Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts

Sunday, March 15, 2015

IMMIGRATION: A Better Plan

By Heather Mac Donald


The lesson from the last 20 years of immigration policy is that lawlessness breeds more lawlessness. Once a people or a government decides to normalize one form of lawbreaking, other forms of lawlessness will follow until finally the rule of law itself is in profound jeopardy. Today, we have a constitutional crisis on our hands. President Obama has decided that because Congress has not granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S., he will do so himself. Let us ponder for a moment just how shameless this assertion of power is.

Article 2, Section 3, of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision assumes that there is a law for the president to execute. But in this case, the “problem” that Obama is purporting to fix is the absence of a law granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Rather than executing a law, Obama is making one up—arrogating to himself a function that the Constitution explicitly allocates to Congress. Should this unconstitutional power grab stand, we will have moved very far in the direction of rule by dictator. Pace Obama, the absence of a congressional law granting amnesty is not evidence of political failure that must somehow be corrected by unilateral executive action; it is evidence of the lack of popular consensus regarding amnesty. There has been no amnesty statute to date because the political will for such an amnesty is lacking.

On February 16, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen halted President Obama’s illegal amnesty with a temporary injunction. The proposed amnesty program, Judge Hanen found, went far beyond mere prosecutorial discretion not to enforce the law against individuals. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security proposed to confer on illegal aliens a new legal status known as “legal presence.” But Congress has not granted DHS the power to create and bestow legal status. The amnesty program represented a “complete abdication” of DHS’s responsibility to enforce the law, Judge Hanen declared. Indeed, DHS was actively thwarting the express will of Congress.

Obama’s Treason Is the New Patriotism

By Daniel Greenfield

When Republicans complained that Obama refused to talk about Islamic terrorism, he accused them of playing into the hands of ISIS by demanding that he identify the enemy we’re fighting.

When they spoke out against his Iranian nuclear sellout, he accused them of “wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran”.

Those hardliners would presumably toe a harder line than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who responded to Obama’s outreach in his first term by saying, “The Islamic peoples all over the world chant ‘Death to America!’” and who stated last year that “This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it.”

(The Supreme Leader of a country which stones teenage rape victims and rapes teenage girls so that they don’t die as virgins, also claimed that “The European races are barbaric.”)

If the moderate Supreme Leader that Obama is dealing with wants Death to America, what could the real hardliners want for America that’s even worse than death? A third term of Obama?

Meanwhile Joe Biden, Obama’s number two, accused Republicans of undermining Obama. This would be the same Biden who threatened to impeach President Bush if he bombed Iran’s nuclear program and who blasted Bush and the idea of an Axis of Evil at a fundraiser in the home of a pro-Iran figure.

Biden undermined President Bush’s efforts to rein in Iran’s terrorism by voting against listing the Revolutionary Guard, which was supplying weapons to help the Taliban kill American soldiers, as a terrorist group (a position he shared with Kerry, Hagel and Obama) and berating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for not negotiating with Iran and Assad.

The toadying of “Tehran Joe” to Iran had already reached its absolute lowest point when Biden responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11 by suggesting, “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”

The administration that Biden is part of has instead been releasing $490 million a month to Iran.

Biden, along with Kerry and Hagel, became notorious as the Tehran Trio during the Bush years for their advocacy for Iran and Assad, and their appearances at pro-Iranian lobbying groups and fundraisers despite criticism from Iranian democracy advocates. Biden, Kerry and Hagel, Obama’s VP, the Secretary of State and the former Secretary of Defense, all appeared at American-Iranian Council events, a group whose founder stated that he is “the Iranian lobby in the United States.”

Treason doesn’t get more treasonous than that.

THIS IS WHY Hillary's email scandal captured the media's attention

Because President Jarrett wanted it that way.

Writing at The New York Post, Edward Klein reveals that "Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state."

But she did so through people outside the ­administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the White House... In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation.

Six separate probes into Hillary’s performance have been ­going on at the State Department. I’m told that the e-mail scandal was timed to come out just as Hillary was on the verge of formally announcing that she was running for president — and that there’s more to come.

...“Obama and Valerie Jarrett will go to any lengths to prevent Hillary from becoming president,” a source close to the White House told me. “They believe that Hillary, like her husband, is left of center, not a true-blue liberal.” ... If she gets into the White House, they believe she will compromise with the Republicans in Congress and undo Obama’s legacy.

“With Obama’s approval,” this source continued, “Valerie has been holding secret meetings with Martin O’Malley [the former Democratic governor of Maryland] and [Massachusetts Sen.] Elizabeth Warren. She’s promised O’Malley and Warren the full support of the White House if they will challenge Hillary for the presidential nomination.”

