Archive for the ‘Barry The Communist’ Category

by John Meyers

“The people on the list might be me.” — Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), speaking during his March 6 filibuster about the “kill list” maintained by the Administration of President Barack Obama
President Barack Obama has big plans to change the United States. Most frightening is that he can back up his Machiavellian plan with a personal army that targets any real or perceived enemies, even if it means killing American citizens without trial or arrest.
It is nothing new. Tyrants have employed personal armies for 2,000 years, beginning with Julius Caesar’s Praetorian Guard. Joseph Stalin wielded his Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and Adolph Hitler had the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS). Obama commands the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
While the President didn’t create this hybrid of the military and CIA, it operates under his command. JSOC is made up of the most elite soldiers in the world, and they follow Obama’s orders. The funding, which is in the billions of dollars, comes from taxpayers (the actual amount is classified); and there is zero Congressional oversight.
The commandos who make up JSOC were born from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, President Jimmy Carter’s failed rescue of American hostage held in Iran in 1980.
Headquartered at Pope Field and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, JSOC has already been woven into myth by the Obama Administration and popular media for the operations of one of its components: Navy SEAL Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden.
The potential for even a good President to abuse force became apparent under the Ronald Reagan Administration, when JSOC was subsequently put on a tighter leash. But it was slipping under the radar even then. In 1993, one of JSOC’s most secretive missions was the disastrous raid against the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, which led to the deaths of 75 people, including 20 children and two pregnant women.
Nixon Had His Enemies List, Obama Has A ‘Hit List’

After 9/11, the neocons in the George W. Bush Administration decided America needed a sleek fighting force to combat enemy Islamic terrorists rather than the standardized armies that the Pentagon had established during the Cold War.
The military machinery of the past needed Congressional approval to wage war. As for the CIA, it, too, was constrained in 1975 when President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 banning the United States from undertaking “political assassinations.” Presidents who followed worked around this rule. After the Twin Towers fell, the Bush Administration followed through on the famous words of Vice President Dick Cheney: “If you want to fight the bad guys, you have to take the gloves off.”
For the most part, Cheney got his way, although he argues to this day that there was too much interference by Congress. Obama doesn’t make that claim and for good reason: He is free to execute his enemies, including American citizens, as he sees fit.
No doubt, the United States has a great deal of enemies; and those who are actively planning to murder and maim Americans need to be killed or captured. (If you have read my previous writings for Bob Livingston, you know I am no fan of Islam or Muslims who retain their religious roots while living in, and profiting from, the American way of life.)
But nothing gives Obama the right to be judge, jury and executioner against Americans he sees as his enemy.
By hook or by crook, the President has the perfect environment to press ahead with his tyranny. The Republican Party is so tied to its neoconservative ideals that Republicans actually complain that the President isn’t tough enough. At the same time, the Democratic Party, backed by the full weight of popular media, refuses to criticize anything Obama does. When it comes to murder, the President is beyond reproach (rather amazing when you consider Nixon was almost impeached for lying).
In his new book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Scahill writes that Democrats would not tolerate such Presidential action from John McCain had he won the 2008 election. According to Scahill, Obama has been granted a blank check to vastly expand drone strikes while blatantly ignoring the Constitution by denying habeas corpus.
Before you dismiss my words as a right-wing rant, consider this warning from an influential Democrat. Michael Boyle, a professor at LaSalle University and former adviser to the Obama Campaign, wrote:
The creation of this “kill list” — as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes, which have now killed at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 — represents a betrayal of President Obama’s promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. …
[T]he president has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the “kill list” being resolved in secret on “Terror Tuesday” teleconferences with administration officials and intelligence officials.
Obama: Why Criminals Shouldn’t Have Guns

So how does the President get away with murder? As far as we know, he has authorized the execution of only two American citizens so far. (Apparently, the former Constitutional law professor believes arrests and trials are messy and time-consuming.)
Under Obama law, you don’t have to be innocent until proven guilty; you just need to be dead before being arrested. Such was the case for Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in 1971 in New Mexico to parents who had recently emigrated from Yemen.
By all accounts, al-Awlaki seems to have grown up like a typical American boy. The last 10 years of his life are much disputed between radicals — both those in the Obama Administration who ordered his “hit” and the Muslims who denounced it.
What everyone agrees upon is that al-Awlaki became more and more radicalized because of what he considered a criminal occupation of Iraq by the United States. He seems to have been an opportunist with a magnetic personality and, for a time, he was a celebrity to his supporters (strangely enough that sounds like the President).
That al-Awlaki was mixed up with some bad characters or was a casual acquaintance with them is beyond dispute. (He was an imam to two of the 9/11 hijackers in San Diego, and he knew Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who executed 13 people during the Fort Hood shootings in November 2009.)
But some in U.S. intelligence believe that al-Awlaki was more of a wannabe jihadist than a real threat. Of course, we will never know because in 2011, while he was in Yemen, two Predator drones fired Hellfire missiles, killing him and three other suspected al-Qaida members.
Just weeks later, his 17-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Denver, was killed by a drone along with nine others. According to Scahill, Obama was “upset” when he learned of the teenager’s death, which a former White House official called “a mistake.”
Oh well, these things happen.
Here is the rub: These things are not supposed to happen if you are an American citizen — not even for the elder al-Awlaki, who may have been inciting terror. When you stop denying one subset of Americans due process, you are on a slippery slope toward eliminating other Americans whom the President and his secret cabal classify as enemies. If you think I am making a huge leap in logic, consider what we learned last week: Obama’s Internal Revenue Service was targeting Tea Party groups before the 2012 election.
We should fear the blatant abuse of power by Obama and the unwillingness of Congress or anyone in the mainstream media to call him out on it.
It is possible that in the not too distant future we may find the President will find libertarians like us to also be the enemy. The Constitution protects us only if the President abides by it or if Congress and the people force him to abide by it. So far, Obama seems intent only on protecting his grand ambitions with nary an objection.
Yours in good times and bad,
–John Myers

