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<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Obama</title>
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		<title>Obama Frees a Nuclear Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-frees-a-nuclear-terrorist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-frees-a-nuclear-terrorist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:47:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mohammed Zahir]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[release]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Is there any terrorist Obama won’t free?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ws.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248323" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ws-284x350.jpg" alt="ws" width="213" height="263" /></a>Which terrorist will Obama set loose next from Gitmo? A better question might be is there any terrorist he won’t free? Is there an Al Qaeda or Taliban Jihadist who poses too much of a threat to the United States for Obama to free with a lot of airline miles and Michelle Obama’s recipe for arugula fruitcake?</p>
<p>If Obama has a red line when it comes to releasing terrorists, we haven’t seen it yet.</p>
<p>There appears to be no threat that a terrorist can pose and no crime he has committed too severe to prevent him from getting a plane trip out of Gitmo at taxpayer expense.</p>
<p>The last releases saw terrorists rated as high risk freed by Obama. They included fighters with experience on the battlefield and covert operations. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-christmas-gift-to-isis-and-al-qaeda/">Obama set loose a suicide bomber</a>, a document forger and a bomb maker who trained other terrorists to make bombs. Those are exactly the sorts of enemies whose license to Jihad will cost lives.</p>
<p>But that’s nothing compared to Obama’s latest gift to the Jihad.</p>
<p>When Mohammed Zahir was caught, among his possessions was found a small sealed can marked, in Russian, “Heavy Water U235 150 Grams.”</p>
<p>According to the classified report, the uranium had been identified by Zahir “in his memorandum as being intended for the production of an “atom bomb.”</p>
<p>Zahir was not just another captured Jihadist. He was the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate and was in contact with top leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His possessions included a fax with questions intended for Osama bin Laden and he had been arrested on suspicion of possessing Stinger missiles.</p>
<p>But that may not have even been the worst of it.</p>
<p>Among the items was a notebook containing references to large sugar shipments to Washington D.C. Investigators believed that sugar was used as a code word for heroin. The Black Sea stops mentioned in the notebook are major hubs for smuggling heroin and for nuclear smuggling as well.</p>
<p>Not only was Mohammed Zahir a terrorist kingpin, but he was also a drug kingpin and the notebook suggested that his eye was on the United States of America.</p>
<p>It was no wonder that Mohammad Zahir had been rated as posing a high risk, but Obama had already freed a number of other high risk Guantanamo Bay detainees. Yet Zahir was the closest thing to a major nuclear terrorist in United States custody. Freeing him was wildly irresponsible even by the standards of a leader who had sacrificed thousands of Americans in a futile effort to “win” Afghan hearts and minds.</p>
<p>Nor did Obama even bother with the plausible deniability of releasing him to a South American country, the way he had with his previous batch of ISIS recruits, or at least to Qatar. Instead Mohammed Zahir went back directly to the battlefield in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama couldn’t have done more without handing over the blueprints for constructing a nuclear bomb.</p>
<p>And yet it wasn’t surprising that Obama would free Mohammed Zahir. He had <a href="http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/12/4_gitmo_detainees_tr.php">already freed Zahir’s old boss</a>, the Taliban’s Deputy Minister of Intelligence, as well as another senior Taliban intel official under whom Zahir had used to work. It just happened to be Zahir’s turn.</p>
<p>If the other Gitmo detainees freed by Obama are deadly, Zahir was part of an effort to engage in the mass murder of Americans using weapons of mass destruction. Considering how many Gitmo detainees returned to terrorism once they were released, it is highly likely that Zahir will go on doing what he used to do and that American soldiers and civilians will end up paying the price for Obama’s license to Jihad.</p>
<p>Zahir wasn’t released on his own. Accompanying him back to the motherland of terror were Khi Ali Gul, who was linked to Al Qaeda’s Haqqani Network, Shawali Khan, the member of group that merged with Al Qaeda and Abdul Ghani, who had frequently bragged about his high rank in the Taliban and had participated in rocket and mine attacks on American soldiers.</p>
<p>These men were assessed as very dangerous. Like the last batch released, they’re almost certain to return to the industry of terror.</p>
<p>Even as <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/12/oops-u-s-offers-5-mil-reward-al-qaeda-terrorist-released-gitmo/">a $5 million bounty has been put on</a> the head of Ibrahim al-Rubaysh, a Gitmo terrorist released for rest and rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia, the same mistakes that led to his release continue to be made.</p>
<p>Ibrahim al-Rubaysh returned to play a leading role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Mohammed Zahir and his pals will have an even shorter trip to get back into the fight. They won’t even have to go through the charade of being rehabilitated before they return to their bloody trade.</p>
<p>With the release of the latest batch of Taliban figures, Obama is helping the Taliban rebuild its organizational structure at the top. Even while he’s declaring victory over the Taliban, he is helping the Taliban win.</p>
<p>And in the process he is sending dangerous men back into the fight. Men like Mohammed Zahir.</p>
<p>Mohammed Zahir may not go back to his old tasks of smuggling heroin to Washington D.C. or trying to assemble materials for an atomic bomb. Or this top Taliban intelligence official may decide to pick up where he left off. It’s bad enough that Obama is empowering Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb, but now he has also managed to aid the Taliban’s search for weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>Americans no longer expect the man in the White House not to release terrorists. We no longer expect him not to release dangerous terrorists who will go on to kill Americans. Now we also know that it’s useless to expect him not to release terrorists caught trying to assemble materials for a nuclear bomb.</p>
<p>We’ve tried to grade Obama on a curve when it comes to national security, but the curve just got nuked.</p>
<p>The very lowest possible expectation we can have of Obama is that he won’t release a nuclear terrorist. And even this lowest of all possible expectations proved too much for him to live up to.</p>
<p>Which terrorists will Obama release next? The answer appears to be all of them.</p>
<p>Obama had sought to take Osama alive so he could receive a trial in civilian court. The SEALS put a stop to that plan and to Osama, but if they hadn’t, then next week we might be seeing Osama bin Laden boarding a plane to Qatar or Afghanistan with a can of uranium tucked under one arm.</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>Return of the 1960s</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/return-of-the-1960s/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=return-of-the-1960s</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/return-of-the-1960s/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:47:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1960s]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shootings]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248435</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A dark past revived under America's Radical-in-Chief. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1379512720-OaklandCopCar2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248436" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1379512720-OaklandCopCar2.jpg" alt="1379512720-OaklandCopCar2" width="348" height="260" /></a>In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama signified that he represented a sea-change in the nature of American politics. Obama proclaimed that as a member of the younger generation — born in 1961, at the tail end of the baby boom — he no longer wanted to participate in the stale and tired politics of the 1960s. Instead, he wanted to thrust America forward into a &#8220;different kind of politics,&#8221; one beyond the &#8220;psychodrama of the baby-boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.&#8221;</p>
<p>Like most of what President Obama said, this turned out to be a lie. President Obama isn&#8217;t merely a reflection of 1960s politics. He represents a return to those ugly politics: the nastiness of anti-cop sentiment, the divisiveness of generalized anti-Western foreign policy, the idiocy of a war between the sexes and against the exclusivity of the traditional family structure. President Obama isn&#8217;t representative of a new breed. He is the child of the 1960s politics he once claimed to abhor.</p>
<p>Those politics, at least, had the excuse of an uglier America — one fresh with the wounds of Jim Crow, the sins of sexism, the controversy of Vietnam. Today&#8217;s 1960s reruns seem wildly out of context. But that&#8217;s the point: For the radicals of the 1960s, just as for the establishment Obamaites of today, context simply does not matter. When you are attempting to craft utopia, context is irrelevant — and human beings become either tools or obstacles toward the creation of that utopia. The vision never changes. Only the calendar does.</p>
<p>And so we&#8217;re watching racial tensions on a scale unseen since the 1970s play out across America — with the support of the political establishment. The images of police officers turning their backs on New York Mayor Bill De Blasio mirror the images of officers booing New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1972 at the funeral of Officer Rocco Laurie.</p>
<p>The images of rioters burning down Ferguson mirror the images of rioters burning down Detroit in 1967. Never mind that America of 2014 is not the America of 1967 or 1972 — if Obama and his allies have to recreate that chaotic era to forward their own political ends, they will.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re watching the foreign policy of the hard-left McGovernites re-establish itself, this time from the Oval Office. The images of Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., railing against the CIA on the floor of the Senate over the CIA&#8217;s use of enhanced interrogation techniques mirror the images of Senator Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., railing against the American military in the aftermath of the Winter Soldier hearings of 1971. The images of the Yazidis starving on mountaintops in Iraq mirror the images of Vietnamese rushing onto boats to escape the horrors of the communists in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re watching the divisive domestic politics of the social radicals reassert themselves. The images of failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis standing in pink sneakers to list the glories of late-term abortion mirror the images of Gloria Steinem blathering about &#8220;reproductive freedom&#8221; in 1971. The images of Nancy Pelosi touting freedom from &#8220;job lock&#8221; thanks to Obamacare mirror the images of President Johnson effectively doing the same thanks to the war on poverty.</p>
<p>President Obama and his ilk quest for a return to hopier, changier times — times like the 1960s. And so they will take us all back to the future. Sadly, our future will then be no more than a reversion to insanity of our past.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Glazov Gang 2014 Episode of the Year &#8212; Dinesh D&#8217;Souza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/glazov-gang-2014-episode-of-the-year-dinesh-dsouza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=glazov-gang-2014-episode-of-the-year-dinesh-dsouza</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:15:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alinsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dinesh D'Souza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248438</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The acclaimed conservative author and filmmaker discussed his stellar new book and motion picture.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dd.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248439" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dd.jpg" alt="dd" width="289" height="159" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This year’s<strong> Glazov Gang 2014 Episode of the Year Award</strong> goes to two special episodes &#8212; each of them joined by a stellar titan who is on the front-lines of the culture and terror war courageously defending our civilization&#8217;s freedom.</p>
<p>One of the winning episodes was with <a href="http://www.americathemovie.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Dinesh D’Souza</strong></a>, acclaimed conservative author and filmmaker who is the author of the book, <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-Imagine-World-without-Her/dp/162157203X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406272202&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=america+dinesh" target="_blank">America: Imagine a World Without Her</a> </strong>– which is also a<a href="http://www.americathemovie.com/" target="_blank"> <strong>major motion picture</strong></a>.</p>
<p>We are honored to present the special episode,<strong> “America: Imagine a World Without Her,”</strong> below.</p>
<p>Our other Glazov Gang 2014 episode award winner was with <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/glazov-gangs-2014-episode-of-the-year-geert-wilders/"><strong>Geert Wilders</strong></a> and ran in <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/glazov-gangs-2014-episode-of-the-year-geert-wilders/">yesterday&#8217;s issue</a>.</p>
<p>The Glazov Gang team extends special thanks to all of our guests, viewers and supporters and wishes all of them a happy, healthy and successful new year.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/h1DQjj1VxHw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Cuban Archipelago</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/the-cuban-archipelago/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-cuban-archipelago</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:17:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oppression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248186</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A reflection on the suffering of the Cuban people under a vicious communist tyranny.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cubaprison.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248187" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cubaprison-450x296.jpg" alt="cubaprison" width="307" height="202" /></a><strong class="alignleft  wp-image-248187"><br />
</strong></p>
<p><em>Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.</em></p>
<p>—Che Guevara, <em>Motorcycle Diaries</em></p>
<p>President Obama’s <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/" target="_blank">recent move</a> to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/">an economic lifeline</a> to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag &#8212; and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro&#8217;s fascistic regime.</p>
<p>Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.</p>
<p>Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.</p>
<p>Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]</p>
<p>The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, <em>Against All Hope</em>, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s <em>Gulag Archipelago. </em>Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]</p>
<p>Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]</p>
<p>Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of <em>the individual</em>, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]</p>
<p>The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]</p>
<p>The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar:</p>
<blockquote><p> The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.[viii]</p></blockquote>
<p>Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidel’s torture.</p>
<p>Maj. James Kasler was another of Fidel’s victims, although he survived the treatment:</p>
<blockquote><p> He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his “buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds.” During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . . the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it.[ix]</p></blockquote>
<p>The reign of terror against American POWs in Vietnam was just a reflection of Castro’s treatment of his own people. In addition to physical hardships even for those who don’t wind up in prison or labor camp, Cuba&#8217;s police state has denied Cubans any freedom at all. Cubans do not have the right to travel out of their country. They do not have the right of free association or the right to form political parties, independent unions, or religious or cultural organizations. The regime has outlawed free expression; it has consistently censored publications, radio, television, and film. There is a Committee for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution (CDR) for every single city block and every agricultural production unit. The CDR’s purpose is to monitor the affairs of every family and to report anything suspicious. A Cuban’s entire life is spent under the surveillance of his CDR, which controls everything from his food rations to his employment to his use of free time. A vicious racism against blacks accompanies this repression. In pre-Castro Cuba, blacks enjoyed upward social mobility and served in many government positions. In Castro’s Cuba, the jail population is 80 percent black, while the government hierarchy is 100 percent white.[x]</p>
<p>Cuban Communism follows Lenin’s and Stalin’s idea of “equality,” wherein members of the <em>nomenklatura</em> live like millionaires while ordinary Cubans live in utter poverty. The shelves in the stores are empty, and food is tightly rationed for the average citizen. Teachers and doctors drive taxis or work as waiters to support their families. Under the system of tourist apartheid, ordinary Cubans are not allowed inside the hotels designated for tourists and party functionaries. There are, of course, police inside every such hotel to arrest any unauthorized Cuban citizen who dares to enter.</p>
<p>The $5-billion-a-year Soviet subsidy that just barely kept the Cuban economy afloat during the Cold War is long gone. And notwithstanding the $110 billion that the Soviets pumped in over the decades, Cuba has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Its sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries were all major sources of exports in the pre-Castro era. Castro destroyed them all.[xi] Because of his belief in “socialism or death,” Cuba is now a beggar nation. Even Haitian refugees avoid Cuba.</p>
<p>Denied the right to vote under Castro, Cubans have voted with their feet. Pre-Castro Cuba had the highest per-capita immigration rate in the Western hemisphere. Under Castro, approximately two million Cuban citizens (out of eleven million) have escaped their country. Many have done so by floating on rafts or inner tubes in shark-infested waters. An estimated fifty thousand to eighty-seven thousand have lost their lives.[xii]</p>
<p>Not content to trust the sharks, Castro has sent helicopters to drop sandbags onto the rafts of would-be escapees, or just to gun them all down. Epitomizing this barbarity was the Tugboat Massacre of July 13, 1994, in which Castro ordered Cuban patrol boats to kill forty-one unarmed Cuban civilians—ten of them children—who were using an old wooden tugboat in their attempt to flee Cuba.[xiii]</p>
<p>These are the heart-breaking stories, and only a few among many, of the Cuban people who have suffered excruciating pain and agony under an evil tyranny that now, as it stands on its last legs, is having <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/">its life extended</a> by an American president.</p>
<p>It is food for thought.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p>[i] For one of the best accounts of the brutality of the Castro regime, see Pascal Fontaine, “Cuba: Interminable Totalitarianism in the Tropics,” in Courtois et al., <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, pp. 647–665.</p>
<p>[ii] Armando Valladares, <em>Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag</em>, trans. Andrew Hurley (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 137.</p>
<p>[iii] Ibid., p. 379.</p>
<p>[iv] For China’s case, see chapter 7 of my book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/product-description/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a></em>; for Cambodia’s, see John Perazzo, “Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot,” <em>FrontPageMag.com</em>, August 8, 2005.</p>
<p>[v] Valladares, <em>Against All Hope</em>, p. 378.</p>
<p>[vi] Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, chapter 19, “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” in <em>Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973</em> (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999).</p>
<p>[vii] Humberto Fontova, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fidel-Hollywoods-Favorite-Humberto-Fontova/dp/0895260433/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1419483023&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=humberto+fontova+fidel"><em>Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant</em></a>, (Regnery, 2005). pp. 141–142.</p>
<p>[viii] Rochester and Kiley, <em>Honor Bound</em>, p. 400.</p>
<p>[ix] Ibid., p. 404.</p>
<p>[x] Fontova, <em>Fidel</em>, p. 88.</p>
<p>[xi] Ibid., pp. 14–15 and 49.</p>
<p>[xii] Ibid., pp. 8 and 56–57.</p>
<p>[xiii] Ibid., pp. 157–163.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>To get the whole story on why leftists venerate Castro&#8217;s tyranny, order Jamie Glazov&#8217;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/product-description/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left&#8217;s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a>:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/un.jpg"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-248192 size-medium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/un-450x299.jpg" alt="un" width="450" height="299" /></a></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>Sanction Relief Empowering the Mullahs, Not Citizens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/sanction-relief-empowering-the-mullahs-not-citizens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sanction-relief-empowering-the-mullahs-not-citizens</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:10:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A year later, the verdict is in on Obama's dirty deal with Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_2677161b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248111" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_2677161b-450x350.jpg" alt="iran_2677161b" width="319" height="248" /></a>There has always been an argument claiming that economic sanctions normally do not yield any result due to the notion that economic sanctions do not target the ruling elite and governmental official, but the ordinary people. This argument is partially accurate.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we need to remember that some targeted economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic (particularly the sanctions in oil and gas sectors and financial and bank institutions) did endanger the hold on power of the ruling cleric in Iran, particularly the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That was the primary reason behind pushing the Iranian politicians to come to the negotiation table in nuclear talks.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the other side of the argument is that if economic sanctions are lifted, the major beneficiaries would be the ordinary people and the civilians. This argument would be accurate if the political and economic system of the given state is democratic, allows open opportunities for all, encourages the private sector, allows transparency, and holds those corrupt officials who commit illegal economic dealings accountable.</p>
<p>The Iranian political and economic system is devoid of the aforementioned standards. In fact, in states which the political system is mainly authoritarian or theocratic, and the economic system is monopolized by few people at top and is state controlled, any increase of wealth or flow of money will inevitably strengthening the ruling elite rather than the ordinary people.</p>
<p>To substantiate this argument, let us take a look on the ground in the Islamic Republic after the sanctions relief.</p>
<p>At the beginning, a majority of Iranian people were hoping that economic sanctions relief would alleviate their suffering, improve their standards of living, and push many families above the poverty line. Almost a year has passed since the Iranian government has been receiving sanctions relief.</p>
<p>After the interim nuclear deal and extension of the negotiations between the six world powers (known as the P5+1: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the Islamic Republic, the Iranian government had received an estimated $7 billion.  Iran continues to receive approximately $700 million every month under the extension deal.</p>
