02/20/15

Too Many Lies, Too Much of the Time

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Lies and Deceit

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”

— THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 19, 1785

I am beginning to wonder if Americans have grown so accustomed to the lies told by the President, his administration, and others said to be highly regarded, that we are losing a sense of outrage?

To the degree that Brian Williams’ serial lies have evoked a national discussion, it’s good to know that most people think he has lost credibility to the point of not being a news anchor, but one still has to wonder what NBC will do at the end of the six month suspension it has imposed on him. I am cynical enough to think he may be offered a job at MSNBC.

Hillary Clinton and Brian Williams

It is far more significant that, regarding the leading candidate to be the Democratic Party’s choice to run for President in 2016, we know she engaged in similar lies of having been “under fire.”

It’s one thing to expect politicians to lie, but the nation’s future is at stake when we still do not know the truth of Hillary Clinton’s full role in the Benghazi attack that left a U.S. ambassador and three others dead. She was the Secretary of State at the time and we watched her stand at his side as the President attributed the attack to a video no one had ever seen. The fact that the attack occurred on the anniversary of 9/11 was conveniently ignored.

The refusal to identify the Islamic State (ISIS) as an enemy representative of the global jihad is not just politics. It is a lie on the order of the President’s assertion that “The Islamic State is not Islamic.” As we are repeatedly reminded, if you cannot or will not identify an enemy, you are leaving yourself and, in this case, the nation open to attack.

Indeed, many elements of the Obama administration have engaged in lying on a level that goes beyond “politics.” It is a deliberate attack on science itself when the EPA, NOAA and NASA actively engage in distorting data to say that the Earth is warming when it has been in a well-established cooling cycle for 19 years at this point.

How are we expected to maintain any confidence in an administration that lies about employment statistics and other critical data we need to know regarding the economy?

The lie about “income inequality” is the core rational for Communism. There is no such thing as equality when it comes to income because some people enjoy higher pay for higher skills, higher productivity, and higher responsibility. We don’t pay “sanitation engineers” the same as we pay real engineers. And you don’t create new jobs by raising the minimum wage when it will reduce existing and potential new jobs.

Most dramatically, it was a series of lies told by the President that led to the passage of ObamaCare. Its two thousand-plus pages were not read by the exclusively Democratic members of Congress who passed it and, today, we learn that it is a major contributor to the nation’s deficit which is the result of the government spending more than it takes in. For the past six years Obama’s policies have added trillions to our national debt, now $18 trillion and growing. It is going to be a burden on generations to come.

There is no evidence of the tax reforms that Congress knows are needed, nor reforms to the entitlement programs that are just years from becoming insolvent.

Whether it is domestic or foreign affairs, Americans have been at a loss to expect the national press to address the lies because they would have to abandon the protection they have afforded the President for the past six years. Only one news service, Fox News, is credited with providing the truth. Fortunately the Internet has provided access to many other outlets where the truth can be found. And, yes, many that maintain the lies.

It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration wants to regulate the Internet with a program that call “Net neutrality”, but there is nothing neutral about it. The freedom the Internet enjoys is the best example of the value Americans put on an uncensored source of information and communication. The Obama administration wants to control the Internet in the same way that despots around the world want to do.

There is always a far higher price to pay for believing lies than knowing the truth.

We expect our enemies to lie. We should not expect our government to do so in such a routine and obscene fashion.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

02/20/15

In Case You Missed Him – Trevor Loudon On The Radio

Hat Tip: Dick Manasseri

In case you missed this critically important broadcast with Trevor discussing The Betrayal Papers – Under Obama: The U.S. Captured by the Muslim Brotherhood:

https://soundcloud.com/the-john-mcculloch-show/jmsair021915thu

Please share this with your friends and family and offer comments. Watch for next week’s Part 2 of the Betrayal Papers.

