Fast & Furious 2015

On May 4, 2015 Nadir Soofi and Elton Simpson drove from Phoenix to Garland, Texas to carry out a terror attack against conservatives hosting a Mohammed cartoon contest. When they arrived on scene, they were immediately shot and killed by police after opening fire outside the building.

Remember, they weren’t radical Islam believers (there is in fact no such thing as radical islam and certainly not any terrorists), guns kill people, and the border is “more secure” than ever.

It turns out Soofi purchased his gun under the Holder Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious back in 2010. As a reminder, Operation Fast and Furious was a program that ran from 2009-2010 in which federal agents purposely allowed the sale of thousands of weapons, including handguns, AK-47s and .50-caliber rifles, to known drug cartels. Agents deliberately allowed weapons to be trafficked and lost in Mexico. Now, Barack Obama’s bloodiest scandal has hit home once again. Richard Serrano at the LA Times has the incredible details:

Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol.At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi’s history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.

Inside the store, he fudged some facts on the form required of would-be gun buyers. What Soofi could not have known was that Lone Wolf was at the center of a federal sting operation known as Fast and Furious, targeting Mexican drug lords and traffickers. The idea of the secret program was to allow Lone Wolf to sell illegal weapons to criminals and straw purchasers, and track the guns back to large smuggling networks and drug cartels.

Soofi’s attempt to buy a gun caught the attention of authorities, who slapped a seven-day hold on the transaction, according to his Feb. 24, 2010, firearms transaction record, which was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, the hold was lifted after 24 hours, and Soofi got the 9-millimeter.

In other words, ATF and the FBI pushed through a shady gun sale that ultimately was used in a terror attack against Americans on U.S. soil.

The Liberal media will ignore that, once they’ve finished burying the Planned Parenthood story until 20,000 feet of bullshit.

Not surprisingly the FBI has been stonewalling information about Soofi’s firearm and the guns used during the Garland attack for months. They did the same when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by Mexican drug bandits in Arizona on December 15, 2010. The guns used in his murder were also sold as part of Operation Fast and Furious. More from Serrano:

A day after the attack, the Department of Justice sent an “urgent firearms disposition request” to Lone Wolf, seeking more information about Soofi and the pistol he bought in 2010, according to a June 1 letter from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch.
Though the request did not specify whether the gun was used in the Garland attack, Justice Department officials said the information was needed “to assist in a criminal investigation,” according to Johnson’s letter, also reviewed by The Times.
The FBI so far has refused to release any details, including serial numbers, about the weapons used in Garland by Soofi and Simpson. Senate investigators are now pressing law enforcement agencies for answers, raising the chilling possibility that a gun sold during the botched Fast and Furious operation ended up being used in a terrorist attack against Americans.

Keep in mind not a single person involved in Operation Fast and Furious has been fired. In fact, many Department of Justice officials and ATF supervisors have been promoted. ATF agents who exposed the scandal, however, have faced extreme retaliation in addition to career and personal sabotage. 

Exposing the Agenda to criticism is not permitted. You shall not embarrass, or be seen to embarrass, The King, Barack Hussein Obama I.

More “inconvenient truth” to hide.

And it’s Bush’s fault anyways… 🙂

The Big Dump

A Dinosaur sized info dump was laid yesterday.  If you want to bury a story release it on Friday, especially so that the Ministry of Truth can kill it by Monday.

So we have Your friend and mine, “Fast & Furious”.

Obama and had the documents buried in the filing cabinet. You know the ones where Holder shared potential classified internal emails with his wife and mother and Obama issued 30 executive orders to try and keep it hidden.

Judicial Watch announced today that it received from the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) a “Vaughn index” detailing records about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.  The index was forced out of the Obama administration thanks to JW’s June 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent September 2012 FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice (No. 1:12-cv-01510)).  A federal court had ordered the production over the objections of the Obama Justice Department.

The document details the Attorney General Holder’s personal involvement in managing the Justice Department’s strategy on media and Congressional investigations into the Fast and Furious scandal.  Notably, the document discloses that emails between Attorney General Holder and his wife Sharon Malone – as well as his mother – are being withheld under an extraordinary claim of executive privilege as well as a dubious claim of deliberative process privilege under the Freedom of Information Act.  The “First Lady of the Justice Department” is a physician and not a government employee.

This is the first time that the Obama administration has provided a detailed listing of all records being withheld from Congress and the American people about the deadly Fast and Furious gun running scandal. The 1307-page “draft” Vaughn index was emailed to Judicial Watch at 8:34 p.m. last night, a few hours before a federal court-ordered deadline.  In its cover letter, the Department of Justice asserts that all of the responsive records described in the index are “subject to the assertion of executive privilege.”

The Vaughn index explains 15,662 documents. Typically, a Vaughn index must: (1) identify each record withheld; (2) state the statutory exemption claimed; and (3) explain how disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption.  The Vaughn index arguably fails to provide all of this required information but does provide plenty of interesting information for a public kept in the dark for years about the Fast and Furious scandal.

Based on a preliminary review of the massive document, Judicial Watch can disclose that the Vaughn index reveals:

• Numerous emails that detail Attorney General Holder’s direct involvement in crafting talking points, the timing of public disclosures, and handling Congressional inquiries in the Fast and Furious matter.

• President Obama has asserted executive privilege over nearly 20 email communications between Holder and his spouse Sharon Malone. The administration also claims that the records are also subject to withholding under the “deliberative process” exemption. This exemption ordinarily exempts from public disclosure records that could chill internal government deliberations.

• Numerous entries detail DOJ’s communications (including those of Eric Holder) concerning the White House about Fast and Furious.

• The scandal required the attention of virtually every top official of the DOJ and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Communications to and from the United States Ambassador to Mexico about the Fast and Furious matter are also described.

• Many of the records are already publicly available such as letters from Congress, press clips, and typical agency communications. Ordinarily, these records would, in whole or part, be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.  Few of the records seem to even implicate presidential decision-making and advice that might be subject to President Obama’s broad and unprecedented executive privilege claim.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton criticized President Obama and his disgraced Attorney General in a statement today:

This document provides key information about the cover-up of Fast and Furious by Attorney General Eric Holder and other high-level officials of the Obama administration. Obama’s executive privilege claims over these records are a fraud and an abuse of his office.  There is no precedent for President Obama’s Nixonian assertion of executive privilege over these ordinary government agency records.  Americans will be astonished that Obama asserted executive privilege over Eric Holder’s emails to his wife about Fast and Furious.

Once again, Judicial Watch has proven itself more effective than Congress and the establishment media in providing basic oversight of this out-of-control Administration.  This Fast and Furious document provides dozens of leads for further congressional, media, and even criminal investigations.

On June 28, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives over his refusal to turn over records explaining why the Obama administration may have lied to Congress and refused for months to disclose the truth about the gun running operation.  It marked the first time in U.S. history that a sitting Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress.

A week before the contempt finding, to protect Holder from criminal prosecution and stave off the contempt vote, President Obama asserted executive privilege over the Fast and Furious records the House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed eight months earlier. Judicial Watch filed its FOIA request two days later.  Holder’s Justice Department wouldn’t budge (or follow the law), so JW filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 12, 2012.

But then the Justice Department convinced U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates to stay our lawsuit, in part to allow ongoing settlement discussions between the Holder’s government lawyers and the House Committee to continue.  Unsurprisingly, the “negotiations” between politicians running the House and the Justice Department went nowhere.

Fed up with the interminable delay caused Holder’s gamesmanship and stonewalling, JW renewed its request to the Court to allow our transparency lawsuit to continue.  Thankfully, this past July, Judge John D. Bates ended the 16-month delay and ordered the Obama administration to produce a Vaughn index of the alleged “executive privilege” records by October 1. Judge Bates noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” President Obama’s unprecedented executive privilege claims in the Fast and Furious matter.

Unhappy with having to produce the records prior to the elections, Justice lawyers asked the judge to give them one extra month, until November 3 (the day before Election Day!) to produce the info.  Judge Bates rejected this gambit, suggested that the Holder’s agency did not take court order seriously.  Rather than a month, Judge Bates gave Justice until yesterday to cough up the Vaughn index. Judge Bates issued his smack down on September 23.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation two days later.

Many share our opinion it was “no coincidence” that Holder’s resignation came “on the heels of another court ruling that the Justice Department must finally cough up information about how Holder’s Justice Department lied to Congress and the American people about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, for which Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives.”

The House had been separately litigating to obtain the records but had gotten nowhere until after Judge Bates ruled that the DOJ finally had to disclose information to Judicial Watch.

On September 9, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, citing Judicial Watch’s success, ordered the Justice Department to produce information to Congress by November 3.

Fast and Furious was a DOJ/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gun running” operation in which the Obama administration reportedly allowed guns to go to Mexican drug cartels hoping they would end up at crime scenes, advancing gun-control policies. Fast and Furious weapons have been implicated in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of other innocents in Mexico.  Guns from the Fast and Furious scandal are expected to be used in criminal activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years to come.

Guns from the Fast and Furious scandal continue to be used in crimes.  Just last week, Judicial Watch disclosed that a Fast and Furious gun was used in gang -style assault on a Phoenix apartment building that left two people wounded.  We figured this out from information we uncovered through another public records lawsuit against the City of Phoenix.

Congress officially confirmed the AK-47 was used in the assault that terrorized residents in Phoenix.  In an October 16 letter sent from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) to Deputy Attorney General James Cole discloses that “we have learned of another crime gun connected to Fast and Furious.  The [Justice] Department did not provide any notice to the Congress or the public about this gun….This lack of transparency about the consequences of Fast and Furious undermines public confidence in law enforcement and gives the impression that the Department is seeking to suppress information and limit its exposure to public scrutiny.”

We have many other active lawsuits over the Fast and Furious scandal:

On October 11, 2011, Judicial Watch sued the DOJ and the ATF to obtain all Fast and Furious records submitted to the House Committee on Oversight.

On June 6, 2012, Judicial Watch sued the ATF seeking access to records detailing communications between ATF officials and Kevin O’Reilly, former Obama White House Director of North American Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council.

On September 5, 2013, Judicial Watch sued the DOJ seeking access to all records of communications between DOJ and the Oversight Committee relating to settlement discussions in the Committee’s 2012 contempt of Congress lawsuit against Holder. The contempt citation stemmed from Holder’s refusal to turn over documents to Congress related to the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal.

On May 28, 2014, Judicial Watch sued the DOJ on behalf of ATF Special Agent John Dodson, who blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious and was then subjected to an alleged smear campaign designed to destroy his reputation.

And the fun never stops…

The Slow and Deliberate

Worth Reading: http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama#.UFsQT41lQ18#LPFWLP_S

The Fast & Furious report from the Inspector General’s Office is in and guess what no one important is to blame for Fast & Furious.

What a shocker.

The script for this Dog-n-Pony show was written before it was it started.

The Wolves have investigated the Chicken house and decided a couple of pups got over excited and they can eat those, but over all, no big deal.

And Brian Terry is still Dead.

100’s maybe thousands of Mexicans are still dead.

But at least one of the Wolves pronounced after nearly 2 years that the Pack leader didn’t do it.

They feel better now. Move on. They have more important Romney bashing to do.

Oh, and it’s Bush’s Fault!  Imagine that! 🙂

The White House’s refusal to release communications related to the Fast and Furious gun-walking program and the refusal of a White House official to be interviewed about the matter “made it impossible” for the inspector general (IG) of the Justice Department to “pursue that aspect of the case,” the IG, Michael Horowitz, testified.

But Obama repeatedly said he had nothing to do with it. 🙂

The IG report states, “We also sought to interview Kevin O’Reilly, an official with the White House National Security Staff, about communications he had in 2010 with Special Agent in Charge William Newell that included information about Operation Fast and Furious. O’Reilly declined through his personal counsel our request for an interview.”

Bill Newell was the ATF Special Agent in Charge for the Phoenix, Ariz., office that was running Operation Fast and Furious.

The IG report says, “We sought to interview O’Reilly in light of e-mail communications he had with Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell in 2010.”
newell

“Newell told us that he had known O’Reilly during previous field office assignments and that the two shared information about firearms trafficking issues relevant to their geographic areas of responsibility,” the report said. “According to Newell, O’Reilly was also friends with ATF’s White House Liaison and through that relationship O’Reilly would be included on some information sharing between Newell and the ATF Liaison about ATF’s efforts on the Southwest Border, and that O’Reilly eventually communicated with Newell directly.”

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), which is overseen by the Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder. The program, which ran from the fall of 2009 to mid-December 2010, allowed guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels through straw purchasers.

More than 2,000 firearms, largely AK-47s and 5.7 caliber pistols, were sold and allowed to walk. The ATF recovered only about 100 of the 2,000-plus weapons. In January 2010, a straw purchaser, Jaime Avila – well known to the ATF — bought three AK-47s at a Phoenix-area gun store. Two of those weapons were later found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 14, 2010.

After Terry’s death, Operation Fast and Furious was halted and Avila was arrested.

O’Reilly’s attorney reportedly said that his client would agree to a telephone interview  (he was in Iraq) with the committee but only if the White House said okay. White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler has stated that O’Reilly will not be permitted to give an interview.(CNS)

The report our attorney general used to justify withholding evidence of who was responsible for the administration program that led to the deaths of two U.S. agents is out. It delivers more scapegoats than answers.

The release by the Department of Justice’s inspector general of a 400-page report on the administration’s gun-walking operation, Fast and Furious, is no big surprise.

As Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) Committee, Fast and Furious represented a “pattern of serious failures” by various agencies.

But he let the buck stop short of where it belongs — Attorney General Eric Holder’s desk.

Horowitz mysteriously chose to lump Fast and Furious, as Team Obama does, with a Bush-era program, Wide Receiver. That operation was run out of Tucson between 2006 and 2007, ending before Bush left office and before Fast and Furious began in 2009.

Both Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious were part of a bigger effort called Project Gunrunner, which began in 2006. Even so, the differences between the two are vast, starting with the fact that Wide Receiver produced no dead bodies. It was run in close cooperation with Mexican authorities, as Fast and Furious wasn’t, and involved gun-tracing and not gun-walking.

The report was repeatedly invoked by Holder as a reason for withholding answers and documents on Fast and Furious from OGR Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Along with Sen. Charles Grassley, D-Iowa, Issa led the investigation of the operation that saw Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata murdered with guns supplied by the program. Holder, held in contempt by the House, still isn’t very forthcoming.

The report incredibly found “no evidence … (Holder) was informed about Operation Fast and Furious, or learned about the tactics employed by ATF in the investigation.” But Holder’s own statements contradict that.

So scapegoats had to be found, and the report cites 14 other department employees for potential wrongdoing and recommends Justice consider disciplinary action.

Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, is resigning after the report essentially concluded he was the one best positioned to stop Fast and Furious. That’s false — Eric Holder was.

