04/25/15

Loretta “I Refuse To Answer” Lynch Confirmed As Attorney General After Republican Betrayal

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

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The Republican Party is becoming more and more detached from their conservative base. They seem to vote against anything the conservatives want and do all they can to enable our Marxist president. As Andrew McCarthy put it, “Voting to confirm an attorney general who won’t uphold the Constitution isn’t a way to inspire confidence among conservatives.”

Last Thursday, Karl Rove couldn’t wait to announce that, “The dysfunctional Congress finally appears to be working again as the Founders intended.” Really? Because this isn’t the way I perceive the Founders having intended it at all. They would have impeached and removed a sitting president who acted like a monarch. Then to validate Rove’s proclamation, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed as attorney general Loretta Lynch who blatantly supports the systematic non-enforcement of federal law. Ms. Lynch also supports President Obama’s boldly unconstitutional usurpations of legislative authority, including Congress’ power to set the terms of lawful presence by aliens in our country. Ted Cruz SLAMMED the Republican majority in the Senate for allowing the Lynch nomination:

On the Senate floor a few moments ago, Ted Cruz SLAMMED the new Senate Republican majority for refusing to block Loretta Lynch’s nomination to attorney general. He said that the Republican majority could continue to block the nomination if they wanted to and it’s something he’s urged them to do because of her admissions to run the DOJ in a lawless fashion just like Eric Holder.

He pointed out that more than a few voters are asking what is the difference between a Republican and Democratic Senate majority when someone promising the exact same lawlessness as Holder will be allowed to get confirmed. He says that’s something each Republican will have to explain to their constituents.

He also adds that not a single Republican can vote for such a nomination and be consistent with their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution.

Unfortunately, Loretta Lynch was just confirmed. Sigh.

Here is a small sampling of Loretta Lynch’s answers at her confirmation hearing:

Q: Will you defend Obama’s illegal Executive Amnesty?
A: Lynch thinks the Administration’s contrived legal justification is reasonable. She sees nothing wrong with the President’s decision to unilaterally grant lawful status and work authorizations that are explicitly barred by federal law to nearly 5 million people who are here illegally.

Q: Who has more right to a job in this country? A lawful immigrant who’s here as a citizen – or a person who entered the country unlawfully?
A: Lynch believes that the right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here. And certainly, if someone is here, regardless of status, she would prefer that they would be participating in the workplace than not participating in the workplace.

Q: Concerning the limits of prosecutorial discretion… the dubious theory that President Obama has put forward to justify his illegal Executive Amnesty; where do you stand?
A: Lynch would give no limits to that theory.

Q: Can a subsequent President use prosecutorial discretion to order the Treasury Secretary not to enforce the tax laws and to collect no more income taxes in excess of 25%?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Can a subsequent President use prosecutorial discretion to exempt the state of Texas, all 27 million people, from every single federal labor and environmental law?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you agree with the Holder Justice Department that the government could place a GPS sensor on the car of every single American without probable cause?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you agree with the Holder Justice Department that the First Amendment gives no religious liberty protection whatsoever to a church’s or a synagogue’s choice of their own pastor or rabbi?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you believe the federal government can employ a drone to kill a US citizen on American soil if that citizen does not pose an imminent threat?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Would you be willing to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the IRS’ targeting of citizens and citizen groups for their political views? An investigator that was at a minimum, not a major Obama donor?
A: She refused to answer.

Our ‘functional Congress’ confirmed Loretta Lynch as our new attorney general, replacing Eric Holder, possibly the most lawless, racist and fascist AG this nation has ever seen. Lynch testified brazenly that she endorses and intends to facilitate the president’s lawlessness and constitutional violations. Having heard her testimony during the confirmation hearings, 10 Republican senators decided to vote for Lynch. Remember, the position of attorney general exists to ensure that the laws are enforced and the Constitution is preserved; and… each senator has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. This should have been a no-brainer. Yet, Republicans sided with the Marxist Leftists and Lynch was confirmed. The ten Republicans who voted for confirmation were: Kelly Ayotte, Ron Johnson, Mark Kirk, Rob Portman, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell. The Senate voted 56–43 in favor of Lynch.

