01/22/16

Fast and Furious Scandal Resurfaces—Media Ignore It

The liberal media avoid reporting on President Obama’s many scandals at any cost, and Fast and Furious is no exception. Despite the media’s studied avoidance of these scandals, their impact continues. When Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents discovered that a weapon from Fast and Furious was found in Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Mexican hideout, there was virtual silence from the mainstream media.

But U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling that President Obama cannot use executive privilege to prevent the release of records to Congress has the potential to breathe new life into this ongoing scandal. “Berman Jackson limited her order to information not covered by other protections and told the Justice Department to produce it by Feb. 2,” reports Bloomberg. The judge is an Obama appointee, and yet none of the network evening news shows found this story to be newsworthy. The only mention of it in The Washington Post was in an online blog, PowerPost, under the heading “Hot on the Right,” that linked to a Politico story. You see, it’s a story that only appeals to conservatives, so why bother to put a reporter on it?

Don’t expect reporters to suddenly start reporting on Fast and Furious’ ongoing death toll.

The weapon retrieved from El Chapo’s hideout was a .50 caliber capable of destroying a helicopter, according to Fox News. A weapon of this size could have, undoubtedly, led to many more lives lost. Yet this has received scant coverage.

Instead, the mainstream media are riveted by the discussion of President Obama’s executive orders. As we have recently reported, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the union, yet Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook were able tokill 14 people and wound many others in San Bernardino.

USA Today and other news organizations are particularly concerned with the background check backlog that has burgeoned since October 2015. “The enormous stakes are not always apparent, until the first reports of a new mass shooting echo across social media or cable television,” wrote Kevin Johnson for USA Today on January 20. He pointed to Dylann Roof’s Charleston Church shooting as an example of how faulty background checks could result in American deaths.

This is the height of hypocrisy. Mainstream media reporters are worried about the consequences of faulty background checks—but not the approximately 2,000 weapons sold through Fast and Furious.

During Fast and Furious, members of the ATF told gun sellers to look the other way during suspicious transactions. “A number of Federal Firearms Licensed (FFL) gun dealers in the Phoenix area routinely contacted ATF when they noticed suspicious customers attempting purchases; for example, someone ordering large numbers of …’weapons of choice’ used by the Mexican drug cartels, and paying with large sums of cash brought in a paper bag,” reported Sharyl Attkisson when she was still at CBS. “But starting in fall 2009, instead of stopping the transactions or questioning the customers, ATF often encouraged select gun dealers to go ahead and complete suspicious sales.”

Attkisson received Accuracy in Media’s Reed Irvine Award for Investigative Journalism in 2012 for her excellent coverage of the Fast and Furious scandal, and for following leads where others shied away.

“ATF’s internal Public Affairs Talking Points show the agency was using Fast and Furious to help justify new gun control regulations—without telling the public that ATF was actually facilitating the delivery of weapons to Mexican drug cartels,” reported Attkisson on her website.

Those talking points, issued in January 2011, state that “These cases demonstrate the ongoing trafficking of firearms by Mexican [drug trafficking organizations] and other associated groups operating in Arizona and the need for reporting of multiple sales for certain types of rifles in order to ferret out those intent on providing firearms to these criminal groups.”

Not only have Fast and Furious guns resulted in hundreds of dead Mexicans, these weapons have also traveled back across the border and been used to attack or kill Americans, such as Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The weapons have also been connected to an Islamic terror attack.

“…the scandal took on a new dimension with the revelation that Nadir Soofi, one of two Muslim terrorists killed attempting to murder attendees of a ‘Draw Muhammad’ cartoon contest held in Texas in May, had acquired one of the guns he owned as a result of the Fast and Furious operation,” reported John Fund for National Review last August. “This meant that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was in the position of indirectly selling Islamic terrorists one of the weapons they may have used in an attack on Americans on American soil.”

“See, this all occurred at a time when reining in out-of-control, unaccountable law-enforcement officials wasn’t a priority to the Left,” noted Jim Geraghty of National Review on January 20. “It is now, but, eh, sorry, you missed the news cycle.”

