Here are the Top 10 Reasons George Soros Is Dangerous:
1. Gives billions to left-wing causes: Soros started the Open Society Institute in 1993 as a way to spread his wealth to progressive causes. Using Open Society as a conduit, Soros has given more than $7 billion to a who’s who of left-wing groups. This partial list of recipients of Soros’ money says it all: ACORN, Apollo Alliance, National Council of La Raza, Tides Foundation, Huffington Post, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soujourners, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women.
2. Influence on U.S. elections: Soros once said that removing President George W. Bush from office in 2004 was the “central focus of my life.” He put his money where his mouth is, giving $23.58 million to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating Bush. His early financial support helped jump-start Barack Obama’s political career. Soros hosted a 2004 fund-raiser for Obama when he was running for the Illinois Senate and gave the maximum-allowed contribution within hours of Obama’s announcement that he was running for President.
3. Wants to curtail American sovereignty: Soros would like nothing better than for America to become subservient to international bodies. He wants more power for groups such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, even while saying the U.S. role in the IMF should be “downsized.” In 1998, he wrote: “Insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.”
4. Media Matters: Soros is a financial backer of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group that hyperventilates over any conservative view that makes it into the mainstream media. Now its founder, David Brock, has openly declared war on Fox News, telling Politico that the group was mounting “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against the cable news channel, and would try to disrupt the commercial interests of owner Rupert Murdoch—an odd mission for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation that is barred from participating in partisan political activity.
5. MoveOn.org: Soros has been a major funder of MoveOn.org, a progressive advocacy group and political action committee that raises millions for liberal candidates. This is the group that had on its website an ad comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and ran the infamous “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times, disparaging the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus.
6. Center for American Progress: Headed by John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, the Center for American Progress has been instrumental in providing progressive talking points and policy positions for the Obama administration. There has also been a revolving door between the White House and the Soros-funded think tank, with Obama staffing his administration with many CAP officials.
7. Environmental extremism: Former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones and his leftist environmental ideas have been funded by Soros’ money at these groups: the Ella Baker Center, Green For All, the Center for American Progress, and the Apollo Alliance, which was instrumental in getting $110 billion in green initiatives included in Obama’s stimulus package. Soros also funds the Climate Policy Initiative to address global warming and gave Friends of the Earth money to “integrate a climate equity perspective in the presidential transition.”
8. America Coming Together: Soros gave nearly $20 million to this 527 group with the express purpose of defeating President Bush. A massive get-out-the-vote effort, ACT’s door-to-door canvassing teams included numerous felons, its voter registration drives were riddled with fraud, and it handed out incendiary fliers and made misleading taped phone calls to voters. ACT was fined $775,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violations of various federal campaign finance laws.
9. Currency manipulation: A large part of Soros’ multibillion-dollar fortune has come from manipulating currencies. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused him of bringing down the nation’s currency through his trading activities, and in Thailand he was called an “economic war criminal.” Known as “The Man who Broke the Bank of England,” Soros initiated a British financial crisis by dumping 10 billion sterling, forcing the devaluation of the currency and gaining a billion-dollar profit.
10. Delusions: Soros has repeatedly said that he sees himself as a messianic figure. Who but a megalomaniac would make these comments? “I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance—to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god” or “I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin.” If only the loony bin were an option. As it is, one of the wealthiest men in the world is using his billions to impose a radical agenda on America.
“‘Truth, justice, and the American way’ – it’s not enough anymore,” the comic book superhero said, after both the Iranian and American governments criticized him for joining a peaceful anti-government protest in Tehran.
Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman’s lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That’s a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It’s also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.
But not everyone’s motivations are as lofty as Superman’s. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.
The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April – this year, the deadline is Tuesday – an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Office, part of the IRS, released a report in December that details the difficulties of filing taxes from overseas. It cites heavy paperwork, a lack of online filing options and a dearth of local and foreign-language resources.
For those wishing to legally escape the filing requirements, the only way is to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship. Last year, IRS records show that at least 1,788 people did, and that’s likely an underestimate. The IRS publishes in the Federal Register the names of those who give up their citizenship, and some who renounced say they haven’t seen their name on the list yet.
The State Department said records it keeps differ from those published by the IRS. They indicate that renunciations have remained steady, at about 1,100 each year, said an official.
The decision by the IRS to publish the names is referred to by lawyers as “name and shame.” That’s because those who renounce are seen as willing to give up their citizenship primarily for financial reasons.
