Thursday, September 29, 2011

9-30-2011 P-DAY EDITION: SO, WILL YA OR WON’T YA?! OH BUT IT’S NOT MY FAULT.... IF I DON’T TURN THE ECONOMY AROUND IN 3 YEARS, "then there is going to be a one term proposition"

" THE SYNTHESIS "  9-30-2011 P-DAY EDITION: SO, WILL YA OR WON’T YA?! OH BUT IT’S NOT MY FAULT.... IF I DON’T TURN THE ECONOMY AROUND IN 3 YEARS, "then there is going to be a one term proposition"

2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@BarackObama you: "I CAN'T GET YOUR PARENTS TO VOTE FOR ME, I NEED YOU TO GET YOUR PARENTS TO VOTE FOR ME" -- fucking lame!!jaberdeen Jim Aberdeen
by 2011teaparty
From 2007 to 2010, the Democratic-controlled Congress added $5.3 trillion to America's already astronomical debt. IRRESPONSIBLE!
by 2011teaparty
COB Sep 27 2011 Total Public Debt Outstanding $14,707,406,820,591.80
ALSO HEREBY KNOWN AS  “THE TEA PARTY RECORDER”
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*2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@EuropeanCourier we can defeat Obama, as he's defeated himself, and we can certainly defeat Hillary
6 hours ago Favorite ReplyEuropeanCourier The European Courier
by 2011teaparty
Chicago Tribune calls upon Obama to drop out of 2012 race and make space for Hillary Clinton j.mp/nAhyCJ2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@ariannahuff @NYTimesCollins @TheDavidBrooks I used to love David Brooks, but he seriously dug himself a hole like an Ant Lion on Obama.TeamRickPerry Team Rick Perry
by 2011teaparty
Can you help us reach our goal of 18,000 donations before the 9/30 deadline? rickperry.org

SO 9/30/2011 IS P-DAY: SARAH PALIN’S SELF-DECLARED DAY THAT SHE WILL ANNOUNCE WHETHER OR NOT SHE RUNS FOR PRESIDENT.


ARE YOU A MAMA GRIZZLY LIKE YOU SAY YOU ARE???

OR ARE YOU JUST A:
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@DailyCaller NEWT UNVEILS 26PGS. OF WHAT HE PROMISES TO DO AS PRESIDENT THAT HE SHOULD ALREADY BEEN DOING - THE NEWT COMPACT - GREAT SUMMARY
lloydbgwells Lloyd Wells
by 2011teaparty
Harry S. Truman - “A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader"jimmyfallon jimmy fallon
by 2011teaparty
To my Jewish friends - Happy New Year!!!

Man Arrested in Jihadist Plot to Blow Up Capitol and Pentagon

Thu Sep 29 2011 08:24

Originally published on LonelyConservative.com

Rezwan Ferdaus thought he was working with al Queda when he plotted to fly explosive-packed drones into the Capitol and Pentagon, according to The Hill.

Ferdaus allegedly gave the undercover FBI agents a detailed set of attack plans “with step-by-step instructions as to how he planned to attack the Pentagon and Capitol,” according to the Department of Justice.

The plans focused on the use of three small remote-controlled drone-like aircraft loaded with C-4 plastic explosives, which he planned to fly into the Capitol and the Pentagon using GPS equipment, according to the DOJ.

The DOJ stressed that the public was never in danger from the explosive devices, which it said were controlled at all times by undercover FBI officials who closely monitored Ferdaus as he allegedly developed his plot.

According to the DOJ, Ferdaus aimed to create a devastating psychological impact with the attacks, saying at one point, “I just can’t stop; there is no other choice for me.”

The Muslim student is a big fan of jihad and was stockpiling weapons. But according to the DOJ, none of this had anything to do with any sort of ideology or anything.

“I want the public to understand that Mr. Ferdaus’s conduct, as alleged in the complaint, is not reflective of a particular culture, community or religion,” Ortiz said.

Well, good. Glad we have that all worked out.

The Other McCain has more.

Read more at LonelyConservative.com2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@StateDept @FBIPressOffice Yemen/Somalia trained 50,000 suicide bombers/training camps and practice training exercisesau.christiantoday.com/article/muslim…
by 2011teaparty
Nigeria: Islamists Kill Five Christians…(ChristianToday) bit.ly/rtS0Ve#tcot #Christian #Christianity #religion #hhrs

Big Brother Update: Facebook Now Spying For Obama?

2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
For those of you inundated by Facebook email, which is used to track you as it is an open site, or tweets from twitter TRY GOOGLE PLUS- YOU+
Google Plus like "circle time" for internet very important for Native Americans-unlike color guard circle time at Henry Co. High School...
9 hours ago 2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
<joins GOOGLE PLUS> and drops twitter usage
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@GAChiefBrooks twitter deleted my other account, so I created this one as a back up emergency one, just for directing tweeting tea parties.
Thu Sep 29 2011 08:10
A post appeared on many Facebook pages last night alerting users of that social media site to what appears to be a spying operation being orchestrated by those in control of the algorithms at Facebook.  Apparently what happens is that the site managers collect every post with the word "Obama" in it then re-post it on a special page for Obama 2012.
It would take a lot of time and skill to confirm or deny this shocking news, but in consideration of Facebook's apology yesterday after being exposed for collecting data from its subscribers even after they had "logged off" of the website, nothing should come as a surprise.
Facebook has admitted that it monitors the web pages visited by its members even if they are not logged onto Facebook at the time.  This data is then collected to be sold to advertisers who then analyze the interests of computer users so they can market to them in a more targeted fashion.
Couple all of this with the news that GM was caught tracking your every move even if you closed your "OnStar" account, and one has to wonder:  Is the era of Big Brother here in more ways than we even know about?
Read more at Blue Grass Bulletin
Home / News & Blogs / Friending Facebook

US congressmen ask FTC to investigate Facebook cookies

By Emil Protalinski | September 28, 2011, 10:01pm PDT
Summary: Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate how Facebook’s cookies behave.
Two US congressmen today asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate recent accusations that Facebook tracks its users even after they log out of the social network, an issue the company says it has since fixed. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, want the FTC to take a closer look at Facebook’s business practices.
You can read the full two-page letter yourself: FTC Facebook Letter – September 28, 2011 (PDF). I’ve also typed up the relevant excerpt below:
Facebook has admitted to collecting information about its users even after its users had logged out of Facebook. Facebook was able to obtain this information when users visited websites that connect with Facebook, including websites with “Like” buttons. There are an estimated 905,000 sites that contain the “Like” button.
As co-Chairs of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, we believe that tracking user behavior without their consent or knowledge raises serious privacy concerns. When users log out of Facebook, they are under the expectation that Facebook is no longer monitoring their activities. We believe this impression should be the reality. Facebook users should not be tracked without their permission.
This past weekend, self-proclaimed hacker Nik Cubrilovic accused Facebook of tracking its users even if they log out of the social network. He explained that even after logging out of the service, whenever he visited a website that had a Facebook plugin, information including his account ID was still being sent to Palo Alto.
The company responded by denying the claims and offering an explanation as to why its cookies behave the way they do. The company explained that it does not track users across the Web and its cookies are used to personalize content. As for the logged-out cookies, Facebook said they are used for safety and protection.
Yesterday, Cubrilovic said Facebook made changes to the logout process, and that the cookies in question now behave as they should. They still exist, but they no longer send back personally-identifiable information after you log out. The company also took the time to explain what each cookie is responsible for.
Cubrilovic offered the following conclusion to the whole fiasco:
Facebook has changed as much as they can change with the logout issue. They want to retain the ability to track browsers after logout for safety and spam purposes, and they want to be able to log page requests for performance reasons etc. I would still recommend that users clear cookies or use a separate browser, though. I believe Facebook when they describe what these cookies are used for, but that is not a reason to be complacent on privacy issues and to take initiative in remaining safe.
Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik made this concluding statement in a comment on this blog:
I’m an engineer who works on these systems. I want to make it clear that there was no security or privacy breach. Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have. Like every site on the internet that personalizes content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user. Three of these cookies on some users’ computers included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook. However, we did not store these identifiers for logged out users. Therefore, we could not have used this information for tracking or any other purpose. In addition, we fixed the cookies so that they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out.
See also:


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2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@BBA4USA @RonPaul_2012 join us in prayer for a balanced budget amendment, every day at 221 AM AND 221 PM.

A SERIOUS REPEAL BILL THAT BACHMANN OR GIFFORDS HAVE NOT BROUGHT TO THE HOUSE FLOOR: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jK6-kGCB_Dbb5K98YSS9o9kSNBwLJsSb7XQ5GQSvTks/edit?authkey=CIS_je8I&hl=en_US2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@THEHermanCain @CainPress paying the government 27% when it is not the church, doesn't sit well with me: your 9-9-9 gives the rich 2% back.
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
Check shows Obama wrong on tax fact in speech chieftain.com/news/associate… via @tweetmeme

Twin66 Twin66
by 2011teaparty
Can we stop the Chris Christie nonsense? Making field look weaker and weaker.....He's a fan guy for NJ, but not as conserv as many think

@BarackObama As 'Jobs Hard to Get Number' Hits 28-Year High, AP Claims Consumers' Related Feelings Are 'Mixed Bag'ow.ly/1eRSLH
27 Sep Favorite Reply
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@CNNMoney so if you add 14 million unemployed to those who are receiving unemployment, then bingo = 25 million-30 million OUT OF WORK
by 2011teaparty
Including people who aren't currently receiving benefits, about 14 million people remain unemployed in the U.S. cnnmon.ie/oXjq2m
7 hours ago 2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
seems like everyone had bad day yesterday-everyone recovering from first month/two of school, family issues, money issues, political souring


@ajcAJC
We're No. 1?! Atlanta region lost more jobs the last year than any other metro area. bit.ly/rjDuKP


ATLANTA BUSINESS NEWS 6:40 a.m. Thursday, September 29, 2011

Atlanta top metro area -- for job losses

By Dan Chapman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta region lost more jobs the last year than any other metro area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday, further evidence that the post-recessionary slump here shows little sign of abating.

