Brutally Honest

"On President Obama’s watch, the IRS was weaponized"

Matt Purple has a humdinger up over at The American Spectator:

When an American compound in Benghazi was attacked last year, the Obama administration targeted a filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, accusing him of setting the Muslim world ablaze and then throwing him in prison. The government also pressured YouTube to remove his allegedly offensive video. After it became evident that Benghazi was a coordinated terrorist attack that had little to do with Nakoula, family members of those killed started asking for answers. Journalists reacted with a smattering of press coverage, followed by weary demands that we all move on.

But when we learned this week that the Department of Justice secretly collected two months of phone records from the Associated Press, suddenly bats flew out of hell, shrieking could be heard from distant castle towers, and Richard Nixon’s ghost was seen clanking about the White House. With one of their own under attack, the press, which was more than happy to ignore the parents of dead Navy SEALs, demanded that the Obama administration be held accountable.

“Journalism,” observed Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for f**koffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector.” I’ve always disagreed to an extent; there are plenty of decent members of my profession, even if they’re merely exceptions to Thompson’s rule. But this week the overweening narcissism of the Fourth Estate was on full display, hoisted from the flagpole and flapping in the wind.

The press is comparing the DOJ’s actions to Watergate. That’s all well and good, but why couldn’t any of them have sent a little affront in the direction of Nakoula, who now sits in a prison cell ostensibly for a parole violation, but eminently for making a video Muslims found offensive? And if collecting phone data is Nixonian, what about when the Obama administration chucked Delphi workers off their pensions because they weren’t unionized? Or tried to obfuscate its role in the Fast and Furious operation that left a Border Patrol agent and countless Mexicans dead? Or engaged in the unprecedented persecution of leakers for years before the AP scandal broke?

Those stories were either mostly ignored or snidely dismissed as fodder for right-wing witch hunts. Only when their fellow scribblers came under attack did journalists suddenly sit bolt upright in bed. “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel,” is a timeworn Mark Twain quote, but apparently it’s also the only rule this administration was ever expected to follow.

The AP matter is bad, and made worse by Eric Holder’s apparent decision to recuse himself from the matter and go paperless on the same day. But the real scandals here are Benghazi and the IRS’s treatment of conservative nonprofits. The latter seems to sprout a new polyp every hour. We now know that the IRS not only targeted Tea Party charities, but also conservative, constitutional, Jewish, and pro-life groups. For more than two years, the agency refused to approve any Tea Party tax-exempt applications whatsoever. Certain applications were inappropriately leaked to the left-wing news outlet ProPublica. IRS employees even tried to blackmail one pro-life group into signing a pledge not to picket outside Planned Parenthood.

On President Obama’s watch, the IRS was weaponized and used to block the growth of conservative intellectual infrastructure. This wasn’t about a couple overcaffeinated agents in the IRS’s Cincinnati office trying to adapt to an onslaught of nonprofit applications. It was a blatant attempt to stymie the spread of ideas; a very potent and unique abuse of power.

Mr. Purple isn't quite done.  What he's written is damning in every sense of the word and should be read by you, by your friends, by your loved ones and by their friends and loved ones.

This isn't really about the right against the left.

It's about the right against the wrong.

The President's grape-fruit sized 'nads

When I heard about this yesterday, I was incredulous:

President Obama used a speech at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología – the National Anthropology Museum – to claim that ‘most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.’

‘I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms,’ Obama said. ‘And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.’

‘But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.’

‘That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States,’ Obama added. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’

'So we'll keep increasing the pressure on gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico. We'll keep putting these criminals where they belong: behind bars.'

It's ballsy, to say the least, that this guy would in essence blame America for Mexico's violent culture while ignoring his administration's own culpability in the Fast and Furious scandal. 

Obama also did not mention the more than 2,000 firearms that his Department of Justice ‘walked’ across the Mexican border as part of Operation Fast and Furious, a federal law enforcement project that aimed to track weapons to drug traffickers.

Those guns have been connected to the deaths of at least 300 Mexican citizens. And U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010 when a so-called ‘Fast and Furious gun’ was recovered at the scene of his murder during a routine patrol in Arizona.

