11/2/15

Ted Cruz Breaks With Koch Brothers on Crime Bill

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Before Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) electrified conservatives with his denunciation of liberal media bias at the GOP presidential debate last week, he took a little-noticed position on a major crime bill before the Senate that set him apart from the politically powerful Koch brothers. Taking the side of law-and-order conservatives on an issue that could emerge as a major focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, Cruz came out against the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) on the grounds that the legislation, which will retroactively reduce the sentences of thousands of federal prison inmates, could lead to the release of violent criminals, some convicted of using weapons while engaged in other crimes. He said the Senate bill would release “illegal aliens with criminal convictions” when a “major crime wave” is already sweeping the nation.

In an extraordinary development, the Koch brothers decided to publicly go after Cruz. Echoing the views of the libertarian billionaires, whose network of conservative advocacy groups was planning to spend $889 million on the 2016 campaign, Mark Holden, Senior Vice President & General Counsel of Koch Industries, Inc., issued a statement denouncing the Texas senator by name. He said, “We are disappointed that some members, including Senator Cruz, who have supported the need for reform and been strong supporters of the Bill of Rights, did not support this bill.”

While Cruz had indicated support back in February for a Senate bill on “sentencing reform,” he voted against the latest version because he said it would lead to more criminals being released from prison and committing crimes against law-abiding citizens and police.

In dramatic testimony, Cruz said that while he had supported the Smarter Sentencing Act, a previous version of the bill, the final version had been changed and had “gone in a direction that is not helpful.” He said it provides “leniency” for “violent criminals who use guns” and gives lighter sentences to criminals already serving time. Cruz said that letting thousands of criminals out of prison at this time makes no sense “when police officers are under assault right now, are being vilified right now, and when we’re seeing violent crime spiking in our major cities across the country…”

Political observers say that the public attack on Cruz from the Koch brothers, who are seeking to influence the selection of a GOP 2016 presidential nominee, could easily backfire and expose the nefarious influence of the libertarian billionaires’ attempt to affect the outcome of the race for president on the Republican side. In addition to the Kochs, libertarian hedge fund operator Paul Singer has entered the Republican contest, endorsing Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and promising him millions of dollars in campaign contributions through his own network of conservative organizations and allies. Singer, whose son is homosexual, wants the GOP to embrace gay rights and gay marriage.

There are very few organizations active in conservative politics that are not financed by either Koch or Singer. Donald Trump, a billionaire in his own right, doesn’t need their support.

Blogger Tina Trent, who writes and lectures about criminal justice issues, hailed Cruz’s decision to come out against the Koch-backed bill, saying the legislation was “a 100 percent giveaway to some of the most radical anti-incarceration activist groups funded by George Soros,” the billionaire hedge fund operator and backer of the Democratic Party. She said, “I’m happy to see Cruz refuse to obey the Kochs on this one vote, but the fact that they came out and chastised him publicly when he did cross them even slightly points to bigger questions—and bigger problems.  Will Cruz go further and completely sever ties with the Kochs?”

Libertarians and their Leftist Allies Push Criminal Justice Reform

Though branded by the media as free market conservatives, the Koch brothers are libertarians on social and foreign policy issues and do business with China and Russia. They chose “criminal justice reform” as their latest high-profile cause, even though this has meant collusion with the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations and his grantees.

We noted in a story last March that the Coalition for Public Safety was playing a leading role in this new “bipartisan” campaign for “criminal justice reform,” and has been financed by $5 million from the Koch brothers and other “core supporters,” such as the liberal Ford Foundation.  Soros money for this effort has been mostly funneled through the ACLU, a major “partner” in the group, which received $50 million to cut national incarceration rates and release criminals.

The Coalition for Public Safety is run by Christine Leonard, a former Ted Kennedy Senate staffer once affiliated with the left-wing Vera Institute for Justice. We pointed out that the Vera Institute is so extreme that its Project Concern had a National Advisory Board on Adolescent Development, Safety and Justice that included the former communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn as an adviser from 1998 to 2003.

One Soros-funded group, Critical Resistance, was founded by communist Angela Davis and says it seeks “to end the prison industrial complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure.” It got $100,000 from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

An all-day “Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform” that was sponsored in part by the Coalition for Public Safety featured former Obama official and Marxist Van Jones as a major speaker. Jones appeared at a podium emblazoned with the company name “Koch Industries.”  Obama’s then-Attorney General Eric Holder also spoke to the event.

Cruz was joined in his opposition to the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act by Republican Senators Orrin Hatch (UT), David Perdue (GA), Jeff Sessions (AL), and David Vitter (LA). Nevertheless, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin pushed the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act through the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 15-5 vote. A Cruz amendment to fix the bill was voted down.

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning said that Senate Republicans, “in a quest for bipartisanship,” have passed a bill that will “retroactively reduce more federal prison sentences, resulting in an additional flooding of our cities with thousands more convicted criminals out of penitentiaries.” He asked, “Given the volatile mix of massive increases of Muslim refugees, the influx of Central American gangs and Mexican drug cartel members, and the disarming of our police, what could go wrong with releasing tens of thousands of convicted criminals early into the already violent cities? Why would Republicans vote for that?”