——————-

Also, tune into the Andrea Shea King Show for her incredible interview with Trevor:

THE ANDREA SHEA KING SHOW – TREVOR LOUDON

02/20/15

Chinese Censorship of Hollywood

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

Selwyn Duke, who writes regularly for The New American and The American Thinker, discusses China’s increasing power and influence in Hollywood. He talks about films in which characters or plot lines have been changed to accommodate the Chinese regime and its censors. His article, “Forget North Korea: Watch Out for Chinese Censorship of Hollywood,” appears in the December 19, 2014 issue of The New American. Duke also talks about Chinese influence over the U.S. educational establishment, trade issues and communist propaganda operations designed to promote “demoralization.”

02/20/15

Obama Readying USA for Islamic Takeover?

By: Sher Zieve
Gulag Bound

Tragically and with full malice aforethought, the beauty, simplicity and essential-to-thought subject of Logic is no longer taught in the US Public school system. As a note, little else that matters is now taught either. It was taught when I attended school. For the purposes of this column, I will deal with two forms of logic, as defined by the current 0n-line Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “a particular mode of reasoning viewed as valid or faulty” and “interrelation or sequence of facts or events when seen as inevitable or predictable.”

I hope that these will assist those people who still cannot—according to their own words seem to fathom why Barack Hussein Obama does what he does and says what he says. Note: Too many of these (many high profile) and, ostensibly, Conservative individuals seem to be extremely well-educated but–due to their statements of incredulity over Obama’s actions or lack thereof–are quite apparently lacking the power of even the most basic practice of logical reasoning. That leaves us with Occam’s Razor, i.e., “the solution amongst competing hypotheses with the fewest assumptions (the one that possesses the most facts) should be selected.” Obama is destroying the USA and replacing its legal citizens with Muslims and other illegals, in order to create a new country of his making. Logic requires rational reasoned thought… not emotion and false premises. Thus… I shall attempt to explain it to them for yet one more time.

The rest of you—Conservatives specifically–understand perfectly well what’s going on.

Obama Syndicate: Christians are responsible for Islamic Violence and their own deaths!

Although they haven’t said it–outright–yet, the Obama syndicate members seem poised to soon say that Christians are actually responsible for their own beheadings and burning of the adults and children..many of them infants. Obama recently said that Christians have done horrible things, too. But—and it’s a big one—he had to go back to the over-a-thousand-years-ago Crusades to make his case. The Crusades were in effect because barbaric and enslaving Islam had taken over Spain and other regions in Europe. In a nutshell, Islam hordes conquered and took Christendom lands, enslaved the people and stole their Holy sites. The Christians fought Islam to get them back. Christianity won.

In Obama’s book “Audacity of Hope.” he (or possibly Bill Ayers) writes of the Muslims “…I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” Due to its atrocities against humanity, the political winds of the world currently seem to be against Islam… yet, he seems bent upon backing them all of the way. In fact, recently, Obama held two “private” meetings with Muslim Brotherhood members. Please remember that the Brotherhood is the parent of most of the terrorist groups currently on our planet. A handful (hundreds of examples are available) of indicators that Obama stands with and actually fully supports “radical” Islam are as follow:

  1. Obama still refuses to use the word Islam when speaking about Islamic terrorists
  2. Obama’s secret meetings (only recently disclosed) at the White House with the Muslim Brotherhood members in the last month
  3. Obama is working with radical Islamic ICNA in its just concluded 3-day “summit” on terrorism
  4. The Center for Immigration Studies advised that Obama imported 300,000 Muslims into the USA in 2013 and at least 70,000 Muslims in 2014
  5. In 2015, Obama ordered the US State Department to overload the immigration system in order to bring thousands of Jihadis into the USA as well as tens of thousands of more Muslims. One way or the other, Obama is determined to turn what was once the USA into an Islamic country
  6. Every time ISIS or another Islamic terrorist group commits another beheading, live human burning, disembowelment of organs for sale (this is one of the new practices) Obama makes excuses for them. At a press conference 19 February 2015, Obama said that the terrorists “may have legitimate grievances.” What?

Everything Obama and the Islamo-Nazi new world order is now doing is designed to implement the “Final Solution” for the USA… that of the North American Caliphate which Obama plans to head. President Ronald Reagan’s “America a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere” will be destroyed and extinguished at last.

