The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

Let Them Eat…Pizza?

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The out-of-the-closet progressive liberal Democratic party is in well-deserved tatters and struggling to come up with a plan to lull voters into the complacency needed maintain their majority in the 2010 mid-term elections, as well as already planning His Transparency’s reelection bid.  In their stereotypical stealth mode, behind closed doors, the White House is picking favorites in upcoming races across the country.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that:

President Barack Obama’s aides are taking pains to operate out of public view to avoid repeating embarrassing miscues made last year, when efforts to pressure unpopular New York Gov. David Paterson into retirement hit front pages and proved unsuccessful.

Embarrassing, indeed.  But to the Democrats, it’s just another speedbump.   

The exit of Michigan Lt. Gov. John Cherry from that state’s gubernatorial contest came as party insiders grew increasingly concerned that Mr. Cherry faced an uphill struggle to win, putting a chill on potential donors, according to Democratic officials.

When Mr. Cherry dropped out, citing fund-raising problems, White House officials began discussions with a potential replacement, Denise Ilitch, whose family owns the Detroit Red Wings hockey team, Detroit Tigers baseball team and Little Caesars Pizza chain.

Ms. Ilitch is an elected member of the state Board of Regents. Strategists believe her personal wealth and image as a businesswoman and political outsider could give Democrats a boost in an economically ailing state where the party’s top official, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, is unpopular.

Now there’s a picture for you.  A wealthy capitalist Democrat handing out $5 hot & ready Little Caesar’s pizzas to the great unwashed masses of Michigan’s unemployed Kool-Aid drinkers to buy their votes.

But, like those 10% unemployed across the country, it ain’t working.  Despite the Demons howling in Massachusetts (“Martha Coakley is running to fill the rest of Ted Kennedy’s term, and her opponent is a far-right tea-bagger Republican,” Chuck Schumer wrote in a fundraising email) it’s just been reported by the Boston Globe that Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has a 4 point lead in the polls.  Though that’s within the poll’s margin of error, other details show just how fall the self-perceived mighty have fallen:

Brown’s popularity is solid. He enjoys a 57 percent favorability rating compared to just 19 percent unfavorable. Coakley’s favorability is 49 percent; her unfavorability, 41 percent.

From the poll itself:

In the race for U.S. Senate, who will you vote for?

Scott Brown: 50%

Martha Coakley: 46%

Joseph L. Kennedy: 3%

Undecided: 1%

In your opinion, who won the debates?

Scott Brown: 41%

Martha Coakley: 25%

Joseph L. Kennedy: 2%

Undecided: 31%

As a U.S. Senator, do you think Martha Coakley will be an independent voice or tow the Democratic Party line?

Independent voice: 24%

Tow the party line: 64%

Undecided: 11%

Do you support the proposed national near universal healthcare law?

Yes: 36%

No: 51%

Undecided: 13%

Can the federal government afford the proposed national healthcare law?

Yes: 32%

No: 61%

Undecided: 7%

And despite those words of the White House laying low with which we started this piece, like all those other words that have come out of the White House to date, there’s a strong push among some Democrats to get His Transparency to visit Massachusetts this weekend on behalf of Martha Coakley so he sent an “impassioned video plea” for Attorney General Martha Coakley to thousands of Bay State voters today.  But Scott Brown’s called it right:

“He should stay away and let Martha and I discuss the issues one on one,” Brown said. “The machine is coming out of the woodwork to get her elected. They’re bringing in outsiders, and we don’t need them.”

Of Goose & Gander

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Obama is a “light-skinned” black man “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” 

And so it is that his much-loved closed doors have come back to bite Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) yet again.  Spoken during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and quoted in a new book about it (“Game Change,” by Time magazine reporter Mark Halperin and New York magazine writer John Heileman), these words reveal a great deal about old Grinch Harry’s mindset and attitude towards blacks; first, that skin color is something by which one judges others and somehow lighter skin means something and, second, that those blacks who are able to speak proper English are either a surprise or useful.

