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Emails Show Hunter Biden Had Close Ties to High-Level Obama Officials

Emails Show Hunter Biden Had Close Ties to High-Level Obama Officials
AP Photo/Julio Cortez
In addition to an alleged $10 million bribe paid to the Bidens ($5 million for Hunter and $5 million to Joe Biden), Burisma gave the younger Biden a position on its board, earning $1 million a year. He had no experience in the energy business, but he was the connection to Joe Biden, then the U.S. vice president, and, as emails show, he had quite a few unconventionally close relationships with officials high up in the Obama State Department.

“Less than six months before Hunter and his longtime business partner, Devon Archer, became board members at the Burisma energy company in Ukraine, email correspondence reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that a top aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry was telling some of his fellow State Department officials Kerry and Hunter had a close friendship and that Hunter asked Kerry to speak to his Georgetown University grad students March 18, 2014,” reports Fox News. “In an email from the fall of 2013, David Wade wrote to John R. Bass and Jonathan Finer about the possibility of Kerry meeting with Hunter and his students at ‘HST,’ which is the State Department’s Harry S. Truman headquarters.”

Federal investigators are already looking into Hunter Biden’s potential Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations during his father’s tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president to determine if Hunter was requesting favors on behalf of foreign entities in his communications with government officials.

Related: Whoa: National Archives Acknowledges Having 5,400 Biden Pseudonym Emails

Last week, we learned that Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, met with then-Secretary of State John Kerry mere weeks before Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in 2016. We also know from Archer’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee that Burisma’s leadership called on Hunter Biden, who was sitting on the Burisma board at the time while earning $1 million a year, to help the company, which was under investigation. A call to Washington, D.C., was made two days before Joe Biden visited Kyiv, Ukraine, in December 2015 to request that the Obama-Biden administration do what they can to get Shokin fired. Shokin was ultimately fired after Biden used a $1 billion loan to Ukraine as leverage under the pretext that Shokin was not doing enough to root out corruption. However, a Department of Justice memo from shortly before Biden’s visit indicated that the position of the Obama-Biden administration was that Ukraine had made sufficient progress implementing anti-corruption reforms and deserved the loan—suggesting that Joe Biden was acting in his own personal interests, not that of the administration.

“Kerry isn’t the only top official Hunter met with or had ties to during the Obama-Biden administration. In July 2015, Hunter met with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken at his State Department office after they appeared to have rescheduled their meeting from May 2015 due to the death of Hunter’s brother, Beau,” Fox News notes. “Hunter and his business partner, Eric Schwerin, also frequently kept in contact with Evan Ryan, who is married to current Secretary of State Antony Blinken. She worked in the Obama White House and State Department and frequently emailed Hunter and Schwerin about attending White House events and keeping Hunter updated on his dad’s schedule. She currently works in the Biden White House.”

Obama, Islamic Civilization, and Black Antisemitism

BY HUGH FITZGERALD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/08/obama-islamic-civilization-and-black-antisemitism;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

In his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama praised Islam to the skies. Almost nothing of what he then said was true. Here is the key paragraph in his Cairo speech about the achievements he ascribes to Islamic civilization:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities — (applause) — it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.

The only way that Muslims “paved the way for Europe’s Renaissance” was when the Seljuk, and then the Osmanli, Turks, conquered all of Anatolia over several centuries, culminating on May 29, 1453, with the Osmanli Turks’ conquest of Constantinople, which for a thousand years had been the largest and richest city in Christendom. From 1400 on, Greek scholars had been fleeing the Muslim Turk invaders, leaving Byzantium for Italy, and bringing with them not only their own considerable learning, both in their heads and in their writings, but also manuscripts from classical antiquity — the works of Greek writers, poets, and historians. These were the seeds for the humanism of the Renaissance. As for Muslims preparing the mental ground for the Enlightenment, this bit of dreamy misinformation must have been found by one of Obama’s speechwriters at a History-for-Dummies site on the Internet. The European Enlightenment, which begins with Spinoza, is grounded in skepticism and the questioning of authority. Islam, on the other hand, insists on submission to authority; skepticism is not just discouraged but even punished. The authority of the Qur’an, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad in the hadith, and the teachings of Muslim clerics, are not to be questioned.

Obama ascribes the invention of algebra to Muslim mathematicians, when it is owed, rather, to Sanskrit mathematicians; only the word “algebra” (al-jabr) comes from the Muslim Arabs. He notes “majestic arches,” but misleadingly ascribes their first use to Muslims; they are based, rather, on the Byzantine squinch that the Muslims then borrowed. He mentions the Muslims’ “soaring spires,” showing he does not know the difference between spires, that are built on top of buildings, and minarets, that are separate structures. He spoke in Cairo of the Muslim invention of the “magnetic compass,” but in fact it was invented by the Chinese in 206 B.C., nearly 900 years before Islam even existed. The “mastery of pens and printing” he ascribes to Muslims is again owed, rather, to the Chinese, who invented printing around 700 A.D., during the Tang Dynasty. The earliest ancestor of the pen probably was the brush the Chinese used for writing by the 1st millennium B.C. However, the early Egyptians employed thick reeds as pen-like implements about 300 B.C. A specific allusion to the quill pen occurs in the seventh-century writings of St. Isidore of Seville. The Chinese, early Egyptians, and Christians in the Middle Age were responsible for the development of the pen; Muslims had nothing to do with it. And the art of calligraphy itself first began not with Muslims, but in China, during the Shang dynasty (1600-1000 B.C.). As for “cherished music” in Islam, whatever can he have been thinking of? Obama clearly is unaware that all instrumental music is forbidden — haram — in Islam. There is no tradition of “mosque music” as there is of “church music” in the West. And Muslims had absolutely nothing to do with our knowledge of “How disease spreads and how i t can be cured.” Obama has apparently never heard of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur.

Does Obama’s praise for Islam help explain his ill-concealed hostility to Israel? Or are there other reasons? For twenty years he faithfully attended the Trinity United Church of Christ, where the pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, married him and Michele, baptized Obama’s two daughters, and gave Obama the phrase he used as the title of his book The Audacity of Hope. Wright also gave sermons in which he denounced America. The government gives them [black people] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

Obama heard this man’s sermons almost every Sunday for twenty years, and never objected to what he heard. He never changed churches. And he only distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright when he was running for president, after the media unearthed such sermons, anti-white and anti-American. Wright told his black audience not to say “God bless America,” but “God damn America.” After Obama became president, Rev. Wright explained why he was not invited to the White House: “The Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.” Wright also suggested that Obama did not send a delegation to the Durban Review Conference in Geneva on racism because of Zionist pressure saying: “[T]he Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Durban Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is.”

Obama Brings Back the Race Card

In 2023, Obama is still addicted to the politics of racial division.

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/obama-brings-back-the-race-card/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

In ‘Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America’, a book edited by Jamie Glazov and containing vital essays by different conservative thinkers, I went back in time to Obama’s 2004 DNC speech in which he celebrated that, “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And then I contrasted those inspiring words with the ugly politics of racial division that he used to tear apart the nation.

Obama recently revisited those words on a CNN podcast with former consigliere David Axelrod. “I think may be the best speech you ever gave,” Axelrod told his old boss, quoting those lines. “I believe in these lines. You believe in these lines, but they feel almost sepia colored now because of what we’ve seen since. And the question is, what happened?”

Barack Obama dismisses “a bunch of post-racial fantasies” and then states that “those lines are aspirational and always have been”. To paraphrase Axelrod, of a lot of lies that Obama told, this may be the worst of them. The DNC lines were in the present tense and addressed to the moment. Obama began by claiming that “there are those who are preparing to divide us” and declared, “I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Then he contended that pundits like “to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States… but I’ve got news for them, too… we are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

None of this is aspirational. It claimed to be a present day description of the country and its current issues, right down to there “are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it.” Any notion that it was some future aspiration could only exist as a secret equivocation living in one of the many chambers of Obama’s mental double life.

That Obama lies with shameless facility about things that are easy to check and that, unlike his successor, he doesn’t have the excuse of dementia or stuttering, isn’t new. And yet this particular big lie is important because it’s at the root of the damage that he inflicted on us.

Obama was telling the country that he did not believe it was racist. His agenda is now just the opposite. On the Axelrod podcast, he lashed out at Senator Tim Scott for using that message.

“I listened to Tim Scott, who’s running for president, and half of it sounds a lot like us. Half of it sounds a lot like what you were talking about in the speech in 2004 and in all of our speeches from that point on, which was, I am living proof that we are making progress as a country. I wouldn’t be here but for that progress,” Axelrod told Obama.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time studying Tim Scott speeches,” Obama sneered, in his trademark petty way. ” I think there is a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, everything’s great, and we can all make it.”

Obama attacks Scott for being willing to “validate America”. What was Obama doing then if he wasn’t validating America? The obvious answer is that he was invalidating America. And that may be the best possible description of Obama’s cultural and ideological legacy. After emerging as a trojan horse promising to validate America, he spent his career destroying its validity.

“Those quotes you made about, you know, from my speech in 2004 about there’s a United States of America, that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present,” Obama complained. Barack Obama has never even made an honest accounting of his own past, let alone his presidency, yet he keeps demanding that Americans account for things.

Barack Obama, the millionaire son of wealthy parents, invokes the myth that black people suffer “crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in the society”. In fact, generational poverty is a choice in each generation. Black children are three to five times more likely to be poor when they’re being raised by a single parent. The household wealth of a two parent black family is more than three times that of a single black family.

Obama knows this. Much like his DNC speech, he used to say these things.

“If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men,” he told a black church in Chicago in 2008.

“You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves.”

Then he continued by dismissing all the excuses that he now invokes, “yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more after-school programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities. But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — it’s the courage to raise one.”

Government and the welfare state were not going to fix the black community, fathers were.

There are some political hacks and leftist ideologues who don’t know what the truth is. They sincerely repeat lies because they don’t know any better and can’t think their way past them.

The infuriating thing about Obama was that he told the truth when it was politically convenient. And then, having won over white liberals and moderates, he pivoted to weaponizing race to divide Americans by treating black people like the perpetual victims of a racist country.

