Memo to Journalists: Quote Hillary to Hillary: "It Is Our Job to Figure Out What Happened"

Hugh Hewitt / Townhall Columnist

 

“It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video."

This statement is part of Hillary's 36 page "fog of war" chapter on Benghazi in her forthcoming memoir, a chapter obtained at least in part by Politico's Maggie Haberman, and it appears to be indicative of how she filled those 36 pages without answering any of the crucial questions about the events of that night and the following day.

This line refers to the killers.

And this line is of course a straw man, easily recognized after the president's straw man Woodstock at West Point earlier this week. It is also "inaccurate to state" that the whereabouts and actions of the president, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense that night are well known or even understood in general outline. That Hillary even bothers to spend time on the laughable "the video made them do it" argument tells us that the chapter is an exercise in space-filling, an effort to appear to be transparent and forthright about the most obvious, tragic failure of her trail of tears tenure at State. This chapter appears to be just another part of the ongoing refusal to come clean about what happened that night both in Benghazi and much more importantly for Hillary's future political ambitions in D.C.

“I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans," Haberman quotes Clinton as writing. "It’s just plain wrong, and it’s unworthy of our great country. Those who insist on politicizing the tragedy will have to do so without me.”

This is a three-part lie: It is not "just plain wrong" to demand answers from those in charge that night, it is not "politicizing" to hold those people to account for their failures, and the investigation into Benghazi will indeed involve Clinton whether or not she agrees to be questioned about her collapse that night. This risible attempt at a "pre-emptive strike" on the subject will not work, not when the event it seeks to exile from the national debate involves the death of an ambassador and three other Americans at the hands of terrorists and not when her failure to anticipate the attack and her collapse in the face of it goes to her central claim of competency to be president.

When Hillary sits down with various journalists, they should all bear down on what did she know and when did she know it; what did she do and when did she do it --in the weeks and months before the attack and the night of the attack. They should press again and again --patiently and respectfully-- for detailed answers on chronology and specifics.

"It is our job to figure out what happened."

That is what then Secretary of State Clinton told Senator Ron Johnson immediately after her infamous "What difference at this point does it make?" outburst that defines her failure at State.

That is in fact the job of every journalist who gets to ask a question of the would-be president. None have dared tried yet, but eventually someone will, and if no one does, Hillary will ask for the country's votes without ever having given an account of her actions or her non-actions. Perhaps she can bluff, bluster and bully her way to the Oval Office but the country does not seem to be in the mood for another era of dodges, half-truths, and false outrage over being asked not only legitimate but absolutely essential questions.

Hillary's 36 page leak won't put out the fire and it won't stop the questions or the commentary. Only the detailed truth would do so, and given Hillary's adamant refusal to provide that, we can assume the truth is even more damaging than her continued stonewalling.

The Data-Mining Body Monitors in Our Schools

Michelle Malkin/ Townhall Columnist

 

Like millions of other American parents, my husband and I received a warning letter from the BMI police last week. Our active, healthy 8th-grade daughter is "very lean," according to her school-administered "Fitnessgram." The national student body monitors think this is a public health problem. 

The obesity report card lectured that because our daughter's body-mass index is "very low," we "should make certain" that she "is eating a healthy diet that includes the appropriate number of calories." Thanks, geniuses. We had no idea such measurements were taking place, and we wondered whether we were alone in objecting to this unsolicited Nanny State dispatch. We're not.

In New York, mom Laura Williams blew the whistle on how her perfectly healthy daughter Gwendolyn was branded "overweight" by her Fitnessgram. City schools sent the reports home to nearly 900,000 students in their backpacks. Gwendolyn showed the assessment to the New York Post last week, exclaiming: "I'm 4-foot-1, and 66 pounds, and I'm like, what?!"

Thanks to the Williams family's whistleblowing and a huge public backlash, Big Apple schools will now change the way the fitness reports are distributed to families. But changing the delivery route doesn't address the expansive government encroachment on our children's health based on dubious science.

Gwendolyn's absurd classification exposes the unreliability of BMI ratings, which many public health scientists admit are inadequate health predictors. The Centers for Disease Control itself says that "the accuracy of BMI varies substantially according to the individual child's degree of body fatness" and doesn't distinguish between "excess fat, muscle or bone mass, nor does it provide any indication of the distribution of fat among individuals."

Yet some school districts have pushed to incorporate BMI results in physical fitness grades, and dozens of states have adopted the BMI-snitching Fitnessgrams, which are marketed by an outfit called the Cooper Institute. The group contracts with New York, Texas, California and a total of nearly 70,000 schools across the country to provide training, administration, data collection and dissemination of its reports. Big Brother is big business.

