The contents of these articles are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
The day’s top political news:
Tea Party Convention begins in Nashville
The first ever Tea Party Convention has attracted a sellout crowd of a thousand activists from as far away as Hawaii (and media from as far away as Japan) to the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center.
Volunteers here intend to propose a series of broad "First Principles" which have already been generally embraced by most Tea Party chapters around the country. They include: fiscal responsibility, upholding the constitution, and national security.
Prospective political candidates will be expected to support the Republican National Committee platform, though without any specific litmus or purity test. If a particular candidate meets the proposed Tea Party criteria he or she would be eligible for fundraising and grassroots Tea Party support.
US Senator blocks all Obama nominees amid tanker feud
A US Senator has taken the extraordinary step of blocking more than 70 of US President Barack Obama's nominees amid a dispute over a lucrative US Air Force tanker deal, senate aides said Friday.
Senator Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, placed a blanket "hold" in part because of the feud pitting Airbus parent EADS and its partner Northrop Grumman against Boeing, his office said.
The US Senate frequently approves non-controversial nominees without a formal roll-call vote, with a "unanimous consent" determination that can be blocked by just one senator, requiring a time-consuming process and 60-votes in the 100-seat chamber to overcome.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.87436e906866c2a0fc6850afd6ffeb25.2a1&show_article=1
Climate Change fanatics Corrupted science – Al Gore’s fraud
First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.
The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.
Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.
How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science -- Michael Barone -- GOPUSA
Opinion:
Nothing will measure Democrat angst regarding current politics than obviously slanted media coverage by the left -- watch what they say about the tea party convention in Nashville
The tea party movement – a grass root activist political tidal wave – is holding a convention in Nashville. Since the movement has been in business for only about a year, this will be its first such gathering (unless you count the million person protest in Washington last September).
An argument might be made that such a movement hardly needs a convention unless it has dreams of becoming a third party. To date, that seems unlikely. Most activists fully understand only liberal Democrats would benefit from a third party strategy. Political history makes that very clear.
In fact, Americans should be alert for Democrat schemes aimed at diminishing the impact of the tea party movement by instigating third party campaigns. If Democrats don’t find a way of effectively mitigating the impact of the tea party movement, this year’s elections will be a major setback for them and their aspirations.
The Obama administration’s dedication to far left positions, programs, and proposals has created a mass of very angry voters who are taking matters in to their own hands. To date, the impact is obvious.
When demonstrators first ambushed Democrat Congressmen who had voted for such extreme liberal proposals as Cap and Trade, Democrats and the media did all they could to dismiss the uprising out of hand. They couldn’t believe so many Americans were so mad at what they were doing on Capitol Hill.
However, when members of both Houses of Congress went home last summer and began holding town hall meetings, they learned the tea party movement was real, very large, and a growing threat to their political futures. Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined the skeptics by calling the demonstrations “astroturf” – suggesting they were phony, not honest grass root uprisings. The mainstream media – long avid supporters of left wing politics and policies – eagerly joined in efforts to diminish the tea party political impact. Liberals simply could not grasp so many normal Americans were so mad at what Washington was doing and has been doing.
However, election results from Virginia and New Jersey soon proved the worst nightmares of liberals to be quite true. Then a special election in Massachusetts, a seat long held by Teddy Kennedy, was captured by Republican Scott Brown. The victory, which gave Republicans an ability to bloc Democrat bills such as their health care scam, signaled the tea party movement was having a major impact at the ballot box. Predictions for November’s election results now suggest the GOP might even take control of the Senate.
All that is history as people begin arriving at the convention in Nashville’s Opryland Hotel. This evening, attendees will hear Sarah Palin deliver a keynote address.
This will be another poke in the eye for the nation’s media (and liberals in general) which makes no secret of just how much it despises Palin. They continually suggest her followers are not people to be taken seriously. The media reprises Obama’s thinking about normal Americans being those who cling to their bibles and their guns – and who don’t support illegal aliens.
For better or for worse, Sarah Palin is not just the most personally popular political figure today, she is the only star in the firmament of either party. After Palin, the emotional connection with other candidates and potential candidates, falls off sharply.
Of course other candidates have not yet begun to campaign and get nearly the attention Palin has attracted. Once the 2010 mid-term elections are behind us, other candidates for president will begin to emerge, gain recognition, and attract supporters. They will begin that process trailing Palin significantly.
