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Monday, August 19, 2013

The plan to overthrow the United States government by the radical Muslim Brotherhood

The plan to overthrow the United States government by the radical Muslim Brotherhood The plan to overthrow the United States government by the radical Muslim Brotherhood isn't a conspiracy theory, it is a verifiable and documented fact. The progress they have made to stealthily slither into the highest levels of our government is nothing short of a Hollywood blockbuster movie, or the latest Sci-fi thriller on the book stand. Unfortunately, this is no movie or novel, this is today's reality. And it is a reality we must confront. Former FBI counter terrorism expert John Guandolo spoke last week to Jim Schneider of "Crosstalk" radio and had me riveted to my seat. Guandolo created and implemented the FBI's first counter-terrorism training and education program. He is the co-author of two books, "Shariah: The Threat to America" and his new book soon to be released, "Raising a Jihadi Generation: MB Handbook for Law Enforcement, Military and Intelligence Professionals." Guandolo is also founder of "understandingthethreat.com". Guandolo, speaking with authority and conviction, pulled no punches as the interview started fast. First he made it clear that there was no reason for listeners to take only his word on what he was going to say because the evidence he discusses comes from actual court documentation: "I am going to reference documents and evidence that already exists inside the Federal court system. What we are going to talk about primarily are issues, that are as a matter of legal fact, true". The first bit of evidence discussed is jaw dropping, especially if you weren't aware of the FBI's raid in 2004 of a Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas (who are a part of the Muslim Brotherhood) leader's home in Virginia. What they found inside the basement of this home has been well documented in headlines across the nation. Guandolo elaborates on the profundity of the raid discovery calling it a "treasure trove of information" and "archives" of the Muslim Brotherhoods plans for North America. He further explains that the FBI findings were: "strategic documents, lists of their organizations leaders, names, financial documents, photographs, audio tapes, video tapes, you name it, it was in there. And, when I say 'strategic documents I mean document that specifically are approved by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in North America, that say it is their strategic document with their objectives, how they are going to meet their objectives, organizations that are going to participate and how they intend on overthrowing the U.S. Government and imposing Islamic law". The organization that had this documentation was called the "Islamic Holy Land Foundation" and was at the time the largest Islamic charity in America, but in reality they were a covert group that were indicted in 2008. All of the documentation discovered during the raid became evidence in the trial which was the largest ever successfully prosecuted trial of Hamas/MuslimBrotherhood and terrorism in America. When looking at all of the evidence that was presented in that court trial back in 2008, Guandolo says many things came clear: "There is something inside of the U.S. called the 'Islamic Movement', it is lead by the Muslim Brotherhood and that its purpose is quote, "Civilization Jihad, to destroy America from within, imposing Islamic law and establishing and Islamic state here." That's not all. Not by a long shot. Because the documentation discovered named the groups that were part of this movement and they are used to meet their deadly objective of destroying America from within. We know today exactly who else is involved in their plans and according to Guandolo these "Muslim Brotherhood entities end up becoming, and have become a massive network to support jihad operations in the U.S." The discussion pivots to points made that the government of the U.S., including the White House itself is embedded and cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood. As an example, summarizes one story that had its roots in the Clinton/Gore administration and it alone is mind boggling when we consider this man was: "An Al Qaeda operative and a "significant" financier, was the adviser to the President of the United States and founded the Muslim Chaplain program for the Department of Defense". It was also no surprise to hear that the former FBI counter terrorist expert is not at all happy with the new $100 million dollar "Islamic Center" being built right now in Maryland: "The Muslim Brotherhood says exactly what their Islamic centers are, they are places from which they launch their jihad. I think that is what the biggest issue is. When we can show what the Muslim Brotherhood says is their doctrine, and when we can show that entities that say they belong to them we know, right off the bat that they are hostile. So let me just read. I am going to read directly from the Muslim Brotherhood's strategic document that was captured by the FBI in 2004 and it was entered into evidence in the Holy land Foundation trial stipulated to by the defense that it is what it says it is, which is the Brotherhood's strategic document, it says this, this is paragraph 17 and its 'understanding the role of the Islamic center' : ' Understanding the nature and work of the Islamic center in every city in what achieves the goal of the process of settlement (and just as a sidebar, they had just defined earlier in the document what is the process of settlement, it is civilization jihad). The center we seek is one which constitutes the axis of our movement, the perimeter of our circle of work, our (unintelligible) center, the base for our rise (unintelligible), to educate us, prepare us, and supply our battalions in addition to being a niche for our prayers.' And it goes on to say, I am going to quote this, 'meaning the centers role should be the same as the mosque's role during the time of God's prophet. Now that we know what Islamic Centers are for, Guandolo drops this not so wonderful news on us: "So today in the U.S. we know that there are over 2100 Islamic Centers, and a large majority of them are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood." When Guandolo commented on the recent Fox news story regarding the Army continuing to do business with groups tied to Al Qaeda so as not to interfere with their "due process", somehow his information went from terrible to chilling: "This is standard, this is where we are. We are extending constitutional liberties to our enemies and those people in the U.S. who are working to educate and teach people about the real threat are being told to shut up and their programs are being de-funded and people inside the FBI and DHS that do understand what you and I are talking about here that were teaching people about it have all been, all those programs inside D.O.D..., I was involved, I taught at the Joint Forces Staff College, the Army War College, a number of law enforcement entities, and myself and others like me that do what I do and understand this threat have all been shut down". If there is good news in all of this, it is that there are ideas and organizations that are involved to help get this word out and to stop the onslaught and overthrow of America by a government that seems all to willing to bow down to the Muslim Brotherhood. The depth of their infiltration is no joke. It can be stopped. There are 300 million of us. But it will take a lot of work. Media will have to get on board with this, or at least stop fighting against us like our government. I can't help but muse, 'is all of this perhaps why there has not been any terrorist attacks on America, the size and scope of 911, since 2001?' That event changed America and brought us together, albeit for a short time. A similar attack, or worse, would perhaps blow the cover off this "civilization jihad" and possibly even get media on board, not to mention local authorities and the FBI, something that would work against their long term plans to destroy us from within. But the radicals are a patient group. Preferring possibly to sit back and plan their Islamic centers, their sleeper cells and quietly move more radicals in our very midst, waiting for the right time. They certainly have the right President in power for such a cabal as this. Now you've read this, you will want to do more. Please share this information far and wide. Please. This is reliable information from a reliable source, no need to be embarrassed to share it with everyone on your friends list or contact list. Your Senator's, Congressmen, local Sheriff's office as well as family and friends must understand the war we are facing here at home.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

