He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities. He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation. Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.
Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”. Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists. This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech. His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech. This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.
Bernstein:
“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”
Y’know what that means, Carl? Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you? It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.
Bernstein is a dinosaur. He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear. He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now. He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.
He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things. He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth. The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.
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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration. The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident. They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?
Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.
From “moderately libertarian” Megan McArdle at the otherwise lefty Daily Beast:
the IRS method for dealing with the volume was to take an unrandom sample. And how did they decide that you deserved extra scrutiny? Because you had “tea party” or “patriot” in your name. Since the Tea Party was a brand-new movement in 2010, they couldn’t possibly have had any data indicating that such groups were more likely to be doing something improper. So how exactly did they come up with this filter?
Yet she comes up with the answer:
There is no answer that does not ultimately resolve to “political bias.”
The current commissioner knew for a full year that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups and other opposition organization for aggressive auditing? And in the middle of an election year, no less? And yet, today Barack Obama insists that he knew nothing of this practice until last Friday.
This is either the most incompetent administration ever, or one of the least honest.
Ed, remember this is the same administration that sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, murdering hundreds of Mexicans and two US federal agents, and then exerted executive privilege to hush it all up. I’d hate to see a poll between Putin and Obama on who people would trust more.
“Having been in the position of a chief executive officer, I can understand why a businessman might be reluctant to speak out against the actions of federal agencies that have the power to harm their enterprises,” he wrote in Rumsfeld’s Rules, which goes on sale Tuesday.
“By doing so, corporate leaders could expose themselves and their companies to government retaliation–from the IRS, the SEC, congressional committees, or the many other agencies of the federal government that regulate and oversee their operations,” he added.
The thing to remember is the enemy was elected. A street-level Chicago agitator is who we have as president, someone who was raised by communists in the Alinsky and Ayers mold, someone who views political power as the only end, and someone whose administration and subordinates are of like mindset.
The only question I’d like answered is why did the IRS come out and apologize last Friday?
Who was going to break this story if the IRS didn’t apologize?
“He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings…
…It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan because of the lawyer. Well I’m not the messenger, he’s the messenger! The modus operandi is to find anything they can do to just attack.”
Thing is, if Hicks were reported as a Democrat supporter who votes Democrat all the time, it goes to show that there is actual bipartisanship – that people as Americans are saying something’s wrong, that this was a criminal coverup. There are actual Democrats who recognize that what happened at Benghazi is wrong, and there are actual Democrats who are critical of the Obama administration.
That would go against the narrative that this is just a right-wing fiction, a right-wing kooky conspiracy theory that’s all about editing a document that gets edited anyway and nobody died and nothing happened and it was all a protest against a reich-wingnut who made a video on youtube to offend the arab world because he’s out to offend them so much.
It’s only natural that people take RPGs and mortars to protests, because right-wingers make people that mad, and they deserve it. So it’s the right’s fault… according to the left.
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That part really is key, in case someone isn’t getting how the White House story of a spontaneous protest doesn’t fit with reality. In the leftist worldview, it’s somehow “normal” that people take fire support to protest, and a “protest” with mortar support is a perfectly acceptable explanation for an attack on a 9/11 anniversary.
Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Obama administration argued for years that there is a big difference between terrorists and the tenets of Islam.
A senior White House aide in 2009 publicly urged Washington to cease using the term “jihadist” — asserting that terrorists are simply extremists. Two years later, the White House ordered a cleansing of training materials that Islamic groups deemed offensive.
Now, some analysts are asking whether the 2009 edict and others that followed have dampened law enforcement’s appetite to thoroughly investigate terrorism suspects for fear of offending higher-ups or the American Muslim lobby.
It’s not just suspected. The most recent fedgov-sponsored anti-terrorism course I took spent the first few hours going over the SPLC’s laundry list of evil white terrorist organizations that to any sane person, aren’t more than a footnote.
In October 2011, 57 Islamic groups wrote a letter to John O. Brennan, now CIA director, but then President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser.
Citing news reports, the groups complained of “biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam” inside the federal government’s instructional halls.
“While recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army,” the letter read.
Muslims objected to several training guides, such as a 2009 report produced at the Army Command and General Staff at the Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies.
“Moderate Muslims are not exercising moderation; they are simply applying other means to accomplish the same goal of establishing global Islamic dominance,” it quoted the report as saying.
At least two of the 57 groups were listed by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators and as being connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in the prosecution of a Texas charity for funding Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The groups are the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America.
The organizations’ letter demanded that biased trainers be disciplined, that all instructors undergo retraining and that materials deemed offensive by Muslim activists be purged.
