Obama: Corruption, Deception, Dishonesty, Deceit and Promises Broken

[Soul Crusher]

Team Obama Spent Up to $200 Million on Obamacare Propaganda Campaign
Gateway Pundit ,Rightnetwork ^ | April12,2011 | Jim Hoft



Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the agency’s massive taxpayer-funded multimedia campaign designed to promote the Affordable Health Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and other HHS policy initiatives. According to the records obtained by Judicial Watch pursuant to a March 23, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 11-608)), the total cost of the campaign, which targets Obama’s electoral coalition, could reach as much as $200 million.

Among the highlights from the documents:

An April 27, 2010 Department of Health and Human Services Acquisition Plan entitled “National Multimedia & Education Campaign & Grassroots Outreach,” details a comprehensive five-year communications program covering a variety of HHS policy initiatives, including “health care reform.” According to a section of the Acquisition Plan entitled, “Independent Government Cost Estimate,” the Health and Human Services ASPA (Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs) states: “ASPCA is unable to provide a definitive government cost estimate. Campaigns vary is [sic] size and scope. Some campaigns involve radio, some TV, and some print. Other campaigns may involve all of those avenues plus on ground events, website, bus tours, etc.” However, ASPA “is letting this contract in order produce three to four campaigns per year through the life-cycle of the contract. We are requesting a contract with a $200,000,000 maximum.” According to a subsequent March 14, 2011, contract included among the documents, HHS hired The Ogilvy Group “to provide services to design, develop, and execute a multiplatform educational media campaign to promote the new website Healthcare.gov, including the new Spanish language version of the website.” The total amount of the contract award: $3,998,928. There’s more.


(Excerpt) Read more at gatewaypundit.rightnetwo rk.com ...

[Freeborn126]

ethanol is shit.  I get like 2 to 3 less mpg with tha 10% ethanol crap.

[Soul Crusher]

Obama and Mexican Trucks
Townhall.com ^ | April 12, 2011 | Phyllis Schlafly




Barack Obama's deal with the president of Mexico to allow Mexican trucks to carry their loads onto U.S. highways and roads is new evidence of his high-handed solo behavior that has become Standard Operating Procedure in the administration. Here are 10 reasons why Obama's plan is dangerous and must be stopped by Congress and public protest.

1. Obama's deal with President Felipe Calderon, announced on March 3, bypasses Congress, defies the wishes of the American people, and looks like the action of a Third World dictator who thinks representative government is a nuisance and can be ignored. Congress made its wishes emphatically clear in 2007 when it voted to continue our ban on Mexican trucks. The House roll-call vote was 411 to 3, and the Senate's was 75 to 23.

2. Obama's deal is a direct attack on the jobs available to U.S. truck drivers because it helps big-business interests cut their costs by hiring cheaper Mexican drivers. Obama's deal is also an attack on small business (i.e., the owner-operated and independent truck drivers) who constitute the big majority of U.S. trucks.

3. The claim that Obama's deal is reciprocal (i.e., U.S. trucks will be allowed to drive into Mexico) is so cynical that we can hardly believe anyone says it with a straight face. "South of the border down Mexico way" (in the words of the old popular song) is the most dangerous war zone in the world (more dangerous than Afghanistan or Libya), where U.S. truck drivers would become the targets of hijackings, theft, murder, kidnappings and even beheadings committed by the drug cartels.

4. Built into the Obama deal is the sneaky imposition of costs on both U.S. truck drivers and U.S. taxpayers. Each truck will be required to install an EOBR (electronic on-board recorder) costing $3,000 plus maintenance fees: U.S. drivers at their own expense and Mexican trucks as a gift from U.S. taxpayers paid out of the Highway Trust Fund. U.S. taxpayers are already paying $1,600 each for many Mexican trucks to replace their old mufflers with catalytic converters.

5. Obama's deal will make it easy for Mexican trucks to bring in loads of illegal aliens and illegal drugs. Border inspection will be a farce, maybe only one in 10 trucks inspected, perhaps merely one in 20.

6. Opening our southern border to Mexican trucks will be a giant step toward the goal of creating a North American Union with open borders between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada -- a proposal launched by President George W. Bush using a website called Security and Prosperity Partnership (since deactivated). Obama is advancing the plan under less threatening names -- the March 23, 2010, State Department fact sheet titled "United States-Mexico Partnership: A New Border Vision," a Nov. 30, 2010, "Trusted Traveler" agreement with Mexico signed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and a Feb. 4, 2011, declaration signed by Obama with Canada called "Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security."

7. When Mexican truck drivers have their layovers and turn-arounds in the U.S., what's to prevent them from enjoying a frolic and diversion? They could use that time to father a baby who would then be proclaimed a U.S. citizen and get generous financial benefits and handouts provided by U.S. taxpayers.

8. We can assume that Mexican truck drivers will not be required to speak and read English, as U.S. law requires. The previous secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, stated at a Senate hearing that if drivers respond to test questions in Spanish, the test-taker nevertheless checks the box that they are "English proficient."

9. While U.S. truck drivers are strictly limited to the number of hours per day they can be on the road, there is no way to figure out how many hours a Mexican truck driver has been on the road when he clocks in at the border. Has he been driving the typical Mexican 20-hour day?

10. Mexican trucks will make highway safety for Americans a major problem. We have no way to know a Mexican driver's record of accidents, alcohol or drugs, or a Mexican truck's record of brakes or emissions. Mexico doesn't bother with records or regulations.

Don't let anybody get by with saying that NAFTA requires us to admit Mexican trucks because it's a treaty. It isn't -- NAFTA never complied with the treaty provision in the U.S. Constitution and is merely a law passed by Congress that can be changed or overturned.

Tell your member of Congress to take action to cancel Obama's truck deal with the Mexican president. Solo deals like this one cannot be tolerated under constitutional government.

[Soul Crusher]

W.H. visitor logs leave out many
By: Viveca Novak and Fred Schulte - Center for Public Integrity
April 13, 2011 04:39 AM EDT
www.politico.com


 


A foot of snow couldn’t keep Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jennifer Hudson and other celebrities away from a star-studded celebration of civil-rights-era music, hosted by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House in February 2010.

Dylan’s haunting rendition of “The Times They Are a-Changin’” was a highlight of the dazzling evening. The digitally friendly White House even posted the video of his performance on its website.

But you won’t find Dylan (or Robert Zimmerman, his birth name) listed in the White House visitor logs — the official record of who comes to call at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., which is maintained by the Secret Service.

Ditto Joan Baez.

Similarly, the logs are missing the names of thousands of other visitors to the White House, including lobbyists, government employees, campaign donors, policy experts and friends of the first family, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

The White House website proudly boasts of making available “over 1,000,000 records of everyone who’s come through the doors of the White House” via a searchable database.

Yet the Center’s analysis shows that the logs routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, whom they met with and the nature of their visits. The logs even include the names of people who never showed up. These are critical gaps that raise doubts about the records’ historical accuracy and utility in helping the public understand White House operations, from social events to meetings on key policy debates.

Among the many weaknesses found by the Center’s review of the database:

• The “event” description in the logs is blank for more than 205,000 visits, including many that involved small meetings with the president and his key aides.

• Five junior staff aides together received more than 4,440 visits. By contrast, then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, famed for his workaholic schedule, is listed as having fewer than 500 visits.

• Less than 1 percent of the estimated 500,000 visits to the White House in Obama’s first eight months — a time when the new administration was bustling with activity — have been disclosed, according to the Center’s analysis.