For the wealthy titans of the Brotherhood

For the wealthy titans of the Brotherhood, their followers are pawns to be disposed of, human shields for their political ambitions The Brotherhood’s Currency of Blood Like all terrorist organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood has only one commodity to trade in. Blood. In the war of ideas for the future of Egypt, the Brotherhood had nothing to offer but the blood of its followers and victims. It has no new ideas. It has no record of accomplishments. It has no vision for the future except the same old corruption and authoritarianism cloaked in a deceptive Islamist garb. The outcome of any interaction with the Brotherhood could have been predicted from its motto; “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” In the streets of Egyptian cities, Muslim Brotherhood activists achieved their highest hope. They died in their Jihad against the liberal opposition and the military, fighting against human rights for women and Christians, against multi-party rule, freedom of speech, museums, libraries and the future in the way that the armies of Allah have died for over a thousand years. Some died trying to kill Egyptian soldiers and police officers. Others were killed by their own people in order to maximize the death toll and spread shock and horror through the international community. Like their Hamas outlet in Gaza, like their Syrian brigades who have wrecked entire cities and filled them with corpses, and like Al Qaeda, whose leaders have always been Muslim Brotherhood members; the Brotherhood does not care whose blood it spills. When your highest hope is dying for Allah, then everything else is a detail. The Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, men like Morsi and Khairat el-Shater, are far less eager to die for Allah. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s mad genocidal preacher, is still hiding out in Qatar and spewing calls for violence from under the skirts of the equally cowardly Qatari Emir, who finances the Brotherhood’s wave of death and terror in the region while living it up in his palaces and hoping that Morsi climbs back into power and signs another favorable natural gas import deal with Qatar so he can add on a few more palaces. In his final speech, Morsi boasted of his willingness to sacrifice his blood for power. The Brotherhood’s preacher of hate, Qaradawi urged Jihadists from around the world to come and be martyred in Egypt. For the wealthy titans of the Brotherhood, their followers are pawns to be disposed of, human shields for their political ambitions. The Muslim Brotherhood spent their blood generously during the clashes with Egyptian police the same way that Hamas and Hezbollah spill the blood of their own people. Terrorist organizations are one-trick ponies What it bought with their blood is the outrage of the world. Terrorist organizations are one-trick ponies. They unleash horrifying violence, blame it on the brutality of the authorities and wait for the world to step in and apply pressure on whatever government they are trying to overthrow. The Brotherhood’s leaders knew that. Their speeches amping up their followers for a deadly struggle created the tension that exploded into brutal violence. In the streets, the men who flocked to the terror camps of the Brotherhood and the women who came to be their human shields, wanted to kill and die. They sought to erase their own sinful existence in a tide of blood. That is the true secret meaning of Jihad. The fanatic who despairs of changing himself into a better man can explode all his repressions in one burst of violence, finding absolution from his mortal crimes in the Jihadist immortality of murder and death. That perverted impulse is at the heart of Islamic terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders followed the oldest traditions of Islam by offering their followers paradise and atonement in exchange for unleashing their darkest passions. That the unleashing should have ended in hundreds of deaths is not at all unprecedented in the many wars and conflicts of Islam. What any normal person would consider a massacre; the Muslim Brotherhood considers an opportunity. Its tactic, like those of most terrorist groups, is to commit atrocities that bait the authorities into a seeming overreaction and then to use that to attract international attention and play the victim. The Muslim Brotherhood used the blood of its followers as currency to buy international outrage that will be used to pressure Egypt into releasing Brotherhood leaders like Morsi and and Khairat el-Shater . It wanted the clashes to be as ugly and bloody as possible. It wanted to outrage the world because it knew that was the speediest way of getting its leaders out of their prison cells and back into power. These murderous tactics would be useless if the United States and Europe weren’t full of useful idiots and fellow travelers, in and out of the media, gasping at the carnage and demanding an immediate halt to the violence. There is only one way to halt the violence and that is to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt has only had peace by suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt has only had peace by suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood. It will only have peace when the Muslim Brotherhood is suppressed once again. The last two years have shown that there can be no peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. In or out of power, the Brotherhood is murderous, intolerant and ruthlessly bent on absolute power. Responding to the carnage with new calls for an end to foreign aid is an explicit form of collaboration in the Muslim Brotherhood’s atrocities and the surest way to ensure that they will be repeated. Egypt may deserve to lose its foreign aid, but issuing such calls now is handing a victory to the world’s worst terrorist organization and giving it every incentive to up the body count next time around. The calls for Brotherhood participation in an Egyptian government are senseless insanity. Is there room for a movement that seeks nothing but death in the ranks of any government? Should murderous madness on such a scale really be the currency that purchases power? Should the burners of churches and the torturers of peaceful protesters be rewarded with power a second time? Wars aren’t won through de-escalation, but through escalation Western governments fear escalation in Egypt. And that fear is the secret weapon of every terrorist group. The terrorist groups always escalate, spending their currency of blood cheaply to break the will of their enemies. The only way to break that cycle is to out-escalate them by showing that their currency of blood is worthless because the people and governments they are terrorizing will not be bent under its terrible weight. Wars aren’t won through de-escalation, but through escalation. America lost in Afghanistan because it wasn’t willing to fight harder and bloodier than the Taliban. The Egyptian government has shown that it is willing to match the Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthlessness without backing down. To reward the courage of the Egyptian soldiers and police who fought the Muslim Brotherhood in the streets by forcing their government to stand down and surrender to the terrorists who nearly turned Egypt into a second Iran is an unmitigated crime. It is a crime whose consequences will not only be felt by the women and Christians of Egypt, but by all of us.

Americans never give up your guns

Americans never give up your guns Americans never give up your guns. These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one’s self and possessions. This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles. Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor. This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington’s clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently. Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lying guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot. Of course being savages, murderers and liars does not mean being stupid and the Reds learned from their Civil War experience. One of the first things they did was to disarm the population. From that point, mass repression, mass arrests, mass deportations, mass murder, mass starvation were all a safe game for the powers that were. The worst they had to fear was a pitchfork in the guts or a knife in the back or the occasional hunting rifle. Not much for soldiers. To this day, with the Soviet Union now dead 21 years, with a whole generation born and raised to adulthood without the SU, we are still denied our basic and traditional rights to self defense. Why? We are told that everyone would just start shooting each other and crime would be everywhere….but criminals are still armed and still murdering and too often, especially in the far regions, those criminals wear the uniforms of the police. The fact that everyone would start shooting is also laughable when statistics are examined. While President Putin pushes through reforms, the local authorities, especially in our vast hinterland, do not feel they need to act like they work for the people. They do as they please, a tyrannical class who knows they have absolutely nothing to fear from a relatively unarmed population. This in turn breeds not respect but absolute contempt and often enough, criminal abuse. For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases. As for maniacs, be it nuts with cars (NYC, Chapel Hill NC), swords (Japan), knives (China) or home made bombs (everywhere), insane people strike. They throw acid (Pakistan, UK), they throw fire bombs (France), they attack. What is worse, is, that the best way to stop a maniac is not psychology or jail or “talking to them”, it is a bullet in the head, that is why they are a maniac, because they are incapable of living in reality or stopping themselves. The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture? No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear. So, do not fall for the false promises and do not extinguish the light that is left to allow humanity a measure of self respect.

