06/22/15

How Did Valerie Jarrett Pass a Background Check

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

Now this also begs the question, what did Obama know, did he approve and what is he going to do now?

The 73 page FBI file on Valerie Jarrett’s family is found here. The father is noted here.

From Judicial Watch:

FBI Files Document Communism in Valerie Jarrett’s Family

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.

According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.

JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett’s many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.

06/22/15

“Deranged Lone Assassin” Mows Down, Stabs 37 Austrians, Answering ‘IS’ Call to Balkan Muslims: “Either Join, or Kill Over There”

By: Julia Gorin
Republican Riot

Is it a coincidence that earlier this month, the following call to Jihad by IS was issued specifically to Balkan Muslims: IS to Balkan Muslims: “Either join, or kill over there”

Well, Alen Rizvanovic killed over there. Not exactly “lone” or “deranged” (beyond the mental disorder otherwise known as Islam which, yes, is lame. And now so are 34 Austrians, plus three dead).

Austria is of course very vulnerable to feeling the effects of the call of the wild, thanks to the Bosnian Muslims it welcomed back when it served as the financing center of the Bosnian Jihad, known to Westerners as the Bosnian war, or “Serbian genocide against Bosniaks.” Official Austria was front and center in helping make the war go in favor of the Muslims who demanded to carve their own Islamic state in Europe out of Yugoslavia.

But getting to the main question at hand: Gee, why would IS think it can recruit Balkan Muslims? Of all people. Didn’t we make it clear that those Muslims aren’t like those Muslims? IS and its forebears must not have gotten the memo that the West proclaimed the Muslims of the Balkans to be modern, secular, European, Western-facing, moderate, and so on — and gave them the upper hand in the war, and then in the peace. Because that way there would be no risk that these Muslims would turn into those Muslims, right? I mean, if they drink alcohol and eat pork — as their advocates constantly point out — then there’s no way they’ll choose Islamic solidarity over the West. Right?

Here was that IS call:

IS to Balkan Muslims: “Either join, or kill over there” (B92, RTS, vocativ.com, June 5, 2015)

The Islamic State has published a propaganda video that threatens Balkan countries and calls on Muslims to either join it, or launch attacks in the Balkans.

The video, titled “Honor is in jihad, a message to the Balkans”, has been published by the Alhayat Media Center – a propaganda center established to reach audiences in the West with Islamic messages.

The video, that lasts a little over 22 minutes, has an English language narrator talking about the history of the Balkans, while showing historical footage, and about the Muslim communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania “and other countries in the region.”

Members of the Islamic State who came from the Balkans are shown, with several of them calling on other Muslims to go to Iraq and Syria, “where they can safely and with dignity live with their families.”

Among the identified Islamists are Abu Bilkis, aka Al Albani and Abu Mukatil, aka Al Kosovo, as well as Abu Muhammad al Bosni.

[What names these are! “Al-Bosni, Al-Albani, Al-Kosovi.”? Who could have foreseen it? Those very same “moderate” and “pro-American” Muslims.]

“Many of you complain that they cannot grow a beard or wear a niqab. Now is your chance, make Hijra,” said one of those featured, Salahudding Al Bosni.

He also told the audience that “to think back to the last war in Bosnia-Herzegovina”.

As in other propaganda videos, the jihadists are telling those who are “unable to emigrate to the land of Islam” to attack “dictators in Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania”, as well as their armies.

“Fight them over there. If you can, put explosives under their cars, in their houses, all of them. If you can, take some poison, put in it their drink, in their food, let them die. Kill them in every place and wherever you can. In Bosnia, in Serbia, in Sandzak. You can do it, Allah will help you,” Salahudding Al Bosni is heard saying.

This clip has been “much better produced than the dozens of previous propaganda materials made for the Balkan Islamists in the past 20 years,” said the reports.

