the laws that are on the books. … If this was an issue that I could do unilaterally I would have done it a long time ago. … The way our system works is Congress has to pass legislation. I then get an opportunity to sign it and implement it.” (1/30/13)
“This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed. And Congress right now has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system. And what that means is that we have certain obligations to enforce the laws that are in place even if we think that in many cases the results may be tragic.” (2/14/13)
“I think that it is very important for us to recognize that the way to solve this problem has to be legislative. I can do some things and have done some things that make a difference in the lives of people by determining how our enforcement should focus. … And we’ve been able to provide help through deferred action for young people …. But this is a problem that needs to be fixed legislatively.” (7/16/13)
“My job in the executive branch is supposed to be to carry out the laws that are passed. Congress has said ‘here is the law’ when it comes to those who are undocumented, and they’ve allocated a whole bunch of money for enforcement. And, what I have been able to do is to make a legal argument that I think is absolutely right, which is that given the resources that we have, we can’t do everything that Congress has asked us to do. What we can do is then carve out the DREAM Act folks, saying young people who have basically grown up here are Americans that we should welcome. … But if we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally. So that’s not an option. … What I’ve said is there is a there’s a path to get this done, and that’s through Congress.” (9/17/13)
“[I]f, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws. That’s part of our tradition. And so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws. And what I’m proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal that you want to achieve. … It is not simply a matter of us just saying we’re going to violate the law. That’s not our tradition. The great thing about this country is we have this wonderful process of democracy, and sometimes it is messy, and sometimes it is hard, but ultimately, justice and truth win out.” (11/25/13)
“I am the Champion-in-Chief of comprehensive immigration reform. But what I’ve said in the past remains true, which is until Congress passes a new law, then I am constrained in terms of what I am able to do. What I’ve done is to use my prosecutorial discretion, because you can’t enforce the laws across the board for 11 or 12 million people, there aren’t the resources there. What we’ve said is focus on folks who are engaged in criminal activity, focus on people who are engaged in gang activity. Do not focus on young people, who we’re calling DREAMers …. That already stretched my administrative capacity very far. But I was confident that that was the right thing to do. But at a certain point the reason that these deportations are taking place is, Congress said, ‘you have to enforce these laws.’ They fund the hiring of officials at the department that’s charged with enforcing. And I cannot ignore those laws any more than I could ignore, you know, any of the other laws that are on the books. That’s why it’s so important for us to get comprehensive immigration reform done this year.” (3/6/14)
“I think that I never have a green light [to push the limits of executive power]. I’m bound by the Constitution; I’m bound by separation of powers. There are some things we can’t do. Congress has the power of the purse, for example. … Congress has to pass a budget and authorize spending.So I don’t have a green light. … My preference in all these instances is to work with Congress, because not only can Congress do more, but it’s going to be longer-lasting.” (8/6/14)
“The one [a president] can confer no privileges whatever; the other [the king] can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies.” – Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 69
Lie #1: Every President has Taken Executive Action on Immigration: No other president has ever issued an amnesty of anywhere near this scope, created it out of thin air, or built it upon a prior executive action instead of a statute. And in the case of President Eisenhower, his executive action was to deport 80,000 illegal immigrants.
Lie #2: Illegal Immigrant Crossings are Down: Actually, this is the third straight year that border crossings have gone up, not to mention the entirely new wave from Central America.
Lie #3: It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently: Under the royal edict, the work permits can be renewed every three years, and most likely, they will be renewed at the same 99.5% acceptance rate as DACA applications. And once they get Social Security cards, they are going nowhere. So yes, this is permanent. And yes, they will be able to get green cards, which puts them on an automatic path to citizenship: “we are reducing the time that families are separated while obtaining their green cards. Undocumented immigrants who are immediate relatives of lawful permanent residents or sons or daughters of US citizens can apply to get a waiver if a visa is available.”
Lie #4: Only 5 Million: Make no mistake about it. Obama’s illegal amnesty will not just apply to 5 million individuals. It will apply by default to all 12-20 million illegals in the country as well as the millions more who will now come here to enjoy the permanent cessation of borders and sovereignty. Given the numerous options for people to become eligible for amnesty, ICE and CPB will be restricted from enforcing the law against anyone because each individual has to be afforded the opportunity to present themselves and apply for status. There is no way those who were here for less than 5 years will be deported and there’s no way the new people rushing the border and overstaying their visas will be repatriated.
Lie #5: Deport Felons: Obama claims he is going to focus on deporting felons. Yet, he has done the opposite. 36,000 convicted criminal aliens were released last year, 80,000 criminal aliens encountered by ICE weren’t even placed into deportation proceedings, 167,000 criminal aliens who were ordered deported are still at large, 341,000 criminal aliens released by ICE without deportation orders are known to be free and at large in the US. Again, this is cessation of deportations for everyone. They are leaving no illegal behind.
Lie #6: Don’t deport families: Obama is playing the family card. It works like this: people are encouraged to come here illegally, Obama grants them amnesty, then their relatives all get to come, even though they would otherwise be ineligible under public charge laws. Yet, at the same time, because the bureaucracy will be flooded with applications of illegals, and those are the applications that will be prioritized, those families who came here legally will have to wait longer to be united. There is no longer an incentive to enter the legal immigration process.
Lie #7: They have to pay taxes to stay: Aside from the absurd notion that they would turn someone away for not paying taxes, almost every one of these illegal immigrants lacks a high enough income to incur a net positive tax liability. Hence, by paying taxes, he actually means they will collect refundable tax credits!
Lie #8: Background Checks: Just the thought of a criminal background check of people coming from the third world on a lawless program is a joke. But the reality is that Obama has already done this with DACA, and 99.5% of applications were approved, including those of criminals.