To our misfortune, invading the privacy rights of Americans

To our misfortune, the Obama White House has proven to be even worse than the Bush White House when it comes to invading the privacy rights of Americans Now More Than Ever, Everybody’s a Target in the American Surveillance State “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”—A senior intelligence official previously involved with the Utah Data Center The recent revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers, with the complete blessing of the Obama administration, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade.A Government of Wolves As I document in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (available now at Amazon.com), what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations). What too many fail to realize, consumed as they are with partisan politics and blinded by their own political loyalties, is that the massive bureaucracies—now computerized—that administer governmental policy transcend which party occupies the White House. This explains why the civil liberties abuses carried out by the Bush Administration have not been corrected by the Obama Administration. Rather, they have been expanded upon. Take, for instance, the warrantless wiretapping program conducted during the Bush years, which resulted in the NSA monitoring the private communications of millions of Americans—a program that continues unabated today, with help from private telecommunications companies such as AT&T. The program recorded 320 million phone calls a day when it first started. It is estimated that the NSA has intercepted 15 to 20 trillion communications of American citizens since 9/11. To our misfortune, the Obama White House has proven to be even worse than the Bush White House when it comes to invading the privacy rights of Americans. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin notes, “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state. [Obama has] systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.” Unfortunately, whereas those on the Left raised a hew and cry over the Bush administration’s constant encroachments on Americans’ privacy rights, it appears that the political leanings of those on the Left have held greater sway than their principles. Consequently, the Obama administration has faced much less criticism for its blatant efforts to reinforce the surveillance state. Insisting that terrorists “will come after us if they can and the only thing that we have to deter this is good intelligence to understand that a plot has been hatched and to get there before they get to us,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, is defending the NSA’s actions, as well as the secret court order requiring Verizon to turn over its phone records to government agents. It’s a tired, overused line that preys on Americans’ fear of another terrorist attack and offers phantom promises of security while ensuring neither safety nor greater freedom. Even the vague and unsupported claim put forth by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) that the NSA surveillance program “helped thwart ‘a significant case’ of terrorism in the United States ‘within the last few years’” fails to justify a program of this magnitude, which makes everyone a target and turns us all into a nation of suspects. Clearly, the age of privacy in America is coming to a close. We have moved into a new paradigm in which surveillance technology which renders everyone a suspect is driving the bureaucratic ship that once was our democratic republic. It will not be long before no phone call, no email, no Tweet, no web search is safe from the prying eyes and ears of the government. People going about their daily business will no longer be assured that they are not being spied upon by federal agents and other government bureaucrats. Thus, the question looms before us. Can freedom in the United States continue to flourish and grow in an age when the physical movements, individual purchases, conversations, and meetings of every citizen are constantly under surveillance by private companies and government agencies? Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for so-called “worthy” (read: politically expedient) reasons such as preventing another terrorist attack, does not surveillance of all citizens gradually poison the soul of a nation and render us all data collected in government files? Does not such surveillance completely eviscerate our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as guaranteed by our Constitution?

The Police State Mindset in Our Public Schools

America is now on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian generation The Police State Mindset in Our Public Schools “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble. Those were the good old days, before school shootings became a part of our national lexicon and schools, aiming for greater security, transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs and strip searches. ************************************************************************************************************************************* Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, instead of making the schools safer, we simply managed to make them more authoritarian. It used to be that if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school. Nowadays, students are not only punished for transgressions more minor than those—such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight—but they are punished with suspension, expulsion, and even arrest. As a result, America is now on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian generation—one populated by compliant citizens accustomed to living in a police state and who march in lockstep to the dictates of the government. Indeed, as I point out in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, with every school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the name of school safety, the lesson being imparted is that Americans—especially young people—have no rights at all against the state or the police. In fact, the majority of schools today have adopted an all-or-nothing lockdown mindset that leaves little room for freedom, individuality or due process. For example, when high school senior Ashley Smithwick grabbed the wrong lunch sack—her father’s—on the way to school, the star soccer player had no idea that her mistake would land her in a sea of legal troubles. Unbeknownst to Ashley, the lunchbox contained her father’s paring knife, a 2-inch blade he uses to cut his apple during lunch. It was only when a school official searching through students’ belongings found the diminutive knife, which administrators considered a “weapon,” that Ashley realized what had happened and explained the mistake. Nevertheless, school officials referred Ashley to the police, who in turn charged her with a Class 1 misdemeanor for possessing a “sharp-pointed or edged instrument on educational property.” Tieshka Avery, a diabetic teenager living in Birmingham, Alabama, was slammed into a filing cabinet and arrested after falling asleep during an in-school suspension. The young lady, who suffers from sleep apnea and asthma, had fallen asleep while reading Huckleberry Finn in detention. After a school official threw a book at her, Avery went to the hall to collect herself. While speaking on the phone with her mother, she was approached from behind by a police officer, who slammed her into a filing cabinet and arrested her. Avery is currently pursuing a lawsuit against the school. In May 2013, seven students at Enloe High in Raleigh, North Carolina, were arrested for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank. One parent, who witnessed police slamming one of the arrested students on the ground, was also arrested for attempting to calmly express his discontent with the way the students were being treated. Unfortunately, while these may appear to be isolated incidents, they are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like criminals, especially within the public schools. The ramifications are far-reaching. As Emily Bloomenthal, writing for the New York University Review of Law & Social Change, explains: Studies have found that youth who have been suspended are at increased risk of being required to repeat a grade, and suspensions are a strong predictor of later school dropout. Researchers have concluded that “suspension often becomes a ‘pushout’ tool to encourage low-achieving students and those viewed as ‘troublemakers’ to leave school before graduation.” Students who have been suspended are also more likely to commit a crime and/or to end up incarcerated as an adult, a pattern that has been dubbed the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Moreover, as suspensions and arrests for minor failings and childish behavior become increasingly common, so does the spread of mass surveillance in our nation’s schools. In fact, our schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. For example, in May 2013, Polk County School District in Florida foisted an iris scanning program on its students without parental consent. Parents were sent a letter explaining they could opt their children out of the program, but by the time the letter had reached parents, 750 children had already had their eyes scanned and their biometric data collected. Making matters worse, these iris scanning programs are gaining traction in the schools, with school buses even getting in on the action. As students enter the school bus, they will be told to look through a pair of binocular-like scanners which will either blink, indicating that the student is on the right bus, or honk, indicating that they’ve chosen the wrong one. This technology is linked with a mobile app which parents can use to track their child’s exact whereabouts, as each time their eyes are scanned the parent receives a print out with their photo and Google map location, along with a timestamp. Benefits aside, the potential for abuse, especially in the hands of those who prey on the young, are limitless. Insiders expect this emerging industry to expand beyond schools to ATMs, airports, and other high security areas within the next few years. It’s definitely big business. The school security industry, which includes everything from biometrics to video surveillance, was worth $2.7 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow by 80% over the next five years and be worth $4.9 billion by 2017. Even so, promises of profit, safety and efficiency aside, it doesn’t bode well for our nation’s youth who are being raised in quasi-prisonlike school environments where they are treated as if they have no rights and are taught even less about the Constitution. It has been said that America’s schools are the training ground for future generations. If so, and unless we can do something to rein in this runaway train, this next generation will be the most compliant, fearful and oppressed generation ever to come of age in America, and they will be marching in lockstep with the police state.

