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It’s not as if the Administration of President Barack Obama has demonstrated exceptional brainpower. In fact, its seemingly endless stumble from avoidable scandal to avoidable scandal has set more than just my tongue to wagging about the very real possibility that Obama and his accomplices may be less sinister and more stupid. How else to explain Obama’s latest attempt to put out a political fire with gasoline?
As last week drew to what I’m sure Obama thought of as a merciful close, the Internal Revenue Service announced that it had somehow lost two years’ worth of emails relating to Obama’s program of using the Nation’s tax enforcement agency as his own personal brute squad. Specifically, the Nation’s tax collectors — who will attack taxpayers with penalties, interest and even property seizures and prison for minor arithmetic errors — claims to have inadvertently lost tens of thousands of emails from Obama hatchet woman Lois Lerner.
According to the IRS, a computer crash in the summer of 2011 cost the agency the data, although officials apparently forgot to mention the loss to Congress before last week. I’m left wondering why House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Calif.) doesn’t simply ask Obama’s Peeping Toms at the National Security Agency for a transcript. At the very least, couldn’t someone just call the Cincinnati field office? Obviously, Lerner hasn’t been particularly forthcoming — unless issuing rambling statements lacking any useful information prior to belatedly invoking 5th Amendment privilege counts as “forthcoming.”
I’m also left wondering why Obama didn’t simply claim: “See, what had happened was we left it on the bus; and that was after the dog ate it. That’s our bad.” It’s not as if I’m any less mortified on the Administration’s behalf as it tries to wriggle out from another nightmare of its own creation with excuses that haven’t worked since Obama was still blazing up with the “Choom Gang.”
As much as it pains me to admit it, we the people elected a moron to the Presidency — twice. It’s a theory that fits the facts far better than so-called “global warming” ever has. Since taking office, not only has Obama failed to demonstrate quality leadership, he has failed to develop a shred of it. There has literally never been a moment throughout his tenure during which there was no scandal involving an Administration member’s getting caught in bald-faced lie. From Operation Fast and Furious to Obamacare to Benghazi to Bowe Bergdahl to Syria to Iraq, the scandals have served as mileposts along the forced march to which his reflexive mendacity has consigned the rest of us.
The only logical alternative holds that Obama and his coven simply lack remorse or concern. They attempted to blame their ham-fisted attempt at a cover-up of the Benghazi massacre on political opponents. They even called Benghazi and the other Obama scandals “phony,” as if the victims of the islamofascist attack on the U.S. compound were figments of our collective imagination. It’s hardly a stretch to suggest that a government that is comfortable blaming the loss of two years of vital information in an ongoing investigation on accidental deletion would be just as comfortable deleting anything else that might interrupt Obama’s golf game and multimillionaire Palm Springs house party. If that’s the case, then we the people elected a borderline sociopath to the Presidency — twice.
At the very least, I’m developing an all new sense of respect for Jay Carney.
WARNING: This story contains graphic content that will be disturbing to some readers.
BAGHDAD (TheBlaze/AP) – Radical Islamic militants in Iraq reportedly tweeted a picture of a Sunni police chief’s severed head and made a disturbing “joke” about using it as a soccer ball.
“This is our ball…it is made of skin #WorldCup,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria group allegedly wrote.
By using the popular hashtag, it increased the likelihood that more people would see the gruesome photo. The Twitter account was shut down after the graphic tweet.
Source: NY Post
In a horrifying propaganda video, the terrorists are shown storming the Sunni police chief’s home at night before blindfolding him and beheading him with a huge knife. It wasn’t immediately clear when the video was taken.
Fighters from the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant made fresh gains, driving government forces at least temporarily from two towns in an ethnically mixed province northeast of Baghdad. The assault threatens to embroil Iraq more deeply in a wider regional conflict feeding off the chaos caused by the civil war in neighboring Syria.
In Geneva, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay warned of “murder of all kinds” and other war crimes in Iraq, and said the number killed in recent days may run into the hundreds, while the wounded could approach 1,000.
Pillay said her office has received reports that militants rounded up and killed Iraqi army soldiers as well as 17 civilians in a single street in Mosul. However, the rebels have made the unverified claim that they have killed over 1,700 Iraqi soldiers and police officers.
Obama did not specify what options he was considering, but he ruled out sending American troops back into combat in Iraq.
“We’re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which, while we’re there we’re keeping a lid on things, and after enormous sacrifices by us, after we’re not there, people start acting in ways that are not conducive to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country,” Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House.
Administration officials said Obama is weighing airstrikes using drones or manned aircraft. Other short-term options include an increase in surveillance and intelligence-gathering. The U.S. also is likely to increase aid to Iraq, including funding, training and both lethal and non-lethal equipment.
The political class is now demonstrating a level of hubris rarely, if ever, seen in the American system.
Within just a few hours, three of the top four most post powerful politicians in the country unabashedly revealed the low opinion they have of liberty and the American people and a willingness to persecute, prosecute and lie to those who advocate and fight for Constitutional government. And by their silence, the rest of the political class nodded their agreement.
First, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Bunkerville, Nev., rancher Cliven Bundy and the hundreds of Americans who rallied to Bundy’s defense domestic terrorists. Then, President Barack Obama brazenly lied to the American people in claiming that 8 million people had signed up for Obamacare and that the program was a success, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And early Friday morning, we learned Speaker of the House John Boehner has proclaimed once again to big money donors and crony capitalists that an immigration bill would be passed this year over the wishes of the majority of Americans.
Within hours of reports circulating in alternative media of Reid’s use of the Bureau of Land Management in his land grab on behalf of a Chinese solar energy firm, BLM pulled its goon squad of armed enforcers out of the area. It also scrambled to delete evidence from its own website that the area the Bundy family has used to graze their cattle is needed for “utility-scale solar power generation facilities on public lands” and that need was hindered by “trespass grazing” cattle.
Reid and his son Rory have worked in lockstep with the BLM and transnational green energy firms to wrestle land and use rights from American ranchers for years. Bundy is the last rancher standing in an area that once saw dozens of them.
What few reports on the standoff between Bundy and BLM that have made it into the mainstream media speciously claim the Bundy ranch is some 200 miles from the proposed site of the ENN Energy Group’s solar farm and panel building plant, and that the ENN project was shelved last year. Even the supposedly reliable “right wing” websites Breitbart.com and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze have carried the Federal government’s water on this dispute. The two-faced Beck — who has called for a pitchfork revolution and sells shirts calling for one — even went so far as to call Bundy supporters “frightening” and compared them with Occupy Wall Street, which was a CIA-funded operation designed to foment unrest in America.
Claims have also been made that the Federal government owns the land in question. But the Constitution specifically describes in Article I, Section 8 what land the Federal government can possess, and there are subsequent Supreme Court decisions that lay out the legal framework. (Hint: It does not include protecting tortoises or building solar plants.)
A BLM document discusses the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone and specifically mentions the Gold Butte area (which includes Bunkerville) and “cattle trespass grazing” as being part of critical concern to future utility-scale solar energy development. In short, Reid is using the BLM (headed by his lackey and former adviser Neil Kornze) to turn all Nevada “Federal lands” into a green energy zone for his and his son’s personal gain and Bundy’s cattle are hindering this effort. This is proven by information on the BLM website (since removed) that states grazing by Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development and the construction of solar development on public lands.
Understand the implications of Reid’s claim that those who bravely stood with Bundy, stared into the barrels of heavily armed oppressors who were threatening to shoot them and faced down the BLM’s armed goons are “domestic terrorists.”
Thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act, the government can simply designate Americans as terrorists and they can then be disappeared into gulags never to be charged, tried or heard from again. Habeas corpus, in the cases deemed “domestic terrorism,” is now nonexistent. Obama has already ordered drone strikes to kill Americans in foreign lands without due process. The step from indiscriminate extrajudicial killings of American “terrorists” overseas to indiscriminate extrajudicial killings of “domestic terrorists” in America has just been shortened considerably.
This is common knowledge in circles of people who depend upon the alternative media and understand the truth about the Federal police state. Don’t think that Reid is not aware of this. And he understands that those who sided with the Bundys recognize this as well.
Reid is too savvy and too skilled a politician to make a slip of the tongue statement accusing Americans of domestic terrorism.
Obama’s claim that 8 million people have now signed up for Obamacare and the law is working as intended is an incredible stretch even for a man who is such a consummate liar that more than half of Americans know he lies on important issues. The law is working “so well” that even in the face of monetary penalties, tens of millions of people who are eligible to sign up for Obamacare insurance have avoided doing so.
Understand that, for the Republican elite, amnesty is not about trying to win over Hispanics in order to bolster chances for carrying national elections. It’s about providing cheap labor for big corporations. The plight of millions of unemployed Americans does not concern the establishment.
I have been writing for many years that the U.S. government is democracy in name only. In truth, it is fascist and ruled by one party with two names under the control of the globalists.
The only goal of the globalists and their psychopathic political class stooges is to loot and pillage. They have done so to the point that America is now a giant rock rolling downhill toward collapse.
As regimes get closer to collapse, they inflict increasingly greater pain and controls on their people. It is now evident in America for those who would see it.
The domestic terrorists in question are not the American people. They are Reid, Obama, Boehner and the rest of the political and bureaucratic class who ignore the rule of law and oppress the American people.
WASHINGTON — The State Department released a report on Friday concluding that the Keystone XL pipeline would not substantially worsen carbon pollution, leaving an opening for President Obama to approve the politically divisive project.
The department’s long-awaited environmental impact statement appears to indicate that the project could pass the criteria Mr. Obama set forth in a speech last summer when he said he would approve the 1,700-mile pipeline if it would not “significantly exacerbate” the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to the Gulf Coast, the report appears to indicate that if it were not built, carbon-heavy oil would still be extracted at the same rate from pristine Alberta forest and transported to refineries by rail instead.
“He’ll deliberate and take the time he needs,” said Kerri-Ann Jones, the assistant secretary of state for oceans and international affairs.The report sets up a difficult decision for Secretary of State John Kerry, who now must make a recommendation on the international project to Mr. Obama. Mr. Kerry, who hopes to make action on climate change a key part of his legacy, has never publicly offered his personal views on the pipeline. Aides said Mr. Kerry was preparing to “dive into” the 11-volume report and would give high priority to the issue of global warming in making the decision. His aides offered no timetable.
