Fire Hydrant of Freedom

CCP:

Both Pamela and Robert Spencer have had "targets on their backs" for many years now.  Both have received countless death threats, and have to travel with armed bodyguards routinely.  As for ISIS having reach here, this is a moot point.   The war IS HERE.  IT IS NOW.  Whether these two jihadists were directly or indirectly connected to ISIS is really irrelevant.  They were following the same sick, evil and repressive ideology.  Americans need to wake up and understand that despite what this President and most of our media would have us think - these people are here now, and are prepared to slaughter us at any opportunity.  This incident proves the point.  Take heed.  Be prepared.  You will be made to care about this situation. (Not that I'm implying you don't care about it, CCP - just making a general statement.)

As if this Administration gives a crap:

http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/fbi-under-increased-scrutiny-for-failing-to-prevent-garland-jihad-attack.html/

And still the cowardly media refuses to even show this man's winning drawing:

http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/afdi-muhammad-cartoon-winner-bosch-fawstin-goes-unto-hiding.html/

New York Daily News: AFDI ad criticizing Hamas is “outrageous drivel” that “would offend many Muslims”

APRIL 26, 2015 7:52 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER

It is no doubt guided by Society of Professional Journalists policy that requires journalists never to state or imply any link between Islam and terrorism, but for Leftist journalists (i.e., almost all of them) these days, it’s a kneejerk reaction: when they see an Islamic jihadist vowing blood and murder, they immediately frame it in their report in terms of Muslims being victimized. So when there is a jihad mass murder attack or foiled plot, we get the stories about Muslim communities fearing a “backlash” against innocent Muslims. And in this execrable New York Daily News editorial, the first and only reaction to the genocidal antisemitic statement from Hamas that is depicted in our ad is to note that “the message would offend many Muslims.”

The Daily News means they will be offended at Pamela Geller, of course, not at Hamas. They should be offended at Hamas, if what we’re constantly told about the vast majority of Muslims being moderate, democratic, tolerant and pluralistic were true. They should see the ad and call upon Hamas and other Muslim groups to stop the jihad against Israel, drop the genocidal rhetoric, and teach against Islamic antisemitism in mosques and Islamic schools in the U.S. The Daily News should be calling upon them to do those things. Instead, it smears Pamela Geller as a “hatemonger” (in the photo caption) for pointing out that this genocidal antisemitic statement was made, and that nothing is being done about it.

More below.

“The First Amendment train: Despite Pamela Geller’s offensive nonsense, the MTA should continue to allow political ads on buses and subways,” New York Daily News, April 24, 2015:

After being forced by a court to run an inflammatory, anti-Muslim ad on the city’s buses and subways, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority aims to get out of the political advertising business.

Hamas is a Muslim group. It made the statement that “killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah” in a video that also said: “Repeat in the name of your Jihad: Death to Israel!” Our AFDI ad was meant to counter Hamas-linked CAIR’s cynical and deceptive campaign trying to fool Americans into thinking that jihad was romping through the daisies and blowing milk bubbles through a straw. The ad counters these comforting fictions with reality, making the point that for all too many Muslims, jihad is something more lethal. The implication is that Muslims and non-Muslims alike should be calling upon Hamas and other Muslim entities to drop this hateful rhetoric. Instead, the Daily News shoots the messenger, referring to the ad as “Pamela Geller’s hateful nonsense” and as an “inflammatory, anti-Muslim ad.”

With sympathy for the MTA’s tough spot, the agency is mistaken in trying to eliminate issue-oriented ads as a way to swat one annoying gadfly.

Pamela Geller makes a habit of throwing rhetorical bombs. She’s written books like “Stop the Islamization of America” and argued that President Obama is “consistently on the side of Islamic supremacist regimes.”

What, he isn’t? Where? When?

One of her latest proposed ads quotes a Palestinian TV station run by Hamas as stating that “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah,” alongside the image of a young man in a headscarf. “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

Understanding that the message would offend many Muslims and arguing that it might even incite violence, the MTA rejected the campaign.

Why would the ad offend many Muslims? Because they condemn Hamas and its genocidal rhetoric, and back up their condemnation with real action to teach against these attitudes in Muslim communities? Where? When? Do they have a different idea of jihad and consider Hamas and its antisemitic jihad to be un-Islamic? Even if that were true, Hamas presents itself as Muslim group waging jihad in cause of Islam, and justifying its actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings. Do Americans not need to know this? Does no one need to call attention to it or endeavor to counter it? Everything the ad says is true: Hamas made this statement, and did so in the context of jihad. Muslims who oppose this view of jihad and this hateful antisemitism should be siding with Pamela Geller and criticizing Hamas, not her. And the Daily News should be more concerned about the fact that there are Muslims who actually believe this than about the Muslims who claim to be so offended by it that they want it off the buses, but don’t lift a finger to counter these attitudes within Muslim communities.

And the idea that it “might even incite violence” is also nonsense. The ad ran in San Francisco and Chicago without incident. The MTA claimed it would incite violence but could not adduce even one example of its doing so. And the violence would be from Islamic jihadists who would presumably mistake it for a pro-jihad ad. You’d have to be quite dim to do that, but if someone did, the focus should be on protecting people from violence, not on curtailing speech in light of the possibility that violence could ensue — for once we do that, we enable any thug to shut down any speech he dislikes by threatening violence over it.

…It’s well and good, and constitutional, to ban ads that could reasonably incite violence — say, with mocking images of the Prophet Mohammed.

In this, the Daily News is essentially counseling surrender to the jihad. Instead of standing up against violent intimidation, the Daily News is saying, Give in to the bullies and thugs. They will kill us if we say something they dislike, so let’s not say anything they dislike. That is the coward’s way, the path of capitulation and submission. What ever happened to, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it? Gone and forgotten. And so also, before too long, will be our freedom of speech, and with it our other freedoms.

Beyond that, viewpoints should be welcome. New Yorkers are big boys and girls. If swallowing some outrageous drivel is the cost of preserving other worthwhile advertising in one of the city’s most important gathering places, so be it. One hater shouldn’t spoil things for everyone else.

So it’s “outrageous drivel” now to call attention to Hamas’ genocidal rhetoric. Which only ensures that we will get more such rhetoric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feOV1Hh9eOU

Why Are Many Former Workers Not Even Applying for Job Openings?

Patrick Tyrrell / April 20, 2015 - The Heritage Foundation - Daily Signal.

There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.

More people who want jobs are finding them, but there is something else going on as well. The labor force participation rate for prime age workers has continued to decline. Fewer of them are working or actively looking for work than before.

How can job openings stand at 14-year highs, but the labor force participation rate for prime age people hover around levels not seen since 1984?

University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan suspects he knows why. As detailed in his 2012 book, and elaborated on more recently in his blog, and in The Wall Street Journal, Congress made major changes to anti-poverty subsidies and regulations during the Great Recession. All these changes provided more benefits that phase out as recipients earn more money.

For example, the federal Lifeline Assistance Program began to give free cell phones and free monthly cell phone usage to applicants if their income was low enough. Mortgage-assistance programs cut the mortgage payments of people if they were not working, but those with jobs still paid full price. The Obamacare health subsidies fall as earnings rise, which is a tax on labor activity.

Mulligan calculates that the marginal tax rate, that is the extra taxes paid, and government subsidies foregone on an extra dollar earned working if taking a job rose from 40 percent to 48 percent within two years of the onset of the Great Recession.

As the recession began, the labor force participation rate fell along with the job openings rate. But as job openings rebounded labor force participation remained stagnant.

People who had left the labor force did not come back. As Mulligan says, “Helping people is valuable but not free. The more you help low-income people, the more low-income people you’ll have. The more you help unemployed people, the more unemployed people you’ll have.”

Mulligan tells the story of a recruiter he met who had many people turn down jobs he offered them because “accepting a job would net them less than $2 per hour, so they would rather stay home.”

If people do not work for $2 per hour, that does not mean they are lazy. It means they are reasonable.

Unfortunately the decision to avoid work to avoid losing government benefits—while often rational in the short term—has terrible long-term effects. Skills atrophy the longer someone is out of work, and government benefits carry with them no chance for promotion or advancement.

To fix this, each existing government subsidy meant to help the poor and unemployed should be examined by lawmakers to determine whether it creates incentives to work or to stay on welfare. Work requirements should be strengthened on all means-tested assistance, and the tax system should be overhauled to ensure that it doesn’t penalize work. Moving people from welfare to the workforce is a win for individuals and a win for society as a whole. It’s time for the government to stop encouraging potential workers to stay home.

Clinton Campaign Kicks Off as Huma Abedin Probe Begins

Posted By Matthew Vadum On April 14, 2015

At long last the Department of State is investigating why a top Hillary Clinton aide with generational ties to Islamic terrorism was allowed to work in a sensitive government position while simultaneously working for a Clinton-connected private sector consulting firm.

Hillary Clinton and the senior aide, Huma Abedin, apparently conspired to keep the sweetheart working arrangement that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked employee had at Foggy Bottom a secret. Because it involves a Clinton, the story is, of necessity, complex and convoluted. And it’s classic Hillary as she tiptoes through a minefield of ethics violations, conflicts of interests, and potential national security-related breaches.

News of the probe came two days before the Benghazi bungler finally launched her long-awaited coronation parade campaign Sunday on YouTube [1].

“I’m running for president,” Mrs. Clinton said in the video. “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times. But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion.”

Yes, Clinton is a champion — of Islamic expansionism. She let four Americans die in 2012 so President Obama, in the midst of his reelection fight, wouldn’t have to reconcile the terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya with his dishonest boast that al-Qaeda was on the run under his leadership. That she hired someone of questionable loyalty to the United States shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Until Sunday the Clinton Foundation had served as a de facto campaign headquarters and international shakedown machine for Mrs. Clinton. With her campaign now officially on, the foundation will probably continue functioning as what the Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel calls “The Clinton Foundation Super PAC.”

“Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes,” Strassel wrote in a recent column. “The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.”

