Our wonderful media SURE DON’T KNOW HOW TO REPORT THE NEWS(Please read and forward):
Subject: FRANCE
Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not
being reported as it should.
To give you an idea of what’s going on in that country where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about 600,000 Jews, here is an E-mail that came from a Jew
living in France.
Please read! “Will the world say nothing – again – as it did in Hitler’s time?” He writes: “I AM A JEW — therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing.
Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France …
1. In Lyon , a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire.
2. In Montpellier , the Jewish religious center was firebombed.
3. so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles ;
4. so was a Jewish school in Creteil – all recently.
5. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails
6. and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus, in Paris , the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted.
7. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars.
8. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
9. According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days.
10. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’
11. A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France
12. A Jewish couple in their 20’s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne -France (the woman was pregnant).
13. A Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles , France .. This was just in the past week
So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do – at least – these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don’t ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.
I remind you of what Pastor Neimollersaid in World War II:
‘First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.’
Second, boycott France and French products. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred.
So boycott their wines and their perfumes
Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs.
Boycott their movies.
Definitely boycott their shores.
If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your co-workers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you – and the people that you care – about need their help.
The number one bestselling book in France is…. ‘September 11: The Frightening Fraud’ which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon!
PLEASE PASS THIS ON. LETS NOT HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF! THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIM
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Know Your Military Colonists
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments
“Military Colonist” is a term that has gone out of fashion in this brave new world of “No Human Being is Illegal” and “Every Refugee Deserves to be Resettled.”
But if you are going to take land or seize power, you will need military colonists to hold it. The military colonist may be an ex-soldier, but he’s more likely to be someone the empire, present or future, doesn’t particularly need or have a use for. The Czars used serfs. The present day military colonist who shows up at JFK or LAX may also be a peasant with even less value to his culture.
Mexico’s military colonists are not military. Often they aren’t even Mexican. But they have managed to take back California without firing a shot. Unless you count the occasional drive by shooting.
While the United States sent tens of thousands of soldiers to try and hold Iraq and Afghanistan only to fail; Mexico took California with a small army of underpaid handymen who claim entire cities and send back some 20 billion dollars a year. As conquests go, it’s not hard to see who did more with less.
In 2009, 417 Mexican migrants died trying to reach America, and 317 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. But Mexico has more to show for it than America does. Every Mexican who settles across the border is a net gain who sends back money and spreads political influence. Meanwhile America is spending trillions on a much smaller army in a country whose land no one actually wants.
In 2009, the year Obama approved a 30,000 man troop surge, 3,195 Afghans received permanent legal status in the United States.
In the decade since the US invaded Afghanistan, 24,710 Afghans successfully invaded the United States and received permanent legal status. That is an occupying force larger than US troop numbers were at any point in time in Afghanistan until the very end of the George W. Bush’s second term.
During this same period there were also 19,000 Afghan non-immigrant admissions. As invasions go, the Afghan invasion of America was far more successful than the American invasion of Afghanistan.
That is even more true when you consider birth rates. Military colonists are not a mere invading army. They are generational footholds.
The American birth rate was at 13.5. The Afghan birth rate was at 37.3 at the time. American soldiers go home when their time is up. Sometimes they come home with a Muslim wife after converting to marry her. Afghan immigrants come with a birth rate that is nearly three times that of the country they are invading.
Across the ocean, the Algerian War is still going strong and France is losing badly. There are fewer bombs and bullets. Only men and women showing up and expecting to be taken care of. An army of millions could not have landed in France and begun pillaging the countryside. Not unless they came as immigrants. If you are going to invade a Socialist country, the best way to do it is as a charity case.
Unfortunately that holds true for us as well.
The military colonists flooding our shores are part of an unacknowledged partnership between their political leaders and ours. Their political leaders are fighting a war to redress the wrongs of centuries or millennia. Our political leaders are looking to shift the voting balances in a ward or a district for the next election. When they resettle the next shipment of Afghans in an otherwise conservative area with a view to tilting the electoral balance, they are using them as military colonists for the short term while their homelands use them as military colonists in the long term.
War is about controlling land, resources and populations. Land just sits there. It’s the populations that cause the trouble. The military colonist makes a more enduring occupation possible by settling the land and giving the conquering power a deeper foothold in the enemy territory.
There was a time when American settlers acted as military colonists holding down lands in Florida and Texas. Today America is being colonized by the settlers of other nations and ideologies. And we will find ourselves in the same position as the Spanish did in Florida and the Mexicans did in Texas.
Mexico invited American settlers to move in to Texas on the understanding that they would learn Spanish and otherwise fit in. Instead language and culture proved to be stronger than land and oaths of citizenship. Many of the Texas settlers might not have had much use for the United States at the time, but creed and culture made them American military colonists whether they knew it or not. The same holds true for the present state of affairs there today.
It’s more than just cultural or ethnic differences that make one a military colonist. It’s a cause. Whether it’s Manifest Destiny or the Reconquista or the Caliphate. Underlying it all is that sense of destiny. The power of an exceptionalism that makes it impossible for the settler to sink in and abandon his roots and beliefs to the tidal pull of a new culture when his grudge against it is more than the mere personal dissatisfaction of the new immigrant or his children caught between two worlds.
Integration is hopeless in the face of that sense of destiny. European nations struggling to defend some notion of secular space misunderstand the problem as one of extremism. Some of the more visible terror attacks may indeed be associated with what can be described as extremism in the sense that its participants are willing to push the envelope harder and further in more violent ways.
But Islamic terrorism is only the foam on the surface. It’s the bubbles at the edge of the pot. A minor symptom of a much bigger problem. Ir’s simply the most violent expression of a widely shared belief that Islamic law is superior to Western law. Most peoples feel that their ways and customs are best. It doesn’t become a problem until they become the majority and won’t take no for an answer.
American liberalism and European republicanism have no answers to Islamic terrorism. Their embrace of the Arab Spring was motivated by the need to believe that the Muslim world was ready to “advance” to the same postmodern level of existence eliminating the need to worry about women in Burkas or Al Qaeda. The same misreading of the power of tribe and religion that led to the foolish belief that Saudi Arabia’s military colonists could safely be turned into Labour voters led to the Arab Spring’s equally misplaced confidence that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to be just like Europe.
It isn’t only a tiny minority of extremists who believe that Islamic values are superior to Western values and who would like the law to recognize that assumption. It’s a tiny minority of extremists who try to prove their devoutness by jumping the gun and killing people over it before the full demographic impact of the military colonists would make a Burka ban into the next Syrian Civil War.
Think of two armies maneuvering into position. The extremist is the one who fires before the enemy is fully in range ruining the strategic effect of the surprise attack. Trying to understand the extremist not only misses the point, it misses the whole chain of events in motion. The schemes for integrating the disgruntled youth and countering violent extremism is symptom control.
Terrorism is an early warning in the clash of civilizations and all our leaders can think to do is hold a meeting with the heads of the opposing army asking them to get their hotheads to stop shooting at us because it’s bringing our civilizations into conflict. Our civilizations are in conflict and have been as far back as they have both existed. The occasional plane hijacker is the first snowflake of a winter storm. Instead of preparing for a storm, we’re trying to figure out how to stop snowflakes.
The conflict is primal. It isn’t about American foreign policy or War X or Country Y or Cause Z. These are all “arguments” that explain the conflict once it’s already under way. It’s simpler than that. It’s about the incompatibility of cultures, religions, political and economic systems. And it’s about countries with a lot of oil and not much else trying to buy their way to an empire by using their own impoverished brethren as cannon fodder. And finally it’s about what happens when birth rates fall.
This unsuistainability is both economic and demographic as budgets and children are both lacking. Meanwhile the countries and cultures that have failed have achieved a perfectly sustainable state of misery. They may not have much income, but they also don’t have much to eat. They may have high infant mortality rates, but they have even higher childbirth rates.
America of 2013 cannot go on being this way indefinitely. It probably can’t even manage another two decades without major changes of some kind. Afghanistan 2013 however can go on being the way it is indefinitely. And that sustainability is what makes its people effective military colonists. Living the Afghan lifestyle in London or Los Angeles is even sustainable because food and housing are free.
That just leaves large packs of nomadic youths roaming the streets, selling drugs and rioting at the slightest provocation until it’s time for them to get married and make more nomadic youths of their own. It’s not that different from Afghanistan. It’s the tribal life transplanted to the West. It’s a culture with no real purpose except to produce young males eager to fight and expand tribal power and a religion with no real purpose except to affirm that as a religious duty.
Islam embodies expansionism. Its directives of male violence and female subjugation have no other end. They protect the tribal imperatives of endogamy and violence, of inbreeding and the feud. It has no ideas except to get bigger and that makes its followers into ideal military colonists.
[I said all of this back in 2007/8, both in the books and on the podcasts. This only possible solution from all of this, is secession, and soon, before all of King Barry’s Dreamers spread their terrorism, and their diseases, throughout the continent.]
Iraq jihadists blow up ‘Jonah’s tomb’ in Mosul: official
AFP
20 hours ago
Storyful
Islamic State destroys the Tomb of Jonah
Islamic State destroys the Tomb of Jonah
Storyful (OT)
Storyful (OT)
1
Islamic State destroys the Tomb of Jonah
Islamic State destroys the Tomb of Jonah
Palestinians Seek Refuge in Hospital
The new jihadist rulers of Iraq’s northern city of Mosul on Thursday completely levelled one its most well-known shrines, an official and witnesses told AFP.
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The Nabi Yunus shrine was built on the reputed burial site of a prophet known in the Koran as Yunus and in the Bible as Jonah.
“Islamic State completely destroyed the shrine of Nabi Yunus after telling local families to stay away and closing the roads to a distance of 500 metres from the shrine,” said the official at the Sunni endowment, which manages Sunni religious affairs in Iraq.
The endowment official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and Mosul residents told AFP it took the Sunni extremists an hour to rig the shrine with explosives.
“They first stopped people from praying in it, they fixed explosive charges around and inside it and then blew it up in front of a large gathering of people,” said a witness who did not wish to give his name.
The endowment official said the Islamic State jihadist group that overran large swathes of northern and western Iraq last month have now destroyed or damaged 30 shrines, as well as 15 husseiniyas and mosques in and around Mosul.
View gallery
Al-Qaida-inspired insurgents gaining ground in Ira …
This undated file image posted on a militant website on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2014, which has been verif …
Husseiniyas are Shiite places of worship that are also used as community centres.
The official listed the most notable losses to Muslim heritage as being the shrines of Imam Yahya Ibn al-Qassem, Aoun al-Din and Nabi Danial.
“But the worst destruction was of Nabi Yunus, which has been turned to dust,” he said.
The Islamic State late last month proclaimed a “caliphate” spanning parts of Iraq and Syria.
The group aims to create an approximation of society as it was in the early days of Islam, which was founded in the 7th century, and considers Muslims who do not adhere to its puritanical version of the religion heretics.
[After being elected, Obama said that the United States is a Muslim Country. Chapter 8 verses 12 – 15 are quite clear. Allah tells ALL believers to cut off the heads, hands, and feet of the non-believers. There has been and only is, one Jihad. It is on now, it is everlasting, and will continue to the end of days.
Israel just wants its own little piece of desert. Islam wants to destroy everything and everybody not of their particular sect. Sunni kills Shi’ia kills Wahhabee, kills whoever, and they all kill us.
AWE TV has a 3 part special on Jihad in the US. Its worth the time. OANN is doing ok, but not great.
Secession is the only way that we can get rid of the corrupt bureaucracy, corrupt courts, and corrupt & grossly incompetent congress.
Buy, Read, and Promote, “The Albany Plan Re-Visited.”]
A REMINDER IN HISTORY
General VoNguyen Giap.
General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader
of the North Vietnam military. The following quote
is from his memoirs currently found in the
Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi :
‘What we still don’t understand is why you Americans
stopped the bombing of Hanoi . You had us on the
ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder,
just for another day or two, we were ready
to surrender! It was the same at the
battle of TET. You defeated us!
We knew it, and we thought
you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was
helping us. They were causing more disruption in
America than we could in the battlefields. We
were ready to surrender. You had won!’
General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed
what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not
lost in Vietnam — it was lost at home. The
same slippery slope, sponsored by the U.S. media,
is currently underway. It exposes the
enormous power of a Biased Media to
cut out the heart and will of
the American public.
A truism worthy of note: . . . Do not fear the enemy,
for they can take only your life.
Fear the media,
for they will distort your grasp of reality and destroy your honor.
By Bill Hoffmann
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The mainstream media exhibit a disturbing malice for Jews that smacks of anti-Semitism, actor, economist and commentator Ben Stein tells Newsmax TV.
“There’s just a certain amount of Jew hatred in the media, especially in the elite media, that cannot be overcome or explained away,” Stein said Tuesday on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
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“The media in this country for a very long time has been contemptuous of Jews and contemptuous of Jewish life,” Stein said.
