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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; law</title>
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		<title>Hatred of Women on the March in Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/hatred-of-women-on-the-march-in-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hatred-of-women-on-the-march-in-iran</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/hatred-of-women-on-the-march-in-iran/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:35:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hijab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vigilante]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247598</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Women live in fear as government empowers vigilante moral police. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_female_ninjas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_female_ninjas-392x350.jpg" alt="iran_female_ninjas" width="320" height="286" /></a>The hatred, misogyny and injustice against Iranian women has continued to ratchet up under the office of the so-called moderate president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.</p>
<p>After a series of acid attacks against young women in the city of Esfahan, the Iranian parliament (Majlis) has passed a new bill, which would <a href="http://archive.radiozamaneh.com/english/content/basij-forces-given-go-ahead-enforce-hijab-compliance"><span style="color: #0433ff;">allow</span></a> Basij, the governmental volunteer militia, to go around in the streets and give verbal warning to those Iranian women who do not comply with the government’s Islamic dress code.</p>
<p>More recently, stabbing women has become another sign of increased violence. A suspect was recently arrested for stabbing six women in city of Fars in Iran, reportedly for wearing an improper hijab. One of the women was stabbed in the stomach. According to <a href="http://sahamnews.org/1393/09/271250/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Saham News</span></a>, the suspect is the son of a Basij Commander from the village of Ghotbabad.</p>
<p>The Basij, which is supervised by the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, intervenes in the day to day activities of ordinary people, spying on individuals, and attempting to impose the ideological and Islamist doctrine of the Iranian government.</p>
<p>When I used to live in Iran, I, like many Iranian people, witnessed how young girls would be dragged into police cars by the moral police for not complying with the government’s religious dress code. Showing some strands of hair or some part of the body in public can lead to arrest, imprisonment, and fines.</p>
<p><b>The Vigilante Law to Impose Hijab and Dress Code</b></p>
<p>Under the presidency of Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian parliament has also <a href="http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2014/10/sotoudeh-on-acid-attacks/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">introduced</span></a> a bill referred to as the “Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice.”  Apparently, all of these human rights abuses and discrimination against women are part of promoting virtue in the perception of the ruling clerics in power.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, what is crucial to point out is that discrimination against Iranian women and the egregious human rights abuses against them are at the core of the cleric political power. In other words, these human rights abuses &#8212; such as restricting women’s freedoms, imposing the hijab on them, encouraging them to stay at home and raise children, forbidding them from participating in sports or even watching some sports events such as volleyball &#8212; are cemented in the state’s institutional structure as well as in the Islamic Republic’s constitution.</p>
<p>Secondly, women are being utilized as a crucial tool and platform to define the country as Islamic. Imposing dress codes and the hijab on women gives the clerical political institution unique character ideologically.  Walking in public and watching millions of women across the country being forced to wear the hijab and cover their hair strengthens the image of the country as being Islamic.  It also makes it stands out immediately in comparison to other Muslim countries, and it significantly ratchets up the ideological foundation and Shiite agenda of the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>Third, forcing women to comply with a dress code is the manifestation of the state’s power. Technically, this is referred to as biopower of the state, which is applied in order to homogenize the population, immediately find those who dissent, make women compliant, subservient, and remind women everyday that the state is in power of even their basic activities such as wearing clothes, listening to music, and watching sports. As Michel Foucault <a href="http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault14.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">states</span></a>, biopower is a political strategy. “By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”</p>
<p>Fourth, marginalization of Iranian women by the state and depriving them of their basic and fundamental rights is a method to treat almost half of the population as second-class citizens.  Subduing women, repressing them, and ensuring that women are controlled by their male guardians and state apparatuses, promotes the patriarchal character of the system.</p>
<p>Fifth, the increasing misogynistic laws and hatred against Iranian women will continue whether the president of the Islamic Republic is a reformist, moderate, hardliner, etc. This is due to the fact, all Iranian presidents believe in the fundamental institution of the Islamic Republic and they totally accept the superiority of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, misogyny and hatred against women has not halted courageous and brave Iranian women from fighting inequality and the repression against them. Several female leaders and formidable women&#8217;s movements in Iran continue to resist the repressive apparatuses even though they face imprisonment, execution, and torture. Their efforts have produced powerful women such as Shirin Ebadi, the Noble Prize Laureate, and Maryam Rajavi, the human rights and political activist, and the president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).</p>
<p>As the repression against women continue in the Islamic Republic, their resistance grows deeper, and their stance firmer. Our responsibility is to chart efficient approaches in order to give a voice to these women and assist them in their struggle for combating extremism carried out under the name of religion, the ruling cleric&#8217;s version and the manipulation of Shia Islam.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Leftist Lynch Mobs from Ferguson to Rolling Stone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/leftist-lynch-mobs-from-ferguson-to-rolling-stone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftist-lynch-mobs-from-ferguson-to-rolling-stone</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:53:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lynch mob]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left has become America’s biggest hate group.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/protest.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247109" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/protest-425x350.png" alt="protest" width="328" height="270" /></a>Did you bury a teenage girl alive after shooting her? Are you on death row after a string of crimes too gruesome to describe? Or are you just a member of Al Qaeda dedicated to destroying America?</p>
<p>If so progressives will fight for you. Just dial 1-800-IAM-VICTIM and the leftist waiting to take your call will insist on your presumption of innocence. Its activists, reporters and lawyers will exploit every pretext to get you off the hook and they will call that justice.</p>
<p>The judicial process, they will say, matters more than public safety, public outrage or the victims.</p>
<p>When the crime wave set loose by their own activism flooded the country they clung to Blackstone’s formulation of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”  As murders, rapes and robberies rose, the value of that formulation went up from ten to ten thousand.</p>
<p>But it had to be the right ten thousand.</p>
<p>Leftist lynch mobs rioting in Ferguson, marching through Manhattan and screaming in Oakland assert that the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to police officers or white Hispanics. Their poses of victimization with their cries of “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe” disguise what they really are.</p>
<p>They were protesting before the case moved forward. They have continued protesting after the verdict was in. That’s not a call for justice. It’s a lynch mob that knows what the verdict should be and seeks to intimidate the authorities into giving it to them by taking the law into their own hands.</p>
<p>Rolling Stone’s rape story was cooked out of the same ingredients; a presumption of guilt and a lynch mob demanding its own brand of justice. The facts never mattered.</p>
<p>The assistant managing editor at the University of Virginia’s student paper admitted that when she argued, &#8220;To let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was never about the facts. It was about the narrative. And the narrative was not only the guilt of a few men, but the way that their guilt stood in for the guilt of all men or all white people. The factual question of whether Officer Darren Wilson or a few UVA students committed a crime was a technicality.</p>
<p>Since the racist and sexist narrative states that all white people or all men are inherently guilty, the factual question of whether a few men actually raped someone doesn’t matter. The factual question of whether a police officer is actually guilty under the law is so obscure that it isn’t worth discussing.</p>
<p>Fact checking just obstructs the narrative that all white people or all men are guilty.</p>
<p>The old lynch mobs presumed that a black man was guilty on account of his race. So do the new lynch mobs.</p>
<p>Wilson’s crime wasn’t shooting Michael Brown. It was shooting him while being white. If he had been black, we wouldn’t be talking about it now. If the black sergeant supervising the takedown of Eric Garner had been the one to restrain him, there would be no protesters shouting “I can’t breathe”.</p>
<p>Subtract the race of the perpetrator and the case wouldn’t exist. That’s what makes the case racist.</p>
<p>A lynch mob brought into existence by the race of the man they want lynched is a racist lynch mob.</p>
<p>At Ferguson and the University of Virginia not only was the crime assumed into existence before the verdict was in, but the action of one police officer in Ferguson was used to indict all police officers and then all white people. The actions of a few men at the University of Virginia were used to indict the entire fraternity and then all fraternities and then all men.</p>
<p>Classic lynch mobs treated the actions of one black rapist as a justification for repressing all black people. The leftist lynch mobs at Ferguson and the University of Virginia used the accusation of an individual crime to call for the repression of entire groups, to attack all white people and all men.</p>
<p>Even if these crimes had turned out to be substantiated, indicting hundreds of millions of people for the actions of a few is the narrative of a hate group. And that’s what progressives have shown that they are; a respectable establishment hate group that demonizes millions of people and leads lynch mobs.</p>
<p>One of the greatest lies of the left is that it believes in civil liberties. The ACLU’s civil libertarian colors were a convenient costume. It never existed to protect the rights of the people against leftist governments. It existed to protect the privileges of leftists.</p>
<p>That’s a direct quote from its co-founder.</p>
<p>Roger Nash Baldwin wrote, “If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties&#8230; When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”</p>
<p>When Baldwin wrote these words, he was speaking of a Soviet Union led by Stalin which was maintaining its dictatorship of the proletariat through a secret police, torture and mass murder.</p>
<p>The co-founder of the ACLU was not only endorsing Stalin’s crimes, but he was also looking forward to an American Stalin rounding up enemies of the state and shooting them with the support of the ACLU.</p>
<p>The presumption of innocence is an idea that leftists only believe in when they aren’t in power.</p>
<p>When the left isn’t in power, then it may protect civil liberties to protect itself. When one of its own radicals is sitting in the White House, then it leads lynch mobs through the streets. The protests aren’t acts of weakness by victims, but signs of strength by oppressors.</p>
<p>The left is rejecting the democratic results of the midterm elections and turning to street violence. Their confidence is derived from the support of the establishment from the White House to the media. Never have lynch mobs received such universal acclaim from all the powers of the United States of America.</p>
<p>The progressive lynch mobs in Ferguson and at the University of Virginia contend that some crimes are too hurtful to a particular population to be protected by the presumption of innocence. Some suspects should be presumed guilty because of the combination of their race and gender with a national crisis.</p>
<p>After fighting for Al Qaeda terrorists at Gitmo, the left hypocritically decided that the presumption of innocence should apply to Muslim terrorists but not to police officers. The civil libertarians of the left went from championing the rights of criminals over those of victims to embracing the conservative position of victim rights… as long these rights are reserved for only the right sorts of victims.</p>
<p>The activists of the left must be forced to admit whether they are for or against the presumption of innocence. If they want to dispense with the presumption of innocence when it comes to enemies of the people like police officers and fraternity members, it will also go away for Islamic terrorists and violent thugs. Not to mention Weather Underground terrorists teaching at prestigious progressive colleges.</p>
<p>We cannot have a presumption of innocence for some people and not others. The left is not entitled to create two justice systems for two types of people. One group will be lynched with a formality of a trial manipulated to produce a verdict that not only damns one defendant, but also his entire race or gender. The other will receive every possible defense no matter how obvious his guilt may be.</p>
<p>America is a nation of laws, not of racist lynch mobs. Its trials are based on facts, not on narratives. The presumption of innocence matters more than the narrative and the social justice hashtag. Without it all we have left are racist lynch mobs with smartphones marching through Manhattan.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <strong>The</strong> <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama vs. Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-vs-us</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Have we reached the "post-Constitution" stage of our history? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245394" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama-438x350.jpg" alt="2014-10-12-obama" width="332" height="265" /></a>Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, &#8220;Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he&#8217;s one or the other!&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;Hold your horses. What are his intentions?&#8221; If the driver&#8217;s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.</p>
<p>This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell&#8217;s column last week, in which he says, &#8220;Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.&#8221; After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn&#8217;t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation&#8217;s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.</p>
<p>Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: &#8220;We are going to fundamentally change America&#8221; and &#8220;We will change America. We will change the world.&#8221; Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.</p>
<p>As Sowell says, &#8220;people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.&#8221;</p>
<p>The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama&#8217;s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.</p>
<p>We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won&#8217;t, in violation of the Constitution&#8217;s Article 2, but is his administration&#8217;s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?</p>
<p>The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.</p>
<p>The courts are bound by the Constitution&#8217;s Article 3. Part of the courts&#8217; responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.</p>
<p>Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we&#8217;ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It&#8217;s the American people who&#8217;ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington&#8217;s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Legal Precedent for Executive Amnesty?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/a-legal-precedent-for-executive-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-legal-precedent-for-executive-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:25:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Georgetown Law confab makes the case for the president.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2329886714_0bfdbfbe73.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244659" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2329886714_0bfdbfbe73-450x337.jpg" alt="2329886714_0bfdbfbe73" width="315" height="236" /></a>C-SPAN recently aired footage of the 11th annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference held every year at the Georgetown University Law Center just off Capitol Hill. The confab’s always a &#8220;who’s who&#8221; of the open-borders, anti-sovereignty movement, from the immigration lawyers lobby to Hispanic chauvinist groups, and past keynote speakers have included such border insecurity-stalwarts as Chuck Schumer and John McCain.</p>
<p>This year’s big panel was on the “legal precedents” supporting President Obama’s forthcoming amnesty, led by Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-open borders, Carnegie-funded outfit. Rosenblum helped craft the 2007 McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill and he’s advised Obama on immigration policy in the past. In other forums, he’s also described America as a “nation of nations,” presumably because he thinks the country should no longer be an actual nation unified by language, culture and history.</p>
<p>Norm Ornstein, resident leftist at the American Enterprise Institute and Rosenblum’s fellow panelist, was more open about his views on transforming America. When speaking about the GOP’s voter base (“old white men”), Ornstein informed the audience that “older white men are a group you cannot trust.” Although this is normal discourse for the contemporary Left, it should still be a red alert for those who resist balkanizing the nation – watch the video from 01:06:30; send your complaints to Georgetown University, AEI, and the SPLC.</p>
<p>Rosenblum’s pro-amnesty presentation was essentially a lecture to attendees (majority law students) on why we should ignore the immigration laws on our books should. He proceeded to “justify” Obama’s forthcoming amnesty by pointing out five previous “executive actions on immigration” going back to the 1960s, which gave some degree of discretion to federal agencies in the management of deportations. To people who actually know immigration law, however, Rosenblum’s presentation was close to fraudulent.</p>
<p>Left out of his powerpoint was that of the five executive actions picked, four were illegitimate power-grabs by federal agencies which were later restricted or completely culled by Congress and the other wasn’t even an executive program at all, but one implemented by Congress. Each are addressed below. Rosenblum’s list actually turns out to be very useful for pro-borders advocates, as it shows a historical pattern of Congress pushing back against programs created out of thin air by the executive.</p>
<p>As Rosenblum first notes, the executive has in the past exercised so-called “parole authority” as a sort of mass refugee program for whole groups of illegals, like after Castro’s takeover of Cuba in 1960 when thousands of Cubans illegally residing in the US were granted permission to stay. But as was recalled in a recent court filing by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the INS’s use of group parole had been in violation of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which grants parole only in isolated, case-by-case situations. In the words of the court of appeals for the second circuit, Congress therefore clamped down on the practice in 1980 with the Refugee Act and again in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) due to a “concern that parole &#8230; was being used by the executive to circumvent congressionally established immigration policy.”</p>
<p>Other programs justifying amnesty described by Rosenblum have followed a similar pattern. The still-current “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) program, started in 1990, is basically a temporary refugee program that can apply to certain national groups when their country of origin becomes ravaged by war or suffers a natural disaster. But TPS was implemented by Congress, not the executive. In fact, Congress passed TPS in order to restrain the executive which had for years practiced a similar program on its own (through a program called “extended voluntary departure,” which Rosenblum also covered). Congress reacted by creating an “exclusive remedy” in the area of deportation-relief based on nationality, which was intended to tether by statute the executive’s potentially boundless application of deportation relief.</p>