• The logs include names of people cleared by the Secret Service for White House entry who apparently never showed up. The Center analysis found more than 200,000 visits with no time of arrival, an indication that the person didn’t enter the White House, though there is no way to be certain. For instance, actor Ryan Gosling is listed at a West Wing event with members of his band, Dead Man’s Bones, in October 2009. But Gosling’s representative, Carolyn Govers, said the actor did not go.

• Two-thirds of the more than 1 million names listed are people who passed through parts of the White House on guided group tours.

The Center’s analysis is based on visitor logs through February; additional names released in late March are not included in this analysis. “If this is transparency, who needs it?” said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. He called the White House visitor logs “very thin gruel.”



A White House official conceded the system has limitations, asserting it was designed not as an archive but “first and foremost to protect the first family, second family and White House staff while imposing the smallest administrative burden possible.”

“The Obama administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency by releasing visitor records from the system each month to provide the American people with more information about their government,” White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said.

“No previous White House has ever adopted such a policy,” she said.

However, the White House agreed to release the data only as a result of settling a lawsuit. And the Obama administration has taken the same legal position as its Republican predecessor on the subject of whether the data are covered by the Freedom of Information Act. (They say no.)

Moreover, the settlement doesn’t cover visitor records generated from Jan. 20 to Sept. 15, 2009. According to the White House, the recordkeeping system was revamped when the settlement was reached, and going back into the old system would be extremely time consuming. The administration said it will respond to “reasonable, narrow and specific” requests for visitor information from Obama’s early months in office, but there will be no wholesale release of material.

It’s a sizable gap that provides the public and historians little insight into how key policy decisions were made and who played a role in them in the energetic early months of the new administration.

And it means it’s difficult to assess whether a major Obama campaign pledge to limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration has been kept, or if big donors have been given ready access to the White House, which Obama said during his campaign would not happen once he took office.

“It pains me to think that there are competent people processing this vast series of records for posting on the Web,” Aftergood said. “The overwhelming majority is of no consequence whatsoever.”

The records posted on the White House website, though voluminous, cover mostly mundane matters, such as tours and social events. In all, more than 50,000 names are listed for people who visited the president, POTUS in Secret Service parlance. Most were for 600 ceremonial or social gatherings, such as the July Fourth celebration in 2010, attended by more than 3,600 people.

But the logs reveal far less about the purpose of nearly half of the 300-plus private meetings listed with Obama, including those with politicians and even sports figures.

Case in point: Jeffrey Kindler, former chief executive of Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug company, is listed as visiting the White House complex eight times. Only three entries describe an event he attended; the rest are blank. Last month, Obama appointed Kindler to a presidential board with the duty to help the federal government improve its operations. Kindler did not return calls for comment.

AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka has been logged in at least four dozen times, often with other labor bigwigs, but the records tell why he was there in only 12 of those cases, and those are mostly ceremonial events or social functions. Twice last year, Trumka met privately with Obama and once with Vice President Joe Biden, the records show, but no details are given. The AFL-CIO declined to comment.


Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker, the Obama’s campaign finance chairman, met with the president on Feb. 16, 2009, in the Oval Office, according to the logs. Several other “bundlers,” each of whom raised $200,000 or more for the Obama campaign, also met with the president, the visitors’ logs show.

Asked why no details are available, the White House said the Secret Service doesn’t need a description for security purposes, and it would be an unnecessary burden to provide it.

In other words, it’s up to the White House staffer being visited, who provides the other information the Secret Service needs for doing background checks on visitors, to decide whether to complete the log’s description field.

Another practice calling into question the veracity of the logs: Junior White House staff members routinely list themselves as the “visitee,” or person being visited, when in fact the visitor has arrived to see someone higher up the chain of command.

The practice appears to apply to the commander in chief in some instances.

Reggie Love is recorded as receiving nearly 300 visits in the West Wing of the White House. Love is Obama’s personal assistant, the young aide who is constantly at the president’s side. Celebrities like NBA star Kobe Bryant and some Obama friends are listed as visitors to Love.

In addition, nearly two dozen campaign fundraisers and their family members are listed as visiting Love. The records give no hint as to who else they saw once they entered the White House or the purpose of their meetings. Among them was Hildy Kuryk, a New York fundraiser for Obama who now is deputy national finance director of the Democratic National Committee.

While Emanuel is listed as having fewer than 500 visitors, the logs show health care czar Nancy Ann DeParle had three times as many visitors. But three young aides who scheduled meetings for Emanuel — Katherine Kochman, Amanda Anderson and Benjamin Milakofsky — collectively had more than 2,600 visits in their names. Emanuel did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked why junior staffers appear so often with top-flight visitors, the White House said administrative staff are often the point of contact for visitors to senior staff, and they receive guests as they arrive.

On the other hand, at times there is an absurd amount of detail for seemingly trivial visits. An example: Jackie Walker, a professional makeup artist, is listed for more than a dozen one-person meetings with Obama. She also made more than two dozen other trips to the White House, visiting various aides or press office staff. Walker, who runs Trackchicks in Chantilly, Va., told the Center that Obama is a client. She declined further comment.

Another lapse in the White House logs is due to Obama staff who met with people off-site. POLITICO has reported that some visitors believe Obama aides avoid listing such visitors in the logs by steering them to buildings just outside the White House complex. An Obama spokesman denied to POLITICO there was any such motive for holding the meetings off-site.

Despite the gaps, some analysts with an eye toward history think the Obama administration has made a good first move.

“I think we’re lucky to get what we’re getting,” said Martha Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who writes about White House transitions.

“Would I like more? Yes.”

Viveca Novak and Fred Schulte are writers with the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit group focused on investigative journalism. A fuller version of this report is at www.iwatchnews.org.
 
 
© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC
 

[Soul Crusher]

Does Obama tell the truth about anything?
American Thinker ^ | April 13, 2011 | Ed Lasky




Barack Obama pledged that if elected he would make it a goal to have much more transparency in his administration than those Presidents who preceded him. There was going to be Change. The transparency would bring about ‘accountability" in his words.



One of the policies he trumpeted would be making available to the public the White House visitor logs so we can know who visited with the President, the Vice-President and key officials of his team. Only later did we discover -- through outside investigators

' efforts -- that these key officials were circumventing the new "policy" by meeting with lobbyists across the street from the White House at Caribou Coffee

, as well as other spots so that their meetings would not show up on the logs.



Now, it turns out that the vaunted White House logs themselves are filled with "inaccuracies."



Alana Goodman at Commentary Contentions

has more:

Here is a reminder of yet another Obama campaign promise unfulfilled. His administration would be the most transparent in history, Obama vowed, but a new study by the Center for Public Integrity finds that the White House has been omitting names and details from the visitors' log.


"Five junior staff aides together received more than 4,440 visits," Politico reported. "By contrast, then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famed for his workaholic schedule, is listed as having fewer than 500 visits."


Meanwhile, Obama's personal assistant Reggie Love is recorded as receiving nearly 300 visits in the West Wing-including celebrities and friends of Obama's.


The study also found that less than 1 percent of roughly 500,000 visits during Obama's first eight months in office have been disclosed.


The main problem with the shoddy visitors' log is that it obscures key details of meetings with relevant political figures. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, Obama campaign bundlers, lobbyists, and drug company CEOs regularly visit the White House. But the logs often don't explain the purpose of the visits, or who the meetings were with.


The Obama administration claims that it has "taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency by releasing visitor records from the system each month." But releasing the records matters very little if the information is absent or clouded with inaccuracies.


Needless to say, debates over ObamaCare were not broadcast on C-SPAN as was also promised. Bills were not posted on-line for five days before they were voted upon to allow citizen comment and time for politicians to read. As National Review's Jim Geraghty has observed, all of Obama's promises have an expiration date (and back in March of last year, he posted a partial listing of these expired promises). Time for an update, Mr. Geraghty.


