GOP Tops Polls
Brent Tantillo • August 31, 2010 17:13pm • Uncategorized
Newsmax reports that the GOP has the largest poll lead for a mid-term election since Gallup Poll has done its polling — with a ten point lead over the Democrats.
But as we know polls only go so far — if the Republicans are to pull off this electoral success they must actually get out the vote. And in 2008, the Democrats did a much better job than Republicans getting their supporters out. The question is without a charismatic President Obama on the top of the ballot will the same constituency still come out to vote?
The Propaganda Presidency
Candace de Russy • August 16, 2010 17:35pm • Uncategorized
Darrell Issa (R-CA), ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary Committee, has issued a 37-page report that accuses the White House of “an unprecedented number of public relations and propaganda efforts,” including efforts that the committee found to be inappropriate or illegal. Notably:
- The White House used the reach of the executive branch to funnel citizens to a website owned and operated by the Democratic National Committee.
- The Administration relied on the reach and resources of federal agencies and their personnel to promote certain of the President’s favorite programs.
- The White House also leveraged ties to the arts and entertainment community to embed propaganda in the content of television programming and artwork. These propaganda efforts violated appropriations riders and federal law prohibiting the use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes.
- The White House used its resources to push visitors to websites that urge grassroots activism based on false and misleading information – an abuse of office and a betrayal of the President’s pledge to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”
- Shockingly, the Department of Justice’s hired a liberal blogger, apparently with the express intention of attacking conservative online bloggers or contents either anonymously or through a pseudonym.
- The administration sent partisan emails through the “messages.whitehouse.gov” mail handler to federal employees touting ObamaCare. This created the appearance that the White House expected career federal employees to push the president’s partisan agenda.
- And the administration skirted the Hatch Act and and federal anti-lobbying laws by using Mrs. Obama to support the presidents social and health care agendas with $240 million worth of free advertising.
And these, but the tip of the iceberg.
Most assuredly, an official investigation of inappropriate and sometimes unlawful use of propaganda by the administration is in order.
Obama’s Zealous Civil Rights Czar
Candace de Russy • August 10, 2010 15:20pm • Uncategorized
Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has a rip-roaring agenda:
Perez is playing a leading role in [the department's] Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new immigration law. He is promising a huge increase in prosecution of alleged hate crimes. He vows to use “disparate impact theory” to pursue discrimination cases where there is no intent to discriminate but a difference in results, such as in test scores or mortgage lending … He is even considering a crackdown on Web sites on the theory that the Internet is a “public accommodation” as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act …
in a recent lending discrimination case, he forced the defendant — who settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing — to pay not only the alleged victims but to funnel $1 million to unrelated “qualified organizations” to conduct social programs …
[Also], he threatened several universities because they took part in an experimental program to allow students to use the Amazon Kindle for textbooks.
Obama’s vanguard of ultras will leave our freedom in tatters.
The 911 Hard Hat Pledge
Phil Orenstein • August 8, 2010 23:10pm • Uncategorized
Andy Sullivan of Blue Collar Corner, is the field supervisor of a huge east coast construction firm. He has initiated the 911 Hard Hat Pledge in response to our spineless elected officials and civic leaders who have betrayed the people of New York in their opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque. According to a Siena poll, 61% of New Yorkers are opposed, and 26% support the Cordoba House, a 13-story mosque to be built two blocks from Ground Zero on top of the ashes of the 3000 innocent lives and tragic heroes murdered in the September 11 terrorist attack. Mr. Sullivan is calling on all union and non-union tradesmen to make the pledge and refuse to work on the proposed mosque site or accept any associated contracts. He blogged the message:
To my readers please send me your names if you will make the 911 pledge and refuse to participate in the building of the Ground Zero Mosque. Go to my message board and state your trade or job that you do and join us. Our leaders are failing us it’s up to us. I want my children to grow up in a nation of pride and freedom but as was once told to me freedom only comes at great cost. God bless you all and God Bless America!
Please go to Blue Collar Corner and take the pledge and distribute this to your friends and associates in the construction and manufacturing trades. Our deepest gratitude goes to all the patriotic Americans who have already signed on and pledged not to participate in the construction of the mosque, which is a symbol of the triumph of Islamic supremacism over freedom. We know that America will remain free and strong by the responses of the red-blooded patriots in the construction trades who have pledged not to work on the site even though they may be unemployed at the time. Freedom is not free and this is the time to stand up for freedom. God bless you all.