“This was true during the Holocaust, when the media was largely controlled by old, lying, wealthy, white Protestant males, and it’s true now when it’s controlled by mostly left-wingers.”
Stein, a former speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and an actor in such films as “Ghostbusters II,” said media defenders try to “pretend it’s not anti-Semitism, it’s really anti-Israel, but it’s really anti-Semitism.”
Just as upsetting is the fact that Jews themselves have key positions in today’s media, he said.
“The media likes to portray Jews as bullies and murderers and . . . it’s kind of amazing to me, because so much of the media is Jewish,” he said.
“Some of that media is very, very good. I mean, I look at people like [The Weekly Standard founder] Bill Kristol, he’s absolutely fabulous. But there’s a deep-seated self-hatred, especially [among] the New York City elite media.
“They want to show they’re not Jewish by being anti-Israel, and it’s not going to work. We know they’re Jewish and we know that they’re not being fair to their own people, but they’ll keep doing it.”
Stein said the media has unfairly slammed Israel for its military strikes against Hamas, which last week fired rockets at key Israeli cities.
“We’re supposed to think there’s something wrong with them for defending their country,” said Stein, who is also a Newsmax contributor.
“Every story about the war in Gaza should begin with ‘Hamas started it, Hamas endlessly refuses to have a ceasefire.’
“Hamas could have an incredibly prosperous and happy, peaceful partnership with Israel, and they don’t, they prefer to fight, they prefer to kill.”
Stein lashed out at Secretary of State John Kerry for his sarcastic off-camera remark about Israel’s military strike against Hamas in Gaza as “a hell of a pinpoint operation.”
“Terrible, shocking, shocking. Kerry is a perfect example of everything we have talked about, because Kerry is Jewish – ethnically,” Stein said.
“Yet he is so eager to push an image as a WASP gentile and to look down his nose on Israel. He is sort of a perfect specimen of the kind of behavior we’re talking about.”
WalMart Pays High Wages, Not Low Wages
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It’s a fairly standard condemnation of the business practices of WalMart that it pays low wages to its associates, what in other companies we tend to call employees. It’s certainly true that WalMart pays low wages by the standards of, say, the computing industry, or the joys of government work. But that’s not actually how we should be measuring whether WalMart’s wages are high or low. The correct method would be, well, what would wages be in retail in the absence of WalMart? And there’s an intriguing little paper that looks at this question. Not exactly, as it’s not looking at WalMart as a specific company, rather it’s looking at the effect of big retail on wages in the retail sector. Given that WalMart is very definitely big retail we can take this paper as being a useful proxy for the effect of the firm. And the result is most interesting:
With malls, franchise strips and big-box retailers increasingly dotting the landscape, there is concern that middle-class jobs in manufacturing in the U.S. are being replaced by minimum wage jobs in retail. Retail jobs have spread, while manufacturing jobs have shrunk in number. In this paper, we characterize the wages that have accompanied the growth in retail. We show that wage rates in the retail sector rise markedly with firm size and with establishment size. These increases are halved when we control for worker fixed effects, suggesting that there is sorting of better workers into larger firms. Also, higher ability workers get promoted to the position of manager, which is associated with higher pay. We conclude that the growth in modern retail, characterized by larger chains of larger establishments with more levels of hierarchy, is raising wage rates relative to traditional mom-and-pop retail stores.
Don’t you think that’s an interesting result? That pay at Big Box and chain retail is higher than it is in the Mom and Pop stores that they largely replace?
Agreed, $8.50 an hour, $10 an hour, whatever it is that WalMart does pay in specific locations and at different levels of training, isn’t all that great an amount of money. However, it’s still rather better than the straight minimum wage that many in the smaller players in the retail industry get. Plus, as the authors not, it’s possible to get promoted inside a large corporation (something which WalMart is very proud of itself, they continually note how many store managers started out as hourly paid associates), to have a career path, which is something not generally available in a small store where there’s the workforce and then the owners as the only level of management.
So the workers appear to be better off as a result of the existence of WalMart. They get higher wages than they would have done in the absence of the company and with the older retail landscape of largely Mom and Pop stores. The Waltons have certainly done well out of the arrangement. And what about the consumers? Well, Jason Furman, currently Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers has had a look at this:
Productivity is the principal driver of economic progress. It is the only force that can
make everyone better off: workers, consumers, and owners of capital. Wal-Mart has
indisputably made a tremendous contribution to productivity. From its sophisticated inventory
systems to its pricing innovations, Wal-Mart has blazed a path that numerous other retailers are
now following, many of them vigorously competing with Wal-Mart. Today, Wal-Mart is the
largest private employer in the country, the largest grocery store in the country, and the third
largest pharmacy. Eight in ten Americans shop at Wal-Mart.
There is little dispute that Wal-Mart’s price reductions have benefited the 120 million
American workers employed outside of the retail sector. Plausible estimates of the magnitude of
the savings from Wal-Mart are enormous – a total of $263 billion in 2004, or $2,329 per
household.
So consumers benefit, and it is consumption that is supposed to be the starting point of any economic investigation according to M. Bastiat, workers benefit, the owners benefit, it all seems like a remarkably good idea really. Which leaves us with just the one final question. Why is there so much rage directed at the company? Why do we have people actively proposing public policy that would prevent these various good things from happening?
My thanks to Paul Walker for the pointer to the first paper.
Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.
Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.
Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they?
Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr. noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed and Nelson died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.
So take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July holiday and silently thank these patriots. It’s not much to ask for the price they paid.
It’s time we get the word out that patriotism is NOT a sin and the Fourth of July has much more to it than picnics, baseball games, and fireworks.
1. For the 2nd time in the last 2 weeks, scientists have measured and recorded the largest amount of Antarctic ice in history. And “yes”, you read correctly, the record has been achieved/broken 2 times in the last 2 weeks!
2. Last year NOAA, one of the “scientific” groups that expounds the “man made climate change” and “CO2” myths, went on record as saying July 2012 was the hottest July on record (if you recall MO was in a drought). This replaced July 1936 as the hottest July on record (July 1936 being smack dab in the middle if the dust bowl). Well over the last 2 weeks NOAA has very “quietly adjusted” the findings and surprise, July 1936 is once again the hottest July on record. Apparently NOAA’s pronouncement in 2013 that July 2012 was the hottest July was based completely on computer modeling and not real data. I gathered from the story that I heard that really the only reason they went back and “re-modeled” the data and “adjusted” the findings is due to a couple of very serious and vigilant watch dog groups. These groups are dedicated to ensuring there is accuracy and transparency w/ respect to the data, findings and stated causation impacts when it comes to the “man made climate change” debate. So they called NOAA out in several articles w/ respect to how they reached their conclusion and NOAA “quietly” “adjusted” the findings.
3. And, again, for those of us who watch “Deadliest Catch”, this is all true as confirmed by the men, and now woman (Mandy Hansen), who fish for crab in The Bering Sea.
U.S. Supreme Court Finds President Obama Lacked the Power to Make Three Recess Appointments to the National Labor Relations Board
This Hot Topic was prepared by the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law, Practice and Procedure Under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) Committee, with the assistance of Brian R. Garrison of Faegre Baker Daniels LLP in Indianapolis, Indiana, representing employers in labor and employment matters, and Lisa C. Demidovich of United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals in San Dimas, California, representing the Union and its represented employees.
On June 26, 2014, the United States Supreme Court decided NLRB v. Noel Canning, holding that President Obama lacked the power to make three of his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”). 573 U.S. ___ (2014). Notably, this is the first time the Supreme Court has interpreted the U.S. Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause, Art. II, §2, cl. 3. See Slip Op. at 9.
Background
The NLRB is composed of five members and cannot issue decisions or take other actions in the absence of a valid three-member quorum. Over the course of 2011, President Obama nominated three people–Sharon Block, Terence Flynn, and Richard Griffin–to serve as members of the NLRB. Their nominations required Senate confirmation and remained pending through 2011. On December 17, 2011, the Senate adopted a resolution stating that it would take a series of brief recesses beginning the following day. Under that resolution, the Senate held pro forma sessions every Tuesday and Friday until it returned for ordinary business on January 23, 2012. During each pro forma session, the Senate would be gaveled to order and then immediately adjourned without conducting any actual business.
The Senate held one such pro forma session on January 3, 2012, which was the same day that NLRB Member Craig Becker’s term expired. This left the NLRB with only two confirmed members–Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce and Member Brian Hayes. The next day, President Obama appointed Block, Griffin, and Flynn to the NLRB, using his authority under the Recess Appointments Clause in Article II, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. This clause provides that the President has the power “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” The President took the position that the Senate was in “recess” on January 4 within the meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause, so he had the authority to fill the three NLRB vacancies.
On February 8, 2012, after an administrative trial and an appeal to the NLRB, a three-member panel consisting of Members Hayes, Flynn, and Block found that Noel Canning–a bottler and distributor of Pepsi-Cola products based in Washington State–had violated the NLRA by refusing to reduce to writing and execute a collective-bargaining agreement with Teamsters Local 760. The NLRB ordered Noel Canning to execute the agreement and make employees whole for any loss.
Noel Canning petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the NLRB’s decision. It argued that the NLRB’s order was invalid and unenforceable because the President’s January 4, 2012, appointments were unconstitutional, as they were made during a period when the Senate was not in recess. As a result, Noel Canning submitted that the NLRB did not have a valid quorum of three members when it issued its order. In response, the NLRB argued that the President’s recess appointment power is not so limited as to prevent him from making recess appointments during a recess that is a “break in the Senate’s business when it is otherwise in a continuing session.” Therefore, the NLRB argued that the President’s appointment of the NLRB members was constitutionally valid and the NLRB’s order should be enforced.
The D.C. Circuit’s Decision
On January 25, 2013, a three-member panel of the D.C. Circuit agreed with Noel Canning that the President’s recess appointments were unconstitutional. Writing for the court, Chief Judge David Sentelle found that the appointments fell outside the scope of the Recess Appointments Clause for two reasons. First, the D.C. Circuit unanimously found that the phrase “the Recess of the Senate” does not include “intra-session” recesses–those that occur within a formal session of Congress–and applies only to “inter-session” recesses–those that occur between such sessions when a return date is not set. Therefore, as the Senate was holding pro forma sessions at the time of the President’s January 4, 2012, NLRB appointments, they were not made during an inter-session recess. Second, the D.C. Circuit found, by a 2-1 vote, that the vacancies filled by the President’s recess appointments did not “happen” during “the Recess” as required by the Recess Appointments Clause. As the NLRB vacancies existed at the time the “recess” began and did not arise during the Senate’s recess, the majority concluded that they did not “happen” during the “recess” so could not be filled pursuant to the Recess Appointments Clause. Consequently, the D.C. Circuit concluded that the NLRB lacked a quorum of validly appointed members when it issued its order in the Noel Canning case, so that order was invalid and unenforceable.
Supreme Court Proceedings
On April 25, 2013, the NLRB petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. Noel Canning did not oppose certiorari. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on June 24, 2013, and heard oral arguments on January 13, 2014.
The Supreme Court’s Ruling
Justice Breyer delivered the Court’s decision unanimously affirming the D.C. Circuit’s decision that the Recess Appointments Clause does not give the President authority to make the three challenged appointments to the NLRB. NLRB v. Noel Canning, No. 12-1281, Slip Op. at 1 & 41 (U.S. June 26, 2014). The majority opinion, joined by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, rejected the reasoning of the lower court in its “first time in more than 200 years” call to interpret the Recess Appointments Clause. Id. at 9 & 41. With three of the five NLRB members’ appointments invalidated, the Court found the Board lacked a quorum and set aside its order. Id. at 2-5 & 41. Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Alito, filed a concurring opinion.
The Opinion, rich in historical references, recognized that the issue of first impression has been extensively considered by the Executive Branch as “Presidents have made recess appointments since the beginning of the Republic.” Id. at 8.
The first aspect of the Recess Appointments Clause the Court examined was whether it applied to intra-session recesses in addition to undisputed inter-session recesses and concluded–contrary to the D.C. Circuit–that the Clause applies to both kinds of recess so long as the intra-session recess was for more than ten days. Id. at 1 & 9-21. Historically, “Presidents have made thousands of intra-session recess appointments,” likely because “opinions of Presidential legal advisers . . . are nearly unanimous in determining that the Clause authorizes these [intra-session] appointments.” Id. at 12. While all Justices agreed the President may make recess appointments during any break–“no matter how short”–between sessions, compare id. at 19 with Concurrence Slip Op. at 15 n.4, the majority found that an intra-session recess “of more than 3 days but less than 10 days is presumptively too short to fall within the Clause,” except for “a national catastrophe,” preventing the Senate from reconvening to approve the President’s needed recess appointments to address the emergent situation. Slip Op. at 21.