by Melanie Phillips

Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.

The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies — and covering up its egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while instead blaming America for its own victimisation.

What is coming out in the Benghazi hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in 2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some — but not to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).

But the administration has form on this — serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as an act of ‘workplace violence’.

Weeks after the Boston marathon terrorist atrocity, there is still no explanation of why the FBI did not act against the Tsarnaev brothers, despite having had one of them on their books as a dangerous Islamic radical after a warning from Russian intelligence; and why, as the House Homeland Security Committee heard yesterday, the FBI didn’t pass on their suspicions about the brothers to the Boston police.

Even now, the US authorities are playing down or even dismissing Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremist Islamic views. Whether or not the brothers had links to foreign extremists is still unclear. But what is bizarre is the authorities’ belief that if they did not have any such links, they cannot have had any religious motive.

Despite evidence such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics’ references to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘contrary to Islam’, the brothers were described by Philip Mudd, the former Deputy Director of National Security at the FBI and the former Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Centre for the CIA, as merely ‘angry kids’. Mudd told Charlie Rose:

‘They may be disenfranchised. They may have had a bad experience at school. They may not have friends, and they say, “Look, we want to do something.” This tactic of terrorism is a tactic of the 21st century. I don’t necessarily think these are real jihadi terrorists. I think they’re angry kids.’

You really do have to pinch yourself. How in heaven’s name can a guy like Mudd, with his background in so-called intelligence, possibly come up with anything quite so stupendously shallow? It is precisely such angry, isolated, disturbed kids who are vulnerable to Islamist preachers who target, groom and manipulate them — whether in person or through the internet — to believe that ‘Islam is the answer’ and that they are its soldiers engaged in holy war against the unbelievers.

The wilful and perverse refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of this holy war — and worse, to lay the blame for such terrorism on the the society that is its victim — is what lies behind the Benghazi scandal.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings this week produced testimony from Gregory Hicks, the former deputy to the murdered Ambassador Stevens, that was simply devastating for the Obama administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton — who infamously erupted, under questioning last January about the nature of the attack,

‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’

Well, Mr Hicks has started to provide the answer. Despite repeated calls for more security to combat the clear threat of jihadi attack on the US mission, Mrs Clinton’s State Department had farmed out its security to none other than a jihadist group. When the fatal attack started, Mr Hicks vainly appealed for fighter jets to buzz the besieged compound. As the Times (£) reported:

‘When a team of four special forces troops were about to leave Tripoli, at Mr Hicks’s request, their leader had to stand them down because he was not cleared by senior military chiefs to travel. Mr Hicks said the furious officer told him: “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has shown more balls than someone in the military.”’

Disingenuously, the Pentagon says in response that no forces could have arrived in time to mount a rescue. But there was more lethal testimony from Mr Hicks.

After the attack, the Obama administration claimed that it had resulted from a protest that had got out of hand over an anti-islam YouTube video. But Mr Hicks testified that it was known from the start that it was a jihadi attack which had nothing to do with that video. The Wall Street Journal reported:

‘Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him, “Greg, we’re under attack.” Mr. Hicks said he knew then that Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House spokesman Jay Carney said it.

‘Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that the YouTube video maker would be “prosecuted and arrested” as if he were responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mr. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton’s then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation.’

Mr Hicks further claims that he was instructed by officials not to talk to congressional investigators, and then demoted after he asked why senior Clinton aides had blamed the attack on a video protest. Again, officials have denied his claim of demotion. But the cat is now out of the bag. The Times (£) reports that an e-mail has surfaced revealing that senior State Department figures — including Ms Clinton — knew within 24 hours that the group responsible for the Benghazi attack was linked to Islamic terrorists.

Meanwhile, from the beginning of this affair there have also been persistent questions about quite what the US mission was actually doing in Benghazi. Now the Washington Times has reported this:

‘A U.S. intelligence official tells Inside the Ring that the hearing and congressional inquiries have failed to delve into what the official said is another major scandal: CIA covert arms shipments to Syrian rebels through Benghazi.

‘Separately, a second intelligence source said CIA operations in Libya were based on a presidential finding signed in March 2011 outlining covert support to the Libyans. This source said there were signs that some of the arms used in the Benghazi attack — assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — ended up in the hands of the terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack as a result of the CIA operation in Libya.