<p>Another program Rosenblum uses, “deferred enforced departure,” merely sought to revive what the executive had been doing before TPS. The courts have described this program as essentially the same as TPS, although Obama extended deportation relief under the program to a group of Liberians living illegally in the US in 2011.</p>
<p>Finally, there’s “deferred action,” Rosenblum’s final justification for Obama’s unilateral amnesty. This program was an attempt by the executive to delegate to itself the authority to grant relief based on humanitarian reasons or reasons of convenience. Congress once again took back this authority with the 1996 passage of IIRIRA, and although DHS admitted in 2000 that the statute expunged deferred action, Obama cited it as an authority in 2012 when he unilaterally implemented the &#8220;Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals&#8221; program, which has twice been held unconstitutional in federal court and which was based on a bill (the DREAM Act) that was rejected 24 times in Congress.</p>
<p>Executive discretion for group-deportation relief has always been followed by Congress either rolling it back or regulating it under legislation according to Congress’s terms. That tension is now higher than it’s ever been.</p>
<p>Much of the motivation behind the executive actions Rosenblum lays out was probably explained as a natural power-grab from bureaucrats simply looking to expand their authority. But the motivation for amnesty today appears to be far more sinister. People like Obama, Rosenblum and Ornstein want to balkanize the nation, presumably out of distrust of “old white men.” And so serious is their drive toward this end, they’ll even ignore the letter and spirit of the law to get there.</p>
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		<title>California Law Enshrines Obama’s Place in History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/california-law-enshrines-obamas-place-in-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=california-law-enshrines-obamas-place-in-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:25:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[His election was a watershed moment in more ways than one.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/obambro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240141" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/obambro-341x350.jpg" alt="obambro" width="247" height="254" /></a>In case you were concerned that future generations of schoolchildren won’t be sufficiently indoctrinated into the cult of the man and the legend that is Barack Obama, here is some good news: the <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/california-law-calls-for-schools-to-teach-about-the-significance-of-obamas-election">reported</a> last week that, beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, California textbooks will teach about the significance of President Obama’s election thanks to a new law signed Monday by Governor Jerry Brown.</p>
<p>Under measure <a href="http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/asm/ab_1901-1950/ab_1912_bill_20140825_chaptered.html">AB 1912</a>, the California Instructional Quality Commission will be required, during its next revision of the history-social science curriculum, to consider including instruction on “the election of President Barack Obama and the significance of the United States electing its first African American President.”</p>
<p>The bill’s sponsor is Democrat Assemblyman Chris Holden, who said <a href="http://asmdc.org/members/a41/news-room/press-releases/governor-signs-assemblymember-holden-s-bill-recognizing-president-obama-in-california-textbooks">in a statement</a> that “Obama will take his rightful place in California textbooks” under the legislation, which “will be the first step toward acknowledging President Obama’s legacy for generations to come.” Holden was concerned that Obama’s presidency would otherwise be “relegated to a footnote in textbooks,” despite the fact that his election “represented the moment when all things seemed possible.”</p>
<p>Let’s look at some of the specific wording of the measure [<em>with added commentary in brackets</em>]: “The Legislature finds and declares all of the following”:</p>
<blockquote><p>(a) The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the office of President of the United States was a historic step in the effort towards equality in the United States.<br />
[<em>And since then, his presidency has been more about racial payback than equality; Obama has done more to inflame race relations in this country than O.J. Simpson.</em>]</p>
<p>(d) Barack Obama attended Harvard Law School where he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.<br />
[<em>And the first to do so without publishing anything of his own, a self-proclaimed constitutional law expert who views the Constitution as a “living” document which he has ignored at will.</em>]</p>
<p>(e) After law school, Barack Obama worked to fulfill the spirit of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by encouraging people to register to vote.<br />
[<em>And to vote as often as possible, including dead people and illegal aliens</em>]</p>
<p>(h) In honor of his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.<br />
[<em>Actually, Obama was awarded the meaningless Nobel Peace Prize not in honor of any effort on his part; it was given to him prematurely by the Nobel Committee – chaired by Thorbjørn Johansen, one of Europe’s leading socialists and an outspoken critic of the mythical plague of “Islamophobia” – for no substantive reason apart from the halo of hope and change enveloping The One’s head. In light of the numerous foreign policy debacles that have unfolded under his presidency, the notion that Obama has strengthened “international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” is laughable</em>.]</p></blockquote>
<p>Though I don’t believe a law is necessary to enforce this measure, I’m actually wholeheartedly in favor of the concept. I believe strongly that California high school students <em>should </em>be educated about Obama and his presidency. Future generations of students <em>all across</em> America <em>should</em> be informed of the legacy he has left us. Every schoolkid should be aware of the subversive process whereby we, as a once-great, pre-eminent superpower, were brought low by a post-colonialist, post-Western, post-American President who successfully carried out his mission to effect a fundamental transformation of the United States.</p>
<p>I’m being facetious, of course; educating our children about the ugly truth of Obama’s rise and reign certainly isn’t what Assemblyman Holden had in mind. The purpose of his bill is to insure precisely the opposite: to enshrine the election of Barack Obama as a watershed moment for civil rights in American history. And in truth, it was; all joking about the sax-playing Bill Clinton aside, Obama is technically our first (half-)black President.</p>
<p>But it was a watershed moment in our history for a much more significant reason. For many of his star-struck fans, Obama’s election may have “represented the moment when all things seemed possible,” as Holden put it, but his subsequent two-term presidency represented the years when all things went to hell in a handbasket.</p>
<p>“If you watch the nightly news,” Obama <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/obama-the-medias-making-you-think-the-world-is-falling-apart/">said</a> at one of his many fundraisers recently, “it feels like the world is falling apart.” Yes it does, because it is. But it’s not just the media ginning up that false impression, as Obama was suggesting; it is a hard reality, and he principal reason for the alarming state of the world today is Barack Obama himself, and six years of his destructive presidency that has kneecapped the United States as the world’s leading superpower.</p>
<p>Assemblyman Holden wants future generations to acknowledge Obama’s legacy, but he didn’t specify in AB1912 or in his statement exactly what that legacy will be, so allow me to elucidate. Obama has alienated our allies and empowered our enemies. He facilitated the disastrous “Arab Spring” and left the Middle East inflamed by chaos. He has exacerbated racial tensions to the breaking point. He has overloaded our immigration system, launched the healthcare leviathan, and boosted our national debt into the stratosphere. He has implanted the Muslim Brotherhood in our own government. He has gutted our military. And he still has two years remaining in which to wreak further havoc.</p>
<p>That is Barack Obama’s shameful, colossal failure of a legacy, about which every schoolkid definitely should be made aware.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Leftist Media Malpractice on Guatemala</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/leftist-media-malpractice-on-guatemala/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftist-media-malpractice-on-guatemala</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:30:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Armando de la Torre &#38; Steve Hecht]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[An international news organization turns PR agency for Guatemalan radicals.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/leoncillo-sabino.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234725" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/leoncillo-sabino-450x337.jpg" alt="leoncillo-sabino" width="284" height="213" /></a>Guatemala has lately been a focus of international attention, and the present writers have<span style="color: #fe262c;"> </span>extensive knowledge of the politics of this country.  Even so, we were surprised when we were contacted by a reporter from the McClatchy news organization, which has a wide reach in U.S. news markets.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The reporter, a certain Benjamin Reeves, was based outside the capital, in the tourist enclave of Antigua. He said he was preparing a report on the controversy surrounding Guatemala’s attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, who was facing a reappointment challenge<span style="color: #151606;"> that she eventually lost</span>. As it happens, Paz y Paz has been a huge favorite among activists of the international left—including, most prominently, the Obama State Department. As Mr. Reeves described his dilemma to us, he easily found people to praise Dr. Paz y Paz but could not locate dissenting views, and he feared he was not getting the whole story. He had then learned of us and wanted to know in detail why we felt as we did.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Our surprise stemmed from the fact that, when international media cover Guatemala, they gladly do so in line with what are called progressive viewpoints. This is by now universal; even conservative media like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have largely bought into the leftist playbook on Guatemala. No journalist anywhere is going to be in trouble for sticking to those views. Quite the opposite: danger lies in going against the canonized version of events, as we ourselves have experienced time and again.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Even so, we decided to work with Reeves. The invitation to speak with a journalist whose work reaches many thousands of people in the U.S. is not something that comes to us every day. So we opened our dossiers to Reeves; we saved him time and legwork. He talked to us with respect, and he promised to let us know when his article was published.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves did not honor his word; it was only afterward that we were able to locate the <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/02/25/219352/guatemala-may-be-about-to-oust.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">article</span></a> he had written with our help. When we read his lead paragraph, we understood that this was not going to be a piece of courageous or insightful reporting: “Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz is a small, soft-spoken woman with the quiet mannerisms of an academic, which she is. But she also displays a dogged perseverance that has made her a champion of human rights and the rule of law. And that may put her out of a job soon.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This kind of encomium is distressingly typical of how Paz y Paz has been treated by the international press. She exemplifies those political figures who are far more popular outside their country than they are inside it. Indeed, she is the Eddie Haskell of international politics—easy to admire, as long as you don’t look around the sides.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">During her term as attorney general, Paz y Paz had a perfect understanding of her power base. It was the network of international bureaucrats who admired her statistics, and whose satisfaction became her first priority. She had no qualms about monkeying with lawful procedure for the purpose of keeping her statistics and her political profile up to snuff.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In Reeves’s account, Paz y Paz’s “most virulent critics are far right groups that say they promote the rule of law but oppose the application of human rights norms and the prosecution of crimes . . .” The facts we had shown to Reeves gave a strikingly different picture. During Paz y Paz’s tenure, her most determined critics were not rightists. They were people in her own ministry—prosecutors and other officers of the law whom the attorney general had thwarted in their efforts to apply the law fairly.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The norms of law enforcement did not support the attorney general’s agendas of statistics-padding or preferential treatment for so-called human rights groups <span style="color: #151606;">(in reality, </span>mostly<span style="color: #151606;"> left-wing militias</span>). For this reason, Paz y Paz was regularly in conflict with prosecutors whose priority was the law, rather than political maneuvering. Unlike the international bureaucrats with whom Paz y Paz played politics, those prosecutors saw the dark side of Eddie Haskell’s face; and numerous officials with long, distinguished records were forced out of the justice ministry, their careers and lives crushed by the Paz y Paz juggernaut.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves’s reporting reflected none of this. It also showed a skewed understanding of human-rights issues. In an <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/05/28/228683/as-guatemala-replaces-attorney.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">article</span></a> of May 2014, decrying the appointment of Thelma Aldana as attorney general to replace Paz y Paz, he made this revealing statement: “ . . . Aldana may favor amnesty for crimes committed during the 1960-1996 civil war, and her selection is seen by many as a death knell for the genocide prosecution of Ríos Montt, who ruled 1982-1983 in a particularly brutal phase of the war.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Contrary to what Reeves suggests, amnesty in Guatemala is not a retrograde notion. It is the law of the land, a key provision of the 1996 peace accords. It reflects the fact that crimes in the fighting were committed on all sides. In the interest of national reconciliation, it grants a general pardon. The amnesty does not apply to exceptional crimes like genocide, but no genocide was observed or reported during the conflict; members of all ethnic groups had fought on different sides. That has been the Guatemalan reality.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is most certainly not the international leftist point of view, however. In this view, to which Reeves and his bosses at McClathy subscribe, the only<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/power-struggle-in-guatemala/"><span style="color: #1255cc;"> crimes in Guatemala </span></a>were committed by the army and its bosses. Since former military and political leaders like Ríos Montt could not be convicted of crimes under the amnesty law, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/obama-revealed-in-guatemala-policy/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=c72ce1cc97-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag&amp;utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-c72ce1cc97-156990833"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the charge of genocide was fabricated </span></a>and imported after the fact. Such was Paz y Paz’s view of how to resolve the legal issues left over from the conflict. The ex-<i>guerrilla</i> faction was to be the beneficiary of reconciliation, while former military and political leaders were to be the victims of it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves’s reporting, in sum, reflects a standard of shoddy journalism that admits careless political judgments as only one of its failings. The essence of the matter is this: aside from Paz y Paz herself, whom Reeves obviously interviewed, all the sources for his stories about the attorney general, with a single exception, are foreign to Guatemala.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The sources have these addresses: the University of Washington (Seattle); the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights (Washington, DC); the Open Society Foundations (New York); the Due Process of Law Foundation (Washington, DC); Human Rights Watch (New York); and George Mason University (Fairfax, VA). The author also cites statements by the Embassy of the United States and by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, an arm of the United Nations. While those last two groups have postal addresses in Guatemala, they are not Guatemalan.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Here’s the ironic exception: the only Guatemalan group whose views are reflected in Reeves’s reporting is ours: the Pro-Patria League of Guatemala, a nonprofit association. In his report, Reeves labeled the Pro-Patria League as an organ of the extreme right—precisely the way Paz y Paz herself has described us. But our purpose, over several decades, has been to build support for the rule of law in Guatemala. In politics that is a liberal goal, not a rightist one.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It might well be that Reeves wanted to have us in his report because he needed to include <i>some</i> indigenous viewpoint. In any case, the balance is revealing. In Reeves’s journalism, as in life itself, extravagant praise for Paz y Paz came from foreigners, while skepticism came from the home ground. Paz y Paz’s defeat, which Reeves lamented, was entirely fitting, but to the international left she remains a victim and a heroine whose spirit lives on. Call it the Eddie Haskell principle; it’s alive and well and living in this country.</p>
