Congressional Republicans Are Now Obama’s Favorite Pets

by Sam Rolley / Personal Liberty Digest

PHOTOS.COM

If ongoing disagreements between the old GOP guard and junior lawmakers are any indication, there’s a rift in the Republican Party that isn’t going to be resolved anytime in the near future.

Junior Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the floor of his legislative chamber last month to vocally express his distrust of establishment members of his own Party.

Cruz’s remarks were in response to Senator John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) suggestion that it was absurd for Senate members of the GOP to object to going to conference with House Republicans to get budget negotiations underway.

“Isn’t it a little bizarre, this whole exercise?” McCain proclaimed after Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) objected to starting the negotiations. “What we’re saying is that we don’t trust our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.”

McCain has continuously accused a fringe minority of conservatives in the GOP of blocking legislative progress on all manner of issues Congress is under public pressure to address.

In matters of economic legislation, however, conservative fiscal hawks in the GOP have a legitimate retort for McCain: Budget talks occurring over the past few years have revealed that Republican lawmakers — especially in House leadership positions — are certainly not unwilling to cede to Democrat demands, with the supposed promise of benefits to conservatives in other areas.

“The senior senator of Arizona urged senators to trust House Republicans… and frankly, I don’t trust Republicans,” Cruz said. “It’s the leaders of both parties that got us in this mess. … A lot of Republicans were complicit in this spending spree.”

An even more pronounced example of ideological sparring within the GOP has concerning recent revelations of vast assaults on Constitutionally protected rights — in the form of differing opinions about whether exposing government secrets is free speech and about whether the spying is even a Constitutional problem.

Some notables erring on the side of fascism are the McCain, Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who have all responded to conservative concerns about government snooping and transparency  in ways that would make White House press secretary Jay Carney beam with pride.

McConnell believes that safety must trump freedom — and that those who dare betray the Federal government’s secrecy must be dealt with as harshly as possible by the state.

“I hope that he is prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” McConnell said, addressing reporter questions about the supposed National Security Agency leaker, 29-year-old Edward Snowden.

And Americans shouldn’t be worried; McConnell and his colleagues are keeping an eye on things for you.

“In response to the leaks of sensitive classified information, the director of national intelligence has declassified a good deal of information to the public to explain the programs in question,” he said.

“What is clear from this information released by the DNI is that each of these programs is authorized
by law, overseen by Congress and the courts and subject to ongoing and rigorous oversight.”

Besides, as Graham put it: If you aren’t doing anything wrong, who cares if the government is disobeying the supreme law of the land to spy on you?

Graham told FOX News recently: “I am glad the NSA is trying to find out what terrorists are up to overseas and inside the country.”

Later in the interview, he opined: “I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States.

“I don’t think you’re talking to terrorists, I know you’re not, I know I’m not, so we don’t have anything to worry about,” Graham told the host. “I’m glad the activity’s going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to.”

Unlike McConnell, Graham claims that he had no idea the NSA was collecting American communication information en masse until the press broke the story.
It’s not surprising that Graham has little use for 4^th Amendment protections — because he goes to great pains to make sure the public is aware of his paltry regard for most of the provisions included in the Bill of Rights.

Like recently, when he mused about whether bloggers deserve 1^st Amendment protections if they happen to write articles that piss in the legislative Cheerios: “Who is a journalist is a question we have to ask ourselves. Is any blogger out there saying anything? Do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times.”

Bloggers subsequently freaked out, and Graham tried to backtrack.

Also speaking about the relationship between the 1^st Amendment and revealing government actions that have the potential to create public unease, King was amazingly able to one-up Graham in totalitarian appeal: To hell with it, let’s even strip the people we consider to be members of the “legitimate news media” of the 1^st Amendment protections designed for the very purpose of keeping the government in check.

King said that reporters who published whistle-blower documents should be pursued with the same vigor by government prosecutors as the whistle-blowers themselves.

“If they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think action should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude,” King said.

“I think on something of this magnitude, there is an obligation both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something that would so severely compromise national security.”
King is a little late to the party, though, as his suggestion is reminiscent of the way in which President Barack Obama already deals with people who get in the way of Federal supremacy.

Cruz may be in the minority as a lawmaker who doesn’t trust the members of his own Party while he is surrounded by his colleagues on Capitol Hill — but on America’s Main Street, far removed from Washington’s marbled halls, he’s part of a growing conservative majority. American conservatives know all too well how dangerous it is to ascribe trust to the current GOP brand.

And while the Texas Republican is not a favorite of the Party leadership, he isn’t completely alone. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently proposed a longshot to do exactly the opposite of what many of his fellow Republicans feel is right: strengthen American’s 1^st and 4^th Amendment protections.