Lie #9: Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration at the Border: Obama promises to beef up resources at the border. But as we’ve seen over the past few years, what good are more agents if they are explicitly intimidated into turning a blind eye. Moreover, there is no promise to build a fence or implement a visa tracking system, so any talk of enforcement is an insult to our intelligence. Moreover, he is unilaterally abolishing the Secure Communities program, the only successful interior enforcement program left after he abolished 287g state-federal cooperation in 2012. At a time when we are facing threats from Islamic terror and deadly diseases, this invitation to the world will present a security nightmare.
Lie #10: Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger: It’s great to see him quoting the Bible for once, but nice try. There are different variations of this verse throughout the Bible, but each one uses the Hebrew word “Ger” to describe what Obama translates as “stranger.” A Ger is a convert to Judaism. The commandment was not referring to people who illegally migrate to a nation state. And more importantly, it is downright offensive to Americans to insinuate that not granting them benefits is tantamount to oppression, especially given the fact that they have been the biggest recipients of our generous legal system. Moreover, if there is oppression taking place it is to the American taxpayer and worker and those who suffer from gangs like MS-13.
“…it has become apparent that the IRS did not undertake any significant efforts to obtain the emails from alternative sources following the discovery that the emails were missing”
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved. The IRS is fighting Judicial Watch’s efforts to force testimony and document production about the IRS’ loss of records in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation about the IRS targeting of Tea Party and other opponents of President Obama(Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv-1559)). The lawsuit is before U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan.
In its September 17 Motion for Limited Discovery, Judicial Watch argues that, despite twoorders, the IRS had consistently failed to provide information detailing how “the missing emails could be retrieved from other sources and produced to Judicial Watch.” On October 17, IRS attorneys asked the court to deny the Judicial Watch request, even while admitting that additional Congressional requests “could result in additional documents being located ….”
In its October 27 Reply in Support of Motion for Limited Discovery, Judicial Watch argued that declarations submitted by the IRS in response to the Judge Sullivan’s orders “fail to answer important questions about the missing emails:”
[I]t has become apparent that the IRS did not undertake any significant efforts to obtain the emails from alternative sources following the discovery that the emails were missing. The emails are potentially responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA requests, and the IRS’s failure to search for them in other recordkeeping systems raises material questions of fact about whether the agency has conducted a reasonable search.
Judicial Watch lawyers reviewed the IRS court filings and concluded that the agency “did not undertake any significant efforts to obtain the emails.”
IRS attorneys conceded that they had failed to search the agency’s servers for missing emails because they decided that “the servers would not result in the recovery of any information.” They admitted they had failed to search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because they had “no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering” the missing emails. And they conceded that they had not searched the government-wide back-up system because they had “no reason to believe such a system … even exists.”
The IRS admitted to Judge Sullivan that the agency failed to “submit declarations about any of the foregoing items because it had no reason to believe that they were sources from which to recover information lost as a result of Lerner’s hard drive failure.” [Emphasis added] Department of Justice attorneys for the IRS had previously told Judicial Watch that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. In the October federal court filing, the IRS does not deny that the government-wide back-up system exists, and acknowledges to the court that 760 other email “servers” have been discovered but had not been searched. The IRS also refuses to disclose the names of the IRS officials who may have information about the IRS scandal, citing unspecified threats. The IRS says it pulled documents about the scandal from various employees into a “Congressional database” and that it has only searched this one “database” for missing records. Incredibly, the IRS has not searched any of the IRS’s regular computer systems for any missing records and admits that it has only searched a “database” that it knows does not contain the missing records being sought by the court, Judicial Watch, and Congress.
Rather than provide information to Judicial Watch and the court under oath about the missing records, the IRS intends for Judicial Watch to wait indefinitely for its production of the records. Judicial Watch argues the IRS’ continuing “failure to provide complete information highlights the need for limited discovery. Neither Judicial Watch nor the court should have to rely on incomplete transcripts, out-of-court conversations, or the other, limited information Judicial Watch’s attorneys have been able to glean from congressional correspondence, media reports, and the internet to determine what system of records the IRS should reasonably search to recover the missing emails. As in all FOIA litigation, an “asymmetrical distribution of knowledge” exists between the IRS on the one hand, and Judicial Watch and the court on the other. It is precisely because the IRS has refused to provide pertinent, complete information that limited discovery is necessary.”
“The Obama IRS couldn’t care less about the federal court’s orders to provide full information about the ‘missing’ Lois Lerner emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Instead, the IRS, with the help of a compromised Justice Department, has engaged in a series of transparently evasive distractions. The IRS would have Judicial Watch wait for years before we can ask questions about the cover-up that is going on now. The IRS thinks it can game a federal court, Congress, and the American people. Having delayed accountability for over two years, the Obama administration is prepared to stonewall on the IRS targeting of Obama’s ‘enemies list’ until after the 2016 presidential election. Judicial Watch’s lawsuit can continue to break through this obstruction of justice, especially if the court approves our effort to put select Obama officials under oath.”
President Barack Obama once declared that an influx of illegal immigrants will harm “the wages of blue-collar Americans” and “put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
“[T]here’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border—a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before,” then-Senator Obama wrote in his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”
”Not all these fears are irrational,” he wrote.
“The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” Obama noted. “If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
If these feel like the words of one of Obama’s opponents, it’s because they’re the exact argument the president’s critics have been making as he now rushes to announce a sweeping executive order that would give work permits to millions of illegal immigrants in the country.
In the passage, Obama also reveals that he personally feels “patriotic resentment” when he sees Mexican flags at immigration rallies.
The number of Obamacare enrollments for top health insurer Aetna is plummeting, according to a report from Investor’s Business Daily.
Aetna’s enrollment reached 720,000 by May 20, after the final end to the the extended open enrollment period. But by the end of June Aetna had less than 600,000 paying customers, IBD reports, and the company expects paying customers to fall to “just over 500,000″ by the end of 2015. That would be a drop of just under 30 percent from the May sign-up numbers — the last time the Obama administration released its official Obamacare enrollment tally.
