House Oversight and Reform Benghazi Hearing Live Feed

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

Goes for a few hours yet.

If you have the time, much like the Fast and Furious hearings, it’s worth watching.  It’s fascinating to see exactly what happens and is discovered versus what the media will report afterwards.

Trey Gowdy Calls Out ICE Director For Releasing Criminal Alien Felons

The Triumph of Executive Will

Reading the first few paragraphs of this Bloomberg article really begins to give a feel for what the Obama administration is:

When President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the biggest question he’ll face will be how to get an ambitious second-term agenda through a divided Congress.

The answer: Go around it.

On climate change, gun control, gay rights, and even immigration, the White House has signaled a willingness to circumvent lawmakers through the use of presidential power. Already, plans are being laid to unleash new executive orders, regulations, signing statements and memorandums designed to push Obama’s programs forward and cement his legacy, according to administration aides and allies.

“The big things that we need to get done, we can’t wait on,” said White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. “If we can take action, we will take action.”

Congress is unpopular because there’s no face to congress other than that of the whiny weakling John Boehner.  The right hates congress because they’re constantly surrendering, and the left hates congress because the right in congress isn’t surrendering enough.  The low information voter just hears complaints about congress and believes it, rather than looking at their own representative.

There is no congressional media office out trying to paint a picture of congress as a benevolent deliberative body in the same way that Obama has his numerous official and unofficial propaganda wings.  Half the country that supports Obama’s agenda (until they find themselves targeted) represents a great amount of support.  Half the country that supports their half of congress doesn’t support the other half of congress, so popularity remains low.

And in this void, with the elected representatives of the people both hated and demonized, comes that powerful figure to simply work around them.  Checks and balances exist for a reason, and working around those checks and balances – imposed by free people who vote for their representatives to represent them – is someone who will simply make things happen.  There is a certain allure to a “man of action” who will make decisions while others deliberate – it’s those exciting, dynamic “men of action” who seize power that make for compelling stories.  A president who merely presides and works to uphold the rule of law and execute the orders issued by the citizens through congress isn’t as fascinating as a heroic figure who goes it alone and tells off the yammering talkers.

But in governmental context, that’s a dictator.

Tax Hike Surprises

From the NY Post:

New Yorkers of all income levels got a rude awakening yesterday when they saw in The Post how much more they will pay in taxes next year without a fiscal-cliff deal by Jan. 1.

“It’s that much higher?” asked IT worker Vikas Kataria, 34, who discovered that his combined household income of about $250,000 per year will cost him nearly $10,000 more in taxes.

“I thought it was a couple thousand — but that’s a lot,” said Kataria, who works at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan and is married to a systems analyst for a brokerage firm. “That’s huge!”

–

Jan Losick, a Medicare-aged counselor at Au Pair in America, makes about $150,000 when combined with her husband’s salary, and would pay about $6,000 more.

“The Senate and the House of Representatives should be sacked!” said Losick, who would have to cut down on vacations, going to the theater and eating out, and just stick to the basics. “They should be doing our bidding — not their own.”

With a likely tax increase of $2,200 looming, Andre Hunter, 49, is kissing his dream of owning a home goodbye.

Funny, because they don’t get that home ownership is viewed as a problem by bigger forces.

See, the thing is, Democrats are for higher taxes, and they don’t negotiate – Democrats don’t compromise.  Remember this exchange?

Boehner to Obama: “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?’
Obama to Boehner: “You get nothing. I get that for free.”

If we go off the cliff, Obama blames Republicans in congress.  If congress negotiates, Obama takes what he wants anyway and Republicans end up voting for tax increases, while there are no spending cuts made – the same thing that happened to Reagan in the 1980s.  Or Democrats just send us off the cliff anyway and reap the rewards.  The Tea Party Republicans in congress are standing firm against raising taxes and demanding concessions in the way of spending cuts, but Obama has demonstrated that he just doesn’t care.  He gets to hurt his political enemies, and he gets to hurt the citizen and blame his political enemies for it.  It’s very cruel, Alinskyite politics, but that’s what happens when you elect a man raised by communists.