Well that must have done the trick. This guy was motivated enough to extrapolate “over there” to his own adopted home of Austria, not far from the Balkans. It’s a call-up that has Deutsche Welle asking, “Are the Balkans a gateway for ‘IS’?”

Now, why would the Balkans per se — more than some other part of Europe — be IS’s gateway? I mean, what is different about the populations of the Balkans from those of the rest of Europe? Surely it couldn’t be the countless Westward-facing Muslims that populate that region. In any case, when has the word “extremism” ever been associated with Balkan Muslims? Yet that is the category Deutsche Welle placed the story under:

EXTREMISM
Are the Balkans a gateway for ‘IS’?
Millions of Muslims live in the Balkans. According to media reports, Islamist terrorists are increasingly trying to influence them. But opinions are split on how dangerous the situation really is.

The history of the Balkans over the past 100 years is nothing but a chronology of Muslim oppression, at least according to the “Islamic State” (IS) terrorist group, whose propaganda targets the region. [Funny, that’s also according to the Bosnian and Albanian ‘not-like-those’ Muslims.] The only solution in the fight against the communists, so-called “crusaders” and Jews is jihad, they say. In an elaborately produced video, “IS” urges Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegowina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia to kill their “infidel” neighbors.

“Put explosives under their cars and houses, pour poison into their food, let them croak,” a young bearded man shouts in Bosnian. The terrorists in the video even have nicknames, depending on where they come from: Al-Bosni, Al-Albani, Al-Kosovi.

The propaganda has already served one purpose: for days, all of the regional media reported that “IS” has its sights on the Balkans. Such reports are extremely useful to the Islamists, warns Vlado Azinovic, a political scientist and journalist from Bosnia.

“Via Twitter alone, the IS publishes more than 200,000 short messages per week,” the terrorism expert says. “They all contain such threats in several languages, so it’s wrong to believe that IS is targeting the Balkans in any way,” Azinovic told DW.

But, notions that the Balkans represent a gateway for jihadists are nothing but media hype and an expression of “hysteria”, he added.

[That’s right, Folks. Stay on-program. There’s no difference between short twitter messages and an elaborately, professionally produced video specifically in the Balkanites’ own language.]

Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper also reported that radical Islamists are increasingly networking in the western Balkans, offering “a kind of initial training for would-be jihadists.” The paper quoted German security officials as saying the situation is so alarming that it was discussed at the most recent G7 summit.

“The threat posed by IS should be taken seriously,” says Filip Ejdus, a Belgrade political scientist. While the expert doesn’t believe “IS” can create branches in the Balkans at this point, he fears the terrorists will soon carry out more attacks in Europe…

Experts may disagree about the extent of the threat posed by “IS” in the Balkans, but there is no doubt that the “Islamic State” has been recruiting many new backers in the region.

A record 250 men from Kosovo have gone to war for “IS”, media reports say. Bosnia-Herzegowina is also said to be at the top of the jihadist recruitment list…

…Ejdus says… “Although a majority of Muslims in the Balkans rejects these anti-civilizing ideas, they still unfortunately find their way to some people.”

The same is true for Kosovo, says Ismail Hasani, an expert on the sociology of religion from Pristina. Some Imams, who were trained in the Middle East, propagate a non-traditional interpretation of Islam, he told DW. “But in the Balkans, these radical versions don’t fall on fertile soil.” Hasani is convinced these interpretations will soon be a thing of the past…

But back to the present. Here is the UK Daily Mail report:

‘Deranged lone assassin’ drives at 90mph into crowds of shoppers in Austria before stabbing bystanders, killing four-year-old boy and two adults, and leaving 34 injured (June 20, 2015)

A four-year-old boy is reported to be one of three people killed after an SUV ploughed into a crowd of people in Graz, Austria.

Another 34 people were injured in the attack, with six – including two children – said to be in a serious condition.

Eyewitnesses say the driver rammed into crowds at up to 90mph before he got out and began randomly stabbing bystanders, which included the elderly and policemen.