Related

More business news

Metro Atlanta shed 30,800 jobs since August 2010. Kansas City -- 12,800 positions erased -- was the closest competitor in job-losses. Nearly all of Atlanta’s peer metro areas added at least some jobs amid the slow economic recovery.
The figures add to a growing sense that Atlanta has experienced a Lost Decade. The Great Recession and its aftermath have obliterated the mid-decade’s huge job and wealth gains that put Atlanta atop the New South economic pedestal. The Atlanta region, for example, notched 2,237,100 jobs last month -- almost exactly the same amount as in early 2002.
Of equal concern are the types of jobs -- telecomm, trade, utilities, leisure -- being lost across the 28-county Atlanta region. Report after report the last few years has documented the evaporation of construction and financial industry jobs. But business leaders and economists wring their hands whenever white collar jobs fade away.
“Out of almost 400 metropolitan areas, we’re dead last and nobody is competing with us for that distinction,” said Chris Cunningham, a BLS statistician in Atlanta. “It’s pretty bad and it has been the same story for the last two, three years.”
Some small metro areas registered a greater percentage loss of jobs, but among major metro areas Atlanta was worst in both total number and percentage.
Among the job seekers spilling out the door Wednesday of the Cobb County Civic Center, few expressed surprise that work continues to disappear. Their attitudes speak volumes about the long, difficult search faced by tens of thousands of jobless Atlantans weathering 10.4 percent unemployment.
Inside the auditorium, a cross-section of mostly low-wage service and public sector industries said they were hiring. Although the men and women dressed smartly, few corporate jobs were posted.
In the 12-month period, the BLS said, metro Atlanta lost 5,500 construction jobs, 11,700 in finance and 14,500 in government. Those reflect the housing and real estate crash, as well as state and local government cutbacks.
Experts worry, though, when some of the jobs that Atlanta is pinning its future on, like information, professional and business services, disappear or barely register gains in the BLS numbers. A net 300 TV programmers, software designers and others lost their jobs.
And only 2,200 white collar professionals -- accountants, engineers, lawyers -- were hired over the last year, a 0.6 percent gain. Dallas (3.7 percent uptick), Detroit (3.0 percent) and the U.S. overall (3.0 percent) did much better in those categories.
In fact, 238 of 372 metropolitan areas added jobs the last 12 months. Major competitors, like Dallas (plus 50,900 jobs) and Houston (65,000), left Atlanta in the dust.
“It’s a little unnerving,” said Roger Tutterow, an economist at Mercer University. “No doubt we cut back employment in some of the higher end professional services firms, like law and accounting firms, during the recession and early part of the recovery. Typically, those firms have tried to weather the slowdown without reducing posisitons, but they had to make some cuts this time.”
Tutterow cautioned that the BLS figures may be revised in the future and the gloomy picture may prove sunnier. He also noted that manufacturing, written off after Nafta and China revolutionized the working world, experienced something of a comeback. Metro Atlanta added 4,100 blue-collar, make-something jobs the last year.
“We cannot continue to be a country that doesn’t make things. We need white collar and blue collar jobs,” said Chris Gillig, a laid-off executive from Alpharetta who’s starting a health care services company.
Gillig, 51, remains bullish on Atlanta.
“When I flew over Dallas yesterday all I could see was flat for miles in every direction, and cement. Plus, they had 60 or 70 days of 100-degree weather. I’m not anxious to move back there,” he said. “Atlanta has a wonderful topography and a number of amenities that will cause me to continue living here for the foreseeable future.”
-----
Job growth or loss, Aug. 2010-Aug.2011
Metro areaJobs added (lost)Percent change
Atlanta(30,800)(1.4)
Boston50,6002.1
Chicago11,7000.3
Dallas/Fort Worth50,2001.8
Detroit24,5001.4
Houston65,6002.6
Los Angeles19,9000.4
Miami/Ft Lauderdale24,8001.1
New York57,4000.7
Philadelphia(11,200)(0.4)
San Francisco8,2000.4
Washington1000

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics



Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control – 2012 Elections
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@stevenfoley @VFWd could that possibly explain HOW dead people, Mickey Mouse, incarcerated voted for Obama? #votingmachines #hackedbyremote
by 2011teaparty
@SpeakerBoehner Congress ok with this?> Obama administration has given ACORN spinoffs $729,849 so far this year wnd.com/?pageId=347313… #tcot

iStockphoto/dcdp

h/t – @VFWd

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”
The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab’s scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor
Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton’s demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system — as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 — relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.
Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.           More
September 29, 2011Biz, Tech & Science2012 Election diebold voting machines election news Politics us newsvoting machines can be hacked by remote controlPerryTweets2012 PerryTweets2012
by 2011teaparty
.@GovernorPerry protected the integrity of TX elections by signing a law requiring a photo I.D. to vote. #rickperry

40 Maryland GOP Legislators and Leaders Endorse Rick Perry for President

Print
Posted on September 27th, 2011
BALTIMORE – Forty Maryland Republican legislators and party leaders today endorsed Gov. Rick Perry for president.
“Rick Perry is the candidate who not only can lead our party to victory in 2012 – he’s the candidate who will get America working again,” said State Senator Chris Shank. “With more than a million jobs gained in Texas on his watch, Gov. Perry’s record proves that the conservative philosophy works.”
“Rick Perry is a principled conservative who has signed 65 tax cuts, reduced state spending and stood up to the job-killing regulations of Washington bureaucrats,” said State Delegate Kelly Schulz. “Gov. Perry doesn’t just talk about conservative reform, he backs up his words with actions.”
“I am humbled to have the support of so many Republican lawmakers and party leaders in Maryland,” said Gov. Rick Perry. “They share my vision for a stronger America with more jobs, more freedom and less government intrusion in the lives of our citizens. With their help, we will run a spirited campaign in Maryland, and in 2012 we’ll get America working again.”
Gov. Perry has been endorsed by the following Maryland leaders:
  • State Senator Chris Shank
  • State Delegate Wendell Beitzel
  • State Delegate Gail Bates
  • State Delegate Kathy Szeliga
  • State Delegate Nancy Stocksdale
  • State Delegate Kelly Schulz
  • State Delegate Justin Ready
  • State Delegate Steve Hershey
  • Finance Chairman Dick Hug, Bob Ehrlich for Governor, 2002 -2010
  • County Councilman Jerry Walker, Anne Arundel County
  • Commissioner Evan Slaughenhoupt, Calvert County
  • Commissioner Haven Shoemaker, Jr., Carroll County
  • Commissioner Doug Howard, Carroll County
  • Commissioner Blaine Young, Frederick County
  • Former Councilman Mike Christman, City of Annapolis
  • Former Commissioner Eric Wargotz, Queen Anne’s County
  • 2nd Vice President Patt Parker, National Federation of Republican Women
  • 1st Vice Chair Diana Waterman, Maryland State GOP
  • Former General Counsel Dirk Haire, Maryland State GOP
  • 2nd Vice President Sylvia Darrow, Maryland Federation of Republican Women
  • 3rd Vice President Catie Ravenscroft James, Maryland Federation of Republican Women
  • National Committeeman Trae Lewis, Maryland Young Republicans
  • Legal Counsel Jason Rheinstein, Maryland Young Republicans
  • Central Committee Member Flora Betro, Howard County
  • Central Committee Member Lisa Griffith, Allegany County
  • Central Committee Member Debbie Belcher, Anne Arundel County
  • Central Committee Member Jeanette Radford, Montgomery County
  • Central Committee Member Dwight Patel, Montgomery County
  • Central Committee Member Rachel Audi, Prince George’s County
  • Central Committee Member Alan Rzepkowski, Anne Arundel County
  • Central Committee Member Sastry Dhara, Montgomery County
  • Central Committee Member John Milden, Montgomery County
  • Central Committee Member Joe Collins, Jr., Baltimore City
  • Central Committee Member Gary Collins, Baltimore City
  • Former Central Committee Member Doug Burkhardt, City of Annapolis
  • Former Central Committee Member Brandon Wright, City of Annapolis
  • Former Central Committee Member Ruth Umbel, Garrett County
  • Former Central Committee Member April Rose, Carroll County
  • Board Member Michelle Corkadel, West Anne Arundel County Republican Club
  • Former President Diane Nash Dillon, Chevy Chase Women’s Republican Club

OMG! Racist cupcakes invade Berkeley!!Posted by: Phineas on September 28, 2011 at 1:01 pm

**Posted by Phineas
Credit the College Republicans of UC Berkeley (1) for coming up with a brilliant way to make their point — and to recruit UCB’s humorless Left help in making it.
The background is that, many years ago, the people of California voted to endAffirmative Action ethnic and gender discrimination in the admissions process of the UC system. (2) The Left, however, has never given up trying to reinstate Affirmative Action re-legalize ethnic and gender discrimination. Their latest effort comes in the form of Senate Bill 185, passed by the legislature progressive oligarchy in Sacramento on September 9th and currently awaiting Governor Brown’s signature or veto.
The College Republicans decide to protest the bill by engaging in satire: they set up a table selling cupcakes, the price of which was determined by the customer’s ethnicity and gender — Whites were charged $2, while Blacks, Hispanics, Asians,woman, and almost any other minority one could think of were charged varying lesser amounts. The result was a predictable howl from the perpetually outraged Left, screaming that this was discrimination, to which the College Republicans would agree and ask “then doesn’t this make SB 185, which does exactly the same thing, also wrong and discriminatory?”
As you can guess, this went right over the heads of the enlightened, educated progressives there.
Be sure to click through to PJM for Zombie’s photo-essay (language warning) of the cupcake sale and protest, and hats off to the UCB College Republicans.
Footnotes:
(1) They still exist at Berkeley? I thought they would have been hunted to extinction by the Progressive Tolerance Police. They must have secret hiding places in the steam tunnels…
(2) See? We’re not all a bunch of loopy Lefties out here.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief  
@WI4Perry @GovernorPerry I SO HAVE BEEN WANTING TO READ PERRY ON THE COVER OF TOWNHALL MAGAZINE TOO !!!!
WI4Perry WI For Rick Perry!
by 2011teaparty
@GovernorPerry's interview w/ Newsmax is his best yet. he emphasized his support 4 metro border fences & more BP & NG troops on the border.
15 hours ago WI4Perry WI For Rick Perry!
by 2011teaparty
@GovernorPerry's wife, Anita, to take bigger role in presidential campaign: politico.com/news/stories/0… #Perry2012

»2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@GovernorPerry we have you to thank for HPV influx being stopped at TX border w/ more women not getting cervical cancernytimes.com/2011/09/27/hea…

Anita Perry takes new role in '12 race

Anita Perry has been taking an active role in her husband's presidential campaign. | ReutersClose
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS | 9/28/11 8:24 PM EDT Updated: 9/29/11 3:19 PM EDT
In the short time since her husband joined the GOP presidential race, Anita Perry has stumped for him in Florida, opened the campaign office in South Carolina and made a series of stops in Iowa. In advance of the Florida straw poll last week, the campaign sent out a mailer to GOP activists with a direct appeal from her.
It’s a dramatically different role than the one she played in Texas.
Continue Reading

Latest on POLITICO

POLITICO 44

For most of Rick Perry’s career in politics, Anita Perry has been absent from the political arena, content to focus on health and women’s issues and keep her distance from the messy business of Texas politics. But she no longer has that luxury as her husband attempts to introduce himself to a national audience against competitors whose spouses are prominent faces in their campaigns.
Her profile is dramatically enhanced on the presidential campaign trail from what it’s been in Texas,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “Anita Perry was really quite reserved and determinedly out of the public spotlight during most of Gov. Perry’s terms.”
The Perry campaign did not respond to multiple requests to interview Anita Perry or to comment on her role. Texas political observers and those close to the Perrys cast her as well-liked and down-to-earth yet nevertheless a reluctant politician’s wife.
That's not to say she doesn't share her husband's conservative politics, though.
At an August retreat in Texas's Hill Country, the Perrys met privately with a group of leading cultural conservatives and the would-be first lady was faced with a direct question: Was she another Barbara or Laura Bush, more liberal than her husband on social issues?
"She took the mic and said, 'You don't have to worry about that with me,'" according to a source in the room at the time.
A former nurse and daughter of a doctor from Haskell, Texas, she quit her nursing job when Rick Perry became governor and began working at the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault as a fundraiser. She makes a salary of $60,000 per year – the first time a Texas first lady has held a paying job. (The salary recently came under fire for coming from funds donated largely by Perry’s political supporters.)
Mica Mosbacher, a Perry donor and family friend who met the Perrys through TAASA, said Anita Perry’s passion for her cause is reveals a lot about her.
“She … takes a stand in an area that frankly people would rather not talk about,” she said. “It’s not like fundraising for the arts.”
At the same time, Anita Perry has been virtually absent from the campaign trail over the years, dating back at least to his run for lieutenant governor.
In his first book, “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For,” Perry describes breaking the last-minute news to Anita Perry that he was running for an open seat in the Texas legislature, just days after their son was born. The reference makes it clear that that election decision, at least, wasn’t spurred by her encouragement.
“I was getting restless with life on the farm. Anita saw how much I wanted to do this,” he wrote. “After all, she knew what Perrys did: they ran for office.”
In a 2005 interview with the Texas Monthly – one of few interviews Ms. Perry has granted to the press – she touched on the draining nature of tough campaigns.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/64675.html#ixzz1ZNTDfPod