One could go on and on regarding fibs about his budget, ObamaCare, and much else.


Louis Brandeis famously said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". When combined with the administration's politically-motivated filtering of Freedom of Information requests (and the White House's refusal to release information that is the subject of the FOI requests), there does not seem to be much be much disinfecting-or change-going on during the Obama era.

[Soul Crusher]

(PJM Exclusive) Did Obama and Holder Scuttle Terror Finance Prosecutions?
High-level source concedes DOJ let off CAIR co-founders and others for political reasons.
April 14, 2011 - by Patrick Poole   Share | 


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/did-obama-and-holder-scuttle-terror-finance-prosecutions/?singlepage=true



During the House Homeland Security hearing last month on the topic of radicalization in the American Muslim community, one exchange between L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) concerned the relationship between the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and Hamas terrorist front the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sheriff Baca told the congressman:

We don’t play around with criminals in my world. If CAIR is an organization that is a quote “criminal organization,” prosecute them. Hold them accountable and bring them to trial.

But according to a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice, who spoke exclusively to Pajamas Media on the condition of anonymity, Sheriff Baca, a long-time supporter of CAIR, was probably already in on the joke.

The joke is that a number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.

But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010, memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of any particular suspect are not public.”

Pajamas Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.

According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were convicted on all 108 counts.

But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the source said.

It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. In an April 2009 letter to Sen. Jon Kyl, FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers said that “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”

And a February 2010 letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to four congressmen who inquired about the termination of the relationship between the FBI and CAIR — just weeks before the DOJ officially ceased further prosecutions, including of CAIR co-founders — elaborated on the evidence about CAIR that had emerged from the Holy Land trial. Yet, according to my DOJ source, CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban and these statements made to members of Congress.

And just last November, a significant July 2009 memorandum order by Judge Jorge Solis, who supervised the initial Holy Land Foundation trial, was unsealed under direction of the Court of Appeals. It provides the court’s reasons for refusing to remove CAIR and two other prominent Islamic groups, the Islamic Society of North America and NAIT, from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case. Judge Solis concluded that “the four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas” (p. 7), specifically naming Omar Ahmad’s part in the conspiracy (p. 6) and adding later that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and with Hamas” (p. 15).

As I reported here at Pajamas Media, FBI Director Robert Mueller reiterated these reasons for cutting ties with CAIR before a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting — just two days before The Daily Caller reported that White House officials had publicly praised CAIR.

Adding to the hypocrisy, after the Obama administration scuttled the next round of prosecutions in the Hamas terror financing investigation last March, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the prosecutors and FBI investigators in the Holy Land Foundation case the AG’s Award for Distinguished Service last October for their work in the case.

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have happened, we probably would have gone through the second round of prosecutions before the change in administrations.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.

It remains to be seen how Congress, the American people, and the establishment media — who always seem eager to rise to the defense of CAIR and the other terror-tied Islamic groups — will proceed.

Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.

[Fury]

(PJM Exclusive) Did Obama and Holder Scuttle Terror Finance Prosecutions?
High-level source concedes DOJ let off CAIR co-founders and others for political reasons.
April 14, 2011 - by Patrick Poole   Share | 


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/did-obama-and-holder-scuttle-terror-finance-prosecutions/?singlepage=true



During the House Homeland Security hearing last month on the topic of radicalization in the American Muslim community, one exchange between L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) concerned the relationship between the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and Hamas terrorist front the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sheriff Baca told the congressman:

We don’t play around with criminals in my world. If CAIR is an organization that is a quote “criminal organization,” prosecute them. Hold them accountable and bring them to trial.

But according to a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice, who spoke exclusively to Pajamas Media on the condition of anonymity, Sheriff Baca, a long-time supporter of CAIR, was probably already in on the joke.

The joke is that a number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.

But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010, memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of any particular suspect are not public.”

Pajamas Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.

According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were convicted on all 108 counts.

But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the source said.

It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. In an April 2009 letter to Sen. Jon Kyl, FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers said that “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”

And a February 2010 letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to four congressmen who inquired about the termination of the relationship between the FBI and CAIR — just weeks before the DOJ officially ceased further prosecutions, including of CAIR co-founders — elaborated on the evidence about CAIR that had emerged from the Holy Land trial. Yet, according to my DOJ source, CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban and these statements made to members of Congress.

And just last November, a significant July 2009 memorandum order by Judge Jorge Solis, who supervised the initial Holy Land Foundation trial, was unsealed under direction of the Court of Appeals. It provides the court’s reasons for refusing to remove CAIR and two other prominent Islamic groups, the Islamic Society of North America and NAIT, from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case. Judge Solis concluded that “the four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas” (p. 7), specifically naming Omar Ahmad’s part in the conspiracy (p. 6) and adding later that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and with Hamas” (p. 15).

As I reported here at Pajamas Media, FBI Director Robert Mueller reiterated these reasons for cutting ties with CAIR before a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting — just two days before The Daily Caller reported that White House officials had publicly praised CAIR.

Adding to the hypocrisy, after the Obama administration scuttled the next round of prosecutions in the Hamas terror financing investigation last March, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the prosecutors and FBI investigators in the Holy Land Foundation case the AG’s Award for Distinguished Service last October for their work in the case.

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have happened, we probably would have gone through the second round of prosecutions before the change in administrations.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.

It remains to be seen how Congress, the American people, and the establishment media — who always seem eager to rise to the defense of CAIR and the other terror-tied Islamic groups — will proceed.

Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.

Disgusting. I'm not the least bit surprised, though. These terrorist-front groups have their tentacles in everything and the God-King Messiah just helps them right along.

[Soul Crusher]

Another Obama Constitutional Grab in the Works
Townhall.com ^ | April, 14, 2011 | Brad O'Leary



President Barack Obama, the confiscator-in-chief of your constitutional rights is at it again. As we’ve come to expect, when President Obama tramples on the Constitution it’s usually under the guise of some noble cause. He embraced new rules for broadcasters designed to silence conservative talk show hosts under the guise of localism and diversity. This year, he’s pushing for so-called “common-sense” legislation that ultimately deprives citizens of their Second Amendment rights.


The Obama administration is working with Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) to pass S. 679, the “Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act,” which would sharply curtail the number of presidential appointees that must be confirmed by the Senate.


Of course, Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution provides for the advice and consent of the Senate with respect to presidential appointments. This new bill would sharply curtail that provision, allowing the President to make high-level appointments to federal agencies without the consent of the governed.


Obama and Schumer claim that the bill is designed to end the backlog of unconfirmed appointees and that it would eliminate the need for the Senate to vote on roughly 200 executive nominations. You see, the confirmation process, let alone enacting annual budgets, is too arduous a task for the Senate, so in the name of efficiency, Obama and Schumer want to do away powers enumerated in the Constitution.


When our Founding Fathers gave the Senate its advice and consent role, they clearly intended for the Senate to be a mainstay against Presidents loading the government with cheerleaders, political operatives, or in Obama’s case, radical anti-First and Second Amendment Presidential supporters.


Some Republican leaders in the Senate, perhaps eager for a lighter workload, have taken the bait and co-sponsored S.679. They include Lamar Alexander (TN), Scott Brown (MA), Susan Collins (ME), Jon Kyl (AZ), Dick Lugar (IN), and Mitch McConnell (KY). Unfortunately, they can’t see the forest for the trees. If they could, they’d understand that this nefarious bill would enable President Obama to fill high-level positions with more anti-gunners, so that Cass Sunstein, Eric Holder, and Janet Napolitano won’t feel so alone.