An ensuing Congressional investigation led to the first-ever citation of a sitting cabinet member – Attorney General Eric Holder – for contempt of Congress. Holder declined to provide most of the more than 140,000 documents subpoenaed by a House committee, although the Department of Justice did selectively turn over thousands of others.

The term gun ‘walking’ referred to the administration-approved practice of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of instructing legal gun dealers to sell firearms to so-called ‘straw buyers’ who intended to pass them on to others.

Once sold, the guns would be ‘walked’ across the U.S.-Mexico border with the permission of federal authorities. While their intention was to follow more than 2,000 guns to their destinations inside the illicit Mexican drug trade, barely one-third of them – principally the weapons used in murders and then discarded at the scene, as is common in Mexico – were ever recovered.

Some gun rights groups have argued that Operation Fast and Furious was intentionally devised as a way to promote gun control, citing emails between senior ATF officials that discussed whether the Fast and Furious guns in one region ‘were all purchased from the same [dealer] and at one time.’

‘We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales,’ one email read.

In another, one ATF leader wrote to another that Fast and Furious ‘could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.’

ATF’s intention, ultimately scrapped under political pressure, was to increase reporting requirements on licensed gun dealers when they sell more than one weapon in a single transaction.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about whether President Obama was referring to Fast and Furious weapons in his speech.

It's glaringly revealing that this report comes not from a stateside media outlet but from abroad.

More revealing is that half the country knows not a thing about Obama's blatant hypocrisy.

We are as a country in deep kimchee.

"The military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith" (UPDATED)

There's a part of me that wants to dismiss this report:

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: "Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense...Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis...”. 

The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith. 

(From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians--including chaplains--sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”)

Being convicted in a court martial means that a soldier has committed a crime under federal military law. Punishment for a court martial can include imprisonment and being dishonorably discharged from the military. 

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)--whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.

Someone tell me this is wrong.

Someone tell me that this is being blown out of proportion.

Please.

UPDATE: The Pentagon has weighed in:

“The U.S. Department of Defense has never and will never single out a particular religious group for persecution or prosecution,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said in a statement. “The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.”

“Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs (proselytization),” Christensen added.

He also said that “when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case by case basis.” He did not specify what the range of penalties could be.

The latest statement was aimed at refuting widely circulated reports in conservative media outlets that Christian soldiers could be court-martialed for sharing their faith.

Good to hear.  Lord, help me believe it.

“Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

If only they were talking about jumping the hell off a cliff:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

And speaking of different standards:

The chief of the FAA told Congress today that Washington-area airports will largely escape the effects of the air traffic controller furloughs — a blessing for lawmakers who fly out of the nation’s capitol.

Michael Huerta, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, told a congressional panel that the Washington region’s airports are spaced out enough and have enough spare capacity that furloughs to air traffic controllers won’t hurt as much here.

Imagine for a moment if Republicans held the White House and the Senate and this was going on.  There'd be an uproar of historic proportions.  But it's hardly causing a ripple right now.

Couple media silence with electorate ignorance and apathy and you have the recipe for a ruling elite who can do whatever they want to do.

I'm disgusted.

"I'm sure what was going through the president's mind is -- we really don't know who did this -- it was tax day"

I find this to be about as revealing as revealing gets:

"That amount would cover 2-6 weeks of White House tours"

Breitbart:

A few weeks ago, the Obama Administration announced it was suspending public, self-guided tours of the White House as a result of the automatic sequester cuts that the administration proposed in 2011. While America's students stand outside the White House fence, the First Daughters, Sasha and Malia, are enjoying spring break with friends at the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. 

Breitbart News' Matt Boyle broke the news Monday morning that numerous sources have reported seeing the First Daughters in the Bahamas this weekend. Presumably, the Obamas are paying the costs of the resort out of their own pockets. The robust Secret Service detail that must accompany the First Daughters, however, is funded by taxpayers. 

The principal reason the White House canceled public tours was to save money on Secret Service staff. The White House reported that suspending the tours would save $74,000 a week. Other reports have put the savings at just $18,000 a week. 

Whichever the true amount, the Secret Service detail necessary to protect the First Daughters on their spring break could likely have been used to keep the White House open to the rest of America's school children. Judicial Watch reported that Malia Obama's Spring Break in Mexico last year cost taxpayers over $115,000. That amount would cover 2-6 weeks of White House tours. 