In 2023, Obama absurdly insists that black people can’t get jobs or buy houses, and that they’re still suffering from living in a perpetually racist country. Minority Republicans who want to offer a message of hope are dismissed for not “addressing some of the deep inequality that still exists in our society that tracks race and is a consequence of our racial history.”

Barack claims that there’s discrimination when it comes “to buying a house”. Which real estate agent, the one selling him his $8 million D.C. mansion or his $11 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, objected to a half-black man buying the homes? The only people who protested Obama buying property in their neighborhood were Chicago black residents pushing back against his grandiose Obama Foundation construction project wrecking the area.

Nearly two decades after his famous 2004 post-racial DNC speech, Obama is even more of a racist hack addicted to the politics of racial division. He laughs at minority Republicans giving speeches that say, “look at me. I’m a Asian Indian-American woman. And my family came here and we worked hard. Clarence Thomas has probably gave the same speech at some point, I guarantee in some commencement, as did Alan Keyes, the first guy that I ran against.”

Scott replied to Obama by asserting, “let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power. The Left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth.” In this, he’s correct.

The power of the Democrats in general and Obama in particular is intimately tied up with invalidating America. As a post-racial president, Obama knew that his power would be limited, but as a crusader against a racist country, he would have the moral, if not the legal, authority to destroy all the infrastructure of an imaginary systemic racism and usher in a new world.

Obama sneers at minority Republicans for refusing to embrace unlimited power. The race card is unlimited and he has kindly lent it out even to old white guys like Joe Biden.

In ‘Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America’, I wrote that, “Barack Obama was, first and foremost, a community organizer. It was central to how he thought and acted. America was just a larger community to organize through the familiar tactics of division. As a candidate, Obama had preached healing and unity, but as a national leader, his overriding agenda was to convince some that they were the oppressed and others, oppressors.”

“What happened?” Axelrod asked Obama. What happened is that Obama didn’t want to unite us, he wanted to rule over us.

Obama started out claiming that, “there’s not a black America and white America”. And that’s true, there wasn’t until he brought them into being, dividing us in order to conquer us.

ICYMI: Graphic Photos Show Bloody Consequences of Obama’s Fast & Furious

Recovered AK-47 Weapon from Obama’s Fast & Furious Operation

Recovered AK-47 Weapon from Obama's Fast & Furious Opperation

BY F. RIEHL

SEE: https://www.ammoland.com/2022/12/graphic-photos-show-bloody-consequences-of-obamas-fast-furious-corruption/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

This article 1st appeared on AmmoLand News on January 5, 2015.

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- Another Obama administration Fast and Furious cover-up has been undone by Judicial Watch. The Fast and Furious photos JW has obtained from the site of a 2013 gang-style assault on a Phoenix, AZ, apartment building are gruesome.

They are graphic. And they dramatically illustrate the results of the Obama administration’s abuse of power and the public trust.

The photos were produced by the Phoenix Police Department in response to this lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. City of Phoenix (No. CV2014- 012018)). Other documents forced out through the lawsuit had already traced the gun to the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning program.

I must warn you that these crime scene photos are not for the squeamish, but they include:

As you know, Fast and Furious was a joint Justice Department-Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives gun-running operation that the Holder Department of Justice perpetrated in the hopes that it would bolster their gun control proposals in the U.S. The idea was to allow guns to find their way into the arms of Mexican drug cartel members who would use them in criminal operations. Some of the weapons used in Fast and Furious have been implicated in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of innocent Mexicans.

AK-47 Fast & Furious Weapon Serial Number
AK-47 Fast & Furious Weapon Serial Number

But the violent impact of Fast and Furious — and its cover-up — continues to this day.

In the weeks following the July 29, 2013, assault in Phoenix, four suspects were apprehended in a raid conducted jointly by Phoenix police detectives and investigators from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). According to press reports at the time “numerous rifles and handguns” were found when “Detectives from the Phoenix Police Department and Homeland Security Investigations served federal search warrants.” The presence of DHS investigators immediately raised questions because Phoenix was the central location of the ATF’s deadly Fast and Furious gun-running operation.

On October 16, 2014, we announced that, based upon information uncovered through our October 2 public records lawsuit, the U.S. Congress had confirmed that the rifle was tied to the Fast and Furious operation.  Attorney General Eric Holder has already admitted that guns from the Fast and Furious scandal are expected to be used in criminal activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years to come.

It is worth noting that local officials and federal officials have been less than cooperative with information requests. Although the crime scene photos obtained by Judicial Watch clearly revealed a serial number that would show that the AK-47 used in the commission of the crime was a Fast and Furious weapon, the City of Phoenix and the Department of Justice failed to turn over the incriminating photos to Congress, despite longstanding requests for such information. According to our sources, investigators knew at the scene and subsequently that the AK-47 was a Fast and Furious weapon.

A close-up shot of the victim's ID
A close-up shot of the victim’s ID

The failure to provide Congress with reports about the Phoenix crime scene is not the first time the Obama Justice Department has been accused of withholding Fast and Furious information. On June 28, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives over his refusal to turn over documents about why the Obama administration may have lied to Congress and refused for months to disclose the truth about the gunrunning operation.

It marked the first time in U.S. history a sitting Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress.

Separate Judicial Watch litigation for these documents, which had been subjected to an extraordinary executive privilege reelection season claim by President Obama, forced their release.  Attorney General Holder announced his surprise retirement two days after the federal court ruling that led to the disclosure of the documents and to President Obama’s abandoning all of his controversial executive privilege claims that had kept the documents secret for nearly three years.

As with the IRS and Benghazi cover-ups, JW has forced the release of Fast and Furious information that Congress was simply unable to get. Even as the evidence and casualties mount, the Obama administration is still secreting information about its reckless program.

So we will keep digging and keep you fully posted on future developments.

Tom Fitton
President
Judicial Watch

About Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfills its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach. Visit: www.judicialwatch.org

“Because No One Is Above The Law”

Judicial Watch

  

 

 

GUNNING FOR US: Biden admin continues arming more federal agents than members of the U.S. military: Why?

BY J.D. HEYES

SEE: https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-11-22-biden-admin-arming-more-federal-agents-than-military.html;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

(Natural News) In another sign that Barack Obama and his sycophants are really in charge of Joe Biden’s White House, the current administration is rushing to arm as many federal agents as possible, the same way Obama did during his two terms.

The question is, why?

According to a report by The Federalist, the Biden regime appears to be arming more agents than U.S. Marines, adding that “the idea that agencies are empowered to effectively create their own laws and go out and enforce them with armed federal agents should be alarming.”

“Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned that ‘Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.'” wrote Mark Hemingway for the outlet.

“A video quickly went viral racking up millions of views, purporting to show a bunch of clumsy bureaucrats receiving firearms training, prompting alarm that the IRS would be engaged in military-style raids of taxpayers,” he continued.

“The GOP claims were widely attacked as exaggerations — since the video, though from the IRS, didn’t show official agent training — the criticism has shed light on a growing trend: the rapid arming of the federal government.”

Hemingway goes on to cite a report issued in 2021 by the watchdog organization Open The Books, “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies,” which noted that more than 200,000 federal agents now have been authorized to carry firearms and make arrests, noting that currently, there are only 186,000 Americans serving in the Marine Corps.

“One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation-adjusted),” the report says. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.”

Open The Books also reported that of all agencies, the Department of Health and Human Resources has 1,300 firearms including a single shotgun, five automatic carbines, and 189 automatic weapons of all kinds. Even NASA has armed agents; the country’s space agency has a SWAT team with all the associated weaponry, along with breaching shotguns, machine guns, and armored vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency now has drones, radar equipment, night vision goggles, and GPS trackers — along with a stockpile of guns.

“A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that the IRS had 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in inventory at the end of 2017 — before the enforcement funding boost this year. The IRS did not respond to requests for information, though the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division does put out an annual report detailing basic information such as how many warrants the agency is executing in a given year,” Hemingway wrote.

He added that, according to the watchdog report, more than 100 Executive Branch agencies have investigators who carry firearms, and what’s more, there isn’t an independent authority that monitors or tracks the use of force across all federal agencies.

RealClearInvestigations contacted agencies from the HHS, EPA, and others who refused to provide or said they didn’t have up-to-date stats on how often firearms in their possession were used or details on how armed operations were carried out.

“I would be amazed if that data exists in any way,” Trevor Burrus, a research fellow in constitutional and criminal law at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Hemingway “Over the years of working on this, it’s quite shocking how much they try to not have their stuff tracked on any level.”

Of course, refusing to track the number of firearms or how each agency is using them means that the federal government has plausible deniability for those uses.

What we do know is this: The more guns the government has, the more necessary it becomes for private citizens to protect and defend their Second Amendment rights. Any federal entity pushing gun control while arming up reveals they are intent on becoming tyrannical.

Sources include:

TheFederalist.com

OpenTheBooks.com

Video of Obama bragging about ‘Democrats’ being ‘in charge of’ voting machines resurfaces

Image: Video of Obama bragging about ‘Democrats’ being ‘in charge of’ voting machines resurfaces

Obama admits Democrats control voting machines.

Obama admits that the Democrats control voting machines in Ohio. He goes on to espouse how people in power have a tendency to cheat. Democratic voters appear to cheer that the election may be rigged in their favor.

Obama Accused of Massive Voter Fraud, Intimidation in 2008

The tip of the iceberg of Obama voter fraud and voter intimidation in 2008. If Obama is allowed to run in 2012, with the power of the presidency behind him, with Eric Holder to pad the voter rolls with his phony crusade against voter ID, the corruption within the 2012 election will make 2008 look mild.

BY J.D. HEYES

SEE: https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-11-16-obama-brags-democrats-in-charge-of-voting-machines-resurfaces.html;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

(Natural News) For all of the Democrats’ claims that Republicans are “election deniers” (when really, they are), an old video of then-Sen. Barack Obama as he ran for president in 2008 made a stunning admission about who’s in charge of voting machines has resurfaced.

The video featured Obama talking casually to a small crowd on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, according to C-SPAN, which carried the 2008 event live.

“I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines,” Obama told the crowd, which clapped at his remark.