And the media continue to pile on, almost as if they were taking orders from the White House.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION: State Department kept just 61,156 emails of more than 1 billion sent

By Kathryn Watson

EMAIL ISSUES: A new report from the State Department Office of Inspector General finds that hardly any of the 1 billion emails State Department officials sent in 2011, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were preserved.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — It looks like Hillary Clinton wasn’t the only one in the U.S. Department of State with email issues.

A new report from the State Department’s Office of Inspector General found that employees only archived 61,156 emails out of the more than 1 billion they sent in 2011, a year that falls right in the middle of Hillary Clinton’s four-year tenure as secretary of state.

To put that disparity in perspective, if each email created by the State Department that year were a sheet of paper, the paper stack would be more than 63 miles high, well into the thermosphere layer of Earth’s atmosphere and far higher than any plane can travel. But the archived portion of those emails or papers would only reach about 20 feet high, roughly the height of a two-story building.

“Federal law requires departments, agencies, and their employees to create records of their more significant actions and to preserve records according to government-wide standards,” the report reads.

Federal Judge Not Only Halts Obama's Lawless Amnesty Order, But Also Demands He Do This

By Warner Todd Huston

The judge who put a halt to Obama’s amnesty plans was being pressured to put aside his ruling by Obama’s administration. But instead of bowing to pressure the judge demanded that Obama send his representatives to his courtroom to explain why they think they have the powers to even issue the amnesty and why they lied about what they’ve already done.

Obama’s team already admitted that they lied to federal Judge Andrew Hanen about what actions have been taken to push Obama’s amnesty and the judge is furious about it.

“The hearing is in response to a filing last week in which the government acknowledged three-year deportation reprieves were granted before Hanen’s Feb. 16 injunction, which temporarily halted Obama’s action, sparing from deportation as many as 5 million people in the U.S. illegally.”

The coalition of 26 states which had convinced Judge Hanen to temporarily block Obama’s executive amnesty charges that the government misled the judge about not implementing part of the plan before the judge halted it, giving the states more time to argue against the president’s unilateral action on immigration.

Judge Hanen is demanding that the administration explain why they issued amnesty papers to up to 100,000 illegals despite telling the judge they hadn’t made any such moves.

This brave judge is not buckling under Obama’s pressure and is instead bringing pressure of his own to bear.


Read more Warner Todd Huston at PubliusForum.com

HEY, N00BS: Laws are for the little people, not the Clintons!

By Investor's Business Daily

Transparency: Hillary Clinton insists she did everything by the book, that she broke no laws and heeded all regulations. That book is obviously not the State Department records management handbook.

The government's book says that you don't get to keep materials, classified or unclassified, in your personal possession and then get to sift through them at your leisure to decide which ones the government that paid you gets to see.

All documents are the property of the government. The State Department determines which ones are returned to you.

As Shannen W. Coffin, a contributing editor at National Review and senior lawyer at both the White House and Justice Department under President George W. Bush, points out, a provision titled "Removal Procedures" requires departing federal employees to relinquish any classified materials at the time of departure and to clear the removal through records-management officials.

State Department employees, from the secretary on down, have to abide by this process.According to Coffin, the records management handbook says, "(The) departing official or a staff member must prepare an inventory of personal papers and non-record materials proposed for removal."

Then the departing official must "request a review of the materials proposed for removal."

On leaving, the official must sign Form OF-109, a formal separation statement, certifying under penalty of law the departing official has "surrendered to responsible officials all unclassified documents and papers relating to the official business of the government acquired by me while in the employ of the (State) Department."

The employee does not get to determine what is classified or not, personal or not, and Clinton's assertion that she never emailed classified material is, as they say in court, irrelevant and immaterial.

Friday, March 13, 2015

The Founders Didn't Fail. We Are Failing the Founders.

By Benjamin Weingarten

Conservatives are understandably depressed in the wake of Speaker Boehner and the Republican-controlled Congress’ predictable caving on executive amnesty.

Let me stop right there by emphasizing that I only said conservatives. Were our republic healthy, every single American would be depressed that President Obama’s amnesty—which on dozens of occasions he said he did not have the authority to enforce—will continue apace to the benefit of lawbreakers at the expense of American citizens.

Americans would be further demoralized at the notion that our president politicized the sovereignty of our nation represented by failing to protect its borders, all in a transparent attempt to win a permanent Democratic majority—which the shortsighted Republican establishment seem perfectly fine with, since they want immigration and the idea of “those racist Republicans” to become non-issues.