Obama’s gun control measures mean little if the administration has already let those who should never have received access to American guns simply walk away with everything.

Investor’s Business Daily summed it up this way:

But don’t expect the White House to suddenly become cooperative. Jackson gave the administration until Feb. 2 to turn over the documents, which happens to be Groundhog Day. And like the classic movie, the administration will likely repeat its foot-dragging efforts in the hope that it will be safely out of office before anyone really knows what happened and why.

Republicans in Congress and the public at large should demand that the administration come clean now, if for no other reason than to honor Brian Terry’s service.

The sad fact is that most of the media have been so dishonest that they refuse to acknowledge any scandal as being tied to President Obama or his administration. David Brooks, the supposed conservative at The New York Times, commented last year that President Obama had run “an amazingly scandal-free administration.” Sure. Maybe if you don’t count Fast & Furious, using the IRS for political purposes, Benghazi, Solyndra, the Veterans Administration deprivation of timely health care, resulting in many deaths, and the State Department mishandling of classified materials, just to name a few. And each of those has included stonewalling by the administration, lies and cover-ups.

07/17/15

How the Republicans Plan to Lose to Hillary

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A new survey from Univision, the pro-Mexico television network, demonstrates the utter folly of Republicans appealing to Hispanic voters. It finds that 68 percent have a favorable view of Hillary Clinton despite the scandals swirling around her. By contrast, only 36 percent have a favorable view of former Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican and speaks Spanish.

Bush “was the highest-rated of all the Republican candidates,” Univision reports, with Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a one-time proponent of amnesty for illegals, coming in second with only a 35 percent approval rate.

What the poll demonstrates is that Hispanics are basically owned by the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ power grab for the Latino vote has been successful. However, ultimately the Democratic Party’s success in the presidential election depends on convincing Republicans to fruitlessly continue to appeal to Hispanics, while abandoning the GOP voter base of whites, conservatives and Christians.

Overall, in terms of political party affiliation, 57 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as Democrats and only 18 percent said they are Republicans. A total of 25 percent called themselves independent.

In another finding, 59 percent of Hispanic voters said they were satisfied with Barack Obama’s presidency after his six years in office. Clearly, most Hispanics have drunk the Kool-Aid. For them, it appears that federal benefits and legalization of border crossers are what matters. Most of them don’t bat an eye in regard to Obama’s lawless and traitorous conduct of domestic and foreign policy.

What the Republicans have left is to try to appeal to white, conservative and Christian voters. But that strategy, of course, runs the obvious risk of being depicted by the liberal media as racist. After all, whites are not supposed to have a “white identity,” as Jared Taylor’s book by that name describes.

Whites cannot have a racial identity, but Hispanics and blacks can. This is one aspect of political correctness. As communists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who are themselves white, put it in their book, it is a “race course against white supremacy.”

If Republicans pander to Hispanics, they will alienate their voter base, which has shown in their reaction to the Donald Trump candidacy that they want more—not less—action taken to control the border with Mexico. Republican Senator John McCain (AZ) calls the Trump supporters “crazies,” an indication that the GOP establishment would rather jettison these people than bring them into the Republican camp. Like McCain, former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has also attacked Trump, saying his remarks about criminal aliens are hurting the GOP. It’s amazing how a loser like Romney, who also threw in the towel on gay marriage when he was governor of Massachusetts, continues to generate press. What he is saying is what the liberal media want to hear.

Of course, the political correctness which dominates the national dialogue and debate also means that Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are likely to continue to demonize Trump, thereby alienating many whites. As a result, the Republicans will get less of the conservative and Christian vote, further diminishing their chances of winning the White House. It will be a replay of the losing campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Republicans have already alienated many Christian voters by giving up the fight for traditional marriage. They had planned to abandon border control as an issue until Trump and “El Chapo” got in the way.

Meanwhile, in another amazing turnaround, Republicans on Capitol Hill are backing Obama’s call for “sentencing reform,” a strategy that will empty the prisons and increase the crime rate, thereby alienating GOP voters in favor of law and order.