“But look, I come from Chicago so I want to be honest. It’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past, sometimes Democrats have too,” he said, likely in reference to all of the cheating that has taken place in his hometown for a century.

“Whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction,” he went on — in what could be a premonition about what Democrats did in 2020 and again last week.

Obama won the swing state in 2008 and 2012, but Ohioans have voted for the Republican presidential candidate — in this case, Donald Trump — since then, as the state has become increasingly red.

Interestingly, in the recent past, whoever won Ohio went on to win the election, but that didn’t happen in 2020. Trump also won 18 of 19 bellwether countries but still failed to ‘win’ his reelection.

Needless to say, there have been election shenanigans during last week’s midterms as well, mostly due to excessive days needed to count ballots — and whenever that happens, the Republican never wins.

“My rule of thumb is simple: if you’re a Trump-aligned Republican and your election results were not released within 24 hours of Election Day, then you’re toast,” independent journalist Emerald Robinson noted on her Substack page this week.

She added:

The entire point of “slow-rolling” vote-counting is that it gives the cheaters the necessary time to count how many ballots they need to beat the Republican candidate and then to manufacture those ballots — or to disappear the necessary number of GOP ballots by “adjudication.”

Didn’t the GOP learn any of these lessons from the 2020 election? Of course not.

No gang of white-show lawyers is ready and waiting in Maricopa County to shut down the steal when Democrats tell people on Election Day to put their ballots in a trash bin marked Door #3.

For her part, Trump-backed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, whose race has been ‘called’ by media outlets after nearly a week of counting — including districts that historically have gone heavily for Republicans — allegedly ‘lost’ to a Democrat who refused to even debate her before the election.

“Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has defeated Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s race for governor, NBC News projected Monday. Hobbs’ victory is key for Democrats in a presidential battleground — though the closeness of the contest left the result up in the air for nearly a week,” the outlet noted.

Right on cue, NBC and others claimed that “early ballots” made the difference.

“A record number of early ballots were dropped off on Election Day in Maricopa County, officials said, which had to be processed in a more time-intensive manner that includes signature verification. Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, said Sunday that it estimated that its count was 94 percent complete after receiving a historic 290,000 of those early ballots on Election Day,” the outlet added.

Americans are going to get fed up with having their elections stolen right in front of their eyes and it won’t take long.

Sources include:

Emeralddb3.Substack.com

NBCNews.com

Obama judge orders Indianapolis schools to allow 10-year-old trans child to rejoin girls softball team

Magnus

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/07/obama-judge-orders-indianapolis-schools-to-allow-10-year-old-trans-child-to-rejoin-girls-softball-team;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

One of his first acts Joe Biden did as President — only a day into his presidency — was to sign an executive order to allow trans athletes full access to female sports, and also to expand access to “gender-affirming” medical care, including to youth. It should come as no surprise that U.S. District Court Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson was nominated by Barack Obama. In the first place, how on earth is a 10-year-old transgender? All youngsters grapple with identity issues, and it is abuse for those issues to be hijacked by adult political agendas, which are physically and psychologically harmful to the child in the long term. In Florida, a mom sued her daughter’s school for helping her 13-year-old daughter transition without parental consent. Also in Florida, State Farm dropped support for books promoting transgenderism to five-year-olds, but only after a public uproar.

While Leftist media presented Biden’s executive order as “curbing discrimination” against the transgender community, it isn’t discrimination that undergirds opposition to trans athletes in female sports. It is for the protection of female athletes, who have little to no chance in competition with athletes who identify as women but are in fact, biological males. A female swimmer at UPenn admitted that the team’s support for transgender swimmer Lia Thomas (who was smashing Ivy League records) was fake. Caitlyn Jenner has also blasted the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for permitting trans women to compete with natural-born females.

Opposition to the transgender encroachment on female sports and female privacy is for the overall safety and protection of women. Two women were impregnated by a transgender individual in a women’s prison in Jersey, while a woman was raped by a transgender individual in a UK hospital's all-female ward.

“Indiana school must allow a transgender girl to rejoin softball team, judge rules,” by Brooke Migdon, The Hill, July 26, 2022:

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) from enforcing a state law preventing transgender athletes from competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity, siding with a transgender 10-year-old that was forced off her school’s all-girls softball team after the law took effect this month.

U.S. District Court Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson issued the preliminary injunction, finding that Indiana’s House Bill 1041, which went into effect July 1, likely violates Title IX and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that discriminating against an individual for being transgender constitutes sex discrimination.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Indiana in May, the group argued on behalf of a 10-year-old transgender girl – identified pseudonymously in the complaint as A.M. – that the state’s transgender athlete ban was discriminatory and unconstitutional.

According to the complaint, A.M. had been permitted to play on her school’s girl’s softball team last school year, but was informed by IPS once the law took effect that she is no longer able to participate because she is transgender.

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.

A.M. informed her family that she was a girl before her fourth birthday, and has consistently used her preferred female first name and pronouns, according to the lawsuit. She has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and is currently taking a puberty blocker.

In her order on Tuesday, Magnus-Stinson wrote that A.M.’s challenge to the lawfulness of House Bill 1041 “raises controversial issues regarding the boundaries of Title IX and whether and how those boundaries should stretch and shift in an ever-changing world.”

Magnus-Stinson added that A.M. has shown that she has a “likelihood of succeeding on the merits of her claim.”

Under Indiana’s House Bill 1041, school sports teams are required to be designated according to the athletes’ sex assigned at birth, rather than their gender identity.

Ronny Jackson: I Am Willing to Assess Biden’s Cognitive Ability

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE? LETTING DEMENTED BIDEN'S HANDLERS DECIDE WHETHER TO PRESS THE NUCLEAR BUTTON?

OBAMA'S EMAIL: "That’s why I have to express my disappointment at the cheap shot you took at Joe Biden via Twitter. It was unprofessional and beneath the office that you once held. It was also disrespectful to me and the many friends you had in our administration. You were the personal physician to the President of the United States as well as an admiral in the U.S. Navy. I expect better, and I hope upon reflection that you will expect more of yourself in the future," Obama told Jackson.

“I have made a point of not commenting on your service in my successor’s administration and have always spoken highly of you both in public and in private. You always served me and my family well, and I have considered you not only a fine doctor and service member but also a friend,” Obama wrote in the email.

“That’s why I have to express my disappointment at the cheap shot you took at Joe Biden via Twitter. It was unprofessional and beneath the office that you once held. It was also disrespectful to me and the many friends you had in our administration. You were the personal physician to the President of the United States as well as an admiral in the U.S. Navy. I expect better, and I hope upon reflection that you will expect more of yourself in the future,” Obama told Jackson.

_______________________________________________________________

 

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder says DOJ should indict Trump over Capitol riot

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

SEE: https://robertspencer.org/2022/05/obama-era-ag-eric-holder-says-doj-should-indict-trump-over-capitol-riot;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

If Obama-era attorney general Eric Holder is any indicator, the knives on the Left are being sharpened again in preparation for another full-out attack on Donald Trump. It’s a reminder just how vicious they’re prepared to be, with the mid-term elections in the offing. Holder says that the DOJ should indict Trump over the Capitol riot. Never-mind the Black Lives Matter hooliganism that destroyed American cities, saw people injured and killed, terrorized the streets, and caused so much hardship to many minority businesses, the very people they claim to support. 

According to New York Post:

At least two known Antifa members were spotted among the throngs of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol ……a law enforcement source told The Post. The Antifa members disguised themselves with pro-Trump clothing to join in the DC rioting, said the sources, who spotted the infiltrators while monitoring video coverage from the Capitol.

But Holder et al are not focused on truth. They’re obsessively focused on beating up Trump for wanting to make America great again. Trump threatens the corrupt globalist, anti-American cabal.  

America has never been weaker than it is now under the Biden-Harris Democrats, who have had ample time to showcase their full incompetence and radical socialist agenda. Thanks to their efforts, America is now an international joke.

“Obama attorney general Eric Holder says the DOJ should indict Trump over the Capitol riot says,” by Tom Porter, Business Insider, May 9, 2022:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said that former President Donald Trump should be indicted over his role in instigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Holder, who served as President Barack Obama’s attorney general, discussed the Justice Department’s investigation of the Capitol riot in an appearance Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

“At some point, people at the Justice Department, perhaps that prosecutor in Atlanta, are going to have to make a determination about whether or not they want to indict Donald Trump,” Holder said.

Holder was referencing an investigation into Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

“Would you do it?” host Margaret Brennan asked of a decision to indict Trump.

“Well, I think there’s going to be sufficient factual information,” Holder said. “And I think that there’s going to be sufficient proof of intent. And then the question becomes, what’s the impact of such an indictment?”…

Obama DHS Chief: Biden Must Not Lift Title 42. Illegal-alien Invasion Is Already “Unsustainable”

Obama DHS Chief: Biden Must Not Lift Title 42. Illegal-alien Invasion Is Already “Unsustainable”

BY R. CORT KIRKWOOD

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/obama-dhs-chief-biden-must-not-lift-title-42-illegal-alien-invasion-is-already-unsustainable/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Three states have sued the Biden administration to stop it from lifting the application of Title 42, the law that permits immigration authorities to expel illegal aliens summarily for health reasons. Reason for the lawsuit: The Americans in those states will pay the price when a hurricane of illegals overwhelms border agents.

Yesterday, President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said without saying it that he agrees.

Appearing on Fox and Friends, the former DHS chief explained what is obvious to all — except Biden and the leftist ideologues who back him. They see the surge as a means to replace and dispossess the American people with new Democrat voters.

Border States Want a Secure Border

Based on a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), last week, Biden announced that he will lift the Title 42 expulsion policy, begun by President Trump in 2020 to battle the China Virus pandemic, on May 23. Administration officials predicted that 18,000 illegals per day would hit the border.

Almost immediately after the announcement, the three states sued not on practical grounds, but because Biden violated the Administrative Procedures Act. 

Johnson takes their side. The invasion must stop.