There’s also an “exit tax” for the very rich who choose to leave. During the last 25 years, a number of millionaires and billionaires have renounced their citizenship. Among them: Ted Arison, the late founder of Carnival Cruises, and Michael Dingman, a former Ford Motor Co. director.
But those of more modest means renounce, too. They say leaving America is about more than money; it’s about privacy and red tape.
According to National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson, approximately 4,000 people gave up their citizenship from fiscal year 2005 to FY 2010. Renunciations increased sharply within the past three years, from 146 in FY 2008 to 1,534 in FY 2010. And during the first two quarters of FY 2011 alone, 1,024 Americans ditched their citizenship.
The advocate’s report cites two reasons for the renunciations. First, many taxpayers abroad say they are confused “by the complex legal and reporting requirements they face and are overwhelmed by the prospect of having to comply with them.”
Second, others have accused the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of “bait and switch” tactics, telling Americans they can resolve their unpaid taxes under an “older voluntary disclosure programs with the promise of reduced penalties, only to find themselves subjected to steeper penalties.”
According to tax attorney Andrew Mitchel, another factor has been a change of law in 2008 that means “non-U.S. citizen, nonresidents can now annually visit the U.S. for 120 or more days without becoming taxed as U.S. residents (under the pre-2008 rules, visits to the U.S. for more than 30 days during any of the 10 years following expatriation caused the individual to be treated as a U.S. resident for that year).”
Ask yourself this: In which administration have there been more egregious miscarriages of justice than the following list?
1. Challenges voter ID laws
The Justice Department has challenged state voter ID laws, first in South Carolina and more recently in Texas, the first such actions in 20 years. Apparently requiring a U.S. citizen to bring a driver’s license to the voting booth is an onerous infringement on their constitutional rights. Why would the chief law-enforcement office in the nation try to make it easier to engage in voter fraud? Could it be because Barack Hussein Obama is on the ballot this November?
2. Challenges immigration laws
The Justice Department is also challenging immigration laws enacted by states—most notably Arizona’s legislation (hasn’t Mr. Holder heard of the Constitution’s 10th Amendment?) In its brief challenging Arizona’s S.B. 1070, the Justice Department said the law interferes with the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration policy. We didn’t know that the federal government was doing much of anything to control illegal immigration.
3. Fast and Furious outrage
The Justice Department turned a blind-eye to the Fast and Furious gun-running operations, with the weaponry ending up in the hands of deadly Mexican drug gangs, and then obfuscated when Congress reviewed the operation. Allowing guns to cross the border resulted in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and some 300 deaths in Mexico. New revelations are still coming, such as the news that one of the chief gun traffickers was questioned and released by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents.
4. New Black Panther Party dismissal
The Justice Department decided to dismiss charges of violating the Voting Rights Act against three members of the New Black Panther Party, who acted menacingly outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008, hurling threats, racial slurs, and brandishing a night stick. The action by the Justice Department prompted a probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which heard testimony by J. Christian Adams, who resigned from the department over the issue. Adams said he was instructed by his superiors to ignore cases involving black defendants and white victims.
5. Defense of marriage recusal
The Justice Department served notice last year that it would no long defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which states that the federal government defines marriage to be between one man and one woman. The action, in a letter from the attorney general to congressional leaders, said President Obama had decided that the act, signed into law in 1996 by President Clinton, was unconstitutional. Odd, we can’t seem to find the spot in the Constitution that allows the President to declare a law unconstitutional.
6. Sen. Ted Stevens case bungled
In its pursuit of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) on charges he failed to report gifts on his financial disclosure forms, the Justice Department concealed evidence from the defense. A report by a special counsel said there was “systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence” by the Justice Department, “which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’ defense.” Stevens was found guilty and died in a plane crash before he could be exonerated. Imagine the howls from the mainstream media, if the senator in question had been Ted Kennedy, instead of Ted Stevens.
7. Civilian trials for terror detainees
The Justice Department sought to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a civilian New York City courtroom, blocks from the World Trade Center site. The action would have afforded Mohammed all the constitutional guarantees of a fair trial, raising the possibility that Mohammed could go free on a technicality despite confessing to involvement in the 1993 and 2001World Trade Center attacks, the Bali, Indonesia, bombings, the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, and other failed terror plots. The outcry against civilian trials forced Holder to back down, and Mohammed and four co-defendants will now face a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.