Aetna’s reported drop-off rate appears to be more extensive than other companies. Cigna reported that between both its exchange customers and those in the private individual market, it expects to lose around 20,000 paying customers throughout the year, out of 300,000.
The federal government released monthly enrollment reports throughout Obamacare’s first open enrollment period, but stopped offering details when widespread enrollment ended in mid-May. But Americans with certain qualifying life changes can still sign up for coverage on an Obamacare exchange at any time, and customers are regularly dropping coverage as well.
But the administration refuses to give out any details on the total enrollment and has never released information on the percentage of Obamacare sign-ups that followed through and paid their first premiums to activate their coverage. Most insurance companies have reported that by the end of the open enrollment period, only around 85 percent of those who signed up on Obamacare exchanges ended up buying a health insurance plan.
Now There Can Be No Doubt: Obamacare Has Increased Non-Group Premiums In Nearly All States
Remember this categorical assurance from President Obama?
“We’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. . . . We’ll do it by the end of my first term as president of the United States”
OK, it’s probably a little unfair to take some June 2008 campaign “puffery” literally–even though it was reiterated by candidate Obama’s economic policy advisor, Jason Furman in a sit-down with a New York Times reporter: “‘We think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it.” Moreover, President Obama subsequently doubled-down on his promise in July 2012, assuring small business owners “your premiums will go down.” Fortunately, the Washington Post fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, honestly awarded the 2012 claim Three Pinocchios (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”).
Unfortunately, this has never settled the debate. When the Society of Actuaries estimated spring 2013 that the ACA would result in increasing claims costs by an average of 32 percent nationally by 2017, such estimates could be dismissed as “projections” since at the time of this study, actual premiums in the Exchanges had not yet been announced. A subsequent plethora of studies showed there had been double-digit increases in premiums (when comparing actual Exchange premiums to previously-prevailing premiums in the non-group market). However, virtually all of these studies focused only on Exchange premiums rather than premiums in the entire non-group market (only half of which consists of Exchange coverage). As a consequence, Obamacare proponents tended to dismiss these studies either as partisan attacks or methodologically limited, making what amounts to apples-to-oranges comparisons.
However, a new study from the well-respected and non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research (and published by Brookings Institution), overcomes the limitations of these prior studies by examining what happened to premiums in the entire non-group market. The bottom line? In 2014, premiums in the non-group market grew by 24.4% compared to what they would have been without Obamacare. Of equal importance, this careful state-by-state assessment showed that premiums rose in all but 6 states (including Washington DC). It’s worth unpacking this study a bit to understand the ramification of these findings.
Non-Group Premiums Rose in 45 States Due to Obamacare
The non-group market can only be accurately assessed on a state-by-state basis. Obamacare. The law creates a single risk pool in each state for non-group coverage. That is, health insurers can sell policies inside or outside the Exchanges but they all are part of the same risk pool. Unlike virtually all other studies that have been conducted to date, this new study examined premium data from both Exchange and non-Exchange plans, i.e., providing a picture of the complete non-group market rather than one segment. This is crucially important since in nearly one third of states (16), Exchange coverage constitutes 40% or less of the entire non-group market (Table 1).
Of equal importance, unlike prior studies which simply compared pre-Obamacare premiums in 2013 to actual premiums offered on Exchanges in 2014, this new study isolates the causal impact of Obamacare statistically by using trend data in each state to figure out what non-group premiums in 2014 would have been in the absence of Obamacare. Thus, critics could dismiss many other so-called “pre-/post” studies by effectively saying “Well, premiums in the non-group have always gone up by a large amount, so what’s happening under Obamacare is no different.” Such criticisms cannot be levied at this study. All of the percentage changes shown in the chart below represent the net change attributable to Obamacare after accounting for all the other factors that would have made premiums go up.[1]
Clearly, the adverse impact of Obamacare on non-group premiums varies sizably across states. The law is estimated to result in lower premiums in only 6 states. However, it should be noted that while the author presented premium estimates for California and New Jersey, the data for these two states is incomplete due to anomalous data reporting requirements. Thus, the large estimated premium decline of 37.5% in New Jersey likely would be different were full data available, but there is no way of telling by how much.
What is disturbing is to see premium increases in excess of 35% in 9 states, including some of the nation’s largest states (Florida and Texas). Remember, these are increases above and beyond normal premium trends. No one can credibly claim that these massive premium increases would have happened anyway since the study was specifically designed to isolate the law’s impacts from all the other factors that have driven up premiums in recent years.
Taxpayers Will Pay About 24% More for Exchange Subsidies Due to Obamacare-induced Premium Increases.
Senator Durbin is the second most powerful Democrat in the Senate. Illinois has the highest taxes in America so companies are leaving in droves. Time to whip out the thug card….
Score another victory this week for the Senate’s lead political thug, Dick Durbin. The second-highest-ranking Senate Democrat and lead political henchman coerced retail giant Walgreens to stay in Illinois and not move as planned to Switzerland.
The government’s intimidation campaign against Walgreens was so heavy-handed that it would make Richard Nixon blush. Walgreens was set to move in order to reduce its tax liability and avoid the 40 percent income tax rate it pays as an Illinois-based corporation. This would have saved the company and its mostly American shareholders an estimated $4 billion over five years.
But back in July Mr. Durbin sent an astounding letter to Walgreens CEO Gregory Wasson warning the company, and demanding that it abandon its plans to relocate.
He lambasted the company’s move as a “clever tax dodge,” and threatened that “deeply patriotic” customers would not “support Walgreen’s decision to turn its back on the United States.” He added, subtly, that “nearly all of your $2.5 billion in profits earned last year were from sales to U.S. taxpaying customers.”