The Court next examined whether the Clause covered “vacancies that arise prior to a recess but continue to exist during the recess” or whether the power was limited to “vacancies that first come into existence during a recess,” and concluded–again contrary to the D.C. Circuit–that the Clause applies to both kinds of vacancy. Id. at 1-2 & 21-33. Again, relying on history, the Court noted that Presidents, dating back to at least President James Madison and including “every President since James Buchanan,” have made recess appointments to pre-recess vacancies. Id. at 26-29. The Court noted Presidents would not likely abuse this power because of limitations on recess appointments, such as they serve “a limited term” and they may have more difficulty tackling controversial issues without the credibility commensurate with Senate approval. Id. at 25.
The Court’s final consideration was whether pro forma sessions where no business was transacted could be excluded when calculating the length of the recess. It concluded that the pro forma sessions could not be ignored and break up a recess where the Senate “retain[ed] the capacity to transact Senate business,” “received a message from the President,” and actually “passed a bill by unanimous consent during the second pro forma session after its [initial] adjournment.” Slip Op. at 2 & 33-40. Because of the pro forma session every Tuesday and Friday during the recess at issue here, the President’s three NLRB recess appointments occurred during a three-day recess, which is “too short a time to bring a recess within the scope of the Clause.” Id. at 2.
The Concurrence
Concurring in “judgment only,” Justice Scalia criticized the majority opinion for “transform[ing] the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future Presidents against future Senates.” Concurring Op. at 2. Instead, Justice Scalia, just as the D.C. Circuit held, would have limited the Recess Appointments Clause to inter-session recesses and to “offices that become vacant during the intermission.” Id. at 1-2. Justice Scalia concludes his opinion by offering alternative speculations of the import of the majority’s opinion: Either the Senate may seek to “avoid triggering the President’s now-vast recess-appointment power by the odd contrivance of never adjourning for more than three days without holding a pro forma session at which it is understood that no business will be conducted” or “[m]embers of the President’s party in Congress may be able to prevent the senate from holding pro forma sessions with the necessary frequency, and if the House and Senate disagree, the President may be able to adjourn both ‘to such Time as he shall think proper.'” Id. at 62 (quoting U.S. Const., Art. II, §3).
Implications
Management Perspective
The Noel Canning decision calls into question every official action taken by the NLRB during the terms of its unconstitutionally appointed Members. This means all the NLRB’s actions between January 4, 2012 and August 2, 2013–which includes issuing over 700 decisions and appointing several Regional Directors–are likely invalid. The NLRB now must revisit and reconsider all the invalid decisions that return to it. It is likely that the parties to many of these cases have already complied with the NLRB’s order or otherwise resolved their disputes, which may render the underlying issues moot. For those cases that have not been resolved and return to the NLRB, the NLRB will have to review each of these cases as new decisions and reissue decisions after this review, just as it did after the Supreme Court’s 2010 New Process Steel decision. As happened after New Process Steel, the NLRB will likely reconsider and reaffirm its decision in most, if not all, of these cases. But that may take substantial time, as many of the invalidated decisions were high-profile cases in which the decisions departed from NLRB precedent and had significant implications for employers. They are much different from the decisions invalidated by New Process Steel, which were issued in cases where a two-member NLRB, with one Democratic Member and one Republican Member, could find consensus. So, while it is unclear what will happen in the decisions invalidated by Noel Canning and in current cases the General Counsel’s office is prosecuting based on those decisions, employers are wise to take guidance from them. On the other hand, the likely invalidation of the NLRB’s Regional Director appointments poses a thornier issue, as its consequences may extend beyond the need to merely revisit cases and reissue decisions. Employers may challenge as invalid a variety of decisions made and actions taken by those Regional Directors since their appointments, such as those related to determining the appropriate bargaining unit, ruling on election objections, and certifying election results in union representation cases.
In conclusion, due to the time necessary for the NLRB to revisit the invalid decisions, Noel Canning will likely bog down the NLRB and inhibit its ability to proceed as planned on the other cases and issues currently before it. This means it will likely take some time before the NLRB takes action on two fronts of significant concern for employers: finalizing new rules to expedite representation election procedures and issuing decisions in cases in which the NLRB has invited amicus briefs (such as Purple Communications, Inc., which addresses employees’ right to use an employer’s email system for activity unrelated to the employee’s business purposes, and Browning-Ferris Industries, which addresses the NLRB’s joint employer standard). Due to Noel Canning and the NLRB’s obligation to continue addressing other pending cases, it may not get around to these two significant issues until after December 16, 2014, when Member Nancy Schiffer’s term ends. That would mean that instead of a Democratic majority, the NLRB would have two Democratic and two Republican members. While lawfully able to operate, the lack of Democratic control would mean uncertainty for the cases and issues pending before the NLRB at that time. And depending on the results of the November 2014 elections, a Republican-controlled Senate may significantly limit the President’s ability to make a recess appointment upon Member Schiffer’s departure. At bottom, during the period while the uncertainty caused by Noel Canning is resolved, employers should work closely with labor counsel when making strategic decisions on how to proceed before the NLRB.
Union Perspective
Subsequent events–namely the Senate rules change to allow for the President’s Executive Branch appointments to be confirmed by a Senate majority and the Senate’s confirmation of the NLRB General Counsel and five board members–have circumscribed the continuing impact and scope of the Court’s holding on NLRB decisions. The greatest effect of the Court’s ruling on labor will be the decisions that were decided by former Members Block, Flynn, and Griffin where the unsuccessful party sought review on the basis that their appointments were invalid, but unions are optimistic that the NLRB–having experience with reconsideration after the Court’s 2010 invalidation of the Agency’s delegation of power to a two-member board in New Process Steel v. NLRB, 560 U.S. 674 (2010)–will handle those pending cases expeditiously and effectively to ensure the NLRA’s purposes are effectuated.
[This is from the ABA LEL section, of which I am a member. Read this carefully, noting the arbitrary 10 rule, and that there are several different opinions involved. Different opinions means that although they all agree on the outcome, they all DISAGREE on WHY. In future rulings, courts and lawyers will point to different opinions, claiming that they were unanimous, which they obviously are NOT. Everyone needs to read this carefully because of the potential impact this case will have in the future. Good outcome, very bad decision making.]
What you don’t know about Social Security—but should
A look at claiming strategies, tax angles and more to help you make sense of a complicated program.
The Wall Street Journal
By Glenn Ruffenach 22 hours ago
Questions
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Imagine that you’re about to accept a new job, and it’s time to talk salary. You sit down with your boss, who begins as follows:
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“Actually, our payroll system is impossibly complicated. You can pick from dozens of different ways to be paid and hundreds of different start dates, and each will produce a different salary. We offer some guidance, but we’re short-handed. As such, deciding when and how to collect a paycheck is essentially up to you.
“So…what would you like to do?”
Welcome to Social Security.
Each day, thousands of Americans apply for the first time for Social Security benefits. And each day—if questions from our readers and the stories we hear from financial advisers are any indication—many applicants have no idea what they’re getting into. They know little or nothing about the program’s complexity, the myriad ways to collect benefits and the Social Security Administration’s staffing and service problems.
As such, they’re putting their retirement—and, in many cases, their spouses’ future—at risk.
“People spend more time planning a vacation than they do planning for 20 or 30 years of Social Security benefits,” says Barry Kaplan, chief investment officer for Cambridge Wealth Counsel in Atlanta. Those benefits, he notes, are insurance against market downturns, hyperinflation and living longer than you anticipate. But would-be beneficiaries, he says, typically “go into this without a clue.”
If you and/or your spouse are weighing your options about Social Security, here’s a look at some of the biggest issues—involving both the agency and the benefits program—that could shape your retirement for better or worse.
The Social Security Administration isn’t your financial adviser.
A fair amount of the mail we receive from readers with questions or complaints about Social Security goes something like this: “My Social Security office never told me about….” About a particular strategy for claiming benefits. About a little-known rule. About the consequences of starting one’s payouts at a particular point in time.
No, the Social Security Administration isn’t perfect. (More about this in a moment.)
But its primary job is delivering a service, paying 59 million beneficiaries, and not financial planning. The agency provides loads of information about benefits on its website and does its best to answer the public’s questions in its field offices and by telephone. But a comprehensive talk about the nuances of Social Security and your financial future? That’s not going to happen.
Indeed, the Social Security Administration doesn’t know about—and it isn’t the agency’s job to know about—your household budget, your health, your savings, life insurance, plans you might have to work in retirement. In short, all the variables that should go into a decision about filing for benefits, says Mr. Kaplan in Atlanta.
So, the onus is on you to learn about, or find help in deciphering, the basics: how benefits work, claiming strategies, possible pitfalls. And if you’re hellbent, for instance, on grabbing a payout at age 62 (the earliest possible date for most people) and locking yourself—and perhaps your spouse—into a permanent reduction in benefits, the agency isn’t going to stop you.
The Social Security Administration is stretched increasingly thin at the worst possible time.
In March, Carolyn Colvin, the agency’s acting commissioner, didn’t mince words in a report tied to President Barack Obama’s request for additional funding for the Social Security Administration.
“Our service and stewardship efforts [have] deteriorated,” she said. “In fiscal year 2013, the public had to wait longer for a decision on their disability claim, to talk to a representative on our national 800 number, and to schedule an appointment in our field offices.”
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The agency, in short, is overextended. In the past three years, it has lost 11,000 employees, or about 12% of its workforce; by 2022, about 60% of its supervisors will be eligible to retire. Meanwhile, budget cuts have resulted in the consolidation of 44 field offices, the closing of 503 contact stations (mobile service facilities) and a delay in plans to open eight hearing offices (where appeals about agency decisions involving retirement and disability benefits are heard) and one call center.
And that 800 number? According to a report in December from the agency’s inspector general, wait times in 2013 exceeded 10 minutes, an increase of more than five minutes from 2012.
The point: The Social Security Administration is grappling with its own problems just as the baby-boom generation, with about 75 million members, is moving full speed into retirement. (The oldest boomers are turning 68 this year.) The demands on the agency mean that you might not be able to find, or find in a timely fashion, the information or help you need. That said…
More services outside Social Security are offering more help.
The Social Security Administration is the first to acknowledge that benefits are complicated. The opening paragraphs of the agency’s “Social Security Handbook,” a guide to the benefits program, state plainly: “The Social Security programs are so complex it is impossible to include information [in the handbook] about every topic.”
Fortunately, a growing number of tools and services—some free, others for a cost—are available to help people navigate these waters.
In recent years, AARP, the Washington-based advocacy group for older Americans, and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., the Baltimore-based mutual-fund company, have introduced sophisticated online calculators that help users determine how and when to claim benefits. Both are free. (The Social Security Administration has several calculators, also free, that can help determine the size of your benefits, but not necessarily when to claim them for maximum effect.)
Among the services that charge a fee: MaximizeMySocialSecurity.com, from Economic Security Planning Inc.; SocialSecurityChoices.com, from SocSec Analytics LLC; and SocialSecuritySolutions.com, all started by academics. Our review of several Social Security tools last fall singled out Social Security Solutions for its ease of use and Maximize My Social Security for its flexibility.
Finally, check out weekly columns at the Public Broadcasting Service website from Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University and the developer of Maximize My Social Security. The articles, published each Monday, address a wide range of issues about Social Security (including numerous “secrets” and “gotchas”) and answer questions about benefits. In short, invaluable reading.
The earnings test deters people from working in retirement—and shouldn’t.
Social Security’s earnings test, in which benefits are reduced if a person is collecting benefits and income at the same time, generates numerous questions and much confusion. But the apparent penalties aren’t what they seem.
If you are under your full retirement age when you first receive Social Security benefits and if you have earned income, $1 in benefits will be deducted for each $2 you earn above an annual limit. In 2014, that limit is $15,480. In the year you reach your full retirement age, the penalty shrinks; after you reach full retirement age, the deductions end completely.
The good news: Money lost to the earnings test isn’t really lost. Once you reach full retirement age, Social Security recalculates—and increases—your future benefits to account for any dollars withheld.
Most beneficiaries, though, aren’t aware of that; as such, they typically “work up to the [annual] limit—and stop,” says Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration.
The earnings test, Mr. Biggs says, “should not be a disincentive to work.” Rather, “think of the test as delaying benefits until later in retirement,” he says. “Over your lifetime, your total benefits will come out the same.”
Spouses, at a minimum, should be aware of three claiming strategies.
Overlooked Social Security Investment Strategies Play Video
Overlooked Social Security Investment Strategies
Couples have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they can claim benefits.
But the options can quickly become overwhelming, which prompts many spouses to default to the easiest choice: grabbing a payout at age 62.
Before you do that, consider these three claiming strategies. Many couples aren’t aware of these options or don’t think they can benefit from them. Do yourself a favor: Run the numbers. (Fidelity Investments recently did a nice job of explaining these and other claiming strategies.)
Maximize survivor benefits: If you claim benefits before your full retirement age, you could be locking your spouse into a low survivor benefit when you die. The longer you wait to claim, the larger the survivor benefits.