8. CIA probed
Attorney General Holder re-opened a probe of CIA officials involved in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees. Holder’s action came despite earlier rulings that the interrogations were legally authorized, despite seven former CIA directors asking the probe be shut down, and despite the fact that the interrogations provided valuable intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway. Holder later admitted he hadn’t read Justice Department memos that concluded no laws were broken.
9. NYPD probed
When the New York Police Department conducted surveillance operations in the Muslim community—including monitoring members of the Muslim Student Association, which has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood—the Justice Department decided to review the police department. While the NYPD is trying to thwart another 9/11, the Justice Department is siding with Muslim apologists. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the right response to the Justice Department when he said, “To let our guard down would just be an outrage.”
10. Pool fiasco
Justice Department guidelines for compliance with the Americans for Disabilities Act included a requirement for public swimming pools to install a lift that could move the disabled from a wheelchair to the water. As 300,000 public pools faced a March 15 deadline to install the lifts—at a cost of up to $20,000 each—DOJ backed down and issued a 60-day stay of execution in March before allowing lawsuits over the matter. Considering there is not an available number of lifts or installers of the devices for every pool in America, “poolmagedon” will provide the nation’s trial lawyers—major supporters of the Democrats—with plenty of new business opportunities.
Creating a hostile and intimidating environment on campus is not protected speech. It is intended to intimidate Jewish students, interfere with their education with such a threatening environment and is designed to infringe on their liberty interest. Florida should lower the boom on this behavior, but considering how antisemitsm is pushed by academia in general I am not hopeful.
More than 200 Jewish students at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL found “eviction” notices posted on their dormitory doors Friday, unaware that it was part of a publicity stunt by Students for Justice in Palestine.
The organization’s chapter president, Noor Fawzy, explained, “We want to raise awareness about the plight of the Palestinians…The intent is to expose Israel‘s illegal policies and give students a feel of what it’s like to live under occupation. “The ”notice” explained that more than 25,000 homes have been demolished since the “occupation of Palestine” began in 1967.
While SJP appears to have gotten university approval for the stunt (some members may have even been escorted by an employee official as they were posting the signs), the school has since removed the postings after many expressed their disapproval.
Charles Brown, the school’s senior VP for student affairs, released a statement: “The recent mock eviction postings did not comply with the policies of University Housing and Residential Life or the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership concerning the distribution of printed material, and therefore the postings were removed.”
Jackie Klein, a student at the school, explained, “Free speech is good for everyone, but this is a bit intimidating…They should be able to promote their views, but in a respectful way.”
Rayna Exelbierd, who received one of the notices, said, “We’re taking it very seriously. We’re considering it a hate crime. The flier promotes hate; it doesn’t promote peace. People were scared by it. People felt threatened by it.”
More than 50 students gathered at Hillel Wednesday to discuss the flyers, but have chosen not to contact “Students for Justice in Palestine” because its members have chanted anti-Israel slogans at their events in the past. Scott Brockman, Hillel’s executive director, commented: “While protecting and ensuring free speech on campus, the tactic used by Students for Justice in Palestine is unacceptable.”
While Obama rails against the “rich” his administration funnels money to some of the wealthiest people in the world, provided of course that they are campaign donors.
Newly recently released tax documents reveal how billionaire “philanthropist” George Soros expanded his U.S.-based empire by using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Obama stimulus. Soros and Obama worked hand-in-glove through the stimulus, which has been called the largest single partisan wealth transfer in American history.
In 2010, tax records show that Soros, a convicted inside trader with extensive knowledge of the American financial system and government policies under Obama, deployed grantees from his Open Society Foundations1 to lobby for and acquire federal contracts for job training, green energy, and community redevelopment programs. By gaining control over those resources, Soros advanced his agenda for “green economics,” open borders, and increased government handouts. In short, he grew his empire, which includes much of the “progressive” movement in the U.S., as the federal government and Obama’s political constituencies grew in power and influence.
This report analyzes George Soros’s grants to organizations in 2010. The records show massive coordination of non-profit networks in the states and nationally. Four powerful organizations and coalitions — The STAR Coalition, The Gamaliel Foundation, the Apollo Alliance, and Green for All — are given detailed scrutiny in this regard, with the involvement of Van Jones getting special mention. Jones is the former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” fired after information about his communist past surfaced through the work of anti-communist blogger Trevor Loudon and then-Fox News personality Glenn Beck. The lobbying power of such efforts ensured that stimulus funds flowed from taxpayers into union coffers and into the hands of other activists who had been instrumental in putting President Obama into office.