Law Enforcement Groups Weigh in on Pending Crime Legislation

Unwilling to let the Koch brothers and George Soros have their way on the crime legislation, organizations representing law enforcement are making their views known. Groups opposing the bill include the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, National Sheriffs’ Association, National Immigration & Customs Enforcement Council, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, National District Attorneys Association, Major County Sheriffs’ Association, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association.

Major figures opposing the bill include Ed Meese, Former Attorney General of the United States; Ron Hosko, Former Assistant Director of the FBI; and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum.

Senator Sessions, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor, quoted Steven Cook, the President of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, as saying that the bill “threatens to reverse many of the gains we have made by making thousands of convicted and imprisoned armed career criminals, serial violent criminals, and high-level drug traffickers eligible for early release.” Cook added that “it would seriously weaken the very tools that federal prosecutors, working with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, have used to keep our communities safe.”

“In reality,” Tina Trent told Accuracy in Media, “there is no big public groundswell of support for releasing recidivist criminals back onto the streets. The urgency around this issue has been almost entirely manufactured by paid activists in the leftist and libertarian camps—aided by the media, of course. This is why they’re being so intentionally secretive about the process and the people who would be released and how the releases would be implemented. It’s also why they’re not making it easy, or even possible, to see state-by-state information about the specific inmates who would be released, nor can the public view the full criminal arrest and conviction records for these inmates.”

Taking on libertarian rhetoric about alleged “nonviolent” drug offenders supposedly populating the prisons, she noted there are several ways an offender can be classified as “non-violent” even when he or she has a long rap sheet of arrests for violent crimes and even convictions for violent crimes. In such cases, defense lawyers will have their clients plead to a drug charge in exchange for charges of violent crimes being dropped.

The “Ferguson” Effect?

Despite the serious flaws in the bill and questions about the radicals backing it, aCongressional Criminal Justice and Public Safety Caucus has been created to make similar legislation a reality on the House side. Representatives Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Raul Labrador (R-ID), Cedric Richmond (D-LA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) will serve as co-chairs of this newly-formed body.

Jessica Berry, Deputy Director of the Coalition for Public Safety, thanked Chaffetz and the other Republicans for partnering with Democrats as well as President Obama, for the purpose of “getting criminal justice reform done.”

Berry’s praise for Republicans should give them concern. She is a former top Democratic Party staffer on Capitol Hill, having served as the principal law enforcement and criminal justice advisor to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and an adviser to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If the “bipartisan” bill passes Congress, Republicans may eventually be blamed for helping to put more criminals back on the streets, producing more of the “Ferguson effect” that Obama’s FBI director James Comey says has put the lives of police officers and innocent members of the community in greater danger.

The controversy over Comey’s remarks could complicate the President’s push “to loosen the nation’s sentencing laws,” the Hill newspaper reported. Another potential complication is that the outspoken Cruz and others may put pressure on Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) to stop the bill from coming up for a vote so that Republicans don’t further embarrass themselves by partnering with soft-on-crime Democrats in hock to Soros-funded activist groups.

Leftist groups are hoping McConnell will bring the bill to a full Senate vote, in order to demonstrate how Republicans can work with Democrats on an issue dear to the Obama administration.

05/26/15

The Jihad Caucus

By: James Simpson
DC Independent Examiner

Turban Durbin

Strange Politics

The United States allows 70,000 people from all over the world to obtain legal permanent residence through our Refugee Program–one of the most generous in the world. We also bring in another 40,000 or so through the Asylum program. Then there is the Special Immigrant Visa for people from Iraq and Afghanistan–about 10,000 in FY 2014–and a Cuban/Haitian Entrant program bringing in another 20,000 annually. That adds up to about 140,000.

Many of these “refugees” come from Islamic countries like Somalia, Iraq and Iran, bringing with them at least the potential for terrorism, in many cases a contempt for our country and the almost universal edict among Muslims to dominate. Islamic supremacist Mega Mosques are being erected all over the country, vigorously supported by the Obama Justice Department, which runs interference for them over the objections of local citizenry.

It’s about to get worse. The Syrian civil war–enabled at least partially by Obama’s insane foreign policy–has created a refugee crisis, with approximately 2.9 million Syrians now living in refugee camps in surrounding countries. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees wants the U.S. to accept 130,000 Syrians by the end of 2016. We have only taken 700 so far, but given the FBI’s warning that it cannot guarantee ISIS or other terrorists are not among the refugees, even that is too many.

Not to be dissuaded from such silly national security concerns, a group of 14 U.S. senators, led by the indefatigable Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, have written a letter to Obama urging him to allow 65,000 Syrians in as refugees. This would require a dramatic expansion of the refugee program, and virtually guarantee that a sizable number of ISIS fighters would slip in among them. Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy has given them the moniker “Jihad Caucus” because practically speaking, Jihad is what this request will bring.