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		<title>Hezbollah and Israel’s Lawyers-in-Chief</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/hezbollah-and-israels-lawyers-in-chief/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hezbollah-and-israels-lawyers-in-chief</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Jun 2014 04:51:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How Israeli civilian interests are being subordinated to the interests of their enemies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/0205-Lebanon-Bulgaria-Attack-Hezbollah-fighters_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-233988 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/0205-Lebanon-Bulgaria-Attack-Hezbollah-fighters_full_600-450x300.jpg" alt="0205-Lebanon-Bulgaria-Attack-Hezbollah-fighters_full_600" width="270" height="180" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-Hezbollah-and-Israels-lawyers-in-chief-358212">Jerusalem Post</a>.</em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Middle East is rapidly changing. Indeed, it is convulsing. After generations of stasis, where strong, despotic central governments ruled with an iron fist and everyone knew who he was and who he was not, today everything – borders, regimes, identities – is in flux.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Take Iraq. Last week, residents of Mosul lived under Iraqi government control. On Tuesday, they lived under al-Qaida control.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today national governments throughout the Islamic world are incapable of defeating strategically minded and aggressive jihadist militias like al-Qaida and proxy forces for the likes of Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most prominent example of an organization that is strategically flexible and capable of evolving and learning is Hezbollah. Since Iran founded the Shi’ite terrorist organization in 1982, Hezbollah has operated on multiple levels simultaneously.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today it is an international terrorist organization with cells throughout the world. It is Iran’s foreign legion. It is a member of the Lebanese government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It controls south Lebanon. And it fields its own formidable military force that now serves as the core of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s military forces in the Syrian civil war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All of these disparate tasks require an enormous capacity for organizational flexibility and learning.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This brings us to Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Leaving aside Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Hezbollah is the greatest looming threat Israel faces. In his address this week before the Herzliya Conference, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz said that Hezbollah has the sixth most powerful military in the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only does it have a missile arsenal capable of destroying strategic targets in Israel including air force bases and electrical stations, Hezbollah’s experience in Syria has provided its commanders with the capacity to carry out sophisticated ground operations unlike any Israel has seen.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet according to an article published in the latest issue of the IDF’s journal Ma’arachot by IDF intelligence officer Lt.-Col. N., the IDF’s assessment of Hezbollah’s war-fighting strategy remains frozen in time.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to N., Israel’s preparations for a future war with Hezbollah have been focused on improving its responses to Hezbollah’s operations in the Second Lebanon War eight years ago. In that war, Hezbollah was unfettered by military commitments in Syria or elsewhere. It had all the time in the world. And so, its goal was to wait Israel out and maintain the capacity to continue attacking it with missiles and rockets until the last moment of the fighting. That is, Hezbollah’s aim was to win the war by not losing it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And as N. explains, Hezbollah accomplished its mission.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since then, Israel has focused its efforts and resources on preventing Hezbollah from repeating its achievement by developing the means to destroy hundreds of targets at the same time.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem, N. explains, is that Hezbollah has moved on. Hezbollah is not the same organization it was eight years ago. It has new capabilities and new responsibilities. There is no reason for Israel to assume that Hezbollah will operate by the same playbook today that it used in 2006.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Based on speeches by Hezbollah commanders in recent years in which they called for a conquest of the Galilee, and given their expanded responsibilities and capabilities in Lebanon and Syria, N. argues that Hezbollah may prefer a short war involving a combination of missile assaults on military targets and a ground invasion of the Galilee.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">N. pointed to a number of vulnerabilities in Israel’s defenses that owe to some degree to our leadership’s focus on winning the last war rather than adapting to our to enemies’ changing capabilities and developing a full spectrum of options for defeating them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His article has received wide attention. But it is far from clear that his wake-up call will be heeded.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Adapting the IDF’s strategic concept to one capable of confronting Hezbollah today requires the IDF’s senior commanders to be flexible and willing to take risks. Yet Israel’s General Staff is conservative, rigid and, most importantly, risk averse.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">N. wrote that most IDF officers and soldiers were deeply disappointed and distressed about Israel’s performance in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, because they recognized that the IDF’s failure to defeat Hezbollah rendered the jihadist force the victor.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But one faction of Israeli society viewed the war as an out-and-out victory. That faction is the legal fraternity.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Due to the widespread outrage over the war’s progression, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert was compelled to form the Winograd Commission to study the military and political leadership’s stewardship of the war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In testimony before the Winograd Commission, then-attorney-general Menahem Mazuz extolled the war as “the most ‘lawyerly’ in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It wasn’t that IDF commanders put legal considerations ahead of operational and strategic goals. It was worse than that. </span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to Mazuz, the generals and the political leaders limited their goals from the outset to what they hoped would conform with perceived legal restrictions. This restraint, he bragged, was “the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">“I remember periods when there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game, and I can’t identify any confrontation… or… demands to ‘let the IDF win.’” According to then-IDF military advocate-general Brig.-Gen. Avi Mandelblit and Mazuz, legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war but by their interpretation of international law.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Law professor Ruth Gavison, who was a member of the commission, found their testimony deeply disturbing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">“I find this analysis harsh,” she chided. “I think that you have ignored the fact that international law is plagued with problems of selective enforcement and that the application and use of international law in the context of international conflicts is very biased and very political…. Therefore, [reliance on international law] seems to me to be a position that is possible to argue on a rhetorical level, but to internalize it as a real position, that looks to me like a strategic danger.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, Gavison’s warning fell on deaf ears. Not only has the power of radicalized lawyers with a distorted view of the laws of war not been rolled back in the intervening years. It has expanded, to the point where today, staff officers in the military refuse to carry out lawful instructions from the government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For instance, according to Haaretz, on Sunday Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was scheduled to meet with the heads of the military government’s Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria to consider ways of sanctioning the Palestinian Authority, which is now led by a Fatah- Hamas government in material breach of the agreements the PLO signed with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The civil administration was supposed to present recommendations for such sanctions for Netanyahu’s approval. But last Thursday, the civil administration’s staff officers rebelled. At a preparatory meeting, they decided to offer the prime minister no recommendations. According to Haaretz, among other things, they said they couldn’t sanction the Palestinians because it is their duty to help them. They further argued that sanctions “will be difficult to defend from a legal standpoint.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, radicalized staff levels of the IDF openly defy the government when it tries to provide for the common defense by taking action against Israel’s enemies. They then justify their actions by hiding behind amorphous and contrived legal restrictions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the long-term consequences of the Mavi Marmara incident.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In May 2010, IDF naval commandos boarded the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara to prevent it from unlawfully breaching Israel’s maritime blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Terrorists aboard the ship attacked the soldiers with knives, clubs and other weapons with the intent of killing them. The soldiers defended themselves and killed nine terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The blame-Israel-first crowd, otherwise known as the international community, accused Israel of committing war crimes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather than simply reject the slanderous accusation, led by the legal fraternity, Israel played along.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As a consequence, Israel formed the Turkel Commission charged with determining whether Israel’s system of investigating charges of war crimes meets the requirement of international law.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the event, in February the commission submitted a 1,000-page report to Netanyahu. It concluded that Israel’s system does abide by the requirements of international law.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, despite this fact, it recommended removing the authority to investigate war crimes allegations from the IDF and transferring it to the attorney- general and the military advocate-general who would no longer be subordinate to the IDF chief of General Staff.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, the commission recommended that Israel’s political leadership and General Staff be held criminally culpable “for violations committed by their subordinates, if they do not take all reasonable measures to prevent these violations or do not bring those responsible to justice when they find out about violations after the fact.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The strategic implications of the Turkel Commission’s recommendations are earth shattering.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They mean that from now on, when defending Israel from its enemies, both government ministers and generals will be at the mercy of a self-appointed, radical, unaccountable legal fraternity whose interpretation of the laws of war has but a glancing relationship with the laws of war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Mazuz explained its interpretation back in 2007, “The laws of war, or international humanitarian law doesn’t concern itself with relations between two states, but with the relationship between civilians and states. That is, it places the two warring states on one side of the divide and the citizens of the two states on the other side, and the goal of international law is to protect the citizens of the two states and to say: You’re big kids. You want to fight, go fight, you have rules… and the rules aim to minimize as much as possible the consequences of the war.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, just as the civil administration officers argued, following international law means caring more about enemy populations than you care about your own. Civilian and military leaders who seek to secure Israel are now being subordinated to lawyers whose primary concern is the enemy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This is a recipe for disaster.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At a time when the threats against us quickly change, grow and change again, we need political and military leaders who are courageous, creative and willing to take calculated risks. But due to our leaders’ unwillingness to challenge our imperial legal guild, we find ourselves at this dangerous juncture with no means of adjusting to strategic shifts.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Rise of American Totalitarianism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-rise-of-american-totalitarianism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-rise-of-american-totalitarianism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-rise-of-american-totalitarianism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:50:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brendan Eich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mozilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oppression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223044</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A country on the precipice. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-big-brother.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223047" alt="Obama-big-brother" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-big-brother.jpg" width="288" height="197" /></a>Last Thursday, Mozilla, the company that&#8217;s home to the web browser Firefox, forced the resignation of CEO Brendan Eich. What, precisely, had Eich done wrong? Back in 2008, Eich had donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 effort backing traditional marriage in California. Dating website OKCupid posted a ban on Firefox traffic, issuing a message to Firefox users instead: &#8220;Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.&#8221; That ban reportedly prompted the action at Mozilla.</p>
<p>Of course, it was the people pushing for Eich&#8217;s ouster who were enforcing &#8220;misery, shame, and frustration.&#8221; Eich had never brought his politics into the workplace. Mozilla had no history of treating homosexuals differently, and no single instance of Eich doing so could be documented. Nonetheless, he had violated the dictates of the Thought Police. And thus he was ousted.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a disturbing story, to be sure. But it&#8217;s also just the tip of the iceberg: Unfortunately, the same folks administering the private Thought Police would love to extend their control into the realm of government. These are not libertarians arguing for the right to hire and fire as you see fit in the private market. These are power brokers seeking to use whatever means necessary to quash opposition.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why gay couples have sued photographers, bakeries and florist shops, attempting to shut them down if they refuse to cater to same-sex weddings. That&#8217;s why the Obama administration has attempted to fine businesses that do not wish to pay for health coverage they deem sinful. The underlying idea: If the left dislikes what you do, the left can compel you not to do it. As Kevin Williamson of National Review writes, American society is quickly morphing into a system governed by T.H. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">White&#8217;s totalitarian principle: &#8220;Everything not forbidden is compulsory.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>Freedom is secondary to the yays and nays of the governing few in this vision. Freedom is merely that which the government allows — and the government should only allow you to do the bidding of the left. If you, recognizing that sometimes people will take action with which you disagree, believe that government should stay out of people&#8217;s business, you must therefore be an advocate for discrimination and brutality. To allow Eich to work is to discriminate against gays. To allow religious businesses to reject contraceptive mandates is to push women into back alley abortions. Forget the notion of disagreeing with your opinion, but defending your right to say it — in the view of the leftist totalitarians, such a notion is inherently unworkable.</p>
<p>When fascism comes, it will come not with jackboots but with promises of a better world. The jackboots come later, when we&#8217;ve all been shamed into silence — when we&#8217;ve been taught that to allow that with which we disagree is to agree with it, and when we&#8217;ve accepted that the best method of preventing such disagreement is government power. We&#8217;re on the verge. All it will take is the silence of good people — people on all sides of the political aisle — who fall prey to the ultimate temptation in a republic: the temptation to force their values on others utilizing the machinery of government. We&#8217;re already more than halfway there.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Lessons from Leaving Islamic Tyranny</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/lessons-from-leaving-islamic-tyranny/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lessons-from-leaving-islamic-tyranny</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:02:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic  Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222083</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What coming to America taught me about Islam's influence on national identity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tragiran-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222084" alt="tragiran (1)" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tragiran-1.jpg" width="310" height="240" /></a></span>A few months ago, I took the oath and became a US citizen. Originally from the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria, I grew up, lived, and worked for most of my life in these countries. I grew up under the theocratic regime of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the autocratic and repressive regime of Assad.</p>
<p>Although being an Iranian-Syrian is not a common combination in the region—since Arabs and Persians (or Sunni and Shia) have traditional rivalries and sometimes hold racist view against each other— I had the opportunity to grow up in both versions of Islamic religious societies: the Shia and the Sunni, as well as Persian and Arab (though some Syrians might call themselves Phoenicians).</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This also allowed me to understand the on-the-ground socio-political and socio-religious platforms of these predominantly Islamic societies.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A few years ago, I came to the United States on a scholarship to teach at a university and later was planning to take my experience and acquired knowledge back to my countries. Nevertheless, the war erupted in Syria and my path changed. However, the issue that I would like to shed light on is that since I have become a citizen, I have witnessed an issue that has increasingly perplexed me. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I have observed that many Muslims, who were born or grew up in the United States while enjoying freedom of speech, expression, assembly and whom this country has given shelter and a home, frequently judge the United States based on the Quran, Allah, Muhammad, and their Islamic ideals, not based on the Constitution or democratic principles and human rights. There are several researchers investigating this phenomenon. I have noticed that many Muslims criticize this country not based on real developmental or economic policies, but based on Islamic principles.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">They criticize the United States for not being Islamic enough, for what people wear, for how people date, for how people listen to music, for how people drink, for how people dance, etc.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I must confess that this attitude has been extremely puzzling and frustrating to me. In the beginning, I thought that one approach to these kinds of people and proponents of Sharia and Islamic laws in the United States was to address the issue intellectually. I thought that the productive approach was to draw on the modern economic, political, social values, and human rights that are in contradiction with what Muhammad said, what the Quran said more than 1400 years ago and what Imams and Sheikhs say now. However, since their evidence is not based on logic or science, and is rather based on what Allah, Muhammad, and the Quran say, it is extremely difficult to have any intellectual debate with proponents of Islamic principles in the United States or other Western countries.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Since their evidence and logic is been based on the Quran— written more than 1400 years ago— Allah’s words, Muhammad’s sayings (since he is regarded as the ultimate model and paragon for how one should live), there is little one can say in response. I usually respond simply by asking why they do not live in an Islamic state or their country of origin. Why do they not return to their Islamic country? There are plenty of Islamic and predominantly Muslim societies around the world to choose from.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It seems that the answer is that if you do not like (or even hate) how the United States is structured and how the society functions, then you can return to your Islamic country of origin. No one is forcing you to stay here. If one is so angry and frustrated with the un-Islamic character of the United States, with how Americans live, drink, dance, listen to music, have parties, work and how the social values contradict Islamic principles, then they can return to their Islamic country, where Islamic social values are respected, ingrained and indoctrinated into every cell of the society and political structure.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There are many other Islamic countries and dominantly Muslim societies where the courts operate based on Sharia and Islamic laws, where the majority of the people are Muslims, where every aspect of Islam is practiced based on the Quran, Muhammad’s sayings, and Allah’s ideal society, where one is punished for violating Islamic laws.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I am not arguing against any kind of constructive criticism in societies. In fact, I do believe that an informed citizen should be consciously and intellectually aware of the political development in the country, in this case the United States, and should be capable of constructively criticizing the path the government is taking in case he or she believes that the policies are detrimental to the good of the society, and to offer solutions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Indeed, it should not only be encouraged to participate in socio-political and socio-economic debate, but I believe that it is also the obligation and responsibility of each person to take part in the political and social process to hold their representatives accountable. I find it totally unconstructive and offensive to judge and criticize the society on the grounds of not complying with Islamic principles, what the Quran says, what Muhammad said more than 1400 years ago, and what Allah believes should be a perfect society.