This report, “Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire,” includes an analysis of how Soros-funded organizations and networks operate, the strategies used to steer stimulus money to special interest lobbies, and an explanation of how taxpayers were forced to subsidize the “progressive” movement in the U.S. However, only Congress, with its investigative powers, can get to the bottom of how this money was spent and into whose coffers it ultimately ended up.
Read more: Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire | The Soros Fileshttp://sorosfiles.com/soros/2012/04/obama-stimulus-dollars-funded-soros-empire.html#ixzz1sK89NdUu
[E]arly last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.”
So what would be the purpose of the leak this time? The same as the last time: it’s supposed to tip off the Iranians to efforts against them, and it’s supposed to dissuade the Israelis from doing anything to stop the Iranian nuclear program. And those efforts are largely Israeli – Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has already denied any US involvement in the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists.
This leak is just the latest in a pattern of leaks from the Obama administration, which has already leaked information about a covert Israeli deal with Azerbaijan to use airbases in that country as a staging point for an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. In 2010, the Obama administration leaked information of a covert deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia to use Saudi airspace for such an attack.
The Obama administration is desperate to prevent any sort of aggressive Israeli action on Iran before the election. That’s because Obama knows it would put him between a rock and a hard place – his leftist base hates Israel, and yet the American people love Israel overall. Meanwhile, Obama recognizes that he’s going to have to go to OPEC and ask them to ratchet up production prior to election, and he will want to make promises about battering Israel in order to secure that ramped-up oil production. All in all, Obama would prefer to wait until after his re-election for any Israel-Iran blow-up, because at that point, he’ll have more “flexibility.”
Yet another example to our leftist friends that “regulations are not made by Angels for the people’s benefit, they are made at the direction of corrupt politicians to pick winners and losers”.
So imagine that you are a small tax preparer and are a minority owned small business. Like so many of these small businesses they train tempts to do some of the work when tax season comes so as to be able to handle the work load.
H&R Block doesn’t like the competition so H&R Block creates a Political Actin Committee (PAC) that spreads around campaign cash to Members of Congress and the parties, spends a few million on lobbying.
What did they buy? New regulations that make even the temporary employees get fully licensed, have to attend a government certified course, AND attend continuing education classes every year. What small business can afford that? BUT WAIT…. you really didn’t think it ended there do you? The large tax preparers are exempt from some of the most burdensome requirements on their seasonal employees…..
So Sabrina Loving of Chicago is suing the IRS with help from the Institute for Justice.
In other words, Obama’s speech itself tells us this is all made up. Obama’s minions calculated the percentage of total spending cuts in Ryan’s budget, and then applied that same percentage to every politically sensitive line item in the budget. But as Ryan has said publicly, that is not what his budget does. The long overdue spending cuts are outlined in hundreds of pages on the House Budget Committee website.
What Ryan’s budget does is just return federal spending to its long–term, historical, postwar average at 20 percent of GDP, which prevailed for 60 years before President Obama and his runaway spending. With that manageable federal spending, America prospered as the richest and mightiest nation in the history of the planet.
But President Obama hysterically and falsely claims just doing that will lead to all of the above disastrous results, and further that “by the middle of the next century funding for the kinds of things I just mentioned would have to be cut by 95%,” which is another fabrication. Just returning to that long term, historical, postwar average of federal spending as a percent of GDP, Obama claims, is “really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country… thinly veiled social Darwinism… antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility.” This from the long-time radical who ran on fundamentally transforming America, not restoring our history. Obama’s wild, false rhetoric is not even an honest, intelligent discussion of the budget issues.
What this means is Obama adamantly opposes restoring traditional, long-term control over federal spending, and won’t do that if reelected. Instead, on our current course under Obama and the Democrats, according to CBO, federal spending soars to 30 percent of GDP by 2027, 40 percent by 2040, 50 percent by 2060, and 80 percent by 2080. Actually, it would be higher than that, as GDP would collapse under that burden. Add in another 15 percent of GDP for state and local spending, and we are at full-blown communism.
Marking the similarities between President Barack Obama’s time in office and former president Jimmy Carter’s is nothing new. But as of Monday, Obama has hit one more Carter benchmark – both saw gas prices double in their first term of office. [See Where Gas Prices are Spiking the Most]
Under the Carter administration, gas prices increased by 103.77 percent. Gas prices since Obama took office have risen by 103.79 percent. No other presidents in recent years have struggled as much with soaring oil prices. Under the Reagan administration, gas prices actually dropped 66 percent. When Bill Clinton was president, gas prices grew by roughly 30 percent, and under both Bush presidencies, gas prices rose by 20 percent.