He promised he would fundamentally trasform the country... and he has.

We're now a monarchy.

Hope and change some of you idiots the gullible completely fell for.

Taking credit for that which with he had nothing to do

It takes a special amount of greasiness to do what this President is doing:

President Obama praised the growth of the U.S. energy sector during a visit to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Il., on Friday, crediting his administration’s “all of the above” energy policy for increased oil and gas production.

“We produce more oil than we have in 15 years.  We import less oil than we have in 20 years,” he said. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever have before — with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it.”

Those numbers are true. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2012, total U.S. oil production rose by about 1.1 million barrels per day over fiscal year 2007, and natural gas production rose 20 percent from 2007 to 2012.

What the president failed to mention is that the growth he is so proud of has taken place in spite of his administration’s energy policy, not because of it.

A recent study by the Congressional Research Service found that all of the increased production from fiscal years 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.

At the same time, the average daily production of natural gas on federal lands decreased by 19 percent between fiscal years 2011 and 2012, and by 33 percent between fiscal years 2008 and 2012.

An oily man attempting to rid America of the oil industry and the many jobs contained therein.

It smacks of a special kind of slickness.

"Death by Bureaucracy"

I stumbled across this story on Facebook this morning:

After a two and a half year legal battle, 15 tons of cheese made and aged near Mountain View was hauled to a dump.  To fans of natural foods, it is monumental waste and over-regulation.  To Missouri's Milk Board, it's merely protecting public health. 

"I see the destruction of what my wife and I and family have worked to build," said Joseph Dixon, owner of Morningland Dairy. 

Dixon and his family aren't the only ones outraged by the trashing of about 30,000 pounds of cheese produced on the farm in Howell County.

"You said earlier you would weigh this cheese.  How do we know that you're being held accountable gentlemen?" a bystander asked of State Milk Board members.

Members of the State Milk Board, which embargoed the cheese 2 1/2 years ago, arrived to dozens of protestors. 

"You have people here today that are saying, hold it!  We have questions why, and that's why these people are here, and we appreciate everyone being here," said Dixon.

Details of the story can be read at Morningland Dairy's blog:

Joseph and Denise Dixon took over Morningland Dairy after Denise completed a two year internship with the founders of Morningland, Jim and Margie Reiner. The Dixons finalized the purchase and began improvements on the Missouri Milk Board inspected and approved raw milk cheese plant in October of 2008. The entire family was tremendously pleased because this would allow Joseph to be home with the family instead of on the road working as an electrician in the eastern half of the United States.  The Dixons wanted to expand the varieties of cheese made by the company and ventured into a broader array of production.

Their desire was to help other families in the historically poverty stricken Missouri Ozarks to make an actual living on the farm and allow families to stay together. They consulted with the Missouri Milk Board and arranged for two families to begin providing goat milk to Morningland and launched a popular goat milk cheese line shortly after taking over the company.

Morningland had six employees and other farming families dependent upon the continuance of the cheese plant. On August 26^th, 2010, it came to a screeching halt.

While Joseph and Denise were at a cheese making conference in Washington State, the plant manager received a call from the Missouri Milk Board stating that there was an issue of potential contamination found by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) in Morningland cheese.

The cooler of $250,000 worth of cheese was immediately put under embargo, more accurately understood as house arrest, by the Missouri Milk Board. Don Falls, an inspector for the Milk Board, told the plant manager, “You should be back up and running by early next week.” Obviously, that wasn’t true. As a matter of fact, the very next morning, presumably after he spoke with the FDA, Falls’ entire attitude changed.

Over the weekend, the FDA leaked a nation wide recall on all of Morningland’s cheese produced in 2010. Not just the two batches that California indicated might be “suspect” for contamination, but their entire year’s production. Most of the cheese implicated as “suspect” by California had already been consumed. No complaints or ill effects were reported by any of the consumers of any of Morningland’s cheese. Nonetheless, the FDA required all of their products to be recalled.

Death by Bureaucracy

 Very few people realize the FDA has an armed and very military aspect. They showed up at Morningland in camouflage and made a lovely impression on those able to be at the unveiling of the future of food safety “FDA style”.