One of the Cooper Institute's most prominent members of its board of directors: Big Government Republican Mike Huckabee, who spearheaded mandatory student BMI reports in 2003 while he was governor of Arkansas. Huckabee has sided with first lady Michelle Obama's meddling initiatives on childhood obesity -- which he calls an "issue of national security." Public health bureaucrats use exactly such hyperbolic rhetoric to justify increasing their powers, budgets and control.

Riding the manufactured obesity-crisis wave, BMI report card promoters are pushing for far more radical data-mining intrusion. A little-noticed study published in the journal Health Affairs a few years ago on "state surveillance of childhood obesity" proposes getting around federal family privacy protections by declaring obesity a "public health threat" at every state level. This would allow agencies to invoke "public health protection powers" to allow unfettered sharing of student BMI data.

These obesity police also advocate circumventing legislative debate by "simply adding a new function to state-run registries and databases" and slipping height and weight monitoring into immunization information-gathering systems.

Exploiting the captive student population for childhood obesity health research, grants, contracts and new tech boondoggles is yet another method of fattening Fed Ed's overstuffed coffers. It's time for parents to opt out and put these government data gluttons on a diet. Hands off. Butt out.

Hope you all can come...

Shinseki resigns!

Shinseki takes the fall so Obama doesn't have to...or so he thinks...

Shinseki apologizes, gets summoned to White House for ominous meeting

 By Ben Wolfgang and Jacqueline Klimas  / The Washington Times

 
For the second time in just over a week, President Obama has called Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to the Oval Office, the White House said Friday, raising more questions about whether the embattled secretary will offer his resignation.

Mr. Shinseki, under increasing fire to step down, will meet with the president at 10:15 a.m. Friday.

He also was summoned to the White House on May 21, the same day White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors left for Phoenix to investigate claims as many as 40 veterans died there while waiting for care at a VA facility.

Mr. Nabors is assisting Mr. Shinseki with his probe into care at VA hospitals, specifically lengthy wait times for care and allegations that VA officials kept false records to hide those wait times.

The VA inspector general also has launched a separate investigation.

Following last week’s meeting with Mr. Shinseki, the president addressed the scandal for the first time and clearly left open the door to fire Mr. Shinseki at a later date.

“If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it, period,” Mr. Obama said last week. “I know that people are angry and want swift reckoning. I sympathize with that. But we have to let the investigators do their job and get to the bottom of what happened.”

On Thursday, the White House refused to say whether Mr. Obama still has full confidence in the secretary.

At least 70 lawmakers have called for Mr. Shinseki to resign. Powerful groups such as the American Legion have echoed those concerns.

Earlier Friday, Mr. Shinseki apologized Friday to veterans, members of Congress and the American for what he called “irresponsible, indefensible and unacceptable” actions at VA facilities across the country.

“I will not defend it because it is indefensible, but I can take responsibility for it and I do. So given the facts I now know, I apologize as the senior leader of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs,” he said at the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans conference in Washington.

“Truth About CAIR” Awareness Ad Campaign Hits Washington DC Metro 

 Pamela Geller / Atlas Shruggs

These huge dioramas (lit up at night) will be going up all around Washington DC for the next six months. More on the Truth About CAIR campaign here.

The leading Muslim Brotherhood-tied organization in America has deceived the media, cultural and political elites in America for years, to the great peril of the American people. Despite the overwhelming evidence presented in the largest terrorist funding trial in our nation’s history, the Holy Land foundation trial, the sharia-compliant media has continued to advance Hamas-CAIR’s supremacist agenda, with willing help from all too many law enforcement and government officials.

CAIR’s influence is vast, and growing all the time. Just recently they got ABC Family to drop its projected show Alice In Arabia, solely because it contained some dramatization of the all-too-common phenomenon of child kidnapping by Muslim relatives. For years now, they have prevailed upon Hollywood to downplay or even change the identity of celluloid villains, so that Muslims are never portrayed negatively in films (thus the Muslim terrorists in the novel The Sum of All Fears became neo-Nazis in the movie).

CAIR pressured Brandeis University to rescind an honorary degree it had planned to award to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It regularly pressures (and usually succeeds) in getting any and every counter-jihad speaker canceled from events. Recently it even tried to bribe the sheriff of Culpepper County, Virginia with $15,000 to get him to cancel a counter-terror training seminar.

Because of this kind of activity, Hamas-CAIR should be shunned by all decent people. But instead, this unsavory gang of thugs is stronger than ever. JP Morgan and ABC are sponsoring their annual banquet this year. And the general silence about their terror-linked background has enabled them to infiltrate the highest levels of the political and cultural spheres.

