Saturday, February 2, 2013

Current Events - February 2, 2013




Obama Blames Economy on 'Bad Decisions'

In his weekly address, President Barack Obama blamed the economic problems on "bad decisions."

"[T]his week, we also received the first estimate of America’s economic growth over the last few months. And it reminded us that bad decisions in Washington can get in the way of our economic progress," said Obama, presumably referring to the uptick in unemployment from 7.8 percent to 7.9 percent and the news that the economy contracted in the final quarter of last year.

The president did not name which decisions were "bad," and who specifically was to blame for those "bad decisions." But he did blame Washington.

"2013 can be a year of solid growth, more jobs, and higher wages. But that will only happen if we put a stop to self-inflicted wounds in Washington. Everyone in Washington needs to focus not on politics but on what’s right for the country; on what’s right for you and your families. That’s how we’ll get our economy growing faster. That’s how we’ll strengthen our middle class. And that’s how we’ll build a country that rewards the effort and determination of every single American," said Obama.

Obama reiterated his support for a "balanced approach" going forward.

"We all agree that it’s critical to cut unnecessary spending. But we can’t just cut our way to prosperity. It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work today. It could slow down our recovery. It could weaken our economy. And it could cost us jobs – now, and in the future," said Obama.

"What we need instead is a balanced approach; an approach that says let’s cut what we can’t afford but let’s make the investments we can’t afford to live without. Investments in education and infrastructure, research and development – the things that will help America compete for the best jobs and new industries."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-blames-economy-bad-decisions_699231.html

Effort to abolish local sheriffs a stealth federal power grab?

A news report has been quietly making its way around the alternative media, under the radar screen, concerning a Delaware legal decision to strip county sheriffs of their arrest powers in the state.

In their role as their counties’ chief law enforcement officer, sheriffs answer only to the U. S. Constitution, not to Washington, D.C. That is why liberty-loving Americans, fearful of the growing power of the federal government, look to the sheriffs as a check. Indeed, on the matter of the Obama regime’s gun control and gun ban, more and more county sheriffs are saying “no.”

It should come as no surprise then that the forces of tyranny mean to curtail the powers of the county sheriff, if not abolish the institution altogether. In that nefarious effort, the State of Delaware is leading the way.

The mainstream media has not reported the story, but the son of Vice President Joe Biden, who serves as Attorney General for the state of Delaware, has issued a mandate to county commissioners informing them that sheriffs in the state's three counties no longer have arrest powers.

When the information reached this reporter late yesterday evening, further investigation revealed that there is a nationwide effort to strip local sheriffs of most of their enumerated powers that are mandated in the state constitutions of the various states. Such a move would have the net effect of abolishing local sheriffs departments and strengthening the power of federal law enforcement agencies.

And this is not the first time such an effort has been launched.

In the 1970s an initiative was launched by county supervisors in California to eliminate the office of sheriff, but one supervisor instead was able to persuade two state legislators to get a question placed on the California ballot as to whether or not the office of the sheriff should be an elected office. The measure passed overwhelmingly, and the mandate for elected sheriffs was placed in the state constitution.

And in 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was set to eliminate all of the 48 states in order to implement nine regional governments that would operate as extensions of the federal government. All local law enforcement would be eliminated. The plan failed, but the fact that it was attempted points to an ever present, insidious stealth plan on the part of some within the federal government to take away the right of the people and the states to elect their own local law enforcement and to vastly strengthen the hand of the numerous federal law enforcement agencies that currently operate throughout America.

Proponents of such unconstitutional measures desire to forge a world government of sorts under the control of the United Nations. Various methods are used to expedite this plan, including the infamous 'Agenda 21' that has raised the alarm among some citizens.

The key to the success of the implementation of such plans is enforcement. How would the federal government insure compliance among the states and their citizens?

Dozens of federal agencies have their own law enforcement divisions, and those divisions are growing quickly under the Obama Administration. Homeland Security is purchasing 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets. The IRS will need roughly 16,500 new employees to implement ObamaCare. The White House has just sent $500 million to the IRS to enforce the new healthcare law. The EPA's recent penchant for using heavy handed tactics outside the authority given to it by Congress has placed businesses under the gun and stymied economic recovery. Citizens complain that the agency regularly violates private property rights.