Claim and suspend: Once you reach full retirement age, you can claim your benefit and then suspend it. (In other words, you stop payments before they begin.) This allows for two things: Your spouse, if he or she is 62 or older, can begin collecting spousal benefits from Social Security. (This assumes that the spousal benefit is larger than the spouse’s own retirement benefit. More on this in a moment.) Second, your own benefit, when you eventually claim it, will have increased in size. (Thanks to “delayed retirement credits.”)
Claim a spousal benefit, then later claim your own benefit: At full retirement age—if you are eligible for a spousal benefit and your own retirement benefit—you have the option of claiming just the spousal benefit. At a future point in time, you can then jump to your own benefit, which will have increased in size.
And speaking of spousal benefits…
“Deemed filing” can box you in.
It’s a frequent question: A husband who is already collecting Social Security (or weighing the claim-and-suspend strategy) asks if his wife can take just a spousal benefit at age 62—and then switch to a (presumably larger) benefit based on her earnings record in the future.
The answer: Nope.
If the wife, in this case, applies for benefits before her full retirement age, she is “deemed”—in the eyes of the Social Security Administration—to have filed for both benefits: the benefit based on her work record and a spousal benefit.
She will receive the higher of the two figures, but she will be locked into that reduced benefit going forward. (Reduced because she is claiming benefits before full retirement age.)
Again, as discussed above, if the wife waits until her full retirement age to file for benefits, she would have a choice: She could apply for just a spousal benefit. Then, a few years down the road, she could switch to a payout based on her earnings history.
William Meyer, founder of SocialSecuritySolutions.com, says the “deemed filing” rule trips up innumerable applicants. “We hear about it all the time,” he says.
The lesson is clear and critical: Claim benefits before full retirement age, and your options are limited; claim benefits after full retirement age, and you have more flexibility—and bigger payouts.
Divorced spouses and survivors don’t know what they don’t know.
Ask almost any financial adviser about Social Security slip-ups, and stories about ex-spouses, widows and widowers come tumbling out.
Mr. Kaplan in Atlanta recalls a woman—age 67, divorced and still working—who walked into his office and simply had no idea that she could have been collecting benefits for the previous five years based on her former husband’s earnings.
Prof. Kotlikoff at Boston University tells the story of a friend who had lost his wife and was convinced that he couldn’t claim Social Security checks as a survivor.
“He told me, ‘I made more [money] than she did,’ ” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “And based on that, he thought, incorrectly, that he wasn’t eligible for a survivor benefit. People just don’t know about this stuff.”
The point: Always err on the side of telling Social Security about your family circumstances and/or a change in those circumstances.
“Tell them about ex-spouses, tell them if you’ve lost a spouse, tell them if you have kids,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. (A surviving spouse with children could be eligible for additional benefits.)
“If you don’t tell them, they won’t know. It’s that simple.”
Delaying Social Security doesn’t just result in a bigger benefit; it also can make good tax sense.
You may have heard the advice countless times: Minimize (or avoid) withdrawals from your nest egg (401(k), individual retirement accounts, etc.) for as long as possible to take advantage of tax-deferred growth. Many investors who follow that advice grab Social Security benefits, typically at age 62, to help pay the bills.
But that advice ignores the possible tax benefits associated with following the opposite course: accelerating withdrawals from savings early in retirement so that you can hold off on claiming Social Security.
The thinking here is tied to the fact that Social Security benefits are taxable. As much as 85% of a married couple’s benefits are subject to tax when their income exceeds $44,000 ($34,000 for individuals); as much as 50% of benefits are taxable at lower income levels.
If you delay claiming Social Security and, as a result, end up with larger benefits, future withdrawals from savings will likely be smaller—a recipe for lower levels of taxable income. (For a detailed discussion of these tax issues, see “Innovative Strategies to Help Maximize Social Security Benefits,” from James Mahaney, vice president at Prudential Financial Inc.)
“Many retirees don’t consider the impact of their withdrawal strategy on how their Social Security is taxed,” says Mr. Meyer, the SocialSecuritySolutions.com founder. “Missteps in tapping the wrong account and investments to generate income can significantly increase your taxes.”
Mr. Ruffenach is a reporter and editor in The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau and the editor of Encore. He can be reached at encore@wsj.com.
[Other things that you should know about SS.
The first thing that you should know about SS is that there is no money in any of the trust funds. LBJ took it out to start Medicare. He replaced it, with congress’ approval, with non-transferable Congressional IOU’s. Literally, they cannot be sold or transferred, and can be defaulted on by a simple act of congress, not requiring bankruptcy. Second, it is not an entitlement, it is a benefit. This means that congress can alter it at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Third, it is a Ponzi Scheme. This means that its income is simply taking from those working and transferring it to those receiving it. It has no basis in any economy. It has no basis in any assets. It has no basis in any commercial venture at all. The value of the payouts is completely dependent upon Federal Reserve Monetary Policies.
It was originally created by Mussolini in the 1930’s as an Italian Socialist Pension Plan. FDR simply copied it over. At the original time of establishment, it was anticipated that those receiving SS would receive it for an average of 2.5 years, and then die.
See the earlier post about no allies in gov’t part 2.
AARP is worthless, go to AMAC if you want value.
And, to my mind, worst of all is that it is 100% unconstitutional. There is no provision in the constitution that allows the federal government to take money from one citizen simply to give it to another. None whatsoever!]
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“That pause before Combat, similar to General Washington on bended knee at Valley Forge”
MISSION STATEMENT
The Combat Veterans For Congress Political Action Committee is dedicated to supporting the election of fiscally conservative Combat Veterans For Congress. We seek Combat Veterans For Congress who believe in limited government, will rein in the out of control spending of Congress, are committed to preserving and defending the U.S. Constitution, and will support the independence and freedom of the individual as outlined in the Bill of Rights. We support Combat Veterans For Congress who are dedicated to promoting The Free Enterprise System creating the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind, provide for a strong national defense, and will endorse the teaching of U.S. history and the Founding Fathers’ core values in educational institutions.
It lacks credibility to believe the Obama administration did not know that prematurely pulling out all US Military personnel from Iraq, before the US Generals in Iraq, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the US Ambassador in Iraq said it was safe to do so, and before the US military were allowed to structure a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. Iraq is the only country in US history where the US military had been engaged in a military campaign, where no Status of Forces Agreement was negotiated before all US Military Forces were pulled out of the country. At that time, Iraq was willing to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Obama administration, but it was an intentional decision by Obama to leave Iraq without negotiating such an agreement, that agreement would have allowed for leaving a small residual force of 10,000 military personnel to continue to train the Iraqi Army and to booster the confidence of Nouri Al Moakley’s government of Iraq.
Recent events reveal why Obama failed to provide a small US military residual force on the ground in Iraq that a Status of Forces Agreement would have provided for—the quick exit from Iraq was Obama’s first step in allowing Iran to have develop a stronger influence over the internal affairs of Iraq. In the below listed article, it is explained that Obama has just effectively improved Iran’s strong influence in Iraq by encouraging Iran to move its Republican Guard Quid Force into Iraq, while for the last week Obama has refused to strike Al Q’ieda’s concentration of forces and the long lines of exposed convoys with US airpower.
The United States should not work with Iran’s military to defend Iraq under any circumstances—-it would be like allowing the fox into the chicken coop to protect the chickens. The US should support the Iraqi government with supplies, ground air control personnel to coordinate air strikes against Al Q’ieda’s forces, by providing US air strikes to take out the Al Q’ieda convoys, provide Spec Ops Forces to conduct certain classified missions, and should encourage the Al Moakley Shiite government to work with the Sunnis that they were working with, when the US was in Iraq, the Sunnis have since been alienated by Al Moakley. If Iraq is taken over by Al Q’ieda the country would be used as a safe haven for attacks on the US like Afghanistan was used to launch the 9/11 on the US. The military stability of the entire Middle East, and stabilizing the cost of a barrel of oil, depends upon the occupant of the Oval Office, who should finally take specific action to shore up the government of Iraq.
The Republic and its American citizens deserve better leadership from the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unfortunately, Obama was too busy golfing and going to multiple fund raising events in California this weekend, while the most serious crisis facing the Republic since 9/11, was unfolding over the weekend. There are 20,000 Americans in Iraq that must be protected; if Obama doesn’t take action to protect them and protect the interests of the United States in the Middle East, it would be a repeat of his “Dereliction of Duty” witnessed by the US Armed Forces when Obama refused to give the US military “Cross Border Authority” so they could dispatch a rescue force to save the lives of the Americans who were murdered by 125 -150 Al Q’ieda terrorist during the Battle of Benghazi.
Advance of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard stirs fears of Mideast proxy war
AARON KLEIN
Aaron Klein is WND’s senior staff reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief. He also hosts “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on Salem Talk Radio.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
TEL AVIV – The deployment of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to Iraq came after the Obama administration quietly gave its approval of the Shiite troop movement, according to informed Middle Eastern security officials.
The Obama administration pressed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow battalions of the Quds Force to aid the Iraqi military in its fight against the Sunni Muslim Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
The Quds Force is special unit of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for international operations.
According to numerous press reports the Iranian forces were dispatched Thursday to fight in Tikrit, which was initially held by the ISIS but was subsequently liberated by the Iraqi army with help from Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported two Guards’ units were further tasked with protecting Baghdad and the Shiite holy sites in the cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Obama’s actions give clarity to State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki’s statement on June 12 that Iran could play a “constructive” role in Iraq.
“Clearly, we’ve encouraged them in many cases to play a constructive role,” she said. “But I don’t have any other readouts or views from our end to portray here today.”
“The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn’t fall. We need to coordinate with the Iranians and the Turks need to get in the game and get the Sunni Arabs back into the game, form a new government without [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki,” Graham added on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The direct military involvement of Iran, however, could trigger larger regional Shiite-Sunni clashes and may even represent the start of a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Shiite leadership of Tehran.
WND reported last week that, according to Jordanian and Syrian regime sources, Saudi Arabia has been arming the ISIS and that the Saudis are a driving force in supporting the al-Qaida-linked group.
The Jordanian regime sources told WND they fear the sectarian violence will spill over into their own country as well as into Syria.
ISIS previously posted a video on YouTube threatening to move on Jordan and “slaughter” King Abdullah, whom they view as an enemy of Islam.
The Jordanian sources explained Obama’s reported initial reluctance to assist in airstrikes in Iraq. The sources claimed striking along the Iraq-Syria border would cut off the supply line to rebels fighting in Syria.
DOD Outlines Authority For Employing Military Force Against American Citizens
Obama, fresh off his Rose Garden triumph to free 5 of the most dangerous “international terrorists” in captivity, announced an effort to re-establish a law-enforcement group to prevent “homegrown terrorism,” according to a report in World Net Daily. The panel apparently will include representatives from the National Security Division of the Justice Department, the US Attorney General’s office, and the FBI. Reuters News Service and The Washington Times reported that the new panel, to be announced this week, will focus on cases “that involve Americans who may be spurred to violence for political or prejudicial reasons.” The Obama administration will employ the US military, DHS, and Special Weapons Para –military Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams that were created in non-security related Federal Agencies against unrest by “domestic groups.”
For 5 years, the Obama administration’s has been taking unusual steps to prepare to employ military force against American Citizens, those plans have been issued in a Pentagon Directive and tested in large scale military urban training exercises (reported over the last few years by alarmed citizens and news media throughout the nation). Pentagon’s Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities” has provisions in it to use military force against domestic unrest. The directive was signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn. A copy can be found on the Pentagon Web site at:http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302518p.pdf “This appears to be the latest step in theadministration’s decision to be able to use force within the United States against its citizens on Obama’s orders,” said a defense official opposed to the directive. In a recent New York Times articlehttp://nyti.ms/1ptgjkU it was reported that the Pentagon has developed programs to arm police departments in 38 states with grenade launchers, heavily armored mine resistant vehicles, silencers, flash grenades, 5.56 mm & 7.62 mm machine guns, equipment to detect buried mines, M-16 rifles, night vision goggles, etc.
This latest initiative is designed to prevent “homegrown/domestic terrorism” is continuing the very early efforts by the Obama administration to address their concern about domestic opposition to administration various policies. That very early initiative, began in the first weeks of Obama’s White House tenure, when Obama put conservatives in the bull’s-eye in his campaign speeches to supposedly oppose domestic unrest. At that time a newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warned of the possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists,” including opponents of abortion. The DHS report was followed days later by a report from the Missouri Information Analysis Center that warned law enforcement officials to watch out for individuals with “radical” ideologies based on Christianity and warned of the threat posed by returning Combat Veterans who were considered a danger to the Obama administration, and initiatives to prevent returning Combat Veterans being treated for PTSD from ever being able to own a firearm, which would be violation of their Second Amendment rights.
The Department of Homeland Security has been building up its armed Federal Police Force at a steady pace for 5 years. DHS has been purchasing many heavily armored vehicles for crowd control, an excessive amount of hollow tipped rounds of ammunition (many more millions of rounds of ammunition than the US Army and the US Marine Corps combined uses annually for training their personnel’s annually).