Abedin herself is a Muslim who is married to disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). Bill and Hillary Clinton are reportedly so close to her that they have called her their surrogate daughter. Abedin, who almost certainly played some kind of a role in the Obama administration’s myriad catastrophic foreign policy failures, currently works at Mrs. Clinton’s personal office in New York City — or at least she worked there as of last week before Hillary launched her campaign.

Very few Republican lawmakers who are critical of Abedin’s working arrangement have raised the alarm about the threat she poses to national security. Some may have been scared away after the grandstanding stunt pulled three years ago by know-nothing Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He bristled with indignation when then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and a handful of House lawmakers raised legitimate concerns about Abedin working in such a sensitive government post. McCain thundered: Abedin’s “character, reputation, and patriotism” were unjustly attacked and “these attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis, and no merit, and they need to stop now.”

State Department Inspector General Steve Linick sent a letter [2] to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) Thursday advising that the inner workings of the “Special Government Employee Program” at the department are now the subject of a preliminary inquiry by Linick’s office. (The document is available here [3].)

“This program is meant to be used in a limited way to give the government special expertise it can’t get otherwise,” Grassley said in a statement Friday. “Is the program working the way it’s intended at the State Department or has it been turned on its head?”

Amazingly enough, the Obama-loving media establishment has been on this case of ethical gymnastics and the potential compromise of U.S. national security for a while.

As the New York Times [4] reported two years ago, under Clinton the Department of State “created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department.”

On her mandatory financial disclosure form, Abedin failed to disclose the setup or how much she was paid. “[T]he picture that emerges from interviews and records suggests a situation where the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”

In a July 2013 letter the State Department indicated Abedin was employed full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also indicated she did not disclose outside employment when ending her full-time status. The department kept her on as an adviser-expert at the hourly rate of $74.51 with maximum pay of $155,500 per year.

When Abedin returned from maternity leave in mid-2012, her role as deputy chief of staff to Secretary Clinton ended and she became what’s called a special government employee, or consultant. A State Department official told the Old Gray Lady “that change freed her from the requirement that she disclose her private earnings for the rest of the year on her financial disclosure forms. Still, during that period, she continued to be identified publicly in news reports as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.”

It goes without saying that the Clintons have long believed that rules and laws are for the little people, not them. They live by the maxim that it is better to ask for forgiveness after the fact than seek permission before doing something awful.

In the second half of 2012 while working at State as a consultant, Abedin also worked for Teneo, a high-flying consultancy established by Doug Band, who was an adviser to President Clinton. Teneo advised MF Global, the failed brokerage of Democrat Jon Corzine, former governor of New Jersey and former U.S. senator.

“At the same time, Ms. Abedin served as a consultant to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and worked in a personal capacity for Mrs. Clinton as she prepared to transition out of her job as secretary of state,” the newspaper reported. (The foundation has since changed its name to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.)

The head of the liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) at the time, Melanie Sloane, engaged in Monty Pythonesque understatement when she described Abedin’s special working arrangement as merely unusual. “If she was being held out as a deputy chief of staff, it would be highly unusual for her to be a part-time employee or a consultant,” Sloane said. “Being a deputy chief of staff at the State Department is generally considered more than a full-time job.”

So Abedin was double- or even triple-dipping, working on sensitive issues in the Obama administration while at the same time working as a consultant at Teneo and the Clinton Foundation.

Political commentators might be more outraged over the Abedin affair but for the fact that the Clintons have always been shady operators. It’s scandal fatigue.

Pick a scandal, any scandal. There’s Whitewater, Juanita Broaddrick, Troopergate, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Elizabeth Gracen, Monica Lewinsky, Bill lying under oath and being disbarred for doing so, Filegate, the senseless slaughter of religious non-conformists at Waco, Texas, and many, many others.

There are so many Clinton scandals that Wikipedia had to create an index page [5] to list them all. Clinton-watching is an exhausting hobby that will turn into a full-time job for multitudes of talking heads, journalists, columnists, and activists should the Clintons take up residence in the White House again.

In the meantime we are left to wonder what role Abedin played in a long list of irregularities, mishaps, scandals, and America-weakening events while serving at the Department of State.

What role, if any, did Abedin play in:

*the Benghazi massacre and the coverup of it

*the State Department’s accountability review board failing to blame Clinton for Benghazi

*the failure of the Obama administration to disclose the cause of death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens who was reportedly tortured and sodomized to death by Muslim terrorists

*the Obama’s administration’s perverse embrace of America’s longtime enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran whose leaders can’t go a day without screaming “Death to America” (and “Death to Israel”)

*Iran’s conquest of its neighbors

*the ousting of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi

*the rise of Islamic State

*the removal of longstanding ally Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt followed by the installation of Muslim Brotherhood favorite Mohamed Morsi in the position

*the conversion of NASA into a Muslim outreach agency

*the odious, lie-strewn “A New Beginning” speech President Obama gave at Cairo University in 2009

All these things that happened on then-Secretary Clinton’s watch. And they happened while the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Foundation reportedly raked in millions of dollars in donations from the governments of Muslim countries including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Algeria.

Call them anticipatory bribes thrown over the transom in case Mrs. Clinton secures the presidency. (Statistics wiz Nate Silver says [6] Clinton is a virtual shoo-in for her party’s nomination but gives her roughly a 50/50 chance of winning the general election.)

As Hillary was screwing up America’s foreign policy, Bill was giving highly remunerative speeches in the Islamic nations of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Turkey, according to Judicial Watch.

For what it’s worth, President Obama’s Cairo speech came on the heels of his worldwide apology tour in which he begged forgiveness from the countries of the world supposedly oppressed for so long by the U.S.

The oration was a major propaganda victory for Islamism that has emboldened fanatics and terrorists worldwide. It was also jam-packed with falsehoods, according to academics Mary Grabar and Brian Birdnow [7].

The address, of course, is a breathtaking work of fiction [8] that whitewashes the blood-drenched history of Islam and falsely attributes accomplishments such as printing, navigation, and medicine to the Islamic world.

Obama gave Islam credit for un-Islamic things such as the Enlightenment and religious tolerance. Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for European Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and “has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality,” Obama said.

Grabar and Birdnow counter that in fact “the intellectual Renaissance began when Byzantine scholars, mostly Greek, fled the advancing Turks in the 14th century and settled in Italy. The Enlightenment was openly anti-theistic and would have been anathema to most practicing Muslims.”

Moreover, they add, “Muslims wiped out Zoroastrianism, they battled Hinduism and Buddhism for centuries, and they levied a special tax on Christians and Jews in their domains.”

The lies in the Obama speech would no doubt be embraced by Abedin’s family. Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abedin’s connections [9] to the Muslim Brotherhood run deep.

Her mother is Saleha Mahmood Abedin [10], widow of the late Zyed Abedin, an academic who taught at Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Abdulaziz University in the early 1970s. The year after Huma was born, Mrs. Abedin received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a founding member of the Muslim Sisterhood, a pro-Sharia organization consisting of the wives of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1978 Mr. Abedin was hired by Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), a Saudi-based Islamic think tank created by Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef was a Muslim extremist with ties to al-Qaeda. In 1983 he became secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a militant organization with links to Osama bin Laden.

The elder Abedins both became members of the editorial board of IMMA’s publication, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. According to Andrew C. McCarthy, IMMA’s “Muslim Minority Affairs” agenda is “to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West.”

Mrs. Abedin became an official representative of MWL in the 1990s. When her husband died in 1994, Mrs. Abedin became the IMMA’s director. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of its journal.

Mrs. Abedin is also a member of the board of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), which has long been banned in Israel because it has ties to Hamas. (In Arabic, dawah, or dawa, means the proselytizing or preaching of Islam.) She also runs the Amman, Jordan-based International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), a Muslim World League affiliate that self-identifies as part of the IICDR. The league, according to Andrew C. McCarthy, “has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.” Huma Abedin was an intern in the Clinton White House between 1997 and some time in 1999, she was a member of the executive board of George Washington University’s radical Muslim Students Association (MSA). The MSA has extensive ties to al-Qaeda. From 1996 to 2008, she was employed by IMMA as assistant editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Someone with Abedin’s background shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington. Yet Hillary Clinton trusted her with vital secrets of state and then surreptitiously deleted their electronic correspondence.

Were Secretary Clinton’s dealings with the foreign governments that gave money to the Clinton Foundation discussed in the emails that she deleted from her now-infamous private email server? We may never know.

There is, nonetheless, some reason for hope. Yes, it is depressing that even as evidence continues to accumulate that Mrs. Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill.

Republican lawmakers seem for the most part unaware of Abedin’s ties to the world of Islamic terrorism, or like John McCain, remain stubbornly in denial.

But with the State Department Inspector General’s investigation set in motion, there is at least a possibility something will be discovered about Abedin that will spark the interest of the party whose elected officials now dominate both chambers of Congress.

The exposure of Huma Abedin is vitally important to the national security of the United States.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here [11].

Subscribe [12] to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, on YouTube [12] and LIKE [13] it on Facebook. [13]

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/matthew-vadum/clinton-campaign-kicks-off-as-huma-abedin-probe-begins/

URLs in this post:

[1] YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=0uY7gLZDmn4
[2] sent a letter: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/04/10/program-that-benefited-clinton-aide-under-review-by-inspector-general/
[3] here: http://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/judiciary/upload/Response%20Letter%20to%20Chairman%20Grassley%20Ltr%20on%20State%20Email%20-SGE%204-8-15%20Sign....pdf
[4] New York Times: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/nyregion/weiners-wife-huma-abedin-failed-to-disclose-consulting-work-done-while-a-state-dept-aide.html?referrer=&_r=0
[5] an index page: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Clinton_administration_controversies
[6] says: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-begins-the-2016-campaign-and-its-a-toss-up/
[7] Mary Grabar and Brian Birdnow: http://www.amazon.com/New-Beginning-Revised-Past-Barack/dp/0986018309
[8] a breathtaking work of fiction: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamas-benghazi-propagandist/
[9] Abedin’s connections: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2556
[10] Saleha Mahmood Abedin: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2557
[11] Click here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=david+horowitz&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&qid=1316459840&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&sort=daterank
[12] Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheFMPMG/featured
[13] LIKE: https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang

I can confirm that Fiorina was NOT well-regarded as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  She did not lead the company well at all.