That was followed by other threats of political retaliation. “Much of Walgreens financial success was built on programs and infrastructure provided by the U.S. government” and “the future success of Walgreens will continue to depend on U.S. taxpayers and government-funded programs.” Just in case Mr. Wasson didn’t get the point, he reminded him that “nearly 25% of Walgreens profits were from U.S-funded Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
Unfortunately, our elected officials in Congress now feel they have the political power to carry out these threats with impunity.
Now Mr. Durbin is celebrating the Walgreens shakedown. The big losers here were the shareholders — including thousands and thousands of middle class Americans — whose retirement funds include Walgreens stock. The stock fell in the 24 hours after the announcement by more than 10 percent and so shareholders lost at least $6 billion on the announcement. That’s a lot of financial wreckage from one single senator.
In case there is any doubt that Mr. Durbin’s threats were heard, the statement by Walgreens about why it was not moving after all was revealing. The firm cited big risks of “consumer backlash and political ramifications, including the risk to our government book of business.” In other words: We got your message, Mr. Durbin.
So much for Separation of Powers. After the revelations of Ed Snowden, Sharyl Atkisson and more, can anyone seriously believe that Members of Congress and their staff are not under electronic surveillance by the executive? Remember when Democrats were caught with tapes of Newt Gingrich’s phone calls?
With the little that we have learned, what we don’t know is likely stunning.
CIA officials improperly hacked the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computers as staffers compiled a report on “enhanced interrogation” techniques, the spy agency’s inspector general has concluded.
In a statement shared with The Hill, CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said the internal watchdog determined “that some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” between the agency and the committee about access to the network they used to share documents.
CIA chief John Brennan told Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) about the findings “and apologized to them for such actions by CIA officers,” Boyd added.
Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a member of the committee, quickly retorted on Twitter that the watchdog’s report “shows John Brennan misled [the] public, whose interests I have championed.”
“I will fight for change at the CIA,” he added.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), another member of the panel, called for Brennan to publicly apologize and give “a full accounting of how this occurred and a commitment there will be no further attempts to undermine congressional oversight of CIA activities,” he said in a statement.
The admission is a stunning turn of events in the standoff between the two bodies and directly contradicts Brennan’s earlier claims that the agency would never snoop on the committee’s computers.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan said in March, soon after Feinstein raised allegations that CIA operatives had been unconstitutionally prying on her panel’s work. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”
Feinstein claimed at the time that operatives had accessed a computer network established in 2009 for committee staff to review classified CIA materials related to the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, such as waterboarding. Those interrogation methods were authorized during the Bush administration but have since been prohibited.
The documents were used to produce a classified 6,300-page study that reportedly shows the techniques were conducted more harshly and more commonly than was previously understood. The executive summary of the report is now being redacted for release to the public, possibly as soon as next month.
Feinstein on Thursday said that the search of her staff’s computers was “in violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” though she declined to pin the blame on Brennan.
“Director Brennan apologized for these actions and submitted the IG [inspector general’s] report to an accountability board,” she said in a brief statement. “These are positive first steps. This IG report corrects the record and it is my understanding that a declassified report will be made available to the public shortly.”
An unclassified summary of the inspector general’s report released on Thursday claimed that the five CIA employees – two lawyers and three information technology staffers – “improperly accesses or caused access” to the shared network.
It also alleged that the three IT staffers “demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities” in interviews with the agency watchdog.
Tensions over the interrogations report have strained relations between the Senate panel and the CIA. Earlier this month, the Justice Department declined to take up criminal charges on either Feinstein’s charges or a rebuttal from the CIA that Senate staffers had improperly taken classified documents from a secure Virginia facility.
To clear up the mistrust, Brennan has passed along the findings of the IG report to an accountability board chaired by former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who used to be a member of the Intelligence Committee.
“This board will review the [Office of the Inspector General’s] report, conduct interviews as needed, and provide the director with recommendations that, depending on its findings, could include potential disciplinary measures and/or steps to address systemic issues,” Boyd said.
At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest gave a robust defense of Brennan. Asked if the hacking incident had hurt Brennan’s standing as CIA director, Earnest responded: “Absolutely not.”
“He has been candid about the inconsistencies that the IG found,” Earnest said.
Earnest said Brennan appointed an accountability board to look into the matter further and has “taken all the responsible steps to address this situation. That’s the kind of proactive leadership the president would expect.”
Some members of the president’s party, however, said it’s time for new leadership at the CIA.
Udall said that blame for the incident lay with Brennan and his “apparent inability to find any flaws in the agency he leads.”
“From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in John Brennan,” Udall added.
What is Operation Check Point? It is very simple, you own a gun store or some other business that Democrats don’t like, so the Obama Administration pressures (read threaten) banks and credit card companies to stop doing business with you.
This is yet another assault on not just freedom of commerce, but freedom of conscience and association as well which is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Thirty members of Congress demanded today that the Department of Justice launch an “immediate investigation” into the agency’s own Operation Choke Point and those involved in creating and implementing the initiative against enterprises that are out of favor with the Obama administration.
Led by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., the 30 lawmakers sent a letter to Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, and Robin Ashton, head of its Office of Professional Responsibility, calling Choke Point a “blatant abuse of legal authority.”
“This situation merits your full and immediate attention, and we request that you launch a comprehensive investigation on Operation Choke Point and the individuals charged with creating and carrying out this unprecedented initiative,” Luetkemeyer and the 29 other lawmakers write.
The letter from House members follows one sent to the Justice Department earlier this month by six Republican senators, demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder release information about Operation Choke Point.
The House members want a response to their request for an investigation by Nov. 12.
“There is no doubt in my mind that [Justice Department] officials have abused their authority to address consumer fraud issues while misleading business owners by claiming financial institutions have not suffered any actual losses,”Luetkemeyer said in a press release.
Continue reading and examine the letters lawmakers sent to the Obama Administration demanding answers HERE.
As we have stated in the previous several posts, the government has no business regulating, or even trying to regulate political speech.