The media, for its part, is driving up the wall by the thought of a Palin candidacy. They accuse her of being extreme, unprepared, and quite unqualified. They accuse her of being shallow and superficial, exploiting the tea party phenomenon for her own purposes.
I recall the media some years back. having similar misgivings and bad things to say about another Republican candidate.
His name was Ronald Reagan.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
http://www.personalliberty.com/chip-shots/obama%e2%80%99s-unjust-remarks/
Obama’s Unjust Remarks
Chip Wood
Is the State of the Union Address finally over?
Just kidding. I know it finally ended a few days ago. But golly, was that sucker l-o-n-g. If I were to dissect every bit of deceptive rhetoric in it, this column would be even longer. That’s not going to happen. But there was one section that I found particularly outrageous.
Before I get to it, however, I want to mention the folks who were sitting behind our Dissembler in Chief. Every time the camera showed Obama, there was Vice President Joe Biden behind his right shoulder and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi behind his left. Those two got to spend the entire evening staring at the President’s back. What fun.
I have to say Joe was the absolutely ideal audience. Every single expression that crossed his face—his smiles, his frowns, his chuckles, his glee—seemed perfectly timed to match to the script Obama was following. It was almost as though the Veep was an audioanimatronic creation of the Disney imagineers. Joe, you were perfect!
I can’t say the same thing about Madame Speaker, though. For much of the President’s speech, Nancy Pelosi looked as though her mind was elsewhere… and she wished her body was, too. I had to wonder what thoughts were troubling her stern visage. Maybe she knows that her dreams of presiding over the socialization of America are over. Maybe she realizes her record and her reputation are heading straight for the dumpster. Whatever the reason, she looked nervous to me. Good.
Now, on to the speech itself. Anyone expecting a milder, more conciliatory approach from the president had to have been disappointed. There were very few mea culpas in his 70-minute address. Instead, his basic message seemed to be that anyone who doesn’t support his programs just doesn’t understand them. So he’s going to ‘splain it all again. It reminded me of Desi talking to Lucy, but without the Cuban accent.
The weekend before SOTU (that’s an abbreviation of State of the Union, in case you saw the acronym and wondered what it meant), Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s top advisers, appeared on Meet the Press. Asked if losing a super-majority in the Senate would change the president’s strategy, she replied, “He is going to fight for what he’s always been fighting for… We’re not hitting a reset button at all.”
Even more telling was the president’s decision to bring David Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, into the White House. Plouffe immediately said that he’d be working to pass healthcare reform legislation “without delay.” His message for his fellow Democrats? “[Let’s] prove that we have the guts to govern. Let’s fight like hell.”
Doesn’t sound very conciliatory, does it?
It’s got to be tough to be a conservative back-bencher at one of these performances. All of the president’s allies fill the first half of the House chamber. And by tradition, they’re supposed to cheer like crazy for every rhetorical flourish that comes out of his mouth, no matter how wrong or ridiculous it is.
But the group I really felt sorry for this time were the six members of the U.S. Supreme Court who were in attendance. There they were, dressed in those flowing black robes and seated front and center, directly below the president.
By tradition, the members of this august body are supposed to sit there looking straight ahead. They are not supposed to show any expression, no matter what the president says and no matter what the sycophants in the audience do. Under the best of circumstance, it’s got to be tough to sit there for an hour-plus without moving a facial muscle.
But these weren’t the best of circumstances, because right in the middle of his speech the president lambasted them. The justices had to have been absolutely stunned to hear the president say: “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Even before he finished urging Congress to right this terrible wrong, hundreds of Democratic senators, congressmen and cabinet officers had jumped to their feet, cheering and applauding the president’s remarks.
Talk about being blind-sided. As law professor Randy Barnett observed in The Wall Street Journal, “the head of the executive branch ambushed six members of the judiciary, and called up the legislative branch to deride them publicly.”
But there was something worse than the president’s bad manners. It’s that his remarks weren’t true; the Supreme Court ruling had done no such thing. Yes, in a landmark case known as Citizens United, the Court had the previous week reversed a 1990 ban against political advertising by domestic corporations and labor unions. But it left standing a 100-year-old ban on foreign entities doing so.