Mitch McConnell bald-facedly lied in October. While he was wooing conservatives for the upcoming midterm election, he stated that any nominee that was going to replace Eric Holder as “the nation’s highest law-enforcement official” must, “as a condition of his or her confirmation,” avoid “at all costs” Holder’s penchant for putting “political and ideological commitments ahead of the rule of law” — including as it “relates to the president’s acting unilaterally on immigration or anything else.” He fibbed big time and betrayed conservatives nationwide. It was his wheeling and dealing that led to the deal that was struck with Harry Reid and that cinched Lynch’s confirmation.

Here’s Mitch McConnell’s deal: If Democrats agree to stop blocking a human trafficking bill over some boilerplate language regarding abortion funding — a position that made them look unreasonable — Republicans, with all the leverage imaginable, will help confirm another attorney general nominee who will rubber stamp the president’s many overreaches. So, you see in the end, the Republicans voted for the continuation of the abuse of Executive power. It’s really just that simple. The reasons given for supporting Lynch included that she was a black woman and the best so far to come out the Obama White House – those are two breathtakingly horrible reasons for Lynch to be confirmed. It’s absolutely shameful politicking.

If you didn’t think Mitch McConnell was a lying, conniving Progressive before… you should now. Once the November election was won and behind him, McConnell went to work behind the scenes to whip up support for Loretta Lynch. He wielded his power from the shadows and strong-armed others into supporting her. By voting for her confirmation, he summarily flipped off any conservative who had been foolish enough to believe his campaign rhetoric. Suckers.

But it is even worse than that. From Andrew McCarthy:

That doesn’t begin to quantify the perfidy, though. In order to get Lynch to the finish line, McConnell first had to break conservative opposition to allowing a final vote for her nomination. The majority leader thus twisted enough arms that 20 Republicans voted to end debate. This guaranteed that Lynch would not only get a final vote but would, in the end, prevail — Senators Hatch, Graham, Flake, Collins, and Kirk having already announced their intention to join all 46 Democrats in getting Lynch to the magic confirmation number of 51.

So, in addition to the aforementioned ten Republicans who said “aye” on the final vote to make Lynch attorney general, there are ten others who conspired in the GOP’s now routine parliamentary deception: Vote in favor of ending debate, knowing that this will give Democrats ultimate victory, but cast a meaningless vote against the Democrats in the final tally in order to pose as staunch Obama opponents when schmoozing the saps back home. These ten — John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas), Bob Corker (Tenn.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Cory Gardner (Col.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) — are just as willfully complicit in Lynch’s confirmation and her imminent execution of Obama’s lawlessness.

This is not a Senate back to regular order. It is a disgrace, one that leads to the farce’s final act: On Monday, Loretta Lynch will ceremoniously take the oath to uphold the Constitution she has already told us she will undermine.

This is not about immigration, amnesty, health care, and the full spectrum of tough issues on which reasonable minds can differ. It is about the collapse of fundamental assumptions on which the rule of law rests. When solemn oaths are empty words, when missions such as “law enforcement” become self-parody, public contempt for Washington intensifies — in particular, on the political right, which wants to preserve the good society and constitutional order the rule of law sustains.

Mitch McConnell and the other Progressive RINOs are responsible for destroying mainstream America’s faith in their government and the rule of law. Our contempt and disgust for those in DC is now complete. The last time out for a presidential election, millions of Republicans were so disillusioned that they stayed home rather than voting. Obama won a second term that way. It appears that the Republican Party is intent on losing the next presidential race as well… they obviously don’t give a flying crap about their base. Ask yourself this… would McConnell be doing anything differently if he were Obama’s insider in the Senate?

Mike Lee had this to say:

“I voted against her because even though I walked into her confirmation process with an open mind, hoping and even expecting to like her, I couldn’t vote for her because she refused to answer any of my questions about prosecutorial discretion and its limits,” Sen. Mike Lee, whose grilling gave Lynch the most trouble, told The Federalist. “Even as I made the questions more and more obvious, and gave her hypotheticals which I thought made the question clearer, she refused to answer. It’s not because she doesn’t have the capacity, it’s because she had concluded that she wanted to share as little information as possible and, apparently, she responded well to coaching. I found that troubling.”