<p>In addition, there has been some sanction suspension with respects to some of Iran’s major industries, including Iran’s auto sector, gold and precious metals, as well as Iran’s petrochemical exports. The Iranian currency, the rial, has appreciated due to the sanctions relief, Iran’s oil and non-oil exports have <a href="http://ameinfo.com/blog/finance-and-economy/irans-non-oil-exports-increase-28-per-cent/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">increased</span></a>, its economy is showing signs of stabilization, Tehran’s stock exchange has soared and Iran’s exports and business dealings with several countries have ratcheted up.</p>
<p>The suspension of sanctions has definitely given both psychological and financial support to the Iranian government.  But the real question is how this money is being spent and which institutions benefit primarily from this sanctions relief. Are ordinary people benefiting from these sanctions relief and flow of money?</p>
<p>Nevertheless, some Iranian civilians have begun to believe that even economic sanctions relief or even the lifting of the whole economic sanctions regime from the Iranian government are not going to assist civilians, their financial day-to-day activities, or bring concrete changes on the ground.</p>
<p>Four major institutions are benefiting mostly from the economic sanctions relief: Iran’s military-industrial complex, the Office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a few top business figures who are connected with the government, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), through either legal and <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">illegal</span></a> imports and exports.</p>
<p>For example, the IRGC controls and owns a considerable amount of shares in the aforementioned industries which have witnessed sanctions relief. In the petrochemical industry, The IRGC military-industrial complex <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">owns</span></a> Zagros Petrochemicals; 40% of Pars Petrochemical Company, part of Arak Petrochemicals; 25% of Kermanshah Petrochemicals; as well as 19% of the shares of Maroun Petrochemicals.</p>
<p>This phenomenon of the monopolization of the economy applies in other sectors of Iran’s economy as well.  When it comes to Iran’s economic system, the Supreme Leader and IRGC do have a considerable amount of control and shares in almost all industries <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">including</span></a> financial institutions and banks, the transportation industry, automobile manufacturing, mining, commerce, and oil and gas sectors.</p>
<p>As a result, these types of sanctions relief will mostly benefit the ruling elite, primarily the Supreme Leader and Iran’s military-industrial complex, IRGC. Iranian people will hardly observe any benefits from this economic sanctions relief or lifting of economic sanctions.</p>
<p>It appears that the easing of sanctions are strengthening the ruling elite without any sign of redistribution of wealth. This is predominantly due to the fact Iran’s economic system is a state and military controlled system, it lacks transparency, as well as the reality that it is crippled with <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1144661.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">widespread corruption</span></a> by the ruling elite and few on top.</p>
<p>If the intention of economic sanctions relief is to assist the Iranian people and alleviate their suffering, there ought to be more efficient approaches to develop some types of targeted sanctions relief (for example, being directed at Iran’s educational system, health care, etc.) which aim at empowering Iranian civilians and primarily the middle class.</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>New Left Totalitarians Celebrate Castro&#8217;s Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/new-left-totalitarians-celebrate-castros-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-left-totalitarians-celebrate-castros-victory</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2014 05:20:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Tom Hayden hails Obama for completing the objectives of the Cuban "Revolution." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/518024350_15_ov1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247968" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/518024350_15_ov1-406x350.jpg" alt="518024350_15_ov1" width="324" height="279" /></a>“I first went to Cuba in January 1968, during the height of revolutionary aspirations,” writes New Left celebrity Tom Hayden in “50 Years Later It’s Time for Closure,” a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article4699068.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Dec. 21 oped piece in the <i>Sacramento Bee</i></span></a>. On recent visits Hayden hung out with Cuba’s former minister of foreign affairs Ricardo Alarcon, and that inspired Hayden to write the forthcoming <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>. Meanwhile, Tom Hayden is excited about recent moves by President Obama.</p>
<p>“The Cuban Revolution has achieved its aim,” Hayden explains, “recognition of the sovereign right of its people to revolt against the Yankee Goliath and survive as a state in a sea of global solidarity.” Further, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a decade of American triumphalism based on the mistaken belief that the Cuban state would collapse like East Germany. We underestimated Cuban nationalism.”</p>
<p>However, “a sticking point on the U.S. side was the persistent funding of ‘democracy promotion,’ or our secret efforts to promote a more open society.” Hayden further explains that Alan Gross “was a covert agent, not a home appliance distributor.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Cuban spies </span>Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez, were all tried and imprisoned in the United States for gathering intelligence on U.S. air bases. They also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/pastors-for-peaces-shameful-visit-to-cuba/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and tipped off the Castro regime</span></a>, which scrambled MIG fighters and downed one of the Brothers’ unarmed planes, killing four people. Tom Hayden’s take is rather different: “<span style="color: #000000;">The Cuban Five were protecting Cuba’s security from us, not acting as terrorists.”</span></p>
<p>Hayden contends that key episodes in Cuban history are “best recalled” through Francis Ford Coppola’s <i>The Godfather: Part II.</i> Fortunately, American viewers can gain knowledge of Cuba in films by actual Cubans that cover events Tom Hayden and Ricardo Alarcon prefer to avoid.</p>
<p>When Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa returned from his military campaign in Africa, “8A,” a play on his name, began to appear on walls all over the island. Long oppressed Cubans believed the popular general was the only one with a chance to topple Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship. Fidel knew it too. He held a show trial for Ochoa and put it on satellite television. Cuban filmmaker Orlando Jimenez Leal taped it and made the documentary “8A.”</p>
<p>Viewers can see the regime’s lawyers demanding that their clients get the death penalty. Fidel Castro agreed and on July 12, 1989 duly carried out the sentence by firing squad, just like back in the revolutionary days. No appeal process, and no more threat from Arnaldo Ochoa.</p>
<p>In “Improper Conduct” Jimenez Leal and cinematographer Nestor Almendros portrayed the Castro regime’s repressions against political dissidents, journalists, poets and homosexuals. The <i>New York Times</i> called the film “convincing” and former Castro supporter Susan Sontag said “The discovery that homosexuals were being persecuted in Cuba shows how much the Left needs to evolve.”</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what Tom Hayden says about this in his new book <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>. In the meantime, readers might consult books written by actual Cubans.</p>
<p>In <i>Against All Hope</i>, which has been compared to Arthur Koestler’s <i>Darkness at Noon</i>, Cuban dissident Armando Valladares charts 20 years in Castro’s prisons, and the violence he and other political prisoners suffered. Arrested in 1960, Valladares was not freed until 1982. This came through the efforts of French president Francois Mitterand and human rights organizations. A ballpark figure for the number of Cuban dissidents the American New Left has supported is zero.</p>
<p>In <i>Family Portrait with Fidel</i>, Carlos Franqui charts the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1964. Franqui broke ranks over Fidel’s shift to Soviet Communism, after which “nothing worked.” The privations of the regime get extensive treatment in Heberto Padilla’s novel, <i>Heroes are Grazing in My Garden</i>.</p>
<p>In <i>The Longest Romance,</i> Humberto Fontova calculates that between 65,000 and 85,000 people have died trying to escape Cuba, 30 times the number of Berlin Wall casualties. Cuba’s prison population is 90 percent black and includes Eusebio Penlaver, “the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner.” That wasn’t a sticking point for Barack Obama.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/">Tom Hayden recently showed up in <i>Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton</i>.</a></span> Author Lee Ellis was shot down over North Vietnam, imprisoned and tortured. Americans were kept in cages with their legs tied together and arms laced behind the back until the elbows touched and shoulders pulled out of joint. Some Americans were kept awake for two weeks and beaten, but the treatment wasn’t just physical.</p>
<p>As Ellis explains, the prison guards piped in propaganda broadcasts by Tom Hayden, a “regular speaker” who supported the regime and said the reports of torture were nothing but lies.  Given that record, Cuban prisons may soon ring with readings from <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>, by Tom Hayden.</p>
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		<title>Obama: Against Free Speech Before He Was For It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:08:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[As long as Muslims aren’t offended, he’s a free speech champion.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247885" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_-406x350.jpg" alt="gall.obama" width="302" height="260" /></a><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/19/sony-the-interview-hackers-gop/20635449/">As far as Barack Obama is concerned,</a></span> Sony was wrong to capitulate to threats from North Korean hackers and pull the movie <i>The Interview</i>. “I wish they had spoken to me first,” said the free speech champion. “I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Remember: this is the same man who <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/remarks-president-un-general-assembly"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said this</span></a> at the United Nations on September 25, 2012.  “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”</p>
<p>Why did he say this? Because he was blaming a video about Muhammad for the murderous jihad attacks on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. In that same speech, he called the video “crude and disgusting” and said: “I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”</p>
<p>Yet this was just empty verbiage. Before he made that speech, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/white-house-innocence-of-_n_1885684.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Obama White House asked Google to remove the Muhammad video from YouTube</span></a>. In fact, this was one of the first things the White House did, even as the Benghazi jihad attack was still going on. <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/05/white-house-contacted-youtube-during-benghazi-attack-darrell-issa-says/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ABC News</span></a> reported that “a still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway — and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened — the White House believed it was in retaliation for a &#8220;controversial video.”</p>
<p>And it didn’t just believe this – it acted upon this belief. An email circulated among Obama Administration officials while the attack was still going on, entitled, “Update on Response to actions – Libya,” stated: “White House is reaching out to U-Tube [sic] to advice ramification of the posting of the Pastor Jon video.”</p>
<p>So the first thing Obama did in response to the Benghazi jihad attack was move to restrict the freedom of speech, and protect Muslims from material that some of them found offensive. Google refused this preposterous and unconstitutional request on free speech grounds, although later a court ordered the video removed.</p>
<p>In those days, Obama never warned anyone not to “get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the most ominous aspect of the Benghazi jihad attack for the long term health of the United States as a free society was the Obama Administration’s desire to blame it all on our freedom of speech. Obama’s declaration that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” was essentially a call for the U.S. to censor itself and voluntarily restrict our freedom of speech so as not to say anything that offends Muslims.</p>
<p>Yet restriction of the freedom of speech creates a protected class (whichever group cannot be criticized), thereby destroying the principle of equality of rights for all people before the law, and paves the way for tyranny by making it possible to criminalize dissent.</p>
<p>But now that a free speech case doesn’t have to do with outraged Muslims, Obama is suddenly a champion of free expression. This isn’t about endangering people, either: the North Koreans are just as capable of going on a bloody rampage as Islamic jihadists are.</p>
<p>For whatever reason, Obama shows a strange solicitude for the sensibilities of Muslims that he doesn’t appear interested in offering to the North Koreans. And as long as he opposes the freedom of speech in any context, his support for it in any other context rings hollow.</p>
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		<title>Obama Comes to Castro&#8217;s Rescue</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/obama-comes-to-castros-rescue/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-comes-to-castros-rescue</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:06:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[embargo]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247879</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The U.S. becomes the new patron of a monstrous communist regime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/castro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247880" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/castro-450x311.jpg" alt="U.S. President Obama greets Cuban President Castro at the memorial service for Mandela in Johannesburg" width="285" height="197" /></a>Did you notice the timing of  President Obama’s economic lifeline to Castro as announced on December 17<sup>th</sup> under the guise of “changing [our] relations with the <i>people </i>[emphasis mine] of Cuba?”</p>
<p>No? But you <i>have </i>noticed the price at the gas pumps, right? These two items are closely related. Oh, and by the way, every atom of evidence shows that the actual <i>people </i>of Cuba actually want U.S. sanctions against the Stalinist regime that tortures them <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/06/over-830-cuban-democracy-activists-sign.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">tightened</span></a>. So perhaps President Obama should stop insulting the intelligence of Cuba-watchers by claiming to speak and act on their behalf.  Here’s their reaction to this week’s early Christmas gift from Obama to the Stalinist dictator who tortures them:</p>
<p>&#8220;Sadly, President Obama made the wrong decision. The freedom and democracy of the Cuban people will not be achieved through these benefits that he&#8217;s giving &#8212; not to the Cuban people &#8212; but to the Cuban government. The Cuban government will only take advantage to strengthen its repressive machinery, to repress civil society, its people and remain in power.&#8221;  (Berta Soler, leader of &#8220;The Ladies in White,&#8221;<i> </i>Cuba’s biggest dissident group.</p>
<p>“[Alan Gross] was not arrested for what he did, but for what could be gained from his arrest. He was simply bait and they were aware of it from the beginning<i>&#8230; </i>Castroism has won.” (Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s most internationally famous dissident.)</p>
<p>&#8220;I feel as though I have been abandoned on the battlefield.&#8221; (Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet<b>, </b>former Cuban political prisoner awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.)</p>
<p>The list of back-stabbed and outraged Cuban dissidents <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/12/cuban-dissident-leaders-react-to-obamas.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">is much, much longer.</span></a></p>
<p>At any rate, Cuba’s post-Soviet sugar-daddy (Venezuela) is currently in dire economic straits from the precipitous plunge in the price of oil, Venezuela’s top export. Their economic lifeline to the Castro regime looks shaky, hence the “Here I come to save the day!” by President Obama.</p>
<p>But let’s face it. Castro’s Stalinist regime has jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands (including some U.S. citizens) for over half a decade and most Americans don’t seem to give a flying flip. Fine. So let’s consult yet another Cuban dissident who actually serves up some red meat.  Let’s notify Joe Sixpack and Soccer Mom (who quite understandably find all this human-rights stuff regarding a foreign country utterly irrelevant) that maybe it’s time to pay closer attention to the issue:</p>
<p>“If the U.S. allows financing towards Cuba, it will be the U.S. taxpayers who would sustain the Castro regime<i>. </i>Since it has run out of doors to knock on [for credit], the Castro regime is now focused on the United States.&#8221;<i>  </i>(Cuban dissident and three-time Amnesty-International prisoner of conscience Rene Gomez Manzanoin.)</p>
<p>Well, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the farm lobby, Council on Foreign Relations and Castro’s agents of influence (but I repeat myself) understandably avoid this issue like the plague, hence its invisibility in the mainstream media. So please listen up: For over a decade the so-called U.S. embargo, so disparaged by President Obama, has mostly stipulated that Castro’s Stalinist regime pay <i>cash up front</i> through a third-party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Ex-Im (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. And that’s what infuriates Castro, and motivates his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>U.S. agents of influence.</i></span></a><i> </i></p>
<p>Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, this cash-up-front policy has been monumentally beneficial to U.S. taxpayers, making them among the few in the world not rooked by the Castro regime, which per capita-wise qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation, with a foreign debt estimated at $50 billion, a credit rating nudging Somalia’s and an uninterrupted record of defaults. Standard &amp; Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by its Stalinist apparatchiks as utterly bogus. Just this year the Russians wrote off almost $30 billion Castro still owed them.</p>
<p>Interesting that a Cuban dissident should plumb this matter more accurately than those “champions of the U.S. taxpayers,” Rand Paul and Jeff Flake, who loudly applauded President Obama’s Christmas present to Castro this week. From the White House “Fact Sheet; Charting a New Course on Cuba”:</p>
<p>* U.S. institutions will be permitted to open correspondent accounts at Cuban financial institutions to facilitate the processing of authorized transactions.</p>
<p>* The regulatory definition of the statutory term “cash in advance” <i>will be revised to specify that it means “cash before transfer of title”; this will provide more efficient financing of authorized trade with Cuba.</i></p>
<p>Whoops! Though still a bit sketchy, it certainly sounds like we’re moving in the direction Rene Gomez warned against. This matter was recently explained in more detail by a Townhall columnist on Canada’s <a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/3949008632001"><span style="color: #0433ff;">SunNews network.</span></a></p>
<p>Obama claims we’ve been “isolating” Cuba. Again, stop insulting our intelligence, Mr. President. To wit:</p>
<p>In 1957 when Cuba was a “U.S. economic colony,” as we’re constantly told by the media (though U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 per cent the island’s GNP), the U.S. exported $347.5 million worth of goods to Cuba.</p>
<p>In 2013 (when Cuba was being “strangled by a U.S. economic blockade,” was we’re constantly told by the media) the U.S. exported $457.3 million to Cuba. In fact for every year Obama has been in office the “Cuba-embargoing” U.S. has exported more goods to Cuba than it did in 1957.</p>
<p>In 1957 (when Cuba was a “playground for U.S. tourists,” as we’re constantly told by the media) 263,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S</p>
<p>In 2013 (when Cuba was being diabolically “blockaded” by the U.S., according to the media) an estimated 500,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S.  So under Obama <i>twice as many people</i> are visiting Cuba as in the golden 1950s.</p>
<p>In 1958 with Cuba under a “U.S.-backed dictator,” with the U.S. “controlling Cuba’s economy,” (according to the media, though in fact, U.S. companies employed 7 percent of Cuba’s workforce) the staff of the U.S. embassy in Cuba numbered 87, including Cuban employees.</p>
<p>Today with supposedly no diplomatic relations with Cuba (according to the media) the staff of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana numbers 351, including Cuban employees. In fact, for well over a decade the U.S. has had <i>twice </i>as many diplomatic personnel in Havana as Canada and Mexico <i>combined.</i> In the Twilight Zone occupied by the U.S. media this is termed “diplomatic isolation.”</p>
<p>In executive order after executive order, President Obama has already abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba last year was estimated at $4 billion a year. While a proud Soviet satrapy Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets. In brief, almost every year since Obama took office more cash has been flowing from the U.S. to Cuba than used to flow there from the Soviets at the height of their Cuba-sponsorship. In the Twilight Zone occupied by the mainstream media this is known as an “economic embargo.”</p>
<p>In sum, the proof is long in: record tourism and foreign investment into Cuba = record repression for the Cuban people. Every shred of observable evidence proves that travel to Cuba and business with its Stalinist mafia enriches and entrenches these KGB-trained and heavily-armed owners of Cuba’s economy. Thus they remain the most highly motivated guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist and Terror-Sponsoring status-quo.</p>
<p>This week they’re all toasting Obama, snickering and rubbing their hands. So <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">grab your wallets, amigos.</span></a></p>
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		<title>Senators Vow to Halt Obama&#8217;s Castro Odyssey</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/senators-vow-to-halt-cuban-relations-thawsenators-vow-to-halt-obamas-castro-odyssey/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=senators-vow-to-halt-cuban-relations-thawsenators-vow-to-halt-obamas-castro-odyssey</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:58:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247801</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But is Congress a match for the president's pen and phone?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-on-cuba.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247802" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-on-cuba-450x300.jpg" alt="Barack Obama" width="375" height="250" /></a>Lawmakers opposed to President Obama&#8217;s sudden move to cozy up to Communist Cuba are vowing a full-court press to prevent official diplomatic recognition of the tropical prison republic from going forward.</p>
<p>But it is far from clear if lawmakers will be able to do much about Obama&#8217;s Cuban escapades. Presidents typically enjoy great latitude in foreign policy, especially concerning recognition of foreign governments. Lawmakers are probably on stronger ground in resisting repeal of the trade embargo that has been in place since the 1960s. On the other hand, Obama has a pen and a phone, as he likes to say, a reference to his brazen contempt for the rule of law and the strictures of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s dramatic actions are setting off a feeding frenzy as American companies salivate at the prospect of doing business in Cuba. Little do they realize that Cuba, a dilapidated Stalinist state that, thanks to the absence of good paying jobs, serves largely as a seedy sex tourism destination for Europeans and hardly has an economy at all. Some business restrictions were already eased by the U.S. around 2000. Some companies are allowed to sell medical equipment to the Cuban government. There is not much money to be made, at least not initially.</p>
<p>Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who are both of Cuban ancestry, have made strong statements about their intentions.</p>
<p>Rubio said it mattered not a whit to him if &#8220;99 percent of people in polls&#8221; disagreed with his position. &#8220;Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama&#8217;s naivete during his final two years in office.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rubio said he reserved the right &#8220;to do everything within the rules of the Senate to prevent that sort of individual from ever even coming up for a vote,&#8221; a reference to confirmation proceedings for a prospective U.S. ambassador to Cuba.</p>