Stop me if this sounds crazy, but we have a President who recently met with the anti-gun crowd in a secret meeting to discuss ways to make an end-around Congress on gun control, and now the Republican leadership is going to help President Obama by giving him a tool to further circumvent Congress? Incidentally, I filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department to get the details from this recent meeting, but given the Obama administration’s disdain for transparency, I’m not holding my breath waiting for the information.


I can just see the U.N. just wanting to credit President Obama for passing their new anti-gun treaty.

[Soul Crusher]

Obama's Increasing Federal Debt $1,148 Per Month Per Household—Enough to Buy a Car or Pay Tuition...
CNS News ^ | April 13, 2011 | Terence P. Jeffrey



(CNSNews.com) - Under President Barack Obama, the federal debt has been increasing at a rate of $1,148 per month per American household.

Overall, according to the U.S. Treasury, the federal debt increased by $3,646,116,554,704.36 between Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was inaugurated, and April 13, 2011, when he gave a major speech announcing a plan to deal with the debt.

Given that the Census Bureau estimated in March that there are 117,538,000 households in the United States, the $3.6461 trillion increase in the debt under Obama works out to $31,020 per household.

Obama has now been in office 27 months. The $31,020 per household increase in the federal debt under his watch thus equals a per-household increase of $1,148 per month.

That $1,148 per month per household is more than a household would need to finance the monthly payments on a new domestically manufactured automobile.


(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...

[Soul Crusher]

White House draft bill would put DHS in charge of civilian computer networks
The Hill ^ | 4/15/11 | Gautham Nagesh



The White House is circulating a piece of draft legislation that would give the Department of Homeland Security oversight over cybersecurity at civilian agencies, according to a report from FedNewsRadio. The proposed legislation combines the comprehensive cybersecurity bill introduced last year by the Senate Homeland Security Committee with the administration's memo from July 2010 to expand DHS's responsibilities over non-military networks, according to the report. Like the Homeland Security bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine)


(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...

[Soul Crusher]

Obama moves forward with Internet ID plan
CNET ^ | April 15, 2011 | Declan McCullagh



The Obama administration said today that it's moving ahead with a plan for broad adoption of Internet IDs despite concerns about identity centralization, and hopes to fund pilot projects next year.

A 55-page document (PDF) released by the White House today adds a few more details to the proposal, which still remains mostly hazy and inchoate.

It offers examples of what the White House views as an "identity ecosystem," including obtaining a digital ID from an Internet service provider that could be used to view your personal health information, or obtaining an ID linked to your cell phone that would let you log into IRS.gov to view payments and file taxes. The idea is to have multiple identity providers that are part of the same system.

Another concern: Although the White House is describing the NSTIC plan as "voluntary," federal agencies could begin to require it for IRS e-filing, applying for Social Security or veterans' benefits, renewing passports online, requesting federal licenses (including ham radio and pilot's licenses), and so on. Then obtaining one of these ID would become all but mandatory for most Americans.


(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...

[Soul Crusher]

 Czars Stay: Obama Ditches Campaign Promise to Never Use ‘Special Signing Statement’
Posted on April 15, 2011 at 8:06pm by 
Emily Esfahani Smith Print » Email » Tweet

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2705973/posts

The president signed into law today the $38 billion in budget cuts that the House and Senate approved earlier in the week week. But Obama said that there were certain provisions of the bill that he would not abide by.

Namely, the provision defunding the czars.

Jake Tapper of ABC explains:

Last week the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans were involved in intense negotiations over not only the size of the budget for the remainder of the FY2011 budget, and spending cuts within that budget, but also several GOP “riders,” or policy provisions attached to the bill.

One rider – Section 2262 — de-funds certain White House adviser positions – or “czars.” The president in his signing statement declares that he will not abide by it.

But remember this?


Earlier this evening, Obama signed the budget bill, with the czars provision attached to it, according to the AP. At the same time, he issued a “signing statement”objecting to the defunding of the czars provision–and a couple others:

In an accompanying signing statement, however, Obama questioned the constitutionality of a provision in the spending bill that prevents the White House from retaining special policy advisers, or “czars.” He also objected to two other sections that block the transfer of terrorist suspects from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States or to other countries.

The president basically told Congress to shove it, issuing this statement about the provision defunding the czars:

 

The President has well-established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch, and to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority…The President also has the prerogative to obtain advice that will assist him in carrying out his constitutional responsibilities, and do so not only from executive branch officials and employees outside the White House, but also from advisers within it. Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President‘s ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The president went on, “the executive branch will construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.”

Tapper translates:. “In other words: we know what you wanted that provision to do, but we don’t think it’s constitutional, so we will interpret it differently than the way you meant it.”

[Soul Crusher]

Obama Spares Arrested Illegal Immigrant Protesters
Judicial Watch ^ | April 15, 2011




In the Obama Administration’s latest move to protect illegal immigrants while an amnesty plan gets worked out, Homeland Security officials said they won’t take action against a group of outlaws arrested in Georgia last week.


The illegal immigrants participated in a disruptive Atlanta demonstration to protest a state measure that bans undocumented students from attending some public colleges. The seven self-described activists, who proudly boasted about their illegal status, were arrested by local police for blocking traffic in bustling downtown Atlanta for about an hour.


Local media followed up this week by inquiring about the arrested demonstrators and the Homeland Security agency responsible for removing illegal aliens, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), confirmed that it was not taking any “enforcement actions against the student demonstrators.” One ICE official pointed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s well-documented stance on not deporting illegal immigrant students.


Last summer the Obama Administration ordered authorities to stop removing illegal immigrants who are students while lawmakers craft legislation to officially shield them from expulsion. The move, which has spared an estimated 700,000 illegal aliens, came in response to nationwide rallies by defiant illegal immigrants protesting their eminent removal or that of their undocumented parents.


The directive is part of Obama’s secret backdoor amnesty plan in case Congress doesn’t pass legislation to legalize the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants. Devised by political appointees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the plan aims to enact “meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action.”


This includes “deferred action” delaying deportation indefinitely, granting green cards, allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. indefinitely while they seek legal status (known as “parole in place”) and expanding the definition of “extreme hardships” so any illegal alien could meet the criteria and remain in the country.


Judicial Watch has sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records detailing the stealth amnesty plan because the agency has ignored a federal public records request that dates back to July 2010.

[Soul Crusher]

IBM exec offers to save $900 billion in health care costs, but Obama turned him down
The Washington Examiner ^ | 02/02/11 | By: Barbara Hollingsworth




The CEO of IBM offered the Obama administration a free software program that would have cut Medicare and Medicaid fraud by almost a trillion dollars, but he was turned down – twice.

"We could have improved the quality and reduced the cost of the healthcare system by $900 billion...I said we would do it for free to prove that it works. They turned us down, "IBM chairman and CEO Samuel Palmisano said during a Sept. 14, 2010 taping of the Wall Street Journal’s Viewpoints program.

FOX News confirmed that a second meeting between Palmisano and Obama administration officials yielded the same result: "No thanks!" – even though the proffered "fix" would have eliminated 90 percent of the nation’s health care deficit – and cost taxpayers nothing it didn’t perform as guaranteed.

Yet Medicare/Medicaid fraud is still rampant. According to the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga,"abuses of Medicaid (alone) eat up at least 10 percent of the program’s total cost nationwide -- a waste of $30 billion a year. Unscrupulous doctors billing for over 24 hours per day of procedures, phony companies invoicing for phantom services, pharmacists filling prescriptions for dead patients, home health-care companies demanding payment for treating clients actually in the hospital -- on and on the rip-offs go."