“I am convinced that most Americans want us to treat migrants in this country fairly, humanely,” he said on Fox and Friends:

They want us to take care of the DREAMers, who are a remarkable group of de facto Americans who grew up in this country. Most Americans, I believe, want to give people who have been in this country for ten or more years an opportunity to get on the books. But most Americans also want a secure border. If you go to Laredo, Texas, for example, [Democrat Representative] Henry Cuellar’s district, 85 percent Mexican American, overwhelmingly Democratic, they want a secure border. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve heard this. 

Most Americans want border security, of course, but Biden won’t listen. Obsessed with bringing in new Democrat voters, he’s done everything he can to send the message to the Third World that the borders are open and free stuff is available.

He and his Homeland Security Secretary, Cuban visa fraudster Alejandro Mayorkas, openly brag that they will not enforce immigration laws. He imported 12,000 Haitians who showed up at the border in September, just after he lied about and attacked his own border agents for doing their jobs.

This Can’t Go On

To his credit, Johnson told the truth, despite being a Democrat who obviously voted for Traitor Joe.

Speaking of the illegals hitting the border now, he added that “7,000 a day is not sustainable, in multiple respects”: 

It overwhelms the communities in Texas and Arizona that have to absorb this population. It overwhelms Catholic Charities. It overwhelms the Border Patrol and ICE and their ability to keep up with these numbers. And obviously, it overwhelms the Biden administration politically. This is affecting his approval ratings. The — we just have to — we have to enforce border security and we have to send the message that we are enforcing border security.

But Biden, again, is sending the opposite message: The border is open; come on in. And bring the family, too.

“I used to go to Central America,” Johnson continued:

I would stand at the bottom of the stairway for the plane returning back to Guatemala and Honduras and bring the cameras to show people in Central America that we were actually sending people back. Immigration is a very market-sensitive phenomenon. It reacts sharply to perceived and real changes in our enforcement policy up here. So, the lifting of Title 42, I’m sure that news is circulating right now in Central America. If I had had my druthers, and I don’t, I would have argued, can we lift this perhaps later in the summer when it gets hotter and the numbers do slow down? We’re right now in the peak season. But longer-term, you’ve got to deal with the push factors.

Longer-term, in fact, the application of Title 42 must remain in place, and not just because of the China Virus. Illegals are not only unvaccinated against myriad diseases once thought wiped out in this country, but also bring in scabies, mumps, typhus, Chagas disease, chickenpox, and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. 

At least for now, the border must close. Since the first full month of Biden’s presidency, border agents have handled more than two million illegals.

Obama: We Will Have to Pay for Biden’s Russia Sanctions

Obama: We'll Suffer ‘Economic Consequences’ From Biden's Russia Sanctions, but It's the Price of Freedom

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/robert-spencer/2022/02/26/obama-well-suffer-economic-consequences-from-bidens-russia-sanctions-but-its-the-price-of-freedom-n1562120;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Everybody else — even many who were happy that he became president — has soured on Old Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency, but not the man who warned us not to “underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”

Barack Obama on Thursday called on all Americans to get behind the sanctions on Russia that Biden has already admitted don’t stop Vladimir Putin from doing anything. Even worse, Obama said that Joe’s sanctions would cost us, like everything else connected to the Biden administration, but that it would all be worth it for the cause of freedom. As Obama was speaking as one of the foremost figures of the increasingly authoritarian Left, his words were hardly inspirational to anyone who has been paying attention.

Obama declared that “people of conscience around the world need to loudly and clearly condemn Russia’s actions and offer support for the Ukrainian people.” This involves getting behind Biden’s toothless sanctions: “And every American, regardless of party, should support President Biden’s efforts, in coordination with our closest allies, to impose hard-hitting sanctions on Russia — sanctions that impose a real price on Russia’s autocratic elites.”

Yet Biden himself emphasized, also on Thursday, that the sanctions would not actually “impose a real price” on Putin or anyone, in that they would not stop Russia from invading Ukraine. “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said, contradicting numerous statements from top officials in his own administration, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden continued, “This could take time and we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them, this is what this is all about. This is going to take time, it’s not going to occur … he’s gonna say ‘Oh my God, these sanctions are coming, I’m gonna stand down.’”

What Joe in his dementia haze was trying to say was that the sanctions wouldn’t make Putin stand down, which really means that they’re just a way of saving face and are otherwise worthless. But that doesn’t mean that the American taxpayer isn’t going to have to pay for them. Obama warned, “There may be some economic consequences to such sanctions, given Russia’s significant role in global energy markets. But that’s a price we should be willing to pay to take a stand on the side of freedom.”

We should be willing to endure the still-higher prices that will result from Biden’s sanctions in order to preserve “democracy,” by which Leftists generally mean “Leftist hegemony.” “For some time now,” Obama said, “we have seen the forces of division and authoritarianism make headway around the world, mounting an assault on the ideals of democracy, rule of law, equality, individual liberty, freedom of expression and worship, and self-determination. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows where these dangerous trends can lead — and why they cannot be left unchallenged.”

Related: How Not to Sanction Russia

“An assault on the ideals of democracy.” Where have we heard that kind of rhetoric before? That’s right: it’s what the Left has been telling us for over a year now about the January 6 non-insurrection. Democrat leaders have been doing everything they could to portray the supporters of President Trump who gathered at the Capitol that day — not just those who entered the building — as violent insurrectionists bent on destroying “our democracy” and installing Trump as a dictator. With the repeated false claims of the intelligence establishment, echoed by Biden himself, that “white supremacists” constitute the greatest terror threat the nation faces today, this operation is being extended to all dissenters from the Left’s agenda anywhere in the country. If all Trump supporters are “white supremacists,” as Leftists have frequently claimed, and white supremacists are the nation’s foremost terror threat, then over seventy million Americans are a terror threat.

The Biden administration’s first year has been marred by, among so very many other things, this ugly and underhanded campaign to criminalize political dissent. The fishing expeditions for something to convict Trump of doing are part of the same initiative: taint the movement by declaring its leader a criminal, and making all his followers afraid to continue to support him for fear that they will be similarly tarred.

When Barack Obama speaks in ringing tones about how we have to support Ukraine in order to stand for democracy, he is acting as the mouthpiece for a movement that would happily behave toward conservative Americans the way Vladimir Putin is behaving toward Ukraine. Consequently, his high-minded language rings hollow. We have already seen enough from Attorney General Merrick Garland and his henchmen to know what’s behind it.

Report: NIH advisers SHRED documents detailing work Fauci’s agency did with Wuhan lab during Obama era

Image: Report: NIH advisers SHRED documents detailing work Fauci’s agency did with Wuhan lab during Obama era

BY J.D. HEYES

SEE: https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-02-18-documents-detailing-fauci-agency-wuhan-work-shredded.html;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

(Natural News) As we have continually documented, the U.S. government is completely rogue. Worse, too few members of Congress are willing to do the hard work to include defunding agencies completely to bring it back under the control of we the people.

The latest example involves the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, in particular, one of its satellite agencies, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has been run since the first term of Ronald Reagan by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci.

According to the National Pulse, the NIH has repeatedly refused to comply with congressional demands for documents linked to its funding of research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID-19 was likely developed and escaped (or was intentionally released). Instead, it is compelling staffers to “shred notes and other documents” related to the agency’s work with the lab during the Obama regime.

The outlet reported: “Members of the Republican House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote a letter to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Director Xavier Becerra urging the release of the documents, which could prove highly relevant to the origins of COVID-19. Rather than be transparent with Committee Republicans, HHS and NIH have chosen to hide, obfuscate, and shield the truth.”

The letter notes that an adviser to the national institutes was “forced by NIH to shred notes and other documents pertaining to the WIV grants as early as 2014.”

An email from someone whose name has been redacted that was sent to a committee staff member on Nov. 5 last year also revealed: “I signed a confidentiality agreement in which I agreed not to discuss any grant with anyone except with other members of the study section, and – once the meeting was over – that I would destroy any notes that I had taken during the meeting (we did this by tossing them in shred box in the meeting room).

In addition, the letter explains how, “to date, HHS and NIH have refused to produce any responsive documents or information.”

The GOP members have demanded documents from former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins regarding an Obama-era grant awarded in 2014 by Fauci’s agency to EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV in May and June of last year.

But despite repeated attempts by GOP oversight committee staff to amend and update requests to make them broader in scope and easier for the federal agencies to fill, both have continued to refuse to hand over any documents.

The letter says: “Since our July 15, 2021 request invoking §2954, Republican Committee staff have provided the following accommodations to HHS and NIH: time extensions, reducing the scope of the request, prioritizing certain documents, and engaging in in camera review of certain documents.

“Throughout this time, Republican Committee staff made clear to HHS staff that Committee Republicans may, at a later date, request full, unredacted copies of the documents reviewed in camera and all other documents responsive to the Requests.

A series of events documented in communications from February to April 2020 raise serious concerns about conflicts of interest and abuse of government resources. On February 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. 

“On this conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned by top virologists that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV, and further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated. It is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them. 

Rather than be transparent with Committee Republicans, HHS and NIH have chosen to hide, obfuscate, and shield the truth. This stonewalling is particularly troubling considering NIH’s direct involvement in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the agency’s policy or practice to destroy potentially pertinent documents related to grant-making decisions.”

The fact of the matter is this: Unless and until Congress stops rubber-stamping agency budgets and cuts funding to rogue federal agencies, there will never be any “oversight.”

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

TheNationalPulse.com

Don’t Tell Mom: Obama Prep Academy Offers Student Pizza for COVID Vax

PIZZA IS NOT ALL THEY BRIBE STUDENTS WITH

Don’t Tell Mom: Obama Prep Academy Offers Student Pizza for COVID Vax

BY VERONIKA KYRYLENKO

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/obama-prep-academy-bribes-teen-with-pizza-to-receive-covid-vax/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Los Angeles’ Barack Obama Global Prep Academy bribed a 13-year-old student into receiving two doses of the Pfizer COVID shot without receiving parental consent, the teen’s mother states.

The school wanted the vaccination to remain secret. “The lady that gave him the shot and signed the paper told my son, ‘Please don’t say anything. I don’t want to get in trouble,’” Maribel Duarte told NBC Los Angeles on Monday.