‘The unanswered questions — that appear unasked by most congressional investigators — include whether the CIA facility in Benghazi near the diplomatic compound and the contingent of agency officers working there played a role in the covert transfer through Turkey of captured Libyan weapons or personnel to rebels fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.

‘“There was a ship that transported something to Turkey around the time Ambassador Chris Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat within hours of his murder,” the official said. “Was the president’s overt or covert policy to arm Syrian rebels?”’

Was it indeed. If it was, then Benghazi might turn out to be yet another and particularly terrible example of the damage Obama has wrought upon the security of America and the free world.

This is a President who, by persisting with the charade of negotiation with Iran over its race to manufacture its nuclear bomb, has allowed it to become the dominant power in the region.

That is why Iran’s puppet Assad, who has just accrued hundreds of Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists to help him win his bloody civil war, has been able to slaughter more than 80,000 Syrians and use chemical weapons against them — while Obama himself may have ineptly armed al Qaeda inside Syria. For the Washington Times report goes on:

‘The official said congressional investigators need to ask whether the president indirectly or directly helped bolster al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Jabhat al-Nusrah front rebel group in Syria and whether the CIA ran guns and other weapons captured in Libya to the organization.

‘“Every troubling Middle East-Southwest Asia country — Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and now maybe Syria — where the Obama administration made a significant policy push has gone over to Islamists that are now much more hostile to the United States,” the official said.’

Precisely.

The Benghazi attack was not just appalling in itself; nor was there merely almost certainly a catastrophic failure by the Obama administration to protect its people, and then a mighty cover-up of that failure. Benghazi also serves as a symbol of America’s tragic abandonment, under the Obama administration, of its historic mission to protect life and liberty both in its own homeland and in the free world.

Welcome to Obamastan.

‘Commercial Drivers License’ to be forced on Farmers

Your teenage son operating a tractor helping plow a field, haul a load etc.
Will be effectively stopped!

An entire way of life is rapidly dying right in front of our eyes. The family farm is being systematically wiped out of existence in America, and big agribusiness and the federal government both have blood all over their hands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today. That doesn’t mean that there is less farming going on. U.S. farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore. Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms. Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon.

The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.

Many old timers are trying to hang on for as long as they can. A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies at this point. Today, only about 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of 35.

Most young people these days are not too eager to choose farming as a career. A lot of young adults that grew up on family farms have decided that investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a business that requires you to work 12 hours or more per day most of the year for very meager wages is simply not worth it.

In recent years, many family farmers have been forced to find second jobs in order to support their families. Many farm families are constantly on the verge of financial ruin. It is a really tough life for many of them.

Sadly, less than 25 percent of all farms in America bring in gross revenues in excess of $50,000.
On top of everything else, the federal government and many state governments just keep endlessly piling more rules and regulations on to the backs of farmers.

Big agribusiness has the resources to deal with all of these regulations fairly well, but most family farms do not.

With each passing year, the farming industry becomes even more centralized. If current trends continue, big agribusiness will eventually control nearly all of it.

Letters From Readers

In your editorial “Flight De­lay Rebuke” (April 27), you say the “political capitulation” was likely caused by backlash from “the American public waiting in departure lounges.” It was more likely caused by backlash from frequent-flying senators and congressmen who were personally unwill­ing to suffer flight delays.

If these people from the political class were dependent on Medicare and ObamaCare for their health care, and So­cial Security for their retire­ment, they would just as quickly fix these institutions. Jim Williams Yorba Linda, Calif.

This is yet another first for President Obarrta: the first-ever strike of a CEO and top management against share­holders. We need an annual general meeting for this bunch of “managers” who can’t manage.

It takes a tremendous effort to make this Congresslook good, but Mr. Obama is ^finally succeeding at that, too. Ken Harms Yorba Linda, Calif.

Your editorial on the Obama administration’s ef­forts to maximize the pain of the sequester through air-traffic-controller furloughs, might have reported that the Federal Aviation Administra­tion’s operating budget is fully funded by user fees col­lected directly from the trav­elers who were delayed.

Airline customers are pay­ing directly for the air-traffic control system and have done so since the passage of the Airport and Airway Revenue Act of 1970. The FAA fiscal year 2013 operating budget is $9.72 billion, while $11.53 bil­lion in user fees were col­lected from airline-industry passengers in 2011, the most recent year available (source: FAA fact sheet, February 2012). As of the end of FY 2012 the Airport and Airways Trust Fund which holds these user fees had a surplus of $10.3 billion, enough to fully fund this year’s FAA opera­tions budget from cash on hand.
D. Roger Ferguson Des Moines, Iowa

In your editorial “The FAA Strikes Again, the FAA Brags” (April 25), you quote an FAA employee email: “FAA man­agement has stated in meet­ings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as pos­sible for the public so that they understand how serious it is.” Another FAA email you cite concludes that manage­ment’s “effort… is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure.”

Can you or any of your readers working in the private sector imagine going through cost reductions with the idea to make it hard as possible on your customers?
Jack Hayden Newport Beach, Calif.