Environmentalists said they were dismayed at some of the report’s conclusions and disputed its objectivity, but they also said it offered Mr. Obama reasons to reject the pipeline. They said they planned to intensify efforts to try to influence Mr. Kerry’s decision. For more than two years, environmentalists have protested the project and been arrested in demonstrations against it around the country. But many Republicans and oil industry executives, who support the pipeline because they say it creates jobs and increases supplies from a friendly source of oil, embraced the findings.
The State Department is expected to shortly release the results of an inspector general’s investigation into the preparation of an earlier draft of the environmental impact report. The investigation was ordered after an environmental group obtained documents indicating that some consultants for the firm that wrote the draft report had previously done work for TransCanada, the company seeking to build the pipeline. If investigators determine a conflict of interest in the preparation of that draft, the State Department may have to conduct a new environmental review.
In light of the investigation, environmentalists were particularly critical of the report released on Friday.
“In what could be perceived as eagerness to please the oil industry and Canadian government, the State Department is issuing this report amidst an ongoing investigation into conflicts of interest, and lying, by its contractor,” said Erich Pica, the president of Friends of the Earth.
Some environmentalists saw reason for optimism in the review, which models several possible future oil market possibilities. Most involve a future of high oil prices and robust demand, in which the oil sands crude is rapidly developed with or without the Keystone pipeline. However, the report offers one alternative sequence, in which oil prices and demand are low. In that case, not building the pipeline might slow development, and thus slow carbon emissions. That possibility is unlikely, but it could provide the administration something to point to should it deny the project.
“We’re taking the inclusion of that scenario as good news,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The oil industry applauded the review.
“After five years and five environmental reviews, time and time again the Department of State analysis has shown that the pipeline is safe for the environment,” said Cindy Schild, the senior manager of refining and oil sands programs at the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.
There are political and strategic advantages to approving the pipeline: It would strengthen relations with Canada and provide a conduit for oil from a friendly neighbor. If the pipeline is approved this year, it could also help the re-election campaigns of two vulnerable Democratic senators from oil-rich states — Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska — while silencing critics who for years have urged the president to move ahead with the pipeline.
Environmentalists said that if Mr. Obama were to approve the pipeline, it would destroy his efforts to make progress on climate change. Thomas F. Steyer, a California hedge fund billionaire and a major donor to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns, has started an advocacy group, NextGen Climate Action, that has spent heavily campaigning against the pipeline.
Larry Schweiger, the president of the National Wildlife Federation, said: “This is a large source of carbon that’s going to be unleashed. We’re headed in a terribly wrong direction with this project, and I don’t see how that large increase in carbon is going to be offset.”
Although the pipeline is a potent political symbol, its true impact on both the environment and the economy would be more limited than either its supporters or its opponents suggest.
The new State Department report concludes that the process used for producing the oil — by extracting what are called tar sands or oil sands from the Alberta forest — creates about 17 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than traditional oil. But the report concludes that this heavily polluting oil will still be brought to market. Energy companies are already moving the oil out of Canada by rail.
“At the end of the day, there’s a consensus among most energy experts that the oil will get shipped to market no matter what,” said Robert McNally, an energy consultant who was a senior energy and economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s less important than I think it was perceived to be a year ago, both politically and on oil markets.”
The new State Department analysis took into account the growing global demand for oil and the rapidly growing practice of moving oil by rail in areas where pipelines have not been built. “Given the anticipated outlook of oil prices and the cost of development, no single project will likely affect the rate of extraction,” said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be named under the ground rules imposed by the department.
But moving oil by rail has its own hazards. As the practice has increased in recent years, so have incidents of explosions of rail cars carrying oil.
Supporters of the pipeline say it will create jobs, though the number may be limited. A study by the Cornell Global Labor Instituteconcluded that the pipeline would create about 3,900 construction jobs over two years.
Privately, people close to Mr. Obama say that although he is committed to building a climate legacy, he does not see the pipeline as a central part of that effort. Instead, the president is moving forward with a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Those regulations do not have the potent political symbolism of the pipeline, but could have a far greater impact on the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by freezing construction of new coal plants and closing hundreds of existing ones.
Ahead of making his decision, Mr. Kerry will take counsel from the leaders of eight other government agencies: the Departments of Defense, Justice, Interior, Commerce, Transportation, Energy and Homeland Security and the E.P.A. It is unclear when the decision might be made, but some close to the process say it could take as long as a year.
Environmentalists are preparing to influence the next stages of the decision-making process.
“This is the most scrutinized pipeline in the nation’s history,” said Brigham A. McCown, a former administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. “The fact that it’s lasted as long as it has means one of two things. They’ve either done a very good, thorough job, or they’ve slowed it down due to political pressure.”
Correction: January 31, 2014
An earlier version of this article misidentified the agency with which Susan Casey-Lefkowitz is affiliated. It is the Natural Resources Defense Council, not the Natural Resources Defense Center.
