09/5/15

Climate Propaganda Paves Way for “Pig Power”

Having been bamboozled into passing a mere bill to thwart the Iran deal, rather than treating the agreement as a treaty, the Republican-controlled Congress is on the verge of being taken to the cleaners again. This time, President Obama is maneuvering to authorize U.S. participation in a United Nations climate change treaty through an executive agreement. The treaty is expected to come out of the December meeting in Paris of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Rather than submit the agreement to the Senate as an Article II Treaty, it is anticipated that the Obama administration will simply accept the treaty on the basis of what it claims to be “existing” presidential authority.

The agreement could establish or propose legally binding limits on carbon emissions, crippling what’s left of our industrial economy, along with new legally binding financial commitments that could run into the trillions of dollars to be “redistributed” from the U.S. and other “rich” nations. Obama has told the U.N. that the United States will meet a pledge of 26 to 28 percent emissions reduction by 2025.

Eleven top Senate Republicans, led by Senator James Inhofe (OK), had asked for “robust and transparent communication between the Executive and Legislative branches, particularly with respect to the Senate and its Constitutional advise and consent responsibilities.” But such requests are typically treated with disdain by the administration, which is determined to get its way no matter what Congress believes.

In order to provide a basis of some kind for Obama to take this questionable approach, our media trumpeted the “news” that July 2015 was supposedly the warmest month on record for the earth dating back to January 1880—with humans the culprits, of course. The source of this sensational claim was the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance noted that CNN, USA Today, the BBC “and lots of other mainstream media lapdogs all obediently reported” the claim from NOAA. But the Heartland Institute points out that NOAA is using land-based temperature recording stations which “artificially skew the temperatures recorded upward,” and that according to the satellite system data, June 2015 was actually warmer than July. The group says, “When one understands what government scientists are doing in an effort to promote climate alarmism, rather than to record and report accurate data for analysis, one must despair whether accurate data can be obtained from ‘official sources.’”

Rather than expose how the government is manipulating data, 25 media members of a “Climate Publishers Alliance” are moving forward to “collaborate on their coverage of climate change” and promote the U.N. agenda. The initiative will conclude on December 11, the final day of the U.N. conference in Paris. The media organizations include The Guardian (United Kingdom), India Today (India), La Presse (Canada), La Repubblica (Italy), Le Monde (France), Politiken (Denmark), The Seattle Times (United States), The Straits Times (Singapore), The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and To Vima (Greece).

This initiative is in addition to major liberal foundation funding of pro-U.N. propaganda and the training of journalists to toe the U.N. line, as documented by Accuracy in Media.

Meanwhile, a “Week of Moral Action for Climate Justice” has been announced for September 21 through September 25 to coincide with the visit by Pope Francis to the United States and the United Nations.

Here are the basics about the pope’s visit:

September 22. The Pope arrives in the U.S. from Cuba.
September 23. Pope meets with Obama at White House.
September 24. Pope gives an address to Congress.
September 25. Pope gives an address to U.N. General Assembly.
September 26. Pope visits Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
September 27. Pope visits World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.

Left-wing activist Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, was invited by the Vatican to address the issue in Rome. She now predicts the pope will put Republicans on the defensive because most of them are opposed to the theory of man-made climate change. She says, “…I think the timing of this trip is obviously going to be very awkward for several Republican candidates who are Catholic and understand that this is a very, very popular pope. He’s particularly popular among Latinos, and that’s a really coveted voting bloc. So, you know, picking a fight with this pope is not a very smart political move if you’re running for office right now.”

At the same time, Klein said that when she was at the Vatican, she talked to “a fairly prominent Catholic” from the United States who told her, “The holy father isn’t doing us any favors by going to Cuba first.” Klein said that “he meant that there are a lot of people talking about how this pope is sort of a closet socialist, and by going to Cuba first, he was reinforcing that narrative.”

The pope secretly collaborated with the Obama administration to begin the process that resulted in U.S. recognition of Castro’s Cuba and the opening of a Cuban Communist embassy in the U.S.

It would be well-advised for the pope to take a look at Cuba’s mismanaged socialist paradise. The Washington Post ran a recent story by Nick Miroff about how the island prison camp is developing a reputation for pursuing “sustainable” development policies, but it acknowledged that the system is still characterized by shortages of food and agricultural equipment. In a previous dispatch, “In an online world, Cuba remains a stand-in-line society,” Miroff noted how Cubans continue to have to stand in line for various products, when they are in fact available.

