Archive for the ‘Barry Soetoro (alias Barak Obama)’ Category

by Brian Preston

As of Monday, there are *four major scandals dogging the Obama administration. More than one of them have the potential to bring major officials down and dominate the news for the foreseeable future. The stories are all moving so fast that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Health and Human Services soliciting funds from the health care industry for the implementation of ObamaCare. This one is “raising eyebrows,” says MarketWatch.

The Times said Sebelius obtained $10 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and $500,000 from H&R Block for the effort. HHS officials said that Sebelius’s efforts would continue, after first denying they were soliciting funds for the effort. But a spokesman for Sebelius said a section of the Public Health Service Act allows her to encourage others to support those working to help carry out public health activities.

Sebelius reportedly has sought donations for Enroll America, a private non-profit group that is working to get the uninsured covered under the 2010 health-care law.

“Nice company ya go there…” This activity is illegal, and marks the second known time that Sebelius has broken the law while atop HHS. The first was when she used official time to campaign for Obama’s re-election, then reimbursed the agency after the fact to paper things over. Does Sebelius get a third strike?

2. Benghazi. Four Americans died in a terrorist attack conducted by Libya’s al Qaeda branch, Ansar al-Sharia, on September 11, 2012. President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Ambassador Susan Rice all blamed the attack on a spontaneous demonstration against an obscure YouTube movie, and downplayed al Qaeda’s role. Just a few days prior to the attack , the Democratic National Convention pushed a theme that al Qaeda had been put on the run with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Talking points drafted after the attack were edited 12 times, consistently to remove references to terrorism and al Qaeda specifically. The YouTube movie never appears in the talking points, but it became the message of Clinton, Rice, and Obama through his UN speech on September 26, 2012.

Security had been deteriorating in Benghazi for months leading up to the attack. A warning published in Egypt on 9-10 proved that the attacks were not about a movie at all. Information from the field during the attack proved that it was a coordinated terrorist attack. Someone ordered U.S. special forces in Tripoli who were readying to respond to the attack to stand down. The administration continues to claim that it did not have time to marshal U.S. forces to help, but they had no idea how long the attack would last. Libya deputy chief Greg Hicks, who assumed command upon the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens, testified that he believed that the attack had turned into a hostage rescue situation when Stevens went missing. The U.S. Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) is designed to go from “zero to wheels up” very quickly and should have been deployed, according to Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for operations — counterterrorism bureau. The Accountability Review Board appointed by Clinton to investigate Benghazi never interviewed Clinton or Thompson, and did not have stenographers present when witnesses were interviewed. Hicks and Thompson claim that State officials engaged in intimidation to silence them. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has spent most of the Benghazi scandal running interference for the Obama administration, but after last week’s dramatic whistleblowers’ hearing is calling for more public testimony from more witnesses. More whistleblowers are reportedly considering coming forward.

3. The Department of Justice secretly obtained the phone records of 20 lines at or connected to the Associated Press. Media are fuming today over the “massive and unprecedented” grab of AP phone records.

The AP reported that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors dated April and May 2012, including incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.

The sweep was evidently in response to a leak about a terrorist attack, a second jihadist underwear bombing attempt. Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to explain his agency’s actions today. Some are already calling for his resignation or firing. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared on Fox News Channel today and questioned the wide sweep of reporters’ communications, including their personal cell phones. The AP says that it was not told anything about the sweep in advance, and that it still has not been explained to them.

4. The IRS targeted conservative Tea Party groups, and Jewish groups favorable toward Israel. For about two years and through the 2012 election, the Internal Revenue Service deliberately targeted conservative, Tea Party, and anti-Obama groups, and groups with “patriot” and “constitution” in their name. The IRS demanded deep personal information of everyone involved with these groups, and was evidently building a database on them. IRS official Lois Lerner apologized for the targeting last week, and claimed that the targeting only happened in the Cincinnati office. Since then, Americans have learned that officials in Washington knew about it a year ago, and were involved. The IRS also leaked information from the groups to liberal ProPublica, according to ProPublica. President Obama claims only to have learned about it on Friday, and in the media. But Congress has asked questions off and on about it for a couple of years now. The New York Times praised the IRS for targeting conservatives in May 2012. The targeting has had a chilling effect since 2009, when Obama joked about unleashing the IRS on enemies. This scandal gets a hearing on Friday. The fact that the IRS is empowered to deal with Americans’ health care choices thanks to ObamaCare adds an additional chilling layer to this story.