“We’ve never had an easy campaign, really,” she said. “Some may have been a little lighter than others – maybe a candidate might not have been as well-funded or as serious – but we’ve always had difficult campaigns. That’s prepared me.”
Perhaps not completely—when Austin American-Statesman humor columnist John Kelso wrote a story in January titled, “Somebody needs to goose Anita Perry to get a smile out of her,” Perry’s office was livid.
Continue Reading
The governor’s office shut out all reporters from the newspaper for a few weeks, according to an American Statesman staffer, refusing to answer their calls or send them press releases.
It won’t get any easier given the prominent role Anita Perry now occupies. Not only is she a key surrogate for his campaign, Rick Perry names her as the reason he decided to run for the White House.
“I didn’t frankly want to be in this presidential election,” he said at a Labor Day town hall in Conway, S.C. “My wife basically sat down with me one day in late spring, early summer, and said, ‘I know you love your job, know you’re passably good at it, but our country’s in trouble and you do not have the privilege to sit on the sidelines. You gotta do your duty.’”
During the recent CNN/Tea Party debate, when each candidate was asked what they would bring to the White House, most answered by citing an inanimate object: a Winston Churchill bust for Mitt Romney, a copy of the Declaration of Independence for Michele Bachmann, a Harley for Jon Huntsman.
The Texas governor cited his wife, asserting that he would bring “the most beautiful, most thoughtful, incredible first lady that this country’s ever seen, Anita.”
It was a sweet answer, yet one that seemed a little awkward and out of place.
All of it suggests a more strategic purpose for Anita Perry’s sudden high-profile: an attempt to humanize the tough-talking Texas governor, particularly among women voters.
“We certainly saw that with Laura Bush – she made up for a lot of deficiencies in the candidacy of George W.,” said Bill Hillsman, who ran independent candidate Kinky Friedman’s advertising in the 2006 Texas governor’s race. “It’s conceivable that Perry looked at the George W. campaign and said, ‘What can we learn from this?’”
It’s a way for the campaign to “soften [Perry] up a little,” said a former top Perry staffer, who noted that in past campaigns Anita Perry showed little interest in the life of a political spouse.
The early reviews from the presidential trail indicate that Anita Perry could play a valuable role in the campaign.
“[She] showed promising signs this morning that she’s not as programmed as the stereotypical political spouse,” wrote Des Moines Register political columnist Kathie Obradovich Wednesday. “Anita Perry’s deftly injected doses of candor helped her efforts to blunt the criticism of her husband’s performance so far.”
Anita Perry’s expanded role also more practical advantages: The nascent campaign can cover more of the map with her on board than he could alone.
“There’s more ground to cover,” said Jason Stanford, a Democratic consultant who managed Perry opponent Chris Bell’s campaign in 2006. “Texas was an easier campaign just to arrange, to set up and play out. You can’t really do that when you’re running for president, no matter how good they have set the game to begin with. She is a loyal, attractive advocate.”Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/64675_Page2.html#ixzz1ZNSiNOro

Cain: Black community ‘brainwashed’ into voting for Dems

September 29, 2011
The one African-American running for the GOP presidential nomination said Wednesday the black community was ‘brainwashed’ for traditionally siding with liberal politicians.
“African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” Godfather’s Pizza executive Herman Cain said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” in an interview airing Wednesday between 5-7 p.m. ET. “I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open minded, pure and simple.”
Cain went on to explain that his interactions with African Americans led him to be optimistic about his own chances with the demographic.
“This whole notion that all African-Americans are not going to vote for Obama is not necessarily true,” Cain said.
He continued, “I believe a third [of African-Americans] would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I’m black but because of my policies.”

NoLies4Me Charlotte
by 2011teaparty
Best news all day!!!! Rachel Maddow, MSNBC sued for defamation wnd.com/?pageId=326585


September 29, 2011

Valerie Jarrett:
The Point of Government Is to Give People a Livelihood So They Can Provide for Their Families
»
2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@foxnation THE POINT OF GOVERNMENT: is to provide services that people have paid for and want to have.

Obama's Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett: from Naked Emperor News on Vimeo.

John Kline Statement: Sec. Solis, Welcome to Minnesota; Join Us in Supporting America's Plan for Job Creators

09/29/11 BURNSVILLE – Congressman John Kline, the Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, issued the following statement today welcoming Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to Minnesota: “As the senior member of Minnesota’s Republican Congressional delegation as well as the Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, I welcome Secretary Solis to our great state and encourage her to listen to what an overwhelming majority of Minnesotans are telling me. Like most Americans, they are tired of policies of this Administration that keep us on a path to national bankruptcy, saddle American job creators and workers with tax hikes, and burden small businesses with regulations and red tape that exacerbate our economic downturn.

“Last month, the President visited Minnesota’s 2nd district which I humbly represent, and promised he was listening to my constituents. Since, he has called for nearly $500 billion in stimulus spending measures, and laid out a proposal to raise taxes on job creators and workers by $1.5 trillion. The President’s track record creates debt, not jobs.

“Last week, I hosted a jobs fair in Eagan attended by more than 1,200 Minnesotans. Many there told me they want Washington to get out of the way. They know that small businesses, families, and entrepreneurs – not Congress – are the key to job creation. I encourage Sec. Solis to join us in supporting our plan for America’s job creators that addresses the economic challenges facing our nation, fosters innovation and investment, and helps job creators without raising taxes on working families and small business owners.”

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Congressman John Kline is the Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. He also serves on the House Armed Services Committee.


2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
Immigration is an issue dividing the GOP and Tea Party into sects: those who want a fence and those who want the tax revenue lost for 10yrs.

POLITICS HERMAN CAIN: ‘AFRICAN AMERICANS HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED INTO NOT BEING OPEN MINDED’
Herman Cain, the only African American currently in a contentious race for the Republican nomination, has a message for African Americans: You have been brainwashed into siding with liberal politicians. On Wednesday, in an appearance on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” he said:
“African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view.
I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open minded, pure and simple.”
Upon hearing this, Wolf Blitzer pushed back a bit, saying, “That’s a strong word to use to talk about your fellow African Americans — brainwashed?”
“For two-thirds of them, Wolf, that is the case,” Cain responded.
Cain also delved into his own ability to gain support from the black community, saying that he believes, based on his policies and the feedback he’s received so far, that he will be able to capture one-third of the African American vote:
“I believe a third [of African-Americans] would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I’m black but because of my policies,” he said.
Watch his comments, below:
(H/T Huffington Post)


2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
I GUESS THE NAACP THINKS THERE IS NO CONSEQUENCES FOR MURDER OR ANY MURDER, FOR THAT MATTER #DAVIS #DEATHPENALTY

Where's the left? Christian to be executed in Iran for being Christian

Iranian crackdown on Christians

Thursday, Sep 29, 2011 at 2:49 PM EDT
Tune into GBTV TONIGHT at 5pm ET for Glenn’s special on radical Islam in America. Start your 2 week free trial here
An Iranian pastor is set to be executed for apostasy if he doesn’t renounce his Christian faith – and while the latest updates provide hope for an acquittal the case is a strong warning against the spread of Islamic law in the Middle East.
The latest report from The Blaze says:
As we have already reported, the young pastor, now 32, made a conversion to Christianity years ago when he was a teenager. While this has become the basis for the Iranian case against him, his initial arrest surrounded his public opposition to Christian schoolchildren being forced to participate in Islamic religious education. He was subsequently convicted of apostasy in 2010 and remains in prison in Rasht.
So far, the courts have said that Nadarkhani must repent of his conversion or he will face the death penalty.
Under Islamic law, repenting would involve the pastor apologizing and denouncing his conversion to Christianity. To date, this has not happened, as Nadarkhani has stuck to his religious ideals during the past four days of his appeals trial.
The report does add that the lawyer is now 95% sure his client will be acquitted, although Blaze writer Billy Hallowell adds “Of course, considering the lack of transparency in Iranian governance and the unpredictability of officials there, this potential for a favorable outcome may be optimistic.”
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Heather Sells with CBN added, “Many believe Pastor Nadarkhani was targeted because he spoke out. He recently questioned the Muslim monopoly on the religious instruction of children in Iran.”
“So we got a guy who’s speaking out and going to be executed. He’s Christian. He is going to be executed. Where is the world? Where ‑‑ where is the media? Where’s the president?” Glenn asked on radio this morning.
Glenn reminded listeners that there was endless media coverage of two American hikers who were held in Iran – but little coverage of this Christian Pastor.
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The left’s disdain for our constitution runneth over…

September 29th, 2011 | 1 Comment
How many of you remember the below clip from the Star Wars movie? A young Anakin Skywalker is sitting in a field with his love Padme talking about how he would change or fundamentally transform the Republic so that it’s more responsive to the needs of the people.  Padme, a champion of the Republic quickly realizes what he’s proposing.
For those who love liberty what Anakin is proposing is the antithesis of liberty. It’s a dictatorship.  
Why did he propose such a thing?  He believed the system didn’t work anymore and something needed to change to get things done.  If you’re a Star Wars fan and have seen the movies you know how this line of thinking worked out for the fictional Republic.  The Republic was eventually transformed into the Galactic Empireruled by someone wise; the Emperor.  And young Anakin fundamentally transformed into Darth Vader.  I know, that stuff only happens in the movies.  That could never happen in America.  Well yesterday news broke that Democratic Governor Bev Perdue from North Carolina called for suspending congressional elections.  When the news of this comment began to spread like wildfire, her office responded by issuing a statement that claimed the Governor was only joking.  Listen to the below clip and tell me if you think she was joking.
Do you think she was joking? I don’t and the reason I don’t is because Bev Perdue embraces the ideology of the radical left and the radical left’s disdain for our constitution runneth over.  Her natural tendency as a leftist is to view the constitution as an obstacle to getting the things done. that need to get done.  After all the constitution limits her ability to encroach on the rights of the people of North Carolina. And it’s this limitation that the radical left hates the most about the constitution.  As I have said many times before they believe the solutions to our problems rest with government and not the people.  They desire to regulate/manage our lives because they believe they know what it best for us.  And as long as the constitution is in place it makes it extremely difficult for the far left to advance this agenda. This is why they have turned it into a living and breathing document; it can change through interpretation.  Forget that pesky amendment process, instead they’ll find the right judge to interpret the document in a manner that best advances their agenda.  Bev Perdue is a typical leftist who in March of this last year vetoed “Protect Health Care Freedom” (HB 2) as passed by the GOP majority NC General Assembly. This bill would have allowed North Carolinians to opt out parts of ObamaCare and purchase their own healthcare.  Again she doesn’t believe the people of her state should should be free to purchase their own healthcare.  Instead she looks towards one of the most awful pieces of legislation in modern times (ObamaCare) passed and signed into law by the Obama administration to solve her state’s coverage problems.  Par for the course.
So basically he wants to cut Congress out of the loop so that things can get done.  What he’s really saying is he want to cut the people out of loop.  These are two examples of how bold the left is becoming in regards to attacking our constitution and the Republic given to us by our founders.  It would be unwise for us to simply dismiss the words of these elitists because what they are proposing is the taking away our individual liberties.  These are people who hold or have held high ranking positions in our political system.  They are people in a position to effect change.  This why we must continue to be on guard against those who would legislate our liberties away for the sake of getting things done.
Liberty forever, freedom for all!

2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@BarackObama you can not go against the Constitution as the law of the land and rule by decree for that surely is tyranny and harkens revolt

Obama Returning To St.Louis And The Tea Party Will Be Ready

2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
@BarackObama I know why you hate the Tea Party so much: they are, in your opinion "white folks with an attitude" --- #roffl

Thu Sep 29 2011 02:55

SHARE THIS STORY Back in March of 2010 President Obama came to St.Louis to show support for Claire McCaskell in an upcoming election, and to push his government-run healthcare bill known as Obamacare. Very many local Tea Party members made their voices heard.