What you will read below is the beginning of several very creepy efforts to destroy freedom of political speech and conscience. Those efforts will likely manifest themselves in three ways:
I – First and most obviously, this “study” is designed to develop techniques to identify the political leanings of Twitter users. That way opinion leaders and top influencers can be singled out for IRS audits like they did to Becky Garritson; or spied upon like they did to reporters James Rosen, Sharyl Attkisson, as well as the entire Washington Bureau of the Associated Press.
This went as far as the government putting classified documents on Sharyl Attkisson’s computer in case they ever decided to charge her with possession of classified documents. Perhaps you are spreading messages someone doesn’t like or you grow to be an influencer on Twitter; so they sneak a little kiddy porn on your PC using government hacking tools and you go bye bye.
II – The study will “determine”, by the standards of “truth” as defined by the Democrats in power who paid for it, what is “true” or not. This is so obvious that it does not even need to be said, but we will say it anyway. Who lies more than government and politicians? Any attempt by them to declare something true or false will be done by pure political motivation. Even if that is not the intent of this study the results and resulting software will be used for just such a purpose, it is only a matter of time.
III – The study will determine what messages propagate through Twitter via mass fake accounts and “astroturfing” vs how messages that genuinely go viral propagate. This will be done for the purpose of perfecting methods of astroturfing to further manipulate and control the messages you see and hear on social media.
By Ajit Pai – Ajit Pai is a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
If you take to Twitter to express your views on a hot-button issue, does the government have an interest in deciding whether you are spreading “misinformation’’? If you tweet your support for a candidate in the November elections, should taxpayer money be used to monitor your speech and evaluate your “partisanship’’?
My guess is that most Americans would answer those questions with a resounding no. But the federal government seems to disagree. The National Science Foundation , a federal agency whose mission is to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense,” is funding a project to collect and analyze your Twitter data.
The project is being developed by researchers at Indiana University, and its purported aim is to detect what they deem “social pollution” and to study what they call “social epidemics,” including how memes — ideas that spread throughout pop culture — propagate. What types of social pollution are they targeting? “Political smears,” so-called “astroturfing” and other forms of “misinformation.”
Named “Truthy,” after a term coined by TV host Stephen Colbert, the project claims to use a “sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex network models” to distinguish between memes that arise in an “organic manner” and those that are manipulated into being.
But there’s much more to the story. Focusing in particular on political speech, Truthy keeps track of which Twitter accounts are using hashtags such as #teaparty and #dems. It estimates users’ “partisanship.” It invites feedback on whether specific Twitter users, such as the Drudge Report, are “truthy” or “spamming.” And it evaluates whether accounts are expressing “positive” or “negative” sentiments toward other users or memes.
The Truthy team says this research could be used to “mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”
Hmm. A government-funded initiative is going to “assist in the preservation of open debate” by monitoring social media for “subversive propaganda” and combating what it considers to be “the diffusion of false and misleading ideas”? The concept seems to have come straight out of a George Orwell novel.
The NSF has already poured nearly $1 million into Truthy. To what end? Why is the federal government spending so much money on the study of your Twitter habits?
Some possible hints as to Truthy’s real motives emerge in a 2012 paper by the project’s leaders, in which they wrote ominously of a “highly-active, densely-interconnected constituency of right-leaning users using [Twitter] to further their political views.”
Truthy reminds me of another agency-funded study, in which the Federal Communications Commission sought to insert itself into newsrooms across the country. That project purported to examine whether news outlets were meeting what researchers determined were the “critical information needs” of the American people. And it involved sending out government-funded researchers to ask editors and reporters questions about their news philosophy and editorial judgment.
Once this study was brought to the attention of the American people, howls of protest from across the political spectrum led the FCC to scrap the project — thankfully. The episode reaffirmed that the American people, not their government, determine what their critical information needs are and that the First Amendment means the government has no place in the newsroom.
That principle applies here. Truthy’s entire premise is false. In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading or a political smear. Nor should the government be involved in any effort to squint for and squelch what is deemed to be “subversive propaganda.” Instead, the merits of a viewpoint should be determined by the public through robust debate. I had thought we had learned these lessons long ago.
Now, I do understand the motivation behind this scheme, even though I disagree with it. To those who wish to shape the nation’s political dialogue, social media is dangerous. No longer can a cadre of elite gatekeepers pick and choose the ideas to which Americans will be exposed. But today’s democratization of political speech is a good thing. It brings into the arena countless Americans whose voices previously might have received inadequate or slanted exposure.
The federal government has no business spending your hard-earned money on a project to monitor political speech on Twitter. How should it instead have reacted when funding for Truthy was proposed? The proper response wouldn’t have required anywhere near 140 characters. It could have been, and should have been, #absolutelynot.
At some point, a compendium of condemnations against the Obama administration’s record of media transparency (actually, opacity) must be assembled. Notable quotations in this vein come from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who said, “It is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering”; New York Times reporter James Risen, who said, “I think Obama hates the press”; and CBS News’s Bob Schieffer, who said, “This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush’s did, and his before that.”
USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page has added a sharper edge to this set of knives. Speaking Saturday at a White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) seminar, Page called the current White House not only “more restrictive” but also “more dangerous” to the press than any other in history, a clear reference to the Obama administration’s leak investigations and its naming of Fox News’s James Rosen as a possible “co-conspirator” in a violation of the Espionage Act.
The WHCA convened the event both to strategize over how to open up the byways of the self-proclaimed most transparent administration in history, as well as to compare war stories on the many ways in which it is not.
In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.
“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.
She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources.
Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”
The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.
The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.
“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”
Attkisson says her source — identified only as “Number One” — told her the spying was most likely not court-authorized because it went on far longer than most legal taps.
But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”
“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.
In her book, Attkisson says CBS lost interest in her coverage of the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and killed her stories of the federal “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.