Lee had offered a hypothetical scenario wherein a governor wanted to raise the speed limit from 55 miles per-hour to 75 but could not convince the legislature. Could that governor decide to unilaterally instruct his highway patrol to not enforce the speed limit? Could he issue permits to drivers who wanted to exceed the limits established by statute? “I thought that was a pretty reasonable hypothetical,” Lee explained. She refused [to] discuss the scenario.

And from TheBlaze:

Much of the GOP’s opposition to Lynch was due to her support for Obama’s executive action on immigration. During her confirmation hearing, Lynch said she believes Obama’s plan was consistent with the Constitution, drawing outrage from Republicans who have said it’s an end-run around Congress.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the most vocal Republican against Obama’s plan, said the Senate shouldn’t confirm Lynch to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer given her support for what he has called an illegal move by Obama.

“The Senate must never confirm an individual to such an office as this who will support and advance a scheme that violates our Constitution and eviscerates established law and congressional authority,” he said Thursday. “No person who would do that should be confirmed. And we don’t need to be apologetic about it, colleagues.”

Obstructionist and evasive doesn’t quite do Loretta Lynch justice here. In my opinion, she is an anti-Constitutionalist and certainly a Liberal Progressive. I am convinced that Lynch is not only a racist, she will be just as bad or worse than Eric Holder and you can thank, in large part, Mitch McConnell and the Progressive Republicans for it. She also has a very special enthusiasm for civil asset forfeiture that she will up the stakes on across the nation. The fact that she is black and a woman should have nothing to do with her confirmation – her adherence and stances on the law and the Constitution should be all that counts. We are definitely at a Constitutional tipping point and Loretta “I Refuse To Answer” Lynch may very well be the Progressive straw that broke the Republic’s back.

01/26/15

No, Hollywood. Islam Does Not have a PR Problem.

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

Ever since the savage attacks in France, our pencil-waving, cartoon-pixelating media and Islamic theologian body politic have gone on an Islamic charm offensive.

In the face of 24,935 jihadist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, we are told over and over again that Islam, one of the world’s great religions, is peaceful and merely being distorted by misunderstanding violent extremists with no particular ideology.

Whether or not you believe this, in spite of Islam’s supremacist goals and history, Koran-endorsed strategic lying and deception by way of taqiyya, the totalitarian theopolitical doctrine of Shariah that compels the systematic persecution of women, gays and non-Muslims, the sermons of influential imams let alone the definition of Islam itself, “submission,” is besides the point and distracts us from the real issue at hand.

The real issue is that there are millions of Muslim jihadists, aiders, abettors and sympathizers in the world – including all throughout the West – working through means, overt and covert, violent and peaceful, to unite the world under the rule of Allah.

Not Islamophobia.

Not America’s support for Israel (pre-Obama at least).

Not drone strikes.

Not Abu Ghraib.

Not Guantanamo Bay.

Not a YouTube video.

Not a cartoon.

The fact that the largest casualties of jihadist savagery are Muslims, renders moot almost all of these points.

And the fact that only a small percentage of Muslims may be jihadists should give comfort to absolutely no one. If even 0.1 percent of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are jihadists, aiders, abettors or sympathizers, then 1.6 million people seek to destroy Western civilization.

As borne out by the latest Pew poll on Muslim views on suicide bombings from July 2014, 0.1 percent would in fact be a shockingly low figure:

One other data point that the folks in Hollywood or Washington, D.C. would prefer not be printed: As of 2013, after New York City, Dearborn, Michigan — with a population of under 100,000, and the largest percentage of Arab-Americans in the country — had the highest number of individuals classified as “known or suspected terrorists” by our government. So it was with great consternation that I read an article in Variety that reflects so well why we are losing a war that only Islamic supremacists are fighting.

Behold:

Given the volume of terrorists who have committed hideous acts of violence in the name of Allah over the years, there will be those who will be convinced there is something intrinsically problematic about Islam if it is linked to so much hatred and bloodshed.

But that’s a leap in logic steeped in ignorance. And that ignorance is rooted partly in an unfamiliarity with Muslims.