Space: The Final Frontier
Brent Tantillo • August 6, 2010 8:37am • Uncategorized
I’m not talking about outer space here though. I’m talking about wide open spaces, like the ones in fly over country. With the proliferation of the Internet, wireless communication, and the growing American population (caused thankfully by Americans still having children and immigration), cities like Boise, Idaho are looking like attractive alternatives for college educated sophisticats who love to fish, ski, and hike, but don’t want to pay Denver or San Francisco prices.
The Economist points out that:
America is far more decentralised than other rich countries. In Britain “there’s London, London and London,” says Mr Kotkin. In America there are scores of hubs. There is also a libertarian streak in America’s most sparsely-populated states. Only 10% of Idahoans trust the federal government, says Greg Hill, a professor at Boise State University. Butch Otter, the state’s governor, rebelled against both Obamacare and George Bush’s Patriot Act. “Don’t tread on me” was one of the first slogans of the American revolutionaries; and in the open spaces, no one needs to tread on anyone else.
And that’s where the Tea Party Revolution comes from — these decentralized communities that are off the radar of New York or Los Angeles, where the mainstream media and elites reside — are places like Boise and Wichita and Oklahoma City where because of the Internet and cable television people are as plugged-in to what’s happening in D.C. as the so-called elites (if not more so) who live inside the Beltway. Utilizing the methods of modern communication, those seeking to preserve their space and the individual liberties that come with it, have taken to blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and other mediums to organize, fundraise, and speak-out against the current abuses coming out of Washington, whether it be socialized medicine or massive deficits. The key though, is that it’s no longer necessary to live in Washington to be an activist, you can now do it from fly over country. Just as it is no longer necessary to be America’s most popular radio host and live in New York, you can now do it from the more comfortable confines of West Palm Beach, Florida.
New, Pro-Rationing ObamaCare Czar Anti-Israel
Candace de Russy • August 3, 2010 14:33pm • Uncategorized
Window into Mind of Al-Qaeda’s Home-Grown Recruits
Candace de Russy • August 2, 2010 17:28pm • Uncategorized
From the Washington Post via the Investigative Project on Terrorism:
The arrest of a young Fairfax County man on charges of supporting Somali terrorists spotlights an operational shift by al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which increasingly are relying on a new generation of American recruiters to radicalize other Americans … Zachary Adam Chesser, 20, of Oakton sought to follow the path of at least four other U.S. citizens with extensive knowledge of American culture who have risen to prominent roles in al-Qaeda’s network overseas …
And those whom Chesser emulates?
Anwar al-Aulaqi, 39, a New Mexico-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, with whom Chesser was in e-mail contact, and Omar Hammami, 26, an Alabama native who has become a senior commander in Somalia and who starred in a rap recruiting video that created an Internet stir as he led an armed group of fighters to a musical beat.
It would appear we need look, urgently, to our own house.
Cracking the Kagan Code
Brent Tantillo • August 2, 2010 10:54am • Uncategorized
The Economist has an excellent piece explaining why both liberals and conservatives have a bit of heartburn over Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. For liberals, like George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley, her nomination is:
“a terrible act of betrayal”, because Ms Kagan is insufficiently protective of free speech (she supports restrictions on obscenity) and takes too expansive a view of executive power. During her confirmation as solicitor-general, she agreed with a Republican inquisitor that America is at war with terrorists, and she appeared to agree that an al-Qaeda financier captured in, say, the Philippines, can be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant. This suggests she would be sympathetic to Mr Obama’s claim of almost Bush-like powers over terrorist suspects.
And conservatives worry about her social positions. For one, when she was Dean of Harvard Law, “she barred military recruiters from campus in protest at the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers.” Also, it certainly can’t be good that she counseled former president Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky crisis as White House Counsel.