Duarte said that her son agreed to receive a vaccine after he was offered pizza at school.

While being vaccinated herself, Duarte did not want her son to receive a jab since “he has problems with asthma and allergy problems,” which could increase his risk of possible adverse reactions to the vaccination.

The mother added, “It hurt to know he got a shot without my permission, without knowing and without signing any papers for him to get the shot.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) refused to comment on that specific case, citing the confidentiality of “students’ matters,” but provided that “its ‘safe schools to safe steps incentive program’ is meant to ensure several steps are in place for vaccinated students to receive prizes.”

LAUSD’s Safe Schools to Safe Steps Incentive Program offers rewards to “families who upload proof of their vaccine, have an approved medical exemption, or have conditional admissions.” Per its website, the winners will receive such prizes as tickets to Disneyland, tickets to music concerts and basketball games, Amazon and grocery gift cards, and a cash prize of $25,000.

Duarte and her attorney, Jennifer Kenned, said they are attempting to reverse the vaccine mandate implemented by the school district. Kenned noted, “The LAUSD does not have the power to add a vaccine to the California school schedule. You couldn’t do it if you were a Podunk school district and you can’t do it if you’re LAUSD, the second-largest district in the nation. You don’t have that legal authority.”

The district issued a resolution that required all students age 12 and older to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by January 10, 2022, unless they have a medical or other legal exemption, according noted by The New American.

Students who don’t provide proof of vaccination won’t be permitted to participate in in-person learning following the end of winter break on January 11 and will have to study remotely under the LAUSD’s independent-study program. The rule affects 225,000 students in grades six through 12, as well as 17,000 students in independent charter schools that use LAUSD campuses.  

There are numerous legal problems with the vaccination of minors against COVID.

First, parents are the ones who should decide whether or not their children should be inoculated.

While the laws regarding parental consent for minors to receive COVID vaccines differ depending on both the state and vaccine in question, most states (41) require parental consent for vaccination of minors below the age of 18, although one of these states (Nebraska) requires consent below age 19. There are some exceptions to these requirements:

  • Many allow for certain minors, such as those who are emancipated, homeless, or living apart from their parent or guardian, or married, to self-consent.
  • Cities in two states (San Francisco in CA and Philadelphia in PA) have moved to allow minors, ages 12 and older, to self-consent for COVID-19 vaccination.
  • In one state (AZ), if a parent refuses to consent for COVID-19 vaccination, but if a child or a doctor requests it, a court order can be obtained to allow for vaccination.

In Rhode Island, South Carolina, Alabama, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., a minor’s ability to self-consent is based on a specific age.

Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington apply the “mature minor doctrine,” meaning that there is no specific age cut-off; it is up to the providers’ discretion to decide if a minor possesses the maturity to consent to receive a COVID shot.

The COVID vaccine mandate for children and adolescents issued by the LAUSD is arguably legally shaky, to say the least. As argued in the petition against the district filed by the California chapter of Children’s Health Defense — a group founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — LAUSD acted beyond its authority by requiring students to receive a vaccine that hasn’t been mandated by the state as a condition for attending school in person.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced in October that all K-12 students in the Golden State must get their COVID shots once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives full approval of the vaccine for their age groups.

Then there is, of course, the safety issue of the COVID vaccines for children. In November, during the Florida COVID Summit, leading physicians from all over the world urged healthcare policymakers to exclude healthy children from the vaccine mandates, arguing that for that population, the risks associated with vaccines far outweigh the benefits.

During deliberations on the Pfizer shot’s safety for children held by the FDA’s Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, Dr. Eric Rubin said, verbatim, “We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it. That’s the way it goes.”

Countering Overreach Banner728

Biden Admin Goes Back to Obama’s Coverup of Christian Persecution in Nigeria

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/11/biden-admin-goes-back-to-obamas-coverup-of-christian-persecution-in-nigeria;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The Obama-Biden regime did its best to block efforts to list Boko Haram as a terrorist organization despite its horrifying massacres of Christians. And did everything possible to bring down Nigeria’s Christian president and replace him with its former Muslim dictator.

Obama and Hillary resisted doing anything about Boko Haram because they believed that its root cause was the oppression of Muslims by the Nigerian government. Across the bloody years of Boko Haram terror, the State Department matched empty condemnations of Boko Haram’s killing sprees with condemnations of the Nigerian authorities for violating Muslim rights.

State Department officials responded to Boko Haram attacks over the years with the same litany of statistics about unemployment in the Muslim north and the 92 percent of children there who do not attend school. When Hillary Clinton was asked about the kidnappings by ABC News, she blamed Nigeria for not “ensuring that every child has the right and opportunity to go to school.”

Two years ago the New York Times ran an op-ed titled, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem.”

The op-ed contended that Boko Haram didn’t exist, that it was a peaceful splinter group and that the Nigerian army was worse than Boko Haram. Somehow these three claims were made on the same page.  The editorial warned the US not to give the impression that it supports Nigeria’s Christian president or it would infuriate Muslims and suggested that Christians might really be behind the Muslim terror attacks.

At the end of April, Daniel Benjamin, from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denied that Boko Haram was affiliated with Al-Qaeda, while conceding that its members were probably being trained by Al-Qaeda. Benjamin then stated that the State Department’s response to the Islamic genocide of Christians by Jihadists in the Muslim north was “to press for a change to its (Nigeria’s) heavy-handed approach to the security threats in the north”.

Johnnie Carson, the Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of African Affairs, in his remarks on Nigeria, claimed bizarrely, that despite a campaign of violence focused heavily around attacks on churches, “Religion is not driving extremist violence in either Jos or Northern Nigeria” and warned the Nigerian government to “avoid excessive violence”.

The same old games are coming back during Obama’s third term.

Christian groups, a U.S. government panel and former senior U.S. diplomats are furious over Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to take Nigeria off a list of countries accused of engaging in or tolerating religious persecution.

Blinken’s decision was revealed last week just before he visited Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and one where Muslim-Christian tensions have long flared.

State Department officials gave no reason for the move other than saying Blinken, upon the advice of various department sections, decided Nigeria didn’t meet the legal threshold to be named as “country of particular concern” in an annual religious freedom list released by the secretary of State. They denied the decision’s unveiling was linked to Blinken’s trip but couldn’t fully explain the timeline.

The Jihad always gets a pass from the Obama-Biden boys.

Biden Administration Blocks Rescue of Persecuted Christians from Afghanistan Just as the Obama administration did to the Christians of Syria.

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/biden-administration-blocks-rescue-persecuted-raymond-ibrahim/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Biden administration is preventing the rescue of persecuted Christian minorities from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, where they face certain and likely gruesome death.

This information surfaced on August 26, 2021, during an interview between Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson on Fox News.  Through his charity, the Nazarene Fund, Beck had managed to charter planes to airlift 5,100 Christians out of Afghanistan and into neighboring nations.  Before long, however, U.S. officials intervened and prevented the escape of a batch of 500 Christians, mostly women and children, who were ordered outside of the airport’s protection zone:  “I have pictures of them pleading to get back through the gate,” Beck continued:

And then I have pictures of blood and body parts and nothing but death in that same area [where they were confined].  We believe that our State Department is directly responsible…  I don’t know how many [of these 500 Christians] survived.  The State Department has blocked us every step of the way.  The State Department and the White House have been the biggest problem.  Everyone else, everyone else, has been working together, putting aside differences and trying to get these people to safety.  The State Department and the White House have blocked us every single step of the way.  In fact, an ambassador was called in Macedonia last night and told not to accept any of these people, as we were trying to get them off of the tarmac here, to keep the airport flowing, and getting these Christians out. We haven’t really been able to move anybody for about 12 hours.  Our mission is now changing greatly.  We have to send people into even greater danger to try to smuggle these Christians out, who are marked not just for death, but to be set on fire alive because they’re converted Christians.

Beck, it should be noted, is not exaggerating.  According to one recent report, “Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they're Christians.”  Similarly, any Afghan caught with a Bible app on their phone is executed.  “How we survive daily only God knows,” a Christian Afghani said earlier this year on condition of anonymity.  “But we are tired of all the death around us.”

According to the World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith, Afghanistan is the worst Muslim nation in the world in which to be Christian. This is saying much, considering that nearly 80 percent of all persecution Christians experience around the globe is committed by Muslims and/or in the Islamic world. Afghanistan is, moreover, considered the second-worst nation in the entire world, just after North Korea:

It is impossible to live openly as a Christian in Afghanistan. Leaving Islam is considered shameful, and Christian converts face dire consequences if their new faith is discovered. Either they have to flee the country or they will be killed…. Afghanistan remains the second highest country on the World Watch List, and persecution is only very slightly less oppressive than in North Korea. The Islamic State group and the Taliban continue to have a strong, violent presence in Afghanistan, with the Taliban controlling large regions…. All Christians in Afghanistan are extremely vulnerable to persecution. Areas controlled by the Taliban are particularly oppressive, but there is no safe way to express any form of Christian faith in the country.

The above excerpt was published nine months ago—when a U.S.-supported government ran Afghanistan.  Since then, matters have only significantly worsened for Christians, now that the Taliban—whose views and modus operandi is similar to ISIS—has become the official master of Afghanistan.

Ironically, while Afghanistan was always bad for Christians, it became significantly worse in direct response to U.S. intervention Because in many non-Christian majority countries, Christians tend to be conflated with the West in general, and America in particular—based on the popular but erroneous belief in the Muslim world that the West and America are Christian—Afghan Christians were especially targeted after the 2001 U.S. invasion as a form of “collective punishment.”

Indeed, even Christians in neighboring Pakistan got attacked; according a 2011 report:

Life on any given day for Pakistani Christians is difficult. But members of Pakistan’s Christian community say now they’re being persecuted for U.S. drone attacks on Islamic militants hiding on the border with Afghanistan. The minority, which accounts for an estimated one percent of the country’s 170 million [mostly Muslim] population, says because its faith is strongly associated with America, it is targeted by Muslims.

“When America does a drone strike, they come and blame us,” explained one Christian. “They think we belong to America. It’s a simple mentality.”