“The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the executive’s expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party,” Paul said when introducing his bill, the “Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013.”

No doubt Cruz and Paul are outnumbered; but as the Constitution hangs in the balance, American conservatives can only hope that the underdogs are prepared for an endurance fight.

War in the Information Battlespace in Seattle The haters are out in full force in Seattle. There is another vicious lie of an ad campaign running on Seattle buses. Palestinians have equal rights with Israelis -- and make up but a third of the population. Both President of the  Palestinain Authority Mahound Abbas and US favorite Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have gone on record saying that no Jews will be allowed to live in Palestine and that all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods built in post-67 Jerusalem will have to be emptied out before they will accept their state. They are demanding a judenrein state. The Muslim minority in Israel identifies with active enemies of its state, such as the terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. "The way to peace" is to recognize the right of the Jewish state to exist and to expunge the quran of the violent Jew-hating texts that exhort Muslims to commit genocide. In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the founders determined that their nation be a Jewish state that offers equal rights to its Arab citizens. You see no such equality for Jews (or Christians or non-Muslims) under the sharia in Muslim countries. There are no equal rights for women or religious minorities in Gaza or any country where the sharia is the rule of law. Of course this wasn't acceptable to the clueless and compromised authorities. They demanded that we give them documentation that the Palestinian Authority was really calling for a Jew-free state. Do you think they asked the Jew-haters for documentation that "Palestinians" don't have equal rights in Israel? I don't either. We gave them the documentation. We sent them quotes from Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian Authority leaders, saying that no Jews would be allowed to live in the Palestinian State. But they still are hestitating to run the ad. They are scared to death of their Islamic supremacist masters, and don't dare to cross them by running our truthful ad. We are ready to sue for our free speech rights. And we will win. But we need your help -- for the legal costs, and the cost of the ads, and the cost of running these ads everywhere that the Jew-haters are running theirs. No one else is putting the jihadis and Islamic supremacists on the defensive the way we are. No one else is countering the Goebbels-like Big Lie and blood libel against Israel that the left is circulating everywhere. Please think about how important it is to counter their lies -- and donate via PayPal to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com. We're a 501c3, and your contribution is tax-deductible. You can mail a check to AFDI, 1040 1st Avenue, #121, NY NY 10022 More importantly, your contribution is making it possible for us to put out words of truth and defend the cause of freedom in these dark days when lies rule the say everywhere.

Obama monitors everything -- except mosques

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

Madness. "Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers," from IBD, June 12 (thanks to Paul):

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.

The bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.

One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.

This is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature to worshippers.

What other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be monitoring?

No Constitution, No Borders, No USA

By: Diana West/ Townhall Columnist

At what point does it become clear that we no longer inhabit America?

When we "Press 2," not "1" for English?

When a National Social Security Number syncs an electronic identity that the government hospital provided us at birth to track us till death?

When borders are no more, but the Surveillance State always knows where we are?

Ours is the age of dislocation before realization: The United States of America no longer exists. Why? How? The answer is simple, tragic and outrageous: Government officials, elected and unelected, with precious exceptions, no longer preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they do whatever it takes to beat it, flout it and ignore it. Worse, We, the People, let them.

This can't go on. Otherwise our country-'tis-of-thee becomes a melody to be forgotten, a mirage of a tradition more storybook than real every day. Nowhere is this more the case, of course, than in Washington, D.C., where absolute unaccountability corrupts absolutely, where echoing down the cool, white marble halls of power, hollow men and women trample sovereignty and citizenship in a pathway to American betrayal. And I haven't even gotten to Congress, busy, busy "reforming" the illegal alien crisis they antiseptically refer to as "immigration," while considering passage of a $940 billion "farm bill," 80 percent of which will fund food stamps. These two laws alone can institutionalize the lawlessness of the land and make countless more Americans wards of the state.

Meanwhile, there is in Washington a faceless power-mongery that lives and works in the shadows. City by city, rural state by rural state, its mechanisms of "immigration," "refugee resettlement," and socialist government programs overwhelm a near-impotent citizenry with alien cultures, religions, languages and traditions.

There is no "melting pot" out there, nor is there even residual belief in one -- particularly not on the part of the state. Most of our new peoples will never embrace American constitutional virtues en masse to perpetuate them because their own sponsor, their own lifeline, is the mega-state that brought them here and supports them.

This goes for newcomers from the Hispano-sphere, 75 percent of whom, Pew reported in 2012, believe the U.S. government isn't big enough and want more government services. It also goes for Muslim "refugee resettlement" populations, willfully deployed by this same power-mongery to displace and erase what we may one day look back on as just another indigenous culture that Washington overlords destroyed.