UPDATE – Just as we predicted, Democrats in the Senate are floating a bill to allow the President to raise the debt limit in direct violation of Article I of the Constitution. The Democrats have written the bill so that it would take a super majority in both chambers to block the President from giving himself an unlimited credit card.
Congress is not a rubber stamp. What President Obama and the Democrats are doing is a frontal assault on separation of powers, Congress’s power and responsibility of oversight of the Executive Branch, and the budgetary authority of Congress
The Democratic Party is pining for a powerful post-constititional Executive Branch that can illegally line item veto, pick and choose who laws will and wont apply to – Chicago style, and seize power to legislate on its own.
Legislating On His Own
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, President Obama has taken it upon himself to change the law in ways he sees fit, a power that only Congress has under the Constitution. President Obama has given over 1,400 waivers to political allies be it groups or businesses which is illegal and corrupt.
The Grassley Amendment mandates that the Affordable Care Act apply to Congress just as it would to regular citizens; a law the President has waived under no constitutional authority whatsoever. He has done this in collusion with some in the congressional leadership and over the objection of some Republicans who believe doing so is unfair.
If a Republican president had behaved such a way Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media would be screaming for impeachment and enough Republicans would likely agree to get it done. Until this recent assault on the constitutional authority of Congress, Republicans have been somewhat timid in fear of being called “racist” by the praetorian media.
While Democrats would claim that Obama’s actions fall under the regulatory authority granted to the Executive Branch by Congress, regulatory authority is for the purpose of creating due process in carrying out the laws passed by Congress. It is not license to change the law or invent new laws unilaterally, nor is such authority permission to pick and choose winners and losers by deciding what parts will apply to who and who it will not. The President is seizing the power to legislate on his own and has been doing this more and more be it immigration laws, voting laws, domestic spying, and the list goes on.
UPDATE – Newt Gingrich: The President has decided that he wants to be “Legislator In Chief” – http://tiny.cc/wrtw4w
Many things are negotiable, equality under the law is not.
Assault on the Oversight and Budgetary Authority of Congress
Normally, under the regular order of appropriations and budgeting, committees in Congress will hold hearings on and then vote on how your money is spent, how much is spent, and review the stewardship of that spending after the fact with its constitutionally mandated power of oversight. This is how government is accountable to you and the representatives in Congress that you elect.
Through the committee and appropriations process the separate segmented appropriations measures are put together into a budget which sets the taxing and spending limits of various parts of the government. Next, the parts of the budget are reviewed and combined by certain standing committees in Congress such as the Budget Committee; that budget is then voted on by the entire House and Senate. Once passed the Budget is published and anyone can examine it. This is the process that Congress has generally used for the last 200 years and is why this process is called “regular order“.
Regular order makes sense. When you look at your budget at home, you look at each line item, see where your expenses are going and you make priorities to adjust your expenses so that you don’t over spend, right?
When President Obama was elected the Democrats began to refuse to even consider passing a budget, abandoning all regular order. Since the Democrats control the Senate no budgets have been passed.
The Democratic Party Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has said again and again that the House of Representatives has no right to pick and choose what it will fund and what it will not. Then Harry Reid and the Democrats started calling Republicans in the House hostage takers, anarchists, arsonists, terrorists, and every other “ists” you can think of. At the same time the Democrats have said they want an all or nothing blank check in the form of a continuing resolution instead of a budget.
Article I Section VII – All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives
Article I Section VIII – The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
Article I Section IX – No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The Constitution is clear that all bills dealing with revenue must originate in the House of Representatives; which also must pay the debts, set taxes, borrow money and as Section IX makes clear that the records must all be in a budget for the people to see.
By claiming that the House of Representatives does not have the right to do exactly what the Constitution instructs in plain English, the Democrats are trying to make an unconstitutional “new normal” where there are no budgets, no oversight as we have known it for two centuries, and just write gargantuan blank checks in the form of massive continuing resolutions(CR) for President Obama to spend as he sees fit.
It is for these reasons that there is nothing clean about the Democrat’s demand for a “clean CR”.
Senator Mike Lee, who is well-known to be one of the top lawyers in the country, speaks of this:
Now Democrats are combining the two power grabs above by saying that Congress has no right to revisit Obamacare because it was passed (without a single republican vote) after Obama was elected and that only President Obama has the right and the power to (illegally) change the law on his own.
Of course the very idea Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media are pushing, that Congress can never revisit a law, is silly on its face. Social Security and Medicare are laws that have been on the books for decades and Congress has changed those programs many times.
It is the job of each new Congress to look at existing law and make changes where the people’s representatives see fit. The very notion that one Chief Justice or one President can decide Obamacare’s fate and that the Congress cannot is laughable and yet the praetorian media has been advocating this very point of view every night since the partial government shutdown.
In an effort to keep members of his own party in line President Obama has illegally changed the law by executive fiat to give Members of Congress and their staff a 72% subsidy if they buy the expensive coverage on the Obamacare Exchange, other portions of the law do not apply to Congress as well.
The Obama Administration ordered federal police to close the open air WWII Memorial and went so far as to rent “barrycades” to keep visiting WWII vets out.
Republican Members of Congress assisted the aged vets in “storming” their own memorial. Park Rangers, who are veterans themselves, refused to lay a hand on our WWII heroes:
The Obama administration ordered Park Police to close even privately funded memorials, private businesses adjacent to them, and even ordered elderly couples to be ejected from their homes which are adjacent to Lake Mead. In doing so Democrats have blamed Republicans for these outrages and for the most part the praetorian media has gone along with it. None of these parks or memorials were closed in the 17 previous government shutdowns since 1976.
The administration has threatened military priests who attempt to give Mass during the partial shutdown with arrest, and the administration has ordered that thousands of Department of Defense workers be furloughed in spite of the fact that the Defense Department has already been paid for with a separate continuing resolution. Of course President Obama has ordered the military to keep his personal retreat at Camp David open while cutting football and baseball coverage from the Armed Forces Television.