Now that Republicans are trying to repeal Obamacare and drastically cut federal spending at the same time, perhaps Palmisano can be persuaded to offer his services again.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/ibm-exec-offers-save-900-billion-health-care-costs-obama-turned-h#ixzz1JkGsm1NL

[Soul Crusher]

DOJ Source: Gov’t Muslim ‘Outreach’ Jeopardized Active Terror Investigations
Pajamas Media ^ | April 18, 2011 | Patrick Poole

________________________ ________________________ __________


An explosive, must-read interview brings sunlight to our counterproductive "outreach" programs. The case of the missing Somali men from Minneapolis highlights the failure and the absurdity.

The nearly six-hour interview I conducted earlier this year with a top Department of Justice official on the condition of anonymity brought forth a number of revelations about serious problems within the U.S. government’s homeland security and law enforcement community.

Last Thursday, I reported here exclusively at PJM on a DOJ memo dated March 31, 2010, from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. The memo effectively ended the prosecution of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad — in addition to the prosecution of other prominent American Muslim leaders — for helping support the Hamas terrorist organization. This decision, according to my source, was not made based on the overwhelming evidence that had been compiled over the past decade by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, but was made due to potential political embarrassment for the Obama administration and out of fear of inflaming the American Muslim community.


But another troubling claim came out during our interview: “Muslim outreach” programs by U.S. government agencies to terror-tied Islamic groups have directly interfered with ongoing terrorism investigations.

My source began by complaining about the counterproductive nature of such programs:

In all my years working for the U.S. government I have rarely seen anything as mystifying as our outreach to Muslims. Do we really need it? Sure. We need to be reaching out to the Muslim leaders who are working to prevent radicalization, not the ones who are making it happen. But that isn’t what we’re doing.

Instead we’re having countless meetings from the Cabinet level on down with groups and individuals that we know are bad guys and who we’ve repeatedly said in court are actively working to support terrorist groups overseas. We even had [FBI General Counsel] Valerie Caproni meeting regularly with these Hamas guys to get their guidance. What advice do you think they were giving her?

And she knew exactly who she was dealing with. It was the FBI who went into federal court and said that CAIR is Hamas.

But at the same time that FBI agents were testifying in the [Holy Land Foundation] trial that CAIR is a Hamas front there was serious disagreement inside DOJ and the FBI about whether we should continue to work with CAIR or cut them loose. So now we do both.


We say publicly that we don’t have an official relationship, but CAIR still has most of the staff in [Attorney General Eric] Holder and [FBI Director Robert] Mueller’s offices on speed dial. Don’t think for a minute that we stopped dealing with them.

And what exactly is our end game for doing this? Nobody knows. Are we getting anything by reaching out to CAIR? Of course not.

Now think for a minute about what we’re doing in any other context. Thirty years ago we didn’t have government liaisons to the IRA. The FBI doesn’t have an interfaith outreach program to the Mafia. Janet Napolitano doesn’t sit down and have lunch meetings with the Mexican drug cartels. And we don’t appoint members of the Crips and Bloods to our advisory boards on gangs. Well, not yet, at least [laughs].

It sounds really silly when you put it like that, but we have been allowing the bad guys to dictate our national policy on terrorism since the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993]. Let’s not forget that during the Clinton administration we had one of al-Qaeda’s top operatives in America — Abdurahman Alamoudi — organizing iftar dinners at the White House! The same guy who stood beside President Bush right after 9/11. Two years later he’s in prison, but his people are still popping up all over Washington.

Then we had [CAIR Executive Director] Nihad Awad advising Al Gore’s aviation security commission back in the late 90s. We said absolutely nothing even though we had him on our wiretaps five years before at a major Hamas meeting in Philadelphia. Nobody from DOJ or the FBI said a goddamn word because CAIR was advising every single federal agency dealing with terrorism at the time. We wouldn’t have these problems if we had cut them off then and there.

Stuff like that really makes me wonder what in the hell are we doing. I could easily give a dozen more examples going on right now. This bizarre fetish we’ve had about Muslim outreach since 9/11 has even damaged ongoing terrorism investigations and is eventually going to get people killed. I really believe that.


I asked for an example of how these outreach programs jeopardized investigations:

Well the best example was the investigation into the missing Somali kids in Minneapolis two years ago.

When Al-Shabaab started gaining support in the Somali community after the Ethiopian invasion in late 2006 and early 2007, all of the government agencies started doing outreach to the Somali imams. But when these kids went missing in Minneapolis, did we get a call from these imams we were reaching out to?

No, they were telling the families to shut up and not to talk to the FBI.

[Author’s note: Subsequent to my interview, Abdirizak Bihi, the uncle of one of the missing kids who was later killed fighting with Al-Shabaab in Somalia, testified before the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee hearing on radicalization in the Islamic community making these same claims: religious leaders and CAIR were intimidating the families of the missing Somali men to prevent them from talking to law enforcement.]

It wasn’t long into the investigation before we started hearing that the ones primarily responsible for recruiting and raising the funds for these kids to go fight with Al-Shabaab were the same imams we had been doing outreach to all along. But everyone was saying “we must do outreach,” like they had all been hypnotized, so the outreach continued.

Now at the same time, the FBI was working to get information from these imams about what might have happened with these kids when somebody somewhere decides to put them on the no-fly list. [Author’s note: It was widely reported that Sheik Abdirahman Ahmed of Masjid Abubakar As-Saddique -- the largest mosque in Minnesota -- and the mosque’s youth director Abdulahi Farah were placed on and later removed from the no-fly list.] So they get stopped trying to leave the country, which tips them off that they’re part of the investigation. And the imams quickly lawyer up. Its months before we actually get their attorneys to agree to let them to talk to us. And we got nothing from them when we did.


Once we started to get a handle on how big this really was, it ended up being becoming the largest CT [counterterrorism] investigation since 9/11. And a couple of months in we finally convene a grand jury to look into this thing. So do we call these imams in? Hell no.

Subpoenas go out to a bunch of mid- and low-level people, but not the big fish. And when the low-level people get their subpoenas, who do they call? The imams who are our prime suspects, oh, and who also are supposed to be our outreach partners. And like magic, the low-level folks all suddenly get CAIR attorneys representing them. The result is that the indictments that have been handed down are virtually all minor players. Instead of going after the guys running the operation, we indict a couple of guys and a Somali woman who raised a couple of thousand of dollars for Al-Shabaab.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they should all go to jail, but do we really believe we’re winning the war on terror when this Somali woman gets indicted and the imams who recruited these kids and sent them to fight and die are allowed to walk free?

I asked: the outreach to the imams finally stopped, didn’t it?

Are you kidding me? They’re still working with these guys!

[Authors note: In fact, one Somali press outlet reported that Homeland Security, the FBI, and several other federal, state, and local agencies held an unpublicized outreach session at the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque earlier this month. According to that report, Sheikh Ahmed and other mosque leaders did not attend for fear of backlash from the Somali community.]


But here’s how we get twisted around our own outreach programs. About two months after all these kids disappear, the Al-Shabaab imams from all over the country get together at a meeting in Ohio, including the Minneapolis imams we’re looking at. Do we wiretap the meeting? Of course not.

Instead, a representative for the imams convinces some dimwit attorney from Homeland Security Civil Rights division to come talk at their meeting about outreach. And so they let this guy talk for about ten minutes, then he’s quickly ushered out of the building so they can get down to business. This gives them perfect cover. “Well we can’t be having a terrorist meeting because we had Homeland Security here!”

And can you guess what happened to the imam’s lackey who arranged for Homeland Security to be at that meeting? He’s now one of [Homeland Security Secretary] Napolitano’s senior advisors and running all of their Somali outreach! They gave this guy a security clearance! I’m not f***ing kidding you!

If anyone wants to understand how utterly insane our outreach policy is they should start right there.