In the below listed article, in addition to the authority to employ military force against American citizens, concerned defense analysts say there has been a surprising creation and buildup by the Obama administration, of military units within non-security-related Federal Agencies, notably the creation of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams in non-security-related Federal Agencies that have no need for SWAT Teams. Those Federal agencies include the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Education Department.
The US Army, the US Army Reserve, the National Guard, and the FBI are fully equipped and qualified to provide security for all those non-security-related agencies in conjunction with local, county, and state law enforcement agencies, if the need arises. The Republican leadership in Congress has been “asleep at the switch” allowing the Obama Administration to create these private armed Para-military Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams to receive salaries, to be funded for their tactical training over the last 5 years, allowing them to buy massive amounts of ammunition, bullet proof vests, helmets, and allowed them to be armed with heavy weapons including machineguns & automatic weapons. Does anyone in Congress really think that the Education Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, etc. needs to be armed to the teeth with SWAT Teams?
The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, that is in controls of the Federal Agency purse strings, should have put a stop to the development of those heavily armed Para-military Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams over the past 5 years; some defense officials in Washington have referred to those heavily armed SWAT Teams as the beginnings of a Private Army. Those SWAT Teams should be eliminated by the Republican Leadership of Congress by eliminating the wasteful funding OF the purchase of millions of rounds of ammunition, the SWAT Teams intensive training programs, their bullet proof vests, their purchase of heavy weapons, helmets, SWAT Team uniforms, armored SWAT Team vehicles, and the salaries being paid to those SWAT Teams. Those SWAT Teams appear to have been developed under the direction of Obama’s appointed Czars, without Congressional authority or approval. The below listed article provides additional details.
DOD Directive outlines Obama’s policy to use the military against citizens
sBy Bill Gertz
The Washington Times
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Pentagon’s directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities”
A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans.
The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest.
“This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive.
Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”
“Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.
“In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.
The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”
“Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states.
Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest.
A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the recent standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters.
Mr. Bundy is engaged in a legal battle with the federal Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees. Along with a group of protesters, Mr. Bundy in April confronted federal and local authorities in a standoff that ended when the authorities backed down.
The Pentagon directive authorizes the secretary of defense to approve the use of unarmed drones in domestic unrest. But it bans the use of missile-firing unmanned aircraft.
“Use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” the directive says.
Defense analysts say there has been a buildup of military units within non-security-related federal agencies, notably the creation of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. The buildup has raised questions about whether the Obama administration is undermining civil liberties under the guise of counterterrorism and counter narcotics efforts.
Other agencies with SWAT teams reportedly include the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department.
The militarization of federal agencies, under little-known statues that permit deputation of security officials, comes as the White House has launched verbal attacks on private citizens’ ownership of firearms despite the fact that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens.
A White House National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment.
President Obama stated at the National Defense University a year ago: “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone or with a shotgun — without due process, nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.”
Three of the 36 endorsed Combat Veterans For Congress, Congressman Duncan D. Hunter, Capt-USMCR (R-CA-50), Lcdr Kirk W. Jorgensen, USCGR/former Capt-USMC (R-CA-52), and Command Master Chief Larry Wilske, USN (Ret) (SEAL) (R-CA-53) are running for election in 2014 in San Diego County. Two of the above listed Combat Veterans For Congress, Lcdr Jorgensen and CMDCM Wilske are in tough primary contests and we respectfully ask you to cast your vote for them on June 3rd. They will bring to Congress their private sector skills and wisdom to better solve problems in government. They will more effectively represent the people of San Diego County, in order to rein in the out of control spending by irresponsible members of Congress. After they are elected, and go to Washington as freshmen Congressmen, they would benefit greatly from the leadership, experience, and guidance of Congressman Duncan D. Hunter, a dedicated American Patriot who has demonstrated his strong support for The Free Enterprise System.
We encourage you to click on the Leadership page of the Combat Veterans For Congress PAC Web site, so you can view combat photos and bios of Congressman Hunter, Lcdr Jorgensen, and CMDCM Wilske; their positions on issues in support of the Republic agree with the Combat Veterans For Congress PAC Mission Statement. We will continue to support and working with Lcdr Jorgensen and CMDCM Wilske after they are elected to Congress, as we have supported Congressman Hunter. The voters are so very fortunate to have two newly endorsed Combat Veteran For Congress of the caliber of Lcdr Jorgensen and CMDCM Wilske running for Congress in San Diego County.
If you have friends, associates, or relatives who know voters in the 50th, 52nd, and 53rd Congressional Districts in San Diego County, kindly pass this E-mail on to them, and ask them to support Congressman Hunter, Lcdr Jorgensen, and CMDCM Wilske by working in their campaigns, providing financial support in any amount to support their campaigns, and/or by networking with others who would support them in their election campaigns.
The military is one of the few remaining institutions producing the caliber of men and women needed to restore this nation to the greatness our Founding Fathers envisioned. We have endorsed three Combat Veteran For Congress in San Diego County that General George Washington would have approved of. They are courageous Combat Veterans who, at one point in their lives, wrote a blank check made payable to “The United States of America” for an amount “up to and including their lives.”
In Memory Of Our Fallen Comrades and Loved Ones
It’s that time of year when we publically honor our fallen comrades, then we go back for another year of quiet reflection on our loyal comrades and family members who are no longer with us. We trust that you will enjoy these two uplifting videos on Memorial Day Weekend; the first video is of the US Marine Corps Band with bagpipes, the second video is a bagpipe rendition of Amazing Grace in memory of our fallen comrades.
My thoughts often go back to my Naval Academy classmates like Col John Ripley, USMC, a true American Patriot, and other shipmates who gave their last full measure of devotion, in far off lands, they did so to defend our liberties and freedoms. We will stay true to their selfless service, and will not allow the domestic enemies of our Judeo-Christian heritage to take precious liberties and freedoms from us, freedoms and liberties that our fellow Americans died to preserve for us.
The US Marine Corps Band marching towards the ALAMEDA COUNTY FAIR GROUNDS in PLEASANTON for the annual CALEDONIAN GAMES BAG PIPE regatta.
The second bagpipe rendition can be watched by clicking on the below listed link.
Cong Tom Cotton, Cpt-USA, Esq. on the House Floor Speaking About The Battle Benghazi Cover Up
By clicking on the below listed link, you can view another endorsed and elected Combat Veteran For Congress, Congressman Thomas B. Cotton, Cpt-USA, Esq. (R-AR-4) speak to his House colleagues from the well of the House floor about The Battle of Benghazi cover up. Congressman Cotton was right on the money; he is running for the US Senate in Arkansas.
You can view Congressman Cotton’s photo in combat gear, and read his bio on the Endorsement page our Web site. We encourage yolu to contact all of your contacts in Arkansas to support Congressman Cotton election to the US Senate. Congressman Cotton repeatedly put his life on the line in Iraq to defend the “Liberties and Freedoms” we all enjoy.
Why Should You Support Conservative Combat Veterans For Congress
“Just 86 of 435 members of the House are Veterans, as are only 17 of 100 senators. This is the lowest percentage of Veterans in Congress since World War II. It’s no coincidence that this same period has seen the gradual collapse of our ability to govern ourselves, a loss of control of the national debt, and a disabling partisanship. Because so few serving in politics have worn their country’s uniform, they have collectively forgotten how to put country before party and self-interest. They have forgotten a “cause greater than self”, and they have lost the knowledge of how to make compromises for the good of the country. Without a history of sacrifice and service, they’ve turned politics into war.”
Please click on the below listed link to see what Obama has promised in his ”Fundamental Change” for the America you once knew, followed by what President Ronald W. Reagan has to say to you today about a vision of the big government, deficits, and out of control spending.
To preserve the freedoms in the Republic, the American legal residents of this country, need to go to the polls in large numbers to elect more Conservative Combat Veterans For Congress. All American citizens who want to right the Ship of State should support the campaigns of the endorsed Combat Veterans For Congress to rein in the out of control spending by the irresponsible members of Congress and they will stay true to their sworn oath as members of the US Armed Forces to protect and defend the US Constitution.
Obama’s foreign-policy ‘flexibility’ seen as weakness
The below listed Op-Ed was written by Admiral James A. Lyons, USN (Ret), the former Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific Fleet; he discussed the unilateral disarmament of the US Armed Forces by the occupant of the Oval Office, while Russia, China, Iran, and Al Q’ieda are building up their military strength.
Admiral Lyons discusses how the Obama administration’s 5 year foreign policy retreat resulted in Russia’s aggression in Crimea and Ukraine, China’s aggression opposing Japan ownership of the Senkaku Islands, Iran’s aggression against Israel & its development of nuclear weapons because Obama unilaterally lifted sanctions, Assad’s aggression against Syrian freedom fighters & his use of chemical agents again this past week against Syrian freedom fighters, and Egypt’s shift from its close relationship with the US to the establishment of a new military alliance with Russia.
Obama halted 30 years of longstanding military aid to Egypt, when the pro US Military Junta ousted Moslem Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi. Morsi was deposed because his supporters were rioting & killing Christians throughout Egypt, and because Egyptian State Security documented for US Intelligence Agency in 2012 that Mohamed Morsi was a co-conspirator in the attack on the US Mission in Benghazi, that resulted in the death of 4 Americans (the Obama administration has withheld the fact the Morsi was a co-conspirator in the attack on the US Mission from the American people for 20 months).
As soon as Obama halted longstanding military aid to the new pro-US military Junta, Putin executed a long term military alliance with Egypt. Russia is now providing Egypt with $2 billion in military aide consisting of MIG 29M/M2 Fulcrum jet fighters, MI-35 helicopters, air defense missiles, coastal anti-ship defensive complexes, light weapons, and supporting ammunition. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are paying Russia for that on-going military aid to Egypt, displacing America’s strongest Arab military ally in the Middle East.
The Black Flag of Al Q’ieda is now flying over territories it has been acquiring in its massive expansion over the last 5 years in Eastern Libya, in Fallujah in Iraq, in large areas of Yemen, in southern Somalia, in areas of Afghanistan, in the tribal region of Pakistan, and Al Q’ieda has been involved in the cocaine trade with FARC terrorists from Columbia, working in the Tri Border area of Argentine/Brazil/Paraguay based in the city of Ciudad del Este. Obama replaced Spec Ops boots on the ground that used to attack and capture Al Q’ieda terrorists for interrogation, with drone strikes from afar that has done nothing to stem the out of control worldwide expansion of Al Q’ieda over the last 5 years. Whenever an Al Q’ieda leader that is taken out by a drone strike, he is simply replaced by another Al Q’ieda leader.
History has taught mankind over the last 2000 years that, “Weakness Encourages Aggression”; President Ronald Reagan understood that well known fact and followed a different course, “Peace Thru Strength.” The current occupant of the Oval Office still doesn’t understand the “Weakness Encourages Aggression” and for the past 5 years he has been intentionally disarming the US Armed Forces and systematically dismantling many of America’s military alliances.
LYONS: Obama’s foreign-policy ‘flexibility’ seen as weakness
U.S. adversaries are watching the timid response in Ukraine
By James A. Lyons
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
The administration Kabuki dance we’re witnessing featuring U.S. refusal to provide nonlethal support equipment for Ukraine is President Obama displaying the new “flexibility” he promised Vladimir Putin he would have after his re-election. In short, it is capitulation.
The administration is trying to make the case that by showing restraint, Mr. Obama will encourage Mr. Putin, the Russian president, to be more willing to negotiate. The mind boggles. What’s taking place in Ukraine has far-reaching implications for the United States and our allies in both Europe and the Far East.
The apparent lack of support from NATO’s political leadershiphttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty is clearly tied to its dependence on Russia for more than 30 percent of their energy requirements. This compromised position was accepted based on the assumption that European security after the Cold War could be guaranteed (with reduced defense budgets) by engaging Russia, not confronting it.
This now appears to be a costly error, since it has been known for some time that NATO’s engagement policies have not required Russia’s reciprocity. However, one positive outcome of the current crisis should be an unmistakable wake-up call for NATO, as its credibility is clearly being challenged.
The administration’s rationale for not providing nonlethal equipment, such as night-vision devices, body armor,medical kits, uniforms, boots and military socks to the “victim” is that it could be perceived by Russia as “destabilizing” and as a “force-multiplier,” and, therefore, too provocative. This is nonsense. Russia has deployed 40,000 fully equipped, modernized troops backed up by tanks, aircraft and helicopters, plus paid KGB goon squads that are creating havoc in Eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Obama responds by debating whether to provide what amounts to humanitarian aid because he doesn’t want to encourage Ukraine’s leadership to take more aggressive action to protect its sovereignty. With this type of convoluted thinking, we’d better hope that this administration and its national security team never gets us into a war that requires real leadership.