Speaker Boehner is outraged by the administration’s behavior:
President Obama has deliberately tried to spook the markets which affects the savings of millions of Americans in hopes to damage the economy even worse so that he can also blame that on Republicans.
The latest attempt to spook the markets is to threaten default on the national debt if the House of Representatives doesn’t give him all of the power that he wants. The 14th Amendment demands that the President make the scheduled payments on the debt. The Treasury takes in almost $240 billion a month which is much more than enough to pay the debt, Social Security etc. President Obama would have to willingly decide to default on the debt.
President Obama has also said that it is unprecedented for the Congress to attach strings to a raising of the debt ceiling. In fact, Congress has done so dozens of times as that is their enumerated power under the Constitution. When Obama was a Senator he favored just such a tactic himself. The President’s lie was so over the top that McClatchy News, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Fox News have all reported that the President’s claims are bunk.
The New Republic, a political magazine that favors the Democratic Party, has suggested that President Obama use the military against TEA Party activists. Other media outlets who have historically slanted reporting to favor the Democratic party have found President’ Obama’s rather obvious falsehoods a threat to their own credibility and thus are sending messages that their willingness to spin for him has limits.
NBC’s Chuck Todd grilled Jay Carney on why the White House won’t accept some of these individual continuing resolutions passed by the House to fund portions of the government that will put some people back to work:
While Obamacare may offer an expensive policy, which is implemented more like a massive tax, in exchange for “deductible not met”, “claim denied”, & “procedure not covered”; this fight is about much more than Obamacare, it is about power. A massive swing of power from the representatives of the people to the President. This is genuine third world style authoritarian power play.
One might not feel the authoritarian chill as of yet, but just wait until the next debt ceiling or government spending fight that leads to a partial shutdown and the President decides to abuse the power of Obamacare to halt payments for medical visits and prescription drugs as leverage to get his way. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.
Editor’s Note: A reader sent a note asking, “What about the budgets that President Obama proposed and what about the budget that Harry Reid put up in March 2013?”
These are good questions but the answer is well known to those who have followed politics.
President Obama’s budgets got next to no support from his own caucus in the Senate as they were so outrageous that Democrats did not want to sign their name on it or be associated with it. Since the Senate Democrat Caucus would not back the House GOP budgets or the President’s budgets they died in the Senate.
After taking criticism for the abandonment of Regular Order for not passing any budgets for four years, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid put up an outrageous budget last March (2013) that was completely unserious, was opposed by four Democrat Senators, violated the Sequestor Law, and amounted to a political gag – as explained by The Hill:
The Senate-passed budget has $975 billion in new taxes, does not balance, and does not cut spending when the fact it turns off sequestration is taken into effect.
The Constitution is clear that tax bills MUST start in the House. Any tax increase that is not approved by the House first is a non-starter. Harry Reid putting up a budget that violated the Sequestor Law and imposes almost a trillion in new taxes was out of Regular Order. Of course Reid knew it, and so did those four Democrats who voted against such a stunt. Reid put up that “budget” to create the illusion of supporting Regular Order when the heat was on. This was no secret as press reports and political blogs reported as much.
UPDATE – Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accuses House Republicans of TREASON for not handing Obama a blank check CR http://tiny.cc/cs7q4w
UPDATE – Obama Administration hires private armed thugs to ring Independence Hall http://tiny.cc/9ybr4w
UPDATE – Senator Mike Lee: The best argument against Obamacare is the behavior of the Obama administration during the “shutdown”; DO WHAT I SAY OR ELSE:
[Editor’s Note – In this post we will be providing links to the many stories on this emerging scandal. This post will take some time to complete and will be continually updated for some time.]
In a nutshell the Obama Administration bugged an entire division at the Associated Press (AP) and many reporters at Fox News, including the parents of reporters. When asked if a national security leak could be justified into such a wide net of bugging computers, emails and phones former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who served four presidents, said that such an action “is inconceivable”.
Former AP Washington Chief Fournier: DOJ’s phone record seizure of reporters is “Unprecedented, chilling and plain stupid”
CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson (who exposed the “Fast n’ Furious” scandal) : My computer has been compromised – LINK – LINK.
US Attorney in Justice Department who targeted Fox News reporters a large Obama campaign donor – LINK.
Obama Administration targeted other Fox News employees – LINK. Tracking at least one’s every movement. Administration claimed that Fox broke the law by merely asking questions about the scandal. The Obama Administration used the Patriot Act “administrative subpoena” to carry out this abuse. Megyn Kelly comments on this nonsense:
Joseph Curl: CIA source says Fox News scandal the “4th Shoe”; says it goes much deeper; says White House also sitting on “something” that has top aides terrified – LINK.
Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on bugging Fox News and labeling Fox reporter James Rosen a “co-conspiritor” – LINK.
Karl Rove: This is how Eric Holder lied to Congress
James Rosen Comments
Ann Coulter goes through the history of “national security” when it comes to reporters under the Bush Administration vs the Obama Administration:
NBC’s Lisa Myers explains how the Obama Administration history of intimidating reporters and sources:
Obama Administration seized records of Fox News reporters parents
Attorney General Eric Holder’s “I don’t know syndrome” under oath:
MORE – IRS Chief Steven Miller: “I Can’t Remember” Who Is Responsible for Targeting Conservatives
Associated Press: Obama Administration has intimidated people from talking to us – LINK.
CNN outlines the timeline of how the Obama Administration accused Fox News reporter Jim Rosen of being a criminal to get his personal information and then lied about it:
Brit Hume: ‘Chilling’ Search of Fox Reporter Shows DOJ Treats ‘Ordinary News Gathering As Crime’
Megyn Kelly – Eric Holder misled Congress:
Kirsten Powers and Denis Prager on Obama’s war in critics:
More prominent liberals call for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation – LINK.
