04/17/15

Sexual Madness in Obama’s America

The headline over the story is, “LGBT Friendly: White House Unveils First Gender-Neutral Bathroom.” But it’s not a joke. It wasn’t a story from the comedy site The Onion. Instead, this was from NBC News.

It is apparent that the liberal media will treat anything “gay” coming out of this administration as somehow legitimate or even compassionate. Nothing will be described as weird or strange, out of fear of offending some new sexual minority. This time, the “transgendered” are supposed to benefit. It’s yet another effort to confuse sexual roles and undermine traditional values.

NBC reported, “For the first time in history, the White House has designated a gender-neutral restroom for visitors and staffers—the latest in a series of steps the administration has taken to protect the rights of members of the LGBT community.”

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, isn’t there an obligation on the part of NBC News to at least consider giving some space or attention to an opposing view? By the way, despite liberal use of the term, it’s not clear what “transgendered” actually means. Does it mean people who dress like the opposite sex? People who have sex-change operations? Or what about people who have mental disorders and simply think they’re the wrong sex?

Instead, the NBC News story merely notes that there’s legislation in “Republican-dominated” legislatures in Florida and Kentucky to keep the “transgendered” out of bathrooms for men and women. What these bills actually do is keep men out of women’s bathrooms, and vice versa. These bills are designed to secure the privacy and safety of all individuals using a single-sex public facility for which the facility is designated. That is, for men and women. This is common sense. But it doesn’t make sense in Obama’s America.

The Florida bill is also designed to keep predators out of the facilities. The bill notes, for example, that “Single-sex public facilities are places of increased vulnerability and present the potential for crimes against individuals using those facilities, including, but not limited to, assault, battery, molestation, rape, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.”

The liberal media describe this common-sense approach as preventing the transgendered “from using the restroom of their choice.” Hence, the Republicans who want to maintain restrooms for men and women are depicted as mean-spirited Neanderthals. This is how the media try to intimidate Republicans into accepting any new “change,” no matter how ridiculous or absurd.

Years ago the idea of a man dressing like or appearing as a woman was good for some laughs. Comedian Flip Wilson evoked that response as the character “Geraldine.” Corporal Klinger did likewise in the comedy show MASH.

But now we’re supposed to take all of this seriously. It’s tempting to laugh now, except that the campaign for transgendered rights has big money and Big Media behind it.

The Washington Post just ran a huge front page story on Shane Ortega, who has served three combat tours, two as a woman and one as a man. He was a woman who became a man, but who is still a woman in the eyes of the military. As the United States is facing threats around the world, our military is currently wrestling with the problem of what to do about Shane Ortega. The Post will make sure this remains on the top of the military’s priority list.

Who’s behind this drive for “transgender” rights?

Three names jump out at you: the Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.

The executive director of the Arcus Foundation is Kevin Jennings. Remember him? He was the Obama-appointed Education Department official whose life of homosexual activism was inspired by Harry Hay, the Communist Party member and “Radical Faerie” who believed in the power of the occult. Hay started the gay rights movement in the U.S.

The Gill Foundation is named for Timothy Gill of Denver, the founder of Quark, Inc., a computer software company, and a tech multimillionaire. He says he has singlehandedly “invested more than $220 million” in the cause of homosexual rights through his Gill Foundation.

Finally, the Open Society Foundations are associated with billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros. In 2009 he financed the “New Beginning Initiative” to encourage the Obama administration to make “policy changes” to benefit the homosexual movement.

The Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation and the Open Society Foundations are all financial backers of the National Center for Transgender Equality. This group has just announced that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission delivered “a landmark ruling that employees must have access to restroom facilities consistent with their gender identity.”

Not surprisingly, The Washington Post covered this development. The Army was found guilty of barring a “transgender employee” from a restroom “matching her new identity” and had “referred to her by her previous gender.” The individual is described as a military veteran who is now a civilian Army employee.

The Post reported, “A recent study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National LGBTQ Task Force found that 90 percent of transgender individuals report mistreatment or discrimination in the workplace, forcing many to hide their gender identity.” How are these for objective sources?

By the way, the “Q” in LBGTQ stands for “questioning.”

Believe it or not, the Post has a “manners columnist” who examines these issues. “When the ‘Q’ is used as a stand-in for questioning, you’re right that it means the individual is uncertain of his or her orientation,” reported Steven Petrow.

So a “questioning” individual could dress up as a man or a woman, depending on how he or she feels on any particular day.

But, one step at a time. The National Center for Transgender Equality is now pressing for the right of transgender service-members to serve openly in the U.S. Armed Forces. After that, presumably, the “questioning” will demand their rights. Then, Petrow says, there is an “I” category for “intersex,” meaning “An individual whose biological birth does not correspond with conventional expectations of male/female anatomy or genetics.”

We’re confident the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, funded by all of the big media organizations, will instruct reporters on what all of this means and how to portray conservatives and Republicans as obstructing necessary societal change.

02/22/15

“America’s Enemies in Hollywood Then and Now” – UPDATED

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

Actor Bryan Cranston (right) plays Soviet/Nazi agent
of influence Dalton Trumbo in the upcoming film “Trumbo

A press conference on “America’s Enemies in Hollywood Then and Now” will be held on February 24 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to offer commentary on the direction of the Academy Awards and the politics of Hollywood.