What is behind such thinking? Is Mr. Obama concerned that Mr. Putin will somehow scuttle his precious P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations — the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain and France — plus Germany) negotiations with Iran over its nuclear-weapons program? We can only hope that Mr. Putin would take such an action, as those negotiations are nothing but a sham. According to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in about two weeks, once the order is given.
Symptomatic of the Ukraine crisis, no matter where you look, the United States is seen as being in retreat. The stability that America brought to the global strategic equation is being systematically dismantled by the Obama administration, principally by the unilateral disarmament of our military forces.
The Ukraine situation is far from being resolved. China is flexing its military muscle in the Far East. The Middle East remains in chaos. Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability is almost a certainty. With the unpredictability of North Korea, why would the Obama administration at this time make the shocking announcement of deep cuts to the U.S. nuclear forces, four years ahead of the 2010 New START treaty schedule?
Our most secure deterrent, our strategic ballistic-missile submarines, will be reduced by 28 percent by having the capability of 56 launch strikes disabled. Thirty B-52 strategic bombers will be converted to conventional use, which represents a 38 percent reduction in capability, and 50 missiles will be removed from our underground silos, which is the most vulnerable leg of the triad.
With every nuclear power in the world modernizing its strategic forces, particularly Russia and China, plus the known fact that Russia has been cheating on existing treaties, making such a dramatic force-reduction announcement now is more than troubling.
The Obama administration is taking the United States down a course that will put us in an absolute nuclear inferiority position with regard to Russia and perhaps China. It is jeopardizing our national security.
With the United States’ strategic policy adrift, Mr. Putin is controlling events in the Ukraine. With basically no opposition, he will certainly seek more opportunities. In the Far East, we can anticipate that China, seeing our basic inability to respond to the Ukraine crisis, will seize the opportunity to absorb some low-hanging fruit in the South China Sea, most likely contested Philippine islands.
What will it take to make Congress exercise its constitutional responsibilities and maintain its legitimacy by acting in the best interest of the United States? We are being challenged, and we cannot afford to continue to embrace a fantasy foreign policy.
James A. Lyons, U.S. Navy retired admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.
Kit Daniels: Sen. Harry Reid Was Behind BLM Land Grab of The Bundy Ranch
The below listed article with the links will enlighten you about how a corrupt Senator Reid was behind the land grab of the Bundy Ranch. It turns out that Neil Kornze who was raised in Elko, Nevada, and was a former senior advisor on Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid’s staff, joined the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2011 and had been leading the agency as the Principal Deputy Director; he was subsequently formally appointed Director of the Bureau of Land Management, by a US Senate vote of 71 to 28. The BLM overseas more than 245 million acres of public lands nationwide, including 48 million acres in Nevada. So why did Senator Reid’s aide who owed his appointment to his old boss go after Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch that had been in the Bundy family since 1870?
It turns out that in 2012, Harry Reid’s son, Rory Reid who is lawyer with the prominent Harvey Whittemore law firm in Las Vegas, became the chief representative for a Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group. Journalist Marcus Stern with Reuters reported that Senator Reid was heavily involved in a “DEAL,” as well as his oldest son Rory Reid who works for Harvey Whittemore. Rory and his father were both involved in an effort to get the Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion utility scale solar energy facility and panel manufacturing plant in the Nevada desert (instead of helping a US energy company benefit from such a development, Harry Reid imported Communists to do own land in Nevada and develop a utility scale solar energy plant). Marcus Stern wrote that that Senator Reid has been the most prominent advocate of recruiting the Communist Chinese Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group on his trip to Communist China in 2011; it was the same time frame when Senator Reid placed his senior senate advisor, Neil Kornze, in the BLM as the Principal Deputy Director. Marcus Stern reported that Harry Reid applied his political muscle on behalf of developing the Chinese Communist project in Nevada. Then in 2012, Rory Reid facilitated the Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group in developing plans to build the $5 billion solar plant on public land in Nevada by helping the ENN Energy Group locate a 9000 acre desert site that it planned to buy well below the going market value of land sold by Clark County; you see Rory Reid was formerly Chairman of the Clark County Commission and facilitated the deal.
Unfortunately the problem with the area was that the 908 head of cattle in the herd on 67 year old Cliven Bundy’s family Bundy Ranch roamed and grazed free as they had been doing since the 1870, their grazing on open range would interfere with the Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group’s solar field. So Rory Reid, working with Neil Kornze, trumped up the bogus charge that the grazing cattle were destroying an endangered species, the desert tortoise. The desert tortoise were proliferating (they were not in danger), despite the fact that the cattle from the Bundy Ranch had been grazing in their habitant for over 140 years, in fact the Interior Department had implemented euthanasia of the desert tortoise to keep the population from getting out of control. The BLM’s official reason for encircling the Bundy Ranch and family with sniper teams and helicopters was to protect the endangered desert tortoise which the Interior Department had been killing in mass for some time. Journalist Dana Loesch wrote “The tortoise wasn’t of concern when US Senator Harry Reid worked with the BLM and his former senior aide, Neil Kornze, who was now in charge of the BLM when they were literally changing the boundaries of the tortoise habitat to accommodate the development plans of the Communist Chinese Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group and the second most powerful man in Nevada, after Senator Reid, Harvey Whittemore,” who just happened to be the employer for Rory Reid’s and Rory’s three brothers (Harry Reid’s four sons).
Unfortunately the left of center liberal media establishment spun the story so Americans would view Cliven Bundy as grossly violating federal regulations and a law breaker, not the true story of how a corrupt Harry Reid was facilitating a Communist Chinese Energy Giant to come into the United States, displacing any possibility of a US Energy Company from getting to develop solar energy in Nevada, and arranged for the Communists to get ownership of US public land in Nevada below the going market price, while using Gestapo-style tactics to illegally remove a Patriotic Cattle Rancher off the land his family owned since the 1870s in violation of the rights accorded him by the US Constitution, the 10th Amendment, and the Bill of Rights. It should have been a story about the overreach by another bloated, corrupt, and out of control bureaucracy that was doing absolutely nothing to manage the overgrowth on public land that they were supposed to be doing, while in fact, the cattle from the Bundy Ranch were feeding on the overgrowth keeping the overgrowth under control. The principle and courageous stand by Cliven Bundy in the face of an oppressive BLM and the prosecution by Holder’s Justice Department, while fining him $1 million, illegally rustling 400 cattle of his herd, surrounding his family with snipers, knocking down his pregnant daughter-in-law, grinding Clive’s head into the dirt with boots on his head, arresting his son for taking photos of the Gestapo-type tactics, and tazing his son three times, etc. Cliven Bundy’s principled stand was a Seminole event, Patriotic Americans from all over the Republic mobilized, rode to the aide of the rancher with American flags flying, and supported the Bundy Ranch against an out of control government bureaucracy. When Neil Kornze realized the magnitude of the opposition he and Reid engendered from throughout the Republic, resulting in over 3000+ armed Americans who had arrived on the Bundy Ranch (with thousands more enroute), in opposition to his 200 federal armed guards, Kornze released the 400 rustled cattle he intended to sell, and pulled his 200 federal armed guards back from the brink of an armed conflict with very angry American citizens from throughout the Republic, who now had their own snipers in place at the ranch aimed at the 200 federal armed guards. This attempt at grand larceny by the BLM, and violation of Cliven Bundy’s freedoms all Americans are accorded by the US Constitution requires a Congressional investigation and actions in the courts to charge the BLM. We wonder if the Republican leadership in Congress will do anything about this attempt by an agency of the US Government to support a group in Nevada commit grand larceny on behalf of the Chinese Communists Energy Giant, or will they just let it ride, and hope it goes away?
We ask you to encourage those in your address book to support our effort to protect and defend the US Constitution, we try to do this by bringing violations of our freedoms by an out of control and corrupt administration to the attention of Patriotic Americans, by campaigning to elect newly endorsed Combat Veterans For Congress, and by campaigning to re-elect the endorsed and previously elected Combat Veterans For Congress. We plan to endorse over 50+ Combat Veterans For Congress to run for Congress before the November election. We are currently considering the endorsement of a slate of 28 additional Combat Veterans in 16 states to run for Congress in 2014. This November election will be the most important election in 238 years, and may be the last chance to save the Republic from Obama’s intent to “CHANGE” the Free Enterprise System, that created the most effective economic engine in the history of mankind, into a Socialist state—Socialism has never worked in any country it has ever been tried in over the last 100 years.
Breaking: Sen. Harry Reid Behind BLM Land Grab of Bundy Ranch
BLM attempted cover-up of Sen. Reid/Chinese gov’t takeover of ranch for solar farm
Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
April 11, 2014
The Bureau of Land Management, whose director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser, has purged documents from its web site stating that the agency wants Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off of the land his family has worked for over 140 years in order to make way for solar panel power stations.
Corrupt Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) working with the Chinese Communist gov’t to take land from hard-working Americans.
Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of “utility-scale solar power generation facilities” on “public lands.”
“Non-Governmental Organizations have expressed concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for offsite mitigation for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not durable with the presence of trespass cattle,” the document states.
Obama Administration Released 68,000 Illegal Criminal Immigrants
Obama administration political appointees in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been recruiting and appointing many pro-amnesty lawyers in key management positions throughout DHS. The goal of the Obama administration in placing those pro-amnesty lawyers throughout DHS was to dismantle the deporting infrastructure it took 12 years for the US government to create. Those pro-amnesty lawyers have been preventing ICE Agents, Border Patrol Agents, and CBP Inspectors from enforcing the Federal Immigration Laws they were sworn to uphold. Those pro-amnesty attorneys have instructed ICE Agents to “walk away” from hundreds of thousands of cases that should be prosecuted. They eventually directed ICE Agents to release 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” into the general public, thus completing the corruption of that once proud Federal Law Enforcement Agency. The “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” were not in jail because of driving infractions—-they were felons who had been tried and convicted in Federal and Superior Courts because of serious criminal infractions, or had been convicted of very serious misdemeanors. Traffic violations like driving under the influence of alcohol or even vehicular manslaughter do not count toward ICE’s description of “Criminal Illegal Immigrant.”
The 68,000 serious “Criminal Illegal Immigrants,” released by the Obama administration will pick up where they left off, and continue with their very serious crime sprees, committing murders, rapes, burglaries, car theft, drug dealing, drug smuggling, human trafficking, armed robberies, attacking law enforcement officers, and much more that they were previously arrested and convicted for. The pro-amnesty attorneys at DHS could have deported the 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” to Mexico, but opted instead to release those dangerous convicted criminals into the general public. American citizens who are concerned about the safety of their sons, daughters, grandchildren, sisters, wives, mothers, grandparents, small businesses, etc. will have to be on high alert to protect them from this new and very dangerous threat foisted upon them by the Obama administration. The “Criminal Illegal Immigrant” releases occurred without the required formal notification of local Law Enforcement Agencies (law enforcement has a need to know whenever dangerous felons are released prematurely, so they can alert police officers of the perceived spike in criminal activity in their jurisdictions), and those dangerous felons were released without notifying the victims of those “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” who will be in fear of their lives because they testified against those felons in court, in order to get them convicted. The political appointees at DHS simply unlocked the jail house doors and let 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrant” walk free. Those “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” will now prey on American citizens, and will seriously complicate the task of law enforcement officers in their attempt to protect law abiding American citizens.
That unlawful release of those serious “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” and the complete corruption of DHS by Obama’s appointees into key management positions, is further proof that Obama continues to violate the US Constitution with impunity, as well as violate Federal Immigration Laws of the United States. In an interview on WBEZ-FM in Chicago on September 6, 2001, Obama said “The US Constitution reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day” and said “the US Constitution has deep flaws, and the Founding Fathers had an enormous blind spot when they wrote it.” He also implied in that interview that the US Constitution was outdated, because he said, “it only reflects the time period of the Colonials and our Founding Fathers.” Obama raised his right hand twice sworn on a bible to uphold the US Constitution when he was inaugurated in 2008 and 2012; he swore “I, Barrack Hussein Obama, pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”—–we know by his actions over the past 5 years, that his two sworn pledges were two more lies to add to, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and “If you like your current healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan.” and “Your healthcare premiums will be lowered by $2500.” and “The public will have 5 days to look at every bill that lands on my desk before I sign it.” and “I knew nothing about the IRS targeting conservative groups before the 2012 election.” and “I knew nothing about the “Fast and Furious” gun running operation to Mexican drug cartels.” and “I will have the most transparent administration in history.” and “I will restore trust in government.” and ”In a speech at the UN 2 weeks after he knew 4 Americans were murdered in Benghazi by Al Q’ieda terrorists, Obama told the entire world; “The attack on the US Mission in Benghazi was the outgrowth of a demonstration against a U-Tube video that went bad.” American citizens are now used to witnessing one lie after another by the occupant of the Oval Office, yet the left of center liberal media establishment continues to cover up the lies emanating from the Oval Office.