As early as Oct. 22, 2010, before agent Terry’s murder, a DOJ official sent Holder a memo saying: “It’s not going to be a big surprise that a bunch of U.S. guns are being used in (Mexico), so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.'” Holder said he didn’t recall the memo.

Nor does he probably recall a speech he gave to Mexican authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, taking credit for Gunrunner as well as Fast and Furious for himself and the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: “Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels…(and) to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner.”

It’s important to note that Gunrunner and Fast and Furious both ran guns to Mexican cartels under the DOJ umbrella and the chains of command all led to Holder.

The report doesn’t contain the answers the Terry and Zapata families, or the American people, were looking for. But it does show that either Holder is culpable or incompetent. And either way, he should be fired. (IBD)

But at least we now know it was Bush’s Fault and all is right with the Liberal World.

Kumbuya.

Fast & Furious II: The Sequel

Two of every three suspected crime guns recovered by Mexican authorities and reported to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives came from the U.S., according to data the agency released Thursday.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said the new data make it “very clear that we need to increase our efforts to starve the supply of American weapons that arm Mexico’s brutal drug trafficking organizations.”

Aka Gun Control. Something wanna-be dictators always want.

In the end, ATF counts stolen guns in this data, guns sold to foreign governments by FFLs under the approval of the State Department in this data and counts guns ATF and DOJ purposely sent into Mexico as “guns being traced back to the U.S.” (Kate Pavlich)

So they can inflate the statistics and make it look worse so they can push for more gun control which is what Fast & furious was all about anyhow originally until it went tits-up on them.

“We also have to remember that the only guns Mexico is going to submit for tracing are guns they know are from the United States, which clearly paints an incomplete picture of the firearms found in the Mexico,” Sen. Grassley said. (townhall.com)

Now we have…GRENADES!

First it was “Operation Fast & Furious”…now there is a new scandal in the ATF. “Grenade Gate” is centered around alleged cartel arms dealer Jean Baptist Kingrey. ATF agents were supposed to be tracking Kingrey…but they let him go TWICE! The Justice Department just handed over a slew of disturbing new photos (including the ones below) to Congress shedding light on the case.(Greta Van Sustren)

They were tracking him, they lost him and lots of explosives made it across the border.

The ATF and/or the US Attorney’s office in Phoenix allowed at least 1,400 guns to be smuggled from the US to drug cartels in Mexico, ostensibly so they could track the guns up the food chain and then make big arrests. Instead, and tragically, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. One of the weapons nearby was indeed one that US law enforcement had allowed to pass through to Mexico. Other weapons have apparently been linked to other crimes.

US Attorney General for the District of Arizona, Dennis Burke, resigned  last year over Fast & Furious. But no one has actually been arrested, prosecuted or even charged because of this mess.

It gets worse. Burke may also have been involved in another smuggling attempt. This one involved parts for hundreds of grenades. The suspect, Jean Baptiste Kingery, was arrested in Arizona, only to be released hours later. ATF agents wanted him held but were overruled by the Attorney General’s office. Kingery was recently arrested in Mexico, with parts for yet hundreds of more grenades.

So how many guns and grenade parts have US law enforcement allowed to pass to drug cartels? More to the point, isn’t this against the law? It shouldn’t matter if law enforcement wanted to do a sting and track the weapons to cartel leaders. They did in fact allow guns to be smuggled into Mexico. This is not only wrong, it’s also, well, crazy. We’re supposed to be cooperating with Mexico yet they weren’t told.

The emails also show Obama administration officials acknowledging that they may lose track of grenades but would still be able to accomplish their original objective even if the grenades explode.

According to an internal email that was provided to Congress by the Department of Justice and first reported by CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson — who’s been the media’s most dogged reporter in tracking down facts on Fast and Furious – ATF began watching accused smuggler Jean Baptiste Kingery’s AK-47 purchases in 2004. In the 2009 internal ATF email, Obama administration officials admitted they believed Kingery was “trafficking them into Mexico.”

The 2009 email shows the ATF officials had then become aware of Kingery’s alleged grenade trafficking.

The administration officials then put together a plan: They secretly intercepted Kingery’s grenade parts after he ordered them online, marked them with special paint and gave them back to him. Then, they allowed him to take those grenade parts into Mexico. ATF was going to try to find his weapons factory there — even though the U.S. government and its federal law enforcement agencies have no jurisdiction in Mexico — with the apparent goal of building a bigger case against Kingery.

ATF agents had planned to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials — who, unlike ATF agents who ultimately report to Attorney General Eric Holder, report up the chain to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

The emails show ATF agents were aware they might lose track of Kingery while they allowed him to transport the grenade parts into Mexico. The emails also show ATF agents knew that the grenades could end up exploding and killing innocent people if they proceeded with the plan. That didn’t stop the Obama administration’s ATF from allowing the grenades to walk.

“Even in a post blast, as long as the safety lever is recovered we will be able to identify these tagged grenades,” an official wrote in one email.

Hey, even if they explode and kill people it’s ok!!! No need to do anything about it because we can still get what WE want out of it!

According to Attkisson’s report, officials had taken Kingery into custody in 2010 — long before Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered with a Fast and Furious-supplied gun — after having caught him trying to transport that ammunition and those grenade parts and fuse assemblies into Mexico hidden inside the spare tire of the SUV he was travelling in.

Attkisson said that ATF agents questioned Kingery at that point but then “inexplicably released” him.

“We are forbidden from doing that type of activity,” ATF’s Mexico attaché, Carlos Canino wrote in one email. “If ICE is telling you they can do that, they are full of shit.”

According to the Journal article, the June decision to release Kingery:

“… is at the crux of a bitter fight between ATF agents and prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix. The lead ATF agent on the grenades case, Peter Forcelli, “was horrified with the thought of releasing this individual” and “practically begged” senior prosecutor Emory Hurley “for permission to arrest the suspect on a criminal complaint…”

An e-mail later surfaced in which Burke wrote, “Agree [with] the course of action as the variables play out.” (New Times 2011)

Sources tell CBS News that, in January 2010, ATF had Kingery under surveillance after he bought about 50 grenade bodies and headed to Mexico. But they say prosecutors wouldn’t agree to make a case. So, as ATF agents looked on, Kingery and the grenade parts crossed the border — and simply disappeared.

Six months later, Kingery allegedly got caught leaving the U.S. for Mexico with 114 disassembled grenades in a tire. One ATF agent told investigators he literally begged prosecutors to keep Kingery in custody this time, fearing he was supplying narco-terrorists, but was again ordered to let Kingery go.

The prosecutors — already the target of controversy for overseeing “Fast and Furious,” wouldn’t comment on the grenades case. U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke recently resigned and his assistant, Emory Hurley, has been transferred. Sources say Hurley is the one who let Kingery go, saying grenade parts are “novelty items” and the case “lacked jury appeal.” (Michelle Malkin 2011)

But don’t worry, they knew nothing about all this. It was all Bush’s/Someone else’s Fault! 🙂

And we just need more Gun Control in THIS country!!

Not one government official has been held accountable for Operation Fast and Furious. (DC)

The top Justice Department official who signed a letter erroneously telling lawmakers investigating “Operation Fast and Furious” that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives never allowed guns to be sold to cartel members will be leaving the department to head up a law school.

He previously served as Chief Counsel to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.,

Hmmm….

Another rat desserts the ship before he has to rat on Holder.

Weich himself testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform committee in June 2011. He mostly testified about the Justice Department’s efforts to comply with congressional subpoenas, but he was also asked about the Feb. 4, 2011, letter.

“Every time the Justice Department sends a letter to Congress, it is true to the best of our knowledge at the time that we send it,” he said. Still, he insisted again that ATF “doesn’t sanction or approve of the transfer of weapons to Mexico.” (FOX)

And if we have to retract it later, as this one was, as being blatantly false and misleading that wasn’t our fault that you discovered it was false. 🙂

So Burke is gone, his replacement was an idiot, and several other flunkies have deserted the Ship and ATF and ICE are both left with sh*t on their face but yet, curiously no is being prosecuted for this fiasco. Holder says they are “investigating” but curiously nothing has been happening for more than a year.

Attorney General Eric Holder and “Big Sis” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napalitano are curiously still here too. The Peter Principle in action.

Curiouser and Curiouser… 🙂

WASHINGTON — Republican House leaders have drafted a proposed contempt of Congress citation against Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in which they charge that he and his Justice Department have repeatedly “obstructed and slowed” the Capitol Hill investigation into the ATF’s flawed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation.

The 48-page draft citation is being drawn up by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Top committee officials recently met for most of a day in the House speaker’s office and were given the green light to proceed toward a contempt citation, according to sources who declined to be identified.

The draft describes a 2010 meeting in the office of then-acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Gary G. Grindler in which charts were presented showing 31 people had illegally paid cash for 1,026 weapons. Also shown were the locations of “stash houses” before the weapons were moved to Mexico.

“Despite receiving all this information … Grindler did not order Fast and Furious to be shut down, nor did he follow up with ATF or his staff about the investigation,” the draft says.

Grindler, however, has told congressional investigators that he was not advised at the meeting about the unusual tactics used by ATF agents in allowing the guns to be illegally sold under Fast and Furious. (LA Times)

But he didn’t do anything about it either!!

Yet another, stooge. Geez, they come out of the woodwork like cockroaches!

Gun, Grenades, eh, so what…No Big Deal. It’s all Bush’s Fault anyhow! 🙂

 

 

 

Transparency

Another book for the Liberals to ban. 🙂

Prefacing her work with an apt introduction from ATF Special Agent Jay Dobyns, one of the whistleblowers who have selflessly helped to illuminate this very dark (redacted!) splotch on the Obama administration’s record, Dobyns lays out the landscape in which Fast and Furious was a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode. Over his decades of service, Dobyns witnessed the slow but sure shift in the management of the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: from dedicated men with boots-on-the-ground know-how and well-weathered experience, to well-suited, expensively educated yuppies with agendas other than protecting the United States in mind. The instances of corruption, the ideological feuds, and the lack of integrity eventually began to dominate the agency in a way that could have only heralded disaster.

Katie takes it away from there, further setting the Fast and Furious stage by taking us through the horrendous death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and then detailing the well-documented anti-gun history of Obama and his cronies—and that’s when things start to get really hairy for the Obama administration. From the seeming pointlessness of allowing straw purchasers to send untraceable (until they turn up at crime scenes, that is) guns into Mexico, with no hope of catching the cartel kingpins; to forcing individual gun-shop business owners to sell their products to known criminals, regardless of the bewildered protestations of honest ATF agents; to the ATF’s bitter and dangerous retaliation against said honest agents—the possible motives of the people in charge become more and more ominous with every detail.

Despite the involved Obama appointees’ best efforts to downplay the impact of their recklessness, shift blame, avoid accountability, stonewall their watchdogs, and perpetuate the “botched” narrative, the unremitting investigations of Congressmen Darrell Issa, Charles Grassley, John Cornyn, and others have eventually revealed that there is something much deeper, and much more formidable, at play here than the perpetrators would like to portray.

In a readable style that’s thorough yet concise, detailed but not overwhelming, Katie presents all of the relevant players in this bloody scandal, and demonstrates the power of smaller media, the blogosphere, and determined individuals like her in uncovering the stories that the mainstream media would be all-too-willing to ignore, instead forcing the nation to finally sit up and pay attention.

While the dubious nature of outrages like the Obama administration’s Department of Energy loan guarantees and financial bailouts have illustrated the president’s willingness to throw taxpayers’ money around, the consequences of this scandal were, and will likely continue to be, American lives. As Katie points out, if the Obama administration is ready to be so cavalier with the Constitution and a few American lives here and there, just to push their leftist agenda—of what else are they capable? (DC)

ObamaCare for one. The EPA for for another.The DOJ in general. Dictatorship for the coup de tat. After all then it would be “fair” because they would get to run everyone’s life on micromanagement scale. How much more “fair” can you be? 🙂

Obama 2009: “The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable.  The way to make government accountable is to make it transparent, so the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they’re being well made, and whether their interests are being well served…For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city.  The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed.  That era is now over, starting today.”

You may now laugh cynically…

Former Bush adviser Pete Wehner writes in the Weekly Standard that Republicans ought to “relentlessly” expose the president’s untrustworthiness through a robust program of fact-checking and timely flashbacks to his previous statements:
 

What is required when dealing with a man who habitually deconstructs truth is to destroy his public credibility. Voters need to be shown that Obama’s words and claims are, quite literally, unbelievable, whether they have to do with the past or the future, himself or others. That can be done in a manner that is tough-minded but not mean-spirited?—?by referring to the public record of Obama’s counterfeit charges and broken promises, which are now sufficiently numerous that they could fill the Library of Congress…

In ads and speeches, during interviews and through the use of surrogates, Romney and his party need to prosecute their case relentlessly. They need to imprint into the mind of voters a basic proposition: Barack Obama’s claims are worthless. They need to accomplish this with an avalanche of facts and by using Obama’s own words against him. The effect will be that Americans will appropriately devalue the president’s words. They will, in increasing numbers, reject his claims because they do not trust the source of the claims. This approach relies on a truth as old as the Scriptures, which teach that fresh water and salt water cannot flow from the same spring. (DC)

I agree. Also because since Liberals have no moral standards and will say or do anything to win regardless you have hit them back to beat them back.

(Mike Opelka) — People in NYC are lining up because they heard that people were getting a debit card loaded with as much as $1,000 of stimulus money. However, based on the latest information, there is no money to be given away. And yet people continue to line up and turn over their sensitive, personal information.

E & M Multi-Services is a tax preparation service that operates out of the back of a “dollar store” in the Fordham section of the Bronx. The company is reportedly collecting copies of Social Security cards, state ID cards and in exchange people are given a debit card from First California Bank. One small problem with this program — the cards are not loaded with $1,000 — not from Obama or anyone. Although, at least one person on the scene believed that the card would contain funds from President Obama:

“They said it was money from Obama.”

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=8623276

There is no more greedy with other people’s money than Liberals.

And they are so Transparent about it. 🙂

Hmmm…

In light of new information emerging about the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious (read here about ATF targeting FBI informants), we thought revisiting this video ain’t a bad idea.

Back in April of 2009, President Obama alluded in a question and answer session to the notion of “gun tracing” in Mexico . . . leading many to conclude that he may have known more than he’s ever admitted about Operation Fast & Furious and long before he says he knew anything.  You be the judge . . .

Hmmmm….

The Wisdom of Samuel L Jackson (He ain’t no Jedi…)

Barack Obama‘s politics meant nothing to Samuel L. Jackson because the “Pulp Fiction” star only voted for the president for one reason and one reason only … because he’s black. 

In an interview with Ebony magazine, Jackson explained, “I voted for Barack because he was black. ‘Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them … That’s American politics, pure and simple. [Obama’s] message didn’t mean [bleep] to me.”