<p>Menendez said he was &#8220;deeply disappointed&#8221; and that it was &#8220;a fallacy to believe that Cuba will reform because an American president opens his hands and the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists.&#8221;</p>
<p>The chill in relations between the two countries has its roots in the Cold War.</p>
<p>Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose forces overthrew the comparatively mild authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, tried to start a nuclear war with the United States and in 1963 openly called for the assassination of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general. War was only narrowly averted after the Soviet Union turned around ships that were carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba. A short time later one of Castro&#8217;s followers, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as Angola. President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.</p>
<p>Many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are saying Obama is a weak leader.</p>
<p>For example, former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that Obama&#8217;s moves on Cuba constitute &#8220;appeasement&#8221; and are a &#8220;very, very bad signal of weakness and lack of resolve by the president of the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>Bolton and others are correct in terms of how the U.S. is perceived abroad under Obama but this does not reflect weak leadership on Obama&#8217;s part. This president knows what he is doing and when given the opportunity to do the right thing reliably chooses to do the wrong thing. Obama is taking the country&#8217;s foreign policy in exactly the right direction in terms of his sinister ideology. Obama does not mean well. He does not, unlike traditional U.S. presidents, think of himself as the leader of the free world. He wants to fundamentally transform America inside and out and is quite content to enfeeble the nation by crippling its military, betraying its allies, and embracing its enemies.</p>
<p>All of this excitement follows the sudden release Wednesday of Alan Gross, a U.S. development worker held in a Cuban prison. (An intelligence operative loyal to the U.S. was also released as part of the deal. Details about that individual are scarce.) Gross is a garden-variety leftist who is being used by President Obama to justify establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.</p>
<p>Obama is repaying a debt to his Marxist friends and allies. Just as President Bill Clinton rewarded his neo-communist supporters by pardoning Marxist Puerto Rican terrorists, Obama is rewarding his Castro-admiring base by freeing Communist spies working for a hostile foreign power.</p>
<p>Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is frequently a home for meddling left-wing activists. He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving Internet access for Cuban Jews. Why the Obama administration would knowingly send an American into Cuba to perform services they had to have known were considered illegal by Cuban authorities is not clear. The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, sentencing him to a 15-year prison term.</p>
<p>Under a deal that Pope Francis, among others, helped to facilitate, Gross was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/17/meet-the-cuban-five-at-the-center-of-the-blockbuster-u-s-announcement-on-cuba/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exchanged</span></a> for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five &#8212; Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino &#8212; who had been held in U.S. prisons.  All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001. They gathered information on Cuban exiles in the U.S. in order to lay the ground for violent action against them in the future. Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.</p>
<p>As Gross prepared for his press conference Wednesday, there was a portrait of  Communist mass murderer Che Guevara <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/17/why-does-freed-cuban-prisoners-lawyer-have-a-picture-of-che-on-his-wall/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">clearly visible</span></a> in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross&#8217;s lawyer, high-profile attorney Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP. The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank. He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro&#8217;s regime to death. In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba&#8217;s most infamous jailer stared down at him.</p>
<p>Guevara, incidentally, wanted to annihilate the United States.</p>
<p>&#8220;If the nuclear missiles [from the missile crisis] had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the press conference Gross maligned the U.S., <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/12/17/Freed-Prisoner-Alan-Gross-Slams-Two-Governments-Mutually-Belligerent-Policies"><span style="color: #0433ff;">pulling</span></a> a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt. Gross drew a moral equivalency between the U.S. and the ruthless authoritarian regime he just escaped:</p>
<blockquote><p>I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba. In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected. To me <i>cubanos</i>,<i> </i>or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented. <strong><i>It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments&#8217; mutually belligerent policies.  Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment. Two wrongs never make a right. I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today.</i></strong> It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months. In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support. [Emphasis added.]</p></blockquote>
<p>Who condemns his own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get him repatriated from the clutches of a dictatorship? And why would he use his opportunity in the spotlight to praise President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the regime that he believes unjustly imprisoned him?</p>
<p>The whole thing doesn&#8217;t smell right. Clearly it was in the works for a long time.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, Gross thanked Jill Zuckman of left-wing PR firm SKDKnickerbocker for helping to free him. SKDKnickerbocker also employs former resident Maoist in the Obama White House, Anita Dunn, and Democrat operative Hilary Rosen. Gross also thanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Communist-friendly lawmakers Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for freeing him.</p>
<p>Those who follow President Obama&#8217;s policy initiatives already know that he delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America. Not so long ago there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban&#8217;s high command.  Not exactly a good deal for America.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s next for Obama, who is hellbent to knock America down a few pegs?</p>
<p>Diplomatic recognition for Iran? At first glance such a development might seem unlikely, but Obama does harbor deep affection for hardline Islamic states. He aided Mohamed Morsi&#8217;s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and during anti-government unrest that began in Iran in 2009, Obama effectively propped up the Islamist regime there by doing nothing to oppose it.</p>
<p>Anything could happen with Obama in his final two years in the White House.</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 Revolution in America &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-revolution-in-america-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-revolution-in-america-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:10:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247711</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Tearing the foundation down from every angle.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247720" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama2-450x319.jpg" alt="obama2" width="276" height="196" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by <strong>Michael Finch</strong>, the president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He was joined by <b>Morgan Brittany</b>, Conservative TV and Movie Star, <b>Nonie Darwish,</b> author of “The Devil We Don’t Know” and <b>Mell Flynn,</b> the president of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.</span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"></span></p>
<p>The <em>Gang</em> gathered to discuss <strong>Obama&#8217;s Revolution in America</strong>, analyzing how the Radical-in-Chief is tearing the foundations of the country down from every angle (<strong>starts at the 9:30 mark</strong>). The episode also focused on <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><em>Feinstein&#8217;s Destructive Torture Charade</em>, </span></span><em>Ferguson and an Arsonist-in-Chief</em>, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DqDUXbeFDmk" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss the<strong> Glazov Gang&#8217;s special episode</strong> with<strong> Geert Wilders</strong> on &#8220;<strong>The West&#8217;s Battle for Freedom</strong>.&#8221;</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/69-nah7rIOc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Bailout for Communist Dictators</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247702</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Americans will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal with Castro.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Getty_121013_ObamaCastro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247703" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Getty_121013_ObamaCastro-416x350.jpg" alt="Mandela memorial service (30)" width="289" height="243" /></a>The Soviet Union did not have to fall. If Carter had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him, the Communist dictatorship might have received the outside help it needed to survive.</p>
<p>And we would still be living under the shadow of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Carter couldn’t save the Soviet Union, but he did <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2011/04/02/jimmy_carter_charms_the_castro_brothers_in_havana/page/full"><span style="color: #0433ff;">his best to save Castro</span></a>, visiting Fidel and Raul in Cuba where the second worst president in American history described his meeting with Castro as a greeting among “old friends”.</p>
<p>Raul Castro called Carter “the best of all U.S. presidents.”</p>
<p>Obama’s dirty deal with Raul will make the worst president in American history, Castro’s new best friend.</p>
<p>Carter couldn’t save Castro, but Obama did. This was not a prisoner exchange. This was a Communist bailout.</p>
<p>Obama boasted that he would increase the flow of money to Cuba from businesses, from bank accounts and from trade. When he said, “We’re significantly increasing the amount of money that can be sent to Cuba”, that was his real mission statement.</p>
<p>The Castro regime is on its last legs. Its sponsors in Moscow and Caracas are going bankrupt due to failing energy prices. The last hope of the Butcher of Havana was a bailout from Washington D.C.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what Obama gave him.</p>
<p>Obama has protected the Castros from regime change as if Communist dictators are an endangered species.</p>
<p>From the beginning, Obama put his foreign policy at the disposal of Havana when he backed Honduran leftist thug Manuel Zelaya’s attempt to shred its Constitution over the protests of the country’s Congress and Supreme Court. And its military, which refused to obey his illegal orders.</p>
<p>Obama’s support for an elected dictator in Honduras should have warned Americans that their newly elected leader viewed men like Zelaya favorably and constitutions and the separation of powers between the branches of government unfavorably. It also showcased his agenda for Latin America.</p>
<p>His embrace of Raul Castro brings that agenda out into the open even if he still insists in wrapping it in dishonest claims about “freedom” and “openness” while bailing out a Communist dictatorship.</p>
<p>Obama began his Castro speech with a lie, declaring, “The United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.”</p>
<p>The Cuban people have no relationship with the United States because they have no free elections and no say in how they are governed. The only Cubans who have a relationship with the United States fled here on rafts.</p>
<p>Obama did not make his dirty deal with the Cuban people. He made it in a marathon phone call with the Cuban dictator.</p>
<p>When Obama claims that his deal with Raul Castro represents a new relationship with the people of Cuba, he is endorsing a Communist dictatorship as the legitimate representative of the Cuban people.</p>
<p>This is a retroactive endorsement of the Castro regime and its entire history of mass murder and political terror. Obama is not trying to “open up” Cuba as he claimed. He likes Cuba just the way it is; Communist and closed.</p>
<p>Obama did not consult the Cuban people, just as he did not consult the American people. He disregarded the embargo, Congress, the Constitution and the freedom of the Cuban people.</p>
<p>His dictatorial disregard of the embargo, which can only be eliminated by Congress, in order to support a dictatorship, is a disturbing reminder that the road he is walking down leads to a miserable tyranny.</p>
<p>Cuban-American senators from both parties have been unanimous in condemning the move. These senators are the closest thing to Cuban elected officials. But Obama disregarded Senator Menendez, a man of his own party, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruz.</p>
<p>Instead Obama chose to stand with Raul Castro and his Communist dictatorship.</p>
<p>Obama tried to whitewash his crime by exploiting Alan Gross, a USAID contractor who was imprisoned and abused by the Castro regime, as if the release of an American hostage justified helping the men holding him hostage stay in power. And the media, which was reprinting Castro’s propaganda claiming that Gross’ imprisonment was justified, is busy now pretending that it cares about his release.</p>
<p>He had similarly tried to whitewash his Taliban amnesty by using Bergdahl and his parents as cover. If a deal is struck with Iran, the release of Robert Levinson, Saeed Abedini or Amir Hekmati will almost certainly be used to divert attention from the fact that their own government has collaborated with the thugs and terrorists who took them hostage.</p>
<p>Even though Obama criticized European countries for paying financial ransoms to ISIS, his own ransom paid to the Castros is worth countless billions. And the blood money pouring out of American banks into the Castro regime will encourage other dictatorships to take Americans hostage as leverage for obtaining concessions from the United States. Americans abroad will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal.</p>
<p>No European country recognized ISIS in exchange for the release of hostages. Only Obama was willing to go that far with Cuba, not only opening diplomatic and economic relations, but promising to remove the Communist dictatorship from the list of state sponsors of terror despite the fact that the last State Department review found that Cuba continued to support the leftist narco-terrorists of FARC.</p>
<p>FARC had taken its own American hostages who were starved and beaten, tortured and abused.</p>
<p>Now Obama has <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/cuba-demands-removal-from-list-of-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">given in to the demand of a state</span></a> sponsor of terror to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for releasing a hostage.</p>
<p>Obama has sent a message to Iran that the best way to secure a deal is by wrapping it in an American hostage. He has told ISIS that we do negotiate with terrorists. And he has once again demonstrated that his vaunted “smart power” is nothing more than appeasement wrapped in excuses and lies.</p>
<p>But Obama did not act to help Alan Gross. He did not even act because he genuinely thought that diplomatic relations would open up Cuba. In his speech, Obama used the claim commonly put forward by Castro apologists that the very fact that the Castros were still in power proved that sanctions had failed. Yet the lack of sanctions against Cuba by the rest of the world certainly did not usher in the new spirit of openness that Obama is promising. Rewarding dictators with cash never frees a nation.</p>
<p>This was not about saving Alan Gross. It was about saving Raul Castro.</p>
<p>Obama and Castro are both weakened leaders of the left. Like the Castros, Obama has lost international influence and his own people have turned on him. The only thing he has left is unilateral rule.</p>
<p>If Obama saw something of his own hopes and aspirations to engage in a populist transformation of the United States in Manuel Zelaya or Hugo Chavez, his horizons have narrowed down to those of Raul Castro. His ability to remake the world has vanished and the American people are revolting against his collectivization efforts. They want open health care markets, free speech and honest government.</p>
<p>Obama can no longer remake the Middle East, he certainly can’t bring the Soviet Union back from the dead, but he could still bail out Raul Castro and maintain Communist rule in Cuba.</p>
<p>No matter how often Obama claims to be “on the right side of history”, the Castros are a living reminder that to be on the left is to be on the wrong side of history.</p>
<p>Obama did not want to see the “Berlin Wall” fall in Havana on his watch. After watching his own grip on the United States collapse, he did not want to see the left fail again.</p>
<p>We can never know how history might have been different if Carter had gotten a second term or if Mondale had replaced Reagan. But Obama’s deal with Castro reminds us that the end of the USSR was not inevitable. It happened because we stood up against the tyrants in the Kremlin and their useful idiots in the White House.</p>
<p>A good man like Reagan could make a difference by bringing down the USSR. A bad man like Obama can make a difference by keeping Cuba Communist.</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>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: &#8216;Weakness Is Provocative&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:51:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[GOP congressman unveils the chaos unleashed by America's retreat abroad at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Congressman Jim Bridenstine&#8217;s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114410255" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: </strong>A lot of people might remember, it wasn&#8217;t too long ago, I went down to a military base in my state called Fort Sill.  I went down there to visit with the commanding general, and the reason I went is because the Department of Defense is being gutted right now.  The fires brigades and the air defense artillery folks that work down there, they&#8217;re getting cut drastically, and so I went down there and I wanted to meet with the commanding general, and when I was down there I said, hey, I&#8217;d like to take a visit of the UAC facility that&#8217;s here at Fort Sill, and the commanding general said you can go, but I&#8217;m not going to go with you.  If you would, by show of hands, do you remember this incident by chance, if you&#8217;d raise your hand if you&#8217;re remember.  I went down to Fort Sill to visit the UAC facility and I got rejected.  I got rejected.  Here I am a member of Congress, a representative of the people, a federal representative of the people going to a federal facility and seeing a federal mission, and they told me I couldn&#8217;t come in. They said you could come back in three weeks.  In three weeks you can come back and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, and I said I&#8217;ve got to talk to somebody in your chain of command because this is not right, and you know what they said, they said, sorry, here&#8217;s the number for the guy in my chain of command and it was the Deputy Director of Communications, who also told me you&#8217;ve got to wait three weeks and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, to which we immediately said, I told my staff I&#8217;m not one of these guys that runs to the media for every opportunity.  I don&#8217;t do that, but in this particular case, the First Amendment was given to us for a purpose, and it&#8217;s to petition the federal government, and I never realized that as a member of Congress I would be one of the people having to petition the federal government using the First Amendment.</p>
<p>In the next week and a half, we did 72 interviews on television. Seventy-two.  We were tired, but I can tell you this, after a week and a half we get an email from Health and Human Services and they said we&#8217;d like to take you on a tour of the HHS facility at Fort Sill housing the unaccompanied alien children.  It only took 72 interviews and a week and a half, and then they sent another email, and I&#8217;d ask everybody to get quiet because what this next email said is critically important.  I want you to listen to this.</p>
<p>The next email we got from HHS said we&#8217;re going to take you on a tour, but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, you can&#8217;t talk to the personnel that work there, you can&#8217;t talk to the staff, you can&#8217;t talk to the children, you can&#8217;t talk to the medical personnel.  We&#8217;re going to show it to you but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, to which we responded with an email of our own that we&#8217;re going to treat your restrictions the way the president is treating the law of the United States as a suggestion, and we gave them a list of everybody we expected to talk to once we got inside of this facility, and we got in and we started asking questions.  The No. 1 question I asked was how many children here have been abused.  We had a great panel with Dr. Fleming and Louie Gohmert and Jeff Sessions regarding the crisis on the southern border and immigration.  We had this great conversation.  Loved every minute of listening to these great folks talk about this issue, but here is why I have such a big concern.  The reports coming out of Lackland Air Force Base is as many as a third of the young girls had been abused, and when I talk about abuse I&#8217;m talking about sexual, I&#8217;m talking about horrible things that have happened to these young girls, and by the way they&#8217;re 12 years old.</p>
<p>So I wanted to find out in my state at Fort Sill the HHS facility how many of the children there had been abused, and I asked them, how many have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  So I asked somebody else, how many children here have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  I couldn&#8217;t get an answer.  Finally I asked a contractor and the contractor said it&#8217;s well over 25 percent, and then another contractor said, sir, it is well over 25 percent, and friends, here&#8217;s what everybody in this room needs to understand, the question is where is this abuse occurring?  It&#8217;s not happening in these facilities.  The abuse is occurring on the way to the United States, and the reason it&#8217;s occurring is because the children that were coming across our southern border, they already have parents that have been smuggled into the United States illegally, hundreds of thousands of them in 2014, and they made a decision that they want their family to come, including their children, and so they hire a coyote down in Mexico, and the coyote goes down to Central America to bring the children up to the northern border, and here&#8217;s what happens, and people in this room understand this.  The GAO has indicated, has said that we have operational control of over 44 percent of our southern border.  That means 56 percent of our southern border is not under operational control, and if we don&#8217;t control it, friends, somebody else does.  In this particular case, it&#8217;s controlled by drug cartels, transnational criminal organizations and when those children get to the northern border of Mexico, the southern border of the United States, then those transnational criminal organizations say we need more money.  If you&#8217;re going to come into the United States &#8212; and by the way, if you control the southern border of the United States you can make a ton of money, and they are doing it.</p>
<p>And so the children get up there, and the organized crime says they need $10,000.00 and we&#8217;ll let you across the border.  How many of these children do you think have $10,000.00 on them?  They call their parents, their parents don&#8217;t have $10,000.00.  They barely had enough money to pay the coyote, and ultimately the children have to come up with $10,000.00 and the drug cartels will get their money.  So they force the children into slave labor.  The force the children into prostitution.  Some of the children disappear altogether and it goes from smuggling into human trafficking, and some of the children just get killed.</p>