The Arabian Candidate

Posted By William Kilpatrick On April 10, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com



In The Manchurian Candidate, the son of a prominent right-wing politician is captured by the Soviets and brainwashed in a secret Manchurian location. His task is to assassinate a presidential candidate, thus ensuring the election of the demagogic vice-president. Hence, the title “Manchurian Candidate.”

The film has several parallels to current events. The main difference is that in those days, Americans had to be brainwashed into serving enemy interests by psy-ops teams. Nowadays, they come self-brainwashed with some indoctrinative assist from the American educational system.

In the film, a scary lady with leftist sympathies who looks vaguely like Hillary Clinton manipulates her husband into high political office. In real life, a scary lady with leftist leanings who looks vaguely like Angela Lansbury (only scarier) manipulates herself into high political office.

In her case, teams of brainwashers are not required, since she has brainwashed herself into believing that foreign governments are dumping truckloads of cash into her family foundation because she’s such a charming and intelligent woman. And also because Arab sovereigns like nothing better than to do their part to improve the lives of the poor, the hungry, the environmentally underserved, and kids who need braces—in short, the very causes for which the foundation was founded.

Another similarity is that in the film, the Angela Lansbury character has some sort of hypnotic power over her son, the unwitting assassin. Whenever it begins to dawn on him that something funny is going on, she flashes a Queen of Diamonds playing card and he falls into a catatonic state of complete obedience. In the present situation the Angela Lansbury look-alike has merely to flash the gender card and, presto, skeptical voters fall back into line.

There are parallels to other movies as well. Today’s Queen of Diamonds has a secret server in her home so that her exchanges with foreign dono—I mean “diplomats”—can’t be traced. I’m not sure if the server takes up only one room of the palatial house, or a whole suite of rooms. And who knows what’s in the cavern-like basement? It’s all faintly reminiscent of those James Bond thrillers in which the villain’s remote island estate sits atop a vast underground military-industrial complex.

At some point the analogy breaks down. You could still convince a sixties audience that leftists were willing to sell out the country. We, on the other hand, have convinced ourselves that we live in a brave new world where such things never happen—at least, not in modern Western societies. No one would dare to pull a fast one on us because we’re just too smart. We’ve grown up watching CSI, we went to schools that taught critical thinking, and our history texts were written by Howard Zinn. We’ve also been nurtured on relativism, so if it were discovered that Arabs controlled the White House, we would shrug our shoulders and say, “at this point, what does it matter?”

The Clinton-Arab connection actually goes back to the time when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas and worked to secure a hefty Saudi contribution to a Middle-Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas. But let’s skip all that and fast forward to relatively recent times when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed her longtime aide Huma Abedin as Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department. When it was discovered that Abedin’s family was deeply involved in the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia, very few eyebrows were raised. After all, even President Obama had relatives in the Muslim Brotherhood. So it would have been silly to make something of it.

It’s probably just a coincidence that while working for the Clintons, Huma herself was the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs which—you guessed it—is a Muslim Brotherhood journal. Before that, and while still interning at the White House, she was an executive board member of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at George Washington University. The MSA was the first Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States and George Washington was the first Muslim president. Well, the latter hasn’t yet been firmly established, but it’s just a matter of time until those Saudi-funded Mid-East studies professors at the University of Arkansas and the Saudi-funded professors at Georgetown (Bill’s alma mater) discover the prayer rug in the attic at Mount Vernon. It’s also probably a coincidence that, like her boss, Huma conducted State Department business using her own personal e-mail address, connected, one supposes, to the same master server that served her master so well… er, mistress.

Abedin also worked until recently for the Clinton Foundation. Again, this is no doubt a pure coincidence and, as the old saying goes, it has nothing to do with Islam. Although CSI investigators would have a field day with such coincidences, today’s government officials seem curiously lacking in curiosity. In 2012, Michelle Bachmann and four other House members wrote letters to the Inspector Generals of several government agencies asking them to conduct an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the government. They were particularly concerned about Human Abedin in view of her family connections and influential position. They noted [1] that the Clinton State Department had “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

The request was dismissed by numerous congressmen and senators as “offensive,” “insensitive,” and even “hurtful.” By that time the machinery of the “Islamophobia” industry was already in high gear and it was deemed prudent even by Republicans to defend Abedin and to damn her accusers as McCarthyites.

Still, the case for an inquiry seemed strong. As one McCarthyite, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy [2], observed, even if Abedin was innocent of any wrongdoing, the State Departments own guidelines about foreign family connections would disqualify her for a security clearance for such a sensitive position.

But then, again, a lot of people in sensitive positions don’t seem to qualify for a security clearance. For example, if all your closest relatives were leftists or communists, if your chief mentors were, respectively, a member of the Communist Party and a radical left-wing preacher, and if you used to hang out with known terrorists, you probably couldn’t get a job as a night watchman at an auto parts warehouse. On the other hand, if someone with the same background throws his hat into the presidential ring, he can become Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, and get to set foreign policy.

He also gets to appoint Secretaries of State. It shouldn’t be any surprise if they turn out to be the kind of people who can’t be bothered with security checks. Such people seem to live in an ethereal realm that puts them above suspicion and above conflicts of interest. Normally, when a Secretary of State receives tens of millions in donations from countries that support the spread of a radical ideology, it would be a sign that something is terribly wrong. For an analogy, ask yourself if you would keep someone on at your firm if she had access to sensitive trade secrets and yet received huge gifts from rival corporations while conducting company business on her private server.

You would probably get rid of her pronto. But that’s only if you apply the normal rules of logic—which apparently don’t apply to Secretaries of State appointed by President Obama. If you applied such logic, you might also think there was something awkward about the fact that current Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter is married to an Iranian who has extensive family ties in Iran. As Kenneth Timmerman [3] points out, the FBI usually won’t grant security clearance to “individuals who are married to nationals of an enemy nation or have family members living in that country, for fear of divided loyalties or, more simply, blackmail.” Of course, you would have to be some kind of conspiracy nut to think that having vulnerable in-laws in Iran would in any way compromise Secretary Kerry’s negotiations with the representatives of a country whose leaders routinely indulge in “death to America” rhetoric.

Undoubtedly, the President consulted with his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett about the matter. Since Jarrett was born in Iran and spoke Persian as a child, she would, by current standards of expertise, be assumed to have deep insight into the Persian mind. She could have assured the president that “Great Satan” and “Death to America” are typical of the rhetorical exuberance that characterizes the rich and vibrant Iranian culture. Moreover, she could have allayed any concerns about blackmail. Anyone who has studied “Cliff Notes on Islam” knows that blackmail runs counter to the deeply held beliefs of the mullahs.

Jarretts’ family left Iran when she was five, but apparently those five years were enough to qualify her as an expert on Iranian affairs. According to Discover the Networks [4], it was revealed in 2012 that for several months, Jarrett “had been leading secret negotiations with representatives of Iran’s Supreme leader… in an effort to normalize relations between the U.S. and Iran.”

The mind spins at the –what’s the word?—the audacity of it all. But the curious thing is not that there are people in high places willing to put self-interest ahead of the national interest. Such people are always with us. The curious thing is that the American people and the American press accept it with such equanimity. During the Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Jarrett-Abedin years, Russia seized the Crimea, ISIS seized large parts of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban re-established itself in Afghanistan, allies stopped trusting us, enemies were emboldened, the Middle East was set on fire, and the Army was drastically reduced. Oh, and the way was cleared for Iran to have nuclear bombs. Future generations—if there are any—will wonder what we were thinking.

What we were thinking, they may discover, goes something like this (in shorthand brain language): “Mustn’t think that! Mustn’t say that! Not nice! What will people think!” You’d have to go back to the Victorian era to find another society with so much concern for propriety of thought and speech. Thomas Sowell put his finger on the phenomenon in a recent editorial [5]. When it comes to matters of survival, he observed, we have “put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.”

He’s right. A sort of suicidal etiquette that chokes off common sense has grown up in our society. Under the rules of the new etiquette, we aren’t allowed to say that the Emperor has no clothes. We dare not even point out that the Emperor and his ministers appear to be throwing open the gates to the enemy.

Let’s see: The people of the United States elect as president a man they know very little about. When it becomes obvious that he has deep leftist sympathies combined with deep Islamist sympathies, they elect him again. He, in turn, appoints one Secretary of State who is beholden to Arab largesse, and then, after she steps down, he replaces her with a man who practices folk-song diplomacy and has close family ties with Iran.

The Manchurian Candidate? On one level, the current situation is so full of farce, that a serious drama like The Manchurian Candidate couldn’t do it justice. If you were to make a movie of the current mandarin mess, it might be better to play it for laughs—an Austin Powers-type spoof or something along the lines of Abbott and Costello meet the Manchurian Candidate.

On another level, the situation is so fraught with apocalyptic dangers that only a deadly serious doomsday film—something along the lines of Fail Safe—could bring home the enormity of our current folly. In any event, there’s a title ready made for it. If the first Obama election could be called Death Wish I, and his re-election, Death Wish II, then the election of Hillary Clinton would deservedly merit the title, Death Wish III—The Final Chapter.

Revived Questions about Huma Abedin

Posted By Matthew Vadum On March 31, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com

Republican lawmakers are probing why Hillary Clinton’s longtime Islamist aide Huma Abedin was allowed to work at the State Department under a special, part-time status while simultaneously working at a politically-connected consulting firm.

Demands for information are coming from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) after the public learned both women used Clinton’s private Internet server and email accounts for Department of State correspondence.

But that’s only part of the endless sleaze and intrigue surrounding Clinton.

The media has also reported that Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton administration damage-control expert known for his relentless attacks on Clinton family enemies and for being the father of Israel-hating pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, was apparently doing freelance work for Mrs. Clinton. Clinton tried to hire the elder Blumenthal at State but the Obama White House nixed the appointment because of Blumenthal’s aggressively slimy attacks on Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

After Blumenthal’s email was hacked in 2013, it was revealed that “starting weeks before” the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, “Blumenthal supplied intelligence” to then-Secretary Clinton that was “gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.”