Want to know why we can’t effectively fight jihadi terrorists? Why we keep having Fort Hoods and Bostons?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu’s reflections on the Obama administration would probably be something like: “If you deny yourself knowledge of the enemy and even deny the enemy’s existence because you don’t want to offend the enemy, you have already been defeated.“
John Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, has spent years studying the global Muslim Brotherhood movement and its links to American Islamic groups. The FBI relies on some of them to guide its training. The political left has branded Mr. Guandolo an “Islamophobe.”
“There is no strategy in the FBI,” he told The Times. “At FBI headquarters, it is a daily fire drill. The threats come in, and they run around to deal with them and run them down. But because none of it can have anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement in the U.S. or Islam, they never address the root cause and common investigative realities.”
Mr. Emerson, who maintains back-channel ties to law enforcement, said any slide presentation on Islamic extremism now has to be submitted to a special Justice Department panel.
He said one slide that was required to be omitted showed the famous photo of captured Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The photo of a disheveled and unshaven Mohammed was deemed “offensive to Islam,” Mr. Emerson said.
There is a strategy in the FBI. It’s a strategy of concession and defeat.
… the president does not “see this challenge as a fight against ‘jihadists.’ Describing terrorists in this way — using a legitimate term, jihad, meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal — risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”
Some analysts disagree with that interpretation, saying the Koran clearly states that jihad is a “holy war.”
Jihad is war.
Denying it and pretending that it’s simply “internal jihad” denies reality. The struggle in Islam is further submission to the will of Allah – Islam means submission. Salaam and the peace of Allah is all about submission to Allah’s will. People with an internal “my struggle” tend to be types who are worth keeping an eye on anyway.
Beyond that point, it doesn’t actually matter what the US says. Contrary to American popular belief, the world does not actually revolve around us. The right knows we’re big and important and we have an important role to play, but we’re ultimately not everything; the left mocks our actual importance, but then thinks every evil in the world is caused by our interference and instead blames America for everything as though we are the cause of all evil in the world – a far more powerful egocentric belief.
Jihadis who are willing to kill themselves to strike a blow against the West in a desire to further the plans for the caliphate do not care what you or I think of them. The US saying “Islamic jihadi terrorists are Islamic jihadi terrorists” doesn’t change much.
They don’t need our opinion to make themselves legitimate. They are, by their own actions, legitimating themselves. They strike terror against the west and they prove they are jihadis. The US understanding and saying “they’re jihadis” does not magically make them jihadis. That they are blowing themselves up for jihad makes them jihadis. This is a question of acknowledging reality. They aren’t seeking our approval to make them jihadis.
For your nation to protect itself does demand that it acknowledge what it is fighting.
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
- Osama bin Laden
Frankly, when we’re acting befuddled because we can’t understand jihad, it doesn’t make us the strong horse. When our government, filled with mush-brained liberals at best; and jihad-allies leftists as well, tells you with their rose-colored glasses and romantic worldview (or straight up leftist redistributive propaganda) that these are a peaceful, peaceable, highly spiritual wise people with a history that goes back thousands of years, wise exotic mystics who travel the deserts and kept alive the knowledge that racist bigoted white European Christians threw away, and then were attacked by ruthless murderous Christian fundamentalist Crusaders who sought to kill them for some reason… it sets up a ridiculous worldview.
The leftist worldview doesn’t allow for acknowledging who the enemy is.
“They say our enemy is violent extremism,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It’s not. It’s not animal rights extremists or white supremacy extremists. It’s Islamic extremism.”
Lieberman’s one redeeming virtue is that he somewhat understands this. At the same time, it’s not extremism.
This is extremism:
Rubio also has part of the problem recognized, but this is still a problem:
Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, told Fox News this week that the administration will not recognize the terrorists for what they are — radicalized Islamists.
These are radical muslims:
Notably, those muslim snowboarders aren’t jihadis. Or at least, probably not (Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a Golden Gloves boxer, after all).
“My problem with this administration is they refuse to acknowledge the existence of this kind of terrorism,” Mr. Rubio said.
He noted that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic complex in Benghazi, Libya, the White House refused to call it terrorism and blamed it on everyday demonstrators.
To really explain that further, the White House’s so-called “demonstrators” brought mortars. The White House story is that they brought fire support to yell about a video that no one had ever seen.
You don’t bring indirect fire area-effect weapons to a protest.
I voice my continued objection to the new zoning regulations! No new strip centers!