<p>People don&#8217;t realize it, friends, but there are, estimates are 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies in Northern Mexico as a direct result of our open southern border.  We talk about all the crisis in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq.  Horrible stuff happening there, but on our southern border we&#8217;ve got 100,000 dead bodies just south of our border, and friends, here&#8217;s the deal.  When the organized crime starts making all of this money, which they are making a ton of money right now, they destroy civil society in northern Mexico.  Friends, if you&#8217;re a judge, and I know Louie Gohmert is a judge, you understand this as well as anybody.  If you&#8217;re a judge, a police officer, a politician, a mayor in northern Mexico, in many cases you are either on the payroll of the organized crime or you are dead, which is why there&#8217;s this 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies, many in mass graves in northern Mexico right now.  The southern border is a national security issue as much as it is anything, and I&#8217;m going to talk for a second about civilized society and how it&#8217;s being lost because we&#8217;re unwilling to actually enforce the law.  The Secure Fence Act, which was passed before I got there, requires 100 percent operational control of the southern border, and yet the president doesn&#8217;t enforce that law.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the situation, I used to mention in the bio, I&#8217;m a Navy pilot.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003. In 2010, I joined a reserve squadron and I started flying counter-narcotics missions in Central and South America.  My squadron alone, VAW77, the world famous Night Wolves, we used to bust $2 billion worth of cocaine every year on the high seas, $2 billion.  My squadron was one of many units in the military that did this kind of operation.  My squadron got eliminated.  That means $2 billion worth of cocaine is coming into our country that didn&#8217;t use to come into our country and $2 billion worth of cash is going to organized crime in northern Mexico and Central America.  What do you think that does to those countries?  And by the way, my squadron was one of many military units that have been cut under the sequester, and it is decimating the Department of Defense, in ways right now that the American public doesn&#8217;t realize, but I&#8217;ll give you an example.</p>
<p>Nicaragua calls the United States and they say we&#8217;re losing our civil society here in Nicaragua, our judges, our politicians, our police officers.  We&#8217;ve got high crime rates.  The organized crime is controlling our country.  We need your help with some counter drug operations, to which the United States says, sorry, can&#8217;t help you.  Who does Nicaragua call next?  The Russians.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the ships on the ocean, to do the counter-narcotics operations.  The only thing the Russians are asking in return is military basing.  Do they want military basing for those assets to encounter drug operations?  No.  They want military basing for long-range strategic bombers in our hemisphere, and by the way, Nicaragua is not the only country in our hemisphere under negotiations for long-range strategic bombing for Russian bombers right now.  You&#8217;ve got Cuba and Venezuela.  Friends, all of this is a national security issue.</p>
<p>The other day, I looked up Homeland Security.  There&#8217;s leaked information from Homeland Security of how many folks have come across the southern border from Guinea and Sierra Leone and Liberia.  Friends, it&#8217;s almost 500 people that have been caught coming across the southern border in 2014 from those three countries which have the greatest outbreak of Ebola.  Almost 500 people caught.  The GAO says that one out of every five gets caught, which means there&#8217;s thousands in this country from those countries that are just unaccounted for completely.  Friends, the southern border of the United States is a national security issue.  It&#8217;s a national health security issue, and here&#8217;s the important thing I want everybody in this room to take away: The children are victims.  It is not their fault, and we don&#8217;t not like them.  The humanitarian thing to do, the right thing to do, the thing that will save lives and protect them is to enforce the law.</p>
<p>So when you think about foreign policy and national security, friends, it starts right here at home and I just talked about Nicaragua and the Russian military basing that is potentially going to occur there because of our absence, and I want to be really clear about what Russian is up to.  They&#8217;ve invaded Georgia.  They’re occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.  They&#8217;re moving the borders towards Tbilisi.  They&#8217;ve got 80,000 troops in Armenia.  They&#8217;ve cancelled energy contracts with Azerbaijan.  That&#8217;s all in the south caucuses.  You go over to Eastern Europe, the Baltic States.  Remember the Baltic States enthusiastically joined the European Union and NATO at the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Well, because of that Russia had to cut off their energy in the dead of winter.  People had to suffer.  People had to die.  In Poland in the Czech Republic they were building a missile defense shield.  Why were they building a missile defense shield in Poland?  It had nothing to do with the Russians.  It’s because Iran is building longer range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and the Europeans said, we’ve got to have a missile defense shield to which Vladimir Putin said, if you keep building that missile defense shield, he said this through his generals, he said, we&#8217;re going to have nuclear war in Poland and the Czech Republic, and I&#8217;m sure everybody in this room remembers when the President of the United States met with Medvedev after that incident. He said wait until after my next election.  I&#8217;ll have the flexibility to bring down that missile defense shield and guess what happened.  He got elected.  The missile defense shield came down and then the Russians moved very quickly to give Edward Snowden asylum.  Friends, here is the lesson, and every lesson of history teaches this: Weakness is provocative and the more we demonstrate weakness the more we will be taken advantage of and the more provocative the enemies of the United States will be.</p>
<p>Then we get to Ukraine, Yanukovych.  This was Thanksgiving.  It was a year ago.  Yanukovych was trying to enter into an agreement with the European Union.  It was social reform, political reform, economic reform.  He wasn&#8217;t joining the European Union, but it included trade, and if you remember Vladimir Putin himself flew to Kiev on our Thanksgiving Day and he said if you sign that agreement we&#8217;re going to cut your energy off, and remember it was going into winter.  It was Thanksgiving Day and they did this before December 31, 2005.  In Ukraine people suffered, people died, they did it in 2009 as well.  So now Yanukovych makes the decision okay I&#8217;m going to align with Moscow temporarily.  Why?  Because he wants to keep energy for his people through the winter.  His people revolt.  Why?  They want freedom.  They want independence.  As people revolt Kiev gets set on fire and then Russia uses that as an excuse to invade and occupy Crimea and make no mistake, regardless of what the State Department says, Russia is now occupying broader eastern Ukraine.  That is happening right now and let&#8217;s talk about where else Russia is active. They&#8217;re helping the Assad regime in Syria, propping them up.  The Mullahs in Iran.  They&#8217;re going around the sanctions because Russia is enabling it.  19,000 nuclear centrifuges in Iran.  I&#8217;m sorry, there is no peaceful nuclear program that needs 19,000 nuclear centrifuges, and under the President&#8217;s P5+1 Joint Plan of Action they&#8217;re going to continue to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 9,000 plus nuclear centrifuges. They&#8217;re not even mentioning the heavy water reactor for plutonium in Iraq. The facility in Parchin which is responsible for creating the devices that can fly on long-range missiles, and I&#8217;m talking about of course nuclear capabilities. None of these are being talked about in the P5+1 Joint Plan of Action on Iran and I&#8217;m going to anchor here for one second.</p>
<p>There is a reason what the President is doing right now to accommodate Iran is wrong and it is because it is extremely dangerous and destabilizing for the best ally the United States has in the Middle East, Israel.  And I will say this on Israel, the Land of Judea and Samaria is not occupied territory.  It belongs to the Jewish people who have had a relationship with that land for over 4,000 years.  And neither the President of the United States or the United Nations has any authority to give that land away.  Only Israel has the authority to negotiate over the land that belongs to Israel, period, end of story.  So you think about what&#8217;s happening in the world and you see that weakness is indeed provocative.  When you think about what Russia is doing, and by the way here&#8217;s an easy answer on the Russian issue.  People don&#8217;t realize this.  Russia relies on energy for 53 percent of its revenue to the Kremlin.  Fifty-three percent of the revenue to the Kremlin is from the export of energy and 84 percent of that energy is going to Eastern Europe, who by the way send ambassadors to my office in Washington, D.C. asking us to send our energy because they no longer want to be dependent on Moscow.  There is an easy way to solve this crisis.  We could dry up 53 percent of Russia&#8217;s revenue simply by exporting American energy.  And interestingly, it&#8217;s not Moscow that&#8217;s preventing us from exporting American energy.  It&#8217;s Washington, D.C.  Friends there are solutions here and, by the way, here&#8217;s the thing: That&#8217;s not a sanction, that&#8217;s allowing the free market to be free, and I know people in this room believe in free markets.  It doesn&#8217;t require firing a shot. It doesn&#8217;t require a sanction, and, oh, by the way, Russia has recently seen fit to send long-range bombers to the Gulf of Mexico.  I don&#8217;t know if you guys have read these reports, and interestingly they&#8217;re defense minister came back and said, well, that&#8217;s not going to work as long as energy prices are about $80.00 a barrel.  We can&#8217;t afford to do this.  Friends energy prices are going to come back and it&#8217;s up to the United States to actually fill the void that everybody understands is happening in Eastern Europe as it relates to energy.</p>
<p>I want to, I&#8217;m going to close here.  I know Ann told me not to take a long time so I&#8217;m not going to take a long time.  I want to close here. Actually, I&#8217;m going to say one thing.  I have to talk about ISIS.  I have to talk about the Middle East and then I&#8217;m going to close.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003.  Our Americans, in 2002, or, actually, I don&#8217;t &#8212; it was early in the war &#8212; we damaged a guy named al-Zarqawi.  He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden.  You guys probably remember al-Zarqawi.  It was compliments of a 500-pound bomb, compliments of the United States Air Force, that damaged al-Zarqawi, and as a Navy pilot that pains me to say that the Air Force dropped that weapon, and I say that with all due respect to Governor Rick Perry who&#8217;s in the front row here who&#8217;s an Air Force pilot himself.  We&#8217;re good, he says we&#8217;re good.  Thank you. sir.  But here&#8217;s the important thing: al-Zarqawi was in Afghanistan, he was part of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden, and when we damaged him, his ribs, his leg &#8212; he went to Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital in Iraq.  That&#8217;s where he went to get his care, and at Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital he got cured and then he became the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ultimately he was killed compliments of two 500-pound bombs of the United States Air Force, but not before he trained his own lieutenant, al-Baghdadi, who now is the leader of ISIS.  Friends, this is an al-Qaeda affiliated force.  All of the authorities necessary to destroy it currently exist, and the President shouldn&#8217;t go on TV and give us a laundry list of everything he won&#8217;t do and, oh, by the way, when he gives us that laundry list he&#8217;s giving it to the enemies of the United States.  What he should do is he should go on TV and tell us what he&#8217;s already done to eliminate this threat, and it could have been eliminated, and if you go back to 2006 when Obama was a senator, he said these words.  He said a precipitous withdraw from Iraq would lead to &#8220;chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.&#8221;  He said it would engulf broad swaths of the Middle East and endanger the United States of America.  Senator Obama in 2006.  Then he ran for President.</p>
<p>Well that message wasn&#8217;t going to work when you&#8217;re running for President, so then he said it was an unjust war.  That we took our eye off the ball, which was Afghanistan, and he&#8217;s going to be the President that would end this war.  Then he became President, and if you look at what happened next, he had his own Iraq team.  Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus.  They said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops in Iraq.  Keep them because we&#8217;ve had all these gains from the surge.  If you remember the Iraqi economy was growing. Things were at peace.  You had an inclusive government, stability and his team said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops.  You have to have that or else we&#8217;re going to lose the gains of the surge, and the President said, no, I promised something else, give me a different plan, and they come back with a different plan, and they said keep 10,000 troops.  It&#8217;s going to require more risk.  By the way, when they say more risk, for those of us in the military that means more of us are going to suffer.  It will require more risk, but we can sustain the gains of the surge with 10,000 troops.  The President said, no, I promised something else.  Then it was the President himself in a phone call with Malaki who said that any status of forces agreement we come to has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, and, friends, for those of us in the military the status of forces agreement is how we have diplomatic immunity.  It is how when we fight in a foreign country we fall under American law not under foreign law, and that&#8217;s critically important if you want to have a foreign fighter.  And the President, in a phone call with Malaki &#8212; historically all the status of forces agreement is, is an exchange of diplomatic letters.  It&#8217;s our State Department and their diplomats saying we&#8217;re going to exchange diplomatic letters, Americans have diplomatic immunity.  That&#8217;s all it had ever been, but because the President wanted a zero-two presence in Iraq, ultimately he said it has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, knowing full well that the Iraqi Parliament can&#8217;t agree on what day of the week it is, let alone how many American troops need to be in Iraq.  The agreement was scuttled.  Every last troop came home.  And just as Senator Obama predicted in 2006, chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.  It engulfs broad swaths of the Middle East and it&#8217;s a danger to the United States of America.</p>
<p>Al-Baghdadi has said himself that the next confrontation will be directly against the United States of America.  Friends, al-Qaeda was a terrorist organization.  ISIS is a caliphate.  It has an army.  It is well trained.  It is well financed.  It is well equipped.  They&#8217;re recruiting from throughout the world and they are looking for people that have American passports, and indeed they have recruited hundreds of Americans to join their ranks, many of which the administration has already admitted have come back to the United States.  Friends, this is a very real threat.  It has to be taken seriously, and what I will tell you is this: This idea that we are going to train and equip so-called &#8220;moderate Syrians&#8221; is not gonna work.  Here&#8217;s what they said, we&#8217;re gonna have 5,000 troops in a year; 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels in a year.  By the way, a lot of them have already fled and turned over weapons to ISIS and 5,000 &#8212; I gave a speech, in fact, I talked to Mike at the Red State Convention down in Fort Worth, Texas.  I hear a clap for Fort Worth. And at the time in that speech I was talking about how dangerous ISIS was because they&#8217;ve got 15,000 troops in their army.  Well now the CIA unclassified is saying that it&#8217;s 30,000 troops in a matter of just a couple of months, and again now they&#8217;ve got heavy armor, American tanks, Abrams Tanks, with ISIS flags flying on the top.  This idea that we&#8217;re gonna train and equip so-called moderates, it hasn&#8217;t worked.  If you look at what weapons they have right now, it&#8217;s because we train and equip the Iraqi Army, which fled at the first conflict.  Friends, this is going to require American leadership, and this is a critically important thing that America has to understand.  Without us, it&#8217;s only going to grow, and the longer we wait the worse it gets, and I want to be clear again why this is so dangerous not only to us, but ISIS has its sights set on Israel.  This is a threat to Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Now, sure.  I would like to, I&#8217;m gonna close now.  At this time I really am.  I see Mike standing over here.  I might take a few more minutes just to upset Ann Coulter.  Okay here&#8217;s a &#8212; I&#8217;m in such trouble.  When I first got elected a friend of mine came to me and he said, he worked really hard, he delivered all kinds of signs throughout the neighborhood.  I challenged an incumbent Republican in a Republican primary which is very difficult and it&#8217;s very hard to find friends when you&#8217;re doing that, but this guy was loyal to me from day one, he worked really hard and we overcame millions of dollars and 11 years of incumbency, and he said I will never ask from you for anything, but I just want one thing I said, and he said, it&#8217;s the only thing that I will ever ask for, he said I want you to get a group, a bipartisan group, Republicans and Democrats alike, and I want you to go down to Arlington National Cemetery and sit there for an hour together and reflect on all the sacrifice that has been given for this nation, and a couple of months ago we made that happen.  Four hundred thousand markers.  Hill after hill, row after row, mile after mile.  Freshman class Republicans and Democrats alike reflecting on the sacrifice and, friends, that is a very small portion of all the sacrifice that has been given for this great country.  One of the markers, there is a gentleman named Martin Treptow who fought in World War I.  Ronald Reagan talked about him in his first inaugural address, and he died on the Western Front delivering messages back and forth between battalions, and when they recovered his body they found on him a journal and in that journal they found these words.  It said &#8212; and he was a barber from Illinois who got drafted.  His words said:  &#8220;America must win this war.  Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure.  I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.&#8221;</p>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t just a few weeks ago now I went down to a funeral for a friend of mine who died in the Middle East, and this was in Georgia, and my whole squadron &#8212; he got, he was sent, what we call individual augmentation.  He&#8217;s a Navy pilot, but he got sent on the ground to the Middle East, and there he died.  So we were at his funeral.  My whole squadron, VAW77, the Night Wolves, my squadron, which no longer exists to do the counter-drug operations that I&#8217;ve already talked about, but all the Night Wolves gathered and we spent time talking about our friend.  The last time I saw these guys I was just a pilot in the squadron and here I am with my buddies and now I&#8217;m a member of Congress.  Thanks.  And they looked at me and they said, &#8220;Jim, our country is in peril.  We have threats all over the world that will change the landscape for the next generation,&#8221; and it&#8217;s not just foreign, it&#8217;s also domestic.  They said, &#8220;We are willing&#8221; &#8212; they&#8217;re not with 77 anymore, but they&#8217;re all still serving in the reserves somewhere &#8212; &#8220;we are willing, but we&#8217;ve got to have leadership.  We need somebody that will stand up and tell us what needs to be done, &#8217;cause right now we are not feeling it.&#8221;  Friends there is an entire country of people who served this nation in uniform and every single one of them feels the way Martin Treptow felt when he wrote that in his journal and I got to tell you as a member of Congress who&#8217;s serving his first term, I got to tell ya, that is the one thing more than anything else that gives me hope and I really do have a lot of hope.  What is right about America, and I know this has been said before, can fix what is wrong about America and there&#8217;s an entire nation of people that are willing to do the right thing knowing that we need to handoff to the next generation what we ourselves inherited.  Thank you so much for having me.  It&#8217;s an honor to be here.</p>
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		<title>A UN Timetable for Israel’s Destruction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/a-un-timetable-for-israels-destruction-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-un-timetable-for-israels-destruction-1</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/a-un-timetable-for-israels-destruction-1/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:53:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[europeans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247556</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And Obama's betrayal. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4hxon.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247524" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4hxon-410x350.jpg" alt="rtr4hxon" width="302" height="258" /></a>The Obama administration is shamelessly outsourcing the United States&#8217; historic leadership in facilitating negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel of a workable, secure two-state solution to the United Nations and European governments. In putting its trust in these two centers of anti-Israel sentiment, the Obama administration refuses to say categorically that it would veto a UN Security Council resolution setting some sort of deadline for the creation of a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines.</p>
<p>In the words of an unnamed senior U.S. State Department official quoted by Reuters, &#8220;These things are all very much in flux, it&#8217;s not as if we&#8217;re being asked to take a position on any particular Security Council resolution right now. It would be premature for us to discuss documents that are of uncertain status right now.&#8221;</p>
<p>Any Security Council resolution the Obama administration would agree to, which imposes pressure only on Israel to make more unilateral concessions for an illusionary “peace,” will serve to legitimize a United Nations timetable for Israel’s surrender to forces that wish to destroy it. The Gaza debacle following Israel’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005 and give the Palestinians a chance to build a prototype Palestinian state illustrates the danger Israel would face from being pressured into more withdrawals at this time.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority leadership is pressing for action on just such a Security Council resolution as early as this Wednesday, according to a Palestine Liberation Organization official and Palestinian U.N. Ambassador Riyad Mansour. The Palestinian resolution, to be sponsored by Jordan (a non-permanent member of the Security Council), would reportedly set a two year deadline for complete Israeli withdrawal from all “occupied” territories, although Jordan’s UN ambassador told reporters it was news to her that any action to vote on the resolution would be taken as soon as the Palestinians are demanding. There is some speculation amongst UN insiders that a vote on a Palestinian resolution could be put off until early in the new year. The Security Council makeup will then be even more inclined towards the Palestinian position, because Malaysia will be replacing South Korea as a non-permanent member of the Security Council.</p>
<p>The Palestinians are finding a very receptive audience in Europe for their use of the United Nations to sidestep direct negotiations with Israel. As the tide of anti-Semitism is rising to the surface and spreading once again throughout Europe, a number of European countries&#8217; parliaments have adopted non-binding resolutions calling upon their respective governments to recognize a Palestinian state. Sweden went further with official recognition of a state of Palestine. France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is taking the lead in crafting a European version of a Palestinian state resolution. The idea reportedly would be to set out an expectation for a final peace agreement to achieve a two-state solution within two years. During the two year interval, the United Nations might accord full UN membership rights to an officially recognized Palestinian state. The text is still a subject of consultations in European capitals, according to the United Kingdom&#8217;s UN Ambassador Lyall Grant.</p>
<p>The Obama administration, which would like nothing better than to see its nemesis Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defeated in the upcoming March 2015 Israeli elections, is calibrating a position that appears intended to send a pointed message to the Israeli electorate. This message is not to count on the administration standing steadfastly with Israel on sensitive security concerns if Prime Minister Netanyahu is re-elected. The Obama administration is willing to consider a &#8220;compromise&#8221; Security Council resolution to pressure Israel into resuming negotiations against a backdrop of a framework withdrawal timetable, so that the administration can say it did all it can to avoid an immediate two year deadline and thereby not have to use its veto power to “protect” Israel.</p>
<p>Thus, Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting early this week with European foreign ministers, Arab League officials, and Israeli and Palestinian officials to &#8220;hear from and engage with other stakeholders&#8230;and to the best of our ability work toward a common path forward,&#8221; according to a senior State Department official.</p>