Reports got some of the details wrong, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto.

“The reporters asked the most obvious question and got a partial answer: ‘A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica . . . that she has turned over’—meaning to the State Department—’all the emails Blumenthal sent to [Mrs.] Clinton,'” he writes.

That is incorrect, Taranto notes. “n reality she turned over no emails, only printouts,” which are of limited value as evidence.

Meanwhile, as evidence continues to accumulate that Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin, who has known ties to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill.

Instead of examining Abedin’s disturbing family ties that make her employment by the U.S. government a threat to national security, Grassley is honing in on the sweetheart arrangement that allowed the operative to get on the public payroll while raking in money from private consulting.

Well, it’s a start, at least.

Grassley complains that many previous requests to the Department of State for information have gone unanswered, so now he is sending requests to the agency’s inspector general and to Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry.

It was about two years ago that Grassley demanded information about Abedin after she moved from being a full-time deputy chief of staff for Clinton to part-time status and then began working at Teneo, a politically connected consulting firm that claims to bring “together the disciplines of government and public affairs.”

In a July 2013 letter the State Department indicated Abedin was employed full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also indicated she did not disclose outside employment when ending her full-time status. The department kept her on as an adviser-expert, apparently at the hourly rate of $74.51 with maximum pay of $155,500 per year.

“A number of conflict-of-interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company, especially when that company (is) Teneo,” Grassley wrote in a March 19 letter to Kerry.

Grassley asked in the letter “what steps the department took to ensure that … Abedin’s outside employment with a political-intelligence and corporate-advisory firm did not conflict with her simultaneous employment at the State Department.”

“She converted from a full-time employee … with seemingly little difference in her job description or responsibilities,” he wrote. In essence Abedin retained the same job and was later hired by Teneo and the Clinton Global Initiative.

“It is unclear what special knowledge or skills Ms. Abedin possessed that the government could not have easily obtained otherwise from regular government employees,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley’s questions also come after the House Benghazi Select Committee learned that the former secretary of state deleted all the emails investigators were interesting in looking at.

On Friday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement, “We learned today, from her attorney, Secretary [Hillary] Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server.”

Destroying the electronic correspondence could be a federal crime since the documents were under congressional subpoena. As Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner,

“There’s no doubt Clinton withheld information that Congress demanded she turn over, and some Republicans believe the documents she destroyed were covered under a subpoena as well. But a look at the story behind the subpoena and other document requests from congressional Benghazi investigators is a tale of obstruction, delay and frustration that underscores the limits of Congress’ power to investigate Benghazi. Clinton and her aides had the means to make life very difficult for Republicans trying to learn the full story of the attacks in Libya, and they did just that.”

Disturbingly, Republicans have yet to focus on Abedin’s ties to the world of Islamic terrorism.

Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abedin’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood run deep. (She is also reportedly just as haughty and unpleasant to deal with as Clinton herself.)

Her mother is Saleha Mahmood Abedin, widow of the late Zyed Abedin, an academic who taught at Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Abdulaziz University in the early 1970s. The year after Huma was born, Mrs. Abedin received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1978 the Abedins moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Abdullah Omar Naseef, then-vice president of Abdulaziz University, hired Mr. Abedin, a former colleague of his at the university, to work for the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), a Saudi-based Islamic think tank Naseef was then in the process of establishing. Mr. and Mrs. Abedin became members of the editorial board of IMMA’s publication, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. According to Andrew C. McCarthy, IMMA’s “Muslim Minority Affairs” agenda is “to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West.”

Naseef himself was a Muslim extremist with ties to al-Qaeda. In 1983 he became secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a militant organization with links to Osama bin Laden. Mrs. Abedin became an official representative of MWL in the 1990s. When her husband died in 1994, Mrs. Abedin became the IMMA’s director. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of its journal.

Mrs. Abedin is also a member of the board of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), which has long been banned in Israel because it has ties to Hamas. (In Arabic, dawah, or dawa, means the proselytizing or preaching of Islam.) She also runs the Amman, Jordan-based International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), a Muslim World League affiliate that self-identifies as part of the IICDR. The league, according to McCarthy, “has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.” IICWC promotes strict Sharia Law and advocates the rescission of Egyptian laws that forbid female genital mutilation, child marriage, and marital rape.

Mrs. Abedin is a founding member of the Muslim Sisterhood, a pro-Sharia organization consisting of the wives of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian opposition newspaper Al-Liwa Al-Arabi has reported that Muslim Sisterhood members: “smuggle secret documents”; “spread the Brotherhood’s ideology by infiltrating universities, schools and homes”; “fulfill the interests of the Brotherhood”; and “organiz[e] projects which will penetrate [the Brotherhood’s] prohibited ideology into the decision-making in the West … under the guise of ‘general needs of women.’” Nagla Ali Mahmoud, wife of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist who was elected president of Egypt in June 2012, is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood.

When Huma Abedin returned to the U.S. and was an intern in the Clinton White House between 1997 and some time in 1999, she was a member of the executive board of George Washington University’s radical Muslim Students Association (MSA). The MSA had extensive ties to al-Qaeda.

From 1996 to 2008, Abedin was employed by IMMA as assistant editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Her brother, Hassan Abedin, an associate editor at the journal, was at one time a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. During his fellowship, the Center’s board included such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated figures as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Abdullah Omar Naseef. Huma’s sister, Heba Abedin, is an assistant editor with the journal.

Someone with Abedin’s background shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington.

Yet Hillary Clinton trusted her with vital secrets of state and then erased their electronic correspondence.

What are these two women hiding?

He said, paraphrasing - on "Special Report with Bret Baier," regarding Ted Cruz's announcement of his candidacy on Monday, that "We've tried having a one-term Senator as President and it didn't work out so well.  We don't need to try it again."  Essentially dismissing Cruz as a serious candidate for this reason alone.  I found it idiotic.

Obama Leaks Israeli Nuke Secrets

Posted By Matthew Vadum On March 27, 2015

President Obama ratcheted up his personal war on the State of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leaking Israel’s nuclear secrets to the media.

This betrayal of one of America’s most loyal allies took the form of the Pentagon’s quiet declassification of a 386-page top-secret memo, titled, “Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations.” The report from 1987, released just before Netanyahu’s address March 3 to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, goes into intricate detail about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and explains how Israel became a nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel is “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs,” according to the report by the taxpayer-funded Institute for Defense Analysis. “That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level.”

By the 1980s Israelis were close to being able to produce bombs a thousand times more powerful than atomic bombs, the report states.

Israel’s nuclear infrastructure is “an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories,” it states, noting that research facilities in Israel  “are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories,” which have been essential to the development of the U.S. nuclear arms program.

The reports indicates that in some cases, Israeli military technology “is more advanced than in the U.S.”

Israel has never officially acknowledged it possesses a nuclear arsenal, reportedly in order to avoid a regional arms race. By releasing the memo, the U.S. government has breached an informal agreement with Israel to not communicate publicly about its nuclear weapons.

Given the Obama administration’s well-documented hostility to the Jewish state, there can be little doubt that the release of the report was a malicious act calculated to undermine Israel’s security. Remember that red diaper baby Obama was a close friend of former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and that he is now putting forward a maximal effort to help the murderous mullahs of totalitarian Iran develop a nuclear weapons capability.

And when not golfing, appearing on late night TV shows, or berating Republicans as “enemies,” America’s Marxist president has spent much of his time in the Oval Office sticking it to Israel. It is hardly exaggeration to say that beating up on Israel is the cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy.

The sections of the report about Israel were declassified but the Pentagon “kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document,” according to Israel National News.

All of this means that the Obama administration, which is notorious for dragging its heels and failing to comply with even the most trivial of Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests, suddenly opted to declassify an ally’s vital military secrets while the media’s attention was focused on Netanyahu and his approaching speech. It used a dusty old FoIA request, which it could easily have stonewalled for years, as a pretext for the document dump.

The three-year-old request came from anti-Israel activist Grant F. Smith, director of something called the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), in Washington, D.C. He has written two histories of AIPAC and was editor of the book Neocon Middle East Policy, according to his official biography.

Breitbart News reports that Smith’s IRmep “organizes an anti-Israel conference each year in Washington, D.C. Last year, the conference featured speakers from anti-Semitic and pro-Islamist publications. During the Q & A session, a speaker openly called for education about the supposed ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration’ during the Holocaust, while another endorsed the possibility that ‘Israel had a hand in 9/11.'”

Meanwhile, an unnamed senior Israeli government official explained Obama’s hostile actions to the Times of Israel.

“The White House is driven by three main motives,” said the official. “The first is revenge [over the Congress speech]. The second is frustration: It’s no secret that they were involved in an attempt to bring down the Netanyahu government – something that we have clear knowledge of – and failed. The third [motive] is the administration’s attempt to divert attention from the negotiations with Iran to the Palestinian issue.”

Earlier this week President Obama sent his cadaverous White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to blast Israel in a speech to the Israel-hating leftist group J Street, which the top Obama aide referred to as “our partner.”

McDonough indicated the White House was less than pleased with Netanyahu’s efforts in recent days to explain what he was trying to say when he vowed there would be no Palestinian state while he is prime minister.

“We cannot simply pretend that these comments were never made,” McDonough said. He added disingenuously, “The United States will never stop working for a two-state solution and a lasting peace that Israelis and Palestinians so richly deserve.”

If there is no two-state agreement, Israel will experience “further isolation,” which a Politico article interpreted to mean there will be “more divestment, boycotts and efforts to delegitimize Israel in the international community.”

McDonough received a standing ovation when he said, “An occupation that has lasted more than 50 years must end.”

The Obama administration’s efforts to defeat Netanyahu in the March 17 Knesset elections flopped spectacularly.

Two weeks after Netanyahu’s March 3 address to Congress which 58 Democratic lawmakers boycotted, the prime minister’s Likud party went on to win a historic victory. Obama refused to attend the speech and with anger in his voice claimed he didn’t even watch it on television. The president, always the sore loser, also took his sweet time congratulating Netanyahu.