On the other hand, because U.S. and Western leadership are very careful not to show interest in Christian minorities—a sentiment that goes hand in hand with Western acquiescence to Islamic sensibilities—they are more prone to turn a blind eye to the persecution of Christians than even some Muslim governments.

Worst of all, not only has the U.S. exacerbated and then totally ignored the plight of Christians in Afghanistan, it is now going out of its way to prevent others, as noted by Beck, from helping to evacuate Christians to other nations willing to accept them.

Beck, it should be noted, is not alone in his accusation: “I’ve heard similar reports,” said Senator Tom Cotton:

I know that our people on the ground inside the airport, both the Department of Defense and intelligence agents and our State Department officials are trying to move heaven and Earth to get people into the airport and out of the country, but the senior leadership at the State Department is a different kettle of fish.

At one point in his interview with Carlson, Beck mentioned two nations that were being cooperative in helping him rescue Christians—though he was anxious to add, “I don’t even want to say who they are, because I’m afraid our State Department will call them and threaten them!”

“I don't know why we have open borders and closed airports,” Beck concluded his interview. While it is easy for all sorts of illegals to cross over the porous US/Mexico border, “one group of people”— he said referring to persecuted Christians—is not even allowed to enter airports, and are abandoned to be “raped, exploited and crucified or set on fire by terrorists,” said Beck, before adding, “There seems to be a pattern with the Biden administration.”

In fact, this is a pattern begun by the Obama administration. Biden—who it bears recalling was for eight years Obama’s vice president—is merely continuing it.  Under Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency, the White House and State Department engaged in all sorts discriminatory measures against Christians, particularly during the refugee crisis that occurred during the rise of ISIS under Obama’s watch.

The Obama administration's discrimination against Christians was so obvious, in fact, that in late 2016, a federal appellate court filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, in which Judge Daniel expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country”:

Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one-half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.... To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.

The numbers were even more perplexing when examined in full context. Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it brought into the United States only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, of whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies with and does not attack. Despite these two all-important facts — and despite the fact that Sunnis were about 75% of Syria's population, and Christians about 10% — 99% of those brought to America were Sunni Muslims and under 0.5% were Christian.  As CNS news noted in 2016, “Record 499 Syrian Refugees Admitted to US So Far in May Includes No Christians.”

In other words, even if one were to operate under the assumption that refugee status should have been made available to all Syrians, regardless of who was and was not being persecuted, there should have been 20 times more Christians and about one-quarter fewer Sunnis granted refugee status under Obama.

This, of course, leads to another pattern established by Obama and continued by Biden: while preventing true victims of Islamic terror from escape or entry into the US, the Biden administration is granting refugee status to countless, un-vetted male Muslims from Afghanistan—not a few of whom share in the same worldview as ISIS and the Taliban.

Fitton: Documents show Obama FDA buying fetal heads ‘fresh, never frozen’

Rumble — Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton speaks out on new damning documents showing the Obama-era FDA purchased fetal body parts. One America's John Hines has more from Washington.

FROM: https://rightwinguncut.com/fitton-documents-show-obama-fda-buying-fetal-heads-fresh-never-frozen/: 

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton speaks out on new damning documents showing the Obama-era FDA purchased fetal body parts. One America’s John Hines has more from Washington.

These people are sick! that explains their demonic push for abortions!;

Why is this not on every major news outlet? We as a country are going to hell in a handbasket;

Because the news is controlled by the Satan worshipers. OAN and Newsmax seem to tell what’s really going on. Of course, the democrats and the fake news will say they’re the ones lying. That’s what Liberals do. They do bad things and blame it on the other side. It’s the first play in their playbook:

HORRORS CONFIRMED: Obama’s FDA purchased “fresh and never frozen” aborted baby heads and other body parts

SEE: https://www.planet-today.com/2021/09/horrors-confirmed-obamas-fda-purchased.html#gsc.tab=0;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

(Planet Today) A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case filed by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch has revealed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under Barack Hussein Obama purchased the heads and other body parts of murdered (aborted) unborn human babies in order to conduct “research.”

The FDA claimed that the aborted baby body parts were for a “humanized mice” project that involved experimenting with “human fetal heads, organs, and tissues,” according to 198 pages of now-extracted FDA records.

(Article by Ethan Huff republished from NaturalNews.com)

These “supplies” came from a biotechnology company called Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR). ABR employee Perrin Lawton reportedly conducted the business deals with the help of FDA officer Kristina Howard, according to unearthed documents.

A lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch sought the records for “all contracts and related documentation on disbursement of funds, procedural documents and communications between FDA and ABR for the provision of human fetal tissue to be used in humanized mice research.”

A federal court responded by ordering that the government provide even more details about the purchase of these human body parts, “including ‘line item prices,’ or the price per organ the government paid to ABR,” Judicial Watch announced about the ongoing case.

“The court also found ‘there is reason to question’ whether the transactions violate federal law barring the sale of fetal organs. Documents previously uncovered in this lawsuit show that the federal government demanded the purchased fetal organs be ‘fresh and never frozen,'” Judicial Watch added in a statement.

Baby murder is big money in America

In 2012, right after Obama had been reelected for his second term, an agreement was made between the FDA and ABR to transact “$12,000 worth of ’tissue procurement for humanized mice.'” That transaction ended up costing some $60,000 when all was said and done.

In some cases, aborted baby body parts came at a rate of $230 per “tissue,” with two per box plus shipping. The delivery of “fetal livers and thymuses,” meanwhile, cost a bit more at $580 a “set,” with some of the more “premium” organs costing $685 a pop.

To obtain an “intact calvarium,” which is just a fancy word for an uncrushed baby’s skull, the FDA was billed $515 each by ABR.

“The HM [humanized mice] are created by surgical implantations of human tissue into mice that have multiple genetic mutations that block the development of the mouse immune system at a very early stage,” a government researcher reportedly told ABR at the time.

“The absence of the mouse immune system allows the human tissues to grow and develop into functional human tissues … In order for the humanization to proceed correctly we need to obtain fetal tissue with a specific set of specialized characteristics.”

Obtusely, Obama actually had the gall to get up in front of the world and condemn this type of medical experimentation with aborted baby body parts – in Africa, anyway.

You read that right: Obama expressed opposition to the chopping up of human babies for the purpose of doing “Frankenstein” experiments on them, but only in Africa. Here in the United States, he oversaw this very same wickedness, which was funded with American taxpayer dollars.

“Chopping up aborted human beings for their organs and tissue is a moral and legal outrage,” says Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This issue should be front and center in any debate about America’s barbaric abortion industry.”

Last year, Judicial Watch reported on how the National Institute of Health (NIH), where Tony Fauci works, has been doing much the same thing via the University of Pittsburgh, which has since been outed as one of the major “tissue hubs” where aborted baby body parts are processed and sold for profit.

The latest news about the abortion racket can be found at Abortions.news.

 

Four Taliban members Obama traded for deserter Bergdahl are in the new Afghan government

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/09/four-taliban-members-obama-traded-for-deserter-bergdahl-are-in-the-new-afghan-government;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Really, what did anyone expect?

“Four Taliban members swapped for Bowe Bergdahl now in Afghan government,” by Samuel Chamberlain, New York Post, September 7, 2021:

Four of the five Taliban members released from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration in 2014 in exchange for admitted US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl are part of the Islamic fundamentalist group’s new hardline government in Afghanistan, according to local media reports.

The four members of the so-called “Taliban Five” who have joined the new government are Acting Director of Intelligence Abdul Haq Wasiq, Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs Norullah Noori, Deputy Defense Minister Mohammad Fazl, and Acting Minister of Information and Culture Khairullah Khairkhah. The fifth member of the Taliban Five, Mohammad Nabi Omari, was appointed governor of eastern Khost Province last month.

Afghan outlet TOLOnews published a list Tuesday of members of the new “caretaker” government, which features several familiar faces who helped run the war-torn country between 1996 and 2001 — when the Taliban were forced from power by US-led NATO forces following the 9/11 attacks.

Wasiq, Fazl, and Khairkhah all held positions in the former Taliban government — Wasiq as a deputy intelligence chief, Fazl as army chief of staff, and Khairkhah as interior minister.

According to assessments written in 2008 by leadership at Guantanamo Bay and later made public by Wikileaks, Wasiq “utilized his office to support [Al Qaeda] and to assist Taliban personnel elude capture” and “was central to the Taliban’s efforts to form alliances with other Islamic fundamentalist groups to fight alongside the Taliban against U.S. and Coalition forces” in the early days of the Afghanistan war.

The same assessments said that Fazl was alleged to have had “operational associations with significant al Qaeda and other extremist personnel.”

Fazl and Noori, who was governor of two northern Afghan provinces during the earlier Taliban regime, are also accused of ordering the massacres of ethnic Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek communities in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.

Khairkhah, who helped found the Taliban in 1994, allegedly took part in “meetings with Iranian officials seeking to support hostilities against U.S. and Coalition Forces” following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to the 2008 assessments. He also was the governor of western Herat province between 1999 and 2001 and was known as “one of the major opium drug lords in western Afghanistan,” US military leadership found.

Despite the assessments recommending “continued detention” for the five, then-President Barack Obama signed off on an agreement that sprung the men from Gitmo in exchange for the release of Bergdahl, who had been taken captive by the Taliban after walking away from an observation post in Paktika Province in June 2009.

“The United States of America does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind,” Obama said at a Rose Garden ceremony announcing Bergdahl’s release on May 31, 2014.

As Bergdhal returned to the United States, the Taliban Five were flown to Qatar, where much of the Taliban’s political leadership resided at the time. Among those aghast by the price paid for Bergdahl’s return was then Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who told CBS’ “Face The Nation” that the Taliban Five were “the hardest of the hard core” and “the highest high-risk people.”

In 2015, Bergdahl was charged by the military with desertion with intent to shirk important or hazardous duty and one count of misbehavior before the enemy by endangering the safety of his fellow soldiers. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to both charges and was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge, a reduction in rank and a fine. Bergdahl has since appealed to federal court in a bid to get his conviction overturned.

The new Taliban government also features Acting Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list with a $5 million bounty on his head and is believed to still be holding at least one American hostage. He headed the feared Haqqani network that is blamed for many deadly attacks and kidnappings….