You will be able to read the details of the illegal release of the “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” in the below listed news article. We have information that although 870,000 Illegal Immigrants have been ordered to be deported from the United States, following their conviction in trials in US Federal Immigration Courts, that the pro-amnesty attorneys in key management positions at DHS have ignored those court orders, and those 870,000 Illegal Immigrants remain in the United States; ICE has been told to leave them alone, to “walk away” and “not enforce Federal Immigration Laws.” Over 40 million unemployed Americans citizens are searching for employment in the 5th year of the worst economic recovery in 70 years, yet their search for employment continues to be undercut by nearly 20 million Illegal Immigrants being paid very low wages under the table with no taxes deducted from their cash payments by US employers. There were over 11 million Illegal Immigrants in the United State when I was recruited as an Armed Federal Law Enforcement Officer in the newly established Department of Homeland Security in 2002—DHS knows that over 800,000 Illegal Immigrants continue to enter the United States thru the wide open borders each year, and for the 12 years since 2002 approximately 9.6 million Illegal Immigrants have come across the wide open borders (you might find it interesting to learn that a DHS official testified that US authorities are not “routinely” notified when foreign sex offenders enter the United States.). So the 11 million Illegal Immigrants figure that the Obama administration and the left of center liberal media establishment has kept referring to for 12 years, is more accurately 20 million Illegal Immigrants, not the 11 million figure that were illegally in the US in 2002. It is interesting to note that US military personnel are employed to secure the borders of South Korea, Afghanistan, and the Sinai, and are not employed by the US Congress or the occupant of the Oval Office to secure US borders.
The American people are wondering, whether the Republican leadership of the House and Senate, intends to do anything about the violation of Federal Law by Obama’s civilian appointees at DHS in the unlawful release of 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants,” many of whom are violent criminals The Speaker has control of the purse strings and funds DHS; he could have put pressure on DHS’s by threatening to only approve very low salaries for the pro-amnesty lawyers who are aggressively corrupting enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws at DHS. The current Republican leadership could have done something to stop the release of 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” and could insist that the DHS deport 870,000 Illegal Immigrants who were ordered deported by US Federal Immigration Courts. It was always the primary responsibility of every one of the previous 43 US Presidents to enforce all Federal Laws passed by Congress, to protect and defend the US Constitution, to enforce Federal Immigration Laws, and to ensure that American citizens were protected from the threats of foreign convicted felons who had been preying on them. The current occupant of the Oval Office, by his actions over the last 5 years, has been intentionally shredding the “Rule of Law” and preventing Federal Law Enforcement Officers from “ enforcing the “Federal Laws” of the Republic that the 43 previous US Presidents upheld in the execution of their office.
SSA Michael Cutler, INS (Ret) provided the below listed information from Senator Jeff Sessions, and highlights how Obama continues to “shreds the Immigration Laws” that he swore to uphold, and cites examples of how Obama “refuses to preserve, protect, and defend the US Constitution”:
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) recently released a critical alert about the status of immigration enforcement in the United States. In it, he writes, “DHS has blocked the enforcement of Immigration Law for the overwhelming majority of violations – and is planning to widen that amnesty even further.”
Put another way,
“At least 99.92% of illegal immigrants and visa overstays without known crimes on their records did not face removal.”
Senator Sessions’ alert continues:
“Those who do not facially meet the Administration’s select ‘priorities’ are free to illegally work in the United States and to receive taxpayer benefits, regardless of whether or not they come into contact with immigration enforcement.”
What we have is an Administration that is creating a de facto amnesty and encouraging more Illegal Immigrants to illegally enter the United States, granting employment authorization to “DREAMERS” and other illegal aliens, all the while American workers continue to struggle to find employment.
SSA Michael Cutler’s most recent commentary for California for Population Stabilization (CAPS) addresses the serious damage being done to America, and Americas by the ongoing expansion of the use of what the Obama administration claims is “prosecutorial discretion” but which, in reality amounts to “Gross Dereliction of Duty.”
REPORT: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION RELEASED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRIMINALS INTO THE GENERAL PUBLIC
President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security caught then released 68,000 illegal aliens who had previously been convicted of a crime, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows.
The report, provided to Breitbart News ahead of its late Sunday evening release, reviews internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) metrics to conclude that the Obama administration released 35 percent—or 68,000—convicted criminal aliens back into the U.S. general population when they could have been deported. “The criminal alien releases typically occur without formal notice to local law enforcement agencies and victims,” CIS’s Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, added.
By “criminal,” ICE means people who have been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony that is not a traffic violation. For instance, traffic violations like Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol or even vehicular manslaughter do not count toward this description of “criminal alien.” As for the definition of “alien,” ICE mostly means illegal aliens, though some are legal aliens when they are considered deportable legal aliens—which is possible for legal immigrants who have committed a serious crime, like a felony.
The documents also show ICE only deported a small fraction of the aliens they encountered overall.
“In 2013, ICE targeted only 195,000, or 25 percent, out of 722,000 potentially deportable aliens they encountered,” CIS’s Vaughan wrote. “Most of these aliens came to ICE’s attention after incarceration for a local arrest.”
This report comes out on the heels of a report from the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) last week which found that only .08 percent of the aliens deported in 2013 were not serial immigration law violators or convicted of serious crimes.
In response to these findings from CIS that follow up on his office’s report last week, Sessions said immigration law in America has essentially ceased to exist.
“The preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that immigration enforcement in America has collapsed,” Sessions said. “Even those with criminal convictions are being released. DHS is a department in crisis. Secretary [Jeh] Johnson must reject the President’s demands to weaken enforcement further and tell him that his duty, and his officers’ duty, is to enforce the law – not break it. As Homeland Secretary, Mr. Johnson is tasked with ensuring the public safety and the rule of law. But Secretary Johnson is not meeting these duties.”
The CIS report also contains a breakdown per city of percentages of criminal aliens who were released back into the population. San Antonio’s 79 percent is the highest, where ICE encountered 36,228 criminal aliens and released 28,680 back into the general population in 2013. New York City’s 71 percent is next, where ICE agents encountered 7,571 criminal aliens and released 5,391 of them. Washington, D.C. follows that, with ICE agents encountering 8,688 criminal aliens and releasing 64 percent, or 5,558, of them into the public. Other cities with high percentages include Salt Lake City, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Newark, and Buffalo. Notably, many of these cities are not in border states, which means visa overstays and illegal aliens who crossed the border but migrated further inward are as much a problem as the actual U.S.-Mexico border in terms of stopping the flow and enforcing the law.
“These findings raise further alarm over the Obama administration’s pending review of deportation practices, which reportedly may further expand the administration’s abuse of ‘prosecutorial discretion,’” CIS’s Vaughan wrote. “Interior enforcement activity has already declined 40 percent since the imposition of “prosecutorial discretion” policies in 2011. Rather than accelerating this decline, there is an urgent need to review and reverse the public safety and fiscal harm cause by the president’s policies.”
Sessions echoed Vaughan’s concerns, saying the lack of enforcement for immigration laws further hurts the ability of American citizens to obtain employment.
“American citizens have a legal and moral right to the protections our immigration laws afford – at the border, the interior and the workplace,” Sessions said. “The administration has stripped these protections and adopted a government policy that encourages new arrivals to enter illegally or overstay visas by advertising immunity from future enforcement. Comments from top Administration officials, such as Attorney General Holder’s claim that amnesty is a civil right, or Vice President Biden’s claim that those here illegally are all US citizens (apparently including someone whose visa expired yesterday), demonstrate the administration’s increasing belief in an open borders policy the American public has always rejected.”
Obama Caught Secretly Giving “Free” US Army and US Marine Corps Equipment to Putin While He Was Invading Crimea and It Continues Now
Another endorsed and elected Combat Veteran For Congress, Congressman James Bridenstine, Lcdr-USNAR (R-OK-1) uncovered another Obama secret scandal, the deal that was entered into behind closed doors by Obama with Putin, and was approved by Obama to give Russia “Free of Charge” crucial, mid-grade sensitive US military technology, used by US Special Operations Forces to get ready for combat operations.
The National Nuclear Security Agency has been providing Multiple Intergrade Laser Engagement Systems (MILES) to Russia; the transfer has been facilitated by Obama’s democratic Secretary of Energy Ernest Moritz he is overseeing this treasonous act and illegal transfer of crucial, mid-grad, sensitive US military technology to Putin while he was invading Crimea and poised to invade Ukraine. Moritz is continuing the transfer in the midst of Putin the mobilization of 150,000 Russian troops on the border of Ukraine.
Every American should be informed of this illegal act by the Obama administration, should read the below listed article, and should click on the three links to see how the Democrats in Congress have been betraying the American people. The Democrats in the Senate and House under Reid, Pelosi and the leadership of Obama have by their actions been degrading the “Combat Effectiveness” the US Armed Forces. They have been caught “RED HANDED” secretly giving US Army and US Marine Corps US military sensitive technology to Putin, instead of giving it to the National Guard, the US Marine Corps Reserve, and the US Army Reserve who desperately need that that type of equipment to prepare their personnel for combat operations.
The question every American should be asking is why didn’t Speaker Boehner halt the “illegal” transfer of crucial, mid-grade technology US military sensitive technology, to Russia “Free Of Charge” and allowed it to inserted in the House Fiscal Year 2014 and Fiscal 2015 budgets. Why did it require the investigation of an endorsed and elected Combat Veteran For Congress, Congressman Bridenstine to discover the traitorous and illegal transfer of US military sensitive technology to Russia “Free of Charge”? Will the Speaker “IMMDIATELY” stop this illegal transfer of US military sensitive technology to Russia, or will he do what he has been doing about the Benghazi investigation for 18 months, nothing, frustrating 186 Congressmen who keep asking Boehner to appoint a Select House Investigative Committee on The Battle of Benghazi, so they can finally have subpoena powers that the 5 House investigations on Benghazi do not have. To cover up what happened in The Battle of Benghazi, the Obama administration has classified information on Benghazi that should never been classified and has prevented 32 US personnel who were on the ground during The Battle of Benghazi from testifying—-the only way to get around that is for the House to have subpoena powers which Boehner has prevented 186 Congressmen from doing for 18 month.
Mr Speaker, 26 million Veterans in the United States, millions of patriotic American citizens, all the members of the US Armed Forces, Republican in the nation, Independent in the nation, Tea Party Patriot in the nation, and many Blue Dog Democrats are waiting for you to “do something”. Please don’t go before the cameras again, and make another indignant speech—we’ve had enough of your indignant speeches for the last 3 years, which are followed by your lack of action. Your lackadaisical attention to your duties allowed US Military’s sensitive crucial mid-grade technology to be transferred “Free of Charge ” to Russia, you also allowed the democrats to cut military benefits to poorly paid enlisted military personnel, to eliminate military commissaries, to reduce the US navy below its strength at the beginning of WWI, reduce the US Army below its strength at the beginning of WWII, eliminate entire categories of US Air Force Combat aircraft, allowed Obama to kill the cornerstone of US Naval Power–The Tomahawk & Hellfire Missile Programs, are in fact allowing the democrats to dismantle the US Armed Forces. Will you ever “do something”——you do control the purse string and have massive powers of control given to you by the framers of the US Constitution?
U.S. GIVES RUSSIA FREE MILITARY EQUIPMENT USED BY ARMY, MARINES
Posted on March 28, 2014 by Patriots Billboard
WHY ISN’T ANYBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS? WHY ARE WE HELPING RUSSIA AND SUPPLYING THEM WITH MILITARY TECHNOLOGY THEY DIDN’T HAVE UNTIL WE GAVE IT TO THEM. IT’S NOT JUST SNOWDEN GIVING AWAY OUR MILITARY TECH; OBAMA HAS ALLOWED CHINA AND RUSSIA MORE OF OUR SECRETS THAN ALL OF THEIR SPY’S COULD POSSIBLY STEAL.
3-28-14 Behind closed doors the U.S. government is giving Russia free military equipment—also used to train American troops—even after President Obama announced punitive sanctions against Moscow and, more importantly, a suspension in military engagement over the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
The secret operation was exposed this week by members of Congress that discovered it in the process of reviewing the Fiscal Year 2014 budget and the proposed Fiscal Year 2015 budget request. It turns out that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has been providing the Russian Federation with the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES), the federal legislators say. The U.S. military uses MILES for tactical force-on-force training because it has a system of lasers and dummy ammunition to simulate ground combat.
It’s a crucial, military-grade technology that’s similar to a “laser tag” available in some commercial markets, according to one of the outraged lawmakers (Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine) that helped uncover the scandal. Bridenstine, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has joined forces with Ohio Republican Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, to demand an end to the program. Along with about a dozen other House colleagues they penned a letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who oversees the agency carrying out the “irresponsible military equipment transfers” to Russia.
The Obama administration’s planned supply to the Russian Federation is a grave mistake given the recent invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, the legislators point out. “It is difficult to imagine a worse time to provide military-grade technology employed by the U.S. Marine Corps, Army, and Special Operations Forces to Russia than when it has illegally invaded Ukraine and is violating the intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty,” the letter to Moniz says. “To make matters worse, it is our understanding from the budget documents that the Department has been, and continues to propose, providing this technology to Russia free-of-charge.”