</span></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Indefinitely Extended Deadline</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamacares-indefinitely-extended-deadline/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-indefinitely-extended-deadline</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[delay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mandate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[March 31]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221988</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Obama administration is bypassing the the insurance sign-up cut-off date. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221989" alt="article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449-450x309.jpg" width="270" height="185" /></a>The Obama administration&#8217;s contempt for the rule of law has hit a new low. On Tuesday night, federal officials revealed that Americans who claim they have been unable to enroll in healthcare plans on the federal exchange will be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-will-allow-more-time-to-enroll-in-health-care-on-federal-marketplace/2014/03/25/d0458338-b449-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_print.html">granted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an extension past the March 31 deadline. “We are . . . making sure that we will be ready to help consumers who may be in line by the deadline to complete enrollment — either online or over the phone,” said Julie Bataille, director of the office of communications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The move reeks of desperation. Once again, as the administration did for calculating premium subsidies based on one&#8217;s income, no actual verification is necessary. People need only check a blue box on the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://healthcare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> website indicating that they tried to enroll before the deadline, and they will have until mid-April &#8212; or perhaps longer &#8212; to ask for an extension based on the &#8220;honor system.&#8221; In other words, the government will make no effort whatsoever to determine if people are telling the truth. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is immune to the absurdity. &#8220;This is not an extension of open enrollment,&#8221; she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/26/Sebelius-Obamacare-Extension-Is-Not-An-Extension">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Michigan Fox 2 yesterday. &#8220;It is just saying, like you do on election day, if you&#8217;re in line to vote, we want to make sure you vote.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of all the illegal and unconstitutional extensions implemented by the Obama administration, this one is the most egregious. Previously, when the president and his minions rewrote the bill passed by Congress, signed by the president and reverently described by Democrats and their media allies as the &#8220;law of the land,&#8221; they cited the &#8220;statutory authority&#8221; to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This time they can&#8217;t even hide behind that dubious facade. In a conference call with reporters on March 11, DHS officials </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hhs-we-lack-statutory-authority-extend-obamacares-open-enrollment-period_784621.html">insisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that March 31 was the hard deadline for ObamaCare enrollment. HHS official Julie Bataille took it one step further. &#8220;We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period,&#8221; she promised. &#8220;In fact, we don&#8217;t actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.&#8221; Michael Hash, who directs the Office of Health Reform at HHS, affirmed that statement, noting that the healthcare bill states that the HHS Secretary must set the deadline for open enrollment dates by June 2012. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did just that. &#8220;Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently,&#8221; Hash declared.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sebelius herself also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2589559/Busted-After-promising-no-delay-final-Obamacare-sign-deadline-Obama-administration-unveils-new-honor-extension-mid-April.html">confirmed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that reality a day later. During a March 12 congressional hearing she told Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) that there would be no extensions. &#8220;Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31?&#8221; Brady asked. &#8220;No, sir,&#8221; Sebelius replied.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite such transparent lying, the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> was more than up to the task of attempting to give the administration wiggle room. &#8220;The rules, which will apply to the federal exchanges operating in three dozen states, will essentially create a large loophole even as White House officials have repeatedly said that the March 31 deadline was firm,&#8221; the paper states. &#8220;The extra time will not technically alter the deadline but will create a broad new category of people eligible for what’s known as a special enrollment period.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So why would the administration need a &#8220;special enrollment period&#8221;? The implications are obvious: enrollment is nowhere near where the administration needs it to be. &#8220;I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014,&#8221; Sebelius </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/03/the-white-houses-claim-that-7-million-enrolled-in-obamacare-was-never-our-target-number/">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> during an NBC News interview on September 30, 2013. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The administration soon backed off that number, and Vice President Joe Biden ratcheted it down even further last month. &#8220;We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that&#8217;s a hell of a start,&#8221; he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/20/us-usa-healthcare-biden-idUSBREA1J02N20140220">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even Joe&#8217;s &#8220;hell of a start&#8221; is problematic. As the administration itself was forced to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/19/white-house-admits-a-fifth-of-obamacare-enrollees-wont-buy-insurance/">admit</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last week, at least 20 percent of so-called ObamaCare &#8220;enrollees&#8221; are people who haven&#8217;t paid their insurance premiums. &#8220;We can point you to major insurers who have placed that figure at 80 percent, give-or-take, depending on the insurer, but we don&#8217;t have specific data that is going to be in a reliable enough form to provide,&#8221; </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/03/18/carney_we_dont_have_specific_data_for_people_who_have_paid_obamacare_premiums.html">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. The White House has repeated that mantra, claiming that they only have data about those selecting plans, because those enrolled are expected to pay insurance companies directly.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Two Republicans aren&#8217;t buying it. On Tuesday, David Camp (R-MI) and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201715-gop-again-accuses-sebelius-of-misleading">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> they have uncovered “new evidence” that “strongly suggests that the administration knows who has enrolled and paid their first month’s premium.” They cited CMS regulations that </span>require<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> insurance companies to inform the agency of  “the full enrollment and payment profile” for consumers on a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">month-to-month basis.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> A </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/camp_brady_letter_to_sec_sebelius_on_exchanges_3_25_14.pdf">letter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sent by Camp and Brady to Sebelius states, &#8220;On January 16, 2014, CMS posted a series of FAQs on the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.regtap.info/">www.regtap.info</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> portal. The portal is used by insurers to receive basic information about how to receive payments, what information is required of them and in what format, etc.&#8221; Based on the requirements contained in those guidelines, Camp and Brady contend &#8220;there is specific information about who has paid their premium that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is collecting and using to make payments to insurers,&#8221; and they &#8220;want this information in its most updated form immediately.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters indicated that HHS wouldn&#8217;t comply. “As we have said previously, information about who has paid his or her premium is collected by individual issuers and is not reported to CMS directly by enrollees,” she contended. “Until the automated payment and reporting system is completed and fully tested, and CMS is able to access individual enrollment and payment information from individual 834 forms, the payment information that CMS receives from insurers is neither final nor complete. When we have accurate and reliable data regarding premium payments, we will make that information available.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That in and of itself is a remarkable statement with respect to the 834 forms. Those are the forms that are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/administration-reports-25percent-error-rate-on-obamacare-forms-from-october/2013/12/06/695d508e-5ea8-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html">supposed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to be sent early </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">each night</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the federal exchange system to participating insurers, telling them who has signed up. In turn, insurers send each customer a bill, and those consumers have to pay their first month&#8217;s premium before coverage begins. The error rate, which had been as high as 25 percent last November, has ostensibly been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115837/obamacare-834-error-rate-falls-25-percent-10-percent">reduced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to 10 percent. Yet now the administration is admitting that the system has neither been completed nor tested. If that&#8217;s the case, how is it that the administration can give out </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">any</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reliable numbers, even those regarding signups?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the administration has done just that, contending that 5.2 million Americans have signed up for the plan as of the middle of March. Thus it appears Sebelius and/or Peters is lying. Camp and Brady believe it is Sebelius, who they accuse of giving &#8220;evasive and perhaps misleading&#8221; testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on March 14.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what? Sebelius is hardly the first Obama administration official to do that, and there have been no consequences whatsoever for any of them. Thus, when Peters </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201791-boehner-what-the-hell-is-this-a-joke">insists</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the elimination of the deadline is due to a &#8220;surge in demand,&#8221; all we get from Republicans such as John Boehner (R-OH) are complaints, absent any threat of concrete action. “The dates are the dates, and the law is the law,” Boehner groused. “The president doesn’t have the authority to change the law whenever he wants, which he continues to do.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With impunity. A CMS source has told the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Daily Mail</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> there is no set date for the extended deadline, and the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> insists that even if people can no longer get extensions through the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://healthcare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> website, &#8220;consumers will be able to request one through one of the federally sponsored call centers nationwide.&#8221; Comically, the paper further notes that the grounds for granting such an extension &#8220;will become narrower, matching rules for special enrollment periods that have existed for the past few months.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sure they will &#8212; unless there’s another “fix” implemented, any time the administration decides to do it. Obama and company have made it clear there are </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">no</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> aspects of this law that are above manipulation.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the ultimate testimony to Democratic arrogance, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/harry-reid-people-arent-educated-on-how-to-use-the-internet/">attempted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to shift the blame for the law&#8217;s disastrous rollout onto the American public, &#8220;because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And so it goes for a Democratic Party and an Obama administration for whom the rule of law has become little more than what they say it is, until it must be changed for nothing more than political expediency. In reality there is only one &#8220;law&#8221; to which the American left religiously adheres: by any means necessary. Whether our democratic republic can survive three more years of such overt contempt remains to be seen. We are truly in uncharted waters.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Governed by Rules, Not Men</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/governed-by-rules-not-men/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=governed-by-rules-not-men</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:01:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220997</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The only way to combat tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220998" alt="law_hammar_xlarge" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg" width="315" height="222" /></a>What kind of rules should govern our lives? I&#8217;d argue that the best rules are those that we&#8217;d be satisfied with if our very worst enemy were in charge of decision-making. The foundation for such rules was laid out by my mother. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>My mother worked as a domestic servant. That meant that my younger sister and I often lunched at home by ourselves during our preteen years. Being bigger and stronger than my sister, I seldom divided the food evenly, especially the desserts. After a tiring day at work, Mom would be greeted by sob stories from my sister about my lunchtime injustices. Mom finally became fed up with the sibling hassles. She didn&#8217;t admonish me to be more caring, fair, sensitive and considerate. She just made a rule: Whoever cuts the cake (pie, bread, meat, etc.) allows the other the first selection. With that new rule in place, you can bet that when either my sister or I divided food, it was divided equally.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;That&#8217;s a nice story, Williams, but what&#8217;s the point?&#8221; The point is that the principle underlying Mom&#8217;s rule is precisely the kind that is necessary for rules to promote fairness. In general, the rules that we should want are those that promote fairness, whether it&#8217;s our best friend or it&#8217;s our worst enemy who&#8217;s the decision-maker. In the case of Mom&#8217;s rule, it didn&#8217;t make any difference whether I hated my sister&#8217;s guts that day or she hated mine or whether my sister was doing the cutting or I was; there was a just division of the food.</p>
<p>Think for a moment about rules in sports, say basketball. One team loses, and the other wins, but they and their fans leave the stadium peacefully and most often as friends. Why? The game&#8217;s outcome is seen as fair because there are fixed, known, neutral rules evenly applied by the referees.</p>
<p>The referees&#8217; job is to apply the rules — not determine the game&#8217;s outcome. Imagine the chaos and animosity among players and fans if one team paid referees to help it win or the referees were trying to promote some kind of equality among teams.</p>
<p>Billions of dollars and billions of hours are spent campaigning for this or that candidate in our national elections. You can bet that people are not making those expenditures so that politicians will uphold and defend the Constitution; they&#8217;re looking for favors. The Constitution&#8217;s framers gave us reasonably fair and neutral rules of the game. If our government acted, as the framers intended, as a referee or night watchman, how much difference would it make to any of us who occupies the White House or Congress? It would make little difference, if any. It would be just like our basketball game example. Any government official who knew and enforced the rules would do. But increasingly, who&#8217;s in office is making a difference, because government has abandoned its referee and night watchman function and gotten into the business of determining winners and losers. Unfortunately, for our nation, that&#8217;s what most Americans want.</p>
<p>Thomas Paine said, &#8220;Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.&#8221; Our Bill of Rights is an explicit recognition of the Founding Fathers&#8217; distrust of Congress. Just look at its language, with phrases such as &#8220;Congress shall not abridge,&#8221; &#8220;shall not infringe,&#8221; &#8220;shall not deny,&#8221; &#8220;disparage&#8221; and &#8220;violate.&#8221; If the framers did not believe that Congress would abuse our God-given, or natural, rights, they would not have used such language. If, after we die, we see anything like the Bill of Rights at our next destination, we&#8217;ll know that we&#8217;re in hell. To demand such protections in heaven would be the same as saying we can&#8217;t trust God.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Gay-Rights Cave-In at Sochi?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/a-gay-rights-cave-in-at-sochi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-gay-rights-cave-in-at-sochi</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:58:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218686</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happened to all that outrage?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/images2.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-218687" alt="images" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/images2.jpg" width="256" height="197" /></a>Over the last few months, while well-intentioned people around the Western world were protesting antigay actions by Russia, conditions for gay people in much of Africa were going from terrible to even worse. Last month, the president of Nigeria signed a law prescribing 14 years behind bars for individuals in same-sex marriages and up to ten years for members of gay organizations, and since then dozens of people have been arrested and gay-rights activists have gone into hiding. In the northern (which is to say Muslim) city of Bauchi, a gay man was whipped 20 times in a courtroom – a disappointment to the crowd outside, which wanted him to be stoned to death in accordance with sharia law. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, gays in Uganda are waiting to see if their president signs a bill that would imprison gays for life and punish gay-rights supporters with up to seven years in jail. Ivory Coast, which by African standards is relatively moderate on these issues, was nonetheless the site of antigay rallies in late January that culminated in a violent mob raid on a gay-rights group&#8217;s headquarters. On January 19, in an apparent effort to stem what seems to be a growing tide of antigay hysteria across the continent, famous Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina came out of the closet – making him, according to reports, the first high-profile black African ever to publicly identify as gay. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Scary stuff. Yet how many gay Americans, activist or otherwise, have gotten worked up about the human-rights situation for gay people in most of Africa? How many even know about it? Damn few. Instead, in recent months, the focus has been on Russia, with more than a few prominent Western gays worrying aloud that the Sochi Olympics would end up being the same kind of PR coup for the gay-hating Putin – in whose country it&#8217;s now effectively illegal for gay-rights activists to organize or speak out publicly – that the 1936 Berlin Olympics were for the the Jew-hating Hitler. Putin, wrote actor Stephen Fry last August in an ardent open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, “is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews.” Consequently, “an absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential&#8230;.At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.” Countless other Western luminaries concurred.