Update: IRS may have targeted pro-life groups too. And there may be a new scandal brewing at the Environmental Protection Agency.

*Fast and Furious and the Pigford scandal are still lurking out there, but neither is in the headlines at the moment. Obama may have killed off Fast and Furious when he invoked executive privilege to seal off the White House’s communications with DOJ on the subject.

More: And Then There Were Five Obama Scandals…?

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

IRS sent confidential info on conservatives to liberal nonprofit ProPublica – PROPUBLICA IS FINANCED BY HERB SANDLER

HERB AND MARION SANDLER: THE BONNIE AND CLYDE OF FREE SPEECH

WorldNetDaily has an interesting story today about the latest hustle of Herb and Marion Sandler – the king and queen of toxic assets who destroyed Wachovia and who Time Magazine named in their list of “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.” (photo right)

You may remember even Saturday Night Live mocking them. The skit was banned by NBC, but can be found here.

So, what are these financial gouls up to now? Well, they’ve created a non-profit organization called Pro Publica, Inc. that underwrite hard-hitting investigative journalism that has a “moral force” to newspapers facing cutbacks in staff and elimination of editions. And they’ve committed $10 million to it.

Problem is, their moral force is decidedly far-left-leaning. As WorldNetDaily reports:

Rather than investigating ACORN, when accusation of voter fraud were being widely revealed, Pro Publica began probing the background of the public affairs group that blew the whistle on ACORN. It also invested resources in investigating Sarah Palin’s “pork history” and her connection to the “road to nowhere.” There was no similar interest in Barack Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers or Rev. Jeremiah Wright or any other similar controversies during the presidential campaign, notes the center.
Along with their investment in left-wing propoganda, the Bonnie and Clyde of free speech have donated

…hundreds of millions of dollars to MoveOn.org, George Soros’ Democracy Alliance, David Brock’s Media Matters, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the William J. Clinton Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy, the Natural Resources Defense Council and two affiliates of the voter-fraud tainted ACORN – and many other groups and causes with portside tilt.
God help America.

Connections …Soros Buddies Herb and Marion Sandler Gave Orders to ACORN
JUNE 8, 2009
by Matthew Vadum
The “Glenn Beck Program” did an excellent piece on June 3 about Herb and Marion Sandler, the toxic mortgage king and queen, and their connection to ACORN and the inappropriately named Center for Responsible Lending. (The video clip is available here.) The Sandlers are also key members of Democracy Alliance, the George Soros-led billionaires’ club that aims to push America farther to the left through strategic philanthropic giving to left-wing groups and institutions.

Through their charity, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, the couple gave at least $5,723,222 to the ACORN network. Specifically, the charity gave $4,498,222 to American Institute for Social Justice (since 2003), $700,000 to Project Vote (in 2005), $525,000 to ACORN (2000–2001 according to Activist Cash). This excludes any contributions that either Sandler may have made personally to ACORN or its affiliates.

According to the “Glenn Beck Program,” the Sandlers paid ACORN to send out protesters to hound Wells Fargo Bank, which competed with Golden West, the Sandlers’ bank. If true, this is an explosive allegation.

The Sandlers have also given heavily to the Center for Responsible Lending, an ACORN ally that champions the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The CRA, which pushed banks to lend money to people they ought to have known were bad credit risks, is at least partly responsible for the subprime mortgage collapse. The Sandlers’ foundation has given the Center at least $11,200,000 since 2005.

The Sandlers are also deeply involved in an effort to push America’s journalistic culture even farther to the left. They have given a reported $10 million to ProPublica, a left-leaning investigative journalism outfit. Cheryl K. Chumley profiled ProPublica in last month’s Foundation Watch.
George Soros, Peter Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler are all part of Soros’s One World Order and Barry Soretoro’s Gangster Empire.

Brett LoGiurato

One of the most politically intense fights over the Affordable Care Act was over the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, infamously dubbed a “death panel” by Republicans during the 2010 elections.

On Thursday, Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled that they would keep working to keep opposition alive by doing everything they can to impede the board’s implementation.