Brainwashed, dumbed downed, Led astray, Education, Common Core, Main Stream Media

Brainwashed, dumbed downed, Led astray, Education, Common Core, Main Stream Media The Confused and Misguided Youth Dr. Thomas Sowell, Economics professor, economist, writer, and sage, encapsulated brilliantly what ails our youth. “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” And the culprits are the American public education, an ever growing lack of religious education, and the indifferent parenting that does not question what children learn or do not learn in school. Young people in any generation tend to be naïve, idealistic, and gullible; it is easy to sell them anything because they confuse feelings with rational thought. They are told so often and so early in life that they are special that they form a distorted view of themselves. Undeserved praise is layered at every opportunity, even when Johnny walks across the stage without tripping. We can’t possibly hurt his self-esteem. Competition is evil, it is bourgeois, everybody knows we are “equal,” nobody is special in any way; we are all born with the same IQ, same abilities, mental capacity, intelligence, talent, no genetic irregularities whatsoever. Why even try to learn, compete, be the best that you can be and achieve excellence? Those are capitalist values. Can we all be Mozarts, Beethovens, Olympic-caliber athletes, Hemingways, Shakespeares, Einsteins? Apparently so, if you listen to liberals, we are all equally special, talented, and brilliant. Test scores tell a different story though, particularly the latest test results from New York public schools, among the first to implement the new and feel-good- about- wrong- answers Common Core nationalized education standards. Worse yet, GED, and college entrance exams, SAT and ACT, will be revised in line with Common Core standards. Terrible public school teachers with personal agendas fail the young minds and society by using their influence and power to inculcate socialism and revisionist history onto the unchartered and unmapped brains of their students. Such teachers diminish and denigrate our common Christian roots while glorifying Islam. In time, reality strikes young people in aha moments and wakes them up, shocks them, and perhaps transforms some into productive Americans. ************************************************************************************************************************************* The MSM markets socialism “seductively,” cleverly and constantly The MSM markets socialism “seductively,” cleverly and constantly. President Obama was highly successful in selling socialism to Americans under the guise of “Hope and Change” and the promise of “free stuff”; rent, cars, kitchens (Who can resist Santa Claus?), college degrees, a better future, a better life, things that Americans already had more than anybody else on the planet. It was an empty promise. While the free stuff came in the form of welfare, he made life much tougher and more expensive for hard-working, tax-paying Americans. He sold socialism as “fairness, social justice, and equality for all.” It was young people who believed this hallow promise and helped him get elected. And now, many are unemployed, blaming everyone else but the obvious, wondering what happened to the guaranteed utopia. My own former students would arrive late to class, with flushed faces, filled with excitement, barely containing their happiness for having campaigned the entire day for the wonderful black man who will be president, “he is just so cool and fascinating and has a nice family.” Once elected, they were sure, America would rid itself of racism.” Did it? Congressman Jim Clyburn (D-SC) is quoted as saying, ““The entire English language was created by slave owners as a means of oppression. You can’t just say that one word is a racist code word or another. The whole language, every single word, letter and apostrophe in it is racist. It’s a fact. If you speak English, you’re a racist.” It is sad that young people look up to this kind of authority. If young people had known true history and had learned from it, they would have understood that all socialist paradises around the globe were dismal economic failures and tyrannies that suppressed the human spirit, robbed people of their freedoms, and sent many to early graves for their anti-government beliefs. Under socialism/communism people were equal - equally miserable, equally poor, equally hungry, equally cold, equally mistreated, equally deprived, and equally imprisoned or killed for their thoughts. Now that the economy is in such dire straits and college graduates unemployment is sky high, is it still Bush’s fault? Young people are living with their parents or moving back in with their parents, default on college loans, postpone marriage, having children, buying a home, buying a car, or living a comfortable American middle class life under capitalism. Young college graduates have voted for their own demise with the ardor and dedication that only a young person can muster. Nobody is holding Presidents and Congress accountable for the “mess they’ve created.” The unemployment, the constant manufactured crises, the wasted bailouts, the manipulation of BLS statistics in order to make the President look good and give Americans a false sense of economic security and reality, the ballooning welfare, food stamps, the massive spending, amnesty for millions of illegal aliens who are taking low paying jobs from Americans, have not convinced the lost generation that their collective future looks bleak and they must change their blind allegiance to politicians’ esoterical rhetoric. Lacking a solid economic education, young people are easily sold on the President’s assertion that giving amnesty to 11million illegal aliens would actually boost GDP by trillions of dollars when in reality, illegals, who are already living now in our economy, are and will be a tremendous drag on the economy, receiving more welfare benefits, Social Security, Obamacare subsidies, earned income tax credits, housing allowance, WIC, EBT, and SNAP cards than they pay in taxes. Young people believe the President’s claim that amnesty will boost housing, a fallacy that was evident during the mortgage crisis of 2008 when a percentage of bank repossessed homes belonged to illegals who did not qualify for loans but received them anyway thanks to the Community Reinvestment Act. Young people cheered when NASA’s space shuttle mission was scrapped. The President said that it would be cheaper to buy astronaut seats on Russian space crafts, one trip at a time. The initial quoted price was just tripled. Why wouldn’t it? The Russians have a monopoly now; they can charge anything they want. Young people have been indoctrinated in schools to glorify other cultures, multiculturalism, and other religions to the detriment of their own “inferior” culture and religion. Yet it is our culture and Christian religion that have created Mozart, classical music, surgery, medicine, technology, space exploration, car industry, oil extraction, and pretty much anything else that brought humanity into the 21st century. It is surprising that Sharia Law and Gulen schools are making their way so fast across the United States while the vocal feminists and liberals are so silent. More and more young women and men are buying into the false rhetoric of the “religion of peace,” willingly adopting a 7th century lifestyle and laws that contradict our Constitution and judicial system. Women become instantly half of a person in a court of law and lose their Constitutional rights and freedoms when marrying into such a political and religious theocracy. What will happen to feminism and to the depraved Hollywood lifestyle of” anything goes that feels good” of our western culture once Americans become second class citizen in the dhimmitude of Islam? The media indoctrinate the young that they should worry that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash following a terrorist attack that kills Americans in the name of Allah. Who can argue with such twisted logic? Young Californians have become so dumbed down and calloused by our education system that are willingly signing street petitions to kill babies two months after they are born and to kill seniors in order to save money on Obamacare. Their faces do not show an ounce of hesitation or rational thought. It is shocking to witness the absence of humanity and care. Young people are the easiest swayed in the direction of environmentalism and global warming although science and historical facts suggest strongly that environmentalist predictions of the past were wrong and that climate change alarmists have falsified data in recent years to match their newest claims. Young people changed into Wall Street Occupiers on a dime without having a solid foundation why they were there and who actually creates wealth and jobs in this country, and without any notion that they were harming the hard-working middle class. The Occupy Wall Street crowd demanded the investigation of oil companies for obscene profits (incidentally the profit margin is low) yet nobody questioned companies like GE or GM or college endowments worth billions. Young people turn into destructive flash mobs in malls and convenience stores because they have nothing better to do, are unemployed, have an evil and destructive streak, or are trying to make a misguided statement, prompted by clever Alinskyite street manipulators and community organizers who want to disrupt the economy and overwhelm the system. Brainwashed youth raise their voices in support of the “poor” who pay no taxes and yet have the gall to claim that the rich, who pay 86% of the taxes, do not pay their “fair share.” Young people are told at nauseam by the alphabet soup channels that Americans who believe in balancing the budget and following our country’s Constitution are “extremists;” following the legal immigration laws of the land is “racist and bigoted;” questioning the government is outright treasonous. Do young people question the out-of-control spending that is destroying their future? Do they object to paying the lion’s share of Obamacare costs while Congress gets 75% subsidies for their premiums, illegal aliens get fully subsidized under the undeserved amnesty plan, and Muslims get free healthcare because it is against their religion to pay monthly premiums? The answer is no. They are too preoccupied with the manufactured “war on women,” and their ability to get free contraceptives and abortions. Will they get quality health care once the unaffordable Affordable Care Act is fully implemented? No, but that is thinking too far ahead for most young people. America’s youth finds no problem with making 4.5 million people who want to become American citizens wait in their countries for 10-19 years, pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, yet does not bat an eye at the idea of letting anyone who crosses our border illegally become American citizens overnight via Congressional amnesty. Poor illegals/undocumented Americans who broke the border laws, they live in the shadows, we cannot allow that to happen, we are compassionate Americans after all. Young people keep repeating that we are unfair and discriminate against black Americans yet we have Affirmative Action, a black President, a black Attorney General, hundreds of thousands of black people in prominent positions of power, and almost 18% of the federal workforce is black when the black population represents 12% of the U.S. population. May I remind the lost generation that life is never fair, nothing is equal, and nothing is free, there is an opportunity cost for everything, somebody else is paying for your free lunch? Next time you feel the need to march for a liberal cause that you joined for no apparent reason or logic other than that it is “cool” or popular with your age group, put what you are doing in proper perspective, you might burn a bridge behind you which you may have to cross sometime in the future.