As this scenario plays out, Mrs. Clinton is coming across on the Democratic side looking like a moderate, by virtue of the fact that an open socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), is running “to her left” for the Democratic nomination.

The Clinton-Sanders show has all the earmarks of a carefully staged demonstration of the Marxist dialectic, an exercise designed to create the appearance of conflict in order to force even more radical change on the American people through Democratic Party rule.

Anybody who knows anything about Hillary, a student of Saul Alinsky, understands that her “moderation” is only a façade. Her thesis on Alinsky for Wellesley College was titled “There Is Only the Fight…” That is the Marxist strategy. It is the Alinsky version of the Marxist dialectic. It was also adopted by Obama, who was trained by Alinsky disciples working with the Catholic Church in Chicago.

In my column, “Study Marxism to Understand Hillary,” I noted that Barbara Olson had come to the conclusion while researching her book on Hillary that “she has a political ideology that has its roots in Marxism.” Olson noted, “In her formative years, Marxism was a very important part of her ideology…”

This means that Mrs. Clinton understands that the Sanders candidacy actually supports and does not undermine her own candidacy. It makes Hillary look like a moderate while she moves further to the left, a place she wants to be, in response to the left-wing Democratic base. Only the Marxist insiders seem to understand what is happening.

Some uninformed commentators refer to something called “Clintonism,” a supposed moderate brand of Democratic Party politics. If that ever existed, it applied to Bill Clinton and not Hillary.

The fact is that Sanders and Mrs. Clinton have associated with the same gang of communists and fellow travelers for many years. Sanders was an active collaborator with the Communist Party-sponsored U.S. Peace Council.

As for Hillary, Barbara Olson reported in her book Hell to Pay that Robert Borosage, who served as director of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), was “a colleague and close acquaintance” of Clinton. Olson wrote that Mrs. Clinton operated in the “reaches of the left including Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford,” who had been “committed Communists” and “Stalinists.” Olson said that Hillary worked for Treuhaft and paved the way for Mitford to lobby then-Governor Bill Clinton on the death penalty issue.

Olson described Hillary as a “budding Leninist” who understood the Leninist concept of acquiring, accumulating and maintaining political power at any cost. She wrote that “Hillary has never repudiated her connection with the Communist movement in America or explained her relationship with two of its leading adherents. Of course, no one has pursued these questions with Hillary. She has shown that she will not answer hard questions about her past, and she has learned that she does not need to—remarkable in an age when political figures are allowed such little privacy.”

Researcher Carl Teichrib has provided me with a photo of a Hillary meeting with Cora Weiss from the May 2000 edition of “Peace Matters,” the newsletter of the Hague Appeal for Peace. Weiss, a major figure in the Institute for Policy Studies, gained notoriety for organizing anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and traveling to Hanoi to meet with communist leaders. In the photo, Hillary is shown fawning over a Hague Appeal for Peace gold logo pin that Weiss is wearing.

Teichrib, editor of Forcing Change, recalls being an observer at the 1999 World Federalist Association (WFA) conference, held in association with the Hague Appeal for Peace, during which everyone in attendance was given an honorary membership into the WFA. In addition to collaborating with the pro-Hanoi Hague Appeal for Peace, the WFA staged a “Mission to Moscow” and held several meetings with the Soviet Peace Committee for the purpose of “discussing the goal of general and complete disarmament” and “the strengthening of the United Nations.” Mrs. Clinton spoke to a WFA conference in a tribute to veteran newsman Walter Cronkite, a supporter of world government

In the WFA booklet, “The Genius of Federation: Why World Federation is the Answer to Global Problems,” the group described how a “world federation,” a euphemism for world government, could be achieved by advancing “step by step toward global governance,” mostly by enhancing the power and authority of U.N. agencies.

Obama’s Iran deal continues this strategy by placing enormous power in the hands of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

At this stage in the campaign, even before the first Republican presidential debate, we can already see how the race is playing out. Hillary is counting on the Republicans nominating another loser with a losing strategy while she moves to the left and looks like a moderate.

Alinsky would be proud.