Jackson then went on to drop the N-word several times when discussing Obama, telling the mag, “When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t have elected a [bleep]. Because, what’s a [bleep]? A [bleep] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [Bleeps] don’t have beers at the White House. [Bleeps] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [bleep] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [bleep] said that?’ I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ‘cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.” (TMZ)

But if you disagree with a Liberal you’re a racist. 🙂

Hmmm….

Late last week, the White House tried claimed to “compromise” on the new ObamaCare requirement that all employers provide insurance with free birth control coverage, including religious employers. The compromise actually wasn’t a compromise at all, yet the White House is shutting down debate on the issue and saying it’s a done deal.

President Barack Obama and his deputies are using the demeaning language of disease and green-eyeshade accounting to establish free birth control as a government-backed right, and also to downgrade the value of human lives, say social conservatives.

“They’re claiming that children are like a disease and increase health costs,” said former Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright.

Unborn children, however, “are humans beings and that’s what Obama and the abortion crowd refuse to recognize,” she told The Daily Caller.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to the new Obama administration regulations is heavily influenced by its ideological and religious support for human life, and its twinned opposition to birth control, including contraception, and abortion.

That ideological point was prominently displayed in the Feb. 10 response to Obama’s announcement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen — to cover sterilization and contraception … [but] pregnancy is not a disease,” said the response.

Obama’s unsympathetic language was showcased in his Feb. 10 announcement that he would require health insurance companies to offer free birth-control services to the employees of religious groups, despite the congregations’ constitutional protection from state regulation.

“It’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one … [and] preventive care should include coverage of contraceptive services such as birth control,” the president said in brief remarks in the White House press room.

Even when Obama championed the claim that women have a moral right to use birth control, he talked about biological health, not of moral freedom. “Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health,” he said.

Except that he passed a law MANDATING their “pro-choice”  “pro-Control”–it was called ObamaCare.

MANDATING Freedom of Choice…Hmmm….

White House officials also justified the far-reaching policy by saying it would cost nothing, and therefore would impose no real burden on religious organizations.

Cost Nothing? Boy he really has no idea how capitalism works does he…Hmmm…

“Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services,” said a White House statement released Feb. 10.

But if you’re oppose to birth control to begin with, Like the Catholic Church…well, screw you… Hmmm…

Making Insurance Companies pay for something without any recourse is “free”.

Hmmm…

The Catholic Church’s advocates have reserved their strongest condemnation, however, for the White House’s description of pregnancy as a disease.

The administration believes “pregnancy is some sort of health care anomaly… [and] to be pregnant is some sort of illness,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C. They believe, he said, that they “must prevent that illness. … A pregnancy becomes the problem.”

“Kids aren’t commodities — they’re humans beings and that’s what Obama and the abortion crowd refuse to recognize,” added Wright, who is now advocating for socially conservative policies at the United Nations.

But they are political footballs…Hmm…

Now, after the many genuine concerns that have been raised over the last few weeks, as well as, frankly, the more cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football, it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution was not going to be an option, that we needed to move this faster.  So last week, I directed the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up the process that had already been envisioned.  We weren’t going to spend a year doing this; we’re going to spend a week or two doing this.

Not to be too cynical about this, but Obama last spoke with those Catholic officials months ago regarding his mandate.  And no one at the White House bothered to contact them when it came time to offer this “accommodation,” as the bishops made clear on Friday after the Obama administration announced it.  That sounds a lot like a cynical desire to punt a political football rather than figuring out exactly why the church objected to it in the first place.  And that failure looks like the product of a cynical desire to impose the same mandate while making it look like a compromise.

Following the announced “accommodations” from the White House for religious organizations whose beliefs preclude them from offering birth control, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, had some tough words for President Obama.

According to Land, the adjustment in the mandate requiring all employers — including religious organizations — to provide birth control is “a distinction without a difference.”

“My initial reaction is: How dumb does he think we are?” Land wondered in an interview with The Daily Caller. “Does he think when he puts lip stick on a pig, that we don’t understand that it is still a pig?”

Yes, he does. Because that’s they way the Liberal mind works. Someone objects to your idea so you just change the wording or the word and suddenly a totally new idea and if object to that it’s just because you’re “obstructionist”.

Perfect Example: Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change etc.

Next up: Deficit Reduction (aka spending more than we have but spending less of the more than before) is good. And if you’re against it you’re just an “obstructionist”

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

The problem by now is familiar to most. Politicians have expanded the safety net without a commensurate increase in revenues, a primary reason for the government’s annual deficits and mushrooming debt. In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.

The recent recession increased dependence on government, and stronger economic growth would reduce demand for programs like unemployment benefits. But the long-term trend is clear. Over the next 25 years, as the population ages and medical costs climb, the budget office projects that benefits programs will grow faster than any other part of government, driving the federal debt to dangerous heights.

Americans are divided about the way forward. Seventy percent of respondents to a recent New York Times poll said the government should raise taxes. Fifty-six percent supported cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Forty-four percent favored both.

But now Obama wants to cut the Deficit (not the debt) so that he’ll promise to have less and less deficits (money we don’t have) every year for the next 4 years.

He’ll have it down to 1/2 trillion in deficits by the time he leaves.

Making it 7 years in a row!

And this is an improvement, and if you don’t want to go for it you’re an “obstructionist” who just wants to protect the “rich” (the same people giving him $38,500 a person).

Hmmm…

 

The Audacity of Dishonesty

1. Announcing a massive $26 billion mortgage deal with “abusive” banks, the president blamed everybody for record foreclosures except the party most culpable: government.

Speaking Thursday from the White House, Obama scolded “irresponsible” and “reckless” lenders, who “sold homes to people who couldn’t afford them.”

Yeah, they dragged people into it, held them down and forced them to do it!

And the people came in and demanded it first!

Back in 2003, as the Examiner’s Philip Klein points out, <Barney> Frank said that the government-sponsored entities were not in any sort of crisis. “The more people exaggerate these problems,” Frank told the New York Times, “the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

For the most part, private firms such as Countrywide Financial were issuing “nontraditional” mortgages in order to package them off to Wall Street and make money, not to please Barney Frank. Like most policymakers, Frank didn’t appear to see the housing bubble or looming subprime crisis before it was too late. (WP)

He <Obama> also cited buyers who bought homes bigger than their budgets, and Wall Street bankers who packaged the shaky mortgages and traded them for “profit.”

“It was wrong,” he asserted. And now the nation’s “biggest banks will be required to right these wrongs.”

Obama acts as if the private sector bears all the responsibility for the mortgage mess. But he and his attorney general know it’s merely a scapegoat for the reckless government housing policies they and their ilk drafted and enforced in the run-up to the crisis.

Starting in the mid-1990s — in a historic first — it became federal regulatory policy to force all U.S. lenders to scrap traditional lending standards for home loans on the grounds they were “racially discriminatory.”

President Clinton fretted that blacks and other minorities could not qualify for mortgages at nearly the same rates as whites and Asians. So Clinton codified more “flexible” underwriting standards in a “Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending,” and entered it into the Federal Register.

At the same time, he set up a little-known federal body made up of 10 regulatory agencies — the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending — to enforce the looser standards. It threatened lenders to either ease credit for low-income borrowers or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related bad publicity. It also threatened to deny them expansion plans and access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“The agencies will not tolerate lending discrimination in any form,” the 20-page document warned financial institutions. The task force enforced these policies throughout the Bush administration.

According to Peter Ferrara, senior fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy:

“This overregulation reached the point of forcing lenders to discount bad credit history, no credit history, no savings, lack of steady employment, a high ratio of mortgage obligations to income, undocumented income, and inability to finance down payment and closing costs, while counting unemployment benefits and even welfare as income in qualifying for a mortgage.

“This” he said, “turned into government-sanctioned looting of the banks.”

The Justice Department — along with HUD, which regulated Fannie and Freddie — proved the most aggressive members of the fair-lending task force. Eric Holder, then acting as deputy AG, ordered lenders to actually “target” African-Americans for home mortgages they couldn’t otherwise afford. Obama cheered Holder on as an inner-city community organizer who also pressured banks to ease credit for home borrowers.

In other words, the same two officials now leading the charge to punish “abusive” lenders had egged them on before the crisis.(IBD)

2. The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

So she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that “in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.” Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply.

Sebelius says that three states have religious exemptions as narrow as the one the federal government has adopted. The notion that the federal government is imposing the model of three very liberal states — New York, Oregon, and Vermont — on the entire country is not comforting. But even in those states, some employers have been able to sidestep the mandates by, for example, organizing their insurance under federal regulation, which until now has not overridden conscience. The new mandate eliminates that escape route.

Joel Hunter, one of Obama’s pet pastors, says “this policy can be nuanced.” (“I have come to bring nuance,” as Matthew 10:34 does not say.) He is wrong. Either the administration will back off, and allow religious organizations to follow their consciences, or it will not. If it chooses the former course, it may still find a way to increase access to contraception — which is not especially scarce, by the way — but it will have to replace its current policy, not just “nuance” it. (NR)

“Nuance” is the new Orwellian phrase for LYING. 🙂

It’s “complicated” 🙂

But the assurances were greeted Tuesday with skepticism from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been leading the opposition to the new requirement.

“So far, ‘work this thing through’ is just the sugar-coated version of ‘force you to comply,’ ” Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel for the conference, said in an e-mail.

Remember, compromise with a Liberal means that you compromise your principles to do what THEY want you to do.

3. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked to respond to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comment that the lack of a budget creates “uncertainty” which is “negative for growth.”

Carney responded: “I have no opinion; the White House has no opinion on Chairman Bernanke’s assessment of how the Senate ought to do its business.”

1,017 Days and Counting!

4. EPIC <The Electronic Privacy Information Center >director Ginger McCall notes that monitoring what people are saying about government policies goes too far and has a chilling effect on free speech.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of political dissent has no legal basis and is contrary to core First Amendment principles,” she said.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said McCall. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties.”

DHS officials have admitted that monitoring of social networks for negative opinion was undertaken by the agency, but claim that the operation was a one off test and was quickly dropped as it did not meet “operational requirements or privacy standards,” which “expressly prohibit reporting on individuals’ First Amendment activities.”

EPIC argues otherwise and has presented evidence that suggests the practice is being held up by the DHS an an example that should be emulated.

“They are completely out of bounds here,” McCall said. “The idea that the government is constantly peering over your shoulder and listening to what you are saying creates a very chilling effect to legitimate dissent.(Info Wars)

5. Mexican cartel suspects targeted in the troubled gun-trafficking probe known as Operation Fast and Furious were actually working as FBI informants at the time, according to a congressional memo that describes the case’s mission as a “failure.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged that guns were allowed into the hands of Mexican criminals for more than a year in the hope of catching “big fish.”

The memorandum from staffers with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform says the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration were investigating a drug-trafficking organization and had identified cartel associates a year before the ATF even learned who they were. At some point before the ATF’s Fast and Furious investigation progressed — congressional investigators don’t know when — the cartel members became FBI informants.

“These were the ‘big fish,’ ” says the memo, written on behalf of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had jointly opened a separate investigation targeting these two cartel associates. … Yet, ATF spent the next year engaging in the reckless tactics of Fast and Furious in attempting to identify them.”

According to Issa and Grassley, the cartel suspects, whose names were not released, were regarded by FBI as “national-security assets.” One pleaded guilty to a minor offense. The other was not charged. “Both became FBI informants and are now considered unindictable,” the memo says. “This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious — to target these two individuals and bring them to justice — was a failure.”

Representatives with the Justice Department and its subagencies declined to comment.

6. Deputy Attorney General James Cole had informed the committee in a letter last week that it would be “impossible” to comply with the document request by Issa’s deadline.

At issue are thousands of pages of internal Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) documents from last year which the Justice Department has provided to the investigating Justice Inspector General, but which the Justice Department initially indicated are not subject to congressional review because of the constitutional separation of powers.

7. Last Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to answer questions about his role in the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. However, instead of answers, Congress got more defiance, more arrogance, and more wasted time with an attorney general who clearly feels no sense of obligation to the American people or our rule of law. …

In a rash attempt to deflect attention away from himself and his own irresponsibility, Holder let Congress know that the Obama administration is still working toward the day when it can reinstate former President Bill Clinton’s so-called “assault weapons” ban. According to Holder:

“This administration has consistently favored the reinstitution of the assault weapons ban. It is something that we think was useful in the past with regard to the reduction that we’ve seen in crime, and certainly would have a positive impact on our relationship and the crime situation in Mexico.”

It’s difficult to follow Holder’s logic here, but it goes something like this …

The Obama administration — particularly Eric Holder’s Justice Department — oversaw an epic scandal whereby our own federal government illegally funneled thousands of firearms into the hands of Mexican drug lords. This contributed to the death of one U.S. Border Patrol agent and hundreds of Mexicans.

Despite being head of the Justice Department and our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Eric Holder claims he doesn’t know how or why this scandal occurred, or even who under his charge may have authorized it. He also refuses to turn over critical documents to congressional investigators that could help prevent something this tragic and corrupt from ever happening again.

Therefore, Obama and Holder are confident that if they can ban a large number of the legal firearms that law-abiding Americans use every day for self-defense, hunting, and recreational and competitive target shooting, it will help solve Mexico’s crime problem.

Now don’t you feel better… 🙂

How to Stop the Elites…

 

 

The STOCK Act would do little to address the problem of insider trading on Capitol Hill, says Hoover Institute fellow Peter Schweizer.

“My biggest concern is enforcement,” Schweizer told The Daily Caller.

He cited the example of former Louisiana Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, who famously stored $90,000 in cash bribes in his freezer.

“He had been taking bribes,” Schweizer explained. “The FBI heard about this, so they did everything they were supposed to do. They got a search warrant from a federal judge and they went in and searched his congressional office. … Congress went absolutely ballistic and said this was an infringement of constitutional rights and authority and there were actually threats to cut the FBI budget as a result of doing this.”

“I just don’t see the SEC wanting to have a fight like that,” said Schweizer. ”And that is why I think law is only as good as its likely or willing to be enforced.”

Remember, this is the SEC that was too busy taking bribes and watching porn at work to see the Mortgage/Banking Meltdown coming!!

Schweizer says the STOCK Act might do some good, but he prefers a bill called the RESTRICT Act, sponsored by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy.

“The RESTRICT Act basically says to members of Congress, number one, you need to put all of you assets into blind trust,” Schweizer explained. ”You know blind trusts aren’t perfect, but I think they are a help. And if you don’t want to do that then you have to disclose, I think on your website within three business days any financial transactions that you engage in.”

Schweizer says that transparency, above all else, is of paramount importance in wringing out lawmakers’ bad habits.

During congressional hearings on the STOCK Act, Schweizer noted, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that it has never charged a member of Congress with insider trading.