Look, I have to admit that these guys are evil, but they’re absolutely brilliant. They are so inside our decision-making process they will always be twenty steps ahead of us. I honestly think if we stopped doing counterterrorism altogether we would be better off. I really don’t mean that, but for us to return to some semblance of sanity we have got to stop relying on the bad guys to make our counterterrorism policy. And we damn well have to stop hiring these people and putting them in charge of outreach.

We also need to get rid of all these supposed outside experts. Four years ago a bunch of these academic idiots were telling us that Al-Shabaab was a nationalist organization that was only concerned with liberating Somalia from U.S.-backed foreign occupation and there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone still believe that? I mean we just had that Somali kid from Portland [Mohamed Osman Mohamud] try to set off a bomb in the middle of a Christmas celebration that would have killed hundreds of people. The [FBI] ran a solid operation on that one, but they aren’t going to be able to catch them all.

And when the day comes that we have dead Americans lying in our streets, you know what we’re going to hear from these experts? We need more outreach! I guarantee it! And they’ll get huge grants from DOJ, FBI, and DHS to tell us that.

At the time of this interview there was considerable criticism from Muslim groups regarding the upcoming House Homeland Security hearing on Islamic radicalization (which I covered for PJM last month). So later in the conversation, I asked about the claims being made by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and CAIR that the Muslim community has been actively helping law enforcement identify potential terrorists in their midst:


That is complete and utter bulls***.

In all my years working counterterrorism I can’t recall a single case where we prosecuted someone based on a tip from MPAC or CAIR or any of these groups. The only time we hear from them is when they think that someone is a government informant. That’s how MPAC blew a big al-Qaeda case in California. When they thought they had somebody spying inside the mosque, they called the FBI and said he was a potential terrorist and the whole case ended up falling apart. So what do we do in response? Did we cut them off? No, DHS has them train thousands of TSA employees in cultural sensitivity. I almost fell out of my chair when I heard about that. Oh, and they still call us when they want to bitch about us arresting one of their friends or employees or board members. But under Obama and Holder that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Just ask Omar Ahmad.

I hear them take credit for all these cases they had absolutely nothing to do with. Like the Lackawanna case. The FBI got one anonymous letter from someone in the Muslim community saying that a group of men had left to train in Afghanistan with bin Laden and he can’t say who he is because he’s in fear for his life. He was probably right to be in fear for his life. Who was he afraid of? Probably the people from his mosque.

But what about the dozens of people in the community who knew that an al-Qaeda recruiter had come through their mosque and knew these men had left to go train with al-Qaeda? From all those people who knew what was going on we got a single anonymous tip. But they raise this example anytime someone dares to question their lack of cooperation. The Muslim community can’t have it both ways. If they don’t want to be tarred every time a Muslim commits a terror attack they can’t turn around and claim to be cooperative with law enforcement when one person does the right thing and everyone else stays silent.

And then you have the case a couple of years ago of the three guys in Toledo who wanted to fight Americans and join the Taliban. When they were arrested the Muslim leaders kept praising themselves that someone from the Muslim community turned them in. But it wasn’t until the trial that it came out that the tip didn’t come from the Muslim community but from an undercover agent. I’m sure that CAIR and MPAC take credit for that as an example of their cooperation with the FBI, and then use that same case to attack the FBI for using an agent provocateur to entrap innocent Muslims.

And these are the groups we have been using as the bridge to the Muslim community for going on twenty years now. I mean the best thing we could do is burn that bridge to the ground and start building some new ones.

I’ll be bringing you more from my exclusive interview here at PJM later this week.

[Soul Crusher]

Obama Plays Down S&P Outlook Change


The Obama administration moved swiftly Monday to downplay ratings agency S&P's downgrade of its U.S. credit outlook, calling the decision a political judgment that should not be taken too seriously.

The timing of S&P's announcement was unwelcome for the White House, coming just as President Obama tried to regain the initiative on the deficit debate in Washington.

Last week Obama laid out his plan to reduce the budget deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years, trying to give markets confidence that he was serious about tackling U.S. fiscal woes.

Standard & Poor's downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there is a risk U.S. policymakers would not reach agreement on how to address the country's long-term fiscal pressures by 2013.

So much for market confidence.

The White House strategy:

1) Pan S&P.

"I don't think that we should make too much out of that," top White House economist Austan Goolsbee said on MSNBC, referring to the S&P downgrade.

"What the S&P is doing is making a political judgment and it is one that we don't agree with," he said on CNBC.

2) Praise Moody's.

The rival ratings agency said it viewed the direction of U.S. fiscal policy as "credit positive."

"It appears to me that Moody's and some others did not agree with that judgment," Goolsbee said.

3) Express optimism.

White House and U.S. Treasury officials said they believed lawmakers would be able to come up with an agreement to reduce the U.S. deficit. S&P's skepticism of that influenced its decision on the downgrade.

"We think that there has never been more momentum to try to get to fiscal consolidation, so we think that we should give that process its due," a Treasury official said.

4) Buy time.

Obama administration officials said it would take some time to get a solution, and S&P should have waited to allow that to happen.

"I think their timing is off," the Treasury official said.

"I think they should allow the process to work its course here. We have got a lot going on between the White House, Congress, the fiscal commission. I think there are some very serious proposals on the table so I think they should take some time to see what happens."


RELATED LINKS
S&P Cuts US Debt OutlookAmid Din, Serious Talk on DebtRepublican Budget Plan to Eliminate National Debt: Ryan
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

TOPICS:Barack Obama | White House | United States | Debt | Politics and Government

[Soul Crusher]

U.S. Gov't Agency Plans $2.84 Billion Loan for Oil Refinery—In Colombia
Monday, April 18, 2011
By Terence P. Jeffrey

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-plan-284-billion-loan-oil-refinery



(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Export-Import Bank, an independent agency of the federal government, is now planning a $2.84-billion loan for a massive project to expand and upgrade an oil refinery--in Cartagena, Colombia.

The money would go to Reficar, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ecopetrol, the Colombian national oil company.

“This is part of a $5.18 billion refinery and upgrade project in Cartagena, Colombia supplying petroleum products to the domestic and export markets,” the Export-Import Bank said in a statement.

The U.S. government-controlled bank says the $2.84-billion in financing it plans to undertake will be the second largest project it has ever done. The largest was $3 billion in financing for a liquid natural gas project in Papua New Guinea.

The statement released by the bank said that on April 7 the bank’s presidentially-appointed board of directors had “voted to grant preliminary approval for a $2.84 billion direct loan/loan guarantee” for the Colombian refinery project.

Export-Import Bank Spokesman Phil Cogan told CNSNews.com that the bank could not say at this time how much of the $2.84 billion would be directly loaned to the Colombian refinery company and how much would be in loans guaranteed by the bank--although he expected it to be a combination.

“It is conceivable it could be all a direct loan,” said Cogan. “Right now it is set up so that the board could do either a complete direct loan or a combination of direct loan and guarantee. That hasn’t been determined yet.”

Since December, the bank has also approved almost $880 million in other loans and loan guarantees to Reficar’s parent company, Ecopetrol. So, in total, if the new $2.84 billion in loans is finalized, the Columbian national oil company and its wholly owned subsidiaries will have received $3.72 billion in financing backed by a U.S.-government-controlled entity within a span of five months.

“Just last February and December the Bank approved nearly $880 million in export financing to help finance the sale of goods and services from various U.S. exporters to Ecopetrol S.A., Colombia's national oil company,” Export-Import Bank President Fred P. Hochberg said in the bank’s statement announcing preliminary approval of the refinery loan.