As the chart shows, America’s debt is currently $15.1 trillion, while the Eurozone (which includes France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and others) has a combined debt of $12.7 trillion. (All dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars, and the data refers to closing 2011 numbers.)
The Eurozone is larger than the United States, so America’s debt per capita also exceeds the Eurozone’s. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. has a population of 313 million, whereas the Eurozone has a population in excess of 331 million.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney frequently warns that the United States should not become like Greece. “We need to rein in government and unleash the extraordinary vitality and creativity of the American people,” Romney wrote in a December op-ed. “We must not wait to suffer a crisis like Greece’s or Portugal’s to right the ship of state.”
But with charts like this, that formulation might already be out of date, considering the enormity of America’s debt burden.
Across America, spending on local and state governments made up 19.8 percent of the average state’s economy in 2008. California spent 22.5 percent, compared with Texas’s 15.4 percent. Simply put, Californians spend 46 percent more of their income on their government than do Texans.
Comparing major categories of spending really brings home the difference.
The average state spends 5.7 percent of its economy on education. Neither California (at 5.6 percent) nor Texas (5.4 percent) deviates far from the average. But Texas stretches its spending much further, employing 17 percent more educators per capita than does California, with its strong teachers’ unions and highly paid teachers.
Welfare spending shows a shocking contrast, with California spending 5 percent of its economy on wealth-transfer programs, compared with the national average of 4.6 percent and Texas’s 3.1 percent.
California also spends more than Texas on law enforcement and prisons, 1.5 percent to 0.9 percent, as well as parks, recreation, and natural resources, 0.7 percent to 0.3 percent.
Mass transit and other state and locally run utilities constitute 1.4 percent of the average state’s economy. California spends 1.9 percent here, Texas, 1.2 percent. California’s proposed high-speed-rail system will significantly grow this outlay. By comparison, heavily urbanized New York, with its mass-transit systems and extensive network of government-run toll roads, outlays 2.2 percent of its economy towards government-run utilities.
Texas manages to spend more in one category than does California: roads. Though Texas has diverted as much as $1.2 billion from its highway fund lately, it still manages to spend 1.2 percent of its economy on highways, compared with California’s outlay of 0.9 percent. The national average is 1.1 percent. California used to spend far more on its roads, but cut back in the 1970s, the last time Jerry Brown was governor — he suggested then that if you build road and water infrastructure, they will come. California stopped building but they came anyway.
The spending category showing the largest divergence between California and Texas should come as no surprise to anyone following the impending bankruptcy of Stockton, California’s 13th-largest city: spending for government-employee benefits. Nationwide, states spend an average of 1.6 percent of their economy in this area. California spends 2.2 percent of its economy — $1,105 for every person in the state — to keep government employees comfortable in their golden years. Texas spends 0.9 percent of its economy for this purpose — $467 for each man, woman, and child in the state. While most Texas civil servants don’t have collective-bargaining rights, they experience about one-third the job-turnover rate of private employees, showing that the State of Texas is seen as a good employer.
Last month, Texas added 27,900 jobs. The official unemployment rate is 7.1 percent in Texas, compared with 8.3 percent nationally. California added 4,000 jobs and has an official unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.
As we reported in July 2008: The Obama Campiagn was paying women less, when McCain was paying them more; all while Obama accused McCain of not supporting equal pay for women – LINK.
Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.
According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).
Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.
The Obama campaign on Wednesday lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a controversial law enacted in 2009 that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.
President Obama has frequently criticized the gender pay gap, such as the one that exists in White House.
“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income,” he said in a July 2010 statement. “And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole.”
It is not known whether any female employees at the White House have filed lawsuits under the Ledbetter Act.
The president and his Democratic allies have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women,” and have touted themselves as champions of female equality. Obama’s rhetoric, however, has not always been supported by his actions.
White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week that Obama believes it is “long past the time” for women to be admitted to the traditionally all-male Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament.
But the president has demonstrated a strong preference for all-male foursomes in his frequent golf outings, a bias that extends well beyond the putting green and into the Oval Office.
“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers told the New York Times.
“There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings,” she wrote. “The president blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress.”
Eric Holder is President Obama’s Attorney General and he says that vote fraud is not a problem (hello he is part of the Chicago Machine) and that voter ID laws are not necessary…….
Attorney General Eric Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them “unnecessary” and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina, citing the fear they would discriminate against minorities.