The three victims killed in the attack have been described as a 28-year-old Austrian man, a 25-year-old woman and a four-year-old boy.

The woman and boy were both killed as the driver ploughed through crowds on the main Herrengasse shopping street before reaching the city’s main square.

The governor of the state has described the driver as a ‘deranged lone assassin’.

The National Police Director, Josef Klamminger, said the man, who is believed to be a 26-year-old Austrian truck driver, was suffering from ‘psychosis’ related to ‘family problems’.

The attacker is believed to be married with two children.

Police director Klamminger added that the man was under a restraining order keeping him away from the home of his wife and two children, after a domestic violence report was filed against him last month. [So far, we’re hitting on all the tropes of being a pious Muslim male.]

The driver did not resist when he was arrested by the police – who say he acted alone – and they have no reason to believe it was an act of terrorism.

The mayor was reported to be riding his Vespa in the street when the SUV sped past him, just feet away.

He only avoided being hit by driving onto the pavement, according to local media.

Always doing his homework, writer Daniel Greenfield found an Alen Rizvanovic on facebook, who has twice “liked” jihadist Bosnian war criminal Naser Oric, commander of Muslim soldiers at Srebrenica whom we are to again memorialize this July 11th. (And with extra gusto, please, as it’s the 20th anniversary of “the worst atrocity in Europe since WWII.”)

By the way, isn’t Graz where the Bosnian Muslims and Croats stole off to in the first place, to have their secret referendum on secession? Graz even sounds like a shortened Grazie — as in ‘Thanks, Austria, for not extraditing that Bosniak war criminal on the Serbs’ warrant, and thanks for trying to block Serbia’s EU accession start. Doing everything “right” for the Bosnian Muslims sure goes a long way.

06/22/15

Full Court Press is on to Pressure Supreme Court into Saving Obamacare

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

President Obama is once again telling lies about Obamacare while bullying the Supreme Court to decide in his administration’s favor in King v. Burwell, a court case which will likely be decided this month and which has the potential to gut the law’s subsidies. On cue, the mainstream media have marshaled their forces in defense of Obama and his signature legislation. And the media, just like the President, have been peddling many of the same lies about this law at the expense of the health and welfare of average Americans.

A recent health care poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, popular with many in the media, asked whether Congress should intervene on behalf of low-income persons who might lose their subsidies. Not surprisingly, six in ten responded, “Yes.” But that poll does not appear to have asked the deeper question of whether all three branches of the federal government should respect the law as written.

“And under well-established statutory interpretation …you interpret a statute based on what the intent and meaning and the overall structure of the statute provides for,” said Obama at a June 8 press conference in Germany.

He added, “It has been well documented that those who passed this legislation never intended for folks who were going through the federal exchange not to have their citizens get subsidies.”

Furthermore, he said, “And so this should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn’t even have been taken up. And since we’re going to get a ruling pretty quick, I think it’s important for us to go ahead and assume that the Supreme Court is going to do what most legal scholars who’ve looked at this would expect them to do.”

In other words, President Obama has determined what the Supreme Court Justices should decide, and that it should be in his favor. But he is wrong on his facts, and abusing his powers.

Whatever happened to the separation of powers? The President clearly doesn’t believe in that doctrine. In 2010, President Obama publicly attacked the members of the court during his State of the Union address over the Citizens United decision.

Why does President Obama criticize the Supreme Court so much? asked a recent Washington Post headline. Their answer sounds like an endorsement of his tactics: “Obama’s willingness to plunge into the court’s business reflects his background as a constitutional law lecturer, his irritation with the legal and political wrangling surrounding the landmark health-care law and his view of the court’s role in American society.”

While some in the media, such as The New York Times, have presented biased accounts of the health care law’s drafting, essentially arguing that this case hinges on a “drafting error,” we have long been reporting that the record is clear: these words were intentionally inserted to garner votes. The phrase “Exchange established by the state” appears ten times in the legislative text. So clearly, it wasn’t a drafting error.