Here are more photos from the event.

On Tuesday, Oct. 4th President Obama will be returning to St.Louis again, this time to award Tom Carnahan, brother of Robin and Russ Carnahan “$107 million of stimulus dollars for his Missouri windfarm. To show his appreciation, Carnahan will host a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for Obama next week,” as reported by Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit:

Jim Hoft (The Gateway Pundit) leads St. Louis Tea Party Coalition as it joinsAmericans for Prosperity, United for Missouri, and other organizations on Tuesday, October 4 to protest Stimulus Waste. Yes, the President will be here.

Date: Tuesday, October 4

Time: 5 p.m. to 6:0 p.m. (or maybe later)

Where: Forest Park along Lindell Blvd, west of the History Museum (see map here)

Theme: Waste and Windmills. Solyndra. The Carnahan Family.

Signs: Please be tasteful, irreverent, and funny.

This is NOT The After Party—this is a good, 2009-era street protest. You know just what to do.

Parking: History Museum, Lagoon Dr. and Grand South of History Museum.

Background

Barack Obama will attend a $25,000-per person fundraiser at the home of Tom Carnahan on Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO on Tuesday, October 4, 2011. We’ll be there to greet him.

For more information and directions go here.

Come join us.

And remember.. Obama’s green agenda is not about saving the planet. It’s about control.

Time to dust off the camera and see what kind of wild and crazy Lefties show up this time. Here are a few of my favorites from March 2010.

Ooo scarey! Just in time for Halloween!

Tags: 2012 President Race | 2012 GOP Primary | perry | global | warming | president | gore

Not funny: The Onion spreads fake report on Capitol hostage-taking, children at gunpoint

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By Michelle Malkin  •  September 29, 2011 11:52 AM
This morning, the satirists at The Onion took things too far. The tasteless timing — more on that in a moment — makes their latest prank especially unfortunate.
Onion editors posted the above photo of House Speaker John Boehnertaking children hostage and mock-reported:
WASHINGTON—Brandishing shotguns and semiautomatic pistols, members of the 112th U.S. Congress took a class of visiting schoolchildren hostage this morning, barricading themselves inside the Capitol rotunda, where they remain at press time.
If the money is not delivered by this evening, members of Congress say they will shoot a new child every hour on the hour.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who has emerged as spokesman for the bipartisan group, informed FBI negotiators that the legislative body’s demands would be issued within the next hour, and that if any attempt is made to stage a rescue “all the kids will die.”
“At this time, we are waiting for more information and to see what the U.S. Congress’s demands might be,” Special Agent Douglas Burkett of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit said. “In the meantime, we have snipers on the Supreme Court building, the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, and the National Museum of the American Indian, but so far none of them has been able to get a clear shot at any senators or representatives.”


The Onion Twitter feed sent out multiple mock-messages:
Capitol Hill police were forced to respond:
US Capitol Police on Thursday flatly denied a joke claim on the popular satire website The Onion’s Twitter feed of “screams and gunfire” in the congress and said they were investigating the comment.
“Conditions at the US Capitol are currently normal. There is no credibility to these stories or the Twitter feeds,” said a spokeswoman for US Capitol Police, Sergeant Kimberly Schneider
“The US Capitol Police are currently investigating the reporting,” she said in a statement issued roughly half an hour after The Onion’s first tweet about a supposed violent standoff in the US Congress.
The satirical publication had tweeted: “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building” as part of an effort to publicize a mock news story in which lawmakers took 12 schoolchildren hostage.
That piece, published on The Onion web site, described lawmakers as “brandishing shotguns and semiautomatic pistols” and vowing to “shoot a new child every hour on the hour” unless they got “$12 trillion in cash.”
The stunt comes on the heels of yesterday’s arrest of an American jihadi plotting to blow up the Capitol and the Pentagon. He planned to kill women and children in a bloody massacre by land and air.
According to the DOJ, Ferdaus aimed to create a devastating psychological impact with the attacks, saying at one point, “I just can’t stop; there is no other choice for me.”
“Although Ferdaus was presented with multiple opportunities to back out of his plan, including, being told that his attack would likely kill women and children, the affidavit alleges that Ferdaus never wavered in his desire to carry out the attacks,” the DOJ said in a news release.
Ferdaus, a Northeastern University graduate with a degree in physics, allegedly visited Washington in May, taking pictures of his intended targets and proposed launch-sites for the remote-controlled aircraft, according to the DOJ.
Ferdaus’s plan allegedly evolved to include a “ground assault” as well, in which six people would coordinate an automatic weapons attack with the aerial assault and massacre whomever came into their path, according to the DOJ.
Maybe if some of these humorists had relatives who worked in the Capitol they would have thought twice.
One Onion follower on Twitter in Washington DC echoed the reaction of many:
“I work at the Capitol and I just yelled at my coworkers that there was gunfire… you scared the s*** out of me.” #fakenewsscares
Posted in: Politics

FUNNY:
BREAKING NEWS ECONOMY GROWS AT 1.3% IN SECOND QUARTER
September 29, 2011

Nicole Richie Got Breast Implants?


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Petite Nicole Richie reportedly got a pair of breast implants.

“The pregnancies took a toll,” a source told Us Weekly of Richie’s upgrade. “She said breast-feeding killed what boobs she did have!”

The “Fashion Star” mentor allegedly went under the knife over the summer, and flaunted a noticeably more buxom figure out and about in L.A., and while celebrating her 30th birthday in Mexico on September 24.
READ MORE AT FOXNEWS.COM

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/nicole-richie/2011/09/29/nicole-richie-got-breast-implants#ixzz1ZNGW6ONG

Perry: Global Warming 'Contrived Phony Mess'


Texas Gov. Rick Perry, announcing his bid for the GOP presidential nomination Saturday, also took time to blast what he described as jobs-killing effort to stop “phony” global warming.

Perry calls global warming "all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight," the British Guardian reports.

Perry is virtually unique in the current presidential field in that he hasn't expressed concern about climate change in the past, so he won't have to do any back-pedaling.

"Based on climate views alone, anyone who is holding their nose voting for Mitt Romney because there's no other viable candidate will now rejoice to have an option with Rick Perry," says Marc Morano, a leading climate change skeptic.

Perry served as Al Gore's Texas campaign chair in the 1988 presidential race, but conservatives don't have to worry that Perry holds any residual affection for the former veep.

"I've heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I'm starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide," Perry said in 2007.

Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, for one, isn't concerned: "If Perry was president, one of the things I'd not worry about is a carbon tax," Norquist told Politico. "I'd worry about big spiders eating New Jersey first."

Perry also prays for a rollback of EPA regulations: "Frankly I pray for the president every day," he recently told CBN News. "I pray for his wisdom. I pray that God will open his eyes. I wish this president would turn back the health-care law that's been passed, ask that his EPA back down all these regulations that are causing businesses to hesitate to spend money."

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Perry blames feds for his controversial stance on illegal immigration

By Alicia M. Cohn - 09/29/11 08:54 AM ET
Rick Perry shifted his message Thursday on illegal immigration, blaming the federal government for its handling of an issue that has appeared to be the Texas governor's Achilles heel as a GOP presidential candidate.
Perry has been forced to defend his decision as governor to extend in-state tuition breaks to illegal immigrants who have lived in Texas for three years or graduated from a Texas high school. Perry's primary competition, Mitt Romney, has attacked Perry on the issue for "sounding like a Democrat."
Until this week, Perry's primary argument has involved the 10th amendment, calling the choice to offer in-state tuition a state-by-state decision. Thursday, Perry shifted blame to the federal level, saying that his state's decision was only necessary because of the "lack of security" implemented by the federal government.
"There has clearly been a failure of our federal government. That's the reason that we're having to deal with issues like in-state tuition," Perry said on CNBC. "The federal government allowed them to come in with their lack of security. We decided in our state it was better to have those kids be educated. How to cure that is for the federal government to secure that border."
Perry added that immigrants will continue to be important to American society, "but we're a rule of law country" and the border needs to be secured.
The "three pillars" of border security Perry named are strategic fencing in metropolitan areas, boots on the ground and aviation assets to monitor rugged terrain.

RELATED ARTICLES

Perry's comments Thursday mark a change in tone on the immigration topic, following an interview Perry gave Wednesday to Newsmax where he apologized for saying anyone who opposed his decision to educate the children of illegal immigrants “did not have a heart.”

“I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate,” Perry said in the previous interview.
"We're Republicans. We're supposed to be trying to fix things," Perry said on CNBC.

Muslim group CAIR solicited funds from Gadhafi & war criminal Bashir

Posted on September 27, 2011 by creeping
via WND IRS tightens grip in CAIR probe.
The IRS has forwarded a congressional complaint lodged against the Council on American-Islamic Relations to its investigations unit for further review, WND has learned. The FBI also has been alerted to evidence the prominent Muslim group has solicited funds from state sponsors of terrorism.
The 8-page complaint originally was submitted by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, after the IRS stripped Washington-based CAIR of its nonprofit status for failure to file annual tax reports as required by federal law.
Wolf cited a 2009 letter in which CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad solicited funds from Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. Referring to the brutal tyrant as “Your Excellency,” Awad asked for donations toward a $15 million fundraising drive. He thanked Gadhafi for his “generous support.”
According to a diplomatic cable, CAIR Chairman Larry Shaw, a black convert to Islam, followed up by praising Gadhafi’s “leadership.”
“We have felt for years pride and glory in your leadership,” Shaw, a longtime North Carolina state senator, told the terrorist leader in 2009. “We want to assure you that Muslims in America are your brothers and supporters. They share with you your interests and aspirations.”
Wolf noted that Gadhafi’s “deplorable” human-rights record was well known to CAIR, long before he slaughtered his own people during the recent civil unrest. He also has a long history of supporting international terrorist attacks, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Gadhafi personally ordered the attack, which killed 270.
CAIR’s Awad also personally solicited funds from Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir, an internationally indicted war criminal, Wolf said in his June 24 letter to the IRS director.
“I request that the IRS investigate whether Awad and CAIR may have violated U.S. law in soliciting or accepting money from foreign governments or agents during the period that CAIR failed to file” its tax records, he said.
CAIR is not registered as a foreign agent.
CAIR repeatedly failed to file its annual disclosure report, IRS Form 990. CAIR blames a clerical error for the delinquency, and claims to have completed the forms. However, several news organizations, including Politico.com, have asked CAIR for the 2007-2010 documents, and CAIR has not been able to produce them.
“Compliance with this law is the only assurance the public has that an organization claiming tax-exempt status is not abusing this privilege,” Wolf wrote. “Given CAIR’s status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case, this failure to comply with federal disclosure laws is all the more troubling.”
In a July 14 letter obtained by WND, IRS official Lois G. Lerner, director of exempt organizations, wrote that information raising questions about the legality of a tax-exempt organization’s activities is automatically forwarded to the IRS’ Dallas office “to determine if it warrants an examination or other action.”
Wolf, in turn, sent the IRS letter and several pages of evidence to FBI Director Robert Mueller for criminal investigation. The FBI in 2007 cut off all formal ties to CAIR after evidence emerged from the Holy Land trial that the group was fronting for Hamas, a federally designated terrorist group.
At a recent appearance in Florida, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would pursue an aggressive criminal investigation of CAIR if elected to the White House. “Absolutely,” Gingrich stated, when asked about it by a concerned citizen.
Critics say CAIR should, at a minimum, be subjected to disclosure requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The law requires foreign agents to report funding from foreign governments and all lobbying activities on their behalf.
Read it all.