The Obama administration funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars to a radical anti-Israel group that aimed to drive Netanyahu from office. The U.S.-based group receiving the money, OneVoice International, in turn worked with V15, an “independent grassroots movement” in Israel, according to Ha’aretz. V15’s unofficial motto was said to be “anyone but Bibi,” a reference that includes the prime minister’s nickname.

Obama operatives temporarily relocated to Israel to try to give Netanyahu the boot. OneVoice hired Obama campaign aides such as Jeremy Bird of political consulting powerhouse 270 Strategies. Bird was national field director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Even though Obama lost this fight, that doesn’t mean he is finished with Israel.

Before Obama leaves office on that glorious day in January 2017, he will have many more opportunities to do injury to the Jewish state that his insidious ideology requires him to despise.

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes - Part 3

Wednesday, 18 March 2015    Brandon Smith  www.alt-market.com


In the previous installments of this series, we discussed the hidden and often unspoken crisis brewing within the employment market, as well as in personal debt. The primary consequence being a collapse in overall consumer demand, something which we are at this very moment witnessing in the macro-picture of the fiscal situation around the world. Lack of real production and lack of sustainable employment options result in a lack of savings, an over-dependency on debt and welfare, the destruction of grass-roots entrepreneurship, a conflated and disingenuous representation of gross domestic product, and ultimately an economic system devoid of structural integrity — a hollow shell of a system, vulnerable to even the slightest shocks.

This lack of structural integrity and stability is hidden from the general public quite deliberately by way of central bank money creation that enables government debt spending, which is counted toward GDP despite the fact that it is NOT true production (debt creation is a negation of true production and historically results in a degradation of the overall economy as well as monetary buying power, rather than progress). Government debt spending also disguises the real state of poverty within a system through welfare and entitlements. The U.S. poverty level is at record highs, hitting previous records set 50 years ago during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The record-breaking rise in poverty has also occurred despite 50 years of the so called “war on poverty,” a shift toward American socialism that was a continuation of the policies launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 'New Deal'.

The shift toward a welfare state is the exact reason why, despite record poverty and a 23 percent true unemployment rate (as discussed here), we do not yet see the kind of soup lines and rampant indigence witnessed during the Great Depression. Today, EBT cards and other welfare programs hide modern soup lines in plain sight. It should be noted that the record 20 percent of U.S. households now on food stamps are still technically contributing to GDP. That’s because government statistics make no distinction between normal grocery consumption and consumption created artificially through debt-generated welfare.

This third installment of our economic series will be the most difficult.  We will examine the issue of government debt, including how true debt is disguised from the public and how this debt is a warning of a coming implosion in our overall structure.  National debt is perhaps one of the most manipulated fields of economics, and the layers surrounding what our country truly owes to foreign creditors and central banks are many.  I believe this confusing array of disinformation is designed to discourage average Americans from pursuing the facts.  Here are the facts all the same, for those who have the patience...

First, it is important to debunk the mainstream lies surrounding what constitutes national debt.

“Official” national debt as of 2015 is currently reported at more than $18 trillion. That means that under Barack Obama and with the aid of the private Federal Reserve, U.S. debt has nearly doubled since 2008 — quite an accomplishment in only seven years’ time. But this is not the whole picture.

Official GDP numbers published for mainstream consumption do NOT include annual liabilities generated by programs such as Social Security and Medicare. These liabilities are veiled through the efforts of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which reports on what it calls “debts” rather than on the true fiscal gap. Through the efforts of economists like Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University, Alan J. Auerbach and Jagadeesh Gokhale, understanding of the fiscal gap (the difference between our government’s projected financial obligations and the present value of all projected future tax and other receipts) is slowly growing within more mainstream circles.

The debt created through the fiscal gap increases, for example, because of the Social Security program - since government taxes the population for Social Security but uses that tax money to fund other programs or to pay off other outstanding debts. In other words, the government collects "taxes" with the promise of paying them back in the future through Social Security, but it spends that money instead of saving it for the use it was supposedly intended.

The costs of such unfunded liabilities within programs like Social Security and Medicare accumulate as the government continues to kick the can down the road instead of changing policy to cover costs. This accumulation is reflected in the Alternative Financial Scenario analysis, which the CBO used to publish every year but for some reason stopped publishing in 2013. Here is a presentation on the AFS by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve. Take note that the crowd laughs at the prospect of the government continuing to “can kick” economic policy changes in order to avoid handling current debt obligations, yet that is exactly what has happened over the past several years.

Using the AFS report, Kotlikoff and other more honest economists estimate real U.S. national debt to stand at about $205 trillion.

When the exposure of these numbers began to take hold in the mainstream, media pundits and establishment propagandists set in motion a campaign to spin public perception, claiming that the vast majority of this debt was actually “projected debt” to be paid over the course of 70 years or more and, thus, not important in terms of today’s debt concerns. While some estimates of national debt include future projections of unfunded liabilities in certain sectors this far ahead, the spin masters' fundamental argument is in fact a disingenuous redirection of the facts.

According to the calculations of economists like Chris Cox and Bill Archer, unfunded liabilities are adding about $8 trillion in total debt annually. That is $8 trillion dollars per year not accounted for in official national debt stats.  For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion of this amount.

Kotlikoff’s analysis shows that this annual hidden debt accumulation has resulted in a current total of $205 trillion. This amount is not the unfunded liabilities added up in all future years. This is the present value of the unfunded liabilities, discounted to today.

How is the U.S. currently covering such massive obligations on top of the already counted existing budget costs? It’s not.

Taxes collected yearly in the range of $3.7 trillion are nowhere near enough to cover the amount, and no amount of future taxes would make a dent either. This is why the Grace Commission, established during the Ronald Reagan presidency, found that not a single penny of your taxes collected by the Internal Revenue Service is going toward the funding of actual government programs. In fact, all new taxes are being used to pay off the ever increasing interest on current debts.

For those who argue that an increase in taxation is the cure, more than 102 million people are unemployed within the U.S. today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Survey (CPS), 148 million are employed; about 20% of these are considered part-time workers (about 30 million people). Around 16 million full time workers are employed by state and local government (meaning they are a drain on the system whether they know it or not).  Only 43 percent of all U.S. households are considered “middle class,” the section of the public where most taxes are derived. In the best-case scenario, we have about 120 million people paying a majority of taxes toward U.S. debt obligations, while nearly as many are adding to those debt obligations through welfare programs or have the potential to add to those obligations in the near future if they do not find work due to the high unemployment rate that no one at the BLS wants to acknowledge.

Looking at reality, one finds a swiftly shrinking middle class paying for an ever larger welfare class.  Do the math, and an honest person will admit that no matter how much taxes increase, they will still never make up for the lack of adequate taxpayers.

Another dishonest argument given to dismiss concerns of national debt is the lie that Domestic Net Worth in the U.S. far outweighs our debts owed, and this somehow negates the issue. Domestic Net Worth is calculated using Gross Domestic Assets, public and private. It's interesting, however, that Domestic Net Worth counts 'Debt Capital' as an asset, just as GDP counts debt creation as production.  Debt Capital is the “capital” businesses and governments raise by taking out loans. This capital (debt) is then counted as an asset toward Domestic Net Worth.

Yes, that’s right, private and national debts are “assets.” And mainstream economists argue that these debts (errr… assets) offset our existing debts. This is the unicorn, Neverland, Care Bear magic of establishment economics, folks. It’s truly a magnificent thing to behold.

Ironically, debt capital, like the official national debt, does not include unfunded liabilities. If it did, mainstream talking heads could claim an even vaster supply of “assets” (debts) that offset our liabilities.

This situation is clearly unsustainable. The only people who seem to argue that it is sustainable are disinformation agents with something to gain (government favors and pay) and government cronies with something to lose (public trust and their positions of petty authority).

With overall Treasury investments static for some foreign central banks and dwindling in others, the only other options are to print indefinitely and at ever greater levels, or to default. For decades, the Federal Reserve has been printing in order to keep the game afloat, and the American public has little to no idea how much fiat and debt the private institution has conjured in the process. Certainly, the amount of debt we see just in annual unfunded liabilities helps to explain why the dollar has lost 97 percent of its purchasing power since the Fed was established. Covering that much debt in the short term requires a constant flow of fiat, digital and paper.  Not only does REAL debt threaten our credit standing as a nation, it also threatens the value and full faith in the dollar.

The small glimpse into Fed operations we received during the limited TARP audit was enough to warrant serious concern, as a full audit would likely result in the exposure of total debt fraud, the immediate abandonment of U.S. Treasury investment, and the destruction of the dollar. Of course, all of that will eventually happen anyway...

I will discuss why this will take place sooner rather than later through the issues of Treasury bonds and the dollar in the fourth installment of this series. In the fifth installment, I will examine the many reasons why a deliberate program of destructive debt bubbles and currency devaluations actually benefits certain international financiers and elites with aspirations of complete globalization. And in the sixth and final installment, I will delve into practical solutions - and practical solutions only. In the meantime, I would like everyone to consider this:

No society or culture has ever successfully survived by disengaging itself from its own financial responsibilities and dumping them on future generations without falling from historical grace. Not one. Does anyone with any sense really believe that the U.S. is somehow immune to this reality?

What Obama has been permitted to get away with by our press today makes what Nixon did look like shoplifting a 5-cent gumball.
It's breathtaking that our press has VOLUNTARILY become "state-run media" as Rush Limbaugh refers to them.
This isn't going to have a pretty ending.  I don't believe the Founders ever conceived of such a treasonous press.

Glenn Beck to NRA: It’s Norquist or Me


Posted By Robert Spencer On March 16, 2015

Glenn Beck has declared that he will leave the National Rifle Association (NRA) if Republican Party kingmaker Grover Norquist remains on the Board of Directors.

This is long overdue: it has now been over eleven years since FrontPage Magazine first published revelations about what David Horowitz described as Norquist’s “alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities.” Horowitz added:

“Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover’s part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.”

Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Norquist has dismissed concerns about his ties to Islamic supremacists as “bigotry” and “hatred,” and this has apparently satisfied the Republican establishment and prominent conservative spokesmen – until now, with Beck breaking ranks.