Then there is the faceless power-mongery that transforms the country, ironically, in the name of "national security." How can "national security" be achievable in an America without borders? It is a post-9/11 fact that more than one million Americans, government employees and contactors, now have "top-secret" access. They monitor our electronic lives, and collect all of our telephone numbers, something we have learned from the completely unauthorized but vital disclosures of Edward Snowden. This mass monitoring, we are told repeatedly, is what it takes to prevent "another 9/11."

Never mind those pinprick jihad attacks in Boston, Arkansas or Fort Hood. In fact, never mind jihad, period. This same Surveillance State has officially eliminated jihad as a subject to be taught or studied by security agencies and the military. In this way, every one of us becomes a suspect.

"Why do you need every telephone number?" NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. "Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?"

"Well, you have to start someplace," Clapper replied.

Incredibly, this deaf, dumb and blind vacuum cleaner approach is touted as effective enough to have prevented 9/11 in the first place. So stresses former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden, a booster of the warrantless "data mining" of the PRISM program and the mass collection of all Americans' telephone records.

The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the hyper-state it enables. Just ask the airline ticket taker in Boston who, constricted by "political correctness" forced herself to tell the al-Qaida hijackers to "have a nice flight" rather than investigate their strange pre-boarding behavior.

If our leaders really wanted to prevent "another 9/11," they would have long ago admitted the obvious: that the world of Islam, from its terrorists to its kings, is engaged in the latest historical cycle of jihad to extend the reach of Islamic law (sharia). They would have decided that "profiling" isn't worse than terrorism. They would have halted Islamic immigration not only to stop more jihad cells from forming but also to prevent Constitution-endangering, pro-sharia demographics from forming, too. They would have sharply curtailed travel, and particularly return travel from jihad nations such as Chechnya and Pakistan. They would have long ago blocked U.S. institutions, including colleges, media organizations and banks, from accepting millions of dollars from sharia-ruled dictatorships. They would have closed down mosques in America where jihad is preached and supported.

Above all, they would have secured our borders rather than leave them open all these post-9/11 years. Of course, that would mean re-establishing and defending those borders, both literally and figuratively.

That's one thing Washington, D.C., will never tolerate.

Barack Obama's "Social Innovation" Slush Fund

By: Michelle Malkin / Townhall Columnist

We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups suffered? You don't know the half of it.

Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady community-organizing pals. The Dems' 2008 party platform proposed the creation of a "Social Investment Fund Network" to subsidize "social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities."

Investigative journalist James O'Keefe's pioneering work helped bring down the fraudsters of ACORN. But a thousand other ACORN-style knockoffs have metastasized in the shadows. Not long after Obama took office, big-government Democrats and Republicans handed him the $6 billion mandatory "volunteerism" package known as the "SERVE America Act." The boondoggle fueled legions of new government "volunteers," including a Clean Energy Corps, an Education Corps, a Healthy Futures Corps, a Veterans Service Corps and an expanded National Civilian Community Corps for disaster relief and energy conservation.

In addition to creating thousands of make-work jobs and boosting bloated national service bureaucracies, the legislation also carved out a left-wing slush fund known as the Social Innovation Fund. In its four-year existence, SIF has doled out $140 million to 20 handpicked grant-making organizations, which in turn have chosen 197 "promising nonprofits" for government support.

Obama promised "accountability" measures to ensure the money is spent wisely. But who has been assessing the effectiveness of the spending? As I reported at the outset, it's interest-conflicted foxes in the social entrepreneurship community guarding the government-grant henhouse.

Among the lucky winners of these crony SIF monies: Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which received $4.2 million and had employed Patrick Corvington, former head of the Corporation for National and Community Service; and social welfare outfit New Profit Inc., which received $5 million and had employed former SIF Executive Director Paul Carttar. New Profit's conflicts are gobsmacking. Nonprofit Quarterly noted that SIF "owes its existence at least in part to New Profit, which in 2007 put together a coalition of nonprofit groups called America Forward to advocate for, among other things, the creation of a federal fund."

The inspector general overseeing SIF, AmeriCorps and other SERVE Act programs agreed with critics that the Social Innovation Fund grant application process lacked transparency, lacked a policy on handling staff conflicts of interest and failed to fully document grant award decisions. Another IG audit released just last week revealed that a prominent SIF grantee, the progressive Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, "fail(ed) to remove two of its employees, who were known by CEO management to have criminal histories that made them ineligible, from working on the SIF grant."