Terrorism and the Media: A Symbiotic Relationship

Terrorism and the Media: A Symbiotic Relationship “The success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives.”—Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (1977) Just imagine that you’re a terrorist with limited funds and you want to wreak havoc. You only have a few bombs, but you want your message broadcast to the world. How do you get the best bang for your buck? The answer is simple: turn the media into broadcasters for your acts of terrorism. (Rest assured, the politicians will also do their part to make the most of the moment and escalate a legitimate crisis into a full-blown political drama.) As the recent terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon shows, the way for terrorists to broadcast their message to the world is to get the attention of the world media. Today’s terrorists know that they have the media at their disposal—CNN, FOX and the rest, including their online counterparts, are all at their beck and call—because today’s media outlets have 24 hours of airtime to fill, and what’s more salacious than the murder and mayhem of terrorism? There is a symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media—especially television media. Not long after Americans were alerted to the news of the Boston bombings, the coverage quickly escalated to a frenzied level, with every possible angle being covered, whether inane or newsworthy. From minute-by-minute updates on the bombings to reports on what the average American thinks about the bombings, there is little ground that has not already been covered mere days after the tragic event. Take a look at CNN’s website coverage of the Boston bombings, and the stories range from a moment by moment photo sequence of moments right after the blast, to photo and video reports from eyewitnesses on the scene, as well as an interactive map and timeline tracking the explosions and their aftermath. It’s almost as if they were creating an interactive video game. Yet does all this coverage really help us understand the tragedy any more or navigate terrorists and reduce a genuine tragedy to an entertainment spectacle? While journalists have a responsibility to report the news accurately and honestly, they play right into the hands of the terrorists when they cross over into entertainment reporting with the kind of continuous coverage we have been experiencing with the Boston bombings. As renowned terrorism expert Walter Laqueur writes in his book The New Terrorism (1999): It has been said that journalists are terrorists’ best friends, because they are willing to give terrorist operations maximum exposure. This is not to say that journalists as a group are sympathetic to terrorists, although it may appear so. It simply means that violence is news, whereas peace and harmony are not. The terrorists need the media, and the media find in terrorism all the ingredients of an exciting story. One reason terrorists use the tactics they do is to get publicity and thereby get their message across. However, in addition to providing them with a megaphone to the world, the publicity actually encourages further terrorist acts and also serves as a recruiting tool for more terrorists—whether foreign or homegrown. In other words, by shining a constant spotlight on these acts of terror, the media actually serve to spawn the system of terror. As Laqueur points out, “Terrorists have always recognized the importance of manipulating the media.” Indeed, terrorists the world over have mastered the art of marketing themselves to a sensationalism-driven media, and the media lap it up. Ask yourselves: why do terrorists fly planes into buildings and blow up buildings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon? Do they do it to be mean? Or because they like to destroy things? Perhaps in part. But the real motivation behind these acts of urban terrorism is the attention the terrorists receive from the world media. Laqueur quotes one terrorist leader as saying, “If we put even a small bomb in a house in town, we could be certain of making the headlines in the press. But if the rural guerrilleros liquidated thirty soldiers in some village, there was just a small news item on the last page.” As consumers of this constant barrage, we are just as guilty of fueling the feeding frenzy. With advances in technology, we now have easy and immediate access to news and entertainment wherever we are—whether at home, on our cell phones, at work on our computers or in our cars. Thus, it becomes a vicious cycle. The more we watch, the harder the media must work to keep us entertained, and the harder they must compete for our viewership. And with all those advertising dollars at stake, the television networks must compete against one another. So what’s the solution? A large part of the responsibility rests with the news media. The answer is to report news as any other tragedy, but don’t dwell on it. Don’t turn it into an interactive video game on your website. And by all means, don’t turn it into an entertainment spectacle. As with so many problems, if we are to have any hope of a solution, we must begin with ourselves, at home. Maybe it’s time to turn the television sets off, stop buying the political spin being sold to us through the media, and start focusing on not only who is behind these terrorist attacks, but equally important, who stands to gain from them.