Some are lamenting the cowardice of our representatives, and to that I quote a former NFL Coach: “They are who we thought they were!

I have even seen one article arguing that the Constitution itself has failed. But the Constitution and our Founders did not fail. Human nature has not changed between 1787 and 2015. There were undoubtedly plenty of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century booze-swilling, cigar-smoking iterations of John Boehner lumbering around Capitol Hill.

What has changed is the size and scope of government, the number and composition of people who are voting, and the public’s general indifference to and acceptance of the greed, graft, lying, and all matter of corruption that have become commonplace in public life. There is also a heck of a lot more bread and circuses to keep us fat, happy, and distracted from what our supposed leaders are doing.

FORMER DOJ DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: Hillary Clinton Broke The Law. Period.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics

MEGYN KELLY: Shannen, good to see you tonight. So, let's start with the broad brush, which is she followed all the rules, all the rules and she didn't commit any crimes whatsoever. You've been maintaining all along that's not necessary -- it's not true on the rules and it may not be true on the law if she concealed or destroyed federal records.

SHANNEN COFFIN, FORMER COUNSEL TO VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: It's demonstrably not true on the rules. She didn't comply with the Federal Records Act. And she clearly did not comply with her own records management handbook for the Department of State which sets out a very specific process about how you remove records from the department control.

PIC: One of her neighbors trolls Hillary

It would be funnier if a felony wasn't involved.



Hat tip: BadBlue News

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

No one in the federal government has the slightest idea how to use computers except for Hillary Clinton!

By Yaël Ossowski

Yet again, Americans can rest reassured their government officials don’t really know how to use email. Or technology for that matter. Save for Hillary Clinton, of course.

This has been made more clear after revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her private email address, hdr22@clintonemail.com, during her tenure to conduct State Department business, bringing the topic of email and Internet security back into the national limelight.

It’s claimed Clinton hosted her own email server at home, a practice endorsed by privacy enthusiasts as one of the best ways to avoid the government snooping on your private emails. The irony being, of course, Clinton was one of the country’s most powerful government officials and using this practice.

This set-up allowed Clinton to keep her emails far away from the prying eyes of the Federal Records Act, which requires government officials to keep digital records of their email correspondence. Her staffers only recently disclosed her emails to the State Department for review, according to the Associated Press, and only upon request.

A public probing of Clinton’s email set-up has revealed a staggering ignorance on the part of government officials when it comes to email specifically, and technology more generally.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, declared on national television on Sunday he’s never sent a single email.

BECAUSE, CRUSADES: Kerry, State Department Agree That any Iran Deal Would Be "Non-Binding"

By The Tower

Over the past two days, both U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki have admitted that the current nuclear deal being negotiated with Iran is “non-binding.”

Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Kerry said that the deal is not “legally binding.”

“We’ve been clear from the beginning we’re not negotiating a legally binding plan. We’re negotiating a plan that will have a capacity for enforcement,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“We don’t even have diplomatic relations with Iran right now.”

Kerry made his remarks in the context of addressing what he called the “misconceptions” contained in the open letter released earlier this week that was signed by 47 Senators.

In an exchange with reporters at yesterday’s daily State Department press conference, Psaki was asked how the deal could be non-binding if the United States does not trust Iran. The video is embedded below the transcript.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The Parties of Crony Capitalism and Corruption

By Lawrence Sellin

Prior to the 2014 mid-term elections, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee claimed it's "un-American" for Barack Obama to consider implementing an executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens across the country.

Priebus said: "We will do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen: Defunding, going to court, injunction. You name it. It's wrong. It's illegal. And for so many reasons, and just the basic fabric of this country, we can't allow it to happen and we won't let it happen. I don't know how to be any stronger than that. I'm telling you, everything we can do to stop it we will."

Given what has transpired since the election, how eagerly the Republican leadership capitulated, if not enthusiastically facilitated the funding and implementation of Obama's "illegal" executive amnesty; one can easily conclude that Priebus must have known what he was saying was not true or he was completely out of touch with the plans of the Republican Congressional leadership.

I think he was lying to get votes.

According an article in the left-wing outlet Politico and reported by Breitbart, Republican House Speaker John Boehner held secret negotiations with Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, leading up to his decision to flip-flop and fund Obama's executive amnesty; including a pre-hashed out deal to use the hoopla around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's March 3, 2015 address to Congress over Iran's nuclear ambitions as political cover to sneak in the extraordinarily controversial vote.