Yes, Barack Obama—an honored graduate of Harvard Law and one-time professor of Constitutional Law—had his facts wrong. Apparently, among the several dozen people who vetted the State of the Union Address, not a single one bothered to check the facts of the matter. While that’s awfully hard to believe, it’s better than the alternative—that Obama knew what he would say was false, and he just didn’t care.
The television coverage of that part of his speech got played over and over again on national TV. In numerous broadcasts, the scene was darkened so only one face showed clearly—that of Justice Samuel Alito. As the camera slowly focused on him, he could be seen shaking his head from side to side and mouthing the phrase, “not true.”
But it could have been worse. He could have emulated Joe Wilson and shouted, “You lie!”
Oops, we’ve run out of room for this week. I’ll have to save the rest of my remarks about POTUS’ SOTU for next week. So be sure to be back here next Friday morning, when we discuss the president’s jobs-creating and deficit-fighting promises.
If you think we’ve seen some fairy-tale forecasting before, folks, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Until then, keep some powder dry.
—Chip Wood
2.
Breaking News: Evidence of criminal wrongdoing in Treasury’s handling of AIG?
by admin
Today Secure Freedom Radio has breaking news from senior litigator David Yerushalmi, a major story uncovering evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the AIG matter.
Transcript
FRANK GAFFNEY: Congressman Darrell Issa, ranking member on House committee on Oversight and Goernment Reform, confronting Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner:
ISSA: In recent weeks, this committee, receiving these documents, have caused us to better underst the NY Fed pressured AIG to avoid negotiations designed to obtain the haircut, as its called, from its counterparties and to keep the details of the counterparties payments from appearing on the firms’ forms at the SEC.
David Yerushalmi, Securities specialist and senior litigator in Murray v. Geithner et al.
DAVID YERUSHALMI: In September of 2008 the US govt took over AIG, effectively over a period of months they invested $180 billion in AIG, collateralized all of its assets, and took 80% of its ownership through shares and voting rights. They controlled AIG from top to bottom. Part of that money that they gave to AIG.
When Mr. Geithner was serving prior to his current position as Secretary of Treasury, he was President of Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They were the ones that originally gave AIG $85 billion of debt by opening up a discount window. He went to AIG and said, we want you to pay off all of the financial institutions (our buddies on Wall St and even in Europe) because they’re demanding money from you for all these credit default swaps and toxic assets that everyone hears about.
So when AIG started talking to these financial institutions, what would you normally expect, that they would go to their creditors and say, we’re on the verge of bankruptcy they’d ask them to take less than 100% on the dollar – to “take a haircut.” But the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Mr. Geithner said no – you need to pay them 100 cents on the dollar because it would be wrong for the Federal Reserve Bank to use it’s clout to gain a better bargaining position. Companies like Goldman Sachs, UBS, Societe Generale in Paris, etc. were involved as creditors.
GAFFNEY: Here’s the breaking news – what did you discover in the process of your lawsuit on behalf of this Iraq war veteran that sheds further light on this story and raises real concerns about not just peculiar and fiduciarily-challenged behavior but maybe even criminal activity?
YERUSHALMI: Keep in mind that the forcing of AIG to pay the counterparties to pay 100 cents on the dollar may have been stupid, or bad policy or bad business, but it wasn’t illegal. But in our lawsuit, which we had brought against the Federal Reserve and Treasury when they acquired AIG, they acquired the world’s largest provider of Shariah-compliant insurance products.
GAFFNEY: Shariah, of course, a term we use all the time (people here are familiar with it at Secure Freedom Radio), namely the theo-political-legal program– that oppressive, barbaric ideology– that the authorities of Islam claim is the true faith. And this is practiced by AIG through its insurance products.
YERUSHALMI: Not just practices, but promoted. Not just to Muslims but to the non-Muslim world…
GAFFNEY: And we own them as taxpayers. and the lawsuit questions the constitutionality, given the Establishment clause regarding of separation of Church and State. We’re running out of time, jump to the news that we have here.