As we recently pointed out, then-Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) was cited in a Politico article published months before the so-called Affordable Care Act passed, saying that the current bill was a “dealbreaker.” “The national exchange is unnecessary and I wouldn’t support something that would start us down the road of federal regulation of insurance and a single-payer plan,” said Nelson, who played a key role in passing Obamacare.

In addition, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of Obamacare. He stated that passing Obamacare depended “on the stupidity of the American voter,” and that it was “written in a tortured way” in order to deceive the voters about all the taxes they would have to pay. On the issue of the subsidies being paid only to state exchanges, Gruber said that was “to squeeze the states to do it [to set up exchanges].” When these comments were made public, Gruber and the Obama administration downplayed his role in Obamacare. But The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a batch of previously unreleased emails indicates that his role was much greater than previously acknowledged.

Also, President Obama has lost many cases his Justice Department took all the way to the Supreme Court, with 20 unanimous decisions against the administration by last July.

That means all nine justices, even the most far left among them, wouldn’t see it Obama’s way. But none of that matters to President Obama. To hear him tell it, he is just looking out for the people, and the country—and he always does the right thing, and for the right reasons.

“The president could not simply give out subsidies if the court stripped them away, so the critical decisions about how to respond ‘would sit with Congress and the states,’ said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services,” according to The New York Times.

When asked on June 10 whether there was any health care legislation currently pending in Congress which the President would sign that fixes the subsidies issue, Secretary Burwell also told Congress, “We have not seen anything.”

Nothing?

The Post’s Dana Milbank also disingenuously told his readers after covering that hearing that “The alternative to Obamacare is nothing” because Congress is so divided. But that is another myth, namely that Republicans haven’t offered any alternative to Obamacare. Forbes demolished that myth back in 2013, but it persists, because it is the Democrats’ narrative.

“And despite the constant doom-and-gloom predictions, the unending Chicken Little warnings that somehow making health insurance fairer and easier to buy would lead to the end of freedom, the end of the American way of life—lo and behold, it did not happen,” said President Obama on June 9 in Washington, D.C. “None of this came to pass.  In fact, in a lot of ways, the Affordable Care Act worked out better than some of us anticipated.”

Politico covered Obama’s statements under the headline, “Obama makes moral case for preserving his health care law.” In reality, Obama’s speech was a toxic mix of arrogance, misinformation, and outright lies mirroring those often perpetuated by the mainstream media.

President Obama is wrong about Obamacare across the board, and the results show it. An examination of the media coverage shows that many in the media also deliberately omit or underplay key facts in order to mislead the public about the underlying viability of Obamacare.

For example, The Hill’s recently published piece on Obamacare’s early impacts deliberately tilted the scale to create a false picture of Obamacare’s successes.

“The success of the law is the subject of fierce debate between the two parties,” writes Sarah Ferris for The Hill. She asserted that the favorite line of the White House is that Obamacare is “working” while “Republicans” call this legislation an “unmitigated disaster that should be repealed.” By presenting this as a political debate, Ferris conveniently presents herself as non-partisan and neutral—and ready to educate her readers as to facts absent political spin.

Yet the first piece of evidence Ferris provides in favor of Obamacare’s success is that “Nearly 22.8 million people have purchased insurance through ObamaCare, according to a national study by RAND Corp. released earlier this month, with 17 million enrolling in a plan for first time.” President Obama cited similar numbers in his remarks.

The study’s key findings, listed on the RAND Corp. website, show that 9.6 million of those 17 million people counted—more than half—obtained employer-based health insurance, not marketplace insurance. Are we supposed to believe that these millions all gained health insurance from large businesses, and that all of these health insurance gains were remarkably due solely to Obamacare’s recently, and partially, instituted employer mandate?