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now, I&#8217;m not suggesting that Putin&#8217;s antigay campaign, which has led to arrests, beatings, and murders, isn&#8217;t utterly despicable and deserving of the severest censure – it most surely is. But witnessing the massive, months-long display of Western fury over the treatment of gays in Russia, one couldn&#8217;t help noticing the contrast between this explosion of righteous anger and the almost total silence in the West about gays in Uganda, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone (where they&#8217;re subject to life imprisonment) and Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria (where they face the death penalty).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fry, to his credit, is actually one of the few prominent gays in the West who has paid attention to gays in Africa: last October, on a BBC program about the persecution of gays worldwide, Fry talked to a Ugandan girl who&#8217;d been raped at age 14 to “cure” her of lesbianism. But Fry is the exception that proves the rule. Why do almost all other Western gay-rights activists all but ignore the savagely antigay policies of Africa&#8217;s despotic regimes? At least part of the explanation seems clear. The despots are black – and, in many cases, Muslim as well – and the activists in question are almost invariably good little multiculturalists who know the rules: first, the white-skinned man must never, ever presume to give moral lectures to the dark-skinned man; second, Islam is above criticism.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And so we had the anti-Putin protests. Which were admissible under the guidelines of political correctness, because Russia is part of the West – sort of, anyway. And which, as I say, were a thoroughly legitimate response to a very real human-rights outrage. But now that the Winter Olympics are underway, there&#8217;s another question to be asked: namely, where have all those protesters gone? Where are the rallies? Where are the rainbow banners? Where are the defiant declarations from the winners&#8217; podium, now that it really matters?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Leading up to the Olympics in Sochi,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/theedge/2014/02/10/274723954/so-far-at-the-games-a-low-key-response-to-russias-anti-gay-law">recalled</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> NPR on Monday, “a dominant storyline was Russia&#8217;s anti-gay propaganda law and what it might mean for athletes and other visitors. Would athletes protest in any way? Would Russian LGBT activists try to demonstrate against the propaganda law at the Olympics? The answers (so far, at least) are: barely, and not really.” A gay Olympics veteran told NPR that for a competitor to think about making any kind of protest at the end of his or her event “distracts you from your focus, and they don&#8217;t need to do that.” So much for what, a few short weeks ago, was being presented as the great human-rights crusade of our time.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The story was the same in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sydney Morning Herald. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Gay athletes in Sochi have so far been content to let their results do the talking – which suits the Australian Olympic Committee fine,” it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.smh.com.au/sport/winter-olympics/competition-not-protests-over-gay-law-top-of-the-agenda-in-sochi-20140210-32czl.html">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Monday. “By all means speak out,” said an AOC official, “but we don&#8217;t want any protests on the medal podium or on the field of play because that will disrupt the Games.” Gay athletes, he insisted, should “put gay rights at the back of their mind” and not let “gay rights get in the way of the job they have to do.” Gay Olympians agreed. “I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a good idea to make protests here,” said an Austrian ski-jumper. “I know Russia will go and make the right steps in the future and we should give them time.” Didn&#8217;t Martin Luther King, Jr., say something like that?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">SMH </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">seemed to think that the Austrian ski-jumper had the right attitude, so, interestingly enough, did the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">which</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/feb/09/sochi-2014-patriotism-protest-russians-olympics">observed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Sunday that the start of the games had marked a turn in “the tide of public opinion” (not just on the gay-rights front but on the lousy-security front, the disastrous-hotel-room front, and so on), resulting in “something of a backlash against the backlash.” The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, apparently, was more than okay with that. While noting</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that gay-rights activists had been detained by cops in Red Square during the opening ceremonies, the British left&#8217;s flagship daily seemed to make a point of mentioning this incident in passing and of treating it dismissively – as if it were a minor bit of unpleasantness that certainly shouldn&#8217;t be allowed to spoil anybody&#8217;s fun. The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s report concluded with this bemusing statement: “These Olympics may not be rainbow-coloured, but they are not all black and white either.” Huh? Meaning what? That the fearless, speaking-truth-to-power </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">has suddenly decided it&#8217;s not a good idea, after all, to let an overweening concern about human rights blunt one&#8217;s ability to get excited about curling and luge?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Exactly what&#8217;s going on here? In the last few days, reading these and other peculiarly docile pieces in various left-leaning Western media – media which, until recently, could be fairly described as having been on the warpath over Putin&#8217;s assault on gays – one wondered whether some of that good old-fashioned Soviet-era Western-progressive “understanding” of Kremlin brutality had, all these years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, finally kicked back into gear. No, Russia is no longer officially Communist – but under Putin it&#8217;s close enough, perhaps, to set off the old acceptance, among leftist journalists and gay-left activists alike, of the need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. As for the American gay activists, at least one explanation for their apparent withdrawal from the Russia issue suggested itself: they needed to get back to the important work of harassing bakers who won&#8217;t make gay wedding cakes and photographers who won&#8217;t take pictures of gay weddings. With such solemn responsibilities, who has the time to stay focused on Putin&#8217;s crackdown on freedom – let alone care about gays in Africa who are being terrorized by cops and pummeled to pieces by sharia-crazed mobs?</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Really Understanding Obamacare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/discover-the-networks/really-understanding-obamacare-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=really-understanding-obamacare-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:29:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Discover The Networks]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217072</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A concise overview of every vital fact you need to know about this legislative monstrosity.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obamacare_leaflet_reuters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217073" alt="obamacare_leaflet_reuters" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obamacare_leaflet_reuters-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>You undoubtedly have heard countless commentators—on both sides of the Obamacare debate—speak about how the new healthcare law will affect you. But if you&#8217;re like most people, there are many aspects of this immensely long and complex piece of legislation that you don&#8217;t know anything about. Moreover, you may wish that you felt better-equipped to answer the claims of devoted leftists who confidently assert that Obamacare is a benefit for the American people.</span></p>
<p>To address these concerns, Discover The Networks today announces the publication of one of the most important special features it has ever produced: <strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1957"><i>Obamacare: Before and After</i></a></strong>. This new addition to our website: (a) examines the state of healthcare in America prior to Obamacare&#8217;s passage; (b) lays out free-market solutions that could have effectively addressed the problems that Obamacare was ostensibly created to solve; (c) explains all the major provisions contained in the Obamacare legislation itself; and (d) examines the politics of Obamacare—laying bare the unspoken yet transformative political agendas that sit at the very heart of this law.</p>
<p>Everything in <strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1957"><i>Obamacare: Before and After</i></a></strong> is arranged in a reader-friendly, bullet-point format designed to make the complex simple, and to let you easily zero in on the topics that most concern or interest you. You will not get lost in dense and interminable text. Rather, you&#8217;ll get plain talk and clear, succinct information. Just a few of the vital facts that you will learn in this feature include the following:</p>
<p>* Politicians have commonly sought to win public favor by passing laws requiring insurance companies to include an ever-expanding range of mandatory benefits in all their healthcare plans, regardless of whether the insured even wanted them. As of 2009, there were 2,133 of these mandates which were, in some places, increasing the price of basic insurance by as much as 50%. Mandates like these are antithetical to a free marketplace.</p>
<p>* Consumers have long been barred from purchasing healthcare policies from insurers located in other states. This has dramatically reduced competition among insurers, and has kept the cost of premiums much higher than they would have been in a truly free marketplace.</p>
<p>* Government healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid egregiously shortchange doctors and hospitals when reimbursing them. Thus, healthcare professionals who accept Medicare and Medicaid patients are forced to charge their privately insured patients higher rates than would otherwise be necessary. This causes families with private insurance to pay an extra $1,500 to $1,800 for their premiums each year.</p>
<p>* From the moment President Obama and the Democrats began pushing for healthcare reform, they repeatedly emphasized the notion that 46 million Americans lacked insurance. This bogus figure included (with some overlap) 10 million who earned over $75,000 annually; another 8 million who earned between $50,000 and $75,000; 14 million low-income Americans who were fully eligible for government insurance programs but simply had never taken the time to enroll; 6 million who were eligible for employer-sponsored insurance but chose not to take advantage of it; more than 10 million (including many illegal immigrants) who were not U.S. citizens; and millions of young “invincibles” who chose not to purchase insurance because low-cost, bare-bones plans without a litany of mandates were not available in their states.</p>
<p>* Obamacare&#8217;s employer mandate stipulates that every business with 50 or more <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324616604578304072420873666.html">full-time workers</a> must provide insurance coverage for all of them. Thus, business owners now have an incentive to limit their full-time work forces to 49 people or fewer, and to rely more on independent contractors.</p>
<p>* The Obamacare employer mandate adds, on average, $1.79 per hour to the cost of keeping a single person on the payroll full-time, and $5.51 per hour to the cost of employing a full-time worker with dependents.</p>
<p>* President Obama consistently promised that his health reform plan would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family.” But the <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/enrollment-in-obamacare-exchanges-how-will-your-health-insurance-fare">premiums</a> for insurance plans available on the Obamacare exchanges are higher than pre-Obamacare rates in at least 45 of the 50 U.S. states. For middle-aged policy holders in 32 states, the premium increases range from 26% to more than 100%. In 27 states, the Obamacare premiums for young adults are between 51% and 252.5% higher than pre-Obamacare levels.</p>
<p>* When Obamacare was being debated, the President repeatedly <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HE-rGGKksQ">pledged</a> that “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.” But Obamacare imposes at least 18 new taxes, tax hikes, or official policies designed to collect <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2012/08/20/obamacares-18-new-tax-hikes/">hundreds of billions</a> of dollars in revenues. Many of these will affect people at <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/04/obamacare-impact-on-taxpayers"><i>all</i></a> income levels.</p>
<p>* The architects of Obamacare knew that if the economics of the law failed to work out as projected, insurers could lose a great deal of money. To address this possibility, Obamacare explicitly contains a provision designed to <a href="http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/120513-681900-two-thirds-oppose-obamacare-insurance-industry-bailout.htm">bail out</a> insurers whose costs prove to be higher than originally anticipated.</p>
<p>* Obamacare was passed, without a single Republican vote, by means of a stunning series of sleazy backroom deals and procedural maneuvers.</p>
<p>* As early as February 2010, the President demonstrably <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O_AkcwoFwk">knew</a> quite well that Obamacare&#8217;s “grandfather” provision for the preservation of existing plans was toothless, and that millions of Americans were likely to lose their insurance. The Obama administration&#8217;s own officials explicitly <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/">predicted</a> that as a direct result of Obamacare, some 93 million people would in fact lose their existing insurance plans and would be forced to purchase new ones.</p>
<p>* It is a matter of public record that President Obama and many other leading Democrats view <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=615">Obamacare</a> not as a final solution to the nation&#8217;s healthcare problems, but rather as a stepping stone toward the ultimate goal of a single-payer system administered entirely by the federal government.</p>
<p>* One of the leading objectives of Obamacare is the redistribution of wealth, mostly from middle- and high-income households to: (a) tens of millions of low-income people who will be funneled, en masse, into Medicaid, and (b) moderate-income households that will be newly eligible for federal (taxpayer-funded) subsidies. This redistribution will have the effect of promoting an entitlement mentality and a greater dependence on government.</p>
<p>* Another Obamacare objective is political payback. The law has designated some <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/node/363699/print">$67 million</a> in taxpayer funds for nearly 50,000 so-called “navigators” to help people enroll in Obamacare plans. These navigators are mostly affiliated with <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/hhs-obamacare-navigators-95575.html">more than 100</a> leftist organizations that have strongly supported President Obama over the years.</p>
<p>* Obamacare is also designed to serve as a vehicle for Democratic voter-registration.</p>
<p>* Obamacare is designed to increase the size and power of the federal government. The IRS, for instance, will hire more than 16,000 new agents to monitor and enforce compliance with Obamacare&#8217;s financial mandates. Moreover, Obamacare will be administered by at least 159 newly created boards, commissions, and agencies—with the assistance of dozens of existing federal bureaus.</p>
<p><b>Click this link to view: </b><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1957"><b><i>Obamacare: Before and After</i></b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Powers or Lawlessness? &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamas-powers-or-lawlessness-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-powers-or-lawlessness-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Dec 2013 05:01:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213726</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A troubling look at an administration's relationship with the Constitution. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/kt1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-213733" alt="kt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/kt1.jpg" width="333" height="266" /></a>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang, </em>hosted by <strong>Monty Morton, </strong>was joined by <strong>Morgan Brittany</strong>, <strong>Dwight Schultz</strong> and <strong>Michael Chandler</strong>.</p>
<p>The Gang gathered to discuss <em>Obama&#8217;s Powers or Lawlessness</em>?</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/IrznCPcZxIk" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II: </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Q3uuxpQ_p-Y" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>To watch previous <i>Glazov Gang</i> episodes, </b><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>La Loi, C&#8217;est Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/la-loi-cest-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=la-loi-cest-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:56:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The latest ObamaCare turn toward lawlessness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/1023-Obamacare-rollout-delay_full_380.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213826" alt="1023-Obamacare-rollout-delay_full_380" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/1023-Obamacare-rollout-delay_full_380.jpg" width="247" height="201" /></a>In a move worthy of a Third World banana republic, President Obama used his extraconstitutional lawmaking wand and secretly extended the Dec. 23 Obamacare enrollment cutoff by 24 hours, usurping the authority of Congress.</p>
<p>This is only the latest in a long series of capricious, imperial, impeachable, <i>ad hoc</i> adjustments that the 44th president has made to his creation. Each and every unilateral abridgment or abrogation of the Affordable Care Act, as monstrous as the statute may be, is an affront to the rule of law that is supposed to prevail in our constitutional republic. This rule by presidential decree creates legal and business uncertainty for insurers and the insured, as well as for employers and all health care market participants.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, public support for Obamacare continues to fall, dropping five whole percentage points in a month to a new record low, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/193853-obamacare-approval-drops-to-record-low-in-cnn-poll">according</a> to a CNN/ORC poll. Barely a third of the public &#8212; 35 percent &#8211; now supports the law, down from 40 percent late last month, and just 16 percent of respondents said they expect their families will be better off when most of the law takes effect in 2014.</p>
<p>The completely unnecessary, mandated chaos of the Obamacare rollout is business as usual for embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who continues struggling to put out fire after fire in what seems destined to be a futile effort to make an unworkable program somehow work.</p>
<p>The <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366985/administration-extends-deadline-obamacare-sign-through-christmas-eve-eliana-johnson">reports</a> that</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Over the weekend, government officials and outside IT contractors working on the online marketplace’s computer system made a software change that automatically gives people a Jan. 1 start date for their new coverage as long as they enroll by 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The Obama administration apparently rationalized the one-day extension away, claiming it was needed in case the perpetually malfunctioning website strains under the weight of a sudden traffic boost from last-minute enrollees.</p>
<p>“Anticipating high demand and the fact that consumers may be enrolling from multiple time zones, we have taken steps to make sure that those who select a plan through tomorrow will get coverage for Jan. 1,” an HHS spokeswoman said yesterday.</p>
<p>In the nightmarish swirl of Kafkaesque arbitrariness that surrounds President Obama&#8217;s much touted signature legislative achievement, insurance companies reportedly won&#8217;t be able to refuse late registrants. Last week the administration decreed that individuals whose insurance plans were canceled may receive an exemption from the individual mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s abundantly clear that President Obama is making this up from finely manicured golf courses and vacation spots as he goes along. Obama reportedly was briefed on HHS&#8217;s latest efforts to keep the Obamacare website operational.</p>
<p>News of the latest presidential diktats came as the Obama administration <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/193922-obamacare-site-sees-traffic-surge-on-eve-of">claimed</a> that the HealthCare.gov website was experiencing a “record day” for visits yesterday.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) said approximately 850,000 people had visited the website as of 2 p.m. on Monday and that the alleged crush of web traffic was expected to continue the rest of the day. &#8220;About 60,000 people were instructed through the system to provide an email address so they could be notified to return at a later time,&#8221; <i>The Hill</i> newspaper reports.</p>