The two leaders wrote a letter to President Barack Obama, notifying him that they would not be submitting any recommendations to the panel because of their opposition to it and to the law in general.

Here’s the relevant part of their letter explaining why they aren’t offering any recommendations:

In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.

The unfortunate result is that decisions which impact America’s seniors will be made in the absence of the democratic process, without the system of checks and balances that would normally apply to important matters of public policy. Yet your recent budget called for expanding IPAB by tasking it with making even larger cuts to Medicare than those called for in the health law, even though the trustees of the Medicare program have told us that IPAB’s provider cuts would be “difficult to achieve in practice,” because of the denied care that seniors would experience.

Though the move will likely play well for Republicans politically, it won’t have much of an effect on the implementation of the health care law, at least for the foreseeable future, according to health care law professors.

The IPAB is set up to be a 15-member panel. Three members will be chosen by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the remaining three are chosen by Obama and the executive branch. All of the members have to be confirmed by the Senate.

But the IPAB is only needed if Medicare costs are projected to go beyond economic growth plus an additional percentage point in any given year, said Allison Hoffman, an assistant professor of law at UCLA. Right now, Medicare costs aren’t growing fast enough to require the board to decide which cuts to make to Medicare providers.

“There’s actually no work for the IPAB to do this year,” Hoffman told Business Insider.

McConnell and Boehner’s letter has “no impact on the ground,” Hoffman said. “It’s a protest move. You know — we’re not going to cooperate with what the law says in this regard.”

Obama, the fall
By Charles Krauthammer The Washington Post
First Published May 03 2013 01:01 am • Last Updated May 03 2013 01:01 am

WASHINGTON — Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination.

And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his re-election success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff, leaving a humiliated John Boehner & Co. with nothing but naked tax hikes.

Thus emboldened, Obama turned his inaugural and State of the Union address into a left-wing dream factory, from his declaration of war on global warming (on a planet where temperatures are the same as 16 years ago and in a country whose CO2 emissions are at a 20-year low) to the invention of new entitlements — e.g., universal preschool for 5-year-olds — for a country already drowning in debt.

To realize his dreams, Obama sought to fracture and neutralize the congressional GOP as a prelude to reclaiming the House in 2014. This would enable him to fully enact his agenda in the final two years of his presidency, usually a time of lame-duck paralysis. Hail the Obama juggernaut.

Well, that story — excuse me, narrative — lasted exactly six months. The Big Mo is gone.

It began with the sequester. Obama never believed the Republicans would call his bluff and let it go into effect. They did.

Taken by surprise, Obama cried wolf, predicting the end of everything we hold dear if the sequester was not stopped. It wasn’t. Nothing happened.

Highly embarrassed, and determined to indeed make (bad) things happen, the White House refused Republican offers to give it more discretion in making cuts. Bureaucrats were instructed to inflict maximum pain from minimal cuts, as revealed by one memo from the Agriculture Department demanding agency cuts that the public would feel.

Things began with the near-comical cancellation of White House tours and ended with not-so-comical airline delays. Obama thought furious passengers would blame the GOP. But isn’t the executive branch in charge of these agencies? Who thinks that a government spending $3.6 trillion a year can’t cut 2 percent without furloughing air traffic controllers?

Looking not just incompetent at managing budgets but cynical for deliberately injuring the public welfare, the administration relented. Congress quickly passed a bill giving Obama reallocation authority to restore air traffic control. Having previously threatened to veto any such bill, Obama caved. He signed.Not exactly Appomattox, but coming immediately after Obama’s spectacular defeat on gun control, it marked an administration that had lost its “juice,” to paraphrase a charming question at the president’s news conference.

For Obama, gun control was a political disaster. He invested capital. He went on a multicity tour. He paraded grieving relatives. And got nothing. An assault-weapons ban — a similar measure had passed the Congress 20 years ago — lost 60-40 in a Senate where Democrats control 55 seats. Obama failed even to get mere background checks.

All this while appearing passive, if not helpless, on the world stage.

On Syria, Obama was nervously trying to erase the WMD red line he had so publicly established. On Benghazi, he stonewalled accusations that State Department officials wishing to testify are being blocked.

He is even taking heat for the Boston bombings. Every day brings another revelation of signals missed beforehand. And his post-bombing pledge to hunt down those responsible was mocked by the scandalous Mirandizing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, gratuitously shutting down information from the one person who knows more than anyone about possible still-existent explosives, associates, trainers, future plans, etc.