So while Ferris wrote that 22.8 million people “purchased insurance through Obamacare,” that is not the same as the number of people who gained insurance as a result of it. Of those gaining coverage, only 4.1 million enrolled in the Obamacare marketplaces, according to RAND’s findings, and 6.5 million enrolled in Medicaid.

Medicaid enrollees do not “purchase” their insurance—they receive it from the government.

As we recently noted, The New York Times omitted any voices favoring the current litigation before the Supreme Court—litigation which would end federal Obamacare subsidies and gut the law. Ferris, writing for The Hill, conveniently fails to mention this debate at all.

The Times’ June 17 article on plaintiff David King emphasizes his political views and raises questions about his standing in the case.

A Washington Post article mentioned the plaintiffs’ perspective while describing how 6.4 million Americans could lose billions from the government if these payments stop.

The rest of the Post’s article was dedicated to covering the damage to America that removing these payments would cause, while citing administration-provided data, and blatantly signaling which side of the debate the Post is on.

While the media and President Obama refer to greater health care access under Obamacare, that claim has already been disproved. The Heritage Foundation found last year that most increases in Obamacare’s enrollment resulted from the Medicaid expansion, not enrollments in the marketplace, and that a significant number of persons now on the exchanges had “already had coverage through an individual-market or employer-group plan.” In other words, many people were replacing one type of insurance for another.

And that new policy is likely costing them significantly more, with a much higher deductible.

“Still, [Clare Krusing], from the health insurers trade group [America’s Health Insurance Plans], argues that it’s almost impossible to make a blanket statement that ObamaCare is driving up premiums across the board,”  wrote Ferris. “If you want to understand the premium story, you have to look at factors and local dynamics,” asserted Krusing for the article.

The Heritage Foundation reports this year that premium costs on the exchanges have increased more than 10 percent in one third of states for a 27-year-old, who would presumably be healthier than an older American. In Alaska, premiums went up 28 percent for this age group.

Clearly, some conclusions can be made at this point about the overall effects of Obamacare.

Yet candidate Barack Obama repeatedly promised in 2007 and 2008 that he would sign into a law health care that would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” Now, President Obama hedges with the unprovable claim that premiums are below what health care “would have been had trends over the decade before” Obamacare passed.

In other words, he can’t even say that health care costs have gone down—because they haven’t.

Politifact considers that promise completely broken, as well, of course, the oft-repeated line that Politifact made “Lie of the Year” in 2013: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Period.”

The media’s obsession with access to health care, and not health care outcomes, deliberately throws sand in the eyes of the public. It is a distraction from real issues such as whether a person can see his or her doctor, and pay for treatment.

As we have repeatedly reported, the true measures of Obamacare’s “success” are what this legislation has done to harm the economy, and whether American citizens can receive care—and, of course, whether it encourages individual responsibility and decreases government waste. Obamacare is bad for the American economy because it discourages labor, its enrollees are not receiving adequate care, and the subsidies provided to its enrollees already amount to more than $10 billion, while failing to enable enrollees to cover their health care costs.

But the complicit media smile, nod, and ignore all this as they desperately try to save Obama’s left-wing agenda.

Ferris does mention the deductible crisis—at the end, where it’s less likely to be read—after she discusses premiums, access, the value of subsidies, and the Medicaid expansion. For the mainstream media, all mention of Obamacare’s chronic problems must be reported last, so that these revelations can be more easily ignored or forgotten.

The Affordable Care Act has never been affordable, and its human costs keep rising. So do the costs to taxpayers. The Post reported last month that “nearly half of the 17 insurance marketplaces” established as alternatives to Healthcare.gov are “struggling financially,” and in Hawaii it will take at least $28 million to make its exchange self-sustaining by 2022.

While the Supreme Court may soon decide whether the Obama administration can continue to distribute federal Obamacare subsidies, it is clear that news outlets will do anything to sway public and the Justices’ opinions as to the viability of this law. By becoming the news, President Obama is providing the media with another excuse to champion Obamacare against the weight of the evidence.