Also, Democrats saying “revenue” are cleverly disguising that what they are doing is trying to take money out of Losick’s pocket, or Hunter’s house, or from Kataria’s pocket.

Because they don’t understand that higher taxes mean people will flee the taxation rates, and will work less to earn less, even well-meaning Democrats who aren’t totally on board with the Obama ideology will never see these ideas solve anything.

And then there are those Democrats (again, Obama) who avidly use the Curley Effect to create new voters, who know that increased taxes mean it’s often financially better for people to stay on welfare.  Of course, once you’ve got them addicted to handouts, they’ll always vote for Democrats.

2012 Congressional Silver Linings

The presidential race looks like it’s going to be a popular vote win for Romney, and an electoral vote win for Obama (at least as of right now), but there’s going to be some legal wrangling and recounts unless Romney concedes.

As anyone who’s followed The Patriot Perspective for more than a day knows, Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious are very, very important issues.  Two of the key congressmen involved in the House Oversight and Reform Committee are Jason Chaffetz and Trey Gowdy, and both are staunch advocates for facts, pushing for the whole story of gunwalker and for accountability for the DOJ and ATF and the criminal operation they were running.

So the good news, if the preliminary reports of Obama winning re-election are right, is at least that Chaffetz and Gowdy have both won their respective districts.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

After relatively quiet campaigns, Republican Congressmen Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz appeared headed toward big wins in their races Tuesday.

Both were ahead in early unofficial returns, and both were projected as winners by the Utah Colleges Exit Poll.

And from AP State News on The Item:

The GOP’s Trey Gowdy has easily won a second term in South Carolina’s strongly Republican 4th District in Greenville and Spartanburg counties.

With about a third of precincts reporting, Gowdy had about 65 percent of votes cast in the three-way contest that included Democrat Deb Marrow and Green Party candidate Jeff Sumerel.

The long march towards accountability in the Gunwalker/Fast and Furious case goes on.

Gunwalker Update: Part 2 of Oversight Report Released

Big news.  Oversight report can be read here, and Oversight reports’ exhibits here.

From Daily Caller:

The latest congressional report on Operation Fast and Furious found that the gunwalking-program-turned-scandal was the result of a “deliberate strategy created at the highest levels of the Justice Department aimed at identifying the leaders of a major gun trafficking ring.”

The report is the second installment in a three-part series from Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley and House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa.

That “deliberate strategy,” congressional investigators argue, sprang from “a series of speeches about combating violence along the Southwest border” that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered shortly after taking office.

And from Katie Pavlich at Townhall here (also big kudos to Katie – your added attention to citations in recent weeks have been noticed!):

The most recent report contains damning information and documentation showing Attorney General Eric Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson and DOJ Official Patrick Cunningham discussing plans for Holder to participate a press conference announcing the “take-down” or the end of Operation Fast and Furious before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed on December 15, 2010. Guns from the Fast and Furious program were left at Terry’s murder scene. Holder claims he didn’t know about Operation Fast and Furious until May of 2011. The email below was sent on December 14, 2010 at 12:28 pm, just 12 hours before Terry’s murder. (email pic here)

And from Breitbart (first part is quoting the report):

“He spoke about the development of a prosecution and enforcement strategy with respect to firearms trafficking, noting that the ‘administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels,’ … In particular, the attorney general said that the Justice Department was committed to adding ‘100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest Border’ and that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would add ‘16 new positions on the border.’ Most importantly, the attorney general noted that there must be ‘an attack in depth, on both sides of the border, that focuses on the leadership and assets of the cartel.’”

After these speeches, congressional investigators found  “a Firearms Trafficking Working Group was formed,” which was tasked with “exploring and recommending proposals to enhance law enforcement efforts to curb firearms trafficking, focusing specifically on investigation, interdiction, training, prosecution, and intelligence-sharing.”