And then there are such agencies as the FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE, and others that are under suspicion for widespread corruption in the Fast and Furious scandal, a fact that has not hampered Congressional Democrats from calling for massive new funding and expanded powers for these agencies.

The move to weaken and dismantle sheriffs offices around the country is viewed by Constitutional watchdogs as an ominous signal in a broader attempt to usurp the rights of citizens on the local level in lieu of an expanded nationalized police force under the control of a federal bureaucracy.

http://www.examiner.com/article/effort-to-abolish-local-sheriffs-a-stealth-federal-power-grab

Rand Paul: We Don't Have To Pay England To Be Our Friend, Why Do We Have to Pay Egypt?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQFH8o4aXgM

35 terror training camps now operating inside U.S.

Government does nothing to impede expansion of 'Soldiers of Allah' network

A radical jihadist group responsible for nearly 50 attacks on American soil is operating 35 terrorist training camps across the nation, but the U.S. government refuses to include the organization on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra, known in the U.S. as “Muslims of America,” has purchased or leased hundreds of acres of property – from New York to California – in which the leader, Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, boasts of conducting “the most advanced training courses in Islamic military warfare.”

In a recruitment video captured from Gilani’s “Soldiers of Allah,” he states in English: “We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.”

Though Gilani and his organization is suspected of committing assassinations and firebombings inside the U.S., and is also suspected of the beheading murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, the terrorist camps spread through the country continue to expand in numbers and population.

A documentary called “Homegrown Jihad: Terrorist Training Camps Around the U.S.” provides compelling evidence of how “Muslims of America” operates with impunity inside the U.S. In the video, producers visited some camps, attempted to visit others and interviewed neighbors and local police officials. It also include excerpts of the “Muslims of America” recruitment video.
 
The recruitment video shows American converts to Islam being instructed in the operation of AK-47 rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns and C4 explosives. It provides instruction in how to kidnap Americans, kill them and how to conduct sabotage and subversive operations.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra’s attacks on American soil range from bombings to murder to plots to blow up U.S. landmarks. A 2006 Department of Justice report states Jamaat ul-Fuqra “has more than 35 suspected communes and more than 3,000 members spread across the United States, all in support of one goal: the purification of Islam through violence.” In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security predicted the group would continue to carry out attacks in the U.S.

“Act like you are his friend. Then kill him,” says Gilani in the recruitment video, explaining how to handle American “infidels.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was attempting to interview Jamaat ul-Fuqra’s leader, Gilani, in 2002 when he was kidnapped and later beheaded. One year later, Iyman Faris, member of both Jamaat ul-Fuqra and al-Qaida, pleaded guilty in federal court to a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.

Gilani was at one time in Pakistani custody for the abduction of Pearl. Intelligence sources also suggest a link between Jamaat ul Fuqra and Richard Reid, the infamous “shoe bomber” who attempted to ignite explosives aboard a Paris-to-Miami passenger flight Dec. 22, 2001.

“What we are witnessing here is kind of a brand-new form of terrorism,” says FBI Special Agent Jody Weis in the documentary. “These home-grown terrorists can prove to be as dangerous as any known group, if not more so,”

As WND reported, a covert visit to a Jamaat ul-Fuqra encampment in upstate New York by the Northeast Intelligence Network found neighboring residents deeply concerned about military-style training taking place there but frustrated by the lack of attention from federal authorities.

Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra. The organization operates communes of primarily black, American-born Muslims throughout the U.S. The investigation confirmed members commonly use aliases and intentional spelling variations of their names and routinely deny the existence of Jamaat ul-Fuqra.
The group openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in compounds where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority.

U.S. authorities have probed the group for charges ranging from links to al-Qaida to laundering and funneling money into Pakistan for terrorist activities. The organization supports various terrorist groups operating in Pakistan and Kashmir, and Gilani himself is linked directly to Hamas and Hezbollah.

Gilani’s American headquarters is in Hancock, N.Y., where training is provided to recruits who are later sent to Pakistan for more jihadist paramilitary training, according to law enforcement authorities.

A Justice Department report to law enforcement agencies, prepared in 2006, provides a glimpse into how long Jamaat ul-Fuqra or “Muslims of America” has been operating inside the U.S.: “Over the past two decades, a terrorist group known as Jamaat ul-Fuqra, or ‘Community of the Impoverished,’ has been linked to multiple murders, bombings and various other felonies throughout the United States and Canada.”