Al-Qaeda

For Israel, there is major significance to the success of stopping the attempts of al-Qaeda and affiliates from returning to large scale terrorist activity Al-Qaeda: Vanquished or Strengthened? Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda captured international headlines again last week, with reports of a direct threat to Western embassies – American embassies in particular – and civilians everywhere. The organization’s propaganda victory was scored after some intelligence information was made public, with partial details leaked by both US administration spokespeople and anonymous intelligence sources. This media event renewed the debate about the threat level currently represented by al-Qaeda. While over the last year senior figures in the US administration, members of the defense establishment, and many analysts embraced optimistic assessments, namely, that the organization is close to elimination, this past week the pendulum swung the other way and pointed to a strengthened al-Qaeda, which in conjunction with its affiliates presents as a multi-tentacle octopus-like creature capable of carrying out simultaneous, multi-victim terrorist attacks throughout the world. The US administration’s decision to close several embassies and issue a travel alert to its citizens was apparently made on the basis of specific intelligence received through the interception of a communication between al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri and some of his most senior associates, first and foremost Nasser al-Wuhayshi, Bin Laden’s former secretary and the current leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In this communication, al-Zawahiri seems to have instructed them to carry out large scale attacks against a string of strategic targets. Additional information indicated that local al-Qaeda prisoners in Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen have made en masse daring, well-organized jailbreaks and have reconstituted themselves into a fighting reserve. Intelligence information shared with the public and travel alerts have in recent years become more prevalent in various Western countries, a function of the 9/11 trauma which also led to serious intelligence housecleaning and unprecedented exposure of the most classified types of intelligence. Several possible explanations may account for the administration’s recent decision to make public high quality intelligence, even at the cost of denying its ability to monitor conversations among al-Qaeda leaders. One, there is the essential need to secure the lives of citizens visiting embassies who would be exposed to harm. These civilians – unlike embassy personnel – are not protected by highly secured fortifications. Preventing embassy visits could help generate more effective preparations against an anticipated attack. Two, the administration is trying to quell the harsh criticism leveled against it regarding the invasion of citizens’ privacy through mass surveillance of civilian electronic communications, both in the United States and elsewhere, by intelligence and law enforcement organizations. Three, the Obama administration was the target of much criticism that it mishandled information about events that ostensibly ended with the murder of the American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi in September 2012, and is now much more cautious, even risking valuable intelligence sources, so as not to be accused again of failing to read the situation correctly. Beyond the precautions of this past week, however, the important question is whether al-Qaeda is weaker or stronger than in the past, and what threat level do it and its affiliates represent in terms of a renewed intense campaign of worldwide terrorism. The assessment that al-Qaeda has not only grown very weak but is on its deathbed, made in the past by President Obama, seemed premature even as it was uttered. The assessment was based on the fact that the organization was badly damaged from the anti-terrorism campaign waged against it for more than a decade, and especially in the last few years, when al Qaeda lost its legendary leader Bin Laden, and many of its senior commanders were either assassinated with drones or apprehended, thus crippling the organization’s ability to attack the West. The anti-terrorism campaign also forced the organization and its affiliates to devote significant time, money, and efforts merely to survive and remain at large. The Arab Spring bore the message that the masses in Arab nations preferred unarmed popular uprisings for the sake of liberal democratic notions over the worldview espoused by al-Qaeda, preaching the removal of the old regimes by means of militant jihad. This gave rise to the hope that the deathblow to the organization would soon be dealt. Thousands of new volunteers are streaming to these battlefields and are accruing combat experience But in their quest for survival and even rejuvenation, the leaders of al-Qaeda and its affiliates chose to adopt the Arab Spring in order to turn it into an Islamic Spring. They encouraged the toppling of regimes even at the hands of elements not their own and even in the name of ideals antithetical to their own beliefs as a means to their own end. They exploited the growing instability in various parts of the Middle East and Africa to secure the release of their operatives from jail, amass arms, and deploy in regions with weak governments. Thus al-Qaeda was prepared to assist Salafist and jihadist organizations in the Maghreb, Sahel, North and Central Africa, Sinai, and recently also in specific locations in Syria. Thousands of new volunteers are streaming to these battlefields and are accruing combat experience, forging relationships with fellow travelers, and becoming more fervent in their global jihad commitment. For al-Qaeda and affiliates, these are manpower reserves, ready to embark on a new wave of global terrorism. Al-Zawahiri and his associates are hoping that the completion of the US withdrawal from Iraq and the anticipated withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan in 2014 will allow al-Qaeda, which is apparently stationed now in the tribal region of Pakistan, to reassert itself and operate freely in the region. Al-Qaeda still has a reserve of veteran commanding officers and a mechanism for attacks abroad that continues to recruit, train, and operate activists, including Western loyalists. All of this gives hope to al-Qaeda and its closest associates – al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb – and their more removed affiliates, such as Jabhat al-Nusra operating in Syria, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis operating in Sinai, the Somali al-Shabab and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Ansar al-Sharia organizations active in various Middle Eastern countries that they will be able to renew their onslaught of attacks. Thus, while al-Zawahiri’s vision of establishing a caliphate and restoring Islam’s lost glory seems imaginary, it is likely that al-Qaeda, by means of its affiliates and perhaps also on its own, will try to renew its efforts to carry out a grand terrorist campaign, as it did in the past, following the withdrawal of the United States and NATO from Afghanistan. As demonstrated by the experience of this past week, the terrorists’ rate of success in realizing their objectives depends largely on the effectiveness of the anti-terrorist campaign to foil their intentions. The key is the ability of local intelligence and law enforcement agencies to cooperate with one another and with foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, intensifying the public relations and diplomatic campaign, designed to tarnish al-Qaeda’s dubious luster blinding many young Muslims around the world, is of supreme importance. For Israel, there is major significance to the success of stopping the attempts of al-Qaeda and affiliates from returning to large scale terrorist activity. Abroad, Israeli and Jewish targets are particularly attractive to global jihadists. Within Israel’s borders, al-Qaeda affiliates are preparing to carry out their declared intentions of exploiting their proximity to harm Israeli civilians and soldiers. Clear evidence of this was provided recently when an Ansar Beit al Maqdis terrorist cell was discovered plotting to fire missiles at Eilat. Near Israel’s border with Syria, global jihadists are fighting the Assad regime, waiting for a lull and the opportunity to operate against Israel. Thus Israel, along with Western, Arab, and other nations, at the forefront of the fight against global terrorism and global jihad and is an important contributing partner to this campaign.