“If there was a health care bill going through Congress and people found out in real time that their congressman was trading stocks in the health care sector, I think they would be outraged and vote them out of office or take some sort of recourse,” he said. “The biggest issue is empowering individual voters in terms of disclosure, so I think the STOCK Act is important to pass because it makes clear that the same rules apply to members of Congress.”

The STOCK Act is insufficient because it doesn’t cover investments made in private companies, something he says has been a problem in the past.

In his book ”Throw Them All Out,” Schweizer discusses Colorado Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, who during the health care debate of 2009 bought millions of dollars’ worth of equity in BridgeHealth International, a private medical tourism company. Polis suspected, as did many, that health care reform would cause medical expenses to increase and that more people would seek medical procedures outside of the United States.

BridgeHealth is a private company, and therefore would not fall under the jurisdiction of the STOCK Act.

“He could go ahead and make that kind of trade and potentially use inside information, and he would not be prevented from doing that based on the way that this law currently exists,” Schweizer explained.

The STOCK Act also makes no attempt at guarding against conflict of interest in earmarks proposed by members.

“Bar is so low that basically so long as they can demonstrate at least one other person will benefit from the earmark, it is OK for them or their family members or whoever to profit from the use of taxpayer monies in this way,” Schweizer said. “That is an abysmally low standard.”

Several leaders in Congress have repeatedly sought earmarks that benefit their personal investments. Nancy Pelosi pushed for a $20 million earmark in 2005 “for waterfront redevelopment only two blocks away from the Belden Street property. The earmark was killed in July of that year. The Pelosis increased their financial stake in the property, and the next year Pelosi asked for the earmark again and this time she succeeded,” Schweizer noted in his book.

Earmarks like the Pelosi redevelopment example would not be considered an abuse of insider information under the STOCK Act.

While examining trades made around the time of the 2003 Medicare overhaul, Schweizer experienced what he calls his “Holy crap!” moment. The legislation, which created a new prescription-drug entitlement, promised to be a huge boon to the pharmaceutical industry—and to savvy investors in the Capitol. Among those with special insight on the issue was Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the health subcommittee of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee. Kerry is one of the wealthiest members of the Senate and heavily invested in the stock market. As the final version of the drug program neared approval—one that didn’t include limits on the price of drugs—brokers for Kerry and his wife were busy trading in Big Pharma. Schweizer found that they completed 111 stock transactions of pharmaceutical companies in 2003, 103 of which were buys.

“They were all great picks,” Schweizer notes. The Kerrys’ capital gains on the transactions were at least $500,000, and as high as $2 million (such information is necessarily imprecise, as the disclosure rules allow members to report their gains in wide ranges). It was instructive to Schweizer that Kerry didn’t try to shape legislation to benefit his portfolio; the apparent key to success was the shaping of trades that anticipated the effect of government policy.

Remember, currently, Insider Trading will get YOU thrown in jail. It just makes Congressman richer. 🙂

Now that’s “fair” 🙂

http://www.amazon.com/Throw-Them-All-Peter-Schweizer/dp/0547573146

Fast & Furious

Former Tucson Drug Enforcement Administration chief Tony Coulson told The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder either knew guns were walking during Operation Fast and Furious, or should have known about the deadly practice.

“[Fast and Furious] was driven locally and it was driven from Arizona, from the ground up, I mean it was not much oversight,” Coulson said in a phone interview. “And, I mean, I can only speak to the reporting, but people all the way up to the attorney general knew what was going on.”

Coulson, who ran the DEA’s Tucson office during Fast and Furious’ implementation, told TheDC he learned that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was letting guns walk back in 2009 or 2010. He said he learned this from people who were working in the Phoenix Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. He didn’t know it was called “Fast and Furious,” but said it was widely known guns were walking.

“Nothing that [ATF] was doing was running into what we were doing at DEA from the Tucson level,” Coulson said. “Now, Phoenix was a little bit different. They were, their targets kept running into DEA cases and I think that was reported out of the House letter last week. But in Tucson, we weren’t running into them. How I became aware of it was through Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

“At the time, [ATF’s] boss here, Bill Newell, was the face and the voice of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” Coulson added. “If you go back during this time, he’s the one who’s on every major national news station. He’s talking about weapons in Mexico. You know, he was the voice of ATF. I mean, he was driving ATF’s policy. There was very little oversight at the time from anyone on what was going on. I became aware of it because ICE interceded on more than one occasion to seize weapons at the port of entry that ATF was trying to walk into Mexico.”

ICE falls under the Department of Homeland Security, and with the news that Holder hasn’t discussed Fast and Furious with its Secretary Janet Napolitano or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there are likely to be new questions into what, if anything, those cabinet officials were told of Fast and Furious.

And, contrary to the picture Holder has tried to paint during his congressional hearing appearances, Coulson said that “yeah, absolutely” law enforcement officials were widely aware the ATF was using gun-walking tactics in Arizona. Coulson went so far as to say he suspects Holder himself was aware of the tactic, or was willfully unaware — meaning he didn’t want to know and made sure he wasn’t informed of gun-walking.

“If someone brings something to your attention and not really all the facts are brought to your attention, yeah we’re sending guns into Mexico, if he [Holder] chooses not to ask the next question, and then makes a statement ‘I didn’t know about that then’ but did find out about it when it became a hot topic issue when he decided well, ‘I should ask that next question now: Are you really walking guns into Mexico?’” Coulson said. “That leads to the next question, which is: ‘Are the Mexicans seizing, recovering those weapons before they’re used in a crime?’ The answer is no.”

And with the widespread knowledge of gun-walking among federal officials in Arizona, Coulson said there’s “no way” people in Washington, D.C., at ATF headquarters and in the Department of Justice didn’t know what was going on.

“I don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but there’s no way people [in Washington, D.C., at ATF headquarters and Main Justice] can say they didn’t know,” Coulson said. “Whether they paid attention to it, whether they thought it was important, how much information exactly did they have? But, you know, at the time, ATF was really laying the story on about these weapons and how this is how they were following investigations to the next level, and how this was leading to ‘big arrests’ and Mexicans tracking guns, which was all kind of smoke and mirrors.”

Coulson also said most other law enforcement officials in Arizona knew Newell had a gun control agenda behind his actions with Fast and Furious and other operations. “Whenever Bill would make those [anti-gun rights] statements [with inflated gun trafficking statistics], everyone would roll their eyes and say, ‘when is someone going to call him on this?’” Coulson said. “That’s because it was only weapons which the Mexican government seized which they chose to trace back to the United States.”

“[Newell] is trying to make this political statement that there is this river of guns, which then the Mexican government picked up on, and said ‘it’s your guns, that’s why we’re having all this violence here,’” Coulson added. “And there’s never any accounting for the fact that probably a majority of the guns, in terms of what law enforcement generally knows, are coming up through Central America and they’re coming from other countries. The 90 percent figure has been debunked as you go along the way. It’s actually something considerably less. … They’re just picking a figure and saying 90 percent of the weapons they seized come from the U.S. Well, really, it’s 90 percent of the weapons that they choose to do a search on results in it originating from the U.S.” (Daily Caller)

So is Holder lying or incompetent or Both!

 

De-Railing Reality

The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes.

“In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent,” said CBO, “mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect.”

The U.S. economy, CBO projects, will perform “below its potential” for another six years and unemployment will remain above 7 percent for another three.

Now that”Hope and Change” you can believe in!

California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.

The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an analogy for California.

Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population density — and population density is the key to the economic viability of mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.

It so happens that I have ridden on Spain’s high-speed rail system. It was very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.

While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

That is what happens when you don’t have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain “has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment.”

The most famous high-speed rail system is that in Japan, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The “bullet train” between Tokyo and Osaka has 130 million riders a year. Tokyo alone has more than three times the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles put together.

In California, an element of farce has been added to the impending economic tragedy, if the envisioned high-speed rail system actually materializes.

The first leg of the system is planned to run between Fresno and Bakersfield. If those names don’t ring a bell with you, there is a reason. They are modest-sized communities out in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, well removed from San Francisco or Los Angeles.

You can bet the rent money that high-speed rail traffic between Fresno and Bakersfield will never come within shouting distance of covering the operating costs. Some people have analogized putting such a rail line between these two towns to the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska.

Why are they doing it? Because they can.

If they began this project where they want it to go — between San Francisco and Los Angeles — they would run into so much opposition from the environmentalists, and from local politicians influenced by the environmentalists, that the delays could take the high-speed rail advocates beyond the time limit for using the federal subsidy money. But the green fanatics have not yet taken over politically out in the San Joaquin Valley.

The only reason for even thinking about building a high-speed rail line between Fresno and Bakersfield is just to get the project underway with federal money, making it politically more difficult to stop the larger project for a similar rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.

An old song ended, “You’ve been running around in circles, getting nowhere — getting nowhere very fast.” On high-speed rail.

But since it’s all about the Politics of Me, it works for them.

And the Money and the debt, who cares.

FAST & FURIOUS

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are officially trying to cover for Attorney General Eric Holder just before he testifies on Thursday about Operation Fast and Furious, with anti-Second Amendment Ranking Member Elijah Cummings leading the way. Last night, Cummings released a 95 page waste of paper and taxpayer money report, alleging that top Justice Department officials did not authorize the program, despite evidence showing otherwise.  The report tries to pin the blame back on a few “rogue” managers in the ATF Phoenix Field Division. This is the same argument we’ve heard since the beginning of the scandal: it was a local operation, nobody important knew anything.

A few important points:

First, Deputy Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer (the number two man in DOJ), approved wiretaps for Operation Fast and Furious. Wiretap applications require excruciating detail about a case to be presented before approval. Wiretaps are considered the most intrusive tool law enforcement can use. Breuer, who read through the wiretap applications, knew details of the strategy used in Fast and Furious, letting guns walk into Mexico without alerting Mexican authorities, yet he approved it anyway. New emails released last Friday in a late night document dump, show Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed about Brian Terry’s death just hours after he was murdered in the early morning hours on December 15, 2010. Later in the day, Holder’s deputy chief of staff at the time Monty Wilkinson, was told directly by former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke that the guns found at the murder scene were part of Operation Fast and Furious. According to the report, Wilkinson doesn’t “recall” that email, despite replying to it with, “Call you tomorrow.” Burke, who resigned from his position as U.S. Attorney in August, was in “complete agreement” with former ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Division Bill Newell about Fast and Furious tactics according to a January 8, 2010 briefing memo.

If Wilkinson’s “I don’t recall,” argument sounds familiar, there’s a reason why. On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder testifed before the House Judicary Committee that he had only known about Fast and Furious, “for a couple of weeks.” Five months later, memos addressed directly to Holder surfaced, with details and discussion about the program. In defense, Holder said he didn’t read the memos and that his staff didn’t inform him of their content.

Second, the report claims Fast and Furious was not used as a way for the Obama administration to push through back door gun control measures.

“The report debunks many unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Contrary to repeated claims by some, the Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice,” Cummings wrote in the report.

But whenever catch a Liberal with his hands in cookie jar, just remember ” Nothing to see here…move on…” 🙂

More Posterior Worship

More kissing up to future Democrats and social welfare recipients by Obama:

Illegal immigrants closely related to U.S. citizens would no longer have to leave the country to try to obtain legal status under a proposed change in immigration policy announced Friday by President Barack Obama’s administration.

The change, which would greatly reduce the amount of time U.S. citizens are separated from undocumented family members seeking legal status, is the latest attempt by the Obama administration to use its authority to implement some immigration reforms without congressional approval.

Some analysts also said the proposed policy change was likely an election-year ploy meant to bolster the president’s standing among Latino voters unhappy with the record numbers of immigrants deported under his administration.

The proposal, published in the Federal Register, does not require congressional action to become final.

The agency will accept public comment about the proposed change, with a goal of implementing it this year, Mayorkas said.

Here’s mine: F*UCK YOU!

But I’m just a “racist” and insensitive. 🙂

“We are proposing a process change to better serve the current law’s goal, a change that will reduce the time of separation and thereby alleviate the extreme hardship to the United States citizen,” Mayorkas said.

How about stopping them from coming here illegally in the first place. Thus alleviating the hardship all together! :0

He said the high standard for obtaining a waiver would not change. To be granted a waiver, illegal immigrants would still have to prove that their separation would harm their citizen spouses or parents.

Oh, like squishy “fair” Liberals who are kissing up to Illegals and Latinos would be so “heartless” and unfair.

The change, however, would likely spur a larger number of waiver applications because the requirement to leave the country has been a deterrent to applying, he said.

And we wouldn’t want to deter Illegal Immigration now would we…

Eli Kantor, an immigration lawyer in Beverly Hills, Calif., said he is worried that illegal immigrants without strong hardship cases might rush to apply for the waivers and then be subject to deportation if they lose.

He also fears the proposed change was politically motivated to gain support from Latinos as the presidential election heats up.

Ya Think?! 🙂

“I’m sure there are people out there who say it’s political, but family separation is real, it’s not political.”

Oh, yes it is. Everything is political to Liberals and Especially Obama.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based immigration-enforcement group, said the proposed change would undermine laws aimed at discouraging illegal immigration by effectively nullifying the 10-year ban on returning to the U.S.

He also called the change the latest attempt by the Obama administration to weaken immigration enforcement.

Last year, the Obama administration announced policy changes to focus on deporting immigrants who commit serious crimes instead of those whose only offense is being in the country illegally.

Immigration officials are currently reviewing thousands of deportation cases and closing the files of illegal immigrants who have not committed serious crimes.

Critics say that policy is de facto amnesty.

Given that policy, Mehlman expects the government to make it easier for illegal immigrants to be approved for hardship waivers.

“In the political context of the way this administration is operating, this is just one more step in their effort to basically say we are going to disregard the fact that people violate immigration laws unless they have gone on to commit some other crime here in the United States,” Mehlman said.

MORE ASS KISSING

Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011.

By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.

Emperor Obama Update

Election season is here, and you might think President Obama would be going out of his way to show voters that he can be trusted with the powers of the presidency. But you would be wrong. Just a few days before Christmas, Obama served notice to all Americans that he will continue to abuse executive privilege by seeking new ways to vilify gun owners and further his anti-gun agenda.

But with this being the “Civility” anniversary of the Gifford’s shooting in Tucson I bet no one on the Left of the Leftist Media will talking about it. 🙂

“I don’t have anything new for you,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday when asked about the anniversary.

And why was the NIH involved in gun issues to begin with??
Congress placed a provision in the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for 2012 designed to bar the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using any of its $30.7 billion taxpayer funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” However, upon signing the bill into law, President Obama issued a caveat of his own:

I have advised Congress that I will not construe these provisions as preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility to recommend to the Congress’s consideration such measures as I shall judge necessary and expedient.

In other words: “Congress may pass laws, but I decide which of its laws are constitutional and which I can simply choose to ignore.”