_____________________________________________________________

SEE ALSO: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/09/afghanistan-talibans-new-government-made-up-of-ex-guantanamo-detainees-and-fbis-most-wanted

Taliban Commander was Gitmo Detainee Swapped for Deserter

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/08/17/obama-released-taliban-leader-from-guantanamo-in-swap-for-deserter-bergdahl-n1470220;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

It was one of the worst trades in history, even worse than Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi or Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac: Back in 2014, Barack Obama traded five Taliban commanders for one American who, we were led to believe, had been captured by the Taliban. Obama did all he could to make the swap seem noble: He said at the time that the recovery of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” and the five Taliban jihadis were sent to Qatar, where they would ostensibly be kept out of trouble. Seven years later, Bergdahl is known as a deserter, not a hero: In 2017, he pleaded guilty to desertion and was given a dishonorable discharge. And now Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the jihadis Obama traded for Bergdahl, is among the Taliban leadership that just took Kabul.

Obama’s deal was fishy from the start. Bergdahl was known as a deserter even at the time the deal was made. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, wrote in the Daily Beast that Bergdahl was “a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

Three days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote to his parents: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

Then there was the Taliban’s 2010 claim that Bergdahl had converted to Islam and was teaching bomb-making to its jihadists. Documents revealed in 2014 corroborate the claim. According to one of these documents, dated August 23, 2012, “Conditions for Bergdahl have greatly relaxed since the time of the escape. Bergdahl has converted to Islam and now describes himself as a mujahid. Bergdahl enjoys a modicum of freedom, and engages in target practice with the local mujahedeen, firing AK47s. Bergdahl is even allowed to carry a loaded gun on occasion. Bergdahl plays soccer with his guards and bounds around the pitch like a mad man. He appears to be well and happy, and has a noticeable habit of laughing frequently and saying ‘Salaam’ repeatedly.”

The Obama/Biden administration ignored all this, made the lopsided deal, and treated Bergdahl as a returning hero at a Rose Garden ceremony featuring the deserter’s parents.

Meanwhile, Obama’s own intelligence team warned him that four of the five jihadis he traded for Bergdahl were almost certain to return to the jihad. He ignored this. And so Khairullah Khairkhwa was free to join other Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2019, negotiating the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. During those protracted, fruitless, and foredoomed negotiations, Khairkhwa declared in March 2021: “I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement.” Or, as things turned out, until Old Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan without bothering to have his military, which was too preoccupied with making sure to enforce woke orthodoxy anyway, prepare a coherent exit strategy that would protect our personnel and get them and our weaponry out of the country safely.

The presence of Khairullah Khairkhwa among the Taliban leadership in Kabul is a vivid illustration of how disastrously wrongheaded, futile, and self-defeating the Left’s foreign policy really is. Jihadis will happily lie to Americans to get what they want, as Obama’s team happily accepted the assurances that the five jihadis freed from Guantanamo for Bergdahl would not return to the jihad. Those jihadis will not see gestures of goodwill as something to be reciprocated, but as signs of weakness in the enemy, a weakness that must be exploited. Now, as the Taliban consolidates its power within Afghanistan and begins to make good on its vow to export its jihad elsewhere, untold numbers of Americans and others will suffer for Obama’s determination to get the traitor Bergdahl back from the Taliban, and to show them what a grand fellow he was by freeing five of their commanders. But preventing the suffering of Americans never seems to have been a high priority for the Obama/Biden team of “experts.”

Federal Judge Halts Unlawful DACA Scam CREATED BY OBAMA’S EXECUTIVE ORDER

BY MICHAEL CUTLER

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/federal-judge-halts-unlawful-daca-scam-michael-cutler/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

I refer to DACA (Deferred Action- Childhood Arrival) as a scam because while it was foisted on Americans as a program to provide legal protection to young aliens, in reality, it enabled aliens in their mid to late thirties to acquire lawful status.  We will explore the true nature and background of DACA shortly, but first, there has been an important development with this program.

On July 19, 2021, the New York Times reported, Judge Rules DACA Is Unlawful and Suspends Applications

That news report included this excerpt:

The judge, Andrew S. Hanen of the United States District Court in Houston, said President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he created the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, by executive action in 2012.

But the judge wrote that current program recipients would not be immediately affected and that the federal government should not take any immigration, deportation or criminal action” against them that it would not otherwise take.”

The New York Times article went on to note, in part:

Judge Hanen, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the creation of the program violated the Administrative Procedure Act, in part because comment from the general public was never sought. D.H.S. failed to engage in the statutorily mandated process,” he wrote, so DACA never gained status as a legally binding policy that could impose duties or obligations.”

Now let’s delve into the background behind the creation of the DACA con game by President Obama.

On June 15, 2012 then-President Barack Obama announced, during a Rose Garden event at the White House, that he was going to create the DACA program to provide temporary lawful status for what he claimed were young “undocumented immigrants.”  DACA is an acronym for Deferred Action- Childhood Arrivals.

On June 17, 2012, Fox News published my Op-Ed Obama Invokes Prosecutorial Discretion to Circumvent Constitution and Congress that took Mr. Obama’s bogus claims to task.

To begin with, Mr. Obama claimed that he was exercising “prosecutorial discretion” to create DACA.  Prosecutorial discretion is a valid concept whereby the limited resources for law enforcement are used to address more serious problems while intentionally ignoring relatively minor law violations.

However, prosecutorial discretion could never be reasonably used to provide lawful status to law violators under the guise of making effective use of limited resources.  Providing lawful status to illegal aliens should require legislation and such a program would create additional burdens that squander and not make effective use of limited resources.

Therefore I noted in my Fox News commentary that Obama was not using prosecutorial discretion but was, instead, using prosecutorial deception!

The notion of “Deferred Action” was one that was used by the former INS and the subsequent follow-on immigration agencies of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) on a limited, case-by-case basis for humanitarian purposes.

If, for instance, a family from another country was visiting in the United States and a family member was injured or fell ill with a serious injury or illness, Deferred Action would permit the family to remain in the United States for as long a period as necessary, as attested to by their attending physician(s).  Immigration authorities would require that their doctors provide periodic updates until the alien was well enough to travel back to their home country.

The action that was deferred was the requirement that aliens depart from the United States.

Deferred Action was never meant to be used to act as a stop-gap in anticipation of pending amnesty for huge numbers of illegal aliens to enable them to remain in the United States.

Obama justified creating DACA because he falsely claimed, “Congress failed to act.”

In reality, Congress had acted and, indeed, acted in accordance with the Constitution.  It is just that Congress did not act the way Obama wanted when it voted to not enact the DREAM Act.  (DREAM Act is an acronym for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) that would have provided lawful status for millions of illegal aliens who claimed to have entered the United States prior to their 15th birthday- however, these aliens could be as old as 35 years of age when they made their applications.

I am compelled to note the hypocrisy in the name of that failed legislative action.  The term “Alien” has come to be reviled by the open borders/immigration anarchists, even though the term alien is defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act as simply being, “Any person, not a citizen or national of the United States.”  However, apparently when the term alien was essential to creating the acronym that conjured up the image of the “American Dream” the supposedly dastardly term “alien” became palatable.

The actual purpose for the DREAM Act and for DACA was to dupe kind-hearted Americans into believing that this was about helping children.  In reality, this was not about children but about flooding America with huge numbers of aliens for political purposes and to enrich those who profit from massive immigration and provide huge campaign contributions to politicians who do their bidding

The immigration system has morphed into a delivery system that, as I have noted in the past, provides an unlimited supply of clients for immigration law firms.  There is no shortage of immigration lawyers among the ranks of politicians from both parties and on all levels of government- particularly the U.S. Congress.

Among those who also benefit from this “immigration delivery system” are companies that want cheap and exploitable labor, religious organizations that want to fill the seats in their houses of worship, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions that seek to increase their membership so that they get more money (union dues) and increased political leverage.

As more aliens flood into the United States housing becomes scarce and the price of housing increases.  Banks make more money as the size of mortgages increases as the cost of housing goes up.  This causes homelessness to increase as more Americans lose their jobs to foreign workers or suffer wage suppression even as the cost of housing soars.

Fraud would permeate this program because there would be no way to interview all of these aliens and no way to conduct field investigations to determine if the information contained in their applications was accurate and truthful.  The 9/11 Commission, in point of fact, identified immigration fraud as a key vulnerability that was repeatedly exploited by terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves.  This nexus between immigration fraud and terrorism and national security was the predication of my article, Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.

The DREAM Act legislation, incidentally, followed on the heels of a prior failed piece of legislation, Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  Comprehensive Immigration Reform is still on the agenda for leaders of both parties.  There would be no age cut-off for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, only a requirement that the aliens who participate would have entered the United States prior to a cutoff date.  Again, the inability to interview so many aliens or conduct field investigations would enable aliens to easily misrepresent their dates of entry into the United States as it would be for them to misrepresent their true identities and potentially their criminal histories and/or affiliation with criminal or terrorist organizations.

These concerns caused me to write an Op-Ed for the Washington Times that was published on June 22, 2007, Immigration bill a ‘No Go’, in which I proposed changing the name of the legislation from Comprehensive Immigration Reform to “The Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act.”
The hotly contested bill was being debated in the U.S. Senate at the time and then-Senator Jeff Sessions quoted my article during the floor debate on three separate days and sent me a certificate in which he attributed my article, in part, to his successful efforts to block that wrong-headed and dangerous bill back then.
We will give the “last word” to none other than former President Obama.  
On November 18, 2014, the Washington Post published a report, Obama’s royal flip-flop on using executive action on illegal immigration that included this excerpt:
With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed — and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know that we’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws.
There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.

The ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court’s Love-Affair With Obamacare

Giving the Left’s healthcare scam a thumbs-up.

BY MATTHEW VADUM

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-does-conservative-supreme-court-love-obamacare-matthew-vadum/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Conservatives across America have to be asking themselves why they put so much time, money, and energy into electing Republicans when the supposedly conservative Supreme Court justices who follow side with the Left in important cases.