Weakest link

Weakest link In the United States’ Intelligence Community (IC) there are more operations charged with the gathering of intelligence activity than you can shake a stick at. There are 16 organizations to be exact. These individual offices are both civilian and military organizations charged with accomplishing the same thing: gather information to be necessarily analyzed to assist in the conduction of foreign policy and defense of national security. In these 16 organizations in the IC, there were (as of 2010 according to the Washington Post and Wikipedia) 1,271 governmental operations and 1,931 private entities working to assess and interpret information dealing with counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence gathering affecting all of these efforts. Over 854,000 individuals possess TOP SECRET clearances or higher. At the time of the study referenced private companies providing governmental intelligence employed 20% of the workforce eating up approximately 49% of allotted personnel budgets. (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) [Following the potential referenced in “Sarge’s 1% theory” stating there will always be approximately 1% of any large population that won’t go by prevailing societal rules, this means there are a potential 8,540 people with agendas contrary to national interests. Even if that representative population is adjusted to .01% that means 84-85 people could be the next Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden. This percentage doesn’t account for foreign employees.] The IC is responsible for gathering information so the President and his National Security Council, The State Department and Department of Defense can perform their obvious duties. This is inclusive of military commanders, foreign policy makers and adjuncts (ambassadors and embassies) as well as Congress on a need to know basis. Covert Operations must be approved by the President. The IC works to acquire and interpret raw intelligence to determine its relative importance to America’s safety. The IC disseminates this data/intelligence to assure the correct agencies may protect against foreign intelligence gathering operations. International terrorists, illegal narcotics operations and other such operations are scrutinized. Foreign policy operational objectives are assisted. Inspection of this type of operation is not available to the average American and only specially vetted personnel in the House of Representatives and the Senate are privy to IC efforts and then only on a need-to-know basis. Some of the 16 organizations have been in business since the 19th Century. Others are relatively new having been established since 9/11 in response to the attack. Much of what’s done by these operations may be duplicative and as such redundant. These operations are as follows: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); established 1947 The United States Department of Defense has the following organizations: Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) established in 1961; National Security Agency (NSA)1952; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) 1996; National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) 1961; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (AFISRA); Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) 1977; Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) 1882 The bureaucratic agglomeration continues with the Department of Energy maintaining an Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (OICI) and is a cousin to the Department of Homeland Security’s Offices of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A-2007) and Coast Guard Intelligence (CGI-1915). The Department of Justice (DOJ) maintains the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI-1908) and the Drug Enforcement Administration, Office of National Security and Intelligence (DEA/ONSI). In 1942, the State Department was granted the Bureau of Intelligence and Research while the Treasury Department birthed the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) in 2004. Various organizations allege to act under the umbrella of such larger entities as the National Intelligence Program (NIP) defined by the National Security Act of 1947. This group works with (or possibly at odds) with the interests of the Military Intelligence Program (MIP). NIP works with MIP but may not play nicely when their need to share intelligence is controverted. Interagency cooperation has always been a problem because petty bureaucrats, given political appointments even when manned by in-house personnel such as military officers seeking upward mobility questioned the need to know of other agencies. Add political appointees such as Janet Napolitano and you can see the “competence and intelligent design gap” widens to approximate a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. The Intelligence budget, not accounting for MIP is over 54 Billion dollars annually. Approximately 70% of the budget goes to private contractors of now questionable quality when it comes to vetting their own personnel. How all of this money is spent is classified with separate, Top Secret accounting conducted for “special covert operations” never admitted to exist. The House Armed Services Committee drafts legislation to pay for intelligence operations and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs formulates legislation pertaining to congressional oversight of these operations. The IC is one of the largest bureaucratic nightmares the United States government ever developed. It’s up to you to interpret whether the levels of duplicative, repetitive, redundant information gathering now conducted against foreign elements (and now American citizens such as yourself) is warranted and really in the best interests of the American people, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Benjamin Franklin, writing in “Poor Richard’s Almanac” said: “Two can keep a secret if one is dead”. America’s security apparatus is endangered most by its size and over-reaching bulk concealing its weakest links. On 9/11/2001, men armed with box-cutters and the element of surprise over-powered a technologically advanced system relying on machines to counter human nature and ingenuity, the weakest, individual human link can create the greatest problems.

Presidential Lawlessness: It's So Cool

Presidential Lawlessness: It's So Cool When the law no longer commands respect, one can pretty well write off a nation that pretends to be a constitutional republic. But how can The People respect the law when the government doesn't?

President Obama seems to regard the law as a mere inconvenience. In his must-read August 5 article "The Front Man" at National Review, Kevin Williamson sums up our Harvard Law School president's taste for lawlessness: "He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park." With a compliant Congress in his first two years, and a divided, gridlocked Congress thereafter, Mr. Obama has been able to "get away with" an awful lot.

One of the ways the president flouts the law is by not enforcing it, such as in his recent "decision" to delay enforcing the employer mandate of Obama-care. Where does the president get off thinking he has the authority to refuse to enforce a law? The president doesn't seem to understand his job. Also, under Obama the executive branch just makes up law, a task generally reserved for the legislative branch. Williamson reports that "although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act -- related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama's managers there have announced that they will do so anyway." 

 That announcement brings to mind a provision in the ACA concerning enforcement of the individual mandate: "In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure. [Sec. 5000A(g)(2)(A), page 249]" With regard to this prohibition, it remains to be seen whether Obama's minions at the IRS will announce "that they will do so anyway"?
The president might also conclude that the $95 penalty in 2014 for noncompliance with the individual mandate isn't nearly enough to offset what government is going to be spending on Obama-care. Obama might then "decide" to raise the penalty himself, and deliver his usual spiel: "
If Congress won't act, I will." Along with his extra-constitutional decisions to ignore or vacate the law, Obama also unilaterally exempts his friends from the law.
Williamson: "Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too." Obama has been granting waivers from the ACA mandates since 2011.