BUSTED – If At First You Don’t Succeed? Report: Holder Went Judge-Shopping for James Rosen Subpoena – LINK.
Senator Ted Cruz: Obama Administration does not respect the Bill of Rights. Eric Holder should resign. Obama should tell the truth. They are telling flat-out falsehoods:
Bob Woodward: I would not dismiss Benghazi as merely politics; compares it to Watergate:
IJR: You’re Right, Obama is No Nixon: Tricky Dick was an Amateur – LINK.
Senator Ted Cruz: Obama Administration does not respect the Bill of Rights. Eric Holder should resign. Obama should tell the truth. They are telling flat-out falsehoods:
Dr. Walter Williams: Why Americans deserve the IRS – LINK.
[Editor’s Note – It is rare that we copy an entire article from another web site and present it in total. Usually we print a key excerpt of the most important points and have a link to the rest, which is considered “best internet manners”. However, in some rare cases, when the piece is so important, the information so crucial, that presenting the entire piece becomes warranted.
This piece from Michelle Malkin shows that some of the same people who were caught abusing the IRS under Bill Clinton, were re-appointed by Obama and are some of the guilty parties today. This indicates clear premeditation from the White House. What other reason would a President re-appoint a man with a criminal history like IRS Department Head Steven Miller?]
UPDATE – IRS boss of Tea Party probes targeted anti-Clinton group in 1990s – LINK.
UPDATE – IRS Official Admits Clinton Enemies Were Audited – LINK.
It’s always the “low-level” peon’s fault, isn’t it? When Democrats get caught red-handed abusing government powers and bullying their political enemies small and large, nobody at the top knows nuttin’. The buck stops … in the janitors closet or something.
Here’s what I know: While they pretend to champion privacy rights, top left-wing operatives have routinely ransacked and plundered through the private documents and personal records of conservative groups, business owners and public figures. Through it all, those on the right standing against government tyranny have refused to stand down.
During the Clinton years, senior IRS official Paul Breslan revealed that the administration’s auditors specifically targeted conservative critics. On the hit list: Judicial Watch, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, the National Rifle Association, The National Review, The American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, National Center for Public Policy Research, Citizens Against Government Waste, Concerned Women for America, and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition.
Steven Miller, one of the Clinton IRS agents who helped conduct those witch hunts in the 1990s, is currently the head of the Obama IRS department that has now admitted it discriminated against tea party groups. Jackboot history repeats itself.
In 1997, far-left Congressman Jim McDermott obtained and leaked an illegally taped phone call involving House GOP leaders to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times. Far from a low-level underling, McDermott was the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee at the time. Ohio GOP Rep. John Boehner won a $1 million civil lawsuit against McDermott. McDermott’s leak was condemned by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan as “willful and knowing misconduct (that) rises to the level of malice in this case.”
In 2005, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — headed by New York Sen. Charles Schumer — targeted then Maryland GOP Lt. Gov. Michael Steele as he considered a U.S. Senate bid. Two of Schumer’s staffers illegally obtained Steele’s credit report by using his Social Security number, which they got from public documents. They set up a fake email account and then impersonated Steele on a website to filch his financial information.
Democrats framed the sleazy move as the work of junior staffers. But the supervising operative involved, Katie Barge, was senior research director of the DSCC, a former researcher at the George Soros-funded attack group Media Matters for America and a researcher for presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.
Schumer’s other document plumber, Lauren Weiner, was a DSCC researcher who had worked for Dick Gephardt and the Democratic National Committee. She pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining a credit report and escaped jail time. After she was fired, she earned a journalism degree at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
In 2006, longtime Democratic operative Bob Fertik called on his minions to attempt to obtain the private phone records of prominent conservatives through shady online information brokers. “If money is scarce,” Fertik vowed, “Democrats.com will reimburse you if you buy the records for an important phone number and discover gold when you get the records.”
In October 2008, top Ohio Democrats targeted real plumber Joe Wurzelbacher after he challenged then presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth” radicalism. Helen Jones-Kelley, then director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, ordered underlings to scour government databases for dirt. In addition to pawing through his child-support papers, her agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes.
Jones-Kelley was not just a high-level state official. She was also an Obama campaign donor who volunteered to arrange an event for Michelle Obama and provided the campaign with nearly 20 names of potential donors ahead of a Dayton campaign stop. Three years after resigning, she found herself back on the taxpayer dole with another government job. Corruptocrats protect their own.
Also in 2008, Obama’s allies at a Soros-tied outfit named Accountable America sent out “warning” letters to 10,000 top GOP givers “hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.” Witch hunt leader Tom Matzzie, formerly of Soros-funded MoveOn.org, promised “legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.” Matzzie also advertised a $100,000 bounty for dirt on conservative political groups “to create a sense of scandal around the groups” and to dissuade donors from giving money.
The effort was supported by Judd Legum, founder of Think Progress, which is run by former Clinton scandal manager turned Obama confidante John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.
During the 2010 midterms, the Obama bully brigade waged a similar campaign against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its donors as payback for the organization’s ads opposing the federal health care takeover. During the 2012 election season, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina declared war on free-market philanthropists Charles and David Koch and private donors to their nonprofit activist group Americans for Prosperity.
As I warned in my column in March 2012, it seemed “no small coincidence” at the time that Team Obama was threatening conservative activists publicly “just as numerous tea party organizations (were) reporting that the Internal Revenue Service (had) targeted them for audits. According to Colleen Owens of the Richmond (Va.) Tea Party, several fiscally conservative activist groups in Virginia, Hawaii, Ohio and Texas (had) received a spate of IRS letters. The missives demand(ed) extensive requests to identity volunteers, board members and … donors.”
The latest confession by Obama IRS officials that they targeted tea party, pro-Constitution and pro-Israel groups isn’t a sign of “rogue” behavior. It’s tyrannical Democratic business as usual.
“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 