Export-Import Bank Spokesman Cogan stressed in an interview that although Reficar is wholly owned by Ecopetrol it remains a separate entity, and is considered as such for Export-Import Bank financing purposes

In its 2009 annual report, Ecopetrol says “we became 100% owners of Reficar, the company in charge of carrying out the Cartagena Refinery modernization plan.”

In its ordinary procedure for financing projects of this magnitude, the board of the Export-Import Bank votes its preliminary approval, notifies Congress of that preliminary approval, then waits five weeks before voting final approval of the deal. This allows members of Congress to comment on the planned financing project.

“The Reficar transaction is subject to congressional notification, with a final vote anticipated approximately 35 days following the expiration of the notification period,” says the bank’s press release on the loan.

When asked if Congress can veto the loan, Ex-Im Spokesman Cogan said, “No.”

The public-policy rationale for the $2.84 billion loan for the Colombian oil refinery project is the same as the rationale for all Export-Import Bank loans to foreign interests: to create jobs in the United States.

“The transaction will help create or sustain over 15,000 American jobs for a total of four years,” says the bank’s statement about the loan.

Spokesman Cogan says the bank calculates the jobs created or sustained by a loan or loan guarantee by using a formula that estimates how much money spent buying U.S. exports in a particular industry it takes to create a job.

If the $2.84 billion loan to Reficar to expand and upgrade its Colombian refinery creates or sustains the 15,000 jobs in the United States that the bank believes it will create or sustain that would work out to $189,333 per job.

According to the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA), 95 percent of the gasoline purchased by U.S. consumers is refined inside the United States, meaning that expanding the gasoline refining capacity of Colombia is unlikely to have a significant impact on the supply of refined gasoline in the Untied States.

Also according to NPRA, the last time a new oil refinery was built in the United States was 1993, when a small facility was built in Valdez, Alaska.  The last time a new large oil refinery was built in the United States was 1976, says NPRA. Older U.S. refineries, however, have been upgraded and expanded in recent years.

[Soul Crusher]

LEAKED: Obama Executive Order Intends to Implement Portions of DISCLOSE Act
Pajamas Media ^ | April 19, 2011 | Hans A. von Spakovsky





Says our source: "They lost in the Supreme Court, they lost in Congress, they lost at the FEC, so now the president is just going to do it by edict."

An impeccable source has provided me with a copy of a draft Executive Order pdf that the White House is apparently circulating for comments from several government agencies. Titled “Disclosure of Political Spending By Government Contractors,” it appears to be an attempt by the Obama administration to implement — by executive fiat — portions of the DISCLOSE Act.


This was the bill introduced last year by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The bill had onerous requirements that were duplicative of existing law and burdensome to political speech. It never passed Congress because of principled opposition to its unfair, one-side requirements that benefited labor unions at the expense of corporations. Democratic commissioners at the Federal Election Commission then tried to implement portions of the bill in new regulations. Fortunately, those regulations were not adopted because of the united opposition of the Republican commissioners.


As my source says:


It really is amazing — they lost in the Supreme Court, they lost in Congress, they lost at the FEC, so now the president is just going to do it by edict.


The draft Executive Order says it is intended to “increase transparency and accountability,” an interesting claim given the fact that federal contractors are already completely barred by 2 U.S.C. § 441c from making:


Any contribution of money or other things of value, or to promise expressly or impliedly to make any such contribution to any political party, committee, or candidate for public office or to any person for any political purpose or use.


Yet this proposed Executive Order would require government contractors to disclose:


(a) All contributions or expenditures to or on behalf of federal candidates, parties or party committees made by the bidding entity, its directors or officers, or any affiliates or subsidiaries within its control.

(b) Any contributions made to third party entities with the intention or reasonable expectation that parties would use those contributions to make independent expenditures or electioneering communications.


The problem is that this will require companies to delve into the personal political activities of their officers and directors — and require them to report political contributions those employees have made, not out of corporate funds (which is illegal), but out of their personal funds.


And note that these disclosure requirements will only apply to companies that make bids on government contracts. Federal employee unions that negotiate contracts for their members worth many times the value of some government contracts are not affected by this order. Neither are the recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants.


Clearly, this administration is not interested in increasing “transparency and accountability” when it comes to forcing union leaders or the heads of liberal advocacy organizations such as Planned Parenthood from disclosing the personal political contributions they make to candidates running for federal office.


The draft order also tries to interfere with the First Amendment rights of contractors. It requires them to disclose independent expenditures that can be made legally on everything from politics to grassroots lobbying on issues. This is clearly intended to deter charitable and other contributions to third-party organizations, since the contractors will have to report any such contributions made with the “reasonable expectation” that the money will be used for First Amendment-protected activities.


“Reasonable expectation” is the kind of broad, nebulous legal term that can cover almost any situation that the government — and government prosecutors — want it to cover. This makes it almost impossible for contractors to know what the acceptable legal standard is for engaging in First Amendment activity.


This administration completely mischaracterized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, especially when President Obama attacked the Court in his State of the Union speech. It misrepresented the intended effects and requirements of the DISCLOSE Act, which former FEC Chairman Brad Smith correctly observed should really have been called the “Democratic Incumbents Seeking to Contain Losses by Outlawing Speech in Elections Now” Act.


With this proposed Executive Order, the administration is engaging in a back-door maneuver that promotes transparency only in the form of transparent political gamesmanship. It’s an alarming proposal that should raise great concern among members of Congress and the American public.


Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

[Soul Crusher]

Obama administration eases pain of Medicare cuts
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press – 1 hr 12 mins ago



WASHINGTON – Millions of seniors in popular private insurance plans offered through Medicare will be getting a reprieve from some of the most controversial cuts in President Barack Obama's health care law.

In a policy shift critics see as political, the Health and Human Services department has decided to award quality bonuses to hundreds of Medicare Advantage plans rated merely average.

The $6.7 billion infusion could head off service cuts that would have been a headache for Obama and Democrats in next year's elections for the White House and Congress. More than half the roughly 11 million Medicare Advantage enrollees are in plans rated average.

In a recent letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, two prominent GOP lawmakers questioned what they termed the administration's "newfound support" for Medicare Advantage.

The shift "may represent a thinly veiled use of taxpayer dollars for political purposes," wrote Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan. Camp chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees Medicare. Hatch is his counterpart as ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Seniors are among the deepest skeptics of the new health care law. A recent AP-GfK poll found that 62 percent disapprove of Obama's handling of health care, as contrasted with 52 percent approval among Americans overall. The poll also found that seniors are more likely to trust Republicans than Democrats on the issue, by a 51 percent to 36 percent margin.

The insurance industry says the bonuses will turn what would have averaged out as a net cut for Medicare Advantage plans in 2012 into a slight increase.

The administration says the reason for the bonuses is quality improvement, not politics.

"We are looking at whether an alternative payment incentive structure would lead to broader quality improvements across all Medicare Advantage plans, by giving incentives for a broader range of plans to improve," said Medicare spokesman Brian Cook.

Medicare covers seniors and disabled people. About one-fourth of beneficiaries are signed up in Medicare Advantage plans that offer lower out-of-pocket costs and more comprehensive benefits than the traditional program. Some of the heaviest enrollment is in states considered political battlegrounds, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Minnesota and Colorado.

The health care law cut $145 billion over ten years from Medicare Advantage, partly to correct a widely acknowledged problem with overpayments to the plans. Those cuts start off modestly in 2012 and build up. Insurers were expected to shift the burden to beneficiaries in the form of fewer services and higher out-of-pocket costs, triggering an exodus back to traditional Medicare.

"The net result is that the boat didn't get rocked," said independent analyst Dan Mendelson, president of the information firm Avalere Health. "It's fair to say that (Medicare) could not tolerate dislocation, given the political climate."