Norton Mezvinsky: Chelsea Clinton’s LaRouchite Uncle
Winfield Myers • August 1, 2010 6:51am • Uncategorized
When Chelsea Clinton wed Marc Mezvinsky yesterday, she got more than a $3 million wedding: she got a new uncle unlike any most of us have known. Yesterday at American Thinker, Asaf Romirowsky and I exposed Norton Mezvinsky’s ties to Lyndon LaRouche. Here’s the essay, which we wrote for Campus Watch, which I direct, in its entirety:
Norton Mezvinsky told the New York Daily News this week that he wasn’t invited to the wedding because of a family feud with his nephew that stemmed from his support for his disgraced brother, former Iowa Representative Edward Mezvinsky, whose plans to move to New York and write a book after his release from prison were opposed by nephew Marc.
But there’s another reason the Clintons might want to keep the Mezvinsky — who says he’s the “senior male member of the family, and Marc’s only uncle” — well away from Rhinebeck on Saturday: Mezvinsky’s ties to the conspiracy mongering anti-Semite Lyndon LaRouche.
Just last year, Mezvinsky shelled out his own cash to bring LaRouche to speak at Central Connecticut State University, where he taught for 42 years. In February 2009, Mezvinsky spoke to assembled LaRouchites at the Schiller Institute in Rüsselsheim, Germany, which was founded by LaRouche’s wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
That Mezvinsky would invite such a man to campus — much less pay his expenses — could be reason enough for the former First Family to treat him like a stranger. LaRouche, after all, has charged Queen Elizabeth II with running a drug cartel and sponsoring the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
LaRouche has a long history of Israel-bashing. Writing in the August 22, 1978 issue of New Solidarity, he deployed a tactic later used by Holocaust denier David Irving to declare that, “the Nazis did not kill six million Jews, but they did kill upwards of a million and a half.” Thus, while not denying the fact of the Holocaust, LaRouche did seek to deny the uniqueness of its horror. In such a scheme, Jews are portrayed as just another victim of the War in a group that includes Poles, Russians, and Gypsies.
In the same piece, LaRouche shows himself decades ahead of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s own conspiracy-theory-mongering work, The Israel Lobby. He offers an early example of the “linkage theory,” which holds that Israel is a strategic burden to the U.S., by claiming that the Zionist lobby is:
[T]he most visible of the internal enemies of the United States–and of the human race–at this specific moment. Every policy it is currently pushing is pure evil….
These rants weren’t lost on the late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose imprimatur gave then-New York senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton the boost she needed to succeed him in the Senate in 2000. In 1986, Moynihan called LaRouche a “fascist” and an “anti-Semite.”
Would the mother of the bride forget her esteemed predecessor’s words about LaRouche and then publicly associate with his supporter?
LaRouche, who spent five years of a 15-year federal prison sentence behind bars for tax code violations and conspiracy to commit mail fraud, claims he was subjected to a “surgical procedure” to torture him while incarcerated. He claimed at the time that with his sentencing, “the vital interests of the United States have been put in jeopardy.”
Yet Mezvinsky’s public statements reveal a high opinion for LaRouche. According to the Executive Intelligence Review, the house organ for LaRouche’s conspiracies, during Mezvinsky’s introductory remarks at the May 4, 2009 event at Connecticut State, he praised EIR as:
[A] weekly magazine he founded in the mid-1970s, which is, I have personally discovered, must reading [emphasis original] for numerous members of the United States Congress, United States State Department officials, other politicos in Washington and around the world, and many academics.
And:
At major Middle-East-oriented think-tanks in Washington and elsewhere, factual information, supplied by the LaRouche group, at least some of his views, are regularly studied and considered. During the past year, especially, when I have been in Washington starting a new Middle East political think-tank, I have witnessed this personally.
Projection, perhaps, or wishful thinking? Mezvinsky’s think tank, the International Council for Middle East Studies (ICMES), is, according to its web site, “located on the premises of the International Law Institute, with office space provided by Professor Don Wallace (Georgetown University), Chair of the ICMES Board of Directors.”
Given Mezvinsky’s potentially embarrassing past support for LaRouche, and his fawning words for the rant-filled Executive Intelligence Review, perhaps he was the family member whose presence just couldn’t be tolerated. People may pretend not to notice a crazy old aunt in the attic. But even a $3 million wedding can’t hide a LaRouche-supporting uncle in the receiving line.
Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch. Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum.
Mark Levin on Arizona Immigration Judge
Candace de Russy • July 29, 2010 13:34pm • Uncategorized