Now, the screw will undoubtedly turn again. If immigration reform passes, Obama will be hailed as the comeback kid, and a new “Obama rising” narrative proclaimed.

This will overlook the fact that immigration reform has little to do with Obama and everything to do with GOP panic about the Hispanic vote. In fact, Obama has been asked by congressional negotiators to stay away, so polarizing a figure has he become.

Nonetheless, whatever happens, the screw will surely turn again, if only because of media boredom. But that’s the one constant of Washington political life: There are no straight-line graphs. We live from inflection point to inflection point.

And we’ve just experienced one. From king of the world to dead in the water in six months. Quite a ride.

Legions of American soldiers must have turned in their graves when the President of the Unites States of America made a mockery of their sacrifice by throwing in with Mexico yesterday.

Speaking to a captive audience of young minds made up of mostly high school and college students—his trademark age group home and abroad—Obama delivered his address at the iconic National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

In his arrogance, ‘El Obamabore’ tried to supplant Davey Crockett, James Bowie and William B. Travis as chief American hero in the minds of today’s Mexican Youth. There is no hero in American history unless his initial is ‘O’. That’s Obama’s prevailing spin and he’s sticking to it.

Patriots in all countries are the same in putting country first and any patriots in the Mexico crowd would ponder how patriotic a president who puts his own country down.

Obama must have forgotten that young Mexican students would have read about Fast & Furious, which saw American guns transferred into the hands of the drug cartels with the full knowledge—and backing—of the Obama administration.

“Meanwhile, we’ll keep increasing the pressure on the gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico, and we’ll keep putting these criminals where they belong—behind
bars”, Obama said.

Tough words now that the caballo is already out of the granero.

In his version of Simón-Bolívar-come-back-to-life, Obama has no skin in the game, and never did. There was no bloodshed marking this newly minted battle like like there was in America’s long fight against Mexico of the historical past. A good thing Obama didn’t have a weapon-bearing prop along with his Teleprompter because worldwide web pictures already prove self-described skeet shooters can’t even handle their weapons properly.

And as no one was there to remind Mexico’s youth that Obama has been president of the USA, lo these past four and a half years, the youngsters were up against it hearing a diatribe which painted an America always at fault by its own president.

If ‘El Obamabore’ were the CEO in the private sector, he would have been immediately fired for disloyalty and for spreading hyperbole; shown the door by security guards if he dared return to his desk.

But in the Hollywood world in which the White House and D.C. now thrive, you can say anything you want—even “God Bless” Planned Parenthood—and appoint a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court martialing, case-by-case military chaplains who share the Christian gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops. In other words, redefine “evangelizing” as “proselytizing”, compare it to rape—and get away with it.

No matter how the mainstream media reported on the National Museum of Anthropology address, not every student shouted “Ole!” being taken down the rhubarb path by a crass politician pretending to be on their country’s side.

“How nice that he came to give inspiring speeches, but what’s happening in Mexico is far from what he talked about today,” said Jose Carlos Cruiz, a 24-year-old graduate student in international relations who attended the speech. “A really good speech by President Obama, but what Mexico was he talking about?” (LA Times, May 3, 2013).

“Obama is fantastic, but I believe that today he was talking about another country, not ours,” said Rosa Castro, 43, a college professor. “My question is: Who wrote Obama’s speech? Enrique Pena Nieto’s team?”

Meanwhile Mexico’s high school and college students think for themselves and some of them will surely identify that girly-looking guy on the baseball mound as ‘El Obamabore The Hypocrite’.

BY PHILLIP SWARTS
Why It Matters:
Lawmakers are zeroing in on anyway to trim dollars from the federal budget. A group of watchdog representatives are concerned about the $1.7 billion the government is spending on vacant and unused buildings.

Everyone sat on plastic folding chairs, on a concrete floor in front of rows upon rows of empty industrial shelves. Speakers sometimes had to pause, to keep the rumble of trucks outside from drowning out their words.

An abandoned warehouse was an unusual spot for an official Congressional committee hearing last week, a far cry from the gilded halls of Capitol Hill. But the Oversight and Government Reform Committee thought the location would help draw attention to one area of federal waste: billions of dollars spent over the last decade on maintenance and upkeep for empty buildings the government doesn’t use.