<p>Is the visitors figure true? The administration has been caught lying over and over and over again about Obamacare&#8217;s so-called successes so there is no way to know if the figures are accurate without conducting a forensic cyber-audit or issuing congressional subpoenas (which the administration would probably ignore anyway).</p>
<p>And when the administration hasn&#8217;t been lying outright, it has been known to carefully parse, calculating its statements to mislead the public. That nearly a million visits to the website were reportedly recorded doesn&#8217;t provide any indication of how many individuals actually applied for or succeeded in obtaining health insurance coverage.</p>
<p>President Obama claimed on Friday that more than a half million people had signed up at HealthCare.gov in the first three weeks of this month. According to <i>The Hill</i>&#8216;s reckoning, this would bring the total number of individuals enrolled in Obamacare to a bit over 1 million, far short of the 3.3 million people the administration hoped would jump aboard the sinking ship by year&#8217;s end.</p>
<p>Deluded administration officials continue to insist that they will hit their goal of 7 million enrollees by the conclusion of the second signup deadline on March 31.</p>
<p>&#8220;The administration also needs consumers who have enrolled for coverage to make their first premium payments to finalize the process,&#8221; according to the newspaper. &#8220;Those payments were due by Jan. 1, but many insurers, at the request of the administration, are now accepting payments as late as Jan. 10.&#8221;</p>
<p><i>Accepting</i> payments as late as Jan. 10 at the <i>request</i> of the administration? Interesting choice of words, isn&#8217;t it?</p>
<p>There was a time when mainstream media reporters thought it was their job to cut through word smog in order to tell their readers what was actually going on in the world.</p>
<p>The above phrase could be translated as, &#8220;nice insurance company you have there. You wouldn&#8217;t want anything to happen to it, would you?&#8221;</p>
<p>But in the Obama era reporters think it&#8217;s more important to advance the mission of the president than to report the truth.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Does Washington Know Best?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=does-washington-know-best</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:20:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cooperation]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Would you trust Congress to oversee every stop light in the nation? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210737" alt="ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg" width="246" height="188" /></a>According to some estimates, there are more than 100 million traffic signals in the U.S., but whatever the number, how many of us would like Washington, in the name of public health and safety, to be in sole charge of their operation? Congress or a committee it authorizes would determine the position of traffic signals at intersections, the length of time the lights stay red, yellow and green, and what hours of the day they can be flashing red.</p>
<p>While you ponder that, how many Americans would like Washington to be in charge of managing the delivery of food and other items to the nation&#8217;s supermarkets? Today&#8217;s average well-stocked U.S. supermarket stocks 60,000 to 65,000 different items from all over the U.S. and the world. Congress or some congressionally created committee could organize the choice of products and their prices. Maybe there&#8217;d be some cost savings. After all, what says that we should have so many items from which to choose? Why wouldn&#8217;t 10,000 do?</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;Williams, those are ludicrous ideas whose implementation would spell disaster!&#8221; You&#8217;re right. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, said it is a fatal conceit for anyone to think that a single mind or group of minds, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning, could manage to do things better than the spontaneous, unstructured, complex and creative forces of the market. The biggest challenges in any system, whether it&#8217;s an economic, biological or ecological system, are information, communication and control. Congressmen&#8217;s taking over control of the nation&#8217;s traffic signals would require a massive amount of information that they are incapable of possessing, such as traffic flows at intersections, accident experiences, terrain patterns and peak and off-peak traffic flows.</p>
<p>The same information problem exists at supermarkets. Consider the challenge in organizing inputs in order to get 65,000 different items to a supermarket. Also, consider how uncompromising supermarket customers are.</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t tell the supermarket manager in advance when we&#8217;re going to shop or what we&#8217;re going to buy and in what quantity, but if the store doesn&#8217;t have what we want when we want it, we&#8217;ll fire the manager by taking our business elsewhere. The supermarket manager does a fairly good job doing what&#8217;s necessary to meet that challenge.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;C&#8217;mon, Williams, nobody&#8217;s proposing that Congress take over the nation&#8217;s traffic signals and supermarkets!&#8221; You&#8217;re right, at least for now, but Congress and the president are taking over an area of our lives infinitely more challenging and complex than the management of traffic signals and supermarkets, namely our health care system. Oblivious to the huge information problem in the allocation of resources, the people in Washington have great confidence that they can run our health care system better than we, our physicians and hospitals. Charles Darwin wisely noted more than a century and a half ago that &#8220;ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.&#8221; Congress exudes confidence.</p>
<p>Suggesting that Congress and the president are ignorant of the fact that knowledge is highly dispersed and decisions made locally produce the best outcomes might be overly generous. It could be that they know they really don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re doing but just don&#8217;t give a hoot because it&#8217;s in their political interest to centralize health care decision-making. Just as one example, how can Congress know whether buying a $4,000 annual health insurance policy would be the best use of healthy 25-year-old Joe Sanders&#8217; earnings? Would he be better off purchasing a cheaper catastrophic health insurance policy and saving the rest of the money to put toward a business investment? Politicians really don&#8217;t care about what Joe thinks is best, because they arrogantly think they know what&#8217;s best and have the power to coerce.</p>
<p>Hayek said, &#8220;The curious task of economics is to illustrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.&#8221; We economists have failed miserably in that task.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Staking Out Israel’s Lawful Claims to the West Bank</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/staking-out-israels-lawful-claims-to-the-west-bank/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=staking-out-israels-lawful-claims-to-the-west-bank</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:15:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[claim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Judea]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209047</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Jewish State has a superior case for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria than the Palestinians. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/israel-west-bank-settlements-e1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209048" alt="israel-west-bank-settlements-e1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/israel-west-bank-settlements-e1-443x350.jpg" width="310" height="245" /></a>Proponents of fairness and equity who have advocated against some of Israel’s most pernicious detractors have often advanced several well-reasoned arguments against further Israeli West Bank withdrawals and Palestinian statehood. Key among those arguments are that the Palestinian leadership is rejectionist, duplicitous, incites violence, is non-democratic and, in general, is not committed to a two-state solution recognizing Israel’s rights to exist within safe and secure boundaries. While all of these positions are accurate and by themselves would constitute sound reasoning to reject additional Israeli territorial concessions, there exits one reason above all others that favors the Israeli viewpoint; simply that Israel’s legal claims to the West Bank are far superior to those of the Palestinians’ under international law.</p>
<p>International laws are generally created by nations when entering into treaties with one another or more informally, through international custom.  General Assembly resolutions have no binding legal authority. In fact, the United Nations charter which spells out the powers of the General Assembly does not convey rule-making powers to that body.</p>
<p>Israel’s legal claims to the West Bank are rooted in the San Remo Conference of 1920, an international meeting of the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. On July 24, 1922 the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations and a body which, under its charter had the authority to enact international laws, confirmed decisions hammered out at San Remo and resolved to establish the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.</p>
<p>The League’s preamble, adopting the principles enumerated in the Balfour Declaration, recognized the Jewish “historical connection” to the Land of Israel and resolved to help facilitate the establishment of a Jewish nation there. At the time, Palestine consisted of land east and west of the Jordan River, encompassing all of modern Israel, Judea &amp; Samaria, Gaza and what is referred to today as Jordan. The League entrusted Britain with being the mandatory authority whose aim would be to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine and to act as trustee until an orderly transition could be made to full Jewish sovereignty.</p>
<p>Article 5 of the Mandate prohibited Britain from ceding or leasing any part of the mandate territory to a foreign power. However, in 1923, Britain acting in contravention of Article 5 did precisely that and despite Jewish protest, gifted Eastern Palestine to Emir Abdullah thus creating a new Arab entity called Emirate of Transjordan. In so doing, Britain ceded 76% of Palestine to Arab rule leaving a paltry 24% for a Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>In February 1947 Britain announced that it would unilaterally terminate its mandate thus setting the stage for UN intervention. Following Britain’s announcement, the UN sent a team of international observers, known as UNSCOP, to Palestine to investigate and suggest a blueprint for the future of the territory and its inhabitants. After completing its investigation, UNSCOP formulated a plan, based on demographic patterns that involved the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states on roughly a 50-50 basis. Jerusalem and its environs were to be designated international zones.</p>
<p>In November 1947, the UN adopted UNSCOP’s findings and voted in favor of the partition. The UN General Assembly’s partition plan was merely a suggestion and had no legal binding authority. The Jews accepted the partition plan and the Arabs flatly rejected it, setting the stage for the first Arab-Israeli War and an Arab invasion.</p>
<p>Had the Arab’s accepted the partition, international boundaries between Jewish and Arab states would have been established and the matter settled. In the absence of such a settlement, the only legal, binding authority was the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which designated the whole of Palestine, including the West Bank, as the future Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>The first Arab-Israel War ended in 1949 and resulted in an Israeli victory and strategic defeat for the Arabs. Israel and Jordan negotiated a ceasefire agreement that was formalized into an armistice agreement. Neither side recognized armistice demarcation line as an official border. The agreement left Jordan in control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, territory that it illegally seized during its land grab. Shortly thereafter, Jordan annexed these territories, an annexation not recognized internationally save for Britain (only with respect to the West Bank) and Pakistan.</p>
<p>The Jordanian occupation of the West Bank lasted for 19 years. During that time, there was not a single UN resolution condemning Jordan’s illegal occupation. While this fact alone does not buttress Israel’s legal position, it does lend credence to the notion that the General Assembly can hardly be considered an impartial body.</p>
<p>On May 22, 1967, Egypt, in violation of international maritime law, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The act was accompanied by aggressive Egyptian military deployments, violations of Israeli airspace and genocidal rhetoric. On June 5, 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, destroying the bulk of Egypt’s air force in under 3 hours.</p>
<p>Contrary to the realities taking place on the ground, Egypt’s Nasser convinced King Hussein of Jordan that Israel was reeling. Hussein, lulled into believing these false claims, ordered his army to attack Israel. Jordanian Hunter jets bombed Kfar Saba and Netanya while Jordanian artillery shelled Israeli population centers in West Jerusalem. Jordanian infantry then began to take up positions in the demilitarized zones. In response to Jordanian aggression, Israel counter-attacked, taking over East Jerusalem and the West Bank in a matter of days.</p>
<p>While the UN considers war and conquests therefrom to be illegal, Article 52 of the UN Charter provides an exception to the illegality of war in cases involving self-defense. Israel acquired the West Bank (territory illegally seized by Jordan in 1948) through defensive conquest. Since Israel had the legal right to defend itself against aggression, its territorial conquest resulting from a defensive war is legal and binding. There is not a single case in history where a nation was forced to relinquish territory it had acquired through defensive conquest.</p>
<p>Following the war, a Soviet sponsored resolution requiring Israel to withdraw from <i>all</i> the territories acquired during the war was rejected by the United Nations Security Council. Several additional drafts were submitted and rejected. The UNSC finally settled on Resolution 242 with a language formulation that deliberately omitted the word “all” and merely required Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The omission of the word “all” was extremely significant in that it provided implicit recognition to at least some of Israel’s territorial gains.</p>
<p>Israel has fully complied with Resolution 242 by virtue of its withdrawal from Sinai, Gaza, Kuneitra (in the Golan Heights) and some 40% of the West Bank. Thus Israel maintains a strong legal claim to the West Bank, superior to all other claims, based on the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Resolution 242 and basic principles of International law.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding Israel’s valid legal claims, Israel has been widely condemned in various quarters for its “settlement” activity in the “occupied” territories. The strongest condemnations emerge from the EU and the Muslim world though the United States position has been more equivocal and has varied from administration to administration. The United States has in the past opposed settlement activity as a matter of policy but with some very minor exceptions, has refused to term such activity “illegal.”</p>
<p>President Ronald Reagan explicitly stated that settlements were “not illegal” a position reinforced by President George W. Bush who provided implicit recognition of the legitimacy of settlements when he noted that, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…”</p>
<p>Those who condemn settlement activity rely on Article 49, Clause 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states that, “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”</p>
<p>As previously noted, the claim that Israel is an “Occupying Power” as defined in Article 49 is dubious at best. Israel maintains a valid, legal claim to the West Bank, far superior to those of the Palestinians or any other entity. But even if Israel was to be given the designation of “Occupying Power,” Article 49 would still be inapplicable.</p>
<p>Israel has not transferred or deported any part of its population into the West Bank. Individual Jews, with varied motivations, voluntarily moved into these territories. Moreover, many Israelis were born in the West Bank thus further highlighting the inapplicability of Article 49. Article 49 does not impose on Israel any duty to prevent its citizens from developing or moving into the West Bank.</p>
<p>Ambassador Morris Abram, a member of the U.S. staff at the Nuremburg Tribunal who was intimately involved with the drafting of the Fourth Geneva Convention, forcefully noted that Article 49(6) <i>“was not designed to cover situations like Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, but rather the forcible transfer, deportation or resettlement of large numbers of people.”</i> Other acclaimed and notable scholars such as Eugene V. Rostow, Dean of Yale Law School and former US Assistant Secretary of State, Stephen M. Schwebel, President of the International Court of Justice, Nicholas Rostow, university counsel and vice chancellor for legal affairs of the State University of New York, David M. Phillips, professor at Northeastern University School of Law and Fulbright Scholar and Professor Julius Stone, international lawyer and prolific author have voiced similar positions and have highlighted the absurdity of applying Article 49(6) in the context of Israeli settlements.</p>
<p>On July 9, 2012 a committee, headed by the respected former Israeli Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy, concluded that Israel’s presence in the West Bank was not an “occupation” within the meaning of Article 49 and that the settlements were not illegal. Recently, 1,000 jurists of various nationalities signed a petition supporting the findings and conclusions of the Levy Report and submitted it to the EU&#8217;s foreign policy chief and one of Israel’s shrillest critics, Catherine Ashton.</p>
<p>It is unlikely that Ashton was moved by the petition but it is demonstrative of the wellspring of support that Israel maintains internationally and that in at least some circles, sanity still prevails. The settlement enterprise, inspired by the original Zionist ethos of building and developing the land will continue to be a source of controversy but from the perspective of international law, it is on rock-solid footing.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Just How Corrupt Is the Obama Administration?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/just-how-corrupt-is-the-obama-administration/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=just-how-corrupt-is-the-obama-administration</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Aug 2013 04:54:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Corruption]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201282</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is there anyone with the guts to take on the White House? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/4614936283_Obama_Corruption_answer_2_xlarge.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201283" alt="4614936283_Obama_Corruption_answer_2_xlarge" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/4614936283_Obama_Corruption_answer_2_xlarge.jpg" width="280" height="203" /></a>Scandal after scandal, coupled with an ongoing contempt for the law and the Constitution, demonstrated by high-level officials and the president himself, point to one deeply troubling conclusion: the Obama administration may be the most corrupt administration ever inflicted on the American public. And while the mainstream media have done a remarkable job deflecting much of that reality, even they cannot keep up with the avalanche of disturbing revelations that arise, seemingly on a daily basis.</p>
<p>We begin with yet another report about the Fast and Furious gunrunning operation, courtesy of Sharyl Attkisson, one of the few remaining reporters who follows a story wherever it goes. Last Wednesday, three more F&amp;F weapons <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57598487/more-fast-and-furious-guns-surface-at-crimes-in-mexico/">turned</a> up at crime scenes in Mexico. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and as many as 300 Mexican nationals, including teens at a birthday party, were slaughtered by those weapons. Yet the ensuing investigation was first thwarted by Eric Holder&#8217;s refusal to turn over critical documents to congressional investigators, earning him a contempt of Congress citation. It was followed by President Obama invoking executive privilege to prevent the same. Other documents reveal that Eric Holder <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20115038-10391695.html">lied</a> to Congress about when he first heard about the operation. The House Oversight Committee is currently suing for release of the material, but both Holder and Obama remain unscathed by this deadly debacle, even as the Terry family&#8217;s effort to <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/06/03/brian-terrys-family-talks-fox-news-about-what-happened-fast-furious">find</a> out what really happened to their son has been ignored.</p>