YERUSHALMI: So here’s what we find out in the midst of discovery when we depose the Treasury Department’s deponent and the Fed and get documents, here’s what we’ve learned:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time that it structured the debt that it was going to give AIG insisted that not only did it get the debt, not only would it get principal and interest payments and collateral for that, it wanted 80% of AIG, precisely 77.9% of the shares and the voting rights. But the Federal Reserve Bank and Geithner knew that it was illegal for the Fed system whether there’s a Fed or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to own that, so what did they do? They created this independent trust.
GAFFNEY: The same was true of Treasury right?
YERUSHALMI: Well that’s exactly right. You would think that if they couldn’t own it maybe they could’ve got the Treasury Department. But the Treasury Department had no legislative authority to take equity from AIG either. So what did they do? They came and opened up a discount window but created a so-called “independent trust” and they hired three trustees, and they insisted that these people were independent non-governmental actors, no conflicts of interests. But in crafting the trust agreement they slipped in a barely noticed provision of the trust agreement which said “Oh by the way, the Fed controls the trust completely, its terms and effectively the trustees.” Under anybody’s rendition of trust law this is not a valid trust, this is simply a ruse or an artifice for the Federal Reserve Bank. The second–
GAFFNEY: Which makes the proposition- David we’re just about out of time. Which makes what they did as I understand it from a technical, legal sense, money laundering.
YERUSHALMI: Exactly right, if you try to do something which is illegal, gaining control of ownership by the Federal Reserve Bank of AIG which was not authorized through a fraudulent artifice then you have violated- that’s a classic violation of money laundering.
GAFFNEY: You heard it here first at Secure Freedom Radio folks. We have evidence of criminal activity on the part of the man who is now Secretary of the Treasury and the man who was just reconfirmed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. We will be pursuing this, David Yerushalmi, as I know you will be very closely. Thank you for joining us here at Secure Freedom Radio. We will be hopefully seeing some of these congressional auditors like Congressman Issa taking up this issue as well. Obviously this plot is continuing to thicken.
3.
Free James O'Keefe
Ben Stein
In case you wonder what the future is for justice and law enforcement and media control in this country, take a look at two cases.
During the last Presidential election, a gang of men calling themselves Black Panthers showed up at a polling place in Michigan. They threatened any voter who did not vote for Barack Obama. This was witnessed and documented. (I am suspicious of their involvement with the real Black Panthers, whom I knew well in New Haven, who had a little more finesse along with many, many faults.)
The bullying was barely reported in the media. Even though it is an unequivocal violation of voting rights laws, it was decided by Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, not to prosecute the case at all. Holder is the legal genius who thought of holding the trial for the self-styled master mind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in downtown Manhattan instead of in a military setting. He has recently backtracked on that.
A few days ago, four young conservatives posed as telephone repairmen and entered the branch office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in New Orleans. Their goal was to check to see if the phone system in the office was working. The men, under the leadership of a young media impresario named James O'Keefe, were querying why constituents of Sen. Landrieu had been unable to register negative feelings about Obamacare on the Senator's phone line. They had been told that perhaps the phones were out of order.
O'Keefe is the fellow who recorded workers at liberal advocacy group ACORN telling a young woman how to set up a brothel for 14-year-old illegal immigrant girls from Central America. This had caused considerable anger towards ACORN, one of Obama's most stalwart supporting groups.
Back at Sen. Landrieu's office, someone was suspicious of the O'Keefe group and called police. The men were arrested and are now charged with a federal felony of something called tampering with a federal phone line.
The New York Times had a front page story about the men and their conservative college pranks. At the top of the story was a photo of each of the men in prison orange.
This was presumably to humiliate these men.
I don't see it that way. These men were journalists trying to get a story. They didn't even touch a phone as far as I can learn. They were undercover reporters and TV operators. But that doesn't matter. Their real crime was disturbing the peace and quiet of the nation's liberal establishment and embarrassing ACORN. For this, these young overeager guerrilla journalists are charged with a federal crime. ("First Amendment? What's that?")
Meanwhile, no charges against those thugs with the clubs at the polling place.
Does this give you the feeling that maybe the prison orange for Mr. O'Keefe and his pals is a mark of courage and honor and that the rest of us should be shivering about what the Obama Justice Department thinks is law? When was the last time you read about federal charges against a liberal reporter for going undercover? The behavior of the feds here is not just worrisome. It is something beyond that. But, Mr. Holder, here is a line from the civil rights struggle I worked in before you were born: We are not afraid.
And we're not going away.
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