Sponsored by America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI), a public policy organization, the event will also explore whether Congress should reinstate a committee on un-American activities and internal security – the same kind that led to the exposure and “blacklist” of Stalinist Communists in Hollywood. Copies of the new book, Blood on His Hands: The True Story of Edward Snowden, will be available. The book analyzes the Snowden espionage operation and how Hollywood is working to glorify the illegal leaker and traitor.

Will New AG Support Civil Forfeiture Reform?

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

The Wednesday hearings on the confirmation of a new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, lasted hours because members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were often called away to vote. In the wake of the scandals surrounding the manner in which Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has functioned, the hearing, led now by Republicans, could have been harsh, but it was not. The Wall Street Journal characterized the mood in the hearing room as “cordial.” Watching it on CSPAN, I can confirm that.

In early November the Wall Street Journal, in an opinion titled “The Next Attorney General: One area to question Loretta Lynch is civil asset forfeiture”, it noted that “As a prosecutor Ms. Lynch had also been aggressive in pursuing civil asset forfeiture, which has become a form of politicking for profit.”

“She recently announced that her office had collected more than $904 million in criminal and civil actions in fiscal 2013, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Liberals and conservatives have begun to question forfeiture as an abuse of due process that can punish the innocent.”

That caught my eye because the last thing America needs is an Attorney General who wants to use this abuse of the right to be judged innocent until proven guilty. Civil forfeiture puts no limits on the seizure of anyone’s private property and financial holdings. It is a law that permits this to occur even if based on little more than conjecture. It struck me then and now as a bizarre and distinctly un-American law.

Writing in the Huffington Post in late 2014, Bob Barr, a former Congressman and the principal in Liberty Strategies, told of the passage of the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) in 2000 “as a milestone in the difficult—almost impossible—task of protecting individual rights against constant incursions by law-and-order officials.” The problem is that civil forfeiture was and is being used to seize millions.

“The staggering dollar amounts reflected in these statistics, however,” wrote Barr, “does not pinpoint the real problem of how law enforcement agencies at all levels of government employ the power of asset forfeiture as a means of harming, and in many instances, destroying the livelihood of individuals and small businesses.”

“In pursuing civil assets, the government need never charge the individuals with violations of criminal laws; therefore never having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are guilty of having committed any crimes.”

As noted above, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Lynch’s office had raked in millions from civil forfeiture. Forbes magazine reports that she has used it in more than 120 cases and, prior to the hearing to confirm her as the next Attorney General US News & World Report noted on January 26 that Ms. Lynch’s office had quietly dropped a $450,000 civil forfeiture case a week before the hearings. She clearly did not want to answer questions on this or any other comparable case.

Just one example tells you why there is legitimate concern regarding this issue and it appeared in a January 3^rd edition of Townhall.com. I recommend you read the account written by Amy Herrig, the vice president of Gas Pipe, Inc, a Texas company that an editor’s note reported as “faced with extinction of a civil asset forfeiture to the federal government of more than $16 million. Neither Herrig nor her father, Jerry Shults, have been charged with any criminal offense.”

Jerry Shults is a classic example of an American entrepreneur. After having served in the Air Force and serving in Vietnam where he earned a Bronze Star, Shults moved to Dallas where he began selling novelty items at pop festivals throughout Texas. Since the first store that he opened had gas pipes exposed in the ceiling, he dubbed it Gas Pipe, Inc. Suffice to say his hard work paid off for him. By the late 1990s, he had seven stores, a distribution company, a five-star lodge in Alaska, and was an American success story. By 2014 the company had grown to fourteen stores and other notable properties.

By then he had been in business for nearly 45 years and employed nearly two hundred people. And then someone in the northern district of Texas, Dallas division, initiated a civil forfeiture seizure against him. I was so appalled by his daughter’s description of events I secured a copy of the September 15 complaint that was filed. I am no attorney, but it looked to me as spurious as one could have imagined, except for the details of Gas Pipe’s assets. On 88 single-spaced pages, those were spelled out meticulously and all were subject to seizure despite the fact that not a single instance of criminality had been proven in a court of law. Imagine having 45 years of success erased by one’s own government in this fashion. It is appalling.

Assuming Ms. Lynch will be approved for confirmation as our next Attorney General, civil forfeiture is the largely hidden or unknown issue that could spell disaster for countless American businesses, large and small, in the remaining two years of the Obama administration. She has a record of pursuing it. The upside of this is that the current AG, Eric Holder, in early January announced that the DOJ would no longer acquire assets seized as part of a state law violation.

On the same day of Ms. Lynch’s hearing, January 28, writing in The Hill’s Congress Blog, former Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) was joined by Bruce Mehlman, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the George W. Bush administration, to raise a note of warning. “The topic of civil asset forfeiture should be an important part of the discussion with Lynch. As U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Lynch was the top official in a hotbed of civil asset forfeiture—helping to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars under the program in recent years.”

Ms. Lynch was not asked about civil forfeiture by either the Republican or Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was a lost opportunity and, if the new Attorney General applies her enthusiasm for it to the entire nation, it will be yet another Obama administration nightmare.