I wonder what Holder will think when he learns just how easy it was for someone to be offered his ballot just by mentioning his name in a Washington, D.C., polling place in Tuesday’s primaries.
Holder’s opposition to ID laws comes in spite of the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008, authored by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, that upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s tough ID requirement. When groups sue to block photo-ID laws in court, they can’t seem to produce real-world examples of people who have actually been denied the right to vote. According to opinion polls, over 75 percent of Americans — including majorities of Hispanics and African-Americans — routinely support such laws.
One reason is that people know you can’t function in the modern world without showing ID — you can’t cash a check, travel by plane or even train, or rent a video without being asked for one. In fact, PJ Media recently proved that you can’t even enter the Justice Department in Washington without showing a photo ID. Average voters understand that it’s only common sense to require ID because of how easy it is for people to pretend they are someone else
Filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is on Tuesday when he dispatched an assistant to the Nebraska Avenue polling place in Washington where Attorney General Holder has been registered for the last 29 years. O’Keefe specializes in the same use of hidden cameras that was pioneered by the recently deceased Mike Wallace, who used the technique to devastating effect in exposing fraud in Medicare claims and consumer products on 60 Minutes. O’Keefe’s efforts helped expose the fraud-prone voter-registration group ACORN with his video stings, and has had great success demonstrating this year in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota just how easy it is to obtain a ballot by giving the name of a dead person who is still on the rolls. Indeed, a new study by the Pew Research Center found at least 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote. They aren’t likely to complain if someone votes in their place.
In Washington, it was child’s play for O’Keefe to beat the system. O’Keefe’s assistant used a hidden camera to document his encounter with the election worker at Holder’s polling place:
Man: “Do you have an Eric Holder, 50th Street?
Poll worker: “Let me see here.”
Man: Xxxx 50th Street.
Poll Worker: Let’s see, Holder, Hol-t-e-r, or Hold-d-e-r?
Man: H-o-l-d-e-r.
Poll Worker: D-e-r. Okay.
Man: That’s the name.
Poll Worker: I do. Xxxx 50th Street NW. Okay. [Puts check next to name, indicating someone has shown up to vote.] Will you sign there . . .
Man: I actually forgot my ID.
Poll Worker: You don’t need it; it’s all right.
Man: I left it in the car.
Poll Worker: As long as you’re in here, and you’re on our list and that’s who you say you are, we’re okay.
Man: I would feel more comfortable if I go get my ID, is it all right if I go get it?
Poll Worker: Sure, go ahead.
Man: I’ll be back faster than you can say furious!
Poll Worker: We’re not going anywhere.
Note that O’Keefe’s assistant never identified himself as Eric Holder, so he was not illegally impersonating him.
Nor did he attempt to vote using the ballot that was offered him, or even to accept it. O’Keefe has been accused by liberals of committing voter fraud in his effort to expose just how slipshod the election systems of various no-ID-required states are, but lawyers say his methods avoid that issue. Moreover, he has only taped his encounters with election officials in jurisdictions that allow videotaping someone in public with only one party’s knowledge.
Teresa Wagner, pictured above, is suing a former dean at the University of Iowa College of Law for employment discrimination after she was turned down for a faculty position. The law school rejected her candidacy because of her conservative political views.
Iowa Republicans are taking aim at the state’s top law school for denying a faculty position to a conservative law professor, who an assistant dean once said embraces politics the rest of the faculty “despises.”
Teresa Wagner, who works as an associate director of writing at the University of Iowa College of Law, is suing former dean Carolyn Jones for employment discrimination, claiming she was not hired for a professor position because Jones and other law faculty disapproved of her conservative views and activism.
To hold a law faculty position at the publicly funded university is viewed as a “sacred cow,” Wagner said in an interview, and “Republicans need not apply.”
The case, which goes to trial this October, has become a chief concern for Republicans in Johnson County, who on Monday passed a resolution calling on the Iowa House of Representatives’ oversight committee to investigate hiring practices involved in Wagner’s case and others like it.
“We think the hiring policies need to be such where there a
re certainly non-discriminatory practices which relate to political philosophy, as well as to race and gender and other issues,” said Bob Anderson, chairman of the Johnson County Republican Party. He claims students are deprived of “diversity of political thought” when conservative thinkers, like Wagner, are rejected based on their politics.
“We have a very active, conservative Republican community within the University of Iowa, which has not been met with an appropriate sense of respect for their ideas,” he told FoxNews.com. “We see generally the climate as unfavorable.”