Pro-Assad crowd stones U.S. envoy's convoy in Damascus

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN | Thu Sep 29, 2011 12:45pm EDT
(Reuters) - Supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad hurled rocks and tomatoes at U.S. ambassador Robert Ford's convoy as he visited an opposition figure in Damascus on Thursday and Syriaaccused Washington of inciting violence and meddling in its affairs.
Assad's crackdown on six months of pro-democracy protests has envenomed relations with the United States, which has imposed fresh sanctions and rallied world pressure on Syria.
President Barack Obama took office in 2009 pledging to engage in dialogue with Damascus and named Ford as ambassador.
"Two embassy cars were damaged," said a witness, who asked not to be identified, adding that the demonstrators were chanting "Abu Hafez (father of Hafez)," a nickname for Assad.
The diplomats were visiting Hassan Abdelazim, a centrist politician who has demanded an end to Assad's crackdown as a condition for any opposition dialogue with the president.
Ford was already inside the building when about 200 Assad supporters attacked the embassy vehicles with large rocks and street signs with concrete bases. Embassy staff inside the vehicles were not harmed. Police later extracted the convoy.
The Syrian government said that once they were alerted to the confrontation, authorities "took all necessary procedures to protect the ambassador and his team and secure their return to their place of work." There was no immediate comment from the State Department in Washington.
Soon after the incident, the Syrian Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing the United States of "encouraging armed groups to practice violence against the Syrian Arab Army."
The attack was the second on U.S. diplomats since protests erupted in March. Assad supporters assaulted the U.S. embassy in July after Ford visited the flashpoint city of Hama, winning cheers from protesters who later faced a tank-led crackdown.
CONTACTS WITH OPPOSITION
Ford, who has angered Syria's rulers by cultivating links with the grassroots opposition, has also visited a protest hotspot in the southern province of Deraa, ignoring a new ban on Western diplomats traveling outside the Damascus area.
Two weeks ago he and several other Western envoys attended the wake of a prominent activist.
Ford arrived in Damascus in January, filling a diplomatic vacuum since Washington withdrew his predecessor in 2005. Obama had hoped the gesture would help convince Assad to reconsider his alliance with Iran and with Islamist militant groups.
Western powers are pushing for a United Nations resolution condemning Syria, although opposition from Russia and China means this is unlikely to impose immediate sanctions.
"The U.N. Security Council cannot stay quiet any longer facing the daily crimes being committed against the population by the Syrian regime," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. "We want to warn the Syrian regime. We want it stop the terror and repression."
Haitham al-Maleh, a Syrian opposition leader who is visiting France and meeting French government officials, said that during a stop in Geneva this week he had urged the U.N. Human Rights Council to prepare a file on Assad and his aides for a possible prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
"How can the international community continue to have a connection with this regime? The regime is using all types of weapons and if the international community continues to wait, you won't find anybody left but the children," the veteran human rights lawyer told reporters in Paris.
The United Nations says Assad's crackdown has killed at least 2,700 Syrians, including more than 100 children. Syrian authorities blame the violence on "armed terrorist gangs," which they say have killed 700 members of the security forces.
Maleh put the death toll at 5,250, saying 5,000 people had disappeared, more than 100,000 had been arrested and 20,000 had fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. He called for U.N. military protection zones for civilians to be set up on the borders.
France's human rights ambassador Francois Zimeray said his country was committed to bringing those responsible for abuses in Syria to justice. "It may take years, but the perpetrators will be judged," he told reporters.
ARMED RESISTANCE
Armed resistance has emerged in Syria after months of mostly peaceful protests, with battles in the last few days in the town of Rastan, 180 km (112 miles) north of Damascus.
Army deserters backed by armed villagers were holding out against tank fire, but Rastan was running short of supplies, activists and residents said.
"The more they (Assad loyalists) take casualties, the more they fire at civilians," said one resident, who gave his name as Sami, adding that defenders were holding up the tanks with boobytraps and rocket-propelled grenades.
"The wounded are not being taken to hospital because it is at the front line. Makeshift clinics in homes are running out of medical supplies," he added.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission, an umbrella for several activist groups, said the army assault had killed 41 people in Rastan in the last 72 hours, but that the figure was an estimate, with communications cut with the besieged town
Maleh said he opposed taking up weapons against the security forces, but said it was now inevitable, estimating that out of Syria's 300,000-strong army, only the 60,000 men in a brigade commanded by Assad's brother were fully loyal.
"The rest will not go and attack their families, parents. This army is starting to divide itself," he said. "This kind of army will turn on the regime and attack it and finish it."
In Lebanon, Syrian refugees said they were unable to return for fear of persecution and complained they still felt unsafe because of agents sent across the border by Syrian authorities.
"I can't return until the regime falls," said dissident Suheed al-Aqari, 30, who has been staying at an abandoned school in the border area of Wadi Khaled, where food and shelter are provided by a local charity.
More than 3,800 Syrians have registered with the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in north Lebanon, which borders Syria's Homs province, a center of the anti-Assad revolt.
(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris and Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

U.S. confronted Pakistan with evidence of ISI-Haqqani links before going public


Even so, Pakistan has "decided not to take action against the Haqqani network for the time being." "US confronts Pak with proof of ISI's terror link," from the Press Trust of India, September 28 (thanks to K):
Washington: The US confronted Pakistan with "concrete evidences" of links between the ISI and extremist organisations like the Haqqani network and LeT, before it launced [sic] a frontal attack on the spy agency for its terror ties, Pentagon officials have said.
"They (ISI) provide financial support (to extremist organisations). It provides technical support. It provides physical support. They (Pak officials) are allowing the safe heavens [sic] to operate," a defence official said on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to speak to the media.
Another defence department official said that Pentagon has been providing such evidences to Pakistan "since ages" but it is only after the recent attack on a hotel in Kabul and the US Embassy in Kabul that this crossed all limits and the Defence Department decided to go public.
But the senior defence official maintained that these evidences gives concrete proof of the relationship between ISI and the extremist organisations including Haqqani network and LeT.
The senior defence official familiar with it refused from giving further details of the type of evidences that the US has provided to Pakistan, based on which Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a key Congressional committee, last week that the Haqqani network "acts as a veritable arm" of Pakistan's ISI.
Officials said Mullen shared his thoughts and text of his remarks with Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, before he went to make such a strong comment against Pakistan in a public hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Posted by Marisol on September 29, 2011 12:08 AM | 1 Comment
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Al Jazeera ‘journalist’ admits to being Hamas operative

Posted on September 29, 2011 by creeping
via Al Jazeera journalist admits to being Hama… JPost – Middle East.
Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Afghanistan, Samer Allawi, was released from an Israeli prison Sunday night after reaching a plea bargain under which he confessed to serving as a Hamas operative.
Allawi reached a deal with the Israel State Prosecutor’s Office under which he will receive a suspended sentence of three years, after he confessed to serving as a Hamas operative and working on behalf of the terrorist organization, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) released in a statement.
Allawi, a Palestinian, was arrested in August at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan.
He said he was recruited into Hamas in 1993 and served until 2004 on a senior committee that oversees Hamas operations abroad and is responsible for fundraising.
In 2001 and 2003 Allawi traveled to Syria where he met with Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal’s deputy and reported on his activities, the Shin Bet said. Abu Marzook offered Allawi to serve as Hamas’s official representative in Iran, but he rejected the offer.
The Shin Bet said that Allawi met with a senior Hamas operative in Dubai in 2000 and expressed his readiness to participate in military operations if asked by Hamas. He also offered to use his job as a reporter for Al Jazeera to promote Hamas interests.


Read it all and ask yourself why some are so anxious to import the terror tv of al Jazeera into the U.S.


It’s Time for Rep. Peter King to Investigate Al-Jazeera
Cliff Kincaid  —   September 28, 2011
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In a major blow to Al-Jazeera’s drive for acceptance and respectability in the West, the government of Israel says that one of the channel’s correspondents has confessed to acting as an agent of the terrorist group Hamas. The Israeli government also claims to have uncovered a network of Hamas operatives using Al-Jazeera as a cover.
The U.S. State Department designates Hamas as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and states that it “was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Hamas does not recognize Israel, and its founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The group considers Israeli settlers and civilians legitimate military targets.
Samer Allawi, a Palestinian who ran Al-Jazeera’s Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau, was released, sentenced to time served, and agreed to pay a $1,400 fine. He was arrested on August 9 and held in an Israeli prison. Various press freedom groups had clamored for his release.
Some commentators are saying that the treatment of the Al-Jazeera correspondent is evidence of a tougher policy by Israel toward Qatar, an Arab dictatorship which completely finances Al-Jazeera and selects its news and editorial personnel. A classified report prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and leaked to the Israeli media in August outlined Qatar’s more radical stance in the Arab and Muslim world and noted evidence of more frequent Hamas visits to Doha, the capital, and funding by Qatar of Hamas.
A story on the Israelnationalnews.com website about the report also indicated that Israel may start restricting the activities of Al-Jazeera correspondents inside Israel. It said, “Qatar is also the home of Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, which the Foreign Ministry considers extremely anti-Israel. As a result, the Ministry has worked in recent months to prevent reporters from the network from operating in Israel, and has stopped giving them visas. Currently, the only way for an Al-Jazeera reporter to enter Israel is using a passport from a country that has full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, but the Ministry is seeking ways to keep these individuals out of Israel as well.”
Although the emir of Qatar pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the channel, making it effectively a propaganda machine for the regime, he prohibits a free press and free elections at home. Bloggers critical of the royal family are simply taken away and tortured, while Al-Jazeera turns a blind eye and deaf ear to their fate.
But because the country hosts a U.S. military base, it enjoys a moderate and even pro-Western reputation. Qatar uses expensive public relations and lobbying firms like Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR) and Brown Lloyd James.
The Allawi incident confirms what Accuracy in Media has been saying for years—that the channel functions as a mouthpiece for terrorist organizations ranging from al-Qaeda to Hamas and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, Al-Jazeera continues to maintain that it is a legitimate news-gathering operation that deserves carriage on major U.S. cable and satellite systems. It operates out of studios in Washington, D.C. and has a major presence at the United Nations in New York. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even praised it for offering “news” to viewers.
Allawi claimed after his release that his contacts with Hamas “were part of his work as a journalist,” the channel reported. His lawyer had acknowledged that Israeli authorities had obtained his “computer login information,” which apparently led to the evidence that forced the plea bargain and his decision not to challenge the charges.
It is true that the channel regularly maintains contacts with Hamas. Indeed, as AIM has reported, Hamas operatives appear at the annual Al-Jazeera Forum sponsored by the government of Qatar. This year’s event featured Osama Hamdan, a top member of the political bureau of Hamas,
We noted at the time: “Americans attending this event included Steve Clemons of the George Soros-funded New America Foundation. An openly gay figure in the U.S. foreign policy community, he has been a cheerleader for Al-Jazeera and his blog features a ‘Watch Al-Jazeera Now’ ad. He reports that he was at the Al-Jazeera Forum as a “guest” of Al-Jazeera, apparently meaning that the terror channel paid his way and accommodations.”
Hamdan was on a panel with former Obama adviser Robert Malley of the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group. The title of the panel was, “Palestinian national strategy in the new Middle East.”
A writer of the recent Soros-funded Center for American Progress report on alleged “Islamophobia” in the U.S. went on Al-Jazeera to promote the charges against leading American conservatives.
Another American participant in this year’s Al-Jazeera Forum was Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago Office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood spin-off. He reported on his Facebook page that his presentation went well and that he was “Getting ready for a guided tour of Al Jazeera headquarters.”
But that headquarters, according to the Israeli information released in connection with the Samer Allawi case, may very well be a meeting place for Hamas representatives.
Israeli authorities claimed in a release about the Allawi case that he admitted that in 2000, during a meeting with a Hamas operative in Dubai, he “agreed to carry out military or organizational activity for Hamas” and “even proposed, on his own initiative, to work to aid Hamas in advancing its goals by utilizing his position as a journalist with Al Jazeera.”
The Israeli government went on to say, “In 2006, Allawi met with Hamas operatives in Qatar, who served as Al Jazeera correspondents, and agreed with them that they would exploit their work with Al Jazeera
in order to strengthen Hamas by—inter alia—criticizing American operations in Afghanistan and expressing support for the Palestinian ‘resistance.’ In 2010, during an additional meeting with Hamas operatives in Qatar, Allawi was asked to work to strengthen public opinion in support of Hamas and the Palestinian struggle by—inter alia—criticizing American activities.”
In another scandal involving the channel, disclosures by WikiLeaks that U.S. officials had been pressuring Al-Jazeera to tone down its anti-American coverage have led to the resignation of Al-Jazeera’s director Wadah Khanfar, who has been replaced by a member of the Qatari royal family, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, an executive at Qatargas.
A cable released by WikiLeaks appeared to show Khanfar taking the U.S. complaints seriously and trying to water down the channel’s inflammatory coverage. This made Khanfar, in the eyes of radical Islamists, an American lackey who had to go.
The cable shows that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was monitoring the channel, apparently because its coverage was leading to the killing of American service personnel in the Middle East. The complaints involved the “use of inflammatory language; a failure to balance of extremist views; and the use of terrorist tapes.” However, Khanfar was quoted as saying in regard to the latter that the channel would continue to use the tapes from terrorist groups. “We have always said that we are going to use these tapes and we will continue to use them,” he says in the cable. “The question is how.”
Other questions are how and why Al-Jazeera always seems to have inside access to terrorist groups.
Al-Jazeera continues to run a “Demand Al-Jazeera in the USA” campaign featuring “Al Jazeera English Testimonials” from such figures as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC; Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Senator John McCain.
However, as we noted in an earlier story about the arrest of Samer Allawi, critics of Al-Jazeera have called upon Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, to hold hearings on Al-Jazeera’s involvement with terrorist organizations and whether that activity qualifies the channel to be officially designated by the U.S. Government as a global terrorist entity.
Such a designation could lead to the banning of the channel’s broadcasts, the closing of Al-Jazeera bureaus in the U.S., and perhaps the expulsion of its correspondents.