Gilani’s “communes” are described by law enforcement as “classically structured terrorist cells.”
Seven of the compounds have been identified as training facilities: Marion, Alabama; Commerce, Georgia; Macon, Georgia; Talihina, Oklahoma; York County, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee and Red House, Virginia. Other compounds are located in California, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan and West Virginia.

 http://www.wnd.com/2012/01/381953/#hW4DA5lrw4sEtwdP.99

Lance and Barack: the Content of their Characters

In trying to discern the content of Obama's character, many people start with the stories told in the book Dreams from My Father. This book purports to have been written by Obama, and is assumed to be a non-fiction autobiographical work. As a hypothetical question, if it were to be proved with mathematical certainty, even metaphysical certitude, that it is impossible for Obama to be the author of this book, would that not provide significant insight into some of the enormous character flaws in Obama?

Several years ago I proved just that. Analyzing quantitative data contained in Deconstructing Obama by Jack Cashill comparing William Ayers' Fugitive Days with Dreams of My Father using a well-known theorem in probability I proved that the same author wrote both books with mathematical certainty. My results were published in American Thinker. The analysis was carried out to many, many significant digits, but mathematical certainty probably comes at between seven to fourteen digits. A probability of .9999999999 is more than adequate to show mathematical certainty in almost all cases, and certainly in the case of authorship of Dreams.

In actuality, the analysis showed .999. . . with at least fifty 9s after the decimal point as the probability that Dreams was written by the anti-American terrorist William Ayers. The only assumption that must be made in the analysis is the assumption that Ayers is the one true author of Fugitive Days and not Obama. This is an easily proved assumption because as Jack Cashill shows in Deconstructing Obama, the very few examples of Obama's writing that can be verified as truly his are written at a 6th or 7th grade level, and Fugitive Days is written at a professional level of writing. In effect, Obama is semi-literate in the written word, and that is Jack Cashill's point in Deconstructing Obama. How could a semi-literate Obama pen an extremely well written book such as Dreams from My Father?

What does it say about the content of Obama's character that he claims authorship of the book Dreams when he knows he is not the author? Collects the royalties from the book, based entirely on the work of another man, as his own? Declares the fairy tales told in the book as the true history of his life when much of it came from the imagination of a violent anti-American terrorist?

What does it say about the content of a man's character that he will not permit anyone, particularly the people of the United States whom he has asked to elect him as their president two times, see the transcripts of his grades in high school, any of the numerous colleges he has attended, or the law school he attended? Do any of us applying for a job keep our transcripts secret from the company at which we are applying? This is nonsense. All of us are proud of our academic accomplishments to one degree or another. Clearly there is much in his transcripts for Obama to fear. Certainly they tell a different story than the fairy tale told in Dreams by William Ayers about Obama's life. How was Obama able to attend expensive private schools in Hawaii, California, New York, and Boston, and how did he performed academically?

What does it say about the content of a man's character that he will not permit citizens of the US to see his real birth certificate? Obama's true birth certificate is under lock and key in Hawaii. Fort Knox should be so well guarded. The birth certificate that Obama has put out for our review is easily shown to be a forgery. Again, one can only assume that what is contained in the true birth certificate does not agree with the fairy tale story told in Dreams. This is nonsense. All of us have copies of our real certificates, and provide them when ever asked-even to Blockbuster to rent a movie. We are all proud of our true ancestry, to one degree or another.But not Obama.

Based on the information in Dreams, Obama has a half brother in Kenya who is destitute, lives in a hovel, and has asked for financial help from Obama to no avail. What does it say about the content of Obama's character that he would deny his alleged half-brother financial aid when asked? Or could it be that Obama knows his half brother is a brother in name only, that they share no DNA because they had different fathers?
Obama is living a lie. Nothing in Dreams should be believed without independent confirmation. It must take a psychic toll on Obama to wake up every day knowing that nearly everything he has said about himself is a lie. Perhaps that is why he surrounds himself with strong minded women for day to day decision making (Valerie Jarrett, Michele), and never gives a speech without someone else penning the words for him to read.
Obama is similar to Lance Armstrong. Lance achieved unheard of success in the Tour de France. At the time, he denied any use of performance-enhancing drugs. That turned out to be a lie. His success was based primarily on the use of drugs, blood transfusions, and other illegal techniques. Lance admits now that he could not have won the Tour without performance-enhancing drugs. Both Lance and Obama based their meteoric success on lies. For Obama it was Dreams; for Lance it was drugs. Lance's days in the sun are over. Most Americans and most Europeans are disgusted. And yet, Lance is on the bumpy road to "redemption" in at least admitting the lie that was his life in competitive cycling. It is highly unlikely that Obama will ever admit the lie that is his life story. In assessing the content of their characters, both Obama and Lance come up as seriously flawed. And yet Obama's star continues to rise, while Lance's has collapsed, never to attain the level achieved prior to the doping story hitting the newswires.