This is a Second Amendment protest – a protest about guns and the right of the people too keep and bear arms in order to throw off oppression – up to and including possibly overthrowing a corrupt government:
And they didn’t bring any artillery. They also aren’t jihadis.
Update: It also looks like the Tsarnaevs’ bombs required some additional training and expertise to make, as though they might not be a “lone wolf” operation as the administration claims, as though there might actually be some kind of global movement that’s doing this bombing extremist stuff (for no discernable reason)… like there’s maybe a group of people who believe in the same thing (extremism and radicalness, sayeth the administration) and are out to spread terrorism for the sake of terrorism. Whoa. (How you can have two people working together and still call them a “lone” wolf ignores what the word “lone” means, but I digress.)
The White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling tours of the president’s home for the foreseeable future as the sequester spending cuts begin to bite and the administration makes good on its warnings of painful decisions.
Announcement of the decision — made in an email from the White House Visitors Office — came hours after The Washington Times reported on another administration email that seemed to show at least one agency has been instructed to make sure the cuts are as painful as President Obama promised they would be.
In the internal email, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown said he asked if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact, and he said he was told not to do anything that would lessen the dire impacts Congress had been warned of.
While it’s a relatively small thing, it is an indicator of how the Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to make any attempts at fiscal austerity seem horrible.
In 1995, when there were government shutdown issues, the first things done were the most public – like closing down the Washington Monument and national parks. The attempt was to make all these cuts look severe.
The problem is that the sequestration cuts are done against parts of government that are “discretionary”, which is almost the exact opposite of what one would expect. “Mandatory” here means handouts that were carved into law by statute – even if they are parts of government that have no Constitutional basis. “Discretionary” spending is appling to sections of government that are generally constitutionally mandated, rather than “mandated” by statute law. This is how welfare handouts become sacred, but the Army and Navy could be completely disbanded.
From Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Among those duties, imposts, and general welfare something as APHIS might be of little import, but it’d also probably withstand at least a cursory examination for Constitutional scrutiny.
It’s worth noting that “general welfare” does not mean handouts.
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) lashed out against President Obama’s gun control proposals on Wednesday, asking if a Fast and Furious probe would be included in the list.
“My home is the home to Fast and Furious, where there was gun-running across the Mexican border, and you know we still haven’t gotten any clear answers,” Salmon said. “Is that part of the President’s gun proposal? To finally come to grips and find out what actually happened with Fast and Furious and how far it went up to the top, to Eric Holder? Because I haven’t heard that yet.”
Hey there, Bob Woodward! Why don’t you ask some questions about this giant government conspiracy? Some guys stealing paper in a hotel is a big deal, but a government agency running guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels isn’t?
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The media doesn’t question it. It was part of the plan – to create a crisis, the “iron river”, when they called Bill Newell up from Phoenix to repeat the 90% lie. They decided to use Sandy Hook instead, because they got caught in Fast and Furious. Sandy Hook just happened to be the lunatic they needed, because their own objectively evilplans to arm narcoterrorists fell apart when they ended up killing Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata.
In Fast and Furious, the Attorney General authorized smuggling guns to narcoterrorist cartels in Mexico with the express outcome of finding guns at crime scenes. We have Congressional testimony of ATF agents who ran the operation discussing that. Heck, CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson even managed to get the story moving a little bit.
The Justice Department hid it, hushed it up, and refused to turn over documents. What they did turn over was a joke.
And Obama exerted executive privilege over things he claims he had no knowledge of (which isn’t how EP works), and it all went away because the media doesn’t ask questions. If Woodward had wanted to, he could’ve run with it and taken down two administrations. But he’s in the tank for Obama just like the rest of the complicit media, he’s just upset that he’s being threatened.
This isn’t really a story. It’s journalists looking at one of their heroes and saying “yeah, he’s taking a stand”. No, he’s not. He’s an irrelevant old man who 5 years into an administration that’s had plenty of scandals hushed up by the media, is just now realizing that they’re not the people he and the rest of the media have been carrying water for. But he’s old, and just a curiosity today, and he’ll be forgotten just as quickly as Geraldine Ferraro was when she questioned misogynistic Democrat attacks on Palin during the 2008 elections.
This makes me more enthusiastic about the sequester, just because now I’m curious to see how derelict he’s willing to be in his duties to in the name of putting political pressure on the GOP. Next up: Suspending TSA checkpoints at America’s airports, maybe? Where else is he going to find two percent savings in three-plus trillion in spending?
In a highly unusual move, federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country in an effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said…
The agency, Ms. Christensen added, “is continuing to prosecute their cases in immigration court and, when ordered, will seek their removal from the country.”