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Egypt: Why the Muslim Brotherhood Isn't All That Fraternal

By RANIA ABOUZEID / CAIRO Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011
ENLARGE PHOTO+
Aboul Fotouh speaks to a crowd in Zefta, Egypt, January 25, 2011.
Mohamd Turky / Demotix / Corbis
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The thundering wave of democratic change sweeping across the Middle East has empowered Islamists, a development often couched in "told you so" tones by some commentators and politicians. But an Islamist is not an Islamist is not an Islamist. Like most political ideologies, there are shades — sometimes just gray, at other times, more starkly black and white — between the various groups now giving voice to their long-stifled political rights.
This vibrant, boisterous awakening is loudest in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous state and the birthplace of some of Islam's most influential modern thinkers, including Hassan el-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Seyyid Qutb, considered by some the father of modern Islamic fundamentalism — and an inspiration to al-Qaeda.(See photos of Egypt's outlawed brotherhood.)
A plethora of Islamist political forces have emerged in Egypt — from hardcore Salafists (who espouse a strict, literalist reading of the Koran) to more moderate, inclusive bodies. Although the revised political party law issued by Egypt's military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), prohibits the establishment of parties based on "religion, geography or race," the new organizations have dodged that restriction by forming "civil" groups with Islamic frames of reference, like the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. To date, SCAF has denied only one licensing application, submitted by the formerly militant group Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, which waged an insurgency against the Egyptian state for decades until the mid-1990s.
As the political jockeying begins for staggered elections in the lower house of Parliament that kick off on Nov. 28, it's unclear if the various Islamist groups will compete against one other, or coalesce to take on the secular, liberal parties. (A three-round election for the upper house will be held from Jan. 29 to March 11.) The powerful Brotherhood recently said it will vie for 40% of the lower assembly, down from an earlier figure of 50% which was up from the 30% suggested by spokesman Essam el-Erian back in March. (Erian is now the vice-president of Freedom and Justice.)
The party now says it does not want a majority on its own, but hopes the Democratic Coalition it has joined (a loose alliance of more than 30 political groups including the liberal Wafd Party), will take the lion's share of the assembly. Still, while it seeks to win seats in the house, the Brotherhood's own house is exhibiting signs of division, with members splintering away from what was for decades one of the best organized, although subdued, political forces of any shade during Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship.(Read about Egyptian Christian and Muslim conflict after the revolution.)
The Brotherhood's breakaways are mainly disaffected youth. Some are uneasy with their elders' comfortable ties with the ruling military council; others more closely identify themselves with other groups. (For example, there are at least four new parties formed by Salafis.)
Still others, like Mohammad Othman, say the party doesn't represent them any more. Othman, 30, was a member of the party for 13 years, but left it a few months after Mubarak was toppled. He participated in the mammoth demonstrations in the capital's Tahrir Square, but says it soon became clear to him that the Brotherhood wasn't interested in real change. "It has forgotten about the more important concerns of the street, it's too busy creating deals with the ruling military council. I think it has betrayed the revolution," he says. "The Ikhwan [Brothers] talk about reforms, they aren't interested in real change on the Egyptian street." Othman says that many of his friends have also left the party, for similar reasons.
Read about how the Egyptian uprising changed the brotherhood.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2095351,00.html#ixzz1ZMmfcgGi

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Erian is quick to brush off the defections. He says they are small in number, unorganized and don't pose a threat. "We are not worried about such things because it is an ordinary thing that some people will separate," he says. "We will wait to see what their future is, if they form parties and how they go ahead." Those who have left the party will have a lot of catching up to do if they want to compete with the Brotherhood, especially in its capacity as a civil society organization, a role that wins it vast support on the ground — support it can cash into political capital.
Still, not all of the Brotherhood's breakaways are political neophytes, and if, as Erian says, the party isn't worried about dissidents, then why did it reportedly expel members who had attended a conference by presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a rebel from the Islamist group? Erian denies the account, published in several Egyptian newspapers, and says that the members were "criticized, only criticized, not punished at all" for breaking party ranks and attending the event organized by Aboul Fotouh.(Read about President's Obama thoughts of the Muslim Brotherhood.)
Aboul Fotouh was a leading figure in the Brotherhood for decades, a popular reformist, who was expelled this summer for defying the party's decision not to enter the presidential race. He is now running for president, and drawing a lot of support from young, reform-minded Islamists like Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, 28, an independent who has emerged as one of the Brotherhood's most outspoken critics.
Houdaiby doesn't like to flaunt his family's storied history in the Brotherhood, but it is a pedigree that affords him a unique platform. Erudite, articulate and exceedingly modest, his great grandfather, Hassan el-Houdaiby, was the Brotherhood's second supreme guide after Banna's assassination in 1948. His grandfather was its sixth, serving between 2002 to 2004. "The Brotherhood is always occupied with the religious question, of proving their religious moderation, so that keeps them unfocused on different matters," Houdaiby says. "I have a lot of hope in somebody like Aboul Fotouh, particularly because of that. If you look at his political stances, you could never understand them as the political stances of an Islamist, and stop there. He's confident enough to move beyond the question of religion."
Houdaiby says that Aboul Fotouh appeals to Egyptian concerns about finding jobs, security, the rising cost of living and eliminating corruption. They are not focused on on the question of religious identity, like many Islamist politicians. A survey by the Egyptian Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Center published on Sunday, said that a whopping 65% of respondents would not even consider following a cleric's endorsement of a political candidate. Although sample size and other statistics about the survey were not provided, it's a fact from Islamabad to Cairo that influence from the pulpit doesn't necessarily translate into political power on the streets or in parliament. Islamic identity only becomes a powerful, unifying political force when it is threatened, as it was during the Mubarak years. That's why, as Houdaiby says, the Brotherhood, which "stood united for 80 years in the context of oppression, cannot stand in the context of freedom."(Read about dissent within the Muslim Brotherhood.)
Houdaiby quit the party in 2008, for ideological reasons. There are four schools inside the Brotherhood, he says: Hassan el-Banna's, Salafists, the Qutbis, and the traditional Azhari school, promulgated by the venerable Al-Azhar institute in Cairo, Sunni Islam's foremost seat of learning. Houdaiby sympathies are for the Azhari school. The Brotherhood, he says, is now dominated by Qutbis and Salafis.
Still, the various groups have far more uniting them than dividing them. Tensions may arise if several Islamist candidates from across the ideological range vie for the same electoral seats. The so-called Coordinating Body for Islamist Political Action was recently formed by young men and women hoping to avoid such a scenario by encouraging the creation of unified Islamist lists for the upcoming election. But perhaps that sorting process is better left to the ballot box. Ultimately, it is the voters who will decide if an Islamist is an Islamist is an Islamist — and whether voting for one will make a big enough difference to their political and economic future.
Read about what's so scary about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
See photos of Islam's soft revolution.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2095351,00.html#ixzz1ZMmR61sT


Report: Russia Assassinating Chechen Rebels Abroad




September 28th, 2011 (3) Posted By Toro520.

I suppose a stopped clock is correct twice a day…
If only the US had such testicular fortitude, I’d volunteer in a heartbeat
Spiegel:
On orders from the Kremlin, Russian agents have been liquidating Chechen terrorists abroad. Turkish investigators suspect that a Russian was also behind the latest killings, the recent murder of three Chechens in Istanbul. Some believe the operations are being planned from Berlin.
The memorial service high above the Bosporus went far beyond what is usual at the funeral of terror suspects. Several thousand people turned up at the mosque, built by Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, to mourn the deaths of three Chechens. A man wielding a pistol had shot the men from Russia’s rebellious northern Caucasus region on Sept. 16 as they left a house in the European part of Istanbul.
The killer fled in a black rental car. Last week, he managed to evade Turkish investigators who had tracked him down to his hotel, but he was in such a hurry that he left behind his pistol, a night-vision device and passports. The Turks are now looking for a 55-year-old Russian who entered Turkey in early September under the name Alexander Shirkov.
So far, the government in Ankara has not commented on the murders. It is reluctant to jeopardize relations with its old geopolitical rival Russia, which had finally been improving recently. However, representatives of Islamist organizations sharply criticized what they called Moscow’s “insidious state-sponsored terrorism” after the funeral service.
‘We’ll Kill Them in the Outhouse’
The bloody deed is a sign of a larger conflict: the struggle between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and those in the Islamic world who sympathize with the radical Chechen underground fighters, provide them funding and grant them refuge. Putin is determined to prevent the region from breaking away from Russia at all costs.
Russian intelligence agents appear to be systematically working off a hit list. When he came into power, Putin, who was president at the time, apparently decided to expand the death zone. “We will pursue the terrorists wherever they go. If we find them in the toilet, we’ll kill them in the outhouse,” the president vowed, and set his agents loose on Chechen rebels and terrorists abroad.
In February 2004, Russian agents with diplomatic passports blew up an SUV carrying Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen rebel commander, in Qatar, where he had been a guest of that country’s emir. Interpol was searching for him, and his name was on a United Nations list of known terrorists, but Qatar refused to extradite Yandarbiyev to Moscow.
When the murderers, officially members of the Russian diplomatic corps, were captured and arrested, Putin himself reached for the phone to secure their release in Qatar. In 2006, Putin got a law passed that legalized his approach, just as his counterpart, then-US President George W. Bush, had done a few years earlier. Now, Russian intelligence agencies and special forces are permitted to kill terrorists abroad. The order to liquidate suspects has to be issued by the president.
Killed in Broad Daylight
The attacks were carried out in Arab countries, Azerbaidjan in the southern Caucasus and, in particular, Turkey. In September 2008, the Chechen militant Gaji Edilsultanov was murdered in Istanbul in broad daylight. Three months later, his fellow militant Islam Zhanibekov was killed in an execution-style shooting in front of his wife and children. Russian special-forces units had targeted the Chechen because of his involvement in several terrorist attacks.
Musa Atayev, a Chechen field commander who was in Turkey under a false name, was killed in Istanbul in February 2009. Neighbors found him lying dead in a pool of blood. Atayev was believed to be the Istanbul representative of terrorist leader Doku Umarov, who has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks, including the bombing of the Moscow Metro in March 2010, which killed 40 people, and the attack on the city’s Domodedovo International Airport in January 2011. The airport bombing claimed 37 lives. Because of his involvement in these attacks, Umarov is often referred to as the “bin Laden of the Caucasus.”
According to Turkish police, Alexander Shirkov, who is now suspected of having organized and committed the recent triple murder, was in Istanbul when Atayev died in February 2009.
Late last week, there was speculation on Chechen underground websites, as well as in the Russian and Turkish media, that a so-called “Berlin group” may have been involved in the killings. Russian undercover operations have allegedly been directed from the German capital, of all places.
Officially, German authorities have no solid evidence that this is the case. However, they did not fail to notice that more than 1,200 Chechen exiles and Russian intelligence agents are now stalking each other in Berlin. The Germans have also noticed that Umarov’s following is growing. They report dubious flows of cash — including from young men who are leaving Germany to join the holy war in the Caucasus.