The 14 senators demanding this massive influx of Syrians are:

Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)

Al Franken (D-MN)

Patrick Leahy (D-VT)

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

Patty Murray (D-WA)

Robert Menendez (D-NJ)

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

Christopher Coons (D-DE)

Tim Kaine (D-VA)

Edward Markey (D-MA)

Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

Mazie Hirono (D-HI)

These same 14 sent another letter in April Demanding action on the Syrians. These senators have truly earned the name Jihad Caucus. A few years back, Dick “Turban” Durbin, as he has been called, said U.S. troops guarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners, were Nazis. Sounds like a bit of projection to me.

04/24/15

The DNA Deniers in the Media

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The media have launched a major campaign on behalf of the “transgendered.” The Bruce Jenner ABC News interview is the most visible manifestation of this campaign. However, the NBC Nightly News on Wednesday ran a story by Kate Snow about the “transgender grandchild” of Democratic Rep. Mike Honda of Hawaii. Lacking in the coverage is any concrete definition of the term “transgendered” or any discussion of how children are now being used to promote an increasingly bizarre sexual agenda that requires physically mutilating or chemically treating very confused young people.

The Human Rights Campaign, a group co-founded by accused sex offender Terry Bean, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, quickly highlighted this latest NBC News report in a continuing series on “transgender youth.”

However, just like the terms lesbian, gay, and bisexual, the word “transgendered” applies to certain behaviors or appearances and does not signify anything scientific or biological about a person.

Regardless of what you may see or read in the media, nature has given humanity two sexes, male and female, which are defined by DNA. People can call themselves anything they want, but the biological facts of life cannot be denied.

This is why, when The Washington Post ran a recent story about a “transgendered” soldier who claims to be a man, the paper noted that the military regards “him” as a “her,” because biologically that is what he really is. You cannot change your DNA.

The point is that those claiming to be one of any number of categories of alleged sexual minorities can accurately be labeled DNA deniers if they deny their fundamental biological identity.

The liberals and their media allies always claim they are in favor of science on matters such as global warming or climate change. But strangely, on the matter of human sexuality, science is denied and people are allowed to make up “facts” about themselves, describing their sexuality in terms that happen to be pleasing to them for any reason at all. A new category is “questioning,” meaning that a person can decide, apparently from day to day, what sexual minority they belong to.

If someone feels he or she is a member of the opposite sex, then that is perfectly acceptable, according to the LGBT community and its supporters.

But facts are facts, and science is science. Even liberal publications have to admit this. “The simplest thing DNA can tell you is whether someone is male or female,” notes the Guardian.

But consider the NBC story. Snow referred to Rep. Honda as having “tweeted a photo of himself on Twitter back in February, grinning next to his beautiful 8-year-old granddaughter Malisa…” But Malisa is not a girl. Malisa is biologically a boy. He was born with the name Brody.

Snow reported that the parents “thought their second child would be a boy. But by the time their child was three, she had chosen a new name for herself—Malisa.” A child at the age of three decided to become a girl? Could it be that the child was going through a phase and living in a fantasy? It seems apparent that the child was born a boy and was going through some confusion about his sexual identity. The parents decided to encourage this confusion by allowing the child to now identify as a girl.

Rather than celebrate this bizarre development, the parents should be questioned about their child-rearing skills. What the child (and the parents) may need is serious psychological counseling.

Of course, the homosexuals and their supporters, most notably President Barack Obama, adamantly oppose any kind of change therapy to return troubled young people to their biologically-based sexual orientation.

Snow reported, “Although there are no exact numbers, Malisa joined what experts say is a growing number of children transitioning at a young age.” No exact numbers? Experts? Who are they? This is propaganda masquerading as journalism. It is designed to feed the notion that nature’s determination that humans are born male and female is a gross miscalculation, and that humans can decide whether they are male or female, or whatever.

What Snow is describing is sexual confusion brought on by a culture (and possibly parents) which has obscured the sexual differences between men and women. This is where the homosexual movement has brought our nation.

Snow reports, “The family knows they are just at the beginning of this journey with Malisa, and work closely with a team of doctors. As she approaches puberty, they’ll have to consider whether to use so called puberty blockers and hormone therapy.”

The “puberty blockers” will be designed to stop “Malisa” from being the boy “she” is. They will stop the growth of facial hair and an Adam’s apple. He may also have to undergo some form of sex change surgery or other medical treatment.

Rather than challenge this insidious campaign of making children into pawns of the sexual “liberation” movement, some conservative and Republican politicians on Capitol Hill are voting for measures to in some way “protect” or outlaw alleged “discrimination” against sexual minorities.

For example, ten Republican senators voted for a measure introduced by far left-wing Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) to protect alleged “LGBT homeless youth.” They were Senators Kelly Ayotte (NH), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Susan Collins (ME), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rand Paul (KY), Rob Portman (OH), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Pat Toomey (PA).

The term “LGBT homeless youth” is designed to expand the reach of the federal government into yet another area of human activity, based on questionable surveys and experts.

The power of the propaganda emanating from the media has created the perception, even among these Republicans, that this is a major problem that the federal government must address.

Not surprisingly, the homosexual movement was ecstatic. Thanks to those 10 Republicans, the headline over the AP article was, “A Majority Of The Senate Is Voting For LGBT Rights.”

The DNA deniers are on the march, making serious inroads into the national Republican Party.