As Paul Light, a public policy professor at New York University who served on a review panel for the fund, told National Public Radio: "It's not clear yet what taxpayers have gotten for the money." The phony-baloney statistics that SIF bureaucrats tout to show how many have been "served" simply demonstrate the Nanny State "entrepreneurs'" real agenda: maximizing the number of government dependents and rewarding social welfare operatives.

The Obama administration's politicization of charity -- or the "Solyndra-ization of philanthropy," as the Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock calls it -- has created a permanent taxpayer-backed pipeline to Democratic partisan outfits masquerading as public-interest do-gooders. There's nothing "innovative" about underwriting the same failed dependency-inducing community organizing fronts while persecuting others based on ideology.

It's self-SERVE-ing Chicago business as usual.

Happy Flag Day...long and proud may she wave...

God Bless the USA.

 

Happy Birthday US Army

Two hundred thirty-eight years ago, our nation's leaders established the Continental Army, beginning a rich heritage of successfully defending this great country and her citizens. Today, we celebrate the continued strength, professionalism and bravery of our ready and resilient Soldiers in the all-volunteer force. Our Soldiers remain Army Strong with a lifelong commitment to our core values and beliefs.

Op-ed:
The blame game...and 'We the People' are the losers
By: Diane Sori

Clueless...totally clueless...don't you just love how some people NEVER see themselves as the cause of or involved in anything..as in 'who me'...NO way.

And that cluelessness becomes outright dangerous when that clueless person is Barack HUSSEIN Obama, the supposed leader of the free world.

Some cases in point in 'Obamaspeak':

• The Arab Spring turned Arab Winter...it's NOT my fault those countries want my brethren in power (pssst...here guys more taxpayer dollars and weapons but shhhhhhh...don't say a word)
• Benghazi...it was the CIA's and the DOD's fault that four Americans died
• The AP scandal...it's their own fault for daring to write something bad about me... forgetting their place is to promote me and my agenda and NOTHING else
• The IRS scandal...it's Conservative and TEA Party groups fault for wanting to promote God, county, family, and the 2nd Amendment...and using that awful word 'patriot' in their names
• The NSA scandal...you Americans have to be monitored for your own good you know
• The economy...but I have to give 'the sponges' free stuff so they will support me and my party
• Iran on the road to become nuclear...they're my brethren so it's only fair
• Stabbing Israel in the back...it's the Jews fault for denying my Palestinian peeps a homeland...hell...everything is the Jews fault...as my brethren say

And dare we forget... Obama blames Bush, Congress, Bush, budget cuts, Bush, Republicans, Bush, Syria’s dictator, Bush, and any and everyone else for the oh so shaky scandal laden start to his second term.

So as Obama and his minions claim that each scandal is just an isolated NO big deal incident...just a few bumps in Obama's otherwise stellar road to greatness (gag)...they try their damnedest to play-down scandal after scandal as more pop up it seems every day, and they do so while taking potshots at Republicans each and every chance they get.

Potshots like Obama saying...or at least thinking...

The bad Republicans want to know why I gave...ooops...I mean who gave the order to 'stand down' in Benghazi (and stand down it was NOT they were told to go to the airport). The bad Republicans don't want to give my sheeple anymore free stuff...hell...they even want my sheeple to work for their stuff just like they do...imagine that. The bad Republicans like to play with 'bad guns' so they voted down my wanting to take them away.

The bad Republicans want the borders sealed...but how then will future Democratic voters get in (so I can give them all that free stuff to buy their votes). The bad Republicans want me to stop spending their taxpayer dollars like a drunken sailor and actually want me to make a workable budget...like that will ever happen...and especially to stop sending their money to those out to kill them...as in to kill 'them' NOT kill me because I'm one of them.

The bad Republicans actually expect me to govern by the law of the Constitution...but like I told Russian President Medvedev at the APEC Summit in Singapore, “It doesn’t matter since for all intent and purposes the US Constitution is dead” so that ain't gonna happen.

And the bad Republicans hate me because I'm black...NEVER mind that I'm the worst president in history...that's why I hold Congress and everyone else hostage with the race card...I have to because if I don't they'll really find out just how bad I really am.

Yeah Obama says or thinks all that...and more...for NEVER before in our nation's history has an American president treated half the country like enemies...but what can you expect from a president who is a proponent of BIG all-intrusive government...a president who sees NOTHING wrong with spying on 'We the People...a president who would rather be out campaigning or golfing then attending to the business of the country...a president who leans so far to the left that individual liberties be damned...and a president who sides with America's enemies against her.

Yeah that's our president all right...clueless and dangerous all rolled into one and its our beloved America and 'We the People' that are suffering for it.

Where is a lightning bolt 'from above' when you need one...