Beck’s peers and Republican leaders could have and should have ended Norquist’s baneful influence on the Republican Party and the conservative movement years ago. The November 1, 2001 issue of The New Republic (hardly a “right-wing” organ) noted that right after 9/11, President Bush met with several Muslim leaders with unsavory ties to the global jihad:

To the president’s left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas “freedom fighters.” Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who last fall told a Washington crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans, “America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.” Days later, after a conservative activist confronted Karl Rove with dossiers about some of Bush’s new friends, Rove replied, according to the activist, “I wish I had known before the event took place.”

Why didn’t he? Because of Norquist, who

“helped orchestrate various post-September 11 events that brought together Muslim leaders and administration officials…Indeed, when Jewish activists and terrorism experts complained about the Muslim invitees to Adam Goldman, who works in the White House public liaison’s office, Goldman replied that Norquist had vouched for them.”

In 1999, the prominent American Muslim leader Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who is now in prison for financing al-Qaeda, wrote two $10,000 checks to Norquist’s Islamic Institute (aka the Islamic Free Market Institute). Alamoudi is also notorious for proclaiming to a Muslim rally in Washington in 2000: “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here? … Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hizballah.” There is no indication that Norquist denounced Alamoudi, or returned his checks, after Alamoudi’s open embrace of jihad terror groups.

Even closer to Norquist is Suhail Khan, Norquist’s American Conservative Union (ACU) colleague. The ACU hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the nation’s largest annual gathering of conservatives, and many observers have charged that Norquist and Khan have foreclosed on any honest discussion of the jihad threat at CPAC. Investigative journalist Paul Sperry revealed in the New York Post in January 2011 that Khan accepted an award from Alamoudi in 2001, commenting: “Abdurahman Alamoudi has been very supportive of me. . . . I hope, inshallah, we can keep working together.”

Sperry also noted that

“in September 2001, four days before the 9/11 attacks, Khan spoke at the Islamic Society of North America’s convention….At the event, Khan shared his experiences from ‘inside’ the White House, and praised his late father, Mahboob Khan, for helping found ISNA — which the government now says is a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood and has raised money for jihad….Khan vowed in his speech to carry on his father’s ‘legacy.’”

There is much more on Norquist’s unsavory associations and activities, as you can see in these articles on Norquist by Daniel Greenfield, Pamela Geller, Patrick Poole, Jamie Glazov (interviewing Paul Sperry), and David Horowitz. Conservatives have suffered from being in Norquist’s shadow for too long. Particularly in these dark latter days of the Obama Administration, it is imperative that conservative candidates establish themselves as a genuine loyal opposition formulating a realistic and coherent alternative to Obama’s disastrous pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies.

Grover Norquist is the biggest single obstacle preventing that from happening. Glenn Beck is to be commended for being the first major figure on the Right to stand up and say that Grover must go. We can only hope that others will soon follow suit.

Never Mind the Terrorism, Find the Toyota

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On March 9, 2015

When Julissa Magdalena Maradiaga-Iscoa rammed her car into a police vehicle while trying to drive through the Miami airport entrance and was then arrested after shouting in Arabic about a bomb, the media did its best to get all the important details right.

The AP made sure to mention that she was driving a silver Toyota. It failed to mention that she was Muslim or that her Facebook page describes her as a Shaheeda, a holy warrior, a term Muslims use to refer to their terrorists. A few American media outlets did report that she was an illegal alien, but only the Spanish language ones told their readers that she had converted to Islam.

Such minor details have become the first casualties of the War on Terror.

That Maradiaga-Iscoa chose to rename herself Shaheeda Hadee tells us more about her state of mind than the color of the car that she was driving. The make of her car is far less important than that her social media likes and follows included Zakir Naik, who said “Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”

In Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State John Kerry had ducked a question about Zakir Naik receiving an award from the Saudi King. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki condemned Naik’s views, but defended Saudi Arabia as a “key partner.” This doublethink on Islam has become typical of our Islam policy.

Other of Maradiaga-Iscoa’s follows included Yasir Qadhi, a Holocaust denier and a favorite of the Christmas bomber, whose media company featured lectures by Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki. Also listed was Bilal Philips, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who was caught on video defending the Islamic rape of prepubescent girls.

No actual bomb was found on Maradiaga-Iscoa. Her family claims that she’s mentally ill, and perhaps she is, but the media still chose to censor highly relevant information about her ideology. The same media that chose to blow up atheist quotes by Richard Dawkins used by the Chapel Hill man who shot three Muslims over a parking spot has buried her enthusiasm for figures with actual terrorist links.

And it’s not the first time that this has happened.

Last year two Muslims carried out attacks against NYPD officers. Both of them invoked Jihad. One of the cases was even classified as terrorism. But most people don’t even know who the perpetrators were.

The media spent more debating whether the first attacker used a hatchet or an axe.

The media has dogmatically covered up the terrorist ties of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, while insisting that Anders Behring Breivik was a Christian and Zionist anti-Muslim terrorist despite the fact that he had contemplated carrying out terrorist attacks on behalf of Muslims, denied belief in any deity and stated that his only interest in Israel was as a “deportation-port for disloyal jews.”

Breivik, like Maradiaga-Iscoa, was probably mentally ill. Unlike Maradiaga-Iscoa, the media spun the story the other way despite plenty of evidence of delusions in Breivik’s manifesto. But the media did insist that Nidal Hassan may have somehow contracted PTSD from the soldiers at the base.

It’s not just that the media covers up Islamic affiliations in violent incidents, but that it exaggerates non-Muslim affiliations to make Islam seem victimized even when the evidence points the other way.

That’s what happened at Chapel Hill. That’s what happened in Miami.

None of this is news. It’s a narrative. When it comes to violence involving Muslims (and any number of other subjects) the news is shaped to fit the narrative. The Chapel Hill killer’s atheism was important because it could be twisted to make it seem that his killings had a religious motive. Had he shot three Christians, that angle would never have been played up. Maradiaga-Iscoa’s religion and her interest in a man who said “Every Muslim should be a terrorist” cuts against the narrative and is cut out of the news.

The narrative is simple and straightforward. Islam can never be a motive for violence. Other religions, and even lack of religion, can always be assumed to be a motive for violence against Muslims.

We have heard far more about the Chapel Hill killer’s atheism than we ever did about Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Islam. And yet the prosecution’s case is that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev saw himself as a Shaheed, a holy warrior, bent on killing Americans on behalf of the Muslim Ummah.

We have mass media coverage of the trial of a terrorist mass murderer in which the prosecution’s argument is not mentioned. But we do get lots of irrelevant “Silver Toyota” details about the killer.

Christians and Jews are taunted in the media with Timothy McVeigh and Baruch Goldstein, men whose actions are over twenty years old, but we still can’t discuss the Islamic motivations of a killer from a few years ago or from last week. And if it’s not McVeigh and Goldstein, then it’s the Crusades. It can be anything and everything as long as it distracts us from dealing with a culture of Muslim violence today.

The one ideology that is involved in violence around the world is also the one we can’t discuss. It exists only as a shadow. We see it in the news only in the constant defamation of Jews, Christians, Atheists, Buddhists and Hindus and any other group suffering from the ravages of Muslim violence that are smeared as violent bigots to make Islam look better. Those lies are the shadow of Muslim violence.

The Washington Post recently responded to the call by Republicans that Obama address “Islamic Extremism” by accusing the GOP of being infested with “Islamophobia.” This comes from the same paper which had suggested that ISIS rapists and butchers were “victims”.

The only way to make such a warped point of view palatable is to demonize non-Muslims while labeling critics of Islamic terrorism as bigots. Discussing Islamic intolerance is intolerant. If you talk about Islamic Christophobia or Judeophobia, then you’re being Islamophobic. Intolerance toward Christians and Jews however is a sign of tolerance.

The extremes of Muslim violence that go beyond anything the media is capable of covering up can only be addressed with more extreme smears of their victims. That is why the media is always searching for Muslim victimization and denouncing Christian and Jewish extremism. As the media coverage of Israel’s conflict with Islamic terrorism has shown us, each Muslim terrorist atrocity leads to even more negative coverage of Israel. When Muslims appear to be perpetrators and non-Muslims victims, the media must step in to rebalance the scales to protect its narrative. A familiar symptom of this phenomenon is the ubiquitous “Muslims fear backlash” story that follows each Muslim terror attack in America or Europe.

This is not bias. Bias nudges the story. This is propaganda.

Propaganda grimly follows a narrative to the bitter end, whether it’s Baghdad Bob’s non-existent American soldiers or the Soviet newsreader cheerfully informing listeners of a 95% successful harvest. Our media’s coverage of Islamic terrorism is not biased or flawed; it’s propaganda.

It’s not enough for propaganda to have heroes; it also needs villains to justify its failures.

The worse Islamic terrorism becomes, the more the media will have to smear us. A failed ideology directs most of the blame at its critics because they are represent the alternative to its lies.

The Washington Post denouncing Republicans as Islamophobes while defending ISIS is Baghdad Bob screaming at the camera. It’s a Soviet newsreader claiming that the harvest would have been successful if not for the CIA. The lies are collapsing under the weight of Muslim violence. Christians and Jews can’t be demonized fast enough to make ISIS seem palatable. The more the media is pushed, the faster it will implode.

Crafty,

I can't speak to the reliability of the source.  All I can tell you is that I've seen this reported in other places on the web - mainly sites with a vested interest in promoting gold as an investment, granted.  I also know that an "appeal to authority" is the most common logical fallacy - so I'm not suggesting that even if Greenspan were on tape saying this, he would necessarily be right about it.  I'm simply offering this to the community for consideration along side the verifiable facts we have at hand regarding the exponential growth of the money supply since Obama took office.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "hearsay."  Brien Lundin is the source.  I am honestly not familiar with his credentials.