Officials did not reveal precisely how many detainees were released or where the releases took place, but immigrants’ advocates around the country have been reporting that hundreds of detainees were freed in numerous locations , including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Texas; Broward County, Fla.; and New Orleans; and from centers in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia and New York.\
What the folks at HotAir miss is that this is a win-win for Obama. He gets to say that we don’t need border security. If people don’t notice an immediate difference, he’ll be able to argue that border security isn’t important. Those in favor of sequestration as a means to get any cuts at all are going to find that’s the consequence of that argument.
After sequester Obama can say that the border will be secured when the funding comes back, and in the meantime he gets to release some undocumented Democrats to go vote for his party several times over.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Monday that her agency would be forced to furlough 5,000 border control agents under mandatory spending cuts, likely allowing more illegal immigrants into the country and potentially compromising national security.
Napolitano said the cuts, known as the sequester, would disrupt the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to conduct customs inspections at ports, leading to increased waiting times for travelers and cargo shipments. Disaster relief funding would be reduced by $1 billion, she added, meaning relief for victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala., could be cut.
At the borders, Napolitano said the department would have to scale back patrols between ports of entry in the southwest United States, after years of making progress in stopping people from entering the country illegally from Mexico.
Furlough for Border Patrol is primarily going to consist of rescinding what’s called administratively unscheduled overtime (AUO). The short version is that Border Patrol Agents basically work 10 hours every day to cover overlapping shifts and so they can continue working when there’s work – it’s the nature of the job.
It’s not standard overtime – agents don’t make “time-and-a-half”, it’s basically just a 10-hour standard workday. It’s set up so that if an agent is out chasing a group of illegals, he doesn’t just look at his watch and go “crap, shift’s over” and let bad guys he’s tracking go – and he doesn’t have to work to chase them down and do so without getting paid. There’s also FLSA, which is Fair Labor & Standards Act pay. AUO represents an increase over base pay of about 25%, and FLSA represents about another 5-7%, depending on the number of hours worked. FLSA exists so that workers can’t be forced or incentivized to work for more hours with less pay. After a 25% increase in hours – from 8 hour a day to 10 hours a day, from 40 per week to 50 per week – if an agent has to work 60 hours one week, AUO doesn’t pay anything additional. The agent is basically working for free – that’s where FLSA comes into play. It’s not a lot, but it’s some compensation for long hours. Then there’s also discussion of cutting one day per two weeks for field agents – resulting in working 9 of 10 days – another 10% reduction in pay.
Ultimately, USBP personnel and some associated agencies are looking at about 40% pay cuts.
When that average of 2 hours of work per day goes away, you have that much less coverage. When you cut down on hours, you cut coverage.
You also begin to hemorrhage good employees. Congress through DHS has made nationwide pushes for new employees, especially the Border Patrol. (They’ve also mandated certain numbers to be maintained.) This brings in people from across the country to work in new locations – ultimately many good, qualified people lured in for the pay. But the problem is that when you cut their pay by about 40%, you’re going to have employees leave. “Federal agent” looks good on a resume, and there are plenty of police departments and sheriff’s offices who will offer lower pay that suddenly looks more appealing when agents can increase their standards of living by moving back home.
Not pictured: A good place to get pizza, someplace to go fishing, Hobby Lobby, Target, Dave & Busters, a motorcycle shop, a comic book shop, or much of civilization at all.
Another issue that will develop is corruption – for people who are flexible in their morals, the good pay is an incentive to stay on the straight and narrow. With a 40% pay cut, those who were immunized to corruption by a good salary will suddenly find enticements by criminal enterprises that much more inviting.
All of this is no small part of what’s being targeted by Obama’s sequestration. He’s already pushing for amnesty, and now the rumors of reductions in Border Patrol coverage have led to greater alien traffic. Anyone who knows any Border Patrol Agents can ask them – they’ll tell you that traffic is up.
Reduction of coverage by Border Patrol, ICE, Customs, and other border control agencies ultimately do result in increased numbers of illegal aliens. A drastic reduction in pay will lead to more officers committing criminal acts, and lead to a loss of good personnel.
It is amazing how “discretionary” spending is paying for the fundamental functions of government – like military & border security, yet “mandatory” spending is paying for handouts to Democrat serf constituencies so they can keep getting their Obamaphones and EBT cards.
“Look, we’re doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester. But there’s only so much I can do,” Napolitano said. “I’m supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those? We want to maintain 22,000-some odd Border Patrol agents. I got to be able to pay their salaries.”
ShortTimer
JBH