Of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually give the president this power, but Obama won’t allow a little thing like the U.S. Constitution get in his way. And in the present case, Congress is right to try to prevent him from using a federal health agency, not to mention our tax dollars, as a weapon in his ongoing war against the Second Amendment. As The Washington Times reports, NIH has wasted over $5 million since 2002 producing deceptive studies aimed at furthering gun control — including one study that tried “to prove that a home without firearms was essential to a child’s safety and well-being.”

Even more importantly, Congress knows that there is no scheme too radical, or dangerous, for the Obama administration when it comes to using federal agencies to push its anti-gun agenda.

Last month, email exchanges surfaced between employees at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) that show the administration helped illegally transfer guns to violent Mexican drug cartels in order to manufacture a case for gun registration. Now gun dealers in four Southwest border states must abide by a new gun registration requirement, courtesy of BATFE, that forces them to register the sales of any law-abiding American who purchases more than one semi-automatic rifle within five business days.

Congress never passed any law like this. Rather, Obama’s BATFE orchestrated the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal to give cause for its unconstitutional gun-control edict. Given this, how hard is it to envision the Obama administration issuing a phony “health” study that maligns gun owners?

Obama may not have a majority in Congress, or the will of the people, behind his anti-gun agenda. But that isn’t stopping his administration from finding deceitful ways to evade Congress and build public support for gun bans, gun registration and other regulations designed to weaken and destroy our Second Amendment rights.

But first we have shooting anniversary to celebrate. That’ll distract them…

 

Post Racial

President Obama led us to believe that he would be a post-racial president who would bring the races together, but it’s gotten to where you can’t criticize this most leftist administration in American history without someone accusing you of racism.

The most recent example involves criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder over Fast and Furious, an operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was overseen by the Justice Department. It involved the indirect sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in some 300 killings in Mexico, including the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Throughout, despite having received detailed memos from DOJ officials about it, Holder has denied he was aware of it.

The scandal and Holder’s stonewalling have led to some 60 congressmen demanding his resignation, and 75 cosponsoring a House resolution calling for a “no-confidence” vote on his performance as attorney general.

Holder has defiantly denied culpability, and President Obama, without betraying the slightest concern, has proclaimed his complete confidence in Holder. In a New York Times interview, Holder suggested race was partially driving a “more extreme segment” against him and Obama.

Holder said, “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him, both due to the nature of our relationship, and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.” When pressed for some proof to support Holder’s allegation, the Justice Department did not respond. Nor has the White House distanced itself from Holder’s comments.

Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson had earlier played the race card regarding Fast and Furious, calling it “another manufactured controversy by the Second Amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement.” He said, “Now, how many firearms are sold to al-Qaida terrorists, to other convicted felons, to domestic violence perpetrators, to convicted felons, to white supremacists?”

And Biden says The Taliban aren’t our enemy.

Nor was this the first time Holder had invoked the issue of race. During a speech commemorating Black History Month shortly after he became attorney general, Holder said the American people are “essentially a nation of cowards when it comes to racial matters.”

This seemed to many a curious way to celebrate the election of an African-American president, not to mention reflecting Holder’s sizable preoccupation with race and his apparent perception of societal problems through a racial lens. It could also help to explain his Justice Department’s indefensible dismissal of an already won voter intimidation case against New Black Panther Party members using the specious excuse that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

None of this comes as any surprise, however, because President Obama had telegraphed his race-oriented mindset in his book, in his church association and in his projecting statement that small-town people “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” He has worn race on his sleeve numerous times as president.

When a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., arrested Harvard professor Henry Gates, an African-American, Obama, without having heard both sides of the case, publicly injected himself into the local matter and gratuitously smeared the entire police department as having “acted stupidly.” In addition, Obama told guests at a private dinner at the White House that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency, especially among tea party members.

Not only has Obama made these viscerally charged racial statements, he has also consciously appealed to minority groups with specific reference to their race. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, he urged “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women … to stand together once again.” Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, he told an audience that Republicans “are counting on black folks staying home.” Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home at election time but to “punish our enemies” and not go along with the Republicans’ “cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.”

These developments are most disturbing and discouraging. There exists a great ideological divide in this nation over which of two primary sets of policy prescriptions ought to be adopted to rescue America from its economic malaise, its bankrupting debt and a host of other major issues.

Conservative opposition to Obama isn’t about race, and I’m confident this administration is well aware of that but is using the race card anyway, out of political desperation, to the destruction of the nation, and to racial relations. It’s disgraceful and unconscionable. (David Limbaugh)

Alabama’s unemployment rate fell at a record pace in November amid stepped-up efforts by President Barack Obama’s deputies to frustrate enforcement of the state’s popular new immigration reform.

The state’s unemployment rate fell 0.6 percent in November to 8.7 percent, according to new state reports, partly because the state’s employers opened up jobs to Americans after shedding illegal immigrants.

The unemployment rate is far below October’s rate of 9.3 percent and September’s rate of 9.8 percent.

“The continued drop is proof that people — American Citizens [and] legal migrants, have suffered at the hands of politicians who choose politics over economics,” said Chuck Ellis, a council member in Northern Alabama’s Marshall County.

“What’s really amazing is that in Marshall County, a county of 95,000 residents, 30,000 workforce eligible, there are over 600 people who now have jobs that they didn’t have 6 months ago,” he said.

In November the county’s unemployment rate dropped 0.7 percent, from 8.1 percent to 7.4 percent.

“Is that a difference of great significance? Ask those families for an answer as they undertake the Christmas season,” Ellis said.

Department of Justice officials, including civil-regulation chief Tom Perez, have repeatedly visited the state to invite people to make claims of discrimination.

Perez is pushing ahead with a lawsuit intended to gut the reform, which was supported by members of both parties, and by both white and African-American legislators.

Perez’s efforts have been broadcast by many established media outlets, many of which have also highlighted the reform’s painful impact on illegal immigrants. Few outlets, however, have detailed the beneficial impact of the state’s falling unemployment rate.

Administration officials have cracked down on immigration enforcement by several states in partial exchange for promises by the Hispanic lobbies to spur turnout by Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters in 2012.

The lobbies had sought a federal amnesty, but rising public opposition has deterred Democrats from seriously promoting any amnesty since Obama’s 2008 election.

In compensation for their inaction, the federal government and allied Hispanic lobbies have already sued several other states, including New Mexico, South Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.

On Thursday, Perez also announced a litany of complaints about the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Perez, who opened his Thursday press conference by saying “Buenos Dias,” also said he would stop helping the sheriff enforce federal immigration laws.

“We’re going to fight back, we’re going to show the politics involved. … The president wants to get the Hispanic vote,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio said in a Fox interview Dec. 16.

The Alabama reform copied federal immigration laws, making it more difficult for local entrepreneurs and businesses to hire or trade with illegal immigrants. Top state officials, including Gov. Robert Bentley, have said they’ll make some trims to the law in the new year to defeat the legal challenges by Obama’s deputies, business lobbies and immigration advocates.

In October, Alabama was ranked 37th-worst in the nation for unemployment. November’s numbers pushed the state up to 30th place, based on the October rankings.

In a complex economy, “it’s certainly plausible that immigration enforcement — and the subsequent drop in the number of illegals — enabled unemployed Americans to find work,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. -based advocacy group.

“Americans with the highest unemployment rates — young workers, less-educated workers, minority workers — are the ones facing the greatest job competition from illegal aliens, and thus would benefit the most from the departure of those illegal aliens,” he added.

The state’s new immigration reform gets much of the credit from local boosters, although stepped-up Christmas hiring likely played some role. However, Alabama reduced its unemployment much more than the adjacent states of Mississippi and Georgia.

In Georgia, the unemployment rate fell to 9.9 percent in November, down from 10.2 percent in October and 10.3 percent in September.

In Mississippi, the November numbers have not been released, but the state’s unemployment rate stayed steady at 10.6 percent in October and 10.6 percent in September.

In Alabama, the unemployment rate is lower in northern counties.

For example, Madison County’s rate was 6.9 percent in November, down from a September level of 8.2 percent, according to the state’s Department of Industrial Relations.

The highest rate of unemployment are in the southern, majority-black districts of WIlcox, Perry, and Bullock. In November, their unemployment rates were 15.5 percent or greater. (DC)

But that’s probably racist too… 🙂

 

Lying is Complicated

Last week, the DOJ took the rare step of formally withdrawing a letter it sent to Congress in February that falsely claimed the program being executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did not allow guns to “walk” into Mexico.

Confronted about this by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., Holder defended the DOJ.

“Nobody at the Justice Department has lied,” Holder insisted.

When Sensenbrenner pressed Holder on the distinction between lying and misleading Congress, Holder said it was a matter of a person’s “state of mind.”

‘Lying’ Is Such A Complicated Concept.

“First let me make something very clear, in response to an assertion you made, or hinted at: Nobody in the Justice Department has lied,” Holder said in response to accusations that he or his confidantes lied to Congress. “Nobody has lied.”

“Then why was the letter withdrawn?,” Sensenbrenner retorted, referring to a factually inaccurate letter one of Holder’s deputies, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, sent to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley on February 4. In that letter, Weich claimed that guns were never allowed to walk.

Holder and one of his other deputies, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, have both admitted that statement was false in recent Senate hearings.

“The letter was withdrawn because there was information in there that was inaccurate,” Holder replied to Sensenbrenner’s question.

Still unsatisfied, Sensenbrenner followed up again. “Tell me what the difference is between lying and misleading Congress in this context?,” he asked Holder.

Holder responded that whether a statement is a lie or misleading comment depends on what the person making it is thinking at the time.

“If you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind, and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that can be considered perjury or a lie,” Holder said. “The information that was provided in that February 4 letter was gleaned by the people who drafted the letter after they interacted with people who they thought were in the best position to have the information.

I guess it depends on the definition of what “is” is.

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

PICTURES: ATF “Gunwalking” scandal timeline

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.” 

More Fast and Furious coverage:
Memos contradict Holder on Fast and Furious
Agent: I was ordered to let guns “walk” into Mexico
Gunwalking scandal uncovered at ATF

On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill–well done yesterday… (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.” 

This revelation angers gun rights advocates. Larry Keane, a spokesman for National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group, calls the discussion of Fast and Furious to argue for Demand Letter 3 “disappointing and ironic.” Keane says it’s “deeply troubling” if sales made by gun dealers “voluntarily cooperating with ATF’s flawed ‘Operation Fast & Furious’ were going to be used by some individuals within ATF to justify imposing a multiple sales reporting requirement for rifles.” (DC)

The Gun Dealers’ Quandary

Several gun dealers who cooperated with ATF told CBS News and Congressional investigators they only went through with suspicious sales because ATF asked them to.

Sometimes it was against the gun dealer’s own best judgment.

Read the email

In April, 2010 a licensed gun dealer cooperating with ATF was increasingly concerned about selling so many guns. “We just want to make sure we are cooperating with ATF and that we are not viewed as selling to the bad guys,” writes the gun dealer to ATF Phoenix officials, “(W)e were hoping to put together something like a letter of understanding to alleviate concerns of some type of recourse against us down the road for selling these items.”

Read the email

ATF’s group supervisor on Fast and Furious David Voth assures the gun dealer there’s nothing to worry about. “We (ATF) are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques which I cannot go into detail.”

Two months later, the same gun dealer grew more agitated.

“I wanted to make sure that none of the firearms that were sold per our conversation with you and various ATF agents could or would ever end up south of the border or in the hands of the bad guys. I guess I am looking for a bit of reassurance that the guns are not getting south or in the wrong hands…I want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk of agents (sic) safety because I have some very close friends that are US Border Patrol agents in southern AZ as well as my concern for all the agents (sic) safety that protect our country.” 

“It’s like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back,” says one law enforcement source familiar with the facts. “It’s a circular way of thinking.”

The Justice Department and ATF declined to comment. ATF officials mentioned in this report did not respond to requests from CBS News to speak with them.

The “Demand Letter 3” Debate

The two sides in the gun debate have long clashed over whether gun dealers should have to report multiple rifle sales. On one side, ATF officials argue that a large number of semi-automatic, high-caliber rifles from the U.S. are being used by violent cartels in Mexico. They believe more reporting requirements would help ATF crack down. On the other side, gun rights advocates say that’s unconstitutional, and would not make a difference in Mexican cartel crimes.

Two earlier Demand Letters were initiated in 2000 and affected a relatively small number of gun shops. Demand Letter 3 was to be much more sweeping, affecting 8,500 firearms dealers in four southwest border states: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. ATF chose those states because they “have a significant number of crime guns traced back to them from Mexico.” The reporting requirements were to apply if a gun dealer sells two or more long guns to a single person within five business days, and only if the guns are semi-automatic, greater than .22 caliber and can be fitted with a detachable magazine.

On April 25, 2011, ATF announced plans to implement Demand Letter 3. The National Shooting Sports Foundation is suing the ATF to stop the new rules. It calls the regulation an illegal attempt to enforce a law Congress never passed. ATF counters that it has reasonably targeted guns used most often to “commit violent crimes in Mexico, especially by drug gangs.”

Reaction

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is investigating Fast and Furious, as well as the alleged use of the case to advance gun regulations. “There’s plenty of evidence showing that this administration planned to use the tragedies of Fast and Furious as rationale to further their goals of a long gun reporting requirement. But, we’ve learned from our investigation that reporting multiple long gun sales would do nothing to stop the flow of firearms to known straw purchasers because many Federal Firearms Dealers are already voluntarily reporting suspicious transactions. It’s pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements.”

On July 12, 2011, Sen. Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees ATF. They asked Holder whether officials in his agency discussed how “Fast and Furious could be used to justify additional regulatory authorities.” So far, they have not received a response. CBS News asked the Justice Department for comment and context on ATF emails about Fast and Furious and Demand Letter 3, but officials declined to speak with us.

“In light of the evidence, the Justice Department’s refusal to answer questions about the role Operation Fast and Furious was supposed to play in advancing new firearms regulations is simply unacceptable,” Rep. Issa told CBS News.

Oh and by the way:

Selling weapons to Mexico – where cartel violence is out of control – is controversial because so many guns fall into the wrong hands due to incompetence and corruption. The Mexican military recently reported nearly 9,000 police weapons “missing.”

Yet the U.S. has approved the sale of more guns to Mexico in recent years than ever before through a program called “direct commercial sales.” It’s a program that some say is worse than the highly-criticized “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, where U.S. agents allowed thousands of weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels.

The problem of weapons legally sold to Mexico – then diverted to violent cartels – is becoming more urgent. That’s because the U.S. has quietly authorized a massive escalation in the number of guns sold to Mexico through “direct commercial sales. It’s a way foreign countries can acquire firearms faster and with less disclosure than going through the Pentagon.

Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves.

Mexico is now one of the world’s largest purchasers of U.S. guns through direct commercial sales, beating out countries like Iraq.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee continually asked Holder what Congress can do to stop the trafficking of firearms into Mexico, implying Congress should be implementing more gun control as a result of this program.(DC)

DOH!

At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Security, It’s Our Job

Notes on that “more secure” Border.

