Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts

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?



Monday, March 09, 2015

Life Under the American Umbrella

By Caroline Glick

South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.

Last Friday, US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, “Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it’s not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy.”

The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang’s refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program.

Sherman negotiated the US’s nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal.

Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs.

Sherman is now the US’s chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran.

Even in the minority, Democrats seize control of Congress from feckless, cowardly boobs McConnell and Boehner

By Gerren McHam

Are the Democrats in charge of Congress?

On its face, this question certainly seems ridiculous since Republicans regained control of the Senate and increased their majority in the House of Representatives last November.

But as we have witnessed over the last several weeks, just because Republicans have the most seats in the Senate and the House doesn’t mean they are actually in control. Just consider the Department of Homeland Security funding debate.

Last December, both chambers of Congress agreed to a $1.1 trillion dollar spending measure that funded the federal government through the next fiscal year with one caveat: the Department of Homeland Security only received a short-term extension through February 2015. Why? Popularly characterized as the “CRomnibus” deal, this action was promoted as an approach that afforded Congress the ability to address President Obama’s unilateral actions on immigration under the new Republican majorities by how they funded the Department of Homeland Security. Feeding off the momentum from the November elections, Republicans appeared motivated and equipped to tackle the president’s actions during 114th Congress.

“Come January, we’ll have a Republican House and Republican Senate, and we’ll be in a stronger position to take actions. [It is], “the most practical way to fight the president’s action.” –Speaker of the House John Boehner in December.

“If President Obama acts in defiance of the people and imposes his will on the country, Congress will act. We’re considering a variety of options. But make no mistake — make no mistake — when the newly elected representatives of the people take their seats, they will act.” –Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.

Or so they thought.

12 Questions Iran Refuses to Answer About its Nuclear Weapons Program

By The Tower

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has questions about twelve aspects of Iran’s past nuclear weapons research that the Islamic Republic has failed to satisfactorily answer, according to an analysis that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday.

These twelve areas of past Iranian research include computer simulations, detonation experiments, and delivery systems for nuclear warheads. While the analysis lists one of the areas of questions as having been discussed and two as “being on the table,” the other nine have not been discussed at all.

The one listed as having been discussed was research into electrically-fired detonators, which Iran explained as having applications for peaceful mining purposes. But experiments involving such detonators are believed to have taken place in the military base at Parchin, and Iran has not allowed a thorough investigation of the site. It has also paved over areas where the experiments are believed to have taken place.

According to the analysis, there is an ongoing debate among Western negotiators over how much weight to give to Iran’s failure to abide by past agreements (including the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action) and come clean about its illicit military nuclear program.

That inner debate, as one European official in the midst of the negotiations put it, turns on “whether to force Iran to explain its past” — especially before 2003, when American intelligence officials believe Iran operated a full-scale equivalent of the Manhattan Project — “or whether to focus on the future.”

American officials are vague when pressed on how fully Iran will have to answer questions it has avoided for years from United Nations inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna. To date, Iran has dodged all but one of the agency’s dozen sharp questions on bomb design.

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.

CARTOON: If Obama were president in 1941

Originally published in the Fremont Tribune:


The artist is Deryl Skelton, who is from Fremont.


Hat tips: Clash Daily and BadBlue News.

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

Come and take them -- literally

By Springer's Blog


Take my administration. Please.

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:

WHITTLE: The "Chickensh**" Leader of the Free World

By Bill Whittle

He’s the Leader of the Free World, elected by a civilized nation: militarily powerful because of, and not in spite of, it’s cultural commitment to science and art and medicine.

Although he spent much of his early life overseas, the Leader of the Free World grew up in the Northeast, and graduated from Harvard University. That he has a deep and abiding love for America is self-evident: he admires our energy, our inventiveness; our decency and kindness; our innate friendliness and charity. He loves our culture; he admires our private sector which generates so much innovation. And the Leader of the Free World admires and respects our vast military power, and the restraint which it is used – to him, it is indeed the Arsenal of Democracy.

And even though he has grown up the victim of bigotry and hatred, the Leader of the Free World loves America, even though slurs are applied to him still today. In spite of all that, he loves everything she stands for.

And there he stood, backed by American flags and framed in American glory – on the floor of the House of Representatives; where his predecessors made the case to fight against the great evils in the world: slavery. Nazism. Japanese Imperialism. Communism.