As it is, the flicker of my home country is very dim now, indeed. As I’ve written before, my ancestral family members built the United States of America from the ground up and I have been witnessing its dismantling. Although I view Barack Hussein Obama as a loathsome creature, even more offensive are those who refused to lift a hand to stop him and those who affected the pretense of being of, for and by the people but, who willingly betrayed their fellow humans for the promise of power in this planned New Dark World and a few pieces of silver. And, to them, I say whether you choose to believe it or not, truth is truth and our Creator God is watching. Even so, Lord, come soon….

Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.
— Daniel 12: 10

Obama at Prayer Event: Christians did terrible things, too:
at foxnews.com 

The Crusades Just and Reasonable:
at forums.catholic.com

Crusades:
at wikipedia.org

ICNA:
at discoverthenetworks.org

Obama Intentionally Overloading Immigration System, Creating Backdoor for Jihadists:
at drrichswier.com

Obama Secret Meeting in White House with Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group:
at vinmedia.biz

Obama Apologizes for Islam, Says Terrorists Have Legitimate Grievances:
at overpassesforamerica.com

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.

02/20/15

The Council Has Spoken! The Watcher’s Council Results – 02/20/15

The Watcher’s Council


The People’s Cube

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

“The difference between golf and government is that in golf you can’t improve your lie.” – George Duekmejian, former Republican governor of California

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. – President Thomas Jefferson

“If we can really understand the problem, than the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.” – Krishnamurti

“It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.” – Will Rogers

https://askmarion.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/right2bplanet.jpg?w=500

This week’s winning essay, The Right Planet’sMore Hipster Harf: ‘We Can’t Stop ISIS by Killing Them; We Need to Give Them Jobs’, uses State Department spokesperson Marie Harf’s ridiculous statement about buying off Islamic State and others with ‘jobs’ as a starting point for an explanation on why the Left has such a problem facing up to radical Islam. Here’s a slice:

For many years now I have said the State Department needs to be cleaned out from top to bottom. And I’m not alone in that opinion, either. The U.S. Department of State has a long history of working against the best interests of the United States, consistently shilling for all things socialist. Those who have looked into tax-exempt foundations like the Carnegie Endowment, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Consortium, Guggenheim Fellowship, etc., and the subsequent investigation by the Reece Committee, might know what I’m talking about.

The first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, once said, “Consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If the diplomats who have mishandled our relations with Russia were merely stupid, they would have occasionally made a mistake in our favor.”

State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf recently told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews ISIS could be stopped if we could just create jobs for them.

At first blush, for those ignorant of Marxist ideology, this sort of thinking seems preposterous. Well, I am strongly inclined to agree. But I digress.

For dyed-in-the-wool Marxists and their fellow travelers (sympathizers), it makes perfect sense. This is why I believe it so important more Americans gain a better understanding of Marxism—since it is lauded and approved of by so many American universities and the liberal media, not to mention those in positions of power within our own government.

Karl Marx believed our view of history needed to be changed (cf. “hope and change”). Cleon Skousen wrote in his book The Naked Communist about the central importance economics plays in the Marxian religion. Marx believed history should be changed to “a fixed, undeviating, pre-determined course of progress which could be charted in the past and predicted for the future on the basis of a single, simple criterion—economics.”

According to Marx and his votaries, if we could only “level the playing field” by making everyone and everything the same (see “equality and fairness”), it would usher in a veritable utopia, i.e., the long hoped for “workers’ paradise.” Interestingly, about 90 percent of what Karl Marx wrote concerned economics (see Das Kapital).

Well, let’s just get something straight: ISIS doesn’t give a damn about economics—quite the contrary. Their motivations and actions are not influenced by Marxism, per se, but rather the teachings of Muhammad, and a literal interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith.

Although it should be noted that Marxism and Islam have quite a bit in a common.

More at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Graeme Wood in the Atlantic with an interesting piece, What ISIS Really Wants, submitted by Bookworm Room. He attempts to present something very rare in today’s climate, an examination of the conflict from the point of view of the Islamic State. An excellent read.

Here are this week’s full results. Only Bookworm Room and Ask Marion were unable to vote this week, but neither was subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and every Tuesday morning, when we reveal the week’s nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it… or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.

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