Obama's success is not based on the content of his character. I truly believe Dr. King would be very disappointed that our first black president is so devoid of redeeming character content. It would take something unimaginably positive, such as winning a Nobel prize, for example, to balance out the negatives. Wait a minute, Obama did win a Nobel! And the world is still wondering why.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/lance_and_barack_the_content_of_their_characters.html

A Second Bill of Rights, or just another Bill of Goods?

Cass Sunstein recently published an op-ed on January 28 at Bloomberg.com saying that President Obama "firmly rejects 'equality of result,' but is simultaneously committed to ensuring both fair opportunity and decent security for all."


After that, Obama will pull a rabbit out of his hat.


If, according to Sunstein, the president "firmly rejects 'equality of result,'" how, then, will he be able to "ensure decent security for all"?  Surely if decent security can be achieved for all, wouldn't that indicate that everyone has the same level of such security?  Isn't that an exemplar of "equality of result"?


The phrases "rejects equality of result" and "ensure decent security" are diametrically opposed even when you discount the ambiguity inherent in the words "equality," "result," "decent," and "security".
  

Sunstein also tries to assuage concerns by alluding to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's call for a series of imputed "rights" in his State of the Union address in 1944.  Sunstein says that FDR wasn't actually calling for additional amendments to the Constitution (while simultaneously plagiarizing the language of the first ten amendments), but rather wanted Congress to enact legislation that would embed the items in his Second Bill of Rights in legislation.  According to Sunstein, Roosevelt didn't believe that "the Supreme Court should enforce the Second Bill of Rights."  Odd phrasing coming from the pen (or word processor) of the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard University, since (a) the Supreme Court never enforces laws, but rather determines if a law is enforceable under the Constitution, and (b) regardless of what a law is called, e.g. a Second Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court would still have ultimate jurisdiction to determine if the specifics of such legislation were in line with the Constitution.  Sunstein should know that, or his students should demand a refund.


Sunstein then lists the "rights" that Roosevelt wanted (with the inference that Obama wants the same things) to have the force of law:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
The right of every family to a decent home.
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
The right to a good education.

Reading this list of eight "rights" makes the Liberal-Progressive-Democrat's heart swell with pride, especially since one of his own thought it up.  It's wonderful, it's caring, it's Progressive!  What more could the people of America desire?


Well, I for one would like to know exactly how all this is to be paid for.  I would like some definitions of terms embedded in this laundry list of "rights."  I suggest that you reread these lofty goals with particular attention to the slippery language used (emphasis is mine):

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
The right of every family to a decent home.
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
The right to a good education.

As with ObamaCare, the devil would be in the details.  Take for instance the second item on the FDR/Obama/Sunstein wish list:

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

How much is "enough"?  Who decides what amount of food is adequate?  Michelle?  Who decides if Versace is too much or if we should all be wearing the equivalent of the venerable Mao jackets so popular in China not too long ago?  And what exactly is our responsibility as a nation to guarantee recreation for anyone?


Look at item number five:

The right of every family to a decent home.

Does this mean that the federal government will be mandating building codes?  Zoning rules?  Will this result in taxes being levied by the federal government on real property? 


So many questions and so few answers provided.  Yes, no rational person would say that some people should be purposely excluded from achieving all the aspirations on the list, but it is flawed.  Obama should love it, though.


Even though it was the brainchild or Roosevelt, the Second Bill of Rights' soaring cadences are right up Obama's alley.  And yet the sum and substance of all of it is about the same as the ultimate example of "politician speak," where ideas sound absolutely wonderful but in the final analysis say absolutely nothing, such as:

You know, if we had some ham, we could enjoy some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

Based on this sort of "politician speak," you could starve to death.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/a_second_bill_of_rights_or_just_another_bill_of_goods.html
 

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