<p>Israeli civilians under relentless attack by Palestinian jihadists are the main &#8220;stakeholders&#8221; whom the United States should be worried about. If there is to be a &#8220;common path forward&#8221; to peace, it requires Palestinian negotiating partners who are willing to publicly give up their claim to a right of return of millions of so-called Palestinian refugees to pre-June 1967 Israeli cities and towns, and who recognize Israel&#8217;s right to self-determination as a Jewish state that can co-exist securely side by side with a peaceful Palestinian state. There has been no such partner to engage in genuine negotiations for more than six decades. There remains no such partner today, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>Hamas has made clear its intention time again, by word and deed, to destroy the state of Israel and kill as many Jews as possible. Following, for example, are excerpts from an interview with Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on May 11, 2011 (courtesy of MEMRI):</p>
<blockquote><p>The [Jews] are brought in droves to Palestine so that the Palestinians – and the Islamic nation behind them – will have the honor of annihilating the evil of this gang…All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews…When Palestine is liberated and its people return to it, and the entire region, with the grace of Allah, will have turned into the United States of Islam, the land of Palestine will become the capital of the Islamic Caliphate, and all these countries will turn into states within the Caliphate.</p></blockquote>
<p>Hamas’s barrage of rocket attacks launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007 attests to its deadly intentions. Just last Sunday, Hamas marked its 27<sup>th</sup> anniversary by parading 2,000 of its armed fighters and truck-mounted rockets. A senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said: &#8216;This illusion called Israel will be removed.”</p>
<p>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has thrown in his lot with Hamas in forming a so-called “unity reconciliation” government and has himself incited sectarian violence in and around Jerusalem with incendiary rhetoric.  But even Abbas has expressed frustration with what he called Hamas’s continued “shadow government&#8230; running the territory&#8221; in Gaza on its own.</p>
<p>In the real world, which is alien to the United Nations, the Arab world, European governments and the Obama administration, simply saying something is so doesn&#8217;t make it so. Diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state does not change the reality on the ground. Nor does a pie-in-the-sky declaration of a “unity” or “reconciliation” Palestinian government that exists only on paper. For example, in delivering his regular briefing to the Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, admitted to Security Council members on December 15<sup>th</sup> the lack of a functioning Palestinian reconciliation unity government to replace Hamas’s governance in Gaza. He said that delivery of thousands of tons of construction materials into Gaza is being permitted by Israel under the temporary Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism agreed upon by Israel, the so-called Palestinian Government of National Consensus and the UN, even though the “Government of National Consensus in Gaza has still not taken up its rightful governance and security function” that is a critical part of the arrangement.</p>
<p>The Palestinians’ own internal power struggle between Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which currently dominates the West Bank, means that there is no real unified state government apparatus. Hamas won’t give up its military control in Gaza and is seeking to expand its influence in the West Bank at the Palestinian Authority’s expense. There can be no real foundation for a workable Palestinian state under international law when there is no single governing authority in a position to effectively exert sovereign control over all of a putative Palestinian state’s territory and people. Nor can there be a real state under international law that does not have the capacity to ensure compliance with any bilateral or international agreements such a state may enter into in the future.</p>
<p>No matter what kind of “common path” Secretary of State Kerry thinks he can achieve with the Palestinians and their Arab and European supporters on a Security Council timetable resolution, Israel must reject the path of forced withdrawal that could lead to its own destruction. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said during the regular Israeli cabinet meeting on Sunday, a UN Security Council-imposed deadline for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines would bring &#8220;Islamic extremists to the suburbs of Tel Aviv and to the heart of Jerusalem. We will not allow this. We will rebuff this forcefully and responsibly. Let there be no doubt, this will be rejected.&#8221;</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>Ferguson and an Arsonist-in-Chief &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/ferguson-and-an-arsonist-in-chief-on-the-glazov-gang-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ferguson-and-an-arsonist-in-chief-on-the-glazov-gang-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:20:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[and chaos]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thuggert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247572</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama emboldened the thuggery, chaos and violence. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-ferguson.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247535" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-ferguson-450x230.jpg" alt="obama-ferguson" width="295" height="151" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by <strong>Michael Finch</strong>, the president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He was joined by <b>Morgan Brittany</b>, Conservative TV and Movie Star, <b>Nonie Darwish,</b> author of “The Devil We Don’t Know” and <b>Mell Flynn,</b> the president of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.</span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"></span></p>
<p>The <em>Gang</em> gathered to discuss <strong>Ferguson and an Arsonist-in-Chief</strong>, analyzing how and why Obama emboldened the thuggery, chaos and violence <strong>(starting at 7 minute mark).</strong> The episode also focused on <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Feinstein&#8217;s Destructive Torture Charade</strong>, dissecting the reasons the Democratic Senator chose to humiliate her country and endanger its citizens&#8217; lives. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DqDUXbeFDmk" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss the<strong> Glazov Gang&#8217;s special episode</strong> with<strong> Geert Wilders</strong> on &#8220;<strong>The West&#8217;s Battle for Freedom</strong>.&#8221;</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/69-nah7rIOc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Ben Shapiro: Republicans Secretly Want Obama&#8217;s Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/ben-shapiro-republicans-secretly-want-obamas-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-shapiro-republicans-secretly-want-obamas-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:50:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247194</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Ben Shapiro explains why establishment Republicans aren&#8217;t using the power of the purse to stop Barack Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty: They don&#8217;t want to stop it. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3DHJ-CbOGQA" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">There is the only one way to explain the new proposal by Speaker of the House John Boehner and other top Republicans for stopping President Obama’s executive amnesty: they don’t want to stop it at all.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Here’s the story.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Republicans have two options: the smart option and the stupid option.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The smart option would be for Republicans to pass a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government through January. That would allow Republicans to come into office and take power in the Senate. Then Republicans could do what Congresses have done for centuries: avoid passing omnibus spending bills, which tie all spending together and lead to shutdowns, and instead fund the government through separate appropriations bills, one per department. That de-links funding for the Defense Department, for example, from funding for Obama’s executive amnesty. Obama would have a tough time vetoing a standalone Defense funding bill that has nothing to do with executive amnesty.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Then there’s the stupid option.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Republicans could push forward an omnibus spending bill that would completely fund the government through next September, but fund the Department of Homeland Security – and Obama’s amnesty –through next March. That would effectively allow 60 days of funding for Obama’s program to give work permits to illegal immigrants.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now, Obama probably won’t accept the deal, and will shut down the government over the failure to fully fund his executive amnesty. Speaker Boehner will then cave, and fund the entire program. We know this because that’s exactly what he did regarding Obamacare two years ago, during the infamous government shutdown.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But let’s say Obama signs the bill. There’s no guarantee Speaker Boehner will fight over DHS funding in March, either. In fact, certain Republican congresspeople have already indicated he won’t.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Naturally, Boehner is pursuing the stupid option. Why? Not because he’s stupid, but because he likes Obama’s executive amnesty. President Obama’s executive amnesty allows him to sign off on the establishment Republican soft-on-immigration policy while simultaneously complaining about Dictator Obama. He can win points with the base by bashing President Obama, and at the same time, greenlight Obama’s immigration policy – which Republican establishment types from the Wall Street Journal to Jeb Bush to the Chamber of Commerce have been pushing relentlessly as “comprehensive immigration reform.” Obama has given them cover. All they have to do now is whine about Obama being a Big Bad Tyrant, then fund his tyranny. They can pop the cork in the back offices secretly while hypocritically blasting Obama for seizing their power in public.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">They’re playing conservatives for suckers.</p>
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		<title>The Once Great Country of America is Crumbling Before Our Eyes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/marcpatrone/the-once-great-country-of-america-is-crumbling-before-our-eyes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-once-great-country-of-america-is-crumbling-before-our-eyes</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:45:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Marc Patrone]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crumbling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[destroy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247200</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So what will our U.S. neighbors do about it?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ok.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247203" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ok.jpg" alt="ok" width="287" height="194" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.calgarysun.com/">calgarysun.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>America is a mess and the world can barely tear its eyes away from the unfolding train wreck.</p>
<p>Our friends are at a crossroads and the implications for Canada and the rest of the beleaguered free world are monumental.</p>
<p>Like it or not, the U.S.A. is the symbol of world freedom and liberty. Without it, I shudder to think what will happen to us.</p>
<p>America must fight to survive the Obama debacle.</p>
<p>Freedom-loving people are growing more angry, frustrated, and worried with each passing day.</p>
<p>They send me e-mail after e-mail out of desperation.</p>
<p>&#8220;What do we do now?&#8221;</p>
<p>They have zero faith in their government.</p>
<p>But for Fox, talk radio and conservative online newsites, the media, to its eternal, traitorous disgrace, has gone full Benedict Arnold.</p>
<p>They have been a Democratic lapdog so long, they now act as if they have no choice but to continue protecting Obama.</p>
<p>Former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has come as close as anyone to exposing media complicity in covering up scandals such as Benghazi.</p>
<p>And what is the administration&#8217;s push to regulate the Internet but a shameless attempt to silence online critics.</p>
<p>It only gets worse. Various arms of the state including the IRS, designed to be apolitical, have been subverted and weaponized into attack drones aimed at conservative groups.</p>
<p>Attempts to expose what&#8217;s going on are stonewalled at the highest levels.</p>
<p>These are nightmarish attacks on freedom-loving people around the world.</p>
<p>Once respected institutions such as academia, the labour movement and the entertainment industry are viewed with great suspicion &#8212; and so they should be.</p>
<p>But worst of all, there&#8217;s the presidency.</p>
<p>Instead of healing the racial divide, the election of this president has only fanned the flames of grievance and hatred.</p>
<p>The sales pitch/sham that was &#8216;hope and change&#8217; is a smoking ruin, trampled and set ablaze in Ferguson.</p>
<p>If the world is lucky, the failure of hope and change will be his only legacy.</p>
<p>But executive amnesty proves this president wants to tear away at the unifying fabric that is a great country &#8212; its Constitution.</p>
<p>This document is being mocked and ignored by a president sworn to uphold it.</p>
<p>Congress has taken the &#8220;nobody here but us chickens&#8221; approach to keeping a check on executive overreach.</p>
<p>Either the Constitution survives the Obama executive action on amnesty or the U.S. risks devolving further into just another sick, bloated, welfare state where an all powerful, hopelessly corrupt bureaucratic borg smothers what&#8217;s left of individual liberty.</p>
<p>On the foreign front, Obama boasts an impressive and growing string of failures.</p>
<p>But the latest impending policy debacle may be his crowning achievement &#8212; the nuclear power of Iran.</p>
<p>Consider this horrifying piece of irrefutable logic: why would Obama attempt to appease and cut deals with a country like Iran, which despises America, unless this president is in sympathy with the views of that country?</p>
<p>Let that sink in over your Thanksgiving turkey.</p>
<p>Such is the state of a great nation. Americans can&#8217;t rely on the newly invigorated Republican Party to do much but talk.</p>
<p>They think NOT opposing Obama won them their huge victory in the mid-terms.</p>
<p>And now, the GOP think acting like a doormat is a key to winning the presidency in 2016.</p>
<p>But by then, who knows what will be left of their country.</p>
<p>Still, Americans are in a rebellious mood.</p>
<p>Hold onto that, America. It may be all you&#8217;ve got left. There is still time to fight back.</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>Feinstein&#8217;s Torture Charade &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/feinsteins-torture-charade-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=feinsteins-torture-charade-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:00:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Democratic Senator chose to humiliate her country and endanger its citizens' lives. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/feinstein.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247382" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/feinstein-450x244.jpg" alt="Former CIA Director Petraeus Testifies At Congressional Hearings On Benghazi Attack" width="291" height="158" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by <strong>Michael Finch</strong>, the president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He was joined by <b>Morgan Brittany</b>, Conservative TV and Movie Star, <b>Nonie Darwish,</b> author of “The Devil We Don’t Know” and <b>Mell Flynn,</b> the president of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.</span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"></span></p>
<p>The <em>Gang</em> gathered to discuss <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Feinstein&#8217;s Destructive Torture Charade</strong>, analyzing the reasons the Democratic Senator chose to humiliate her country and endanger its citizens&#8217; lives. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DqDUXbeFDmk" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Kimberley Strassel on the GOP Game Plan Going into 2016</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/kimberley-strassel-on-the-gop-game-plan-going-into-2016/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kimberley-strassel-on-the-gop-game-plan-going-into-2016</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[2016]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Wall Street Journal editor lays out the political battle ahead in Washington at Restoration Weekend.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Kimberley Strassel&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113680186" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>A little bit more on me and my background.  I do sit on the editorial board of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>.  We have a motto. We&#8217;ve had the motto, the same motto for decades, &#8220;Free Markets, Free People.&#8221;  It used to actually be &#8220;Free Markets, Free Men,&#8221; but then folks like me worked there, and we had to switch it up a little.  I&#8217;m the only member of the board who sits down in Washington and, from there, I write quite a few of the unsigned editorials that are the opinion of the editorial page.  Most of those focus on laying out our views on policy.  I separately also, under my own name once a week write a Potomac Watch column, and the idea of that is not to talk about policy but to try to explain politics which is, of course, infinitely harder, although infinitely more amusing.  It always reminds me of that famous Will Rogers line, &#8220;I don&#8217;t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, we just had an election.  We are still waiting for a few last final results, Louisiana Senate race, some House seats, but the headline news is in and, of course, it is that the Republicans won and they won big.  This marks the first time in four years that one party has owned both houses of Congress, and the first time in the Obama presidency that he has faced a united Republican front.  In other words, after years of watching Harry Reid turn the Senate into an earthbound equivalent of the black hole, we are about to experience in Washington something very, very new, and I thought what I would do is just spend a few minutes talking about what I think we might expect.  What can we expect from President Obama in terms of his interaction with Republicans?  What can we expect from the GOP in terms of what they&#8217;re going to try to accomplish with domestic legislation and foreign policy and oversight?</p>
<p>Let me start with the President because I think that one&#8217;s pretty easy.  There are some, we can call them the world&#8217;s bipartisan optimists, who think that perhaps President Obama has been chastened by this loss.  They believe that he is like most Presidents, that he&#8217;ll be worried about his legacy, he hasn&#8217;t passed anything of consequence since 2010.  He&#8217;ll want to move up those approval ratings.  He&#8217;ll extend a hand to Republicans.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a Conservative, and so I&#8217;m a born optimist, but I also try not to confuse optimism with insanity.  I think if we&#8217;ve learned anything about this presidency it&#8217;s that this President is fairly self-satisfied.  What you hear coming out of the White House is that he already believes he has written himself into the history books.  He did Obamacare.  He will take credit for restoring the economy.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize.  There is a view in the White House that what will in fact determine President Obama&#8217;s legacy is his party&#8217;s ability to keep the White House in 2016 and therefore protect programs like Obamacare.  And if that&#8217;s your guiding principle, then your impulse is going to be to spend the next two years trying to lay traps and create scenarios designed to make Republicans look bad, to make them look obstructionist and hostile to progress and therefore laying the groundwork for another Democratic President.  And I point out that he&#8217;s likely to get a lot of support for that strategy from Congress.  They are not chastened either.</p>
<p>One aspect of this recent midterm that has not been adequately noted is that most of the Democrats who lost their seats were the ones who at least claimed to represent the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party.  So the Democrats who were going to be returning to Washington in January are not only going to be greatly reduced in numbers, they&#8217;re going to be a far more liberal caucus than that party has probably seen in decades.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re already seeing the President&#8217;s approach.  I&#8217;d like to point out to you for any of you who didn&#8217;t watch it or didn&#8217;t note this, the most telling line in the President&#8217;s press conference after his midterm thumping, &#8220;To all the Americans who voted, I hear you.  To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.&#8221;  This is a story Democrats are already telling themselves.  They didn&#8217;t lose this because it was a referendum on Obama.  They didn&#8217;t lose it because people disapprove of their policies or their candidates or want to change.  Oh, no.  They lost because not enough people voted.  In particular, not enough people on their side.  And so the approach going forward is to double down, to reenergize the liberal base with more aggressive policies.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s been the definition of Obama&#8217;s past week.  In the ten short days since this midterm, the President&#8217;s announced he&#8217;s going to unveil a series of unlawful immigration orders to get the Hispanic vote back onside.  He&#8217;s unilaterally cemented a new climate deal with China to get the Tom Steyers and the environmental base back onside.  He&#8217;s pressuring the Federal Communications Commissions on net neutrality to get all those Silicon Valley donors onboard.  And this in my view will be the definition of Obama&#8217;s behavior in his last two years in office.  This is going to be a White House that continues to break in every form and fashion and to new levels of the boundaries of Presidential power.  And the reason I think this is guaranteed is because I believe there is really only one lesson this President has learned in the last six years and that lesson is this.  He has discovered, to his delight, that when he does this stuff, there really isn&#8217;t anything anyone can do to stop him.</p>
<p>So, what about Republicans.  Republicans.  It is sometimes easy to look at the Republicans over the past few years and not be filled with huge amounts of rousing confidence that they&#8217;re going to successfully navigate the next couple of years.  But I think the glass-half-full side of all of this is that, in fact, the GOP has learned some very bruising lessons over the last couple of years, and they&#8217;ve learned them the hard way.  And so they come into this majority with those mistakes under their belt a little bit savvier perhaps than in recent years.  And their greatest insight, in my mind, and the one that their ability to remember I think is going to define their success, is that they can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t.  You can push, you can demand, you can block, you can exert influence.  They&#8217;re going to have a bigger megaphone than they did because they&#8217;ll now have both chambers.  But it&#8217;s the other guy who has the veto pen, and they know that this President is going to use that pen to draw lines around certain of his priorities and to protect them at all cost.  And so the trickiest thing the GOP is going to have to handle over the next two years is expectations management.  They cannot afford to go out and promise to repeal Obamacare because they can&#8217;t.  And they can&#8217;t reform Medicare.  And they can&#8217;t abolish the EPA.  That&#8217;s just not going to happen.</p>
<p>What they can do, and what they must do, is instead lay out on the national stage an optimistic, creative, pro-growth, problem-solving agenda by moving a steady stream of targeted, sometimes smaller legislation, to the President&#8217;s desk and daring him to say no to that.  Set peace battles in which the GOP highlights very specific positive changes and then forces congressional Democrats and President Obama to make choices.  And note this President has never had to do that before.  For six years he&#8217;s been protected by the Democratic Senate which spent its first two years only sending him his priorities, and the last four years shutting down the entire chamber to shield him from any controversial bills.  And by the way, most of the Senate has never had to take a difficult vote.  Do not underestimate the power of simply forcing the left to have to vote on some issues.</p>