Gunwalker Update: DOJ Seeks Lawsuit Dismissal

Missed updating this last week, from FOX:

The Justice Department on Monday night sought dismissal of a lawsuit by a Republican-led House of Representatives committee demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder produce records about the botched law enforcement probe of gun-trafficking called Operation Fast and Furious.

President Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege and the attorney general has been found to be in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents that might explain what led the Justice Department to reverse course after initially denying that federal agents had used a controversial tactic called gun-walking in the failed law enforcement operation.

–

In its court papers, the Justice Department says the Constitution does not permit the courts to resolve the political dispute between the executive branch and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that is seeking the records. The political branches have a long history of resolving disputes over congressional requests without judicial intervention, the court filing said.

If the lawsuit is allowed to go forward, “countless other suits by Congress are sure to follow, given the volume of document requests issued by the dozens of congressional committees that perform oversight functions,” the Justice Department’s court filing stated. “This case thus illustrates vividly why the judiciary must defer to the time-tested political process for resolution of such disputes.”

The problem with this is that if the lawsuit doesn’t go forward, then the DOJ can simply stonewall on any criminal activities they’re involved in.  The president’s use of executive priviledge is suppposed to be limited to things he knows about, yet here he claims no knowledge, yet exerts priviledge to prevent the investigation from finding the criminals he’s protecting.  The lawsuit is pushing against that shady use of executive priviledge to protect criminals in the DOJ, and now Eric Holder’s DOJ is trying to dismiss the lawsuit so there will never be disclosure.

From February 2012, for some idea of the stonewalling:

Security Failures of Benghazi

House Oversight & Reform Committee hearing today.  Viewable live here.

Plenty of questions about what was going on, when, and how.

Gunwalker Update: Katie Pavlich on Obama’s Lies and Coverup of Fast and Furious

Hey Katie, those “small bloggers” are Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars and David Codrea of Examiner.com.  You’d do well to name them and give them the credit they’re due.

Noteworthy that around the 7:30 mark she mentions White House security advisor O’Reilly who had direct communication from ATF SAC Phoenix Bill Newell and how O’Reilly was sent to Iraq to be hidden by the White House from congressional investigators.  Cam Edwards of Cam & Company, subbing in for Andrew Wilkow, noted today that O’Reilly is no longer in Iraq, but the State Dept. won’t say where he is.  The State Dept. also sent O’Reilly to Iraq to fill a position that was already filled, to the point the original guy’s family was already in Iraq.

Update – CNS news notes that here:

“O’Reilly’s sudden transfer to Baghdad occurred just days after the aforementioned e-mails with William Newell were produced to the Committee and Newell testified about them before Congress,” Issa and Grassley wrote. “Additionally, we have learned that O’Reilly took the place of a previously selected individual—and individual who had gone through a competitive application process and thorough vetting process, had the necessary qualifications, and whose spouse was already in Baghdad in anticipation of the individual’s arrival—to serve as the head of the Police Development Program.”

A State Department official told CNSNews.com last week that O’Reilly was no longer assigned to Iraq and is now between assignments—but would not say what O’Reilly’s next assignment is.

“I can confirm that he [Kevin O’Reilly] is no longer in Iraq but he has not yet started in his next position,” said a State Department official. “So, I can’t confirm what that position is. I just don’t have any information on that right now, what his next position will be or when he will be starting.”

Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious OIG Report; Full Video of DOJ OIG to Oversight and Reform

Last week, the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General released their internal report on Fast and Furious.  Obviously, having the investigating agency’s own watchdog investigate them is going to produce limited results, but as Darrell Issa noted, you have to go through the procedures and give them a chance to work.  If DOJ OIG is objective and does a good job, great.  If they don’t, it becomes one more thing in need of reform.

The testimony in front of the House Oversight and Reform Committee is here:

And Oversight & Reform’s report on the key findings of the OIG is here:

http://oversight.house.gov/release/10961/

Note that the first thing that comes out of Democrat Cummings’ mouth is “BUSH DID IT”, which has been proven over and over again to be a load of crap.