The latest is his exemption of Congress and its staff from the mandate. Obama is buying off Congress. To read more about the "legal gymnastics" involved in this exemption, read the August 7 article "Members Only" in the Wall Street Journal. Obama is turning the law upside down in order to bail out Congress. So the taxpayer will continue to pay for the Cadillac health insurance plans of Congress. "Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi." 



 The law is not the law if it doesn't apply to everyone. Obama's arbitrary exceptions from the ACA for his friends are utterly corrosive; they breed contempt for all law. We cannot have contempt for law if we are to remain a constitutional republic. If laws are foisted upon the citizenry against their wishes, as was the case with ObamaCare, the government invites massive noncompliance at the very least.

Congress should give the president a choice: Either agree to a postponement of everything in the ACA that was mandated to go into effect in 2014 (in which case Congress would pass a quick bill to that effect), or enforce the ACA in its entirety as written, including the employer mandate --- either full steam ahead or a year-long delay of everything. That might be a better tactic for the GOP than trying to defund the ACA. In any case, if Obama doesn't find that choice agreeable and instead chooses to go his merry way postponing only the employer mandate, then Congress should impeach and remove him from office.

No president has the authority to pick and choose which laws he will enforce. The question is: How likely is it that the Democrat-controlled Senate would be up for such a showdown? "If Congress won't act, I will," the president repeatedly assures us. But that's not the way it works in a constitutional republic of laws. Nonetheless, Obama acts, and who's going to stop him? As he lists the president's unconstitutional power grabs, Williamson makes an unflattering comparison: That President Obama has adopted President Nixon's approach but limited himself to health care might be considered progress if he had not adopted as a general principle one of Nixon's unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isn't illegal. President Nixon's lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama's lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that "we're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends." Barack Obama, of course, is too cool to feel shame. So one wonders what's next for our oh-so-cool president. Perhaps he'll "decide" to bail out public worker unions in Detroit. Bondholders would no doubt again be stiffed, even though they're supposed to be first in line for the proceeds of a bankruptcy.

 The Supreme Court is partly responsible for Obama's unconstitutional power grabs. In salvaging Obama-care, the Court had to rewrite the law. Obama might surmise: If you can legislate from the bench, then you can legislate from the White House too. If the Supreme Court can rewrite the law then so can I. After all, I'm the cool one. In fact, I'm The One. The Court made a grievous mistake in not reversing Obama-care, and they could have ended it easily, as they had found it unconstitutional on two counts. Of course, given our president, had the Court struck down Obama-care, Obama might have "decided" to enforce it anyway. In rewriting the law in order to save it, the Court ruled that a penalty is a tax and a command is a choice. That paved the way for Obama's lawlessness. We must hope that the Court is beginning to understand what its wretched ruling has wrought. Velociraptors are so cool. Like all good velociraptors, President Obama continues to test the perimeter, nudging, poking, and shoving to see how much he can get away with and how far he can go. And with an in-the-tank media, an unmoored Court, and an irrelevant Congress, what's to stop him?

ObamaCare really will "destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family

ObamaCare really will "destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family Some public figures like to dismiss the so-called "social issues" as irrelevant to the economy; many of those same people think that they can address fiscal concerns without any understanding of the pressures and drains put on the economy from the breakdown of the family. With the government now owning 51 percent of the private sector, we would do well to remember that our society has suffered grievously from programs and policies that meant well but failed miserably - and on a colossal scale - as is documented by an abundance of data and the negative social trends in America that have done so much damage to the nation's families and children. Now, with the implementation of ObamaCare looming and tax increases seeming inevitable, we face yet another ill-advised call for a return to the old, failed social welfare policies of entitlement, income redistribution, and tax increases. Best estimates indicate that the U.S. tax Code now contains approximately 3.7 million words -- almost nine times the total number of words in the King James Bible. Carrie L. Lukas, in her article, "The Tax Man Cometh," reports that the nation's families face a double-whammy in terms of taxes: in addition to losing about 30 percent of our income for federal, state, and local taxes (more than the typical family spends on food, clothing, and housing combined), Americans also spend nearly 4 billion hours in complying with income tax laws. Worse, we are discovering that ObamaCare really will "destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family -- with financial incentives for staying single." ObamaCare's marriage penalty could possibly cost couples over $10,000 a year. This intentional disparity means that U.S. government policy will encourage singleness and create increased disincentives for marriage. Single individuals will have an advantage with the earned income tax credit as well as welfare benefits, including food stamps. This comes as no surprise, of course, because "making the subsidies neutral towards marriage would lead to a married couple with only one bread-winner getting a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income-level." With ObamaCare ramping up subsidies promoting single motherhood and discouraging marriage, an increase in poverty is inevitable -- along with dramatic increases in entitlements and dramatic tax hikes to pay for the increased entitlements. These increases are just one more of the numerous financial incentives in current government policy that increasingly encourage individuals to reject marriage -- the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), housing subsidies, food stamps, child support payments, and the welfare dependency programs that created and sustained the inner city matriarchal culture. These perks are costing American taxpayers trillions of dollars a year. Current welfare programs total close to $1 trillion a year (twice as much as national defense and nearly the size of the federal deficit); ObamaCare is projected to add another $2.5 trillion after all its provisions take effect. There's no end in sight to the increasing costs of these entitlements. Politically, the "marriage penalty" is also a Democratic vote-getting initiative -- 70 percent of unmarried women voted for President Obama in the 2008 election. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a liberal firm that consults for clients such as Bill Clinton and John Kerry, said: "Unmarried women represent one of the most reliable Democratic cohorts in the electorate ... leading the charge for fundamental change in health care." As the nation's largest public policy women's group, Concerned Women for America has been sounding the alarm about how the fiscal health of the nation and economic crises are affecting America's families. We advocate a fiscal reform plan that focuses on entitlement reform -- offering options that will enable today's families to keep more of the money they earn and rescue our children and grandchildren from the debt and national decline that will otherwise land on their shoulders. We remind legislators that the nation's women are very concerned about the way government dependency is impacting American families. We want to see principled, courageous action to reverse the crisis and bring back the kind of financial and economic stability that propelled America into the world's superpower and enabled families to thrive - having a steady, good paying job, owning a home, and enjoying a bright, prosperous future. We reject any and all tax increases that will cripple families, devastate the economy, and consolidate more power in government. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children."