<p>Look at Keystone.  I think this is a fabulous example.  It has been delayed for six years.  The House has passed legislation authorizing it nine times, and Harry Reid acted like the subject never existed, never had binding vote on it.  But now, Democrats came back and they realized that this was going to be one of the first things that Republicans took up when they took over the Senate.  They realized that 70 percent of Americans support the idea of the Keystone Pipeline.  They know that many of their members are going to get shellacked if they actually do vote no.  So rather than wait for Republicans to take credit for that, they&#8217;re moving it up, and they&#8217;re likely to have a vote on Tuesday.  And I will wager that there will be a number, a significant number, of Democrats who vote for this only because they are finally being made to.  So that&#8217;s an idea of the dynamic and how it changes.</p>
<p>Republicans are going to have a lot of avenues by which to make President Obama and Democrats have to make those choices.  In particular, because they have vowed to, and this is important not just for the country, I think, but for their success in Washington, they vowed to go back to regular order.  Something Washington has been missing a while.  We may finally have, for instance, an honest to goodness appropriations process.  Imagine that.  And that means the full use of the power of the purse which is the power that&#8217;s been largely obliterated by these many years of continuing resolutions and omnibus bills.  Those CRs have meant that if Republicans ever wanted to force a policy change via the federal purse, they had to hold the whole government hostage.  That&#8217;s what happened last fall with Obamacare and the government shut down, and it isn&#8217;t always good politics.</p>
<p>If you go back to the regular process, however, as both John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have promised to do, and it&#8217;s important that they be held to that, that&#8217;s a whole new ballgame.  You can put policy into individual funding bills.  You can pressure Democrats to join it.  You can send it to the President and then he has a choice.  He can agree to your policy, or he can be responsible for shutting down one piece of his own government.</p>
<p>Think about how much fun this could be with, say, an energy appropriations bill.  You put all this policy in there that the President and Democrats have for years, claims that they&#8217;re in favor of, more liquid natural gas terminals, offshore drilling, and you force them to vote on it, and you send it to the President and if he vetoes it, darn, he shut down his energy department, which would just be awful, right?  I mean he wouldn&#8217;t be able to send anymore subsidies to Solyndras.</p>
<p>If Republicans are going to lay out an agenda, that appropriations process is also going to be vital for another reason.  It&#8217;s going to be the main way to finally and again have a national debate on spending and priorities in government.  This is a debate the President has also been largely able to deep-six over the last few years because of the continuing resolution culture.  &#8220;Government Just Gets Funded,&#8221; it&#8217;s a little note on Page 36 of the newspapers.  Nobody talks about what was in it.  Republicans can once again talk about the sequester.  They can tie this into the foreign policy debate that we&#8217;re now having, the cuts President Obama has made to the military and what&#8217;s that meant for our national security, and even if they don&#8217;t send all their ideas to the President, they can tee-up via these process, budget process, their visions of healthcare reform and entitlement reform and give the country an idea of what would happen if there were a Republican President.</p>
<p>Some of these little set piece battles aside, there&#8217;s probably a few bigger and bolder things, if Republicans are very smart about it.  There is a push right now coming from the White House to work with Republicans on corporate tax reform.  Paul Ryan is taking over Ways and Means.  He&#8217;s very serious on this subject.  And the question is going to be whether Obama can be a trusted partner in a tax venture.  He never has been before.  We&#8217;ll see if he&#8217;s changed.</p>
<p>Immigration.  There is only one reason in my cynical little mind that the President is now threatening these immediate actions on immigration executive orders.  It isn&#8217;t to help the Hispanic community.  It isn&#8217;t to clarify the law.  It probably isn&#8217;t even likely because he believes that it&#8217;s great politics for him.  It is for one reason only. It is to goad Republicans into acting like lunatics.  And I know there is a very controversial question out there still, immigration, among the conservative ranks, but in my view Republicans would be very wise to act in a responsible way on some form of legislation and just clear this from their decks.</p>
<p>A little takeaway from the midterm that I didn&#8217;t think got a lot of attention, but it&#8217;s hugely relevant.  One of the reasons Republicans did better among Hispanics this midterm, and they did – a lot of senators, a lot of governors, a lot of house members.  Their numbers were higher with Hispanic voters.  I think it&#8217;s because immigration wasn&#8217;t really a topic.  The President didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because of what had gone on down at the border.  Republicans didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because it&#8217;s an uncomfortable subject.  And it just didn&#8217;t come up in a lot of races.  And as a result, the GOP had an opportunity to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter deeply to the country, the economy, jobs, healthcare.  This ought to be the situation that Republicans are striving for.  Being able to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter to them, and you can&#8217;t do that until immigration as a policy topic is neutralized.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s legislative.  Beyond that, the next most important thing the GOP is going to have to do is tackle nominations.  It&#8217;s huge.  As many of you know, Mr. Reid at the end of last year blew up the Senate filibuster for Presidential nominations.  The consequences of that have been profound.  For years now Federal Appeals Courts have favored Conservative justices because of the legacies of Reagan and both Bushes.  Now for the first time in more than a decade, and a lot of people don&#8217;t know this, for the first time in more than a decade judges appointed by Democratic Presidents significantly outnumber judges appointed by Republicans.  Democratic appointees now hold the majority of seats of 9 of 13 appellate court circuits.  When Obama took office that number was one.</p>
<p>The most consequential of these as you may know is the DC Circuit which hears almost every important case out of Washington and now has seven Liberals and five Conservatives on it.  Four of those seven were picked by Obama, and most of them ran through just in this past year since the filibuster was blown up.  Obama has now not only appointed far more judges than President Bush had by this time in his tenure, those justices, because there has been no filibuster to provide a check on what kind of judges they are, they are far more Liberal than most justices that have been put on the court in decades.  And they&#8217;re going to serve lifelong terms.</p>
<p>Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said he&#8217;s going to return the Senate to regular order and also restore the filibuster to 60 votes to confirm nominees.  I know there&#8217;s a big debate out there among Republicans on whether or not this is a good idea.  I think it is.  I know a lot of people think that Republicans should give Democrats a taste of their own medicine, but if you don&#8217;t go back up to 60 votes, here&#8217;s one of the problems.  There are a lot of Republican Senators right now in the Senate who are of the mind frame that you need to show deference to Presidential appointments and nominations.  And there are plenty more Republicans who are up for election in 2016 in very tough states, and they are not always going to be reliable when it comes to the nominations questions.  And I think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard.  I don&#8217;t think, I&#8217;m sorry, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard for Democrats to get 51 votes on most of these nominations, so if you don&#8217;t put it back up to 60, it becomes much harder to block things.  And I want everyone to think about that too in the context if there is a potential Supreme Court opening.</p>
<p>Finally, the other major priority for Republicans has to be oversight.  This is a Presidency that is a mountain of scandals: Fast and furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the Veterans Administration, the Pebble Mine veto.  And the only thing that all of these cases all have in common is that we don&#8217;t have answers to any of them.  We have very valiant people trying to get those answers.  I saw that Cleta Mitchell got your Annie Taylor award last night.  By the way, Cleta Mitchell took me to the bar last night, and if I don&#8217;t make it all the way through this speech, it&#8217;s her fault.</p>
<p>The individual agencies that are the subject of these probes backed up by the Justice Department and aided by Democrats in Congress have spent the past three years engaging in a fulltime outright effort to stonewall every one of these probes.  Will a Republican Senate get us all the answers?  No.  But what this does do &#8212; and Cleta actually wrote an amazing piece in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> this last week which everyone should pay attention to because it&#8217;s correct &#8212; this ought to be a moment for the Republicans to finally get more serious about oversight, to be far more aggressive to get the right people at the committees who are actually going to go to the wall to get some of the answers.  And that&#8217;s a big moment for Republicans too, because unravelling some of these scandals, I think, it&#8217;s going to be important for laying the groundwork for 2016 for them.</p>
<p>And they&#8217;ve got to do all this because it plays back to the opening point.  The GOP&#8217;s challenge in a nutshell is this.  They were voted in because people in this country desperately want change, but it&#8217;s also the case that they can&#8217;t run all of Washington just from Congress.  There are limits on what they can do, so they&#8217;ve got get through what smaller things they can while every day showing what things could be like, how things could be different.  And every day master the impulse to react to Obama, because his only goal is going to be to paint them as obstructionists who can&#8217;t govern, who are driven by internal fights, and they&#8217;ve got to prove that that isn&#8217;t true.</p>
<p>And they have to too because this next Presidential race is going to be very tough and nobody should think otherwise.  The Republicans on the upside have a very neat, new, young generationally different crew of potential nominees coming up, and that&#8217;s very good for the party.  But it&#8217;s also going to mean potentially a very long and ugly nomination fight.  And the Democrats aren&#8217;t going to have that problem because they&#8217;re going to have Hillary.  I mean everyone keeps asking is Hillary going to run?  Hillary is running.  She&#8217;s running right now.  She&#8217;s running, running, running.  You don&#8217;t go out and write a book and campaign for everyone across the country unless you&#8217;re saying I&#8217;m running.  Now she could change her mind in the next few months, but right now we are going to have some Republican versus Hillary Clinton.  And not only does some Republican have to get through a potentially ugly primary, but that some Republican then has to run in a general election in which increasingly the demographics of this country do favor a Democratic party.</p>
<p>And it isn&#8217;t just the Presidency on the line.  I&#8217;ve talked to some Democrats in the last few weeks since this election.  They&#8217;re not really overly fussed that they just lost the Senate.  Why?  Because they&#8217;re convinced this is going to be the shortest term loss ever.  The last three election cycles have all favored Republicans in the Senate.  Far more Democrats up for reelection than Republicans.  In 2016, that situation is totally reversed.  There will be 24 Republicans up for reelection.  Many in states that are absolutely brutal for Republicans to hold.  Places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.  By comparison there will be ten Democrats up for reelection in 2016.</p>
<p>So, again, the ability for Republicans to prove that they can do something and to lay out, to lay out very clear, modest proposals, act on them, and then provide a vision could well shape the politics of this country for the next decade.  The policies the President&#8217;s passed, whether they&#8217;re allowed to stand, the shape of the courts, the final truth about these scandals, the biggest questions and whether they can ultimately be changed &#8212; entitlements, the tax code, tort reform, campaign finance, speech laws &#8211; this next two years are very important.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just going to finish by telling you what I&#8217;m actually most excited about, and that&#8217;s actually the things I don&#8217;t yet know are going to come.  A major shift has actually been happening in Congress, one that tends to not get a lot of attention.  The media tends to be so obsessed with the split in the Republican Party, the Tea Party versus establishment and Libertarians versus Hawks.  The biggest change I&#8217;ve actually seen in Washington and particularly in the Senate in the decade I&#8217;ve been covering is in fact a generational one.  When I first started writing about the Senate, the average age of a Senator was about 180 years old.  And the real story of recent elections is how many of these older, distinguished politicians have retired or died in office and been replaced by a lot younger people with new ideas.  And that&#8217;s happened on both sides of the aisle, by the way.  It&#8217;s not just a Republican phenomena.  But given Harry Reid&#8217;s lockdown, hardly any of these guys have ever had a chance to make a mark.</p>
<p>And some of them are really impressive thinkers and policymakers.  I know you&#8217;ve heard from Ron Johnson last night.  Yeah.  Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and they&#8217;re about to be joined by what I would term the best crop as a whole of Republican Senatorial candidates in goodness knows how long.  Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Dan Sullivan in Alaska &#8212; woo hoo, just got Alaska! &#8212; Joanie Ernst in Iowa, Steve Daines in Montana.  This is a really impressive crew, all of whom have real expertise in the areas that are actually going to matter profoundly in the debates in the next two years, things like energy, things like foreign policy.  And you&#8217;re going to see them join the many reformers you&#8217;ve also seen in the House.  And you can have real opportunity, I think, for some ideas and innovation of the kind that the Conservative moment has been lacking for some time and I think that&#8217;s going to be a really fun thing to watch.</p>
<p>So, on that more optimistic note, I&#8217;m going to let you all get back to your lunch.  Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me, and if there are any questions I&#8217;m happy to take them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>The Democrats have really poisoned the well.  Everybody who is an uninformed voter knows full well that every Conservative, every Republican is mean, selfish, dishonest, homophobic, bigoted, racist and any other bad thing you can think of.  So the question is, if people are really convinced of this, we have to change that impression first.  How the heck do we do it?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, we have to show it, you know, and actually I think there were some remarkable examples of how people did that in this last election.  I think it&#8217;s why the Republicans won is because they did.  You know, the war on women thing, okay.  I mean, that has crushed Republicans the last few years.  It hit a wall this year and in part it was because of guys like Cory Gardner out in Colorado, who when they started running ads against him saying he was anti-women and, and would stop everything, he said, actually you know what, I&#8217;m in favor of over-the-counter contraception which actually would make it much easier for all of you women out there.  And by talking about policies that would actually help women in particular and by not being afraid to, he didn&#8217;t just say no, I&#8217;m not.  He actually gave examples of what it was that made him, his policies and his ideas work for women and, you know, I can&#8217;t remember what the final vote was but he kept the gap with Mark Udall very small in the women&#8217;s vote.  When Ken Buck ran in 2010 he lost women by 17 points.  And they did the same playbook on him in Colorado and I think Cory Gardner lost women by 3 or 4 in the end or something like that.  Tom Cotton won women by 10 points in part by talking about issues that mattered to women that went beyond uteruses.  You know, he talked about foreign policy.  You know, remember, there&#8217;s a lot of women out there that are national security moms.  They care about things like this.  So I think you have to address these head on.  You know, Ed Gillespie in Virginia, so close, but he spent most of his time, a lot of time on the campaign trail and I advised everyone to go look in Ed Gillespie&#8217;s campaign, he had all of his policies laid out.  He was a very informed candidate who went on an agenda and he spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about ways in which Republican policies will help the working poor.  You know, you have to address these things if you&#8217;re not going to be tarred as anti-women, anti-poor and everything else.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, just so the Republicans don&#8217;t overreact and go ballistic and actually damage themselves, what is your recommendation for a strategy after Obama commits his lawless act next week?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel:</strong> Well, look, I think the first thing Republicans have to do is actually just point out, A) how unlawful this is, okay, and that&#8217;s a theme that&#8217;s really grown out there among people and the public and I think it resonates.  I think they also have to point out that this was done for cynical reasons.  The President is not helping Hispanic voters.  What he will put out will not be durable, it does not address a lot of the problems the Hispanic community cares about.  There are all kinds of problems with doing this by executive order because you shouldn&#8217;t do it that way.  So they should point out that there are major problems and that he didn&#8217;t do this to actually help and it&#8217;s not good policy, and then I think they should put forward a series of bills that address different issues, starting with the border security bill, but going through some of the things.  And, you know, I think that Republicans have the ability, when I think of immigration, I know that this is very controversial but immigration can also be seen as a big jobs bill.  I mean, there&#8217;s a lot to this about high tech visas, guest worker programs, things like that, and I think it&#8217;s got to be a framing issue as well as anything.  But they do I think have to respond in some way.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>John Boehner has already rolled over on immigration and is going to give us amnesty and it makes those of us who worked hard to get Republicans elected wonder what the effort was about and why the Republicans in the House can&#8217;t seem to get a Republican as a leader.  Would you like to comment on that?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, they just had elections.  Anyone could have challenged him and nobody did.  So I think one problem that has happened, and I would wager if you talked to members of Congress they would agree with this too, is that probably one of the failings of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell over the last few years is they haven&#8217;t actually talked to each other, and they haven&#8217;t necessarily talked to their conferences as much as they should and told them what they&#8217;re going to do and make an effort to get them onboard with it.  And you know when you&#8217;re not sending a message about what your plan is and working hard internally to get your guys onboard, you create a vacuum which allows everyone to kind of do whatever they want.  And, you know, I think that was some of the craziness you saw over the shutdown last year, it wasn&#8217;t the shutdown itself but the fact that the party didn&#8217;t seem to know where it was going, it was running in 15 different directions all at the same time.  So this isn&#8217;t directly addressing your question but I do think one of the things that I&#8217;m hearing from people is that there&#8217;s been a big push on Boehner and McConnell to be a lot more responsive to their caucuses, be a lot more informative about what they&#8217;re doing and to work with each other and have a unified strategy and we&#8217;ll see if that doesn&#8217;t help.  Thank you.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Christmas Gift to ISIS and Al Qaeda</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-christmas-gift-to-isis-and-al-qaeda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-christmas-gift-to-isis-and-al-qaeda</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-christmas-gift-to-isis-and-al-qaeda/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:24:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guantanamo Bay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[release]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246936</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A bomb maker, a forger and a suicide bomber in a pear-tree.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246938" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-1-419x350.jpg" alt="obama-1" width="318" height="266" /></a>Everyone likes presents; even murderous Muslim terrorists.</p>
<p>That must be why Obama decided to give ISIS, Hamas and Al Qaeda an early Christmas present by freeing their followers from Guantanamo Bay and dispatching them to Uruguay.</p>
<p>Why Uruguay? It’s one of several South American countries run by Marxist terrorists.</p>
<p>Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, a former Marxist terrorist, already offered to take in Syrian refugees and a number of the freed Gitmo Jihadists are Syrians who trained under the future leader of what would become ISIS. If they stay on in Uruguay, they can try to finish the job of killing the Syrian refugees resettled there. If they don’t, they can just join ISIS and kill Christian and Yazidi refugees back in Syria.</p>
<p>It’s a win-win situation for ISIS and Marxist terrorists; less so for their victims.</p>
<p>Most of the Guantanamo detainees freed by Obama were rated as presenting a high risk to America and our allies. They include a bomb maker, a trained suicide bomber, a document forger and a terrorist who had received training in everything up to RPGs and mortars.</p>
<p>The only thing Obama left out was the partridge in the pear tree. It probably wasn’t Halal.</p>
<p>These terrorists aren’t about to settle down in a country best known for its agricultural sector. There is no major demand for bomb makers to herd sheep or suicide bombers to milk cows.</p>
<p>Obama’s Christmas gift to Islamic terrorists includes Mohammed Tahanmatan, a Hamas terrorist who told American personnel at Gitmo that he &#8220;hates all enemies of Islam, including Americans, Jews, Christians and Muslims who do not think as he does.&#8221;</p>
<p>Uruguay is filled with these enemies of Islam, but so is the rest of the world. There’s no telling where Mohammed Tahanmatan will take his Jihad against Americans, Christians and Jews; he might go back to Israel or head over to Syria. Or he might just go back to Afghanistan and Pakistan to kill the American soldiers still left there.</p>
<p>Either way the blood of his victims will be on Obama’s hands.</p>
<p>And yet Mohammed Tahanmatan is the least dangerous of the terrorists freed by Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, Abd al Hadi Omar Mahmoud Faraj, Ali Husain Shaabaan and Jihad Ahmed Diyab were members of the Syrian Group which left an Assad crackdown to join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Syrian Group was headed by Abu Musab al-Suri, a key ideological figure in international Jihadist circles, who was linked to multiple bombings in Europe, including one that wounded American soldiers.</p>
<p>The Damascus Cell of the Syrian Group was run by the uncle of Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi who also sat on AQIQ’s advisory council. Al Qaeda in Iraq is known today as ISIS.</p>
<p>Even while Obama bombs ISIS in Syria and Iraq, he releases experienced ISIS recruits from Gitmo.</p>
<p>Ahmed Adnan Ahjam was listed as receiving advanced training from Al Qaeda in the use of a wide range of battlefield weapons up to artillery. He will be invaluable to ISIS in its campaign in Kobani.</p>
<p>Obama’s present of Ahjam to ISIS will aid in genocide against the Kurds of Kobani. Ahjam was rated a “high risk” and should never have been released.</p>
<p>Abd al Hadi Omar Mahmoud Faraj received training at a camp run by Zarqawi providing him with an even more direct link to ISIS. He is a trained suicide bomber. ISIS will make use of him to train suicide bombers including its growing army of brainwashed and abused child soldiers.</p>
<p>Faraj was rated “high risk”. He should never have been released.</p>
<p>Ali Husain Shaabaan also trained at a Zarqawi camp. He was listed as “high risk”. Like Farj and Ahjam, there is little doubt that he will be in Syria before too long.</p>