There he stood: The Leader of the Free World; a thoughtful, serious man making a thoughtful, serious case to the World’s Greatest deliberative body. The Leader of the Free World spoke frankly of the need to confront today, as we have confronted in the past, this latest threat to freedom, and science, and medicine, and art, and the basic human rights not only of women, and homosexuals but of everyone to live their own lives as they saw fit. He spoke against the clear and present danger posed by Islamic savages, motivated by religious hatred, implacable in their desire to see the world burn – and especially about the threat posed by the stat of Iran, which is working feverishly, night and day, so see those fires burn not at hundred but rather at thousands of degrees.

The President of the United States declined to attend this speech by the Leader of the Free World, because the President of the United States has called the Leader of the Free World “chickensh**.”

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.

Trash Day at the White House

By Springer


Read more at Springer's Blog

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

REPORTS: Hillary's Use of Covert Email System to Skirt Subpoenas May Constitute a Felony

Geriatric oligarch hacks hardest hit.

The Federal Records Act requires the preservation of any official “record,” which is defined functionally to require preservation whenever a record relates to the performance of a federal official’s duties. There is little question that Hillary Clinton was conducting official business on her private e-mail account...

...the law as it existed before Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, were codified by National Archives Regulations in 2009, which required that any records created on private e-mail accounts must be saved to the federal-records system. And Congress confirmed that in 2013, by adopting a prohibition on the use of private e-mail, unless the employee forwards to or copies an official e-mail account within 60 days of the record’s creation...

...Mrs. Clinton did something here that went well beyond occasional or incidental use of private e-mail accounts. She eschewed the use of an official account entirely, and deliberately established a private e-mail account, apparently maintained on a server in the Clintons’ New York home. As a result, her e-mails were at no time during her tenure in office subject to the Federal Records Act ...

[Despite scores] of Freedom of Information Act requests that would have implicated her e-mails[,] they were never searched, even though a reasonable search of all responsive federal records must be made in response to FOIA requests. And the records would have been relevant to congressional inquiries as well, including continuing investigations of the Benghazi attacks.

Why does that matter? Well, a federal criminal law makes it a felony when any custodian of official government records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same.” The crime is punishable by up to three years in prison. And interestingly, Congress felt strongly enough about the crime that it included the unusual provision that the perpetrator shall “forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

I suspect that Lanny Davis just let loose a little dinky in his trunks.

As Flyovercountry observes, "Her crime, my fellow gentle snow flakes, had little to do with email, although that was the vehicle which she used to commit her transgression. Her crime was establishing a subpoena-proof system to hide her dealings on behalf of a public which has a legal right to know what their servant is up to, even before she held the job for which said email was to be used. She committed a covert act, three days before her confirmation hearing to cover up a crime she hadn’t even committed yet, but clearly was planning on committing in the very near future. The holder of the Guinness Wold Book of Records most sleazy crook has witnessed the exploits of Hillary Clinton and declared, “Hell’s Bells, that’s some sleazy stuff!”


Hat tip: BadBlue News

Obama EPA Chief Can’t Say Whether Climate Models Were False Or Not

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) grilled EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy earlier today and solicited a stunning admission.

Sessions: “When we go to our states, the group we have the most complaints about from our constituents—whether it’s highway people, whether it’s farmers, whether it’s energy people—is the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s an [agency of] extraordinary overreach. And you apparently are unaware of the pushback that’s occurring in the real world… So now you say that we’ve got a crisis and there are dangers out there. Let me ask you this. There was an article from Mr. [Bjorn] Lomborg… from the Copenhagen Institute. He says, along with Dr. Pielke from Colorado, that we’ve had fewer droughts in recent years. Do you dispute that?”

McCarthy: “I don’t know in what context he’s making statements like that…”

Sessions: “What about hurricanes. Have we had more or less hurricanes in the last decade?” …

McCarthy: “In terms of landing those hurricanes on land, I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”

Sessions: “It’s not complicated on how many have landed. We’ve had a dramatic reduction in the number. We’ve gone a decade without a hurricane [Category] 3 or above… Would you acknowledge that over the last 18 years, that the increase in temperature has been very little, and that it is well below, matter of fact 90 percent below most of the environmental models that showed how fast temperature would increase?” …

McCarthy: “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to…”

Sessions: “This is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency—who should know more than anybody else in the world, who is imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in cost to prevent this climate temperature increase—doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong.”


Hat tip: Stephen.

Most Transparent Administration Ever Suffers Curious Epidemic of Disappearing Email Systems, Crashed Hard Drives and Lost Backup Tapes

Remember when Barack Obama promised his would be the "most open and transparent administration ever"?

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Good times, good times.


Disappearing email systems:

A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

Here's why unions despise right-to-work

By Jason Hart

Have you ever wondered why labor unions are so strongly opposed to right-to-work laws?

Watch this brief video and wonder no more.