The FDA and Milk Board worked hand in hand to ensure that this little cheese plant in the midst of the Missouri Ozarks, that hadn’t made anyone sick in 30 years, would never make another batch of cheese for their loyal customers. Yet the FDA, who admit to killing 100,000 people a year, are allowed to gain ever more control over everything we take into our bodies. So the tally on deaths over the 30 year history of Morningland Dairy versus the FDA is:  Morningland “Zero”, FDA “3 Million”…or somewhere near that.

Despite significant effort, the FDA found no contamination in any cracks or drains in the cheese plant or even on the legs of the milk talk in the dairy barn. This evidence was not allowed to be introduced as part of Morningland’s defense because the Missouri Attorney General’s office contended that the FDA “was a separate issue.”

When pointedly asked what the specific process for getting the cheese plant back into production was, the Milk Board representative said it would involve a panel and consultation with the FDA to determine if that were a possibility. The members of the panel, other than the Milk Board and the FDA, and the specific requirements and processes were never delineated and no effort to achieve anything other than the destruction of the plant was ever evidenced by any official arm of the State of Missouri.

Neither the State of Missouri or the FDA ever conducted any tests on Morningland’s cheese. As a matter of fact, when Morningland tried to contract with a State approved lab to do proper tests on batches of their cheese, they were told that the lab simply did not want to get involved in the controversy. Morningland was denied the ability to legitimately test their product and defend their livelihood.

Adding insult to injury, Milk Board employee Don Falls testified in court and under oath that, improperly collected cheese samples, taken with no supervision and no instruction by an employee of Morningland for the plant’s manager, were in fact the State’s own tests.  This remains a very sore point for Joseph Dixon. He says, “When one commits perjury and no one in authority will hold them accountable for it, that individual and the system they support are nothing more than liars and thieves. In this case, the theft is of our ability to provide for our family and is based on bearing false witness to harm people who have harmed no one.”

There's more.

It smells of travesty.  

It smells of what America is becoming under progressive leadership.

It smells worse than bad cheese.

God bless the Dixons.  

Their blog post ends as follows:

Rest In Peace, Morningland. Righteous judgment will come.

I'd like to say God have mercy on those who will be judged... but I'm not feeling it.

God have mercy on us all.

Harry Belafonte: Obama should jail his opposition

It's not necessarily sad that Harry Belafonte would say such a thing.  

It is necessarily sad but more importantly revealing to know that many of Obama's voters would agree with the man.

Know that this mindset isn't, in the minds of many, as radical as you and I might think.

Now America, back to your reality TV shows and your video games

This happening today isn't surprising, it happening in North Carolina however...

First grader's poem edited by school officials.  Her crime?  She wrote of her grandfather praying to God during the Vietnam War.

This is America?

Officials at an elementary school in North Carolina are in hot water with local residents — as well as veterans across America — after they forced a first grader to remove references to God from a poem she had written to honor her grandfather. The student, whose grandfather served in the military during the Vietnam conflict, had expected to read the poem at a Veterans Day ceremony at West Marion Elementary School in McDowell County, North Carolina. In the poem the proud and patriotic little girl included the lines — “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength” — to describe the actions of her grandfather during the war. But when a member of the community supposedly complained about the poem's mention of God and its inclusion in the ceremony, school officials forced the girl to remove the offending lines before presenting it at the Veterans Day observance.

Chris Greene, an employee of McDowell County Schools, told CBS News that the elementary school “had one parent concerned with the use of the word God in this program. This parent did not want the word God mentioned anywhere in the program.”

Explaining the school's actions, McDowell County school superintendent Gerri Martin told the McDowell News that “we wanted to make sure we were upholding the school district’s responsibility of separation of church and state from the Establishment Clause.”

The elementary school principal, Desarae Kirkpatrick, echoed that excuse, saying: “We jointly decided that we must err on the side of caution to prevent from crossing the line on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.” She added that “as a principal of a public school, I must put aside my personal religious beliefs and follow the law, which upholds that we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but that we, as public schools, cannot endorse one single religion over another.”

Zero Tolerance.  For common sense.

This goes beyond idiocy.