<p>Jihad Ahmed Diyab is a document forger who provided documents to the Jihadist network of Abu Zubaydah linked to the bombing plot against Los Angeles International Airport, he worked with Zarqawi and associated with 9/11 terrorist recruiter Mohammed Zammar.</p>
<p>Jihad Diyab was not only listed as being “high risk”, but also as being of high intelligence value. He has connections to multiple Islamic terrorist groups around the world. That makes Jihad potentially the most valuable member of the Syrian Group to be released by Obama in his Christmas gift to ISIS.</p>
<p>ISIS will find Jihad Diyab useful for providing forged documents to smuggle its fighters into Syria and also to potentially move terrorists into Europe and America.</p>
<p>And yet giving this gift of Jihad to ISIS may pale next to Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy, the final Gitmo Jihadist, who not only has many links to Muslim terrorist groups, but is a bomb maker who also trained terrorists in his explosive arts. The United States suspected that he may have even known beforehand about 9/11.</p>
<p>Ourgy is likely to head for North Africa and his ability to move money around will help strengthen the operations of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda linked groups in the area. His bomb making skills will be used to train the next generation of terrorists. The blood of those they kill will be on Obama’s hands.</p>
<p>It goes without saying that Ourgy was listed as “high risk” and that releasing a bomb maker who will train other terrorists to build bombs is about as irresponsible as it gets.</p>
<p>Obama didn’t just free six more Gitmo detainees. He dumped “high risk” Jihadists with skills that make them extremely useful to ISIS and extremely dangerous to us into a country run by a former terrorist.</p>
<p>These terrorists are not just Al Qaeda, but the majority of them have personal links to Syria and to the network of what has become ISIS.</p>
<p>“We’ve offered our hospitality for human beings who have suffered a terrible kidnapping in Guantanamo,” President Jose Mujica has said, making it clear once again where his sympathies lie.</p>
<p>The former Marxist terrorist predictably sympathizes with the terrorists, not the terrorized. Obama might as well have given the new ISIS recruits a plane ticket directly to Istanbul. The only difference between doing that and doing what he did is plausible deniability.</p>
<p>As soon as the money gets wired to them from Saudi Arabia or Qatar, they’ll be at Carrasco International Airport. After a plane trip from there to Buenos Aires to Istanbul, the rest will be a jaunt across the border with a wink and a nod from friendly Turkish border guards happy that ISIS is committing the genocide that their prospective position in the European Union won’t allow them to openly carry out.</p>
<p>Of the terrorists released from Gitmo, 100 were confirmed as having returned to terrorism. Thanks to Obama’s Christmas present to Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS, that number is about to go up.</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>
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		<title>Trashing the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/trashing-the-constitution-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trashing-the-constitution-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:23:05 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[America's fiercest warriors for freedom reveal Obama's assault on our rights at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Trashing the Constitution,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113571263" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Cinderella, Superman and Pinocchio were walking through the woods one day when they came upon a sign advertising a beauty contest.  Cinderella smiled at her two companions and said, “I’ve got this.”  She comes back an hour later with a trophy.  They continue on their journey until they see another sign, this one advertising a competition for the world’s strongest man.  Superman puffs out his chest, says, “I’ll be right back,” and about an hour later he comes back with a trophy.  Finally, just before sunset, the trio spies a final sign calling for a contest to find the world’s greatest liar.  Pinocchio scratches his nose and says, “No problem,” but an hour later he returns in tears with no trophy.  He manages only to blurt out, “Who is Barack Obama?”  When Pinocchio finally composes himself, his unbelieving companions ask how he possibly lost.  Pinocchio said, “I was in first place and then Barack Obama said, ‘I’m a constitutional scholar.’”</p>
<p>And so we find ourselves in 2014, gathered to discuss the trashing of the American Constitution.  My name is Paul Erickson.  I’ve been a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy since 1980 when I cast my first vote for President and for Ronald Reagan, and then serving eventually in his first administration.  Today’s topic has been one of the three animating issues of my avocation in politics since the days of my senior year at Yale when the Algonquin Round Table of my Yale political union party of the right stalwarts first formed the Federalist Society and I was privileged to take Nino Scalia’s final seminar at the University of Virginia School of Law before his elevation to the federal bench and his eventual donning of the black robes of justice.  But with us today are some very special individuals whose expertise makes me happier than President Obama with an open border.  I’ll introduce each of the experts in turn as they speak with plenty of time for your questions and a timely lunch.</p>
<p>Sean Noble is the founder of DC London, a one-stop shop for expert political messaging and campaign services.  Most of us first met Sean during his tenure as Arizona Congressman John Shadegg’s chief of staff.  His smiling, vicious campaign expertise has earned him the sobriquet “el sol diablo” from Arizona Democrats, many of whom speak English.  Sean has five children and is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, but unlike Clayton Kershaw, his children have never let him down in the World Series.  His last thought of the day on his blog before he was swept up in the 2014 mid-term election analysis was a timeless quote by Margaret Thatcher.  “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”  I’m happy to have him charging the breach once again today.  Sean Noble.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Thank you, Paul.  Well, it’s an honor to be here today and to be at this conference.  This has been a wonderful experience.  I was completely motivated by Dennis Prager last night.  I thought he spoke real truth to power.  We are at a very interesting point in American history, and it’s something that’s kind of evolved over the last few years as Barack Obama’s been in the White House, and that is that we have seen the absolute destruction of not only the hope of what the American dream is, but the actual expectation that people have about what America is and what Americans should believe in, and it’s one of those things that is why the First Amendment is so important, because we have to have a vigorous debate about what it means to be an American, what it means to believe in policy, to fight against policy, those kind of things, and yet in Barack Obama we have someone who is actually wanting to erase the First Amendment, and that is to squelch speech of anyone who wants to be critical of him.  A few months ago my organization, American Encore, put together an ad that we ran nationally online, and whoever’s running the AV, if you could run that ad.</p>
<p><strong>Ad Audio:</strong>  Where would America be without free speech?  We haven’t always agreed with what’s said, but until now we’ve always agreed on each other’s right to say it.  The Obama administration recently proposed new rules at the IRS to control the speech of certain nonprofits, to legalize the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups.  Now the right to free speech is dependent upon who is speaking, and it’s up to the IRS to make that call.  The Obama administration is proposing new tax rules, unfairly scrutinizing nonprofits, another line of attack against these groups.  The American Civil Liberties Union says the proposed rule threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America.  Tell President Obama don’t use the IRS to kill free speech.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>So what the IRS proposed was pretty egregious, and Cleta is actually going to talk a little bit more about that.  I’m going to leave that to her, because she’s the actual expert on that front, but needless to say, the IRS is one of the most feared agencies of the federal government, obviously, and what’s particularly egregious about what they were doing is the fact that they were targeting not just organizations, which Cleta will talk about, but targeting individuals.  Obama had a hit list of folks in the White House in which they were actually breaking the law and getting the individual tax returns of individual Americans and businesses and then leaking that kind of thing to the press.  There were five nonprofit organizations that the IRS illegally provided confidential information to a supposed newspaper outfit.  It’s really a leftist organization.</p>
<p>One of those groups was Americans for Responsible Leadership, which is an organization that I put together and had been targeted for some activity in a ballot proposition in California, so we had a situation where the IRS was targeting individuals and organizations and then we had a state agency in California at the behest of Jerry Brown, who was the governor at the time and wanting to expose what was going on with a donation that came from Americans for Responsible Leadership to a ballot initiative fighting a tax increase that Jerry Brown wanted, and in California there’s an agency called the Fair Political Practices Commission.  Now it’s fair, they call it &#8220;Fair Political Practices,&#8221; as long as it’s liberal political practices.  If it’s not then it’s clearly not fair, and what they did is they specifically targeted the chairman of the commission.  It was a woman named Ann Ravel, and here you had a situation in which this organization decided they wanted to expose who was behind this contribution because they don’t believe in anonymous free speech, and they went to great lengths.  They couldn’t under the law actually find that information out because it’s not allowed, so what they did is they made up a law in the sense that they said we’re going to audit a report.</p>
<p>Now, it’s kind of complicated, but under the California Statute if you give a big political donation in a ballot initiative and you’re an organization, then you’re required to, the next January, file a report that says we did this.  Well, they wanted to audit a report that had not yet been filed, so that’s the authority they asserted, that they’re using their audit authority of a report that hadn’t been filed, and they took that all the way to the State Supreme Court, and on Sunday night before the election at 11:00 at night California time, the State Supreme Court voted unanimously 7 to 0 to allow the commission to force that disclosure from these organizations, which is just a complete overreach.  Now, the reason we know it’s an overreach is because the next year they went to the legislature and they actually passed a statute to give them the authority that they had asserted the previous year.</p>
<p>Now, Ann Ravel was then, this last year, has been put on the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission by President Obama.  That was the thank you to trying to expose these anonymous contributions and target those who would speak, and what was among the first things she did after she got to the FEC?  She’s proposing a rule, and she’s starting hearings in which she says that if you are a blogger and you talk about politics or you talk about campaigns then you need to be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission.  Think about the chilling effect that that would have on speech.  Not only is it so anyone who does opinion writing on a web site, who has a blog, frankly, the next step would be their Facebook pages.  Now we’re talking about individual Americans who would be targeted by a federal government agency and told what you can and cannot say, and when you can and cannot say it, and how much of it you can say.</p>
<p>That is the reason that we have to be stalwart in our defense of the First Amendment.  Because ultimately the biggest challenge we have is that the enemies of ours on the First Amendment are the press and liberal Democrats and left.  The press because their influence over the American people has been waning for years and years.  Newspapers are not nearly as influential as they used to be, and now an organization can be involved in the process and have just as much influence or more than the local newspaper.  They don’t like that.  Their power has been taken away, and secondly, the unions.  We hear all this stuff about “dark money.”  The left has been involved in this stuff since the 1940s with labor unions, and it wasn’t until labor unions’ influence started to wane, along with the newspapers and the media influence started to wane, that the left woke up and said wait, we’re losing control of the message, of the narrative.  We can’t have a level playing field because when conservatives have a level playing field with us, they’re going to win because our messages resonate with the American people, and so that’s why we’ve seen such an assault on the First Amendment, and in my mind it’s just so ironic that it’s the press that is leading the assault on the First Amendment, and they are protected, so you notice when Harry Reid put through the Senate a constitutional amendment to essentially regulate the First Amendment that &#8212; all the amendment language by Senator Udall from New Mexico is there &#8212; and at the very end of it, none of this amendment applies to the press, the way they define it.  They would not define bloggers as the press, which is the problem, so that’s why they have the FEC targeting these things.</p>
<p>So I would ask that you stay totally up on this.  Watch Ann Ravel at the FEC.  She’s a very scary person and doing the bidding of the left, and our hope is that we can expose them for what they’re trying to do and make sure we continue to have a robust debate in America under the First Amendment.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Thank you. Charles Johnson is a writer and a thinker, not always the same thing.  You’ve recognized his words from coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal.  His thinking has been recognized as the recipient of both the Robert Bartley Fellowship and Eric Breindel Award at the Wall Street Journal as well as being named to the Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute.  He earned his credentials in the vast right-wing conspiracy when he was named a junior prince of darkness at the Phillips Foundation.  We know that as the Robert Novak Award.  He’s most recently authored “Why Coolidge Matters,” and he’s here today to remind us why the Constitution still matters.  Charles Johnson.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>Hello.  So I’m actually probably the most optimistic on this panel, probably because I’ve seen that Barack Obama can be beaten and even humiliated, and so what I kind of want to think about, and forgive me, I’ve been very busy over the last few months electing a lot of Republicans, and what we’ve been doing is kind of thinking a lot about why it is that President Obama was elected in the first place, and I want to tell just a quick story.  In 2004 I went to the Democratic Convention in Boston, where I’m from.  My parents got tickets.  Our shop was closed down because it was right near where the convention was being held, and so I decided to go and have a look for myself, and what was remarkable there was how quickly people glommed onto this freshman senator who had no experience, and every time you’d ask them, “Why are you guys big fans of Barack Obama?” they would recite his story.  They would say he’s black.  They would make a big deal about this, and it occurred to me, when I worked with Andrew Breitbart and many others in the vast right-wing conspiracy, the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, that he really wasn’t vetted and what we did is we expected the press to really do the job for us, and it really didn’t happen, and so what I’ve kind of taken as my kind of life mission is hunting Democrats and RINOs for sport, and business is very, very good, especially after this last election, but I would caution you, just because we’ve elected a Republican Senate does not necessarily mean that we’ve elected a conservative Senate and that’s something very important to kind of keep in mind.</p>
<p>Now, as I mentioned earlier, I got my start with Andrew Breitbart, and he really had this idea about vetting the President, and really focusing on him, and so I’d find all sorts of things that were damaging to him and to the First Lady.  I found some stuff surrounding Barack Obama’s life in Indonesia as well as in Hawaii as well as in Chicago, and really it’s become clear to me that what we need to do on kind of the conservative right is start to vet these candidates very seriously, and that’s what we did this last election cycle.</p>
<p>One of the projects I worked on most recently was with Michelle Nunn in Georgia.  Now, Nunn is an extreme liberal Democrat, and she was kind of coasting on this moderate reputation.  Well, what we did is we took apart her entire life story and we went through every single chapter of it and found out that she had been in favor of bringing lots of immigrant children into the United States.  We took that piece of the puzzle and made sure that everyone saw it in sort of rural Georgia, and we also kind of looked into her past when she was hitting her opponent for outsourcing, and what we found is that her ancestors owned slaves.  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Lots of people in Georgia owned slaves.  What’s the big deal?  But a lot of people in black talk radio really don’t like it that her family owned slaves, and so we made sure that they all saw that, so they weren’t enthusiastic to vote for her.  And these are the kind of things that we need to be thinking much more strategically about.</p>
<p>It’s my contention that we can defeat the liberal media.  We can actually replace it in many respects.  I was one of the first journalists to publish the name of Nina Pham, who’s this woman who had Ebola.  I had it 12 hours before NBC.  The liberal media was basically stopping that from getting out to the public because they realized that if there was a face behind this Ebola stuff it would be bad for them politically.  The media would sort of be forced to cover it, and I was talking to journalists in Texas and they were basically suppressing this information, and my attitude is what’s the worst that can happen?  And I published her name on my site, got a million page views in under a day, and what ended up happening next was really remarkable.  I had all these journalists criticizing me for providing information, and some of them even filed complaints about me violating HIPAA with Twitter, and so they kicked me off Twitter, and so I had to go to Twitter court to get reinstated.</p>
<p>But it’s my contention that right now we’re at a very, very good point.  I’ve been part of the team that’s been publishing these Gruber videos. [Applause.] Thank you.  If you had told me a week ago that Gruber would be trending on Twitter, this obscure policy analyst, I would have thought you were insane, and it’s kind of amazing that all this type of nerd research has paid off in quite amazing fashion, but there are people who are now publishing videos on Gruber that, when I started with Rich Weinstein in July, we had sort of a strategy of how to get this video out to the country, and I’ve been very excited to see kind of what’s happened there.</p>
<p>But I would say that the best thing we can do with Barack Obama is really realize that he is a lame duck, but he also has the executive orders, and so what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to shape events around him and run out the clock, and I think it can be done if only we start actually publishing material and really be aggressive towards every step of what he’s trying to achieve, and I think one of the kind of complaints that I had with a lot of conservatives is they spend a lot of time complaining about the liberal media, but I think that what we really need to start focusing on is replacing it and having it lose market share, and in particular, as we kind of start with Hillary Clinton, she has some of the highest negatives of anyone who’s ever run for President, and we should be exploiting this constantly and mercilessly, but we should also be strategic about it.  The Washington Free Beacon has published a lot of material surrounding Hillary Clinton.  I think it’s a mistake to release all of it right now, that we should basically have a strategy going, like with the Gruber tapes where we released the material in staggered stages, and I’m working on kind of the Hillary bomb right now that I think will be quite helpful.</p>
<p>But I want to say just very briefly, I think we can actually win the narrative, and one of the things I’ve learned from Andrew Breitbart is that if you frame news in the right context, in a pro-America, pro-citizen context, you can really change the debate.  We shifted the debate from talking about all these children who were sent here to dealing with the national health concerns of all these people coming with Ebola and really we’re winning the arguments among the American people, and I think there’s all this question about how can the Republican Party reach out to Hispanics, reach out to immigrants, but if you really think about last Tuesday’s election returns the Democrats have a serious problem with America.  They lost something like 22 percent of the white vote.  This is not a majority coalition thing, so I think, going back to thinking about the 2004 when Barack Obama came, really the dream, or the nightmare, that was Barack Obama is coming to an end, and in fact he is the exception to the rule, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we can kind of defeat him, and I think it’s much more important right now to defeat Obama-ism than to defeat Obama, because we need to stop them from kind of doing this kind of strategy in the future with other candidates and so we need to be proactive about neutralizing those kind of candidates now.  So with that, I’ll hear some of your questions.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Andrew McCarthy graduated from New York Law School and taught at both his alma mater and at Fordham University Law School.  He’s a contributing editor at National Review.  He’s the author of both “Willful Blindness, a Memoir of Jihad” and “The Grand Jihad, How Islam and the Left Sabotaged America,” detailed accounts of the campaign the Middle East Quarterly describes as an attempt to insinuate Islamic Sharia law into the fabric of American society.  The books are almost prosecutorial in tone, which would be appropriate since Andrew was the chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York who led the successful prosecution against Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh who’s behind bars because of Andrew.  What have you done in the war against terrorism today?  What many people do not know is that his investigations of President Obama led to discovery that Michelle Obama is a virgin.  Much like his war on terror, every night President Obama sits on the edge of Michelle’s bed and describes in vivid detail everything he’s about to do, and then nothing happens.  To tell us what we should be doing, Andrew McCarthy.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>And here I thought we spent all weekend talking about executive action.  Well, so you’ve heard from the most optimistic person on the panel, so I guess I’d be the most pessimistic person on the panel, but that probably comes with the territory of writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration.  The day my book, which is called “Faithless Execution:  Building a Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment,” the day that the book came out there was an announcement that Obama had released five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, who turns out to be a deserter, and what dawned on me at that point was the problem for a writer writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration is that at a certain point in time the writer has to stop writing so they can bind the book and get it to the stores and sell it.  The Obama administration goes merrily along, so I guess it was only natural that by the time the book came out I was four or five impeachable offenses behind, and that unfortunately is a pattern that has only picked up pace over time.</p>
<p>Now, what I get all the time about this is look, it’s politically impossible to impeach Obama, so why even talk about it?  And there’s a few answers to that, but I think the most important one is Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism really, famously said that the power of bad men is no indifferent thing, and Edmund Burke obviously didn’t know Barack Obama, but I think he had Barack Obama in mind, and I know the framers had Barack Obama in mind because one of the things that they spent the most time about in their deliberations was how to rein in the dangerous potentials of the presidency that they were creating, which was quite intentionally created as an awesome source of power because it’s in the presidency that we basically have most of the national security responsibility of the United States.  The problem of course is if you’re going to create an office that is that powerful, anything that powerful has the potential to be very destructive, so they wanted to make sure that they could rein in the power of the presidency if it ever fell into the hands of somebody who was not only corrupt but potentially incompetent or who at the very least had a different idea of what the government should look like than the constitutional framework that the framers gave us.</p>