That’s why my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is now unveiling a new ad campaign that tells the truth about this Islamic supremacist hate group.

Now more than ever, as CAIR’s influence grows in the media and government, this ad campaign is necessary to raise awareness among the public, to protect people from being taken in by this unsavory and unscrupulous group.

The ad depicts several CAIR officials who have been arrested and convicted of terror-related crimes. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department during the trial of the Islamic charity known as the Holy Land Foundation.

CAIR has a long record of duplicity and deception. Although it has received millions of dollars in donations from foreign Islamic entities, it has not registered as a foreign agent as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), despite spreading Islamic supremacist propaganda within the United States.

Although it presents itself as a civil rights group, CAIR actually has numerous links to Islamic supremacist and jihad groups. CAIR founders Omar Ahmad and Niwad Awad (who still serves as CAIR’s executive director), were present at a Hamas planning meeting in Philadelphia in 1993 where they and other Hamas operatives conspired to raise funds for Hamas and to promote jihad in the Middle East. CAIR has steadfastly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups.

Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror:

Ghassan Elashi, founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, in 2009 received a 65-year prison sentence for funneling over $12 million from the Islamic charity known as the Holy Land Foundation to the jihad terrorist group Hamas, which is responsible for murdering hundreds of Israeli civilians Mousa Abu Marzook, a former CAIR official, was in 1995 designated by the U.S. government in 1995 as a “terrorist and Hamas leader.” He now is a Hamas leader in Syria.

Randall Royer, CAIR’s former civil rights coordinator, in 2004 began serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding al-Qaida and the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan and recruiting for Lashkar e-Taiba, the jihadist group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai jihad massacres.

Bassem Khafagi, CAIR’s former community relations director, was arrested for involvement with the Islamic Assembly of North America, which was linked to al-Qaida. After pleading guilty to visa and bank fraud charges, Khafagi was deported.

Rabih Haddad, a former CAIR fundraiser, was deported for his work with the Global Relief Foundation (which he co-founded), a terror-financing organization.

In 1998 Omar Ahmad, CAIR’s co-founder and longtime Board Chairman, said: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

After he received unwelcome publicity as a result of this statement, Ahmad denied saying it, several years after the fact. However, the original reporter, Lisa Gardiner of the Fremont Argus, stands by her story.

CAIR’s spokesman Ibrahim Hooper once said: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”

The post “Truth About CAIR” Awareness Ad Campaign Hits Washington DC Metro appeared first on Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs.

Friday Fume

By: Craig Andresen

It seems like it SHOULD have been a short week, what with Memorial Day and all but…LIBERALS COULD MAKE A ONE CAR PARADE SEEM LIKE IT TAKES A MONTH OF SUNDAYS!!!

Not to worry though, we made it through and we’ve come to yet another Friday.

Let’s just jump into the deep end of liberal insanity shall we?

Friends and Patriots…

I’m fuming.

We have an URGENT update on the “MISSING” Malaysian Flight 370!!!!

Yes, I KNOW this has been covered ad nauseum …hell I’m ad NAUSEATED by it MYSELF but THIS is important and I feel COMPELLED to bring it to you.

Dear whoever built the thing that looks for things that are lost and make noise so you can find them…

You had ONE job…

I’m talking to the nerd or team of nerds who, no doubt, acquired taxpayer dollars to fund their research to build something called a…”Towed Pinger Locator”…It’s a thingy that gets towed behind a ship to listen for and locate the black boxes of flying machines that may well have become submersibles.

Within days of Flight 370 going missing…EVERYBODY just KNEW it went into the Indian Ocean so…they go and get the ”Towed Pinger Locator” and start dragging it around and VIOLA…they started hearing “PINGS!!!”

That was 2 ½ months ago but the “PINGS” faded away and they’ve been looking around in the same area ever since but…on WEDNESDAY…we learned THIS…it seems the “PINGS” they were hearing either came from…THE SHIP they were using or…

THEY CAME FROM THE DAMNED THINGY THEY WERE TOWING BEHIND THE SHIP!!!

Yep…according to Michael Dean, the U.S. Navy’s deputy director of ocean engineering…“Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship … or within the electronics of the Towed Pinger Locator.”

Look…I’m not a towed thingy engineer but, I do have a little advice for those who are…IF YOU’RE GONNA MAKE SOMETHING THAT LOOKS FOR LOST THINGS THAT MAKE A CERTAIN NOISE SO YOU CAN FIND THEM…MAKE SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T MAKE THE SAME CERTAIN NOISE  AS WHAT YOU’RE LOOK FOR…FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!