This is preposterous and borders on criminal if you really think about it. As if we need reminding, Congressman Turner recants Putin’s “brazen disregard for the sovereignty and stability of Eastern Europe” as well as his disregard for international law. “Despite this overwhelming evidence that Putin is not our ally, it is astonishing that the Obama Administration would still provide superior, U.S. military technology to an aggressive and advancing Russia,” Turner said. “The United States must seriously redirect its approach and immediately terminate all military aid to Russia.”
President Obama has already proven to be an international joke for his response to the worsening crisis in Ukraine. Even the mainstream media in this country has blasted the commander-in-chief’s foreign policy as based on fantasy. One famously liberal magazine published a satirical article saying that the Obama administration froze Putin’s Netflix account as a “major ramping up of sanctions.” In a piecepublished a few days ago, a former veteran congressman wrote this: “The embarrassment of U.S. impotence in dealing with Russian aggression in the Ukraine is only the beginning of what will likely be a series of foreign policy disasters.”
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The Next Shoe Just Dropped: Court Denies Attorney-Client Privilege
Tyler Durden’s picture
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2014 22:14 -0400
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Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,
In the Land of the Free, people grow up hearing a lot of things about their freedom.
You’re told that you live in the freest country on the planet. You’re told that other nations ‘hate you’ for your freedom.
And you’re told that you have the most open and fair justice system in the world.
This justice system is supposedly founded on bedrock principles– things like a defendant being presumed innocent until proven guilty. The right to due process and an impartial hearing. The right to counsel and attorney-client privilege.
Yet each of these core pillars has been systematically dismantled over the years:
1. So that it can operate with impunity outside of the law, the federal government has set up its own secret FISA courts to rubber stamp NSA surveillance.
According to data obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, of the nearly 34,000 surveillance requests made to FISA courts in the last 35-years, only ELEVEN have been rejected.
Unsurprising given that FISA courts only hear the case from the government’s perspective. It is literally a one-sided argument in FISA courts. Hardly an impartial hearing, no?
2. The concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ may officially exist in courts, but administratively it was thrown out long ago.
These days there are hundreds of local, state, and federal agencies that can confiscate your assets, levy your bank account, and freeze you out of your life’s savings. None of this requires a court order.
By the time a case goes to court, you have been deprived of the resources you need to defend yourself. You might technically be presumed innocent, but you have been treated and punished like a criminal from day one.
3. Attorney-Client privilege is a long-standing legal concept which ensures that communication between an attorney and his/her client is completely private.
In Upjohn vs. the United States, the Supreme Court itself upheld attorney-client privilege as necessary “to encourage full and frank communication between attorneys and their clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law. . .”
It doesn’t matter what you’re accused of– theft. treason. triple homicide. With very limited exceptions, an attorney cannot be compelled to testify against a client, nor can their communications be subpoenaed for evidence.
Yet in a United States Tax Court decision announced on Wednesday, the court dismissed attorney client privilege, stating that:
“When a person puts into issue his subjective intent in deciding how to comply with the law, he may forfeit the privilege afforded attorney-client communications.”
In other words, if a person works with legal counsel within the confines of the tax code to legitimately minimize the amount of taxes owed, that communication is no longer protected by attorney-client privilege.
Furthermore, the ruling states that if the individuals do not submit attorney-client documentation as required, then the court would prohibit them from introducing any evidence to demonstrate their innocence.
Unbelievable.
While it’s true that attorney-client privilege has long been assailed in numerous court cases (especially with regards to tax matters), this decision sets the most dangerous precedent yet.
With this ruling, government now has carte blanche to set aside long-standing legal protections and even deny a human being even the chance to defend himself.
Naturally, you won’t hear a word about this in the mainstream media.
But it certainly begs the question, what’s the point of even having a trial? Or a constitution?
When every right and protection you have can be disregarded in their sole discretion, one really has to wonder how anyone can call it a ‘free country’ any more.
Justice Stevens & the 2nd Amendment, from the ABA Journal, my notes in []
Posted: 18 April 2014
[Another reason for secession. This article is from this week’s, 18 April 2014, ABA Journal.
Notice Justice Stevens wants the legislature to change the 2nd Amendment. Note how the liberal justices ALWAYS ignore Article V. Article V is the article which explains how amendments are to be made. Stevens, and the others, all want amendments to go through the legislature. A legislature controlled by the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Keep in mind that Pelosi’s net worth before she became a “public servant”, was a negative value – she owed more than she was worth. Since becoming a “public servant”, her net worth is over $25,000,000.00. Yupper, that’s 25 million U.S. Dollars. As to Reid, go to the Youtube address posted as the first line after [ ] in the Bundy Farm Fact Check post, posted yesterday.
As noted in “The Albany Plan Re-Visited”, Justice Stevens has not got a clue as to who the militia is. Federal Statute defines the militia of the United States. Last time that I looked, that was every able bodied male between the ages of 16 and 54, the only exceptions being first responders and, get this, elected officials. Women were excluded. Now, it has been many years since I looked, but I doubt that the definition has changed extensively, if at all.
Secession, pure and simple, secession.]
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Constitutional Law
Retired Justice Stevens proposes this fix for the Second Amendment
Posted Apr 14, 2014 6:25 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
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Retired U.S. Supreme Court
Justice John Paul Stevens.
Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com
Legislators rather than federal judges should be allowed to decide what kind of guns can be carried by private citizens, as well as when and how those weapons can be used, according to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
Toward that end, Stevens is proposing a change to the Second Amendment to clarify that it applies only to citizens’ right to keep and bear arms in state militias. He offers his suggestion in a Washington Post essay taken from his new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.
Stevens thinks the court misinterpreted the amendment in recent opinions finding a right to own a handgun at home for self-defense. The amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Stevens would add five words to the amendment, so that it reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
Gene therapy
Ingenious
Fixing a body’s broken genes is becoming possible
Feb 8th 2014 | New York | From the print edition
Timekeeper
IT SOUNDS like science fiction, and for years it seemed as though it was just that: fiction. But the idea of gene therapy—introducing copies of healthy genes into people who lack them, to treat disease—is at last looking as if it may become science fact.
The field got off to a bad start, with the widely reported death of an American liver patient in 1999. In 2003 some French children who were being treated with it for an immune-system problem called SCID developed leukaemia. Since then, though, things have improved. Indeed one procedure, for lipoprotein lipase deficiency (which causes high levels of blood fats, with all the problems those can bring), has been approved, in Europe, for clinical use.
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Eyesight and eye health
University of Pennsylvania
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Genetic engineering
The most recent success, announced last month in the Lancet, was of an experimental treatment for choroideremia, a type of blindness. This is caused by mutation of the gene for a protein called REP1. Without REP1, the eye’s light receptors degenerate. Robert MacLaren of Oxford University used a virus to deliver working versions of the REP1 gene to the most light-sensitive part of the retina. Five of the six participants in the trial duly experienced an improvement in their sensitivity to light. Two were so improved that they could read more letters than previously on a standard eye chart.
Dr MacLaren’s work complements that of Albert Maguire and Jean Bennett at the University of Pennsylvania, who use gene therapy to treat another eye disease, Leber’s congenital amaurosis. A defective version of a gene called RPE65 means that, in this condition, retinal cells are starved of vitamin A, which also causes blindness. Putting normal copies of RPE65 into the retina leads, as with REP1, to greater light sensitivity and—sometimes—clearer vision.
Drs MacLaren, Maguire and Bennett all use adeno-associated viruses (a type not known to cause illness, and which does not much provoke the immune system) to carry their genetic payloads to the target. Luigi Naldini of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, in Milan, employs a rather scarier vector—one derived from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS—because its life cycle involves it integrating its genes into its host cells’ nuclei.
Last year Dr Naldini and his colleagues reported that, using their safely neutered version of HIV, they had inserted working copies of genes into blood stem cells which lack them, in order to treat metachromatic leukodystrophy (which damages nerves) and Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (which harms the immune system and reduces blood’s ability to clot). In both cases—though in only a handful of patients, for the diseases are rare—Dr Naldini’s approach either prevented the disease or at least halted its progress.
The rarity of metachromatic leukodystrophy, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome and many other diseases for which gene therapy might be appropriate means a lot of the applications of this approach are narrow. But a different one—constructing tailored genes and using them to guide the immune system—may have wider application, specifically against cancer.
Michel Sadelain, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, in New York, is one of those at the forefront of a method that works this way. It employs chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cells, which are engineered versions of T-cells, the part of the immune system that kills body cells, including tumorous ones, which have become threats.
Dr Sadelain’s trick is to take natural T-cells from patients (specifically, leukaemia and lymphoma patients) and add to them genes which turn those cells’ attention to the tumour in question, causing them to seek out its cells and destroy them. He then returns the modified cells to the patient, where they multiply and attack.
The CAR pool
The extra genes in CAR cells are derived in part from monoclonal-antibody genes. These have, in turn, been selected for their affinity to the target tumour. Because CAR cells multiply in the body this is, as Dr Sadelain puts it, like creating a living drug.
Last year Dr Sadelain’s team, and also another group led by Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania, published results showing the promise of CAR cells in treating people with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Dr Sadelain’s paper showed that they caused full remission in all five adult patients treated (though two subsequently died of complications, one set of which was unrelated to the treatment); Dr June’s, that they eradicated the cancer from two children. And, at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology held in December, both researchers reported further successes.
There is, moreover, one further technique that might bring gene therapy into the mainstream. Current approaches work by adding genes to affected cells. But it may be possible to modify those cells’ existing, broken genes, using a method called CRISPR-Cas9 editing, a process that takes advantage of a natural antiviral system which chops up genetic material.
CRISPR-Cas9 editing is specific to particular sequences of genetic letters, and can thus be tweaked to do a researcher’s bidding. In a recent edition of Cell, Sha Jiahao of Nanjing Medical University showed how to use it to execute the reverse of gene therapy—creating genetic problems, rather than solving them—in monkeys. His aim was to produce model organisms that might help understanding of diseases in human beings (though making such models out of monkeys is controversial). But the technique might eventually be employed to do running repairs on damaged DNA in people.
That, if it ever happens, is a long way off. In the meantime, the promise of gene therapy can be seen in the fact that it is attracting lawyers. The University of Pennsylvania has licensed its CAR technology to Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm. The pair of them are now fending off a lawsuit brought by competitors including Juno Therapeutics, the creation of three research centres of which Memorial Sloan-Kettering is one. For patients, that suggests gene therapy really is something worth fighting over.
From the print edition: Science and technology
[This is just one of many reasons that I subscribe to both The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. The Lancet is reporting, and The Economist re-reporting, that someone has figured out a cure for HIV/aids. Delivery is a few years away, but someone HAS figured out how to cure the disease. So, where are ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and FOX? My local NBC station, as recently as two weeks ago, ran a ‘story’ on how bad AIDS is and what its doing to us. They ran their story over two weeks AFTER The Economist printed this article citing the research published in The Lancet. What news media????
BTW, the article preceding this one, reports on how a 3D printer is getting closer to printing real human organs, and this without using stem cells!!!]
This woman has a lot to say and she does it very eloquently.
Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer’s television series, “A World of Ideas.” The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas . Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after an interview in 2004 she was awarded tenure. This article by her is something else.
No He Can’t – – – by Anne Wortham
Fellow Americans,
Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America. I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival – all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. I would have to believe that “fairness” is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.
Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.
So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine – what little there is left – for the chance to feel good.
There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.
Justplainbill's Weblog 
Current News from France, from John Fasb, [nc]
Our wonderful media SURE DON’T KNOW HOW TO REPORT THE NEWS(Please read and forward):
Subject: FRANCE
Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not
being reported as it should.
To give you an idea of what’s going on in that country where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about 600,000 Jews, here is an E-mail that came from a Jew
living in France.
Please read! “Will the world say nothing – again – as it did in Hitler’s time?” He writes: “I AM A JEW — therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing.
Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France …
1. In Lyon , a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire.
2. In Montpellier , the Jewish religious center was firebombed.
3. so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles ;
4. so was a Jewish school in Creteil – all recently.
5. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails
6. and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus, in Paris , the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted.
7. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars.
8. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
9. According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days.
10. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’
11. A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France
12. A Jewish couple in their 20’s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne -France (the woman was pregnant).
13. A Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles , France .. This was just in the past week
So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do – at least – these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don’t ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.
I remind you of what Pastor Neimollersaid in World War II:
‘First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.’
Second, boycott France and French products. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred.
So boycott their wines and their perfumes
Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs.
Boycott their movies.
Definitely boycott their shores.
If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your co-workers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you – and the people that you care – about need their help.
The number one bestselling book in France is…. ‘September 11: The Frightening Fraud’ which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon!
PLEASE PASS THIS ON. LETS NOT HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF! THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIM
E.
Cu