Both of these perspectives, judgement calls, if you will, are troubling.  Particularly when uttered by someone who is now the majority leader in the United States Senate and a highly-visible member of that progressive liberal gang of bleeding hearts who tout that their efforts are always for “the common man” yet are the first to play the race card when confronted with common sense.  They show us eyes that view the world through a lens of class and racism, both of which have no place in a country where “all men are created equal”.  That old Harry sees Obama’s speaking ability as something that is controlled begs the question of just how much old Harry thinks it may be used to some advantage, thereby relegating a human to the status of an object.

Of course, everyone knows and (unfortunately) accepts that Democrats are collectively the lowest of scum-sucking douchebags so a Democrat making racist comments goes pretty much unnoticed by other Democrats.  But when regular Americans took offense at old Grinch Harry’s remark, he apologized and His Transparency, in a show of maintaining some image of party unity or in obeyance to his self-perceived image of magnaminity, promptly accepted it. 

But words once spoken can never be taken back.

And it is through spoken words that yet one more time the blatant hypocrisy of the Democrat double-standard comes bubbling up.  Both old Grinch Harry and His Transparency went after Trent Lott back in 2002.  President Walking Eagle himself had called for Lott’s resignation after Lott mentioned that in Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, a campaign centered on opposition to integration, Mississippi was one of four states Thurmond carried and followed that up with, “We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

Then-Senator Obama stuck his nose up in the air:

“It seems to be that we can forgive a 100-year-old senator (Thurmond) for some of the indiscretion of his youth, but, what is more difficult to forgive is the current president of the U.S. Senate (Lott) suggesting we had been better off if we had followed a segregationist path in this country after all of the battles and fights for civil rights and all the work that we still have to do.  The Republican Party itself has to drive out Trent Lott. If they have to stand for something, they have to stand up and say this is not the person we want representing our party.”

Even the Congressional Black Caucus  released a statement at the time, calling for a “formal censure of Senator Lott’s racist remarks”.  And after Lott resigned, old Grinch Harry went on the record about it this way:

“He had no alternative,” said Reid at the time claiming, “If you tell ethnic jokes in the backroom, it’s that much easier to say ethnic things publicly. I’ve always practiced how I play.”

Cue the flying pigs.

The Enemy Within: Islamic Jihadists Controlling U.S. Anti-Terrorism

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PJTV’s Bill Whittle has posted a very disturbing look at how U.S. counter-terrorism efforts are being controlled by the Islamic jihadists.  Sources within the intelligence community have stepped forward to present some of the details about the liberal progressive politically-correct mindset that is driving an operational model that directly endangers America.

You can watch the interview here (you may have to register first) but I find the information contained in it so unsettling and important that I took the time to transcribe the interview.  Key points have been highlighted.

BILL WHITTLE:  Hi, I’m Bill Whittle from PJTV and I’m standing in front of what is very likely the most photographed structure on the face of the earth.  Inside the White House sits the President of the United States of America; the most powerful man in the world.  The President bears enormous responsibilities, and primary among them is to defend the citizens of the United States of America.  We’re here in Washington today to speak to a Department of Defense analyst and counter-terrorism official who, requesting anonymity, has made some very remarkable charges.  Charges that both the political and the military structure of the highest levels of our government are infiltrated by the very agents of the enemy against which we find ourselves fighting today.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, you were given an assignment from the Joint Chiefs, essentially from the upper levels of the Pentagon, to understand what the Islamic jihadi enemy’s ideology and operational methods might be.  Is that a fair statement?

DoD Analyst:  Yes.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  What did you discover?

DOD ANALYST:  Well, I was expecting to find that, well, there was some basis to the jihadi arguments that their jihadist warfare, that there were competing arguments and that we could leverage these competing arguments but because they were claiming Islamic laws as basis for their actions we had to start there.  And over a long period of time I ended up collecting a large body of Islamic law, an enormous amount of it available in English, and realized that if Islamic law is the criteria by which you measure legitimacy or illegitimacy you can’t show that the moderates have a doctrinal basis for the position they hold, and you can’t show that on the statement of the law the radicals are wrong. 