<p>Holder&#8217;s duplicity regarding Fast and Furious is hardly an anomaly. On March 1, 2011, Holder <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/081613-667885-obama-presidency-leaves-a-lawless-legacy.htm?p=3">told</a> Congress that &#8220;decisions made in the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) case were made by career attorneys in the department.&#8221; It was subsequently revealed that an Obama appointee, Associate A.G. Thomas Perrelli, overruled a unanimous decision by DOJ attorneys who favored prosecuting NBPP members seen on videotape attempting to intimidate voters outside a Philadelphia polling station during the 2008 election.</p>
<p>Holder also &#8220;misled&#8221; Congress last June. &#8220;With regard to the potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material: that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of or would think would be wise policy,” he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/20/holder-i-didnt-lie-about-james-rosen/">said</a>. Yet it was subsequently revealed that Holder personally <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/eric-holder-signed-off-on-search-of-james-rosens-private-emails-nbc-reports/">signed off</a> on a warrant to investigate Fox New reporter James Rosen, allowing the DOJ to search Rosen&#8217;s email and phone records, as well as those of his family members.</p>
<p>The DOJ also secretly <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/13/us/justice-ap-phones">seized</a> the phone records of AP reporters and editors, claiming they only did so after making &#8220;every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means.&#8221; The timing of the investigation suggested the DOJ was looking into who leaked classified information about a plot to disrupt a second underwear bomber from blowing up a jetliner in Yemen. According to the <i>New York Times</i>, that was one of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/phone-records-of-journalists-of-the-associated-press-seized-by-us.html?pagewanted=all">two leaks</a> Holder was investigating &#8220;after a spate of disclosures about the bomb plot, cyberwarfare against Iran, Mr. Obama’s procedures for putting terrorism suspects on a &#8216;kill list,&#8217; and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.&#8221;</p>
<p>On Monday, the <i>Washington Times </i>offered the DOJ a big assist with regard to that second leak, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/18/trail-of-stuxnet-cyberwar-leak-to-author-leads-to-/">revealing</a> that &#8220;scores of State Department emails&#8221; show the Obama administration itself granted <i>Times</i> reporter David E. Sanger access to a series of high-level administration officials. Sanger then wrote a book about the American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus.</p>
<p>As for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, none other than Vice President Joe Biden <a href="http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/05/30/what-happened-to-seal-team-six-the-most-serious-scandal-of-all/">revealed</a> the involvement of SEAL Team 6 in that operation. Congress has <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/313039-congress-to-probe-lethal-seal-crash">announced</a> an investigation into the subsequent deaths of 22 SEALs whose helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan in 2011. Part of that investigation will likely include the possibility that Biden&#8217;s shameless promotion of administration &#8220;toughness&#8221; may have made those SEALs targets. Additionally, misleading information provided by the Defense Department to family members of the slain SEALs indicates this scandal may be even bigger than Benghazi.</p>
<p>The ongoing investigation of the IRS&#8217;s targeting of conservative groups, which has expanded from &#8220;rogue agents&#8221; in Cincinnati all the way up to IRS Chief Counsel&#8211;one of two agency members appointed by the president&#8211;now <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/08/irs-scandal-hits-3-month-mark-where-accountability-mr-obama/">enters</a> its third month. It has also expanded beyond the IRS, as a series of previously undisclosed emails indicate the Federal Election Commission (FEC) may have been given taxpayer information in violation of federal law and the IRS regulations. Earlier this month House House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) <a href="http://thehill.com/video/in-the-news/315301-issa-to-subpoena-irs-documents">announced</a> he would subpoena IRS documents, because the agency was stonewalling investigators&#8217; requests, exactly as the DOJ did in the Fast and Furious scandal.</p>
<p>With regard to these scandals and others, the administration&#8217;s water-carriers in the media, as well as the president himself, have attempted to dismiss them as &#8220;phony&#8221; or &#8220;unnecessary distractions.&#8221; This &#8220;what difference at this point does it make&#8221; attitude, exemplified by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is part of a well-established strategy by an administration convinced the attention span of the public can be undermined by both the volume of scandals, and the time it takes to unravel each one. Thus, for example, the <i>Washington Post&#8217;s</i> August 15 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html">revelation</a> that the NSA &#8220;has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008&#8243; overshadows the IRS scandal, which overshadows Navy SEAL scandal, which overshadows the Benghazi scandal, which overshadows Fast and Furious&#8211;all of which have been dismissed at one time or another as partisan witch hunts.</p>
<p>Yet even if one were to completely concede such a deplorable assertion, there is still no question whatsoever that administration officials have trampled on both the rule of law and the Constitution. Perhaps the most contemptible effort in that regard is President Obama&#8217;s transparently unconstitutional <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-obamas-unconstitutional-steps-worse-than-nixons/2013/08/14/e0bd6cb2-044a-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html">effort</a> to suspend various parts of the Affordable Healthcare Act. How Americans feel about that piece of legislation is irrelevant. What&#8217;s relevant is that Congress passed the law, including the part that calls for its implementation beginning on Jan. 1, 2014, and the president signed it. There is no Constitutional way the president can simply choose to ignore sections of a law he doesn&#8217;t like, or go around Congress completely when they won&#8217;t kowtow to his agenda.</p>
<p>Yet that&#8217;s precisely what Obama and other administration officials have done. In 2012, the president unilaterally <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2013/08/16/can-obama-write-his-own-laws/">decreed</a> that the same DREAM Act rejected by Congress 18 months earlier would be implemented for the children of illegal aliens. He also gutted part of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, in clear violation of the statute. Obama is still ignoring a ruling by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and federal appeals courts in D.C. and Philadelphia, all of whom ruled his &#8220;recess&#8221; appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.</p>
<p>And while the contempt for the law starts at the top, it is by no means limited to the president himself. On August 12, Eric Holder ordered his attorneys to stop <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/us/justice-dept-seeks-to-curtail-stiff-drug-sentences.html?pagewanted=all">seeking</a> mandatory sentences in low-level drug cases, by <i>deliberately withholding evidence</i> regarding the amount of drugs involved. Holder is also suing the state of Texas to pre-clear its latest election law, in complete defiance of the recent Supreme Court ruling that stated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is &#8220;unconstitutional&#8221; and that &#8220;the formula can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdiction to preclearance.&#8221; He is also pursuing civil rights violations against George Zimmerman, absent a shred of evidence for doing so.</p>
<p>Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is also demonstrating contempt for the law. A Daily Treasury Statement dated July 26 revealed the federal debt had <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/70-straight-days-treasury-says-debt-stuck-exactly-1669939600000000">remained</a> at approximately  $16.7 trillion for 70 straight days, despite the reality that the federal deficit <a href="http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/morganbrittany/2013/08/19/jack-lews-extraordinary-measures-on-debt-just-cooking-the-books-n1667607/page/2">rose</a> by $98 billion in July. If the debt had continued to increase, it would have topped the debt limit imposed by Congress. Lew characterizes his effort to circumvent Congress as &#8220;extraordinary measures.&#8221; Yet any American company engaging in similarly “extraordinary” accounting procedures would be targeted for prosecution.</p>
<p>Newly appointed EPA head Gina McCarthy is also comfortable bypassing the Legislative Branch of government. McCarthy <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/14/climate-change-obama-epa-plan-action-sans-congress/">announced</a> on August 14 that the EPA will unilaterally enact rules to combat global warming, despite the reality that a bill to establish a cap-and-trade system was rejected by Congress in 2009&#8211;when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.</p>
<p>Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is being <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/14/house-committee-to-probe-sebelius-soliciting-money-for-obamacare-sign-ups/">investigated</a> by Congress for soliciting donations from health organizations to promote Obamacare. In May, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348582/sebelius%E2%80%99s-suspect-solicitations-katrina-trinko">explained</a> that such an effort might be yet another attempt to bypass Congress. “If she is raising money from private entities and coordinating with those entities to do something that Congress has refused to do, the Constitution doesn’t allow that and federal law makes it a criminal violation,” he told National Review.</p>
<p>Congress may have trouble getting to the truth. According to an Associated Press story published in June, Sebelius and a number of other administration officials have been <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ap-administration-officials-using-secret-email-addresses/">using</a> &#8220;secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages.&#8221; Yet the AP further notes that, despite filing a Freedom of Information Act three months earlier, most agencies have failed to turn over such information, and that the Labor Department demanded more than $1 million for the account names. The AP pursued the story after it was discovered that former EPA head Lisa Jackson was conducting official business using a secret email account under the alias “Richard Windsor.”</p>
<p>And lest anyone think the practice may have been discontinued, the House Oversight Committee last Tuesday <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/13/lerner-used-personal-email-for-irs-business-say-lawmakers/">requested</a> that IRS official Lois Lerner turn over emails sent to, or from, her personal “<a href="http://msn.com/">msn.com</a>” account. “Through the course of the investigation, we have learned that you sent documents related to your official duties from your official IRS e-mail account to an <a href="http://msn.com/">msn.com</a> e-mail account labeled ‘Lois Home,’” a letter sent to Lerner states. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business.”</p>
<p>So much for the self-professed &#8220;most transparent administration in history.&#8221;</p>
<p>All of the above suggests the Obama administration is guided by one over-riding imperative: we’ll do whatever we want, and we dare someone to stop us. Since the media are more a part of the problem than the solution, that burden falls on the Judicial Branch of government, or the Republican Party. As mentioned above, Eric Holder is already ignoring a Supreme Court ruling regarding voting rights, and Obama will ignore the ruling on his illegal NLRB appointees until the Supreme Court <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/06/24/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-obamas-nlrb-appointments/">hears</a> the case next term.</p>
<p>As for Republicans, investigations into the numerous administration scandals is ongoing, but best described as plodding. This is due in large part to the sheer volume of dubious activity they are tasked with investigating. But their reticence in certain areas, most notably House Speaker John Boehner&#8217;s (R-OH) <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/terrorism/312539-conservatives-seek-to-put-pressure-on-boehner-with-60-foot-long-benghazi-petition">refusal</a> to appoint a Select Committee to investigate Benghazi, despite pressure from fellow Republicans, is deeply disturbing.</p>
<p>Yet their calculatingly reticent reaction to the president&#8217;s determination to ignore the law is beyond the pale. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the party&#8217;s unbearably pusillanimous attitude was <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/marco-rubio-immigration-reform-obama-executive-order/story?id=19948135">expressed</a> last week by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) with regard to so-called comprehensive immigration reform. &#8220;I believe that this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order as he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen,&#8221; Rubio said in an interview last Tuesday.</p>
<p>In other words, give Obama what he wants because he&#8217;ll take it anyway. It is precisely this kind of capitulation that has millions of Americans wondering if there is anything Republicans will do to throttle any aspect of this administration&#8217;s illegal behavior. It is not an exaggeration to say the fate of the nation may depend on the answer to that question.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part III)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:12:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199956</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rescuing the definition of "capitalism" from the clutches of the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199957" alt="stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg" width="283" height="220" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the third installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>. </em></p>
<p>Capitalism. “The economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions.”<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest difficulty in any discussion about capitalism is overcoming the widely divergent concepts of what <i>capitalism </i>means and settling upon an agreed definition. For the political left, the term <i>capitalism </i>is so heavily laden with negative connotations that leftists have employed it as a label of derision, scorn, and condemnation, if not an outright curse, for more than a century-and-a-half. Karl Marx may be long gone, and the grand socialist experiment in central economic planning widely discredited after the collapse of the USSR two decades ago, but many people still loathe capitalism and yearn for a radical alternative to it. Both the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of the current decade have held demonstrations prominently featuring signs proclaiming, “Kill capitalism!”</p>
<p>The dictionary definition given above is correct as far as it goes, but let’s expand on that definition so that we may increase our chances of engaging in intelligent discussions about it. The late economist Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate in economics (he also earned one in political science) under Ludwig von Mises and later guided me through my doctorate, preferred the phrase <i>private property order</i> to <i>capitalism</i>.</p>
<p>Indeed, <i>private property order</i> is a less problematical term. First, it describes a real-world political-legal system instead of another contentious ideology, another “-ism.” Second, as stated earlier, all human societies require capital as a factor in economic production, regardless of whether capital is privately or publicly owned. <i>Private property order</i> is a more precise, accurate, and illustrative descriptive term than <i>capitalism</i> as a name for a particular order and organization of economic production.</p>
<p>If we were starting from scratch, I would favor adopting Dr. Sennholz’s term. However, given the left’s constant misuse of the term and leftists’ Orwellian attempt to mutilate the term by bastardizing its definition, it is important to rescue the word from their malign distortions.</p>
<p><i>Free market economy</i> and <i>free enterprise system</i> are two other acceptable alternative terms for the <i>private property order</i> or <i>capitalism</i>. The key distinctions between <i>capitalism </i>and alternative systems involve the role of government and the related question of who is in charge of economic production.</p>
<p>In a truly free market—genuine capitalism—the “means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated,” and the government does not tell individuals or companies what to produce, how much to produce, how to produce it, what wages it should pay or what prices it should charge, etc. Under capitalism, the government does not redistribute property from some citizens to others, nor does it pick economic winners and losers in the business world by favoring some with subsidies, bailouts, insulation from competition, etc., or weighing down others with discriminatory taxes, regulatory requirements, and other economic hindrances.</p>
<p>Under capitalism, the proper role of the government is to act as a night watchman, impartially defending everyone’s rights—upholding legal contracts, upholding clearly defined property rights, punishing fraud, theft, etc. To use a metaphor from sports, the government in a capitalistic system plays the role of the referee, enforcing the rules of the game, but does not become an active participant in the economic contest that determines who prospers.</p>
<p>In a free market, all transactions are voluntary. No business can compel anyone to purchase its products or services. Every day, providers of goods and services compete with other providers (actual and potential, within their line of business and between different product choices) for customers. Those providers of goods and services who fail to provide what consumers want at a price consumers are willing to pay either amend their business plan or go broke. Only those providers who excel at fulfilling the most highly valued wants of consumers will survive and prosper.</p>
<p>This is the doctrine of <i>consumer sovereignty</i>. Under capitalism, the consumer sits in the position of the crowd watching Rome’s gladiatorial games, rendering the fateful verdict of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the various business enterprises seeking their approval and patronage in the competitive marketplace.</p>
<p>Ludwig von Mises described <i>consumer sovereignty</i> in these clear, succinct passages: The consumers’ “buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the land. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.</p>
<p>“The consumers determine ultimately not only the prices of the consumers’ goods, but no less the prices of all factors of production. They determine the income of every member of the market economy.”<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>“All production must bend to the consumers’ will. From the moment it fails to conform to the consumers’ demands it becomes unprofitable. Thus free competition compels the obedience of the producer to the consumer’s will and also, in case of need, the transfer of the means of production from the hands of those unwilling or unable to achieve what the consumer demands into the hands of those better able to direct production. The lord of production is the consumer.”<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>We can plainly see today that government in the United States often abandons the night watchman, impartial referee role, and instead actively intervenes in economic activity. It frequently overrules the preferences of consumers and usurps a significant portion of the sovereign control that consumers wield in a truly capitalistic system.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the political left and right have been in agreement about the injustice of at least one type of government intervention: federal bailouts of big Wall Street firms during the financial crisis a few years ago. Millions of Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Americans have denounced those bailouts, condemning them as “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism.”</p>
<p>This is where the linguistic waters have been muddied. The use of the adjectives<i> crony</i> and <i>corporate </i>is correct, but to use the noun <i>capitalism</i> in this context is utterly incorrect, because in genuine capitalism, government would not intervene to save private corporations from their mistakes. To describe such a clearly non-free-market practice as a form of capitalism is to mutilate the meaning of the word. Neither <i>crony capitalism</i> nor <i>corporate capitalism</i> is capitalism. Linguistically, they are oxymorons; in practice, both are rejections of capitalism, because they denote the replacement of free markets with politically rigged markets.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>The distortion of words’ meanings can cause great mischief, for by associating <i>capitalism</i> with offensive, non-capitalistic policies, the left believes that capitalism is something pernicious. This can blind them from seeing true capitalism which, when rightly understood and practiced, remedies some of the most serious human problems about which the left professes concern.</p>