Bank of America to charge $5 monthly fee for debit card users

By Jeremy C. Owens
jowens@mercurynews.com
Posted: 09/29/2011 09:15:09 AM PDT
Updated: 09/29/2011 09:15:42 AM PDT

Click photo to enlarge
FILE - In this Jan. 25, 2009 file photo, a Bank of America branch office is... ( Mark Lennihan )
Bank of America customers with basic checking accounts will be hit with a $5 monthly fee in order to use a debit card for purchases, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.
Banks and card companies have been aggressively establish and raising fees in recent weeks as banks plan for new rules taking effect Oct. 1 that limit the amount they can charge retailers for each debit card purchase.
JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are currently testing $3 fees for debit cards in select areas, and Citibank recently announced it is raising its fees for checking accounts.
"The economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations, and we've decided to introduce a monthly fee for customers who use their debit cards for purchases," Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, told Bloomberg.
Fees will begin being assessed in January and clients with premium accounts will not be affected, Pace said.
Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; fo

BLACK VOTERS ABANDON OBAMA – DICK MORRIS TV: LUNCH ALERT!

By Dick Morris
09.29.2011
Dear Friend,
In this video commentary, I discuss how a new poll shows real erosion, for the first time, in African-American attitudes toward the president. This could be a catastrophe for him!
Click the buttons above to share this video commentary with your friends!
Thanks for watching,
Dick
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Raising Cain: Florida Win and Perry Plunge Boost Black Hopeful

African-Americans aren't all "brainwashed" by Democrats, the candidate declares.
by  Tony Lee
09/29/2011
CommentsAfter a week in which members of the Congressional Black Caucus expressed their displeasure at President Obama, Herman Cain, a black businessman who has surged in the polls after a surprising and convincing win in Florida's Presidential 5 GOP Straw Poll, said Democrats have “brainwashed” African-American voters, and that he could not support Texas Gov. Rick Perry if he were the nominee today in part because of Perry’s soft stance on illegal immigration.

When asked by Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room” why Republicans have trouble with African-American voters, Cain said that many “African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view.”

“I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative,” said Cain.  “So it’s just brainwashing people and people not being open-minded, pure and simple.”

When pressed on his "strong" words in talking about African-Americans, Cain said, “For two-thirds of them, Wolf, that is the case.”

Cain said the “good news is” that he happens to believe that “a third to 50% of the black Americans in this country” are “open-minded.”

“I meet them every day,” said Cain.  “They stop me in the airport.”

Cain said that he believes a third of African-Americans would vote for him, based on his own anecdotal feedback.

“Now, they won’t be voting for me because I’m black,” Cain said.  “They’ll be voting for me because of my policies and because of what I’m offering to fix this economy, starting with, as you know, my 9-9-9 plan.”

Cain reiterated his point that “this whole notion that all black Americans are necessarily going to stay and vote Democrat and vote for Obama, that’s simply not true.”

In the same interview, Cain said that as of today, he could not support Texas Gov. Rick Perry if Perry got the nomination for a myriad of reasons, and highlighted Perry’s weakness illegal
immigration.

Perry’s campaign knows that his record on immigration is a hurdle it will have to jump over if Perry is to get the Republican nomination.

Earlier, an interview in which Perry expressed regret at referring to those opposed to giving instate tuition rates to illegal immigrants as "heartless" was released.

Perry’s stumbles on immigration gave Cain the opening to revive his campaign.  In fact, a new poll of Florida Republicans found that Perry’s favorability numbers plummeted after his poor debate performance.

According to the poll, 63% of Florida Republicans had a favorable view of Perry before the debate, while only 23% had an unfavorable view of him.  In the two days after the debate, only 48% of Florida Republicans viewed Perry favorably, while 36% viewed him unfavorably.

Perry has attracted considerable support from voters who identify with the Tea Party movement.  These are the same voters that are likely to be drawn to Cain.

Perry’s challenge going forward will be to convince voters that he is conservative enough in early primary states such as South Carolina and Iowa, two states in which primary voters are even more conservative on immigration than Florida’s Republicans who rejected him after the debate.

If Perry fails to make the case, Cain is hoping to be a beneficiary of the beleaguered candidate's misfortune.


Tony Lee edits The Chase 2012 section and writes on politics and culture for HUMAN EVENTS. Follow him on  Twitter and Facebook. E-mail: ALEE (at) EaglePub.com


The FBI Raided A Pennsylvania Boeing Plant Arresting Dozens Of Employees

Robert Johnson | Sep. 29, 2011, 11:05 AM | 593 | 4


The FBI stormed the Ridley Park, Pa. Boeing plant Thursday morning arresting dozens of people allegedly involved in a prescription drug ring.
FOX News Philadelphia reports at least three-dozen people have been arrested including current employees, former workers, and outside persons.
The Ridley Park plant manufactures the military CH-47 Chinook helicopter and parts of the V-22 Osprey.
Federal prosecutors will have the individuals in federal court Thursday afternoon for arraignment, at which time the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office will hold a joint press conference discussing the investigation.
Those arrested are charged with being involved in a large prescription drug-selling ring based out of the plant and includes workers from the production line and administrative offices.
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2011teaparty Tea Party Chief
President’s illegal uncle giggles in court bit.ly/mXIkdi via @AddThis

President’s illegal uncle giggles in court

By John Zaremba
Thursday, September 29, 2011 - Updated 49 minutes agoE-mail   Print   (103) Comments    Share   
A giggling Onyango Obama -- the president’s illegal alien half uncle -- made a brief appearance in Framingham District Court today on charges he was drunk when he nearly struck an unmarked police cruiser last month.
Obama, 67, was visibly amused at the media spectacle, stifling laughter several times before his 30-second court appearance where a judge set a Nov. 17 pre-trial conference.
Obama did not acknowledge a Herald reporter’s questions upon arrival at Framingham District Court and neither he nor his lawyer made any comment on his way out where they were followed to the parking lot by a horde of media.
His attorney, P. Scott Bratton, did, however, tell the Herald that Obama, who has been living illegally in the United States for nearly 20 years, has returned to work at Conti Liquors in Framingham.
"He has. He’s doing well," Bratton said.
Obama was accompanied in court today by two attorneys and an unidentified male supporter. The courtroom was packed with some members of the media, but mostly with other defendants hauled in for the usual round of arraignments at the county court located in suburban Boston.
Onyango, who had a valid driver’s license and Social Security card when he was arrested last month, was in the U.S. illegally having already faced a 1992 deportation order. Immigration officials have ordered him to "check in" with them.
When he was arrested by Framingham police on suspicion of drunken driving Aug. 24, he suggested his first call should be to the White House. A spokesman for the president told the Herald that call was never made. He actually called his boss at Conti’s Liquors.
Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone has also vowed to prosecute Obama to the fullest extent possible on the OUI charge.
-— john.zaremba@bostonherald.com

FAITH RADICAL CLERIC WHO CALLED FOR MURDER OF ‘EVERY ZIONIST WHO ENTERS EGYPT’ LIVED & LECTURED IN AMERICA

  • Comments (61)Remember Dr. Salah Sultan, the radical cleric and Muslim Brotherhood member who, on al-Jazeera, recently called for the murder of “every Zionist who enters Egypt?”
As horrifying as his original comments were, some other details may be even more surprising. Sultan, who has radical ties to Islamist figures across the globe, recently resided in Columbus, Ohio. In addition to living in the U.S., he has also allegedly lectured at a local, Islamic elementary school (Sunrise Academy) and purportedly still has family living in the house he owns here in America.
Since leaving the U.S., he has relocated to Bahrain. His application for U.S. citizenship, of course, has been denied (he appeared at a Hamas rally in Turkey and has made comments overseas that lay blame for 9/11 on the U.S. government). While he initially scheduled an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network,
Below, watch a CBN report that delves deeply into his connections here in America.
Patrick Poole, who says that Sultan lived in his community and who has sounded the alarm on his antics in the past, has more:
…Prior to Sultan being denied U.S. citizenship and later being denied reentry into the United States because of his advocacy of violence against the U.S., he lived in my own hometown of Hilliard, Ohio, not a mile from my own house. In fact, he still owns his home and some of his family still reside here. His oldest son, Mohamed, is the president of the Ohio State Muslim Student Association.
Below, watch Sultan’s most recent comments calling for any and all “Zionists” who enter Egypt to be killed:
Back to The Blaze »

COMMENTS (61)

CRIME IRAQI POET IN ST. LOUIS ALLEGEDLY HAD STAR OF DAVID CARVED INTO HIS BACK DURING ATTACK

One Iraqi immigrant living in St. Louis, Missouri might have learned the hard way what happens to Muslims who publicly support Israel and the Jewish people, when he allegedly suffered a heinous attack in August — where, in addition to being stabbed and held at gunpoint, assailants carved a Star of David into his back.
Alaa Alsaegh, a writer whose Arabic language poem, “Tears at the Heart of the Holocaust,” was featured on Nonie Darwish’s website, ArabsForIsrael.com, reported the incident to local authorities and was later taken to a hospital where his wounds were photographed. The Egyptian-born Darwish is a former Muslim who converted to Christianity and has been one of the most prominent and outspoken critics of Islam since the September 11 attacks.
According to Darwish’s article in FrontPage Magazine on Wednesday, Alsaegh‘s poem expressed the author’s affinity for Israel, the Jewish people and his mourning over the grim fate of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Such sentiments purportedly did not sit well with certain members of St. Louis’ Islamic community, however, prompting a string of alleged threats directed at Alsaegh in which the poet was smeared an infidel and a traitor to Islam.
But despite being accused of apostasy, the young man continued writing his poems — that is until the morning of August 14 when Alsaegh was reportedly attacked.
FrontPage provides an account of the incident:
According to Mr. Alsaegh, as he was driving at 10:30 in the morning on Compton St. near Park Ave., a small white car cut him off and hit his car, while another car stopped behind him. The occupants of the cars, some of whom wore security guard-type uniforms, quickly entered Alsaegh’s car, pointing a gun at him. They pushed his upper body down against the steering wheel, stabbed him and pulled off his shirt to expose his back. Then, with a knife, they carved the Star of David on his back while laughing as they recited his pro-Jewish poem. Mr. Alsaegh believes that the attackers could be Somalis, but he was not sure. After the attackers fled the scene, Mr. Alsaegh was surrounded by witnesses to the crime and was taken to the hospital. The photo representing this story was taken at the hospital.
St. Louis Police confirm that officers responded to a call for help at approximately 10:45 a.m. on August 14 and Both Dariwsh’s article and a report from local KMOV state that the FBI has become involved in the investigation — though the agency has not yet made any official statements pertaining to the incident, nor has it labeled it a “hate crime.”
Thus far, no arrests have been made.
Below is an interview with Alsaegh and his father. The video captures the outline of the Star of David, still visible on Alsaegh’s back over a month after the incident took place:Video | News | Weather | Sports
Tue Sep 27 20:16:46 PDT 2011