I was expecting to find competing views that had some merit. I was expecting to find that the moderate view would be the dominant view, and we’d have to figure out how to make these arguments so that people in the Middle East would know what it was, and could not find it.

Now, I could find that you’re not allowed to fight a jihad you can’t win, and that’s a limiting factor, but when you get to actually what published Islamic law says, it supports the radicals and what they say.  And you come to find, after you kind of get a sense for the language of jihad, and the language of how Islamic law works, that it’s pervasive, even in the U.S. Muslim community.

BILL WHITTLE:   So you got out, you do this research that you were tasked to do by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense; you come back and you say to them, “It’s the radicals that appear to have the doctrinal basis, not the moderates.”

DOD ANALYST:  That’s correct.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  Well, presumably, this would be an interesting piece of information for our Defense department to have.  What were the consequences of you coming back with this information?

DOD ANALYST:  Shock. Because what my experience brought me to was the complete unresponsiveness to facts that as a practical matter they experience every day.  I think that gives way, on a different level, to one that basically has had me believing or holding that if you have no profession…if you have no factual basis to hold a position, you have no professional basis to support it.  If you’re professionals, then you have a duty to be competent; that includes the duty to know.  And if you are national security analysts who are professionals, you’re in violation of your oath to be competent, you’re in violation of your oath to protect and defend.  It just seems they picked up our whole national security apparatus and moved it from a factual legal basis to one that supports the narratives.  But it just struck me that when you hit a certain level, and I don’t want to sound too cynical, but at the same time it seemed where the point at which your future promotion was dependent upon toeing a party line as…let me rephrase that; toeing a narrative as opposed to orienting on facts, or I witnessed a complete shutdown.  A friend of mine used to call my brief, “the redco brief” or the “guilty knowledge brief”, meaning you see this brief that clearly lays out facts that must be accounted for, and at a certain point they just stopped coming.

BILL WHITTLE:   So when officials started telling you, “Hey, we’re not interested in this; we just really don’t care to hear this,” I mean, how pervasive was this attitude?  Was it large numbers of people or one or two key individuals?  I mean, just exactly what are we looking at?

DOD ANALYST:  I can’t give you names and numbers; I have to say, in fairness, there are scores of senior people who got it and were supportive, but it seems that the organizational emphasis, the institutional emphasis, was in the other direction.  And so you would get it in terms of people who would come up and tell you, “We really support you but we can only go so far.”  You know, I supported some missions where the people who I supported made it very clear to me that using the information I used really brought success in a stunning way.  And for a while there I thought that just the sheer force of those successful things would cause some people to do a double look.  It didn’t happen.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, immediately after we concluded that interview here in the Mayflower Hotel, a second whistleblower came forward.  We received a phone call from another gentleman who’s also extremely concerned about the infiltration of radical Islam into law enforcement and defense.  Let’s go upstairs now and listen to parts of our interview with a former special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok, can you start by giving me a quick thumbnail of your professional experience?

FORMER FBI AGENT: I spent nearly 15 years working in the government with a primary expertise on the Islamic movement in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic doctrine.

BILL WHITTLE:   And which department did you work for?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  The FBI.

BILL WHITTLE:   So you were a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Yes.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  You assert that we’re getting many of our cues on how to react to this terrorist threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, that essentially we’re letting our enemy tell us how to fight them.  Now, I think this is a critical point that we really need to make clear:  is this speculation on your part?  Or is this credible, factual information that you’ve been able to obtain as a former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  It’s all factual information and it’s open to the public to digest if they so desire.  These documents from the Holy Land Foundation trial are available online.  All you need to do is Google “Holy Land Foundation”.  The documents also show that every major Muslim organization in the United States is a Muslim Brotherhood front, specifically the most prominent organizations.  The two most prominent organizations in the United States, or three most prominent, are the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America).  CAIR is a Hamas entity; it is Hamas; and ISA is a huge financial entity for Hamas in the United States.  And CAIR and ISNA are the two groups that the U.S. government, including the FBI, DoD, state department, DHS, look to and utilize to do their outreach with the Muslim community in America.