Compelling video - echoes what Robert Spencer has been saying for years - but this from a former Muslim himself:

https://fbcdn-video-a-a.akamaihd.net/hvideo-ak-xap1/v/t43.1792-2/10590281_881494028527618_404734724_n.mp4?rl=1500&vabr=304&oh=0ebf5d748ce39a5f499b6bcda7ca95aa&oe=54EF426D&__gda__=1424965873_2ba47db320bac560b75e2c0eea222230

Does Obama Love America or Islam?

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 23, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com

Walk into a store and you’ll see piles of red and pink in the Clearance box. Everything from heart-shaped cards and boxes of chocolate candy to plastic flowers and teddy bears clutching plush red hearts will be 50 percent off because Valentine’s Day comes but once a year. And Valentine’s Day is over.

Obama’s love for America also comes but once a year. He tosses it into a speech in the Midwest when his poll numbers are down and then it goes into the clearance box where you can buy his love and his patriotism for 50 percent off. And it’s still expensive at the price because the heart-shaped box is empty.

Greeting card sentiments come easily to the man who will say anything. Obama promised to eliminate income tax for seniors making less than $50,000, vowed transparent open government and promised that you could keep your doctor. His words were empty promises.

Love, of a person or of a country, is not judged by what we say. It is judged by what we do.

Every politician with ambition claims to love America. Most only love themselves. Some love other things. No one can know what is it in Obama’s heart, which is why the media’s shrill demands that Scott Walker affirm Obama’s love for America are silly and cynical, but we can certainly follow his passions.

We show our passions in the things that we really care about. We all have our duties and obligations. Obama’s obligations include delivering speeches praising America, occasionally placing his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance (when he can find it) and badly saluting soldiers with a latte cup.

But are these the things he loves and cares about?

We can follow Obama’s passions the way that an adulterer’s trail to his mistress can be followed no matter how many cards or stuffed bears he gives to his wife.

What are the things that Obama is passionate about?

In his first days in office, he signed a number of executive orders. Of his first five orders, three involved Muslim terrorists captured and held in Gitmo. His third executive order was about the “humane” treatment of terrorists. His fourth executive order sought to close Gitmo. Like the man who can’t wait to get away from his wife so he can call his mistress, Obama made his priorities clear from the start.

It took Obama a month to set up the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. It took him two days to set up a Special Interagency Task Force on Detainee Disposition to free Gitmo terrorists.

Obama prioritized helping Muslim terrorists over the economic recovery. Why? Because that was a subject he was passionate about.

People will always prioritize what they are passionate about over what they aren’t. It’s easy to look at a mission shift and see the choice that has been made.

For example, is Obama passionate about space exploration? He told the head of NASA that his “foremost” priority was making Muslims feel good about themselves.

Obama is more passionate about Muslim self-esteem than he is about visiting other planets.

Is he passionate about god and religion? That depends on which god and which religion.

Obama left out “Under God” when reciting the Gettysburg Address. The DNC’s platform initially left out “God” and booed the reinsertion. Obama’s invocation at his inauguration also dropped “Under God”.

However Obama cheerfully recited “Allahu Akbar”, the opening of the Islamic supremacist call to prayer, and called it “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.” He had a man jailed for making a YouTube video attacking Mohammed and blamed him for Muslim acts of terror against America.

Obama’s religious beliefs, such as they are, remain locked in his head. But there is only one religion that he is passionate enough to protect by imprisoning those who blaspheme against it.

He may botch salutes and the pledge of allegiance, but he has retained the ability to chant “Allahu Akbar” with a “first-rate accent”.

He may think that the “good book” says “don’t throw stones in glass houses”, but he accurately quotes the Koran. The things that we remember are the ones that we really care about.

Obama has an obligation to reference the Gettysburg Address, to wait out the pledge of allegiance and to praise America. He has no obligation to quote the Koran or chant “Allahu Akbar”. These are things that he does because he wants to do them. They are the things that he is actually passionate about.

Does he love them more than he loves America? No one can know what is in another person’s heart.

There are married couples who have lived together for decades only to discover that the love of their life had been cheating on them all along. And who is to say that the adulterer doesn’t love? We can’t pass a final verdict on his feelings. But we can know his faithlessness by his deeds.

We can say of him and of Obama that they broke faith with the covenant that they had entered into. We can say that they betrayed those who trusted them, lied to them, used and abused them, and then feigned outrage when their actions were questioned.

Can the media’s furious talking heads denouncing Giuliani deny that Obama lied to Americans? Can they deny that he harmed them? Can they deny that he refused to take responsibility for his actions?

The facts are clear. Only the interpretation is in doubt. And the interpretation is what we are debating.

Does Obama lie to Americans because he loves them? Does he weaken America abroad because he loves it? And if Obama loves America, what does he love about it and how does he show that love? Does he love the Constitution? If he did, he wouldn’t constantly violate it. Does he love Americans? Which Americans? The ones whose health plans he took away for ObamaCare or the ones whose jobs he took away to legalize illegal aliens? The ones whose votes and wishes he ignores and snidely mocks?

Is it the Americans who no longer believe in the future under his rule that he loves? Is it the unemployed Americans he loves? Is it the Americans he jailed under his new laws and regulations that he loves?

If Obama loves Americans, then it’s a clear case of hurting the ones you love.

And if Obama doesn’t love Americans, what America does he love; the rock band or the Walt Whitman poem, the town America in the Netherlands or the Neil Diamond song?

Questioning Obama’s love for America is alleged to be unacceptable gutter politics, but accusing his critics of being racists is a standard debating tactic for those same outraged media talking heads.

It wasn’t gutter politics when Obama claimed that the national debt under Bush was “unpatriotic”. Is Obama at least as “unpatriotic” for increasing the debt by 70 percent? Is it possible that his spending spree proves that he doesn’t love America? Or is indebting our children the way that he shows his love?

Can we question the patriotism of a man who frees terrorists or only of a man who locks them up?

Is asking whether Obama loves America an unacceptable question because the answer is obvious or because it isn’t?

Obama will go on making speeches in which he claims to love America while making the country poorer, more dangerous and weaker. He will also go on making speeches praising Islam while increasing the power, influence and wealth of Muslims in America and around the world.

As the clearance box after Valentine’s Day shows, anyone can buy a card or a teddy bear. It’s the actions that count. It’s not what we say that shows love. It’s what we do that shows what we truly care about.

This is certainly a positive and hopeful development IF it is true.  Since it comes from The New York Times - I am highly suspicious of the veracity of the information therein.
I'm not aware of any widespread program like this within the American Muslim community - let alone the Muslim community in Europe.  Muslims with whom I have talked here in the Atlanta area are all either quietly supportive if ISIS, ignorant of the actual teachings of the Koran and Hadith (Muslims in name only) or genuinely afraid to speak out against Islamic terror for fear of repercussions from their local Mosque and community.

I take this story with a grain of salt.  If I see more evidence emerge that this is actually taking place in any significant way - that will be a good thing.  The NYT has no more credibility to me than any other left-leaning rag.  Everything it publishes is suspect ipso facto.

http://pamelageller.com/2015/02/obama-makes-islamic-state-finger-salute-to-african-leaders.html/

Obama’s Anti-Netanyahu Boycott Is Collapsing

Posted By Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn

The final numbers are not yet in, but it seems clear that the White House-orchestrated campaign to boycott Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress is collapsing.

Despite two weeks of intense anti-Netanyahu leaks, insults, and pressure, the White House has so far succeeded in persuading only a handful of Democratic members of Congress to stay away from the speech.

A grand total of two Senators and twelve Representatives have publicly announced that they are boycotting Israel’s prime minister. Assuming that those figures change only marginally in the days ahead, it will mean that 98% of the Senate and 95% of the House of Representatives will be in attendance.

Even the most vocal critics of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are not united against the Israeli leader. Emerging from a meeting with President Obama last week, Caucus chairman Rep. G.K. Butterfield told reporters, that the subject of Netanyahu’s speech “didn’t come up” during their 90-minute meeting with the president. But he then proceeded to chastise Israel’s prime minister for supposedly being “disrespectful” to the president, and Congressman Hank Johnson said it was “about President Barack Obama being a black man disrespected by a foreign leader.”

But not all the African-American congress members joined the anti-Netanyahu chorus. U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), who is the only senator in the Congressional Black Caucus, refused to toe the line. The Politico reports that when his colleagues began lambasting Prime Minister Netanyahu, reporters asked Booker where he stood, and he pointedly dissented, saying “I’ve been asked that a number of times–I’m not commenting.”

Knowing of Senator Booker’s longtime support for Israel and close relationship with many American Jewish leaders, we find it difficult that he will go along with an insulting and disrespectful boycott of Israel’s prime minister.

Another major crack in the anti-Netanyahu boycott effort appeared this weekend in the form of a message from Elie Wiesel in a full page advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post, sponsored by “This World: The Values Network.”

The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has always been something of a moral compass for the Jewish people–certainly far more than the two or three Jewish organizational leaders who have been quoted as opposing Netanyahu’s visit. We all remember Wiesel bravely confronting President Reagan over his visit to the Bitburg cemetery, not to mention his speaking out on so many other important issues over the years. So Wiesel’s words in the Times and Post ads carry particular weight.

Wiesel announced that he will personally attend Netanyahu’s speech. He appealed to President Obama and Vice President Biden to “put aside the politics” and hear what Israel’s prime minister has to say. He pointed out that Netanyahu will speak to Congress the day before Purim–the day when, in ancient times, “a wicked man in Persia named Haman” sought to destroy the Jews…”Now Iran, modern Persia, has produced a new enemy,” Wiesel wrote. “The Ayatollah Khomeini has been as clear as his predecessor in declaring his goal: ‘the annihilation and destruction’ of Israel. He is bent on acquiring the weapons needed to make good on the deadly promise.”

Finally, it’s worth mentioning another crack that appeared in the boycott effort this week. The pro-Palestinian lobbying group J Street, which has been the engine driving the boycott movement, has been circulating a poll claiming that 84% of American Jews support President Obama’s position on Iran.

But now the fraudulent methods used to elicit that 84% number have been exposed. It turns out that the respondents were not asked about the actual terms that Obama is negotiating with Iran. They were asked whether they would support an imaginary agreement under which Iran would completely and permanently give up its capability to produce nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, that is not at all what President Obama is insisting upon, according to numerous news reports.