“We have vacant buildings like this eating taxpayer dollars and bureaucrats unable to make a decision,” said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the subcommittee on Government Operations. “At a time in which the government is struggling to try to make ends meet and our deficits are climbing, I think it’s appropriate that we look at the multi-billion dollar waste and practices that do not adequately address the problem of vacant properties and underutilized assets.

According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ chief watchdog agency, the federal government owns more than 100,000 office buildings, warehouses and other structures that aren’t in use. And maintenance and upkeep on those vacant buildings costs an estimated $1.7 billion each year.

It’s one type of spending that Ranking Member Gerald Connolly, D-Va., said should come to an end.

“Every dollar spent on an unnecessary lease is a dollar diverted away from a mission-critical function,” he said. “In this current era of austerity, inefficiencies such as these have real world consequences for the citizens they serve.”

As the seat of the federal government, D.C. alone has roughly 14,000 of the abandoned buildings. The location of the committee hearing, a warehouse located in southeastern D.C., was used by the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff for storage until 2009. Now it sits vacant and unused, costing tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance and upkeep each year.

“This is a $70,000 a year hearing,” Connolly joked.

But officials at the General Services Administration, the government’s landlord, said it’s not as simple as listing a property on the market. First, other government agencies must be given a chance to use the building if they want. The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims had been interested, but eventually decided not to use the warehouse, said Michael Gelber, the Acting Deputy Commissioner for the GSA’s Public Building Service.

Now the GSA is trying to evaluate a fair market price for the structure, Gelber said. By selling the warehouse, GSA expects it can get $19 million to spend on repairs at other government facilities.

“We have a large number of facilities that are in need of repair,” Gelber said.

The money lost on the vacant buildings isn’t the only issue lawmakers are concerned about. The abandoned warehouse in southeast D.C. could be given to the local government and turned into a vibrant community center, supporters argued.

“This property is just off from M St., which essentially has been remade into an entirely new community,” said Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. in the House but has no voting power.

Holmes Norton said she would be supportive of a proposal that would give the property to the city. The warehouse is in one of Washington’s most rapidly growing neighborhoods, the waterfront along the Potomac River. And it’s just two blocks away from National’s Ballpark, where D.C.’s professional baseball team plays.

Local residents are supporting the “Half Street Market initiative,” a proposal to turn the building into a multi-purpose education and culinary center.

“Half Street Market presents a unique and exciting opportunity to create a public amenity that will promote economic development, support small business, and prepare D.C. residents for D.C. jobs,” said David Garber, the advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area the warehouse is in.

Garber described the plan as a “vibrant public market and restaurant that will operate a workforce development and education program for D.C. residents, host community education programming and provide a shared-use commercial kitchen.”

Local resident Tom Worrell, 67, said he and his wife just bought a condo across the street from the abandoned warehouse, partially because of the Half Street Market plan.

“One of the decisions in that factor was seeing the proposal for this several months ago,” he said.

If the warehouse were converted into an educational and culinary center as proposed, Worrell said it would help train people for jobs in D.C.’s many restaurants and cooks, waiters and other staff.

“We think it’s a very good use of the area, good educational use,” he said.

But first control of the warehouse has to be handed over to the city, a move that would likely deprive GSA of the payday it was hoping for. Because the agency is just starting the process to sell the warehouse, it hasn’t even been listed as “excess” property, the first step in allowing the city government to take over control.

Gelber said any decision the GSA reaches will keep in mind that the property is in the middle of a growing community. Chairman Mica said he hopes a mutually beneficial compromise could be reached between the GSA and the city.

The hearing comes as D.C. citizens overwhelmingly voted for a measure that would give the city control greater control over its budget. As a federal territory, D.C. doesn’t have the full autonomy of a normal city, as almost much of its spending be approved by the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, as politicians continue to debate the best use of the facility, the warehouse sits unoccupied, costing money.

“The problem is no one’s doing anything,” Mica said. “The process they’ve gone through…has taken an extraordinary amount of time, and here it sits.”

One of Mica’s colleagues echoed his concern.

“There are two ways to get things done here in Washington, D.C.: slow and never,” lamented Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., upon hearing GSA did not have a firm timetable to sell the building.