BILL WHITTLE:   Can you tell us how these radical Islamic organizations interface directly with the federal government, in terms of the Defense Department, in terms of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, local law enforcement?  How exactly do these radical Muslim groups use their connections to suppress the defenses of the United States against these type of activities?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  That’s a great question.  At the national level, or the FBI and DHS, they actually are invited in by general council’s office of the FBI and DHS to sit in on brainstorming about investigative techniques that FBI agents are using in the field….

BILL WHITTLE:   I have to stop you because, frankly, that sounds so absurd that I have to really make sure I’m understanding you correctly.  Are you saying that the radicalized Muslim groups are invited in to learn our investigative techniques?  That they are invited in to get their feedback on how we’re going to fight against them?  Is that…is that what I understood you to say?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Yes.  So for instance, in the FBI, the general council of the FBI, Valerie Caproni, invited these Muslim organizations, as well as the ACLU and other groups, in to make sure the investigative techniques and the attorney general guidelines and the way the FBI was going to implement the attorney general guidelines was ok and not offensive to these organizations.  As an investigator, and certainly speaking for many others that I know, that is…ummm…that’s nothing short of outrageous.  If you can imagine any group, whether it’s the Costa Nostra or the mafia or any kind of organized crime syndicate, certainly the Muslim Brotherhood could loosely fall under that category, certainly it’s much, much more significant than the mafia was, but to invite them in to make sure that our investigative techniques aren’t offensive to John Gotti; I mean, it’s absurd on the face of it but that’s exactly what we’re doing.

BILL WHITTLE:   Sure. Because you’re revealing in great detail exactly what your investigative and interrogation techniques are, right?  I mean, in a meeting like that you’re giving away the farm, essentially, in terms of how you’re going to be operating in order to make sure that their feelings don’t get hurt.  And then you’re essentially giving the enemy all of the details about how you plan to operate against them, right?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Certainly a significant strategic look a how we’re doing things,yes; as well as some specific techniques.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, you’d mentioned earlier that there’s no training; that people ranging from upper-level administrators in the FBI down to some local sheriff’s deputy in some county out in the middle of Arizona, some place local, local law enforcement; you mentioned that there’s no training for these people whatsoever in terms of the real nature of the threat.  Why is that?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Well, again, I think there are a lot of pieces to that but number one is when the people advising the assistant directors, the special agents in charge in the FBI, the assistant secretaries, and the Department of Homeland Security, etc., when those are Muslim Brothers you’re not going to get training that discusses Islamic doctrine and who the Muslim Brotherhood is, their history and their influence, and their penetration operations here in the United States.  And, to boot, the people who ARE training the FBI are groups like CAIR, which is a Hamas entity and an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing throughout the history of the United States.

BILL WHITTLE:   Now I have to stop you again because this is virtually impossible for me to process.  You’re saying that the training that our counter-terrorism forces get is determined by radical Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  No, I’m not saying it’s determined.  It’s given by them.  They have been in our FBI field offices, they’ve been in our FBI headquarters teaching and training our agents and our employees.

BILL WHITTLE:   Is this not too dissimilar to saying that the people who were determining the landing zones for  the D-Day invasion of Germany were Nazi S.S. officials giving out information on gunner placements, and where the best places to come ashore are; is it too far-fetched to say that? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  It’s not about analogy.

BILL WHITTLE:   And then when the plans are finalized and all of the operational details are locked and sealed up in a little envelope, and then it’s handed over to the Gestapo and hopefully they won’t do anything mean with the information.

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Right.

BILL WHITTLE:   I think that as an average American citizen listening to this information, my first response would be, “How on God’s green earth did this happen?  How did this get this far?”

FORMER FBI AGENT:  This has happened because the Muslim Brotherhood has a long-term strategy; they are well-organized with hundreds of front groups that support their public relations, their research arms, they’ve insinuated themselves into our largest universities, they have Muslim student’s associations, which is the first Muslim Brotherhood group that formed in the United States in 1963.  MSA is on every major college campus in the United States, recruiting people to the Brotherhood in our own campuses.