20 Funniest Reactions to Hillary's Catastrophic Email Press Conference

Maybe her illegal email server -- which explicitly violates the Federal Records Act -- will turn up in the White House someday like those infamous Rose Law Firm files?



Sunday, March 08, 2015

IGNORANT: EPA Chief Gina McCarthy Can't Answer Basic Questions About the Climate

By Investor's Business Daily

Climate Change: Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA, can't answer basic questions about global temperatures, climate models or numbers of hurricanes. She didn't know being a global warming zealot requires knowledge of math.

If the science of climate change was "settled," you'd think one of the generals in the war on global warming would have memorized the numbers that point to our planetary doom from a menace the administration says is a greater threat than terrorism.

But McCarthy was asked some pretty simple questions Wednesday at a Senate hearing Wednesday on her request for $8.6 billion to help fight the claimed imminent doom of climate change, and her performance didn't help her case.

One of the questions involved droughts and the claim that their frequency has increased due to warming that is said to be caused by mankind's increased production of greenhouse gas, such as carbon dioxide, the basis for all life on Earth but judged by the EPA to be a pollutant.

"Let me ask you this," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., inquired of McCarthy. "There was an article from Mr. (Bjorn) Lomborg ... from the Copenhagen Institute. He says, along with Dr. (Roger) Pielke from Colorado, that we've had fewer droughts in recent years. Do you dispute that?"

The seemingly clueless McCarthy pathetically responded that she didn't "know in what context he's making statements like that." Context? Truth has its own context, and the inconvenient truth that McCarthy wasn't aware of, or didn't want to face, is that Pielke and Lomborg are right.

OBAMA'S FORMER DEFENSE INTEL CHIEF: Uhm, Of Course Obama Lied About Al Qaeda Being on the Run to Get Reelected

By Sara Noble

People shouldn’t be surprised that Barack Obama continually lies to us. He lied to get elected and the lies were obvious, such as his lie that al Qaeda was on the run.

He’s been selling us snake oil.

To most of us, this is not big news.

Gen. Michael Flynn, who served under Barack Obama as his defense intel chief, was interviewed by Bret Baier of Special Report this past week and it was clear to him that what Barack Obama was saying was diametrically opposed to all we knew was taking place on the ground.

Bin Laden, at the time of his death, was actively running al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was not on the run. “The lines were thicker and the organizations were more robust”. Gen. Flynn said.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

The Death of the American Dream in 22 Numbers

By Michael Snyder

We are the generation that gets to witness the end of the American Dream. The numbers that you are about to see tell a story. They tell a story of a once mighty economy that is dying. For decades, the rest of the planet has regarded the United States as “the land of opportunity” where almost anyone can be successful if they are willing to work hard. And when I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living the American Dream. I lived on a “middle class” street and I went to a school where it seemed like almost everyone was middle class. When I was in high school, it was very rare to ever hear of a parent that was unemployed, and virtually every family that I knew had a comfortable home and more than one nice vehicle. But now that has all changed. The “American Dream” has been transformed into a very twisted game of musical chairs. With each passing year, more people are falling out of the middle class, and most of the rest of us are scrambling really hard to keep our own places. Something has gone horribly wrong, and yet Americans are very deeply divided when it comes to finding answers to our problems. We love to point fingers and argue with one another, and meanwhile things just continue to get even worse. The following are 22 numbers that are very strong evidence of the death of the American Dream…

#1 The Obama administration tells us that 8.69 million Americans are “officially unemployed” and that 92.90 million Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”. That means that more than 101 million U.S. adults do not have a job right now.

#2 One recent survey discovered that 55 percent of Americans believe that the American Dream either never existed or that it no longer exists.

#3 Considering the fact that Obama is in the White House, it is somewhat surprising that 55 percent of all Republicans still believe in the American Dream, but only 33 percent of all Democrats do.

The curious case of Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, the Muslim Brotherhood and all of their missing emails

By Investor's Business Daily

Scandal: The email plot thickens with news that Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff also used a private email account on the Clintons' server to conduct government business.

Watchdog group Judicial Watch, which doesn't like being lied to or jerked around any more than the House Benghazi Select Committee does, has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of State seeking all communications, including emails, between Secretary of State Clinton and Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi between Jan. 21, 2009, and Jan. 21, 2013.

The lawsuit — which also seeks a thorough search of Clinton's newly discovered private email accounts connected to a home-based server to exclusively conduct government business — comes alongside the issue of subpoenas by the Benghazi Select Committee. Both have long been curious about the scarcity of produced emails with Clinton's name on them.