Wagner, who graduated with honors from the law school in 1993, has taught at the George Mason University School of Law. She has also worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion, and the conservative Family Research Council.
In 2006, Wagner applied for a full-time instructor position with the law school and was denied. She was also rejected for an adjunct or full-time position in four subsequent attempts, according to her attorney, Stephen T. Fieweger.
“For the first time in years, there are more registered Republicans in the state of Iowa than there are Democrats, which is obviously not reflected at the University of Iowa,” Fieweger told FoxNews.com.
Fieweger said Wagner’s candidacy was dismissed because of her conservative views, and he cited a 2007 email from Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson to Jones in which Carlson wrote: “Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it).”
WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.
But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.
The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.
The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.
The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.
In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.
In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.
In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.
And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.
Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.
Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has said it is “pointless” to take part in talks on a new constitution, saying mounting Islamist domination in the talks has led them to withdraw from the assembly, Egypt’s state news agency said.
The 100-member constitutional assembly selected by the parliament is dominated by Islamists, reflecting their resounding victory in parliamentary elections.
Late on Sunday, the Church announced the decision to withdraw; a move which followed earlier calls by Egyptian liberals to boycott the constitution drafting committee, which is seen as failing to adequately represent the nation’s diversity.
“The Coptic Orthodox Church General Council agreed with the approval of all of the council’s 20 members to withdraw from the constitutional assembly… as it found it was pointless for the church to be represented following the comments made by the national forces about the way the assembly was formed,” the state news agency said, quoting a church statement.
The current constitution was suspended by the country’s army rulers in February of last year shortly after they took power from Egypt’s long-serving autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak.
Coptic Christians, who form Egypt’s biggest minority group and constitute most of Egypt’s 10 percent Christian population, have long had a difficult relationship with the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim majority.
Since Mubarak’s ouster, Christians have become increasingly worried after an upsurge in attacks on churches, which they blame on hardline Islamists, although experts say local disputes are often also behind them.
Who didn’t see this one coming? Your Democrat Party union controlled schools at work….
Drew Zahn:
Who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – a group of men merely fighting “for a cause,” or a band of radical Muslims bent on violent jihad?
According to a new, comprehensive study of 6th-12th grade textbooks used by schools across the country, America’s children are being taught a very different answer to that question than many alive to witness 9/11 remember.
The non-profit organization ACT! for America Education studied 38 textbooks from popular publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin, for example, to determine whether American schoolchildren are being taught the truth about Islam and its role in 9/11.
“This report shines a bright light on a pattern of errors, omissions and bias in the textbooks reviewed,” explained ACT! for America Education founder Brigitte Gabriel in an email. “To give you just one example of the errors our research uncovered, in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.
“In just a few years after Sept. 11,” she continues, “the history of what happened on that tragic day was rewritten in our school textbooks. Omitting this vital information, that jihad was the motivation for the attacks, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for today’s young teens, who don’t remember 9/11, to really understand what happened that day – and why.”
According to the executive summary of the report, “The full reportreveals a pattern of historical revisionism, omissions and bias in the presentation of all aspects devoted to Islam in these textbooks. These aspects include its theology and doctrines, its role as a world religion, its ongoing struggle with Western tradition and its intrinsic anti-Semitism.”
The summary continues, “Textbook errors identified in the report range from egregiously false historical statements to significant omissions and subtle half-truths. Some are blatant and obvious, others are subtle and deceptive. The errors in these textbooks are not grammatical or typographical. They are substantive, significant and often repetitive.”
For example, the report notes the textbook “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” published by McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin in 2007, glosses over the violent birth of Islam and paints its founder, Muhammad, in a glowing light.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills,” the textbook asserts. “He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
But did Muhammad win converts among and build a peace accord with the Jews? The study’s founders cite several sources and recorded histories in asserting this description is a bald-faced lie.
“This language is a gross falsification of the relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,” the report states. “Muhammad … expelled two of the Jewish tribes from Medina and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery. This important and essential historical fact of the Medinan period is commonly omitted in the textbooks reviewed, and it is impossible for students to accurately understand the rise of Islam without it.”
I agree with France. The leftist experiment in multiculturalism (read anti-western post-modernism) is worse than a failure; it had turned into a suicide pact and had to be abandoned.
France is to ban radical Muslim preachers from entering the country as part of a crackdown after shootings by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman in Toulouse, President Nicolas Sarkozy said today.