PHOENIX (KPHO) –   A suspected human smuggler who  has been deported 14 times was among a group of illegal immigrants  arrested Monday night in Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office  said.

Juan Ramos-Alegria was most recently arrested one week ago in Colorado, MCSO said.

Five suspected illegal immigrants, including Ramos-Alegria, were apprehended without incident.

Sheriff’s investigators said the immigrants  had paid anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 each to be smuggled into the  U.S. Those arrested reported to be heading to Arkansas and Georgia as  their final destination, MCSO said.

So how long before #15??

Just days prior to that:

(Maricopa County, AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio reports that the Maricopa County
Sheriffs Office Human Smuggling Unit arrested 12 illegal aliens involved in
smuggling operations last night in the north valley, including the smuggler Ivan
Lara-Roque who has been previously deported from the United States 13 times
and has been permanently banned from entering the United States.

But don’t worry, if you want to enforce the law Attorney General Holder will just sue you and sell guns to the Drug Cartel members who are trying to kill you.

No Problem. If they, the Government, want to ignore the law and the security and safety of the US Citizens there is nothing you can do. Just suck it up, even if it’s lead.

Documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”

At least 300 people in Mexico have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry who records were sealed by the Administration so no one can see them. But they have nothing to hide. 🙂

And who will Holder through under the bus tomorrow to deflect blame from himself and his cronies???

Now, Would you like some salt for those wounds?

The House committee probing government gun-running now sets it sights on possible money-laundering involving drug cartel funds run in the name of drug enforcement. Why should we believe DOJ this time?It’s an old adage that when investigating criminal activity you should follow the money. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has announced an investigation into a money-laundering operation allegedly run by the Drug Enforcement Administration. We may need to follow the people following the money.

Just as Fast and Furious was allegedly intended to track and interdict gun-trafficking into Mexico, this operation, detailed in a New York Times article Sunday, is said to have as its purpose to follow how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

But the question once again arises: Have the feds interrupted or aided the flow?

After a Friday document dump showing how deliberately deceptive the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder were regarding Operation Fast and Furious, the government’s gun-running operation that led to the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, it’s hard to believe this latest scheme was well-run.

In a Monday letter to Holder, Issa noted that as in Fast and Furious “this same goal of dismantling Mexican drug cartels motivated the Drug Enforcement Administration in aiding and abetting these same cartels in laundering millions of dollars in cash.”

It may have produced equally tragic results.

According to the Times report, agents said the requirement that the laundering of amounts greater than $10 million get formal DOJ approval was routinely waived.

According to Issa, that means “hundreds of millions of dollars” could’ve been “laundered” into the hands of drug cartels by the Obama administration and Holder’s Justice Department.

The Times quoted an agency official, who asked not to be identified: “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the DEA could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”

Is that the case?

In anticipation of Holder’s testimony on Thursday, Issa requested that his staff be fully briefed on the money-laundering operation no later than 5 p.m. Wednesday and that he would not accept on Thursday another my-dog-ate-the-memo excuse for not knowing what his department and its agencies were doing.

If this was a clone of Fast and Furious, this time involving money rather than guns, we need to know the extent of the damage. Money is the lifeblood of drug-trafficking, and we may have only succeeded in giving the drug lords a transfusion.

We have argued the possibility that Fast and Furious was a planned attempt to augment gun violence in Mexico using U.S. weapons as a predicate to pushing for more gun control.

Aiding and abetting the money laundering of these same drug cartels is equally unconscionable.

We agree with Issa that it is “almost unfathomable to contemplate the degree to which the United States government has made itself an accomplice to the Mexican drug trade, which has thus far left more than 40,000 people dead in Mexico since December 2006.”

This latest scheme involves handling blood money.

Some 52 GOP congressmen and two senators have called for Eric Holder’s resignation or firing. Maybe when President Obama gets back from his 17-day vacation. (IBD)

Poke the Tiger

Now that the Justice Department got Brian Terry’s record sealed and it’s Friday (so the news media is away for the weekend) they finally decided who to throw under the bus for “Fast & Furious” and then baffle everyone else with bullshit.

Not Holder. It would never have been Holder.

With Grassley and Issa on their trail like a pack of raptors they threw one of their own out and apparent “apology” for lying as a distraction.

Just two days ago: The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

Yep, we’ve been lying, but here’s why…  (that beeping bus noise you here is Eric Holder driving)…

The Justice Department on Friday provided Congress with documents detailing how department officials gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border.

The materials contain clues into how misleading information about the botched gun trafficking operation made it into a Feb. 4, 2011 letter to Congress that department leaders have since acknowledged was false.

The February 2011 letter said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives makes “every effort” to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally before they cross into Mexico. It added that the allegation that the ATF had “sanctioned or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons” to suspicious people was false.

— Jason Weinstein, a senior aide in the Justice Department’s criminal division, played a key role in drafting the February 2011 letter. So he’s a target for “underling” assassination. 🙂

7 Months later and with no buying the bovine fecal matter, Time to get out the bus and start baffling them with bullshit.

Misleading Congress can be a prosecutable offense if a person who makes the statements knows they are false. But Attorney General Eric Holder has told lawmakers that so far he has no evidence anyone intended to deceive them. The matter remains under investigation not only by Republicans in Congress but also the Justice Department’s inspector general.

This distraction brought to you by Attorney General Eric Holder.

In a letter last February to Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had not sanctioned the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser and that the agency makes every effort to intercept weapons that have been purchased illegally. In Operation Fast and Furious, both statements turned out to be incorrect.

The Justice Department letter was responding to Grassley’s statements that the Senate Judiciary Committee had received allegations the ATF had sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers. Grassley also said there were allegations that two of the assault weapons had been used in a shootout that killed customs agent Brian Terry.

In an email four days later to Justice Department colleagues, then-U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix said that “Grassley’s assertions regarding the Arizona investigation and the weapons recovered” at the “murder scene are based on categorical falsehoods. I worry that ATF will take 8 months to answer this when they should be refuting its underlying accusations right now.” That email marked the start of an internal debate in the Justice Department over what and how much to say in response to Grassley’s allegations. The fact that there was an ongoing criminal investigation into Terry’s murder prompted some at the Justice Department to argue for less disclosure.

Some of what turned out to be incorrect information was emailed to Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division. Breuer sent an email saying “let’s help as much as we can” in responding to Grassley.

The emails sent to Capitol Hill on Friday showed that Burke supplied additional incorrect information to the Justice Department’s criminal division that ended up being forwarded to Breuer. For example, Burke said that the guns found at the Terry murder scene were purchased at a Phoenix gun shop before Operation Fast and Furious began. In fact, the operation was under way at the time and the guns found at the Terry murder scene were part of the probe. Breuer was one of the recipients of that information. In written comments this week to Grassley, Breuer said that he was on a three-day official trip to Mexico at the time of the Justice Department response and that he was aware of, but not involved in, drafting the Justice Department statements to Grassley. Breuer says he cannot say for sure whether he saw a draft of the letter before it was sent to Grassley.

And with the records sealed who can argue? 🙂

Attorney General Eric Holder said it’s not fair to assume that mistakes in Operation Fast and Furious led to Terry’s death.

He’s sorry, and the records are sealed, so just forget it.

Where Burke got the inaccurate information is now part of an inquiry conducted by the inspector general’s office at the Justice Department.

But since some of those records are likely sealed unless there is more pressure what do you want to bet nothing new will come out until…2013 or never! 🙂

Burke’s information was followed by a three-day struggle in which officials in the office of the deputy attorney general, the criminal division and the ATF came up with what turned out to be an inaccurate response to Grassley’s assertions.

Meaning no one bought the bullshit, now what!?

The process became so intensive that Breuer aide Jason Weinstein emailed his boss, “The Magna Carta was easier to get done than this was.” A copy of the latest draft was attached to the emails.

Initial drafts of the letter reflected the hard tone of Burke’s unequivocal assertions that the allegations Grassley was hearing from ATF agents were wrong. Later drafts were more measured, prompting Burke to complain in one email: “Every version gets weaker. We will be apologizing” to Grassley “by tomorrow afternoon.” Regarding the allegation that ATF sanctioned the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser, the Justice Department denial was scaled back slightly from “categorically false” to “false.” ”Why poke the tiger,” Lisa Monaco, the top aide to the deputy attorney general, explained in an email to Ron Weich, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs whose signature was on the letter.

In another email, Burke wrote, “By the way, what is so offensive about this whole project” of response “is that Grassley’s staff, acting as willing stooges for the Gun Lobby, have attempted to distract from the incredible success in dismantling” Southwest Border “gun trafficking operations” and “not uttering one word of rightful praise and thanks to ATF — but, instead, lobbing this reckless despicable accusation that ATF is complicit in the murder of a fellow federal law enforcement officer.”

It just more and more incredible doesn’t it. 😦

On Friday night, Grassley spokeswoman Beth Levine said that “Burke personally apologized to Sen. Grassley’s staff for the tone and the content of the emails” after learning from the Justice Department that the emails would be released.

Whoops! 🙂

It is unusual for the Justice Department to provide such detail of its internal deliberations as it did on Friday with Congress.

The department turned over 1,364 pages of material after concluding “that we will make a rare exception to the department’s recognized protocols and provide you with information related to how the inaccurate information came to be included in the letter,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole wrote Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is looking into the Obama administration’s handling of Operation Fast and Furious.

Please Make this go away…Please!! (Holder and the ATF to Grassley and Issa)

“After a first glance at today’s document dump from the Justice Department, there appears to be even more questions for Assistant Attorney General Breuer, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Weinstein and former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke,” said Beth Levine, spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IW), who has been leading a congressional investigation of the gunrunning program. “The congressional investigators will continue to scour the documents over the upcoming days and will have further questions for department officials.”

Operation Fast and Furious involved more than 2,000 weapons that were purchased by straw buyers at Phoenix-area gun stores. Nearly 700 of the Fast and Furious guns have been recovered — 276 in Mexico and 389 in the United States, according to ATF data as of Oct. 20.

Amid probes by Republicans in Congress and the IG, the Justice Department in August replaced Burke, acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson and the lead prosecutor in Operation Fast and Furious.

But they were too cowardly to do any other time than late on Friday when everyone had gone home.

And remember, Burke is the one guy in all of this that quit. The others were merely “reassigned” to other desk jobs in Washington where Daddy Holder can keep an eye on them.

Grassley, who has been leading an investigation into what went wrong in the Fast and Furious operation for most of this year, says, “the Justice Department can’t have it both ways.” He took to the Senate floor Thursday night to raise a series of new questions about the operation. Many of them could emerge anew next week, when Attorney General Holder testifies in a House oversight hearing December 8^th.

“It is not about one person,” said Mr. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, during a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

“It is about a failure that seems to be pervasive within Justice that investigations play fast and loose with the expectations of what is right or wrong when it comes to what I am going to call collateral damage,” he said.

Like Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. 😦

Transparent Seal

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of more than 1,000 guns which have been used in numerous crimes. In Terry’s case, five illegal immigrants armed with at least two semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and Terry got hit.

In Truth they had NO way to track these guns and had no intention of tracking them.

We know this only because Washington D.C.’s conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, got ahold of the court documents before the government suddenly made them off limits. The now-sealed federal grand jury indictment tells the frightening story of how Terry was gunned down by Mexican drug smugglers patrolling the rugged desert with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.  

You can see why the administration wants to keep this information from the public and the media, considering the smugglers were essentially armed by the U.S. government. Truth is, no one will know the reason for the confiscation of public court records in this case because the judge’s decision to seal it was also sealed, according to the news story. That means the public or media won’t have access to any new or old evidence, filings, rulings or arguments.

A number of high-ranking Border Patrol officials are questioning how the case is being handled. For instance, they wonder why the defendant (Manuel Osorio-Arellanes) hasn’t been tried even though it’s been almost a year since Terry’s murder. They also have concerns about the lack of transparency in the investigation, not to mention the recent sealing of the court case.

Osorio-Arellanes is charged with second-degree murder. The four other drug smugglers fled the scene and their names were blacked out in the indictment. In 2006 Osorio-Arellanes had been convicted in Phoenix of felony aggravated assault and in 2010 he was twice detained for being in the U.S. illegally.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this month to address the flawed gun-tracking program, Attorney General Eric Holder said it’s not fair to assume that mistakes in Operation Fast and Furious led to Terry’s death. Holder also expressed regret to the federal agent’s family, saying that he can only imagine their pain. (Judical Watch)

Nope, no cover up here. “transparency” is our middle name. What’s transparent is the cover up.

Washington Times: Five illegal immigrants armed with at least two AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole known as Mesquite Seep just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and one U.S. agent was killed, records show.

A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.

At least two of the Mexicans carried their assault rifles “at the ready position,” one of several details about the attack showing that Mexican smugglers are becoming more aggressive on the U.S. side of the border.

According to the indictment, the Mexicans were “patrolling the area in single-file formation” a dozen miles northwest of the border town of Nogales and — in the darkness of the Arizona night — opened fire on four Border Patrol agents after the agents identified themselves in Spanish as police officers.

Two AK-47 assault rifles found at the scene came from the failed Fast and Furious operation.

Using thermal binoculars, one of the agents determined that at least two of the Mexicans were carrying rifles, but according to an affidavit in the case by FBI agent Scott Hunter, when the Mexicans did not drop their weapons as ordered, two agents used their shotguns to fire “less than lethal” beanbags at them.

At least one of the Mexicans opened fire and, according to the affidavit, Terry, a 40-year-old former U.S. Marine, was shot in the back. A Border Patrol shooting-incident report said that Terry called out, “I’m hit,” and then fell to the ground, a bullet having pierced his aorta. “I can’t feel my legs,” Terry told one of the agents who cradled him. “I think I’m paralyzed.”

Bleeding profusely, he died at the scene.

After the initial shots, two agents returned fire, hitting Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, 33, in the abdomen and leg. The others fled. The FBI affidavit said Osorio-Arellanes admitted during an interview that all five of the Mexicans were armed.

Peck Canyon is a notorious drug-smuggling corridor.

Osorio-Arellanes initially was charged with illegal entry, but that case was dismissed when the indictment was handed up. It named Osorio-Arellanes on a charge of second-degree murder, but did not identify him as the likely shooter, saying only that Osorio-Arellanes and others whose names were blacked out “did unlawfully kill with malice aforethought United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry while Agent Terry was engaged in … his official duties.”

The indictment also noted that Osorio-Arellanes had been convicted in Phoenix in 2006 of felony aggravated assault, had been detained twice in 2010 as an illegal immigrant, and had been returned to Mexico repeatedly.

Bill Brooks, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s acting southwest border field branch chief, referred inquiries to the FBI, which is conducting the investigation. The FBI declined to comment.

The case against Osorio-Arellanes and others involved in the shooting has since been sealed, meaning that neither the public nor the media has access to any evidence, filings, rulings or arguments.