BILL WHITTLE:   So even something as innocuous as a Muslim student association at any American university campus, you can categorically connect those campus groups to the most virulent, radical, anti-American organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  I can say that that’s 100% legally and factually true. The evidence entered into the Holy Land Foundation trial demonstrated the Muslim Students Association was the first Muslim Brotherhood entity in the United States formed in 1963 for the sole purpose of being and establishing the Muslim Brotherhood here, and it continues today to be a Muslim Brotherhood entity that has expanded and recruits students on campuses in the United States.

I did a Google search and the NEA Foundation site has a good compilation of court documents, etc.  for the Holy Land Foundation trials. 

I will let Clare Lopez, Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies have the final word:

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.     

—

Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack. We can do better than this…..much better.

Increased 2010 Payroll Taxes Hit Even More Americans

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“I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.
Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
(Barack Obama)

Firm as Jello, eh?  In an unreported demonstration of Chicago-style fiscal responsibility, everyone who must have federal taxes withheld from their paychecks will see an increase in the amount taken out, and with a lowering of the threshold, millions more poor Americans will now be paying federal taxes, too.  These are only some examples from the new witholding tables:

1.) Congress has lowered the threshold to capture more wages that qualify to owe taxes–across the board. For example, in 2009 the withholding tax threshold began at weekly single wage levels of $138. In 2010, that same wage is lowered to $116. In short, instead of the taxable wage starting at $138, it is now down to $116–which changes the income threshold and taxes even poorer Americans.

For married couples, the change in the weekly base taxable wage changes from $303 in 2009 down to $264 in 2010. These lower wage thresholds can be seen throughout the new withholding charts for weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and annual, as well as daily and miscellaneous pay periods.

This across-the-board reduction in the initial wage threshold increases the number of wage earners who would have to pay taxes.

2.) Instead of seven (7) wage categories, there are now nine (9) wage categories. The new structure allows for direct taxation on the middle class with these wages broken out into smaller categories. The direct hit on the middle class withholding taxes can be seen on all of the new tables. Additionally, the IRS could not explain these changes.

Let’s look at the actual numbers for one category and compare them from 2009 to 2010:

2009 Biweekly, Single, Payroll Period, after subtracting withholding allowances

Not over $276: $0 in taxes
Over $276 – $400: 10% payroll tax
Over $400 – $1,392: $12.40 plus 15% of excess over $400
Over $1,392 – $2,559: $161.20 plus 25% of excess over $1,392
Over $2,559 – $6,677: $452.95 plus 28% of excess over $2,559 (Notice the large salary range)
Over $6,677 – $14,423: $1,605.99 plus 33% of excess over $6,677
$14,423: pays $4,162.17 plus 35% of excess over $14,423

Let’s look at the new numbers for 2010:

2010 Biweekly, Single, Payroll Period, after subtracting withholding allowances

Not over $233: $0 in taxes
Over $233 – $401: 10% payroll tax
Over $401 – $1,387: $16.80 plus 15% of excess over $401
Over $1,387 – $2,604: $164.70 plus 25% of excess over $1,387
Over $2,604 – $3,248: $468.95 plus 27% of excess over $2,604 (Notice the large salary range is gone)
Over $3,248 – $3,373: $642.83 plus 30% of excess over $3,248 (Notice the substantial increase and 30% tax rate on these wages)
Over $3,373 – $6,688: $680.33 plus 28% of excess over $3,373
$14,450: pays $4,169.99 plus 35% of excess over $14,450

These patterns of additional withholding can be seen throughout the new charts for the 2010 tax year for single and married persons. It appears that everyone earning a paycheck is affected, not just retired military; social security payments will remain the same.

 In the immortal words of Joe Wilson, “YOU LIE!”

Quote Of The Day

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The new health care plan will be written by a committee whose Chairman says he doesn’t understand it,

passed by a Congress which hasn’t read it,

signed by a President who smokes,

funded by a Treasury Chief who did not pay his taxes,

overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese,

and financed by a country that is broke.

 

What could  possibly go  wrong?

Profiling Terrorists

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It reads like a bad joke.