The President said he would block the entry of some imams invited to an Islamic conference next month, organised by the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF).
The UOIF, one of three Muslim federations in France, is regarded as close to Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
‘I have clearly indicated that there certain people who have been invited to this congress who are not welcome on French soil,’ Mr Sarkozy told France Info radio.
The crackdown follows the murder of seven people in Toulouse by Islamic extremist Mohammed Merah, 23.
The gunman shot down a Rabbi, three children and three soldiers in three separate attacks before being shot dead at the end of 32-hour police siege.
Following the shootings last week, Mr Sarkozy has announced plans to punish those viewing websites advocating Islamic extremism and going abroad for indoctrination or terrorist training.
Obama campaigned on cutting the deficit in half from the levels under Bush, which were a pittance compared to the spending and debt that is going on now.
A Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against the Republican presidential candidates.
The 8th grade students, who attend Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County, were required to seek out the vulnerabilities of Republican presidential hopefuls and forward them to the Obama campaign.
“This assignment was just creepy beyond belief — like something out of East Germany during the Cold War,” one frustrated father, who asked for his family to remain anonymous, told The Daily Caller.
The assignment was for students to research the backgrounds and positions of each of the GOP candidates for president and find “weaknesses” in them, the parent explained. From there, students were to prepare a strategy paper to exploit those weaknesses and then to send their suggestions to the Obama campaign.
Liberty teacher Michael Denman, who declined to comment, unveiled the assignment in mid-January when he broke the Civics Honor’s class into four groups, one for each Republican candidate. The students were then to collaborate as a group and research the backgrounds of their assigned candidate.
Denman assigned two kids to write a paper revealing the identified “weaknesses,” two to write the attack strategy paper and two others to locate an individual inside the Obama campaign to whom they could send the information.
“My classmates don’t actually know a lot, but a few of us tended to agree that the most recent instruction on this project just didn’t seem right,” one of the students told TheDC. “Mr. Denman didn’t tell us where to find the information, just to research on them.”
This is priceless, check out the excuse that the school administrator offers up:
As a result, the school received multiple phone calls from parents frustrated with the political nature of the assignment, the father told TheDC.
“I was shocked that a school teacher would so blatantly politicize the curriculum of a middle school classroom,” the parent said. “I asked [my child] if a similar assignment had been handed out to examine the background and positions of President Obama to see if the teacher was at least being bipartisan.”
No similar assignment was given to research Obama’s history, identify his weaknesses or pass them along to the Republican candidates.
John Torre, a spokesman on behalf of the Fairfax County Public School system, insists that students were never instructed to actually send their results to the Obama campaign.
“Instead, the teacher simply asked his students to find out the name of the office that would receive such information,” Torre wrote in an email to TheDC.
OH! It is all OK because they never sent the results to the Obama Campaign office, as if that makes a residue of difference. Of course, the only reason the results were not sent in is because they got caught. Notice how the excuse completely fails to address the main issue at hand, which is blatant indoctrination. After seeing countless hundreds of instances of this kind of misbehavior and much worse at public schools, I sometimes wonder if there is an unwritten rule that one may not have an IQ of over 90 to be a public school administrator.
This has been the plague for Mitt Romney’s election “victories”. In areas he wins the vote turnout is below 2008 levels where many conservatives, who had little faith in John McCain, stayed home. This low turnout problem has followed him in counter per country and state per state. In part, it is his own fault as he has carpet-bombed the states he has done well in with millions of dollars of dishonest negative ads. More and more pundits, including this very writer, said that the idea of Romney’s electability is a myth, and that he just doesn’t have what it takes to close the deal.
CHICAGO (CBS) — Turnout for Tuesday’s Illinois primary in Chicago was a meager 24 percent, officials said.
It was the lowest turnout for a presidential primary in the past 70 years.
Election officials said a lack of contested races was behind the lackluster activity at the polls.
“It’s very, very disappointing,” said Langdon Neal, chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. “I think what it indicates is that a lack of a contest on the Democratic side at the top of the ticket really did cause our voters not to be engaged in this election.”
Four years ago, Barack Obama was in a heated primary race with Hillary Clinton. This year, Obama has his sights set on the general election. Meantime, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, who rolled to an easy win in Illinois over his main rival, Rick Santorum.
But that didn’t equate to enthusiasm for Romney, an expert said.
“You could draw a larger crowd at a Green Bay Packers rally in downtown Chicago than what Mr. Romney delivered yesterday in Illinois,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday on CBS This Morning.
“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 