I know nerds have a hard time getting dates and all but geez…a BLACK BOX is NOT going to COME TO YOU when it HEARS ITS MATING CALL!!!!!

Fuming.

Click on link to read entire article... http://www.thenationalpatriot.com/2014/05/30/friday-fume-124/

Op-ed:  

An address NOT needed...especially by those going off to war 

By: Diane Sori

"It's your task to extend peace and prosperity."
-Barack HUSSEIN Obama to West Point graduating class of 2014

NO it is NOT. That task falls squarely on the shoulders of the President of the United States and while Obama might hold that title...or should I say he usurped that title...he is but a sham of a president.

And so Barack HUSSEIN Obama sashayed into West Point on Wednesday to give the Commencement Address to this year's graduates. And while as president and Commander-in-Chief he has every right to give this address, as the man who defames and dishonors our military every chance he gets he had NO business being there.

Rattling off uninspiring boring words that first spoke as usual about his narcissistic self and his 'supposed' accomplishments, then carefully choosing words to mask the very radical changes he's made to our military...including making our military caretakers of the ridiculousness of non-existent climate change...Obama's address was devoid of much needed and wanted strategic goals thus rendering it shameful at best. Proving once again that he is continuing on with his failed foreign policy agenda of hand-picking conflicts for America to get involved in... foreign policies based solely on what's paramount to political expediency for he and his party...as well as policies that pander to a carefully chosen block of voters tired of spending our dollars on war instead of on them...this most shameful of presidents has once again defamed our brave warriors by alluding instead to a loss of U.S. credibility and respect in the eyes of the world.

Playing for the cameras as he spewed his empty words that so lacked passion of the heart that “America must always lead on the world stage” but that America would use its military might only at times when its “core interests” were under threat, this address was full of platitudes and excuses, and was received with an oh-so-cool reception and rightly so as its now come to light that among all those serving in our military a mere 32% approve of his job as Commander-in-Chief. And how can our armed forces be successfully led into war when the leader in charge is NOT respected...simply...they cannot. And when that Commander-in-Chief is also embroiled in scandal after scandal...including a scandal directly related to those who wear our country's uniform...being respected overseas takes a back seat to a lack of respect here at home.

And this address was also full of silent mockery as it was NOT an address any Commander-in-Chief should ever have given to Army cadets about to be dispatched around the world... especially with those cadets encompassing many heading off to war. And ignoring the fact that leadership...strong determined and focused leadership...is needed now more than ever...this man stood before our nations next generation of military leaders and told them basically that diplomacy trumps strong leadership ...that diplomacy trumps war...that our military is NOT needed unless he alone deems it necessary.

With his emphasis on diplomacy and the continuing use of (useless) sanctions, Obama blatantly told these graduating cadets that under his command America will rely less on our military force to keep peace in the world. Yet he NEVER mentions that it's his very lack of leadership and his selective use of our military (and his carefulness NOT to step on muslim toes) that translates into the world's perceived lack of American resolve and action in hot-spots ranging from Syria to Ukraine to allowing Iran to do as they so choose.

And with this address at West Point coming right after Obama's it's all about a photo-op Memorial Day weekend visit to Afghanistan...a visit solely taken in hopes of deflecting some attention off the ever expanding VA scandal and Benghazi... Obama's announcing for all to hear...for America's enemies to hear...and remember that America's enemies are NOT his enemies as Barack HUSSEIN Obama views all conflicts and wars from a muslim NOT American point of view...by giving the date for our final troop withdrawal from the Afghan theater...a bulls eye has now been placed on our remaining troops. 

And this being reminiscent of a replay of Iraq in Afghanistan, that bulls eye makes it easier for the enemy...for the Taliban and al-Qaeda...to kill as many of our brave warriors as they possibly can before they swarm in and retake a country so much American blood has been shed to free...so much American treasure has been spent to free...before they swarm in as we withdraw in what Barack HUSSEIN Obama's actions...or lack thereof...he sees as a way for him to say...for him to add to his legacy...that by the end of this his second term in office that the war in Afghanistan is finally over. But what Obama has now done by announcing the date of our withdrawal is turning American victory into American surrender...as he bows yet again to his brethren's wishes.

Simply stated...and while his minions and cronies might NOT like it...this announcing of the 2015 Afghan withdrawal date...and having the gall to do so at the West Point commencement...basically sets the stage for a said enemy retake of a country we fought hard to free...and thus has Barack HUSSEIN Obama in his capacity as president committing treason by directly aiding and abetting the enemy in that retake.

And NOT a word from Congress is said...NOT a word from the media is said...and our troops will continue to die on his watch as Barack HUSSEIN Obama simply looks away.