You might be a terrorist if:

  • You believe in the United States Constitution (earning a higher position on the watch list if you can actually quote it)
  • You exercise your right to bear arms
  • You exercise your right to free speech
  • You think letting Muslims without passports onto airplanes while strip-searching Grandma is wrong
  • You believe in fiscal responsibility (earning a higher position on the watch list if you actually practice it)
  • You believe that charity begins at home
  • You believe everyone has a right to choose for themselves
  • You don’t believe everyone must pay for the choices of others

This profiling comes courtesy of our progressive liberal administration.  The same progressive liberal administration that wants to change the lexicon to call terrorism “man-made disasters” and its perpetrators “unprivileged enemy belligerants” sees no hypocrisy in profiling the average American.  Maybe because such a broad swath cuts across race and gender?  One certainly can’t accuse them of discrimination now, can they?

But when there are significant numbers of people in this world whose only goal in life is to kill Americans, if not outright destroy America, discrimination is desperately needed.  The average American practices it every single day.  Children are taught to not accept candy from strangers.  Women walking alone at night are taught to cross the street to avoid coming close to a strange man.  When there’s a knock on the door in the middle of the night, everyone looks through the peephole before opening the door and when what they see isn’t a familiar face, most won’t open it.

Truth is our lives are made up of an endless series of judgement calls, discriminating against a combination of various oh-so-unpolitically-correct variables.  It’s an inherent survival mechanism, for to blindly embrace what is radically different on the surface may mean death.  (It’s why the progressive liberal cavemen didn’t survive their hugging the sabre-toothed tiger.)  Sure, it can create a stubborn mindset of prejudice but more are the stories of those pleasantly surprised when they find out not everyone of a certain stripe is really all that different (caveman hugs wolf) than the stories of those who take their prejudice up like a sword and set forth to destroy their perceived enemy.

Yet is is exactly such a hard-core, prejudiced-based war that we have with Islamic extremists, those zealous jihadists the average American rightly call terrorists.  They are identifiable by their ethnicity or chosen cultural identification, by their words and their deeds and to ignore them is what now tremendously endangers us.  The enemy we face is without but by not recognizing them using clear, level-headed judgement for fear of being seen as racist or bigoted, or lacking in their beloved sophistication or what have you (by anyone other than the average American, that is), this administration has effectively become the enemy within. 

Though Washington may be loathe to admit it, the average American knows this.  They look at this administration with its endless excuses and it is slowly dawning on them that, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  And in order to survive, the average American will do what they have always done.  They will create a profile to allow them to root out their enemy, and they will not hesitate to call that enemy by its real name:  progressive liberal politician.

Happy New & Increased Taxes Year!

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Yes, yes, I know, recovering from late-night reveling readers, President Walking Eagle promised during his campaign that there would be no new taxes under his watch.  If we elected him, he would most assuredly keep middle America safe from the greedy avarice of that evil and secretive federal government.

And pigs fly.

As this new year and a new decade gets off to its shaky start, courtesy of those silly, misunderstood “unprivileged enemy belligerents” labeled as common criminals by the administration faster than it takes His Transparency to address the American people about it and given the full rights of American citizens to due process under our laws even when they attempt to enter the country under dubious legality while setting their underwear on fire on a plane several thousand feet in the air, every one of us is going to feel the soaring rhetoric of hope and change as we begin preparations for the annual headlong run into the textbook definition of federal bureaucracy.  The filing of our annual income tax returns.

Let’s hope Turbo Tax can keep up.  Effective today, the following tax breaks are no longer available:

  • Deduction of state and local general sales taxes (section 164) (Personal Tax Incentives)
  • Additional standard deduction, up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for couples, for state and local property taxes (section 63) (Personal Tax Incentives)
  • Research tax credit and alternative simplified credit (section 41) (General Business Tax Incentives)
  • New markets tax credit (section 45D) (Community Assistance Provisions)
  • Empowerment zone incentives (sections 1391 and 1202) (Community Assistance Provisions)
  • Renewal community tax incentives (sections 1400E, 1400F, 1400I, and 1400J) (Community Assistance Provisions)
  • District of Columbia Investment Incentives (sections 1400, 1400A, 1400B, and 1400C) (Community Assistance Provisions)
  • Net disaster loss designation and $500 limit per casualty for personal casualty losses attributed to federally declared natural disasters (section 165) (General Disaster Relief Provisions)
  • Expensing for qualified disaster expenses (section 198A) (General Disaster Relief Provisions)
  • Biodiesel and renewable diesel incentives (section 40A) (Energy Incentives)
  • Alternative motor vehicle credit for heavy hybrids (section 30B) (Energy Incentives)