ST LOUIS MAN SAYS HE’S THE VICTIM OF A HATE CRIME

Alaa Alsaegh says that two cars followed him as he drove on Compton. view full article

Tucson town hall over Fast and Furious

fox11az.com
Posted on September 27, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Updated Tuesday, Sep 27 at 10:22 AM
TUCSON, Ariz. -- It was a botched operation that sent more than 2,000 guns into the hands of Mexican cartel members.
There are still many questions about the federal gun-running investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious, but Monday night there were some answers.
The Tucson Tea Party hosted a town hall meeting at CDO High School Monday night in an attempt to the get the facts straight about the under cover operation that essentially armed the Mexican cartels.
"We want to make sure that all the documentation on who knew who OK'd comes forward," said District 1 Representative Paul Gosar while addressing the crowd.
Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar told a crowd of more than 600 people that the White House knew weapons were being sold to Mexican gang members as part of Operation Fast and Furious.
"Attorney General Eric Holder in a speech in Mexico City actually outlines tactical changes to Operation Gun Runner and it details exactly what transpires to be Fast and Furious. So there has to be some connection of who knew about this," said Gosar.
Gosar is on a House Committee tasked with finding out what went wrong.
"These guns will show up on crime scenes on this side of the border as well as the other side of the border," said Gosar.
Those guns did show up at a crime scene. At the site of the shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
"If somebody gives a gun to somebody knowing their going to commit murder guess what we call them we call them accomplices," said Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu was also on hand to voice his concerns to attendees, but the crowd was especially interested in ATF Agent Vince Cefalu.
"Knowing that at the end of the day there may be a dead atf agent at the end of one of those guns, it nauseated me," said agent Cefalu while addressing the crowd.
Cefalu blew the lid off the weapons-tracking blunders by starting a website, clean up ATF.org.  He claims he's being pushed out of his job.
"I dont care.  I dont care as long as those guns are kept out of the hands of people who will do our people and the Mexican people harm," said Cefalu.
The audience had a chance to ask questions and one person wanted to know if those invovled can be prosecuted.
Gosar says if the House Committee can pinpoint who messed up, those people will be charged.
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Obama Evades ‘Fast and Furious’ Questions from Latino Media

Thu Sep 29 2011 08:54
During a White House roundtable with three Spanish-language media outlets on Wednesday, President Barack Obama skated around questions about Operation Fast and Furious.
“We’re working very hard to have a much more effective interdiction effort … we are checking southbound transit … to capture illegal guns, illegal cash transfers to cartels,” he said at the morning event with representatives from Yahoo!, MSN Latino, and AOL Latino/Huffington Post Latino Voices. “It is something we’ve been building … its not yet finished, and there’s more work to do,” he said.
Conservative Action Fund treasurer Shaun McCutcheon told The Daily Caller that Obama’s inability to answer basic questions about Operation Fast and Furious suggests the administration is covering up even more about the controversial program.
“The more that comes out about this Fast and Furious scandal, the more we realize that there are very real dangers in a government that is too big to monitor itself,” McCutcheon said in an email. “The Obama administration refuses to take responsibility for the deaths of Americans and Mexicans alike under their watch because of their program.”

ATF Fast and Furious guns turned up in El Paso

They were being stored for shipment to Mexico, documents show. It's the first case of vanished weapons from the surveillance program showing up on this side of the border outside the Phoenix area.

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By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
September 29, 2011
Reporting from Washington—
A cache of assault weapons lost in the ATF's gun-trafficking surveillance operation in Phoenix turned up in El Paso, where it was being stored for shipment to Mexico, according to new internal agency emails and federal court records.

Forty firearms along with ammunition magazines and ballistic vests were discovered in Texas in January 2010 during the early stages of the program, meaning the firearms vanished soon after the program began.

Under the program, dubbed Fast and Furious, agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosivesin the Phoenix field office allowed licensed firearm dealers to sell weapons to illegal "straw" buyers in the hope that the agents could track the weapons and arrest Mexican drug cartel leaders.

Instead, more than 2,000 weapons were trafficked along the U.S.-Mexico border, and many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. In addition, two AK-47 semi-automatics involved in the program were recovered after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed south of Tucson, and two others were found after a violent confrontation with state police officers in Maricopa, Ariz.

The El Paso case is the first example of Fast and Furious weapons turning up on this side of the border outside the Phoenix area.

According to an ATF document, Sean Christopher Steward bought the 40 AK-47-type assault rifles on Dec. 24, 2009, from the Lone Wolf Trading Co. gun store in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. The cache was part of 290 firearms ultimately acquired by Steward, a convicted drug felon, during the Fast and Furious operation.

Last January, he and 19 others were indicted in the only criminal case to arise out of Fast and Furious.

According to ATF emails and a federal court affidavit, El Paso police officers tracking alleged drug smuggling from Mexico followed a dark blue Volkswagen Jetta as it backed into a garage at a residence on Jan. 13, 2010. The driver was identified as Alberto Sandoval. Police later searched the vehicle and found the weapons and other devices.

According to an email from ATF Special Agent Oscar B. Flores in El Paso, Sandoval told authorities that he was paid $1,000 "to store the firearms at his residence until they could be transported to the Republic of Mexico" by an unknown third party.

More emails discussing Sandoval's arrest and the recovery of the weapons were sent to Washington headquarters and Kenneth Melson, then the ATF acting director, and William J. Hoover, the assistant director.

Sandoval was indicted and pleaded guilty to weapons charges in May 2010 in U.S. District Court in El Paso. He was sentenced to 61/2 years in prison.

richard.serrano@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

CRIME MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL LEAVES SACK OF SEVERED HUMAN HEADS NEAR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Five severed human heads were found outside a Mexican elementary school Tuesday in the latest escalation in gruesome drug cartel violence.
State police said the heads, which appear to be male, were found in a sack along with a handwritten message threatening three alleged drug traffickers. Headless bodies found elsewhere in the city a day earlier were too badly burned to immediately determine their gender and make a possible match.
Watch Reuters’ report on the recent violence:
It‘s unclear whether the grisly discovery is related to extortion threats that led about 140 elementary schools in the city to temporarily close earlier this month after teachers and parents decided it wasn’t safe enough to start classes.


Last week, 35 bodies were found in Veracruz, Mexico. Over the weekend, a journalist was found decapitated after she used social media to cover cartel violence.
A Mexican forensic worker turns over the body of a man next to a charred vehicle in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco. (AP Photo/Bernandino Hernandez)
The Daily Mail reports that the note contained threats toward three alleged drug traffickers and Guerro State Governor Angel Aguierre:
The message, in an apparently sarcastic tone, told people to thank the governor for continuing ‘this war’.
Earlier this week, the Mexican government reported it was investigating two videos posted on the Internet of masked men who were stating were taking action against the violent Zetas drug cartel themselves, but the government opposes this vigilante method.


Drug-related/vigilante/(both) violence escalates in Mexico.

 
Posted by Moe Lane (Profile)
Thursday, September 29th at 1:00PM EDT
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Well, I suppose that this was inevitable.
A self-styled drug-trafficking group calling itself the “Zeta Killers” claimed responsibility this week for the recent murders of at least 35 people believed to belong to the Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal organization.
The claim by the “Mata Zetas” has stoked fears that Mexico, like Colombia a generation before, may be witnessing the rise of paramilitary drug gangs that seek society’s approval and tacit consent from the government to help society confront its ills, in this case, the Zetas.
(Via AoSHQ Headlines) Before you start cheering, the WSJ article goes on to note that these guys (they call themselves Los Mata Zetas, or “Zeta Killers”) are probably not so much ‘annoyed Mexican citizens taking the law into their own hands’ as they are ‘rival drug gang members using vigilantism as a cover’ – although I suppose that you could be a violent drug gang member and still find the Zetas appalling. Which they are. It’s just that it’s an open question whether these people are any better: while the WSJ did report that the group assassinated 35 people, the AP notes that that total “included 12 women and two minors.” While killing hangers-on of a drug gang may be an effective terrorist tactic, it is nonethelessstill a terrorist tactic. And it’s a tactic that suggests that angels – even the Old Testament (read: scary) ones – are thin on the ground in Mexico right now.
Of course, the real question – at least, for ugly Americans – is: if Mata Zetas is from a narco-terrorist cartel, then did we sell that group the guns? And if we did, did we do it deliberately? I have been very, very resistant to the idea that the White House may have decided that the best way to control the worst Mexican narco-terrorists (H/T: Transterrestrial Musings and Confederate Yankee) would be to run guns to the somewhat less-awful Mexican narco-terrorists. I mean, it sounds like a subplot in a Tom Clancy novel. LITERALLY. And I would like to believe that the Obama administration would have thought twice, or three times, or however many times it would have taken to realize that running guns to Mexico without telling the Mexican government is what people call a casus belli, not to mention a damnably* stupid idea. Stories like the above make me wonder.
It’s a heck of a thing when you have to hope that your government is just being run by idiots who can’t be trusted to come in from the rain.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Theological opinion, not profanity.

A 'Furious' revelation

Feds sold guns to drug gangs

Last Updated: 5:10 AM, September 29, 2011
Posted: 10:24 PM, September 28, 2011
More PrintMichael A. Walsh
This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.
Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.
GETTY IMAGES
Stonewalling: What did Attorney General Eric Holder know, and when?
Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy four Draco pistols for cash and even got a letter from his supervisor, David Voth, authorizing a federally licensed gun dealer to sell him the guns without bothering about the necessary paperwork.
“Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62x39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson,” read the June 1, 2010, letter. “These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of performance of his official duties.”
On orders, Dodson then sold the guns to known criminals, who first stashed them away and then -- deliberately unhindered by the ATF or any other agency -- whisked them off to Mexico.
People were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, including at least two American agents and hundreds of Mexicans. And the taxpayers picked up the bill.
So where’s the outrage?
There’s none from the feds. Attorney General Eric Holder has consistently stonewalled Rep. Darrell Issa, Sen. Chuck Grassley and other congressional investigators.
In a constantly evolving set of lies, Holder has denied knowing anything about Fast and Furious while at the same time withholding documents from the House and Senate committees looking into the mess while muzzling some witnesses and transferring others.
Justice calls the allegations about Dodson’s operation “false.” But Grassley says that’s “a lie,” as he told Greta van Susteren the other day. “The ATF ordered this ATF agent to purchase these guns and in turn sell them, and supposedly track them,” he said. “But he was a lone wolf in the operation -- they wouldn’t give him any help for 24-hour surveillance.”
So now the wheels have come off the official explanation for Fast and Furious. Of course, that explanation never made much sense in the first place.
For one thing, the ATF had no authority to track the guns once they were in Mexico; for another, nobody bothered to inform the Mexicans of this intrusion on their national sovereignty.
Further, we now know that a host of federal agencies (including the ATF, the FBI and IRS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration and, very probably, top officials at the Department of Homeland Security) were all in the loop at various levels, as was the White House.
So calling “Fast and Furious” a cockamamie operation gone wrong just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.
If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go -- and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.
A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.
Of course, there’s a third explanation -- that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol.
Time for a special prosecutor, who’s both fast and furious.
Michael Walsh’s new spy thriller, “Shock Warning,” hits stores this week.
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Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/furious_revelation_OhK6TBqPlEpRglHjsSbiBI#ixzz1ZNZxS9a7

Holder Loses: Court Upholds Alabama Immigration Law


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