The concept of “sustainable development,” as endorsed by the U.N. and the pope, could actually make things worse.

Indeed, the Cuban communists insist they have been following this model of development for years. “Cuba is a world leader in ecologically sustainable practices,” says Marce Cameron of the Cuba’s Socialist Renewal blog. It seems socialism always has to be “renewed,” until it finally begins to work.

Years ago, the U.N. Development Program’s Choices magazine published an article touting “Pig Power” as a way to run the economy of the future. It was an article about an experimental energy project in Cuba that involves feeding pigs and using their gasses and excrement to produce energy. In a story datelined Havana, the magazine said, “At a research institute in the suburbs of Cuba’s capital, pigs are pampered with meals prepared by the city’s finest chefs.”

Letting the pigs live “High off the hog” produces the energy for the human population, which seems to have a much lower standard of living.

Will this fact of communist life be noted by Pope Francis when he travels to Cuba, where he will presumably dispense communion to the communist atheists running the island nation?

Equally important, will U.S. political figures have the guts to take on the pope’s pro-Marxist view of the world before the Vatican and the Obama administration prepare to use the U.N. as a means by which to impose their anti-capitalist vision on the U.S. and the world?

If not, consider “pig power” the wave of the future. It will be our future under the U.N.

09/5/15

Hillary’s Email and National Security Scandal Continues to Grow

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails establishes beyond a doubt that she regularly received classified information. This has become both an email scandal and a national security scandal, as Mrs. Clinton risked the safety and well-being of all Americans with her lax security practices.

Some might blame this gross negligence on incompetence, or falsely argue, as she does, that other secretaries of state have done the same thing, but her deliberate use of a private email server is, in fact, the mark of Hillary’s supreme arrogance.

To arrogance one must also add corruption, as it has also become undeniable that Mrs. Clinton worked on behalf of the interests of the Clinton Foundation, her family, and associates while in office.

“In another exchange, Mrs. Clinton praised an idea to set up schools in Haiti, developed by…longtime domestic partner to top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who was her chief of staff at the department,” reports The Washington Times. “Great ideas (no surprise). Let’s work toward solid proposal maybe to Red Cross and Clinton Foundation since they have unencumbered $,” Mrs. Clinton, then Secretary of State, responded to Mills.

“Records show the [Clinton] foundation would become a major player in the [Haiti] relief and reconstruction efforts, raising more than $30 million.” In other words, Mrs. Clinton was using her position as Secretary of State to steer contracts to the Clinton Foundation.

President Obama cannot have failed to have noticed Mrs. Clinton’s behavior as Secretary, and needs to be held equally accountable for this scandal. It is just one more scandal that has occurred on his watch that the media choose to treat as if he has no responsibility. Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is asking, “What did President Obama know and when did he know it?” Surely he knew he was emailing with her on her unsecured server. Did he use a private email account too? IBD reminds us that the White House won’t say if he has. We, too, have been asking some of these same questions for many months.

Mrs. Clinton’s email practices are currently being investigated by the FBI, particularly in relation to potential violations of the Espionage Act, according to Fox News. However, despite the confidence some have in FBI Director James Comey’s independence, this investigation has become inherently political, and will have a political outcome. President Obama has two choices: indict Mrs. Clinton, and risk a civil war within the Democratic Party, or allow her to continue to stonewall as she runs for the presidency. The second option could be accompanied by selective leaks to undermine Hillary’s narrative that she has done nothing wrong. In the meantime, Obama has already given Vice President Joe Biden his blessing to run against her, and announced through his spokesman that appointing Biden was “the smartest decision he has ever made in politics.”

Mrs. Clinton’s released correspondence contains nearly 200 emails with classified information, according to The Washington Post. The Post is one of the few mainstream media organizations acknowledging that Mrs. Clinton “wrote and sent at least six e-mails” with classified information.

Yet The New York Times’ report made sure to include a quote from Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, stating that if these emails contained intelligence information, “it would certainly be classified at a higher level than confidential.”

“Confidential” is the lowest level of classification. This lower-level information seems to be all members of the mainstream media really want to talk about, as if it excuses Mrs. Clinton’s actions.

“But classifying government information is more of an art than a science, often relying on judgment calls by examiners,” reports the Times.

The Intelligence Community’s Inspector General has identified two emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server as “top secret.”