<p>Plainly, capitalism in its pure form does not exist today. Government intervenes in economic activity in myriad ways. Perhaps pure capitalism can never be attained, since imperfect human beings are incapable of adhering perfectly to any ideal—although the United States came close to achieving that ideal (at least, for white males) and thus can rightly be said to have been predominantly capitalistic during its first century. Realistically, capitalism may be what Ayn Rand called an “unknown ideal,”<sup>5</sup> but it is an ideal worth striving toward, as we shall now see by comparing capitalism with alternative economic systems in the following subsections.</p>
<p><strong>Read Part IV of this series in the next issue of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Webster’s, p. 268.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> Mises, <i>Human Action</i>, pp. 270-1.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Ludwig von Mises, <i>Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,</i> (trans. J. Kahane), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund/Liberty Classics, 1981, p. 400.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> To distort the meaning of the word “capitalism” by joining it to an incompatible practice like cronyism is a favorite demagogic tactic of anti-capitalist ideologues. It is the same intellectual deception that they employ when the federal government overrules, suppresses, and prevents the operation of free markets—like it did to cause economic downturns in the 1930s, 1970s, or 2000s—and then, when the inevitable economic dislocations appear, anti-market ideologues blame “the free market” rather than the government intervention that stifled free markets.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Ayn Rand, <i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal</i>, New York: Signet Books, 1967.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Seven More Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/j-christian-adams/seven-more-reasons-to-impeach-eric-holder/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=seven-more-reasons-to-impeach-eric-holder</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Aug 2013 04:35:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The multiple new reasons why Holder is unfit to serve as Attorney General.]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/holder.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199415" alt="holder" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/holder-450x299.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a><strong>To order J. Christian Adams&#8217; pamphlet <em>Ten Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=WY6LJDB7J48Y">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Power is never vested in just one man. Even the powers of the man in the Oval Office depend on internal checks and balances. A president alone cannot violate the law. His cabinet has to aid him in that task. The man who stands at Obama&#8217;s side, the man who aids and abets his lawbreaking more than any other, is Attorney General Eric Holder.</p>
<p>Holder is the man who is truly accountable for Obama&#8217;s lawlessness because it is his responsibility to hold Obama accountable. Instead Holder has descended into entirely new areas of lawnessness. Instead of acting to enforce the law, he has become the enemy of the law.</p>
<p>Over a year ago, I penned <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/ten-reasons-to-impeach-eric-holder/" target="_blank">Ten Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder</a>.  In that David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlet, I documented how Attorney General Eric Holder has corroded the rule of law, abused power and deserved to be impeached.  Since the publication of the pamphlet, Holder has provided multiple new reasons why he is unfit to serve as Attorney General.</p>
<p>Instead of moderating, instead of adopting a more centrist approach after the publication of that pamphlet in Spring 2012, Holder has radicalized even further.</p>
<p>This should be unsurprising to anyone who has followed Holder’s career.  Holder is driven by a radical progressive view of the law, and by contempt for conservatives.  He is hostile to the rule of law, at least as traditionally understood by Americans.</p>
<p>Holder once said to a gathering of the American Constitution Society the “nation must be convinced that it is a progressive future that holds the greatest promise for equality and the continuation of those policies that serve to support the greatest number of our people.”  Progressivism, with all of its bending of the plain meaning of words, of ends justifying means and its hostility toward constitutional restraints on the power of government, enchants our Attorney Gneral.</p>
<p>Projecting, he also said conservatives “have made a mockery of the rule of law.”</p>
<p>But Holder’s record demonstrates it is he who has made a mockery out of the rule of law.  His tenure at the Justice Department overflows with abuse of power, appeals to racial division, and disregard of the constitutional balance of powers.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Taking Sides in George Zimmerman Trial and Federal Threats</span></b></p>
<p>Soon after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida on February 26, 2012, Eric Holder took the side of the racial mob calling for vengeance for Trayvon Martin.  After the shooting, the racialist anti-Semite head of the New Black Panther Party – Malik Zulu Shabazz – and a gang of uniformed New Black Panther Party members, were calling for the seizure of George Zimmerman.  Just<a name="1404bc321b1f5aba_1404b9851e53577d__GoBack"></a> after the black panther rallies, Rev. Al Sharpton travelled to Florida to agitate for George Zimmerman’s arrest.</p>
<p>Eric Holder’s Justice Department did not stand silently by.  Instead, they devoted time and resources to aid the racial mob, including the New Black Panther Party.</p>
<p>A little known component of the Justice Department, the Community Relations Service, or “CRS,” travelled to Florida and helped the protesters.  For example, CRS helped to facilitate a police escort for college students to travel forty miles to participate in a rally seeking the arrest of George Zimmerman.</p>
<p>DOJ documents reveal thousands of dollars in travel costs and manpower devoted to helping the mob seeking the seizure of George Zimmerman off the street.  The New Black Panther Party produced wanted posters for Zimmerman and offered an award for his illegal seizure.  One member of the New Black Panthers said the bounty would be paid if Zimmerman were seized, “dead or alive.”</p>
<p>DOJ officials met privately with protesters and gave them advice how to conduct their protests.  Other components of Holder’s Justice Department met with the Sanford police and elected officials and strongly “suggested” that the city take a second look at charging Zimmerman.</p>
<p>The DOJ Community Relations Service is supposed to act as a neutral party to provide a buffer during heated disputes.  They aren’t supposed to take sides.  But a black teenager was dead, and the shooter was a “white-Hispanic,” according to NBC News, and therefore Holder took sides.</p>
<p>The rest is history.  Because of DOJ and New Black Panther pressure, that “second look” by law enforcement officials led to the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin.  Even Al Sharpton admitted to Tom Joyner that everyone knew the case lacked merit. But in the age of Holder and Obama, the law isn’t used like it once was.  The law is no longer the great leveler.  Instead, it is a weapon for those in power to satisfy the demands of their racially inflamed faction, to prosecute a man who exercised self-defense against a bloody and unwarranted physical attack.  The law, to Holder, is a means to punish those on the wrong side of the racial divide, a divide Holder has helped to create.</p>
<p>Holder erased any doubt about his racial radicalism soon after the jury acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges.  Holder appeared before a number of racially homogeneous audiences, including the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and announced that the Justice Department would consider civil rights charges against George Zimmerman.  Never mind that the Federal Bureau of Investigation already concluded that Zimmerman did not act with any racial animus toward Trayvon, an necessary element under the federal law.</p>
<p>But law doesn’t matter to Holder the same way it matters to the rest of us.  Law is what once protected us from people like Holder.  But to Holder, law is a nuisance to be cast aside when he seeks applause from the all-black sorority audience at the Delta Sigma Theta convention.  Gaining approval from, and fostering excitement in, a racial faction is more important to this attorney general than whether an American should face down the federal government because he is a disfavored “white-Hispanic” to that racial faction.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Failure to Indict Black Panthers</span></b></p>
<p>Holder’s involvement in the Zimmerman matter was not confined to the outrageous meddling by the DOJ, as we have seen.  Holder also failed to act against crimes in Florida possibly committed by the racial mob demanding action against Zimmerman.</p>
<p>Holder announced to the loud applause of the Delta Sigma Theta convention that his DOJ may charge George Zimmerman with federal civil rights charges.  As usual, Holder has given the New Black Panther Party a pass on the same civil rights laws.</p>
<p>When the New Black Panther Party conspired to have George Zimmerman seized off the streets, dead or alive, they likely violated the exact same law under which Holder may yet charge Zimmerman.  Section 245 of Title 18 protects people from being attacked or seized off the streets in part because of their race.  And the Panthers made no secret of their racial hostility toward Zimmerman.  Section 249 of Title 18, another civil rights law Holder will use to investigate Zimmerman, prohibits conspiracies to harm someone with a racial animus.</p>
<p>These federal civil rights laws could be used against the New Black Panther Party for actions they took during the mob protests in Florida even easier than they can be used against George Zimmerman.</p>
<p>But will Attorney General Holder announce the opening of an investigation against Malik Zulu Shabazz and his anti-Semites in the New Black Panther Party? Of course not, because we know well Holder’s reluctance to enforce the law against them.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Contempt of Congress</span></b></p>
<p>Eric Holder has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law, but also contempt for Congress.  Holder&#8217;s contempt for the legitimate constitutional oversight authority of the Congress is so extreme, that the House of Representatives voted to find him in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012. Even House Democrats voted to find Holder in contempt of Congress.</p>
<p>After the vote, House Speaker John Boehner said, “But no Justice Department is above the law and no Justice Department is above the Constitution, which each of us has sworn to uphold.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Holder’s Justice Department behaves as if it is above the law, and appears to show no loyalty to the Constitution, oath or no oath to uphold it.</p>
<p>The contempt vote by the House was preceded by many months of attempting to obtain documents to find out the truth about the Fast and Furious gunrunning program concocted and managed by Holder’s Justice Department.   In Fast and Furious, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms allowed guns to be purchased in the United States for ultimate transportation into Mexico by drug cartels.  In Mexico, these guns were used to kill hundreds of Mexicans, and were also found where U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered.</p>
<p>While the DOJ was allowing guns to flow into Mexico, President Obama was complaining that American guns were killing Mexicans, and advocated for restrictions on the Second Amendment.  Naturally, Obama never bothered to tell anyone that Holder’s own Justice Department was responsible for the flow of weapons.</p>
<p>When the House Oversight Committee sought to obtain Justice Department documents about who developed this bloody scheme, Holder obstructed Congress.  The historic contempt finding against Holder formalizes what many Front Page readers have long known about the Attorney General of the United States: that he holds in low regard American traditions, norms and institutions.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Failure to Prosecute IRS Officials</span></b></p>
<p>Attorney General Holder has failed to prosecute a single IRS official that feloniously leaked private tax information of Tea Party and conservative groups to the media.  IRS officials have been shown to not only improperly have targeted conservative groups for heightened scrutiny for IRS 501(c)(3) tax exemption applications, but to have actually leaked the information contained in those applications to the political enemies of the applicants.</p>
<p>Consider IRS official Cindy Thomas.  Thomas is the manager of exempt organizations at the IRS office in Cincinnati.  Thomas illegally released the tax applications of nine conservative groups to the left-wing website ProPublica, an organization that includes President Obama’s old friend, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates.</p>
<p>Other leaks included information leaks against pro-marriage groups to radical gay-marriage groups.  Information contained in the IRS 501(c)(3) applications ended up in the hands of radical groups dedicated to defeating the pro-marriage groups.</p>
<p>These actions by IRS officials are federal felonies.  Holder has an obligation to have them investigated and charged, but instead has done nothing.  The victims of IRS abuse haven’t even been interviewed by the FBI.  FBI Director Robert Muller was completely unaware of the status of any DOJ investigation in testimony before Congress.  He couldn’t even name who was investigating the matter.</p>
<p>Moreover, prosecution of IRS leakers would be a simple matter.  Leaking information constitutes the crime.  It doesn’t not require the complicated burden of proving racial animus, as any federal prosecution of George Zimmerman would entail. Simply, for charges not to have been filed against an IRS official by now means Holder doesn’t seem to care much about the IRS targeting of conservative groups.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">DOJ Vendetta Against Fox News and James Rosen</span></b></p>
<p>Eric Holder authorized a criminal investigation against James Rosen of Fox News.  This provides an example where progressives often engage in projection.  During the Nixon years, the left would claim Nixon had a vendetta against certain reporters and used law enforcement against them.  We find the fulfillment of that plot in the age of Obama and Holder through the DOJ actions against Fox News.</p>
<p>James Rosen had reported on various national security issues.  These revelations angered the White House and the Justice Department launched a criminal investigation in response to the reports.  They sought to discover the sources behind Rosen’s reporting.</p>
<p>Under DOJ guidelines, the Attorney General must personally approve any subpoenas of news reporters.  When I was at the Justice Department, I sought and obtained the personal approval of the Attorney General in a matter I was investigating.  But before a subpoena can issue against a reporter, DOJ rules require a number of steps.</p>
<p>First, the DOJ must seek the information through less restrictive means.  So if it could identify the leaker without subpoenaing the papers of James Rosen, DOJ rules required them to do so. Second, the DOJ is supposed to try to work out an arrangement with the news organization.  But the Justice Department kept the investigation of Fox News secret, and so therefore never tried to “work out” any resolution.</p>
<p>Eric Holder was supposed to sign off on any press subpoena under DOJ guidelines.  This requirement ensures accountability and protects Americans from an out of control administrative state that can seek press subpoenas as a routine matter.  Yet Holder delegated this authority in the Rosen matter to a deputy.  He said, without a trace of irony, that the reason he did so is because the investigation also included interviews to determine if Holder himself was the source of the leak!</p>
<p>But merely authorizing criminal investigations against Fox News reporter James Rosen wasn’t the worst thing Eric Holder’s Justice Department would do in the saga.  The worst was yet to come.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Perjury Before Congress on Rosen Investigation</span></b></p>
<p>Eric Holder also lied before Congress about the Rosen matter.  On May 15, 2013, Holder was asked if he knew anything about investigations of reporters by his DOJ.</p>
<p>“With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy,” Holder said.</p>
<p>When Holder gave this testimony, he was “involved” in and “heard of” potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material.   Holder knew about various investigations of journalists and was involved in them.  His under-oath testimony before Congress was demonstrably false and misleading.  The House Judiciary Committee would issue a report reaching the same conclusion.</p>
<p>Eric Holder cannot be trusted to tell the truth, even when under oath and when the entire nation is watching him.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Manipulation of 2012 Elections and Opposition to Election Integrity</span></b></p>
<p>The gravest and most long lasting damage that Eric Holder has done to the nation is his manipulation of the electoral process, particularly before the 2012 presidential election.</p>
<p>Eric Holder allowed that election to take place with over 4,000,000 ineligible voters on the rolls.  The left-leaning Pew Foundation issued a report showing that voter rolls around the country were polluted with dead and ineligible voters.  Holder is obliged to enforce federal laws which require states to remove these ineligible voters from the rolls before a federal election.</p>
<p>Instead, Holder has a philosophical objection to these laws and he refuses to enforce them.  Failure to remove ineligible voters allows people to vote multiple times in multiple states.  It allows dead voters to remain on the rolls to be voted by family members or others who know they have died.  Felons who have not been removed from the rolls will also be allowed to cast illegal ballots.  Since Holder alone has power to prosecute federal election crimes, we cannot count on him to do anything about voter fraud in federal elections.</p>
<p>Consider Meloweese Richardson in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Richardson admitted on camera to news reporters that she voted multiple times for President Obama in 2012 and 2008.  She voted in the names of people who spent time at her house as well as family members.  She was unapologetic.</p>
<p>Voting twice for president is a federal crime.</p>
<p>Yet, to this day, Eric Holder has not prosecuted Richardson for violation of federal law.  After all, she voted for the President, and some people get breaks from this Attorney General, and others get threats.  It all depends on who you are or what you look like, not how you behaved.  It is true that Ohio brought charges against Richardson. But there are federal issues at stake separate from the state concerns.</p>
<p>The arrogance of Melowese Richardson is a symbol of what a nation with Attorney General Eric Holder will produce. Her brash unrepentant arrogance for voting six times for President Obama sounds like Eric Holder’s unrepentant testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Fast and Furious.</p>
<p>Like Richardson, even after Holder is found to be contemptuous of the law, there are no apologies.  At her sentencing, Richardson blustered that she did it all for her beloved President out of a deep allegiance.  Holder acts contemptuously toward Congress and the rule of law for the same reason.  It is all about power, power for President Obama and his revolutionary transformation of America.</p>
<p>Meloweese Richardson didn’t care if the law was perverted as long as President Obama held power – and neither does Holder.  If IRS officials committed federal crimes to target Tea Party groups, so be it.  They are the enemies of the progressive President and deserve a pass.  If the New Black Panthers violated federal civil rights laws, so be it.  They were fighting to stoke racial tensions and threaten an innocent man because of his race.  If Holder’s DOJ intimidates Fox News, so be it.  Fox News provides the most objective coverage of the Obama administration and deserve the pain.</p>
<p>Eric Holder is the Ivy League schooled lawyer representing the hopes and dreams of the progressive mob and race hustlers.  He displays the same contempt for the law as does the mob calling for racial vengeance. He is skilled at using power and position to protect political friends and harm political enemies.  Holder’s version of justice is foreign to these American shores, and to our American age.</p>
<p>Eric Holder is a menace to the rule of law and the individual liberty it protects.  He should not only be run out of his office, but hounded forever by liberty-loving Americans exposing his behavior until he is bereft of clients after he leaves the Justice Department.</p>
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