Could Hollywood help remedy that? In the wake of a tragedy borne from a dastardly desire to silence freedom of speech, there’s a crying need for an artistic expression of a very different kind than Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire.

What is needed now is more depictions of average Muslims in popular culture. Not the kind ripped from the headlines that paints them as violent zealots but the kind that shows them to be the normal friends, neighbors, business associates, etc., that millions of them are all over this nation.

Got that?

According to Hollywood, the proper response to jihadist slaughter is to show Americans that not all Muslims are jihadists.

Islam just has a PR problem.

It is reminiscent of an Obama administration that blames demonstrably disastrous policies on the ignorance of those simple Americans, fooled by poor “optics,” or, when it’s taking responsibility, the administration’s failure to explain its policies well enough.

The author continues:

Would there even be a question of whether the evil radicals who took the lives of innocents were any kind of reflection on Muslims in general if more people, particularly non-Muslims in the U.S., had any sense of what average Muslims are actually like?

Lacking any normative alternative, it’s almost understandable that people lapse into lazy, dangerous stereotypes. Too many associate Islam with the actions of a radical fringe because of the absence of cultural signposts that modern Muslims exist, breathe, love and eat just like the rest of us.

Those bitter clingers are just not sophisticated enough to understand that Islam is peace.

Leave aside for a second the fact that folks in tolerant, progressive, diverse and clearly hypocritical Hollywood show profound ignorance of Islam as practiced throughout wide swaths of the world, where the very groups Hollywood purports to care about most are discriminated against and routinely slaughtered.

Leave aside for a second the fact that the America outside of the New York-Los Angeles-Washington, D.C. axis actually contains a far higher number of folks who have interacted with average Muslims in the flesh, while serving in our armed forces.

While Islamic supremacists are at war with us as part of a global jihad, why is Hollywood’s first obligation to make sure that all Muslims don’t get a bad name – to fight a PR battle that only exists because Muslims are killing people?

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Shouldn’t Hollywood’s job actually be to expose us to the truth that there are those in the world who pose an existential threat to our way of life, including the free expression on which Hollywood relies and cherishes?

What is wrong with America is not that as progressives would have us believe, ignorant bigots in flyover country are Islamophobes engaging in a hypothetical Teahadist crusade.

What is wrong with America is that people have been burying their heads in the sand for years, ignoring, whitewashing, and showing extreme cowardice – dhimmitude — in the face of Islamic supremacists carrying out a slow motion, mass ethnic cleansing against non-Muslims for decades.

While the comparison becomes tired, it must be asked of Hollywood: During World War II, would our response to Nazi aggression have been to script movies portraying Germans as moderate, peaceful people?

Regardless of what helps America’s elites sleep at night, in the real world, evil exists. And evil does not care for Western projection, whether it comes to the mullahs in Iran or the comrades of the Kremlin.

Culture really does matter, and Hollywood, which has already done a great deal of damage to the fabric of America in its promotion of moral relativism, victomology and other values antithetical to our Judeo-Christian heritage, will only make things that much worse by undertaking the efforts described in this Variety article.

What Hollywood should be doing is educating Americans on the actual nature of her enemies, not idealizing, coddling or humanizing them.

Where Hollywood should be placing its emphasis and empathy is on the victims of said enemies, not the victimizers, and the heroes like Chris Kyle who protect us from them.

The problem is not that the American people are ignorant of Islam, but that our media and government continue to distract us from the real threat, and are themselves Islamophobic – unable or unwilling to critically examine Islamic doctrine, facts and history.

It has and will continue to get Americans killed the longer we ignore it.

12/11/14

The CIA, “Torture,” and Obama’s Drone Strikes

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

Charles S. Faddis is a former CIA operations officer with 20 years of experience in the conduct of intelligence operations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. His books include Beyond Repair: The Decline And Fall Of The CIA, and Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion Of Homeland Security. His bio notes that he took the first CIA team into Iraq in the Summer of 2002 in advance of the invasion of that country. We talk about the “torture” report, WMD in Iraq, Obama’s drone program, Vladimir Putin, Russian links to Islamic terrorism, intelligence reform and intelligence failures.