An email from Clinton’s server conveys spy satellite information regarding North Korea’s nuclear program, frequently classified as top secret, according to The Washington Times. It reported on September 1 that the intelligence community believes a State Department employee summarized this extremely sensitive information and sent it on to Mrs. Clinton. Thus, her defense is that while she may have passed classified information on her unsecured private email server, she didn’t recognize it as such because, she says, it wasn’t marked classified.

As we pointed out in prior columns, Mrs. Clinton has demonstrably and repeatedly lied about her private email arrangement. She falsely claimed that the public record she submitted to the State Department was complete despite having deleted half of her emails that she claimed were personal, having her email server wiped clean, and even having altered some of the ones she turned over. And there is a high probability that Russia and China have hacked her server and seen all of her emails. She also falsely maintained that her relationship with Clinton confidant and hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal was “unsolicited” despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Now the Clinton acolytes are proceeding forth from the woodwork in defense of her inexcusable behavior. Andy McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney writing for National Review, describes how Anne M. Tompkins, a Hillary Clinton donor, hastaken to USA Today in defense of Mrs. Clinton’s case because the latter, somehow, didn’t “knowingly” do what she did. Thompson is the Obama-appointed prosecutor who gave former CIA Director David Petraeus a “sweetheart plea deal” after he grossly mishandled classified information and provided it to his girlfriend, according to McCarthy.

“To exonerate Clinton, [Thompson] relies on nothing other than her status as the government lawyer who oversaw the prosecution of David Petraeus,” writes McCarthy. He continues:

Tompkins seems to believe that unless the prosecution has the kind of slam-dunk proof she had (but shied away from using) in the Petraeus case—namely, proof that Petraeus admitted to someone that the information he hoarded was highly classified—it is impossible to prove knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, there are innumerable cases in which investigators and prosecutors establish knowledge, intent, willfulness, gross negligence, and other mental elements without a confession by the suspect.

The media aren’t interested in making reasonable inferences about Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. Instead, reporters tie themselves in knots to avoid making common sense conclusions which might implicate her.

Former Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano’s decision to plead the Fifth before the Select Committee on Benghazi has taken the Committee’s investigation to a whole new level. Pagliano “was the information technology director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign,” helped set up Mrs. Clinton’s private server, “and then worked at the State Department as an adviser and special projects manager for its chief technology officer…” reports The New York Times. How much did he know about the vulnerability and usage of that server? Michael Isikoff is reporting that Pagliano also refused to talk with the FBI or the State Department Inspector General.

The media’s fact-checkers, especially, are supposed to hold leaders accountable and expose candidates’ false statements for what they are. After Mrs. Clinton said on August 26 that she was “confident that this process will prove that I never sent nor received any e-mail that was marked classified,” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, in his Fact Checker column, gave her only two Pinocchios for “excessively technical wordsmithing.” Maybe, as the Democratic primary nears, Mrs. Clinton’s false statements will be downgraded to only one Pinocchio—or maybe she’ll start winning the “prized” Geppetto checkmark.

“In all the 87 email threads examined by Reuters, the State Department has blanked out the confidential information in the public copies, adding the classification code ‘1.4(B),’ denoting foreign government information,” reportsJonathan Allen.

“This is the only kind of information that presidential executive orders say is ‘presumed’ to likely harm national security if wrongly disclosed.” In other words, it is born—and presumed—classified.

Mrs. Clinton’s continued claims about her receipt of classified information are egregious lies, second only to her misconduct in the Benghazi scandal. Yet the liberal media continue to ignore, downplay, or trivialize this scandal.

The Benghazi scandal, in particular, will continue to haunt Mrs. Clinton just as much as the continued drip-drip-drip of emails. Just as no further information is necessary to demonstrate that Mrs. Clinton lied about classified information on her server, no further revelations are necessary either to implicate Hillary Clinton, or President Obama, in perpetrating a cover-up after the planned terrorist attacks in Benghazi that claimed the lives of four brave Americans. The media refused to be honest in the 2012 election; it seems that they are set to continue with this dishonesty into 2016.

09/5/15

Free Kim Davis, Fire Shepard Smith

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

This special edition of America’s Survival TV is the result of the unprecedented persecution of Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis, a Christian who was taken into custody by federal Marshalls on the order of a federal judge, and then put in jail until she agrees to issue licenses for same-sex marriage bearing her name. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who has attacked Davis on the air, has regularly spouted pro-homosexual views on the air, such as when he denounced Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day as the “National Day of Intolerance.” The outburst was triggered by a Chick-fil-A executive speaking out against gay marriage. Smith is said to be dating a young Fox News male staffer.