But Mendelson also said he agrees with the administration that the new money will get more plans thinking about how to improve quality, if they want to remain profitable.

"They are giving the plans training wheels to improve their quality," he said.

The health care law itself tried to soften the impact of Medicare Advantage cuts by providing quality bonuses for highly-rated plans that received four or five stars in a government grading system.

But in a policy shift quietly completed this month, HHS decided that average-quality plans garnering three or three-and-a-half stars would also get bonuses. About half of all the plans fall into the three-star category, according to Avalere's analysis.

The HHS decision means that four of five Medicare Advantage enrollees are in plans now eligible for a bonus. That contrasts with the approach that Congress took in the health care law, where only one in four beneficiaries would have been in plans getting the extra payments.

HHS' nearly $7-billion bonus program is temporary. In 2015, the cuts called for in the health care law will kick in again.

But the episode could be an early sign that Medicare cuts used to finance much of Obama's coverage expansion for the uninsured will turn out to be politically unsustainable, as have other efforts to impose austerity. For example, Congress has routinely waived cuts in Medicare payments to doctors.

A nonpartisan agency that advises lawmakers on Medicare criticized the bonus plan. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission said it amounts to "a mechanism to increase payments" and its design "sends the wrong message about what is important to the program and how improved quality can best be achieved."

At a time when government is urging health care providers to improve quality and cut costs, the bonus plan "lessens the incentive to achieve the highest level of performance," commission chairman Glenn Hackbarth wrote to HHS officials. Medicare spokesman Cook disagreed, saying even plans that get two stars will now have an incentive to improve.

Medicare has classified the bonuses as a demonstration program, relying on broad legal authority Congress gave the agency to experiment with quality improvements. It's the costliest demonstration program in Medicare history. The money will come from the Medicare trust fund.

[Soul Crusher]

Environmental Laws Stymie Border Patrol’s Effectiveness, Report Says
cnsnews.com ^ | 19 April 2011 | Edwin Mora



Federal land managers in Arizona, where about half of all illegal alien apprehensions took place in 2010, denied a U.S. Border Patrol station permission to build a road deemed necessary for “achieving or maintaining operational control” of an area along the southwest border.

According to an April 15 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), land managers, including officials from the Department of Interior and Department of Agriculture, denied permission to build the road because of environmental restrictions related to the Wilderness Act.

The GAO, which surveyed 26 stations along the southwest border, also found that Border Patrol headquarters had denied two of them funding for infrastructure along the southwest border which was required to “achieve or maintain operational control.”

Federal lands comprise about 820 miles, or more than 40 percent, of the approximately 2,000-mile southwest border. As of Sept. 30, 2010, the U.S. government had established operational or “effective” control along less than half (873 miles) of that border.

The GAO says illegal cross-border activity on federal lands “has increased substantially” since the 1990s.


(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...

________________________ ________________________ ___


So the Bama, piss and shit be upon him,  can give a waiver to bamacare but not this.  Got it.     

[Soul Crusher]

 Czars Stay: Obama Ditches Campaign Promise to Never Use ‘Special Signing Statement’
Posted on April 15, 2011 at 8:06pm by 
Emily Esfahani Smith Print » Email » Tweet

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2705973/posts

The president signed into law today the $38 billion in budget cuts that the House and Senate approved earlier in the week week. But Obama said that there were certain provisions of the bill that he would not abide by.

Namely, the provision defunding the czars.

Jake Tapper of ABC explains:

Last week the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans were involved in intense negotiations over not only the size of the budget for the remainder of the FY2011 budget, and spending cuts within that budget, but also several GOP “riders,” or policy provisions attached to the bill.

One rider – Section 2262 — de-funds certain White House adviser positions – or “czars.” The president in his signing statement declares that he will not abide by it.

But remember this?


Earlier this evening, Obama signed the budget bill, with the czars provision attached to it, according to the AP. At the same time, he issued a “signing statement”objecting to the defunding of the czars provision–and a couple others:

In an accompanying signing statement, however, Obama questioned the constitutionality of a provision in the spending bill that prevents the White House from retaining special policy advisers, or “czars.” He also objected to two other sections that block the transfer of terrorist suspects from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States or to other countries.

The president basically told Congress to shove it, issuing this statement about the provision defunding the czars:

 

The President has well-established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch, and to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority…The President also has the prerogative to obtain advice that will assist him in carrying out his constitutional responsibilities, and do so not only from executive branch officials and employees outside the White House, but also from advisers within it. Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President‘s ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The president went on, “the executive branch will construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.”

Tapper translates:. “In other words: we know what you wanted that provision to do, but we don’t think it’s constitutional, so we will interpret it differently than the way you meant it.”

Obama shreds the Constitution again, this time with his signing statement
Flopping Aces ^ | 04-19-11 | Vince

Posted on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 4:08:50 PM by Starman417



Last week President Obama was overheard telling a room full of Democrats that during the most recent budget negotiations the GOP had sought to defund some of his priorities. He checked them into the boards with “Do you think we’re stupid”?

While the GOP members certainly don’t think the President is stupid, he definitely thinks the voters are. (Perhaps with good reason… If you haven’t seen the video “How Obama Got Elected” now as we roll towards 2012 it might be a good time to watch it. If you have, now is a good time to revisit it. The level of ignorance of some of people who exercise their right to vote is nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than giving out voter cards at the DMV like lollypops at a pediatrician’s office we might want to require prospective voters to pass the same citizenship test wannabe citizens must pass…)

Not that it should be a surprise to anyone that the President thinks Americans are stupid. It’s one thing to hoodwink people during the campaign as everyone expects politicians to stretch the bounds of credulity. This was perfectly demonstrated when candidate Obama suggested that he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years yet somehow never heard a single one of his racist anti-American diatribes. It’s another thing all together to expect citizens to believe their President is openly seeking to mislead them. Such was the case early on in the Obama presidency and that arrogance was never as clear when the administration introduced what is possibly the most absurd policy gauge ever uttered by any politician, the infamous: “Jobs created or saved.” How is it even remotely possible that the president thought that anyone with a functioning brain would consider “Jobs created or saved” as a legitimate measure for any policy anywhere? No idea, but they did… and did so with a straight face.

Now we jump ahead two years and we finding the President once again demonstrating low opinion he has of average American’s intelligence. Not only does he think that Americans will somehow forget his plethora of flip-flops, (which Victor Davis Hanson lays out brilliantly here) what’s worse, he thinks that no one else in the country is bright enough to understand the Constitution.

(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...

[Soul Crusher]

U.S. Hurries to Sell GM Stake (taxpayers get hosed)
WSJ ^ | April 19, 2011 | by Sharon Terlep



~ EXCERPT ~

The U.S. government plans to sell a significant share of its remaining stake in General Motors Co. this summer despite the disappointing performance of the auto maker's stock, people familiar with the matter said.

A sale within the next several months would almost certainly mean U.S. taxpayers will take a loss on their $50 billion rescue of the Detroit auto maker in 2009.

To break even, the U.S. Treasury would need to sell its remaining stake—about 500 million shares—at $53 apiece. GM closed off 27 cents a share at $29.97 in 4 p.m. trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, hitting a new low since its $33-a-share November initial public offering.


(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...

[240 is Back]

I can just see the U.N. just wanting to credit President Obama for passing their new anti-gun treaty.

WTF do you care about gun rights?  Your love affairs with Bloomberg (2009) and Trump (2011) show you care not about gun rights. 

[Soul Crusher]

WTF do you care about gun rights?  Your love affairs with Bloomberg (2009) and Trump (2011) show you care not about gun rights. 

You kneepad obama bro.   

[240 is Back]

You kneepad obama bro.   

so youre a bag of shit anti gunner just like me?