And effective today, the following new taxes will be levied:

  • Increased exemption levels for the individual alternative minimum tax (section 55) and personal tax credits allowed against the AMT (section 26)
  • Exclusion of unemployment compensation benefits from gross income (section 85)
  • Alternative fuel mixture tax credit (section 6426(e))
  • Reduced estimated tax payments for small businesses (section 6654(d)(1)(D))

No one is left out; from business owner to laid-off worker, there’s something in here for everyone and the sole purpose is to suck more of your money into the federal coffers so the liberal progressives can hand it out to their special interest “victims”.  Current example being Numbnuts Abdulmutallab; charged under U.S. criminal law instead of by the military he must have a lawer, you know.  And why not one paid for by you and I, instead of his wealthy family?  And why not a corrupt lawyer in a corrupt federal jurisdiction at that?  Welcome to the affirmatively-graduated Ivy League ideology of “equality” for all. 

But I digress.

Now, His Transparency is going to tell you that it’s not HIS fault that middle-class America sees new and higher taxes today.  No, no; don’t blame HIM.  He promised, but even though Nancy’s Nuthouse managed to pass legislation to prevent these tax hikes and new taxes from going into effect, high-roller Harry in the Senate found it more important to concern them with appropriating your tax dollars for planes the Pentagon doesn’t need and cutting those backroom, closed-door secret deals to get 60 votes for his unconstitutional version of “health care reform” instead of addressing less-pressing problems like, oh, the economy.  So of course Obama simply must pass the buck on this one.  Those unrepresenting representatives in Congress are the ones that didn’t do their jobs and do right by you.  He promised.  Really. He. Did.  It was Congress who didn’t deliver.

Cue those busy flying pigs.

It was President Walking Eagle’s “historic agenda” that HE mandated as top priority.  Pesky little things like these tax hikes and tax cuts that break his promises never even entered his head.

Welcome to 2010.

Obama Takes A Step Towards Eliminating U.S. Sovereignty

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It is with great concern I recently read that President Walking Eagle has taken it upon himself to quietly change Executive Order 12425.  While Congress and the country has been embroiled over the Senate battle over health care “reform”, last Thursday he signed the following:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

December 17, 2009

Executive Order — Amending Executive Order 12425

EXECUTIVE ORDER
– – – – – – –
AMENDING EXECUTIVE ORDER 12425 DESIGNATING INTERPOL
AS A PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION ENTITLED TO
ENJOY CERTAIN PRIVILEGES, EXEMPTIONS, AND IMMUNITIES

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words “except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act” and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 16, 2009.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?  It’s certainly not making any headlines in the media.  But unfortunately, it’s a Really Big Deal.  You see, INTERPOL is the International Criminal Police Organization.  Basically, the global cops; according to their own website:

Created in 1923, it facilitates cross-border police co-operation, and supports and assists all organizations, authorities and services whose mission is to prevent or combat international crime.

INTERPOL aims to facilitate international police co-operation even where diplomatic relations do not exist between particular countries. Action is taken within the limits of existing laws in different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. INTERPOL’s constitution prohibits ‘any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.’

The United States was a founding member of the organization, however She is not part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in which INTERPOL plays a significant role.  President Bush removed the U.S. as a signatory (Bill Clinton had signed the Rome Statute, a U.N. treaty establishing the ICC) , and:

“President Bush in fact went so far as to gain agreement from nations that they would expressly not detain or hand over to the ICC members of the United States armed forces. The fear of a symbolic ICC circus trial as a form of international political protest to American military actions in Iraq and elsewhere was real and palpable.”