The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, which is prosecuting the case, would confirm only that it was sealed. Also sealed was the judge’s reason for sealing the case.

The indictment lists the names of other suspects in the shooting, but they are redacted.

In the Terry killing, two Romanian-built AK-47 assault rifles found at the scene were identified as having been purchased in a Glendale, Ariz., gun shop as part of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) failed Fast and Furious investigation.

A number of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents have questioned why the case has not gone to trial, nearly a year after Terry’s killing. Several also have concerns about the lack of transparency in the investigation, compounded now by the fact that the court case has been sealed.

Shawn P. Moran, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 17,000 nonsupervisory agents, said it is rare for illegal immigrants or drug smugglers to engage agents in the desert, saying they usually “drop their loads and take off south.”

“The Brian Terry murder was a real wake-up call,” Mr. Moran said. “It emphasizes the failed state of security on the U.S. border, which poses more of a threat to us than either Iraq or Afghanistan. We have terrorism going on right on the other side of the fence, and we’re arming the drug cartels.

“My biggest fear is that someday a cartel member is going to go berserk, stick a rifle through the fence and kill as many Border Patrol agents as he can,” he said.

Mr. Moran said he understood the “rationale of working things up the food chain,” as suggested in the Fast and Furious probe, but had no idea how ATF planned to arrest cartel members who ultimately purchased the weapons since the agency lacks jurisdiction south of the border and never advised Mexican authorities about the operation.

“It was a ridiculous idea from the beginning, and it baffles us on how it was ever approved,” he said.

Mr. Moran also challenged the use of less-than-lethal s in the shooting incident, saying field agents have been “strong-armed” by the agency’s leadership to use nonlethal weapons. He said they were not appropriate for the incident in which Terry was killed.

“That was no place for beanbag rounds,” he said, noting that the encounter was at least 12 miles inside the U.S. and was carried out by armed men looking specifically to target Border Patrol agents.

CBP has said Terry and the agents with him carried fully loaded sidearms, along with two additional magazines, and were not under orders to use nonlethal ammunition first.

Mr. Moran, himself a veteran Border Patrol agent, said he also was “surprised” that the suspected Mexican gunmen were carrying their weapons at the ready position, meaning that the butts of the weapons were placed firmly in the pocket of the shoulder with the barrels pointed down at a 45-degree angle. He said this probably meant they had some level of military training.

More than 250 incursions by Mexican military personnel into the United States have been documented over the past several years.

The Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona that many of the intruders were “trained to escape, evade and counter-ambush” if detected. The agency cautioned agents to keep “a low profile,” to use “cover and concealment” in approaching the Mexican units, to employ “shadows and camouflage” to conceal themselves and to “stay as quiet as possible.”

Several of the incursions occurred in the same area where Terry was killed, including a 2005 incident in which two agents were shot and wounded by assailants dressed in black commando-type clothing in what law-enforcement authorities said was a planned ambush. More than 50 rounds were fired at the agents after they spotted the suspected gunmen.

Many of the Mexican drug cartels use former Mexican soldiers, police and federal agents to protect drug loads headed into the U.S. Many cartel leaders also have targeted U.S. Border Patrol agents and state and local police, sometimes offering bounties of up to $50,000.

But it’s “more Secure than it has been” according to Big Sis Janet.

Feel better??

The New Stimulus

The New Stimulus (according to Obama Bureaucrats)– FOOD STAMPS!

14% of all people in this country being on government food stamps is good!

Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: “Well, obviously, it’s putting people to work. Which is why we’re going to have some interesting things in the course of the forum this morning. Later this morning, we’re going have a press conference with Secretary Mavis and Secretary Chu to announce something that’s never happened in this country — something that we think is exciting in terms of job growth. I should point out, when you talk about the SNAP program or the foot stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus. Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity. If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, someone has to stock it, package it, shelve it, process it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It’s the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.”

<<Industrial strength Barf Bag please!>>

But then again this the same group of idiots that said Unemployment benefits was a stimulus!

July 2010:  Let me say that unemployment insurance… is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy, and it’s job creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name. -Nancy Pelosi

So if you’re unemployed and on food stamps you’re the greatest stimulus out there! :0

And we’ll have a roaring economy within…days… 🙂

Oh, and Obama has yet a new plan! (read: speech) But he’s not telling you what it is until September. It’s going to be great and it’s going to create jobs!

Mind you, the dozen other “plans” (speeches) did nothing but when you’re a pathological ideologue doing the same thing over and and over again and expecting a different result is just normal. 🙂

But he has his minions in the Liberal press to hype it for the next few weeks so that by the time he gives his speech he’ll be walking on water and turning it into Whine. 🙂

NBC “journalist” Chuck Todd: TODD: “It does seem as if he has pledged to do this plan out there. Not a lot of details, but to me he’s raised the bar, because he said, ‘this plan is going to grow the economy, create jobs and deal with the debt.’ So that’s, sounds like a big, large plan to me, Ezra.” (as in ultra lib Ezra Klein).

It’s going to be soaring rhetorical speech, not a plan, and it will be the Republican fault when it fails utterly. 🙂

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry calls President Obama a black cloud over our economy. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz edits the clip to make it look like Perry is calling Obama a “black cloud.” He then apologizes, but the Talking point has been made.

So yet again, the race card comes out.

Isn’t “journalism” fun. It’s so objective and “fair”.

And Obama is, after all, a victim and you should feel his greatness.

President Barack Obama said yesterday in Decorah, Iowa, that he absorbs more political criticism than Abraham Lincoln, the assassinated 16th U.S. president, attracted from his Civil War critics.

The comment came during a question-and-answer session where one invited audience member asked Obama how he deals with his congressional critics in the GOP. “The Congress doesn’t seem to be a good partner. You said so yourself, they’re more interested in seeing you lose than [seeing] the country win,” the questioner lamented.

“Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama responded. “When you listen to what the federalists said about the anti-federalists … those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

The arrogant insult to a great man like Lincoln is just beyond astounding, but not beyond his ego.

But I will give him one thing about his comparison, their is a Civil War going on in the country. The only problem is that the President and his party ARE THE CAUSE of it!

Criticism of Lincoln in his day “was even more vitriolic than what you see about Obama,” said Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian at Columbia University. “Obama is a guy who has a thin skin and does not take criticism well.” Foner’s Pulitzer-winning volume was titled ”The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”

Obama’s sensitivity to criticism is bound up with his progressive ideology, which sees political disputes as best resolved by experts, said Michael Franc, vice president for government studies at the Heritage Foundation. Obama believes “he has discovered the truth and if you disagree with him, it’s not only against the country, its unpatriotic and anti-Obama,” Franc suggested. (DC)

Amen! And haven’t I been saying just that…

Eric Dezenhall, a former communications aide to President Ronald Reagan, went ever further in an interview with The Daily Caller: Obama’s complaint, he said, “is more grandiose than narcissistic … It’s equating any form of push-back with some sort of giant historical crime.”

Lincoln faced a civil war in which “half the country would rather leave than accept that he was a constitutional president,” Felzenberg told TheDC. But “no one challenged Obama’s election, no one tried to shut down the inauguration … to put himself at [Lincoln’s] level seems very vain and self-absorbed.”

Talk is cheap. That seems to be the only thing that is when it come to his Grandness Barack Hussein Obama.

FAST & FURIOUS UPDATE

Oh, and the Peter Principle of government bureaucracy strikes again.

Three supervisors of the US government’s controversial anti-gun-running program “Fast and Furious” were promoted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) despite continued criticism of their actions, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

Screw up and deliberately sell guns to Mexican Drug Cartels and get people killed — Get a Promotion!

No wonder the fire rate in government is .0055%!

Maybe we need more unemployment and food stamps in government employees to really stimulate the economy!!

 

 

They are More Important

You remember “Fast & Furious” don’t you?

Where the government deliberately sold 1,400+ guns to known drug cartel members and when gun owners and ATF field agents objected they made let them go to Mexico.

Then they lost them (they were supposed to be “tracking” them-at least that was there story).

Then one shows up at the scene of a Border Patrol agent being killed by drug smugglers. It’s the murder weapon.

The administration has been trying to suppress it ever since.

Well here’s an Update:

U.S. Attorney, Dennis Burke is opposing a motion routinely approved by prosecutors, that would have the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry, recognized as crime victims, Fox News is reporting.

Burke claims the gun purchases made by Jamie Avila, whose purchases of guns included the one that was allegedly used to kill Terry, “is not any particular person, but society in general.”

Being recognized as crime victims, the Terry family would have been able to speak at Avila’s sentencing, as well as conferring with prosecutors.

Former U,S, Attorney in Florida, Kendall Coffey, told in a Fox News report, “The government leaders responsible for the tragic mistakes of Operation Fast and Furious have a lot of explaining to do before Congress. But at the same time, they still have a duty under federal law to give answers, to consult and extend respect to the family.

Paul Charlton, the Terry’s attorney, alludes this may be a tactic used by the federal government to possibly cover their tracks.

“The government’s already been put on notice that they might be facing a wrongful action by the family. And you have to wonder if the government’s efforts to deny the family the status of ‘crime victims’ is part of a strategy to avoid legal responsibility for some of the tragic mistakes of Operation Fast and Furious,” Charlton told The Fox News Report.

Burke also writes in the case, the family is not a crime victim because they were not “directly of proximately harmed,” by the illegal purchase of murder weapon.

They actually want to screw over the family of a dead Border Agent in order to lessen the damage from the government deliberately selling guns to known drug cartel buyers.

They are more important than you are.

Which brings me to The “Emergency” Food Tax here in Phoenix.

If there was no food tax, there would be no pay raises, DiCiccio
said. Its as simple as that. The Arizona Republic, June 14, 2011

The food tax is expected to bring in $28 million this year. Meanwhile,
city employees got $27 million in raises and bonuses this year. Now
the Phoenix City Council has tentatively approved a budget that
includes another $28.9 million in pay raises and bonuses for the
coming year. – Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts, May 28, 2011

City management has admitted that they can find no documents that show
they told the City Council or public the AMOUNT of employee pay raises
until a month and a half after the budget was approved.

City Manager David Cavazos was given until noon today (Aug. 10, 2011)
to show that his staff didnt hide that information while the budget
was being formed and debated. He was unable to produce anything
showing that staff informed anyone of the pay raise amounts until
April 21, 2010. That is a month and a half after the budget was
approved and 2 1/2 months after the city imposed a 2 percent food tax
essentially equal to the amount of pay raises.

City Attorney Gary Verburg confirmed that City Manager Cavazos has no
more records to turn over nothing that supports his contention that
the Council knew the amount of the pay raises. Verburg wrote that the
documents provided to you contain whatever information the City has,
to my knowledge, relevant to your request.

During the budget process when the pay raises went unmentioned the
city said the food tax was needed or managers would have to lay off
police officers and cut back senior centers, libraries, pools, transit
routes, recreation and programs for schoolchildren.

Its taken more than a year to drag an admission out of the city that
no one was told the amount of pay raises and bonuses until long after
the budget was approved, said Councilman Sal DiCiccio, who had made
multiple requests of the city manager to produce that information.
City Manager Cavazos produced reams of documents talking about the
budget process, but he never answered the question about when the pay
raise amounts were first mentioned.

The simple question City Manager Cavazos refused to answer is:

Mr. Cavazos, when was the first time city staff told Council members
the AMOUNT of employee raises?

I challenge the press and the public to see if even today they can
get a direct and clear answer from him to that question without trying
to divert it to other issues, DiCiccio said.

Even today, he continues to dodge the question in spite of the
citys admission that no document exists prior to April 21.  Its time
for Mr. Cavazos to start leveling with the citizens of Phoenix about
budget matters rather than hiding behind a blizzard of diversion.

The April 21, 2010 document shows that the public was not told the
full amount of the pay raises until after the food tax was passed
(Feb. 2, 2010), 15 public hearings were held (February, 2010) and the
City Council voted on the budget and union contracts (March, 2010).

Phoenix faced the worst budget shortfall in history, $270 million,
closing pools, cuttings libraries and services for seniors and
schoolchildren. It still managed to give out $29 million in pay raises
and bonuses by adding a new food tax, which hurt the poor the most.

The public deserves better from the city of Phoenix.

Its one thing to refuse a councilman requested information. Its
worse to hide information from the public about how its taxes are
raised and spent. Phoenix has an obligation to provide information,
and taxpayers deserve to know how their city is being managed.

The reason this remains important to me is because a well-run Phoenix
that is citizen- and business-friendly could and should be leading the
nation out of this recession. We have great assets, including a
citizenry that truly cares about the community. We owe them honesty
and our best performance in their interest.

Thank you,
Sal DiCiccio
City of Phoenix
Councilman, District 6

So lying is now acceptable as a way to get your apparatchiks a raise when the City is facing the worst budget crisis in it’s history.

Everyone get’s a 2% hike on all their food to feed the greed of City Workers.

And you know what the liberals I have shown this to say?

“Well, they had a Union Contract they had to honor.”

Seriously…no joke.

Partisanship is that bad in this country that lying is ok if it fits in with your ideology.

Moral and ethics, honor, decency can just be chucked out the window at a seconds notice if you can find an ideological reason to support the lies.

No wonder we have young people who have no sense of right or wrong. Everything is relative….to your Political views.

And that way lies disaster.

“You’ve got to tell them you’ve had enough of the theatrics, you’ve had enough of the politics, stop sending out press releases. Start passing some bills that we all know will help the economy right now,” he said. “That’s what they need to do. They’ve got to hear from you.”–President in Michigan this week at a $35,000 a plate fundraiser (no evil “rich” people here).

That’s why he and they all went on vacation for a month! And you know he means it (not just Republicans). 😦

Is that an Iceberg I see up ahead?…

The Fast and The Furious

Two months after the Department of Labor launched a special program to assist and protect illegal immigrants in the U.S. the Obama cabinet official who heads the agency is personally encouraging undocumented workers to report employers that don’t pay them fairly.

In a Spanish-language public service announcement, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis assures that “every worker in America has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.” Illegal aliens who are not getting fair wages are encouraged to call a new hotline set up by the agency on a new “Podemos Ayudar” (We Can Help) web page designed to administer worker protection laws and ensure that employees are properly paid “regardless of immigration status.”

In the short video, also posted in English, Solis tells illegal immigrants that it’s a “serious problem” when workers in this country are not paid fairly and that all workers have the right to receive their salary regardless of immigration status. She encourages those who are not to call the new hotline and assures it’s free and confidential. “Podemos ayudar,” (we can help), Solis guarantees at the end of the brief segment.

The Labor Secretary’s new message is part of a campaign launched a few months ago to help illegal immigrant workers in the U.S., who she refers to as “vulnerable” and “underpaid.” At least 1,000 new field investigators have been deployed to reach out to Latino laborers in areas with large numbers of illegal alien employees and the agency will focus on enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities.