A genuinely objective poll, which asked American Jews whether they want the U.S. to insist that Iran be permanently prevented from having the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, would surely find the vast majority of Jews in favor.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu appears next month before Congress, with the overwhelming majority of Congress members from both parties in attendance, he will explain the truth about the Iranian threat and the danger of the U.S. agreeing to weak and unenforceable terms.

And that, of course, is what the Obama Administration, J Street, and the other Netanyahu-bashers most wish to prevent.

And further - I would argue - and I think it's been amply demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt by his actions - that Obama hates Jews.

Is Israel the Problem, or is it Jews?

Ben Shapiro - February 18, 2015 - www.truthrevolt.org

In the aftermath of the killing of a man at a Copenhagen synagogue by a member of the Religion of Peace, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "This wave of attacks is expected to continue. Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home." Russian emigre Natan Sharansky echoed Netanyahu's call, stating, "There is no future for Jews in western Europe."

In response, European leaders shouted down Netanyahu. "We know there are doubts, questions across the community," said French President Francois Hollande, who was elected with in excess of 93 percent of the Muslim vote. "I will not just let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe and France, in particular." The same week, Jewish tombstones were spray-painted by the hundreds in eastern France.

But undoubtedly, European anti-Semites will now claim that Netanyahu's comments simply demonstrate why Europe must force out its Jews: because Israel is just so awful. That, at least, is what a German court in the city of Wuppertal concluded after convicting two German Palestinians of setting fire to a synagogue. The Wuppertal court stated that the men were simply attempting to bring "attention to the Gaza conflict." In other words, Jews are fair game because of Israel.

But it's precisely the reverse that is true: Israel is fair game because it is Jewish. This is the dirty little secret of anti-Israel policy: It is almost entirely anti-Semitic policy. That is why Muslims attack Jewish synagogues in Paris during the Gaza war: because Israel is a stand-in for the Jews, not the other way around. Were Israel a Muslim country, the rest of the world would see it as a beacon of light and hope for the future of an entire religion. Because it is Jewish, Muslims target it for destruction, and the rest of the world tut-tuts Israel's nasty habit of attempting to survive. The extra-American world hates Israel because it is Jewish. It does not hate Jews because of Israel. Israel is merely a convenient excuse.

Ironically, radical Muslims, in targeting Jews throughout the world, reinforce the necessity of a state of Israel. Their argument seems to be that Israel is an unnecessary Jewish nationalist cancer; to prove that argument, they suggest killing Jews all over the planet, leaving no place safe for Jews except for Israel.

And so Jews go to Israel by the droves. European governments can rip Netanyahu all they want for his supposedly brusque dismissal of European tolerance, but that supposed tolerance means less and less when Swedish Jews abandon entire cities as the authorities make way for radical Muslims. European governments can condemn the Gaza war, but Jews see that war for what it was: an exercise in Jewish self-preservation, with the Europeans once again attempting to prevent such self-preservation.

Unlike the Europeans, Americans continue to side with Israel because America is founded on Judeo-Christian principles. America embraces Judaism, and so it embraces Israel, not the other way around. The formula is simple: Love Jews; love Israel. Hate Jews; hate Israel. Opposing Israeli action may not be anti-Semitism, but it sure does have a funny habit of backing the agenda of anti-Semites.

Ex-imam: Islamic State “animated entirely by Islam. The manner in which they kill – prescribed and outlined in the Koran.”

FEBRUARY 10, 2015 10:52 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER


Obama, Kerry, Biden, David Cameron and the rest — they couldn’t be lying to us, could they? Inconceivable!

“Ex-Muslim Imam Pens Open Letter, Giving Obama A History Lesson About Islam,” Mad World News, February 9, 2015:

President Barack Obama sparked outrage when he compared medieval Christian wars to modern-day Islamic terrorism at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday. He spouted that terrorist groups like ISIS “professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it,” chastising the opposition from getting on “our high horse” when “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ” during the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition.

Dr. Mark Christian, founder of Global Faith Institute, knows Islamic history too well, being an apostate from the Muslim faith himself. Having experienced the true nature of Islam firsthand as a devout Imam, Dr. Christian penned a fiery open letter to the American leader, which he graciously provided to Mad World News, that includes a blunt history lesson in the unchanging goal of ancient Islam:

President Obama… I realize you thought you were brave and courageous when you defamed Christianity by equating the Crusades and the Inquisition with the present-day barbarism of Islam, but I wonder if your “courage” goes so far as to blame Muslims for the Islamic conquests? Do you have the guts to tell them that in the name of Allah, they invaded nations, practiced ethnic and cultural cleansing, going so far as to erase the very history of conquered lands. Can you tell them that they changed languages and names, enslaved millions and killed an unknowable number of innocent souls simply because they worshiped God, and not “Allah?”. I think not. You know Christians will bow their heads and pray for you whereas Muslims will simply take your head and celebrate.

ISIS is not animated by the usual “reaction to oppression” narrative the Left trots out as an excuse for every instance of horrible behavior, whether that behavior is rioting in Ferguson, Missouri or the systematic slaughter of all those opposed to your ideology.

ISIS is animated entirely by Islam. The manner in which they kill – prescribed and outlined in the Koran. The way they make war – prescribed and outlined in the Koran. The way they treat prisoners – also prescribed and outlined in the Koran.

ISIS does nothing that Mohammed didn’t first do 14 centuries ago.

You see, the problem isn’t a “radical interpretation of Islam,” the problem is the belief in Islam that Mohammed was the “perfect man,” and as such, worthy of emulation in all things.

Until Islam can recognize that their “perfect man” wasn’t perfect, and both did and ordered horrible things to be done – certainly things that have no place in a modern world – then there will always be an ISIS. There will always be those who dedicate their lives to imitating the man who spawned the greatest killing machine in known history…Islam.

Mike Konrad, the pen name of a colleague at American Thinker, has done the math for us in a remarkably cogent piece that deserved far more attention than it received when first published in early 2014.

The President drew a moral equivalence argument at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast between the predation of Islam and the actions of Christians during the Crusades and the Inquisition. The President is not uneducated. He is surely aware of the speciousness of that argument, yet still proffered it as a back-handed justification of the profane brutality of ISIS and other Islamic supremacist groups.

When we think of genocide, the names that spring to mind are Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Of course Mao and his utopian fantasies deserve a place alongside the other luminaries of human devastation; millions suffered and died because of these men.

But, when one looks a bit deeper we discover that when it comes to dealing death, the aforementioned dictators are mere peddlers compared to Islam. People forget that the Islamic conquests began 400 years before the Crusades, which were largely a response to Islamic aggression.



Beginning in the year 1000 and lasting for another 500 years, Islam attempted to depopulate India. They did a remarkably good job of it, as the overall population of the Indian subcontinent (despite very high birthrates) dropped by an estimated 80 million in that period.

Don’t forget that Islam has always been a leader in the trafficking of humans – from the slave trade to present-day prostitution – Muslims have excelled in the sale of their fellows.

Just under 30 million slaves from Africa were held in the Middle East and considering the death rate of slaves in transport (an estimated 80%!) Arab Muslim traders would’ve needed more than a 100 million to have provided the number of slaves we know survived.

While Christianity is forever maligned for forced conversions and bad behavior in Africa, in truth, Muslims performed these atrocities on a scale many orders of magnitude greater, and continued to do so for more than a thousand years.

Of course, we shan’t forget the Islamic slaughter in Sudan, the methodical murder and sexual slavery ongoing in Nigeria or the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Muslim Turks at the turn of the 20th century.

When Mohammed began his spread of Islam, most of North Africa and all of Europe was Christian. Where are they now? According to the Catholic Education Resource Center, there are no remaining communities of Christians that can trace their roots back to antiquity. Over the span of centuries, this number adds up to millions more dead, at the hands of Islam.

According to Mr. Konrad,

“Possibly one-third to one-half or more of all those killed by war or slavery in history can be traced to Islam.”

The totals boggle the mind. By a conservative estimate, Islam is directly responsible for a quarter of a BILLION dead. Indirectly, hundreds of millions more.

To quote Mr. Konrad,

“Unlike the 20th-century totalitarians whose killing fury consumed themselves, reducing their longevity, Islam paces itself. In the end, though slower, Islam has killed and tortured far more than any other creed – religious or secular. Unlike secular tyranny, Islam, by virtue of its polygamy and sexual predation, reproduces itself and increases.”

Other tyrannies are furious infections, which burn hot, but are soon overcome. Islam is a slow terminal cancer, which metastasizes, and takes over. It never retreats. Its methods are more insidious, often imperceptible at first, driven by demographics. Like cancer, excision may be the only cure.

Mohammed is the “perfect man” of Islam, and as such is the role model for every Muslim. Looking at the horrors perpetrated by Mohammed, it becomes crystal clear that the more devout the Muslim, the more depraved and regressive their behavior.

There is no justification, no moral equivalence to be drawn between the behavior of Christians a thousand years ago, and the behavior of Muslims today. The more salient point is that while the predation of Christianity died away, the worst of Islamic practices are on the rise.

So Mr. President, please focus your attention toward a real problem – Islamic supremacism – the rest of us have the Crusades and the Inquisition under control.

Dr. Christian’s anger is righteous and warranted, and if elected leaders in the U.S. do not heed his word, America will become another conquest of an Islamic Caliphate revived.

Because of Muhammad’s example, Muslims have justifiably wiped out 270 million non-Muslims in their endeavors to establish the world Islamic government their prophet viciously commands.

ISIS is more than an Ottoman army reborn; it is the last attempt at bringing about the apocalyptic rule written in the Quran, which, like all communistic regimes, comes at the price of millions of innocent lives. In fact, it’s as if ISIS’s every decision is made by carefully consulting the Quran and Hadith beforehand, cautiously avoiding straying from the path of Islam. Never before has Islam been so successful in jihad than to force Western nations to bow to Sharia law, and that has been and is the goal of Islam’s political ideology since the time of Muhammad. If the greatest Christian nation on earth cannot even call it by name, there is little chance of preventing it from infiltrating our homeland.