<p>So here’s the thing.  They came up with dispositive powerful checks on the presidency, and there’s primarily two of them in the hands of Congress.  I mean, they hope that the best check on the presidency would be the ballot box.  Right?  They assumed that if somebody was, or had demonstrated himself during his candidacy to be corrupt, incompetent or power hungry that the public wouldn’t elect such a person, and certainly wouldn’t reelect such a person, so I guess maybe they had higher hopes for what the American people would end up to be than has proven to be the case, but they did come up with two checks for Congress.  One of them, and the one that they expected was going to be used the most, was the power of the purse.  To the extent that the President needs resources to carry out schemes that contravene the Constitution, that funds, those resources have to come from Congress, so the thought was that Congress would be able to check the President by basically pulling back the purse strings.  The problem with that is, and we’re seeing this with immigration, for example.  We’ve heard any number of times all weekend long people talk about the President’s lawless executive amnesty plan.  Well, it’s lawless all right, but there are vast components of it that the President can actually implement without violating the law.  For example, the President can pardon every crime committed against federal law in the United States.  He could pardon tomorrow every crime committed by an illegal alien in the United States, and even classes of people outside the United States who violated federal law, and talk about resources.  You know he talks about he has his pen and his phone?  He doesn’t even need his phone for that.  He just needs the stroke of a pen.</p>
<p>The point is, there’s certain things that a President can do because the office is so powerful that even the power of the purse is not a check for.  The only other check that the system provides is impeachment.  Now, we hear impeachment and we think, oh, well, it’s inconceivable, and certainly the Republican establishment has taken the position since the Clinton days that, oh, that impeachment thing was a debacle and we never want to talk about it again.  The &#8220;i-word&#8221; is not to be mentioned on Capitol Hill.  We had the crazy specter about a year go where they had a hearing in the House about executive lawlessness, and you had a bunch of liberal law professors explaining to members of Congress that one of the major checks on lawlessness in the Constitution is impeachment.  Professor John Turley, who is a self-described left-winger called Obama’s manner of governance the most profound constitutional crisis that had arisen in his lifetime, and he lived through Nixon.  Right?  So you had these law professors saying impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, and you had these congressmen kind of ducking under their desks at the very mention of the word, saying to these professors, look, that’s a word we don’t say up here.</p>
<p>It’s a word that the framers not only said in the Constitution but that Madison described as indispensable.  He thought that without impeachment it would be impossible to rein in what they called the maladministration of the executive branch, whether it was corruption, incompetence or what have you, and they put impeachment in very intentionally as the ultimate decisive check on that kind of behavior, and the reason it’s important to talk about it is because it’s the only check if you decide that you’re not going to impeach the President and you decide that we are going to take this off the table and never even discuss it, that’s fine.  That’s a political choice that you can make, but when you make it &#8212; and this is the reason I wrote the book.  I want people to have their eyes open about this.  If you make that choice, you must make it mindful of the fact that there are certain abuses of presidential power that only impeachment can check, and if you deprive yourself of your only arsenal for combatting those abuses of power, you are going to get those abuses of power.</p>
<p>Now, why is this so important?  And I’ll leave it with this.  There have been checks on President Obama’s abuses of power over the last six years because there have been elections to worry about, his own elections as well as congressional elections, and don’t think public pressure doesn’t work.  Don’t think political pressure doesn’t work.  Remember when Obama just came to the presidency and the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House.  What was one of the first things they wanted to do?  They wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan civilian court, the place where I used to work.  They weren’t able to do it, and the reason they weren’t able to do it is even in blue, blue New York the people rose up and protested against it, and that lit a fire under Congress, and Congress lit a fire under the White House, and the White House had to pull back and withdraw from the plan, so they are responsive to political pressure.  It’s not easy to do, and it’s certainly not easy to keep up the pressure, but they do respond to it.  But look, up until now, President Obama has had mid-terms to worry about twice and his own reelection to worry about once.  Now there’s nothing else, so you have somebody who has this vast power, who no longer has the political check of an election coming around the corner, and who has a lot of mischief that he can make over the last two years, and I think we’ve gotten every indication in just the last week that’s exactly the way things are going to go.</p>
<p>So yes, right now there’s no political will to remove President Obama from power, but I think we’re in for a very bad time unless we change that climate, and that doesn’t mean impeaching the President necessarily, but what you have to do, because of the way our system is designed, is go back to a time when impeachment was a credible threat that would bring the President to heel, or at least back him up before he would engage in corrupt or unlawful schemes.  If we don’t have that, I’m sorry to say I think we’re in for a very, very bad time the next two years.  And on that happy note …</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Anticipating Andrew’s cheery comments, Matt Drudge this morning on the Drudge report put up a banner headline that said “Impeachment Insurance” under the smiling face of Joe Biden.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell is one of the truly indispensable players in the American conservative movement.  Last night you heard a list of her many accomplishments.  Today I would add only two.  I’ve had the high honor of serving with Cleta on the Board of American Conservative Union and watched her expert chairmanship of the American Conservative Union Foundation during a crucial time in that organization’s history.  In presidential campaigns and critical causes I have had to evaluate and hire some of the finest election law attorneys in the land.  Cleta is simply the finest election law lawyer in America, period.  She has been my lawyer.  The consigliore of the vast right-wing conspiracy and Freedom Center Annie Taylor Award winner, Cleta Mitchell.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Well, good morning.  Yes, on that cheery note … but I want to talk about three things, but I’ll probably meander and talk about more than that, but I want to focus on three.  I want to talk about the IRS, I want to talk about campaign finance and how it works together, and then I want to talk about some of the scariest things that are going on in America today.  Those two things, but I’ve been working, I think I said last night, five years ago is when I first started realizing something had changed in the IRS.  I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I think we have not looked at and I really hope that Congress will do, because I think that one of the most frightening things to me is something that Congress has yet to investigate, but I have to believe, and I just know what I know what I know.  I used to tell my daughter when she was growing up, particularly when she was a teenager, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and interestingly, when I would find out things, she would just go, “Mom, how did you find out?”  I say, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and I think we will find out, because I absolutely believe that this IRS looks at publicly available campaign finance reports, looks at contributions that people make, and decides who it’s going to subject to IRS personal and business audits based on their political contributions.  I think that’s a pretty frightening thing, but I absolutely believe it has happened, and I think that we have to get to the bottom of that.</p>
<p>I absolutely believe the IRS looks at organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, does not have to disclose its donors publicly but guess who it does disclose its donors of $5000.00 or more to?  You have to disclose those to the IRS.  The IRS uses that information, I believe, to target people for audits and further government inquiry, and I think that there are so many things.  Sean made reference to the IRS leaking confidential taxpayer information.  I know they’ve done it.  They’ve done it to my clients.  They’ve done it to other conservative groups.  Again, he made reference to the release of confidential tax information of Koch Industries.  That’s a criminal offense.  There have been no prosecutions, and in fact that’s a 6103 violation.  You should really do something with your life when you can start quoting sections of the tax code by number.  A 6103 violation is one in which the IRS is prohibited by law for any agency or IRS employee to release confidential taxpayer information, but guess what happens if you believe your confidential taxpayer information has been violated and you ask for information about that?  The IRS has turned that on its head and said we can’t tell you that information because whoever did it, whoever did that to you, the perpetrator, is protected by Section 6103 from having their information disclosed to you.  Now that is so unbelievably bizarre, but these are things Congress needs at look at and fix.  The IRS has failed to answer multiple subpoenas from the House committees.  They’ve just disregarded them.  They’ve said, subpoena from Congress?  So, your point is?  And I think that Congress has got to reassert its legislative prerogative.</p>
<p>Let’s not forget, contrary to what Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate in 2008, Article 1 of the Constitution is the legislative branch.  That’s what the founders started with.  They started with the people’s representatives.  The executive branch is in Article 1, but we’ve let that get completely out of whack, and I think Congress needs to undertake what I call the great unwinding.  The great unwinding of a federal government, an administrative regulatory state that was built over a century by people who fundamentally disagree with us, and I think with our founding principles, and that’s what I think we as conservatives need to be talking about.  We don’t need new programs.  We need to get rid of what’s there, the great unwinding.  We have multiple situations where members of the Obama administration have gone before Congress and perjured themselves.  Let’s start with the IRS commissioner in March of 2012, who went before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and when asked is there targeting of conservative organizations going on today, and he said no.  Well, the last time I checked, lying to Congress is a federal crime.  Perjuring yourself before Congress under oath is a federal crime.  Just ask Roger Clemens.  And I want to know from the new attorney general nominee, and I’m going through and preparing and getting this to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the number of administration officials who have gone before the Congress in the last six years and lied under oath.  And they need to be prosecuted.  They are criminals.</p>
<p>Sean mentioned the FEC and its proposal to regulate Internet activity.  Everybody in this room write this down.  FEC.gov.  Comments are due by January 15.  There is no reason why everybody in this room should not write a paragraph, go online, submit comments.  Have ten of your neighbors do it.  The last time the FEC started talking about regulating Internet political speech they were inundated with so many thousands of comments they said uncle.  We have to do that again.  We have to get everybody we can think of, your organizations, your individuals, write FEC.gov.  Comments close January 15.  Tell them you want to come testify.  That’ll scare them to death.  If they think they’re gonna have thousands of people wanting to testify, they’ll collapse.  January 15.  No reason not to do it.  Do it.  We have to get those comments.  We did that with the proposed IRS regulations, the one that Sean talked about, the IRS C4 regulations.  More than 160,000 comments we were able to generate saying don’t do this.  I mean, there might have been ten that said they were for it.  Of course, they were all submitted by people who are close to the New York Times, but they finally withdrew those proposed regulations, but guess what?  They’re working on reissuing them next year, so be vigilant.</p>
<p>Campaign finance.  I want to talk about that for just a minute.  Understand when they say campaign finance reform, here’s what they mean.  They say campaign finance reform.  They mean shut up conservatives.  That’s what that means.  Never be misled by what they mean.  Here’s what that bill that Sean referred to, the Harry Reid thing.  Let me reiterate what he said to you.  It was a proposed constitutional amendment to amend the First Amendment.  Think about that.  This great thing that the left supposedly reveres, crucifixes in urine, protect all that, etc. etc.  But they wanted to amend the First Amendment to allow elected politicians to decide what you a can and can’t say.  How’s that been working out for conservatives so far?  And guess what?  Every Democrat in the Senate voted for it.  Every one of them, and would you like to know what the political headline said the day after it was defeated, because it didn’t get the necessary two thirds?  All the Republicans voted against it.  “GOP Kills Campaign Finance Reform”</p>
<p>So that brings me to my third point.  Everybody’s got to buy this book.  Everybody’s got to read this book.  You gotta give it to everybody for Christmas, and you gotta talk about it:  “Stonewalled.”  It’s just out by Sharyl Attkisson.  It’s everything we know, but documented.  The lies, the deception, the chilling activity to which she was subjected, to which others have been subjected about the extent to which this government is going to spend our money to lie to us and to keep us under surveillance.  I’m going to read you one paragraph because this is a panel about the Constitution.  I’m going to sit down.  The big chill is on.  Now, mind you, her computer was hacked, classified documents were planted on her computer, deep in her computer.  Her phones were tapped, etc., etc.</p>
<p>Many sources, she writes, including congressmen, become wary of communicating the ordinary way.  One evening I’m talking with a member of Congress on my regular mobile phone about a somewhat sensitive news matter.  He’s avoiding giving straight answers.  I keep pressing.  Finally, sounding exasperated, he blurts out, “Sharyl, your phone’s bugged.”  I can’t argue the point.  We decide to meet in person and work out alternative ways to communicate.  It’s the new reality in a society where journalists and politicians suspect their government is listening in.</p>
<p>Now, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, people, but I am telling you, this is a lawless administration.  There are not enough hours in today’s program to go through all the ways that this government, under this administration, is violating the statutes and the Constitution, and we have to do everything we can do to keep them from continuing and being successful, and that’s what we’re about to do.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Q&amp;A</strong></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>This is for Andrew.  You say that without any further election and without the power to impeach that we have basically disarmed and can’t do anything about President Obama’s lawlessness.  What about his doing further damage to the Democratic Party?  Does he care?  Do the Democrats care?  I mean, he’s already hollowed the party out.  Couldn’t he do even more damage in the next two years by his lawlessness, and would that be a deterrent?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>Look, in a vacuum, if that was the only consideration, sure it would be a deterrent, but let’s take a step back.  I was watching the news the day after the election results, or I guess the day after Obama spoke about the election results and indicated that he was actually doubling down on the executive amnesty, and the commentators presenting the news seemed baffled by it, and they just said this guy just doesn’t get it.  The electorate just spoke and he seems to have a tin ear.  He just doesn’t get it, and I sat there and I’m thinking about the commentators.  No, no, you don’t get it.  I mean, after six years you don’t get who this guy is.  He is trying to advance an ideological agenda, and his Alinsky-ite tactics are such that he has a long-range ambition but he has a very disciplined approach about going about it, which is you never go further than you think the political climate of the moment will allow you to go, but you always keep your eye on the ball, and you compute your activities in terms of what you think your political environment is, and that’s why it’s more dangerous now because he doesn’t have any elections to worry about, and will that hurt the Democrats in the short term, just like Obamacare did?  Sure, but they still got Obamacare, which was what they wanted.</p>
<p>If Obama’s successful in what he’s doing now, two things to bear in mind.  Cleta just listed them.  We could go through a thousand things, but the amnesty could result in as close to permanent as anything you get in politics, a permanent electoral majority for Democrats, no matter how unpopular some of their policies seem to be at the moment.  That’s why they’re pushing so hard to get it, and the second thing is, if you think you’re rid of Barack Obama in January of 2017, I got news for you.  By then he’s going to have put about 400 like-minded progressive activist lawyers on the federal bench who will be serving for 30 to 40 years and advancing the same agenda, so his work continues after he’s gone on the basis of the laying of the pavement that he’s doing now, so I don’t think he’s worried about the short-term interests of the Democratic Party.  I think he’s worried about, and moving toward, the long-term objectives of progressive ideology.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>I’ll just add one thing.  It’s obvious he doesn’t care about the interests of the Democrat Party because a few weeks before the election he was, in prepared remarks &#8212; this is what’s astounding.  In prepared remarks, he said, “I’m not on the ballot this year, but you can be sure that my policies are, every single one of them.”  Now that was him trying to assert his role.  That was a gift for us.  We used that quote in commercials against members of Congress, against Senators, against a Secretary of State candidate in Arizona, a governor’s candidate, because we realized that while he was trying to assert himself in prepared remarks, it was a disaster for him to be saying that because we could use that against the Democrats that we were running against, so he doesn’t care about them because he’s such a narcissist.</p>
<p><strong>Georgette Gelbard: </strong>Georgette Gelbard from California.  This is mainly for Andy.  What would it take to limit executive orders for all Presidents going forward, and do you think that that’s a good idea for the future?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I think it’s been unfortunate that the concept of the executive order has been kind of tainted in this whole escapade about not just immigration but other things as well.  There’s nothing in principle wrong with an executive order.  The executive branch is very extensive.  The President is the head of the executive branch, and as long as the President is just directing the proper activities of the executive branch, executive orders are a good thing.  They’re a little transparency for the executive branch.  The problem is when the President uses his executive directing power as camouflage for when he’s actually usurping the power of Congress and the courts either to write the law or to interpret the law, and this President has used executive orders for that purpose.  That’s the problem, and it’s not the number of executive orders, it’s what he does with them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Hi, this question’s for Charles.  Which conservative candidate are you researching for 2016 and why?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>So I’ve researched almost all the conservative candidates, and the guy for me is clearly Cruz.  I know he’s controversial, but I’ve known Ted Cruz before he was an exclamation point on the right and an expletive to the Republican establishment and the Democrats.  What’s interesting, last year he told me his strategy for the shut-down.  He said look, people aren’t going to remember what the shut-down was about.  They’re going to remember that we stood up for them, and it’s interesting that in nearly every Senate race, except one, which was Scott Brown in New Hampshire which he lost, they were asking for Ted Cruz.  He was filling rooms in Alaska, and I’m a chess player.  It’s my hobby, and Ted Cruz is a chess player.  He’s advancing the ball, and I know there’s this silly notion right now that we need an executive or we need a governor, but the reason it’s silly is we need somebody with an executive temperament, and I’ve gone through a lot of the candidates on the right, and if you’re a governor you have a staff, and your staff can cause you a lot of trouble.  We’ve certainly seen that with Governor Christie and with some others, so I think for the moment I would go with him.  There’s a lot of stuff on Hillary.  I was talking with the FBI agent who investigated her for Whitewater, who’s actually a gay Democrat, believe it or not, one of the main ones, and there’s so much material there that the Republican Congress did not use because they were afraid of how hot it would be, and I think basically the problem right now is we’re going to have a GOP civil war, which is going to play out over the next two years, and it’s very intensive.  You talk to staffers, and there’s a serious fight for the soul of the right that’s about to take place, and right now we’re at the bleeding Kansas moment, but it’s going to get ugly.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Will there be any problems with Ted Cruz and the fact that he’s born in Canada?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>No.  This is a debate that a lot of people have.  The answer’s no.  John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.  George Romney was born in Mexico.  The question of natural born is at birth are you a citizen, and his mother is from Delaware.  It’s still in the continental United States.  It’s still a state, I believe, even though Joe Biden’s from there.  No, a lot of people are trying to use this to disqualify him, which is kind of craven but no, he’s clearly eligible.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I thought he was born in Kenya.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Here’s one of the things I think is important and it goes to Charles and all.  This book makes pretty clear the extent to which the Obama administration has gone out of its way to attack journalists, to spin the stories, one after another, from fast and furious, Benghazi, the healthcare.gov, the IRS, all of it.  But guess what’s interesting about that?  No matter how much of our money they spend, no matter how hard they have tried and how well they have succeeded with what I call what is the state-owned media, NBC, CBS, ABC.  As I’ve said, we might as well be in Venezuela for all the independence they show for the government, but notwithstanding all of that, guess what, the people still know.  They have a low opinion of this president and contrary to Mr. Gruber, we’re not stupid, and we tell each other, and because we have these other outlets and ways to get information everywhere from Charles Johnson to Fox News and Andrew McCarthy, and all, we get the information.  We share it with each other, which is why, circle back to why is the FEC doing what it’s doing?  Why has the IRS been doing what it’s doing?  Because they’re trying to shut down those channels of communication, but we will not let them.  We’re not gonna let them, but you can buy the book, but you’ll have to look for it.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Johnson: </strong>The last question before lunch, the gentleman in blue.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yes, I think that despite what was on Drudge this morning about our very loving vice president, my understanding is Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats are not enthralled at the present time with Barack Obama.  Do you not think there’s an opportunity for them to think Joe Biden is a better hope for them in 2016 than Barack Obama?</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Sean?</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that everyone on the left, well, not everyone, the Democrat establishment is all in for Hillary, and that’s going to be Biden’s demise because they –</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>I’m not talking about the presidency.  I’m talking about &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that it’s going to be very difficult for the Democrats to win a presidency if their previous president gets impeached, so they will do everything they can to prevent any type of impeachment proceedings.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Please thank our panel.</p>
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