In 1983, President Reagan signed the original Executive Order 12425:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), it is hereby ordered that the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), in which the United States participates pursuant to 22 U.S.C. 263a, is hereby designated as a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities conferred by the International Organizations Immunities Act; except those provided by Section 2(c), the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act. This designation is not intended to abridge in any respect the privileges, exemptions or immunities which such organization may have acquired or may acquire by international agreement or by Congressional action.

Section 2(c) reads:

Section 2(c) Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.

What we have here is that INTERPOL was simply granted “diplomatic immunity” but, unlike diplomats, because of Reagan’s exception, they have always been subject to, in particular, the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution.  The same way citizens, including those who work in the FBI, the CIA, Congress, etc., are subject to it.  (A good explanation of this matter can be read here.)  Yet this is the crucial part just removed by Obama (the other sections refer to various taxes from which diplomats are typically exempt; does this mean U.S. INTERPOL operations will now pay Social Security, FICA, and property taxes?)

For just what purpose has Obama chosen to allow the members of this international law enforcement organization who operate in the United States the right to do so ABOVE the law of the land?  He has granted them special privileges and effectively subordinated the Constitution to international law.  And perhaps a more disturbing part of the whole matter is this:

“…INTERPOL’s central operations office in the United States is within our own Justice Department offices. They are American law enforcement officers working under the aegis of INTERPOL within our own Justice Department. That they now operate with full diplomatic immunity and with “inviolable archives” from within our own buildings should send red flags soaring into the clouds.

Ultimately, a detailed verbal explanation is due the American public from the President of the United States detailing why an international law enforcement arm assisting a court we are not a signatory to has been elevated above our Constitution upon our soil.”

—

UPDATE:

Andrew McCarthy at the National Review Online shared further thoughts today about this still-underreported, underquestioned, and most importantly unanswered change:

Mark Tapscott has thoughts at the Washington Examiner.  Mark points out something I’d forgotten:  “Interpol and ICC [the Intenrational Criminal Court] … took seriously Iran’s Oct. 3, 2009, request that 25 top Israeli civilian and military officials be placed on the international ‘Most Wanted’ list because of their actions in Gaza against murderous Palestinian radicals.”

Mark also observes that an Obama offical told the New York Times that the administration has not explained the President’s decision to immunize Interpol because — notwithstanding that the President took pains to amend a longstanding, Reagan-era executive order (EO 12425) and the White House issued a press release announcing tha the had done so — “there is nothing newsworthy here.” [By the way, I love the fact that, to Charlie Gibson and the rest of the Obama press office at the Times, the interesting part of this story is not the immunization of a police force but the fact that Obama’s decision “irks conservatives.”] Mark counters:

If there is nothing newsworthy involved, then why won’t the White House answer these basic questions regarding the EO?

  • Every other international organization granted such exemptions deals with mundane issues like fish – the International Pacific Halibut Commission – or disaster aid – the Red Cross. But Interpol is a law enforcement operation. Why does President Obama think it appropriate to give such exemptions to an international law enforcement operation, and what does he want Interpol to do here in the U.S. in the future with the exemptions that it cannot do now without the exemptions?
  • Does the search and seizure exemption extend to the activities and documents created by U.S. Department of Justice employees working with and for Interpol in New York and Washington, D.C.? If these employees and activities were already exempt from coverage of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), why have FOIA requests concerning them been previously answered?

A Blue Christmas (Tree)

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I don’t know about you, but I’m always so pleased to see my hard-earned tax dollars at work decorating the White House for the Christmas holidays. 

Not.

Now we all know that the blame is going to be placed on the tree’s designer, but the bottom line is that it is His Transparency himself, President Walking Eagle, who can veto the designer’s work  and therefore he owns this latest bit of ugliness. 

But he hasn’t.  And I doubt his arrogance will allow it.

So we are treated to a White House Blue Room Christmas tree decorated with no less than an ornament showing us the face of Communist leader Mao (“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”)  Tse-Tung, and another with Obama’s face transposed onto Mout Rushmore.  Neither of which can be construed as even the least bit “politically correct”; unless, of course, you are a fan of Communism?