For a government agency to protect law breakers in this fashion may seem unbelievable but not if you consider the source. A Former California congresswoman, Solis has close ties to the influential La Raza movement that advocates open borders and rights for illegal immigrants. She made the protection of undocumented workers a major priority upon being named Labor Secretary, assuring illegal aliens that “if you work in this country, you are protected by our laws.” (JW)

Graduation of Debt

 The median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008, according to a study released on Wednesday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. That is a decline of 10 percent, even before taking inflation into account.

Of course, these are the lucky ones — the graduates who found a job. Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted. That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007. (Some have gone for further education or opted out of the labor force, while many are still pounding the pavement.)

So 4 in 10 graduates had no job at all – not even one that didn’t use their putative skills for which they spent the money.

But let’s assume you do have a job. The median income was $27,000. What if you have $60,000 in student loans?

On a 10 year amortization schedule and a 5% blended interest rate the payment is $633.75. Every month. Your gross income is $2,250/month. More than 25% of your gross income, before taxes, is consumed by student loan payments.

But don’t worry, the Liberals will be right there to tell them it’s the Rich People’s fault! And Class Warfare is the only answer! (that is just re-enforcing it after 16 years of liberal socialism in schools to begin with). So, the answer is to vote for Democrats so they can redistribute the wealth to you!

The new American Work Ethic! 😦

Your imputed income (that is, the effective purchasing power of your “degree” when you subtract out the debt service) is $19,395, again before taxes. But you’re in a higher tax bracket than the person who simply earns $19,395 – which, I will remind you, is $9.70/hour.

Worse, your debt cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy. A high school graduate who takes on debt like this and gets in trouble can file a Chapter 7 (being well under the median household income) and shed it. You, as a graduate, cannot. You’re stuck with it, and if you lose your job you’re instantly hosed, as that $60,000 will have penalties and interest immediately added to it. (KFYI)

Isn’t Obamanomics fun!! The Labor Department is more worried about illegal aliens than the legal ones! And even if you get a college degree you’ll be in so much you’ll likely drown. Just like the US Budget Deficit! 🙂

But fear not, it’s Rich people and Corporate America’s Fault!!  (according to the Democrats).

But hey, at least ObamaCare guarantees that you can suck off your parents’ health insurance until your 26! And as reported earlier 1/2 the jobs created in a recent month were from McDonalds. So have it Obama’s Way. 🙂

Sanctuary

Last month San Francisco’s Michael Hennessey, California’s longest-serving sheriff, announced that he would ignore federal detainer orders on illegal immigrants arrested for low-level crimes such as shoplifting, disorderly conduct or public drunkenness. Under Secure Communities, arrestees identified as undocumented are held by local jails until Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials transfer them.

But the arrangement violates San Francisco’s longtime sanctuary law, which forbids public employees and police from asking anyone about their immigration status. The famously liberal city by the bay also offers illegal aliens official government identification cards and all sorts of taxpayer-financed public benefits.

Hennessy, who is an elected official, claims that all residents are equal and stresses that San Francisco is proud of its diversity and values the contributions of immigrants. “San Francisco has always been a city of immigrants,” Hennessey said, adding that all civic leaders work hard to serve all residents regardless of immigration status.

Notably absent in the rhetoric were cases in which violent criminals were protected by the sanctuary policies. For instance a few years ago a Salvadoran gang member with two felony convictions murdered a father and his two sons because he never got turned over to federal authorities for removal.

Judicial Watch obtained California public records that revealed San Francisco authorities knew the triple murderer (Edwin Ramos) was an illegal immigrant and active member of a deadly street gang known as MS-13. The records also show that Ramos had been previously arrested on gang-related and weapons charges yet was released under the county’s sanctuary policies.

The Fast & Furious

Oh, and then there’s “Fast and Furious” a brilliant strategy by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

Let’s force gun dealers in Arizona to sell thousands of semi-automatic firearms to straw purchasers (those who buy guns for someone who can’t do so legally) — and then just watched as the guns went across the border, into the hands of Mexican drug cartels members so we can trace the guns in Mexico to the “bigger fish”.

Only, they couldn’t actually trace them! Or as it turned out, find them!

PHOENIX – ATF Field Agents in Phoenix were told that they were the first Southwest Border Group to be pursuing operation Fast and Furious and that it was the “pinnacle of U.S. law enforcement techniques.”

A day after a fiery Capitol Hill hearing on the controversial program that allegedly let guns “walk” across the border, it is becoming more apparent that the strategy was ineffective and dangerous. So much so that when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others were shot in Tucson, panic spread within the entire Phoenix Field Division of  ATF.

“There was concern from the chain of command that the gun was hopefully not a fast and furious gun,” Special Agent Peter Forcelli testified at a House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

“Everytime there’s a shooting whether it was Mrs. Giffords or anybody, anytime there was a shooting in the general Phoenix area or even Arizona, we’re fearful that it might be one of these firearms,” said Special Agent Olindo Casa.

The ATF was tracking a straw buyer who purchased a truckload of assault weapons in January 2010 but did not stop him.

In December two of those guns were recovered at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry in Rio Rico, Arizona.

Terry’s mother, Josephine Terry, testified at Wednesday’s hearing but is now back home in Michigan.

Reached by phone she told 3TV she was pleased with how the hearing progressed. “I felt like everyone was on Brian’s side 100 percent,” said Terry.

Members of Congress vow to continue to probe the ATF operation and find out who at the highest level sanctioned the program. (KTVK-Phx)

ATF agents–turned–whistleblowers John Dodson and Olindo James Casa testified that they begged to seize the firearms, which included .50-caliber sniper rifles, once the straw purchasers handed them off. “My supervisors directed me and my colleagues not to make any stop or arrest, but rather to keep the straw purchaser under surveillance while allowing the guns to walk,” he said.

Casa also said that “on several occasions, I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms.”

So the guns were just allowed to slip across the border. All the ATF has is the firearms’ serial numbers. They weren’t even working with Mexican authorities. As a result, Agent Dodson said, “We knew the next time we’d see the guns would be at crime scenes. And not [the scene of] the first crime these guns were used in, but at the last.”

When asked how he thought sending guns into Mexico could lead to busts of drug cartels, Agent Dodson said, “I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did.”

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R., Iowa) testified that “the president said he didn’t authorize it and that the attorney general didn’t authorize [Fast and Furious]. They have both admitted that a ‘serious mistake’ may have been made. There are a lot of questions, and a lot of investigating to do. But one thing has become clear already: This was no mistake. It was a conscious decision by senior officials. It was written down. It was briefed up to Washington, D.C.” (NRO)

And if it leader to, say Eric Holder or Big Sis or Obama himself will they be held responsible for this stupidity.

Hell NO!

Late in the hearing, Josephine Terry — the mother of Brian Terry — was asked if there is anything she would like to say to whoever approved Operation Fast and Furious. After taking a moment to regain her composure, she said, “I don’t know what I would say to them, but I would like to know what they would say to me.”

Hope and Change?

Do you want fries with that?

Win The Future! 🙂

P.s. “Chocolate milk is soda in drag,” said Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Boulder Valley School District in Louisville, Colo., which has banned flavored milk. “It works as a treat in homes, but it doesn’t belong in schools.” (NBC)

Oh then there’s this gem:

A “Labor Studies Curriculum for Elementary Schools,” entitled “The Yummy Pizza Company,” takes up to 20 classroom hours over a two-week period. Important concepts in the 10 lessons, such as the value of work and money management, are critical components, but are quickly overshadowed by the fact that 40% of the curriculum is about forming Pizza Makers Union Local 18. That’s right – the program is focused on teaching kids to unionize.

I don’t suppose this creative curriculum has anything do to with current issues, like collective bargaining privileges for public employees. Teachers wouldn’t be so blatant as to involve young children in their political issues, would they? (townhall.com)

P.p.s. Georgia lawmakers passed an immigration bill similar to Arizona’s SB 1070. The legislation allows local law enforcement to inquire about immigration status after an individual commits a crime. The law was passed in order to deal with the mounting illegal immigration problem costing the state billions of dollars each year. Now, Mexico, along with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru, are joining civil liberties groups in their efforts to sue the American state.

Mexico and 10 other countries have filed amicus briefs in a lawsuit that asks a judge to declare Georgia’s new immigration law unconstitutional and to block it from being enforced.

Yep, foreign countries are now lecturing Americans about what is and is not Constitutional with the backing of groups like the ACLU and the SEIU. (Townhall.com)

America What a Country! 🙂

Bargaining For Your Life

Government Collective Bargaining 101

Members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1260 rejected a contract offer by HECO. Contracts between the IBEW represent 1,200 employees at HECO, Maui Electric Co. and Hawaii Electric Light Co.

The business manager Lance Miyake for the IBEW issued a statement: “As of 3:30 pm today, March 4, 2011, IBEW Local Union 1260 will be on strike against Hawaiian Electric Company, Maui Electric Company and Hawaii Electric Light Company.”

This is just after a big storm struck the island and left thousands without power to begin with. So that’s the perfect time to go on strike!

The move comes as dozens of HECO workers are scrambling to fix power outages around Oahu and fallen power lines in Ewa. About 8,000 customers remain without power, a HECO representative said.Leeward Oahu lawmakers voiced outrage over the walkout.”It is unacceptable for union members to put their pay before the safety of my community. Many people in Ewa Beach are already out of work and for them to walk off in a state of crisis is egregious,” Rep. Kymberly Pine said.The union has said it opposes management’s proposal to require employees to work two more years to get full retirement benefits, pushing back their retirement age to 62 from 60. (KITV)

It has now gone to mediation.

***************************************************

BEANBAGS Vs. AK-47’s & More

A policy requiring U.S. Border Patrol agents to use nonlethal bean bags as a first line of defense evidently led to the murder of an agent who was gunned down by a heavily armed group of illegal immigrants in Arizona.

The deadly gun battle took place on December 14, but the Department of Homeland Security has kept details from the public under the often-invoked premise that it’s an “ongoing investigation.”

The murdered agent, Brian Terry, and his colleague encountered five illegal border crossers at around 11:15 p.m. in an area known as Peck Canyon, northwest of Nogales. The illegal aliens refused commands to drop their weapons and the two federal agents proceeded to fire beanbags, as per Border Patrol policy to use nonlethal force against migrants.

Turns out the illegal immigrants were heavily armed with sophisticated assault weapons known as AK-47s. They responded to the beanbags with gunfire and agent Terry was mortally shot in the back.

Making matters worse, a separate new reports indicates that the gun used to murder Terry was actually part of a federal experiment that allowed firearms from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers have lost track of hundreds of guns which have been used in numerous crimes.

A federal operation that allowed weapons from the U.S. to pass into the hands of suspected gun smugglers so they could be traced to the higher echelons of Mexican drug cartels has lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which have been linked to crimes, including the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent in December. John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who worked on Operation Fast and Furious, said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, that he was still haunted by his participation in the investigation.

“With the number of guns we let walk, we’ll never know how many people were killed, raped, robbed,” he said. “There is nothing we can do to round up those guns. They are gone.”(LA Times)

Among them were at least three guns found at the Peck Canyon scene of Terry’s murder. The weapons were traced through their serial numbers to a gun shop in Glendale, Arizona, which led to a Phoenix man (Jaime Avila) that the feds repeatedly allowed to smuggle firearms into Mexico. Known as Operation Fast and Furious, the disastrous project was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

But it gets Better, with Big Sis:

Newly-released documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reveal that the US Depart of Homeland Security has been working on plans to roll out a new wave of mobile surveillance technologies at train stations, stadiums and streets. These new technologies will track your eye movements, capture and record your facial dimensions for face-recognition processing, bathe you in X-rays to look under your clothes, and even image your naked body using whole-body infrared that were banned from consumer video cameras because they allowed the camera owners to take “nude” of people at the beach.

Most importantly, many of these technologies are designed to be completely hidden, allowing the government to implement “covert inspection of moving subjects.” You could be walking down a hallway at a sports stadium, in other words, never knowing that you’re being bathed in X-rays from the Department of Homeland Security, whose operators are covertly looking under your clothes to see if you’re carrying any weapons.

According to a Forbes.com article one project pursued by DHS using technology from Siemens would “mount backscatter x-ray scanners and video cameras on roving vans, along with other cameras on buildings and utility poles, to monitor groups of pedestrians, assess what they carried, and even track their eye movements.”

Forbes Blog: American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Another project involved developing “a system of long range x-ray scanning to determine what metal objects an individual might have on his or her body at distances up to thirty feet.”

We already know that the U.S. government has purchased 500 vans using covert backscatter technology to covertly scan people on the streets They’re called “Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs.”

“This would allow them to take these technologies out of the airport and into other contexts like public streets, special events and ground transit,” says Ginger McCall, an attorney with EPIC. “It’s a clear violation of the fourth amendment that’s very invasive, not necessarily effective, and poses all the same radiation risks as the airport scans.”

It’s not clear to what degree the technologies outlined in the DHS documents have been implemented. Multiple contacts at the DHS public affairs office didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Then a TSA official responds in a statement that the “TSA has not tested the advanced imaging technology that is currently used at airports in mass transit environments and does not have plans to do so.”

Which mean they have. This government after all, and especially Big Sis.

“When you’re out walking on the street, it’s not acceptable for an officer to come up and search your bag without probable cause or consent.,” EPIC’s  Mcall says. “This is the digital equivalent.”

We are from the Government and we are here to help you!

And we are NOT looking at your naked body! 🙂

We do not suspect you! 🙂

And Muslim Terrorism is not terrorism. The Border is secure even though we admit to having very little “operational” control over it!

But we are fighting the  armed Drug Cartels with bean bags and just watching as known Cartel buyers buy guns to kill us and Mexicans alike.

Rejoice!

We have everything under Control. Trust us. 🙂

But at least you have ObamaCare.

The number of temporary healthcare reform waivers granted by the Obama administration to organizations climbed to more than 1,000, according to new numbers disclosed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS posted 126 new waivers on Friday, bringing the total to 1,040 organizations that have been granted a one-year exemption from a new coverage requirement included in the healthcare reform law enacted almost a year ago.

And…

The pension funds for state and local workers in the United States are understating the amount they will owe workers by $1.5 trillion or more, according to some economists who have studied the issue, meaning that the benefits are much costlier than many governments and taxpayers thought.

Doubts about government pension accounting have been voiced by analysts for years, but with shortfalls in state and local pension plans exacerbated by the recession, the push to refigure pension fund shortfalls has gained political momentum.

The trillion-dollar gap arises from the government method of accounting, which several experts say significantly underestimates the cost of future pension payments.

When the accounting is revised to value future payments more accurately, in the critics’ view, the amount that pensions are underfunded grows to more than $1.9 trillion, according to Munnell’s calculations for 126 large plans.

Those calculations have been published in part in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But don’t worry, be happy. The Government is here to save you!

Trust Us. 🙂