Abedin, perhaps best remembered as the wife of disgraced former congressman Anthony Wiener, is a longtime Hillary friend and confidante. She served as Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the same time she worked as a consultant to the Clinton Foundation and a New York advisory firm tied to the Clintons, one that did business before the government.

Foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation — including from governments and sources which might not have our best interests at heart, during and after Clinton's tenure as secretary of state — are raising questions about conflicts of interest and possible quid pro quos.

Abedin made $135,000 a year as Clinton's deputy, a period in which she is reported to have raked in as much as $355,000 from consulting contracts. Having a pipeline into the Clinton inner circle is invaluable to some. This reminds us of Johnny Chung's famous comparison of the Clinton White House to a subway turn style — you had to put money in to gain entry.

Abedin also has some interesting family connections. Her father is said to be close with the Saudi government's Muslim World League, and her mother is said to be a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. World Trade Center bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review: "The ties of Ms. Abedin's father, mother and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated."

Friday, March 06, 2015

White House Takes Out Two Democrat Critics of its Insane Iran Deal in One Week: Hillary and Menendez

It would appear that the Obama back office is far more competent than its front office.

Lee Smith asks a logical question: "We’ve Known About Hillary’s Email for Years. Why the Hoopla This Week?"

...the public first became aware that Clinton was using her personal email two years ago, in March 2013, when a Romanian Internet activist using the nickname Guccifer hacked into Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL account and uncovered a trove of work emails between the two from and to her personal account...

So, why did it take the Obama Administration two years to admit to what was already known and to then suggest that Clinton’s behavior was reckless and may have even been criminal? And why did it take so long for a major news organization like the New York Times to come up with the big “scoop” it published earlier this week?

Or to put the question another way, why did Hillary Clinton become the Obama Administration’s bête noire this very week, the same one during which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled all of the world’s focus onto the issue of the administration’s negotiations with Iran?

The answer is that the two are related: This week’s tarring of Hillary Clinton is part of the White House’s political campaign to shut off debate about its hoped-for deal. It’s not hard to see why they’re anxious. With Netanyahu’s speech forcing lawmakers and editorial writers to face up to the proposed agreement’s manifest problems, the administration fears the prospect of Democrats jumping ship and signing on to Kirk-Menendez sanctions legislation that also would give Congress oversight on the deal. So far, the White House has managed to keep Democratic lawmakers in line, no matter how much they seem to question the wisdom of the proposed deal. Hillary Clinton, gearing up for a 2016 run in which she is likely to put some distance between herself and Obama’s dubious Middle East policies, is the one major national Democratic figure who can give Democrats in Congress cover.

Did someone say "Menendez"?

The Perverse Lie That is the "Unemployment Rate" Under Obama

President Obama gleefully celebrated another government-reported drop in the unemployment rate today, this time to 5.5 percent.

The Obama economy has created a perverse distortion of the “Unemployment Rate” because that widely-reported rate represents the percentage of the total workforce actively seeking employment but not able to find employment... The more people who give up hope, and stop seeking employment, [the more it lowers] the “unemployment rate" ... And again today, with a seemingly strong jobs report, the “unemployment rate” dropped, but the number of those dropping out of the workforce also dropped.


Back in the little land we call "reality", Tyler Durden observes:

Thursday, March 05, 2015

CARUBA: Why Hillary Will Abandon Her Run for the Presidency

By Alan Caruba

The revelations, reported initially in the most left-wing newspaper in the nation, The New York Times, that Hillary Clinton used her own private emails to conduct public business, suggests that there are forces within the Democratic Party that do not want her to be its candidate for President in 2016.

It’s not like Hillary did not know she was supposed to use the State Department’s email system for reasons of national security; her private emails could have been hacked by forces unfriendly to the U.S. All government employees are routinely briefed on the laws that require this.

For the record, I am no fan of Hillary Clinton. On September 18 of last year, I wrote a commentary titled “Go Away, Hillary” in which I asked “Other than earning her law degree, name one thing that Hillary Clinton has accomplished on her own. Her accomplishments—slim as they are—have been achieved on the coattails of either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.”

Beyond Hillary, what I object to is the necessity to raise millions with which to secure either Party’s nomination and a billion to run for the presidency. We are electing someone who has literally bought the election courtesy of donors who have made the selection for the rest of us. There is something fundamentally undemocratic about that.

That said, I don’t think Hillary Clinton will run in 2016.

That may surprise you, but it surprises me as well. And, yes, I could be wrong, but the revelations about her patently illegal email use while Secretary of State suggests that there are forces within her Party that want to end her candidacy now rather than later. They are sending her an ominous message.