The latest jurisprudential atrocity is the high court’s dreadful but not altogether unexpected betrayal of the U.S. Constitution in California v. Texas, a challenge to the Obamacare redistribution statute lodged by Texas and 17 other states that had been backed by the former Trump administration.

“It’s never been a proper role for the federal government to regulate health care and health insurance,” Robert Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who represented two individual plaintiffs, said after winning at the trial court level. “It is a proper role for the states.”

There are 6 conservative justices and 3 liberal justices on the Supreme Court, or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Yet instead of dealing with the legal controversy head-on, a majority of the court chickened out, failing for a third time to mete out a richly deserved death blow to the flagrantly unconstitutional, un-American monstrosity that is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). By a vote of 7–2 on June 17, the Supreme Court cavalierly brushed aside questions of the law’s constitutional validity by finding that those challenging it lacked the required legal standing to do so.

Of the three Trump appointees, two –Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett— voted to protect the ACA. Even the most brilliant member of the court, conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, bought into this cowardly nonsense, siding with the majority on standing.

This ruling should disabuse Americans once and for all of the claim, repeated ad nauseam by the Left, that the Supreme Court, which momentarily is dominated by Republican appointees, is somehow “conservative” or “right-wing.”

It also demonstrates that threatening to pack the court, as Democrats vow to do, is an effective way of making sure the court fails to do its job.

After all, the Supreme Court does what it wants to do. In controversial cases, it sometimes adheres to the Constitution, as its members are sworn to do; other times it just makes stuff up, issuing incoherent decisions written to justify a predetermined conclusion. Invoking standing is a tried and true method of copping out.

After the court opinion in California v. Texas was released, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said what needed to be said.

“Obamacare was sold on a lie to the American people,” the Republican wrote on Twitter

“Its crown jewel —the individual mandate— was unconstitutional when it was enacted and it is still unconstitutional. Yet, seven justices decided to avoid the question of constitutionality by limiting their decision to a ruling on standing. If the government is allowed to mislead its citizens, pass a massive government takeover of health care, and yet still survive after Supreme Court review, this spells doom for the principles of federalism and limited government.”

“The failed Obamacare system will stagger on as a result of this decision,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a physician who has worked to repeal the law. “Every American’s health care has been harmed by Obamacare.”

Recall that in the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Hussein Obama lied to voters, claiming that his health care scheme would drive annual premiums down by $2,500 and that patients would not see their health care arrangements disrupted. Even left-leaning PolitiFact deemed Obama’s mantra, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” its “Lie of the Year” in 2013.

After BHO conned his way into the Oval Office, the law was enacted in 2010 without a single Republican vote in Congress on final passage. Later, Obamacare “architect” and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber said lying was essential to getting it done. It was “the stupidity of the American voter” that made it important to conceal Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he said.

Insurance premiums have shot up since then. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the total cost of the average employer-sponsored family health insurance premium increased to $20,576 in 2019, up from $13,375 in 2009, a 54 percent increase. In individual markets, premiums rose from an average of $2,640 ($220 per month) in 2011 to $6,960 ($580 per month) in 2019, a 164 percent increase. Many consumers haven’t been able to afford premiums and have lost their insurance.

Finally, the case of California v. Texas came along, affording the Supreme Court a wonderful opportunity to at long last drive a stake through Obamacare’s heart.

Congress teed up the case by making the ACA’s individual mandate disappear in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 by reducing the tax penalty for not purchasing insurance to zero. Those fighting the statute in the current case argued that the revised law ran afoul of the Constitution because the individual mandate was so integral to the law that Obamacare couldn’t function without it.

At the end of 2018, Texas-based federal Judge Reed O’Connor sided with the challengers, ruling they had standing and that the Obamacare law was unconstitutional in its entirety.

In 2017, Congress “sawed off the last leg [Obamacare] stood on,” wrote O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. The “mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions of’” the law, he wrote.

But the Supreme Court had no interest in doing the right thing.

The majority opinion in California v. Texas was written by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, though it reads like something written by the weaselly virtue-signaling fake conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts, along with conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the majority opinion. Naturally, liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also joined it.

Roberts, who wrote the NFIB v. Sebelius decision, had said during oral arguments November 10, 2020, that the Supreme Court had no business striking down unconstitutional statutes.

“On the severance question, I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire Act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the Act,” Roberts told Texas Solicitor General Kyle D. Hawkins.

“I think, frankly, that they wanted the Court to do that. But that’s not our job,” Roberts said in an assertion that would no doubt surprise his predecessor John Marshall, who invented judicial review in 1803 in the seminal Marbury v. Madison ruling.

Roberts was in fact wrong when he said Congress did not try to repeal the Obamacare law. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that zeroed out the mandate-related penalty came out of the 115th Congress (2017–2018). In fact, lawmakers voted on several bills in that Congress that would have repealed Obamacare.

Returning to the case at hand, Breyer wrote that the 18 states argued that without the penalty the law’s “minimum essential coverage requirement,” as he put it in pleasant-sounding language, was unconstitutional.

They said “neither the Commerce Clause nor the Tax Clause (nor any other enumerated power) grants Congress the power to enact it,” Breyer wrote. “They also argue that the minimum essential coverage requirement is not severable from the rest of the Act. Hence, they believe the Act as a whole is invalid.”

Then Breyer began the excuse-making.

But the Supreme Court does “not reach these questions of the Act’s validity” because “Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them.”

Article III of the Constitution “gives federal courts the power to adjudicate only genuine ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies[,]’ … [and] includes the requirement that litigants have standing,” Breyer wrote.

A “plaintiff has standing only if he can ‘allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.’”

Citing two precedents, he stated fatuously that, “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have shown that the injury they will suffer or have suffered is ‘fairly traceable’ to the ‘allegedly unlawful conduct’ of which they complain.”

Come again?

Another way of putting this is to say that the Supreme Court didn’t care about the needless hardship and suffering Obamacare has imposed on Americans without controlling costs, which keep rising and rising.

The court lacked the resolve to do the right thing and actually interpret the Constitution, so, as it has done many times before, the court chose the result it wanted and then after the fact threw together yet another poorly reasoned written opinion to justify the desired outcome.

“Standing, after all, is not a complicated concept,” Andrea Widburg wrote at American Thinker, citing Whitmore v. Arkansas (1990).

It requires a litigant to clearly demonstrate he has suffered an “injury in fact,” which “must be concrete in both a qualitative and temporal sense.” The litigant must allege an injury to himself that is “distinct and palpable,” not merely “abstract … and the alleged harm must be actual or imminent, not ‘conjectural’ or ‘hypothetical.’” The litigant must also show the injury “fairly can be traced to the challenged action” and “is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision.”

So what would it take to demonstrate an “injury in fact”? Surging health care cost-related bankruptcies? Reduced hiring by employers because health insurance is unaffordable? An increase in morbidity rates because patients can’t afford to go to the doctor? Rising suicide rates resulting from sick patients killing themselves because they can’t get the care they need?Dead bodies overflowing from morgues?

If the Supreme Court doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, the standing excuse is an easy out.

Justice Samuel Alito used sarcasm to slam his colleagues for engaging in legal sophistry because they didn’t want to do the right thing.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue.”

Let’s go over the other two constituent parts of the trilogy.

In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the Supreme Court upheld the statute 5–4, on the theory that the individual mandate—which compelled Americans to buy health insurance even if they didn’t want it—was somehow a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

The court again threw a lifeline to Obamacare in King v. Burwell(2015), finding 6–3 that even though the law provides that Congress makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State,” the latter phrase actually means on an “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government,” as the justifiably angry late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion.

In his dissent in California v. Texas, Alito wrote, “No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats.”

“A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.”

Perhaps Justice Thomas’s conscience bothered him so instead of doing the right thing he slammed his colleagues for wrongly deciding NFIB v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell.

“But, whatever the Act’s dubious history in this Court, we must assess the current suit on its own terms. And, here, there is a fundamental problem with the arguments advanced by the plaintiffs in attacking the Act—they have not identified any unlawful action that has injured them,” he wrote in an opinion concurring with the majority.

Tedious stuff.

And although Gorsuch may have done the right thing in this case, his brief tenure on the court does not inspire confidence.

With Gorsuch’s majority opinion last year in the 6-3 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, the justice used the court as a national super-legislature and amended a law without involving actually elected lawmakers. (Roberts was the only other conservative in the majority.) Gorsuch stretched the meaning of the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity, something nobody thought it meant in 1964. As then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco said during oral arguments, “Sex means whether you’re male or female, not whether you’re gay or straight.”

“Many will applaud today’s decision because they agree on policy grounds with the Court’s updating of Title VII,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“But the question in these cases is not whether discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity should be outlawed. The question is whether Congress did that in 1964. It indisputably did not.”

But I digress, sort of.

Over the past year the Supreme Court has left the American people at the mercy of radical leftists. 

Power-mad governors and mayors inspired by swamp creature Anthony Fauci and fed bogus data by lying, monomaniacal epidemiologists, declared war on the American people as they combated the Chinese virus that causes COVID-19. 

The Supreme Court stood by for the most part and allowed the Left’s ongoing experiment in social control to proceed unimpeded. Ditto for the election-related challenges brought by President Donald Trump and Republicans, which seem more and more justified with each passing day as post-election audits and investigations continue.

There was so much justice to be done, but the Supreme Court refused to do it.

As it turns out, what seemed true before the ruling has only come into sharper focus after it: good, patriotic people who believe in the American idea cannot count on the Supreme Court, which has long enjoyed reverence it does not deserve, to save America.

We will have to do it ourselves.

Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly

March 22, 2021

Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

SEE: https://tinyletter.com/Rachel_Bovard/letters/leaked-docs-show-obama-ftc-gave-google-its-monopoly

Good afternoon,

In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission had an opportunity to go after Google on antitrust grounds. In 2013, the agency closed the investigation and dropped the case. A remarkable leak of those investigatory documents -- usually kept confidential -- reveals the extent to which the FTC relied on speculative economic forecasting over actual evidence of market distortions. Moreover, the pressure Google applied to the FTC through its deep ties to the Obama Administration suggest that the lack of enforcement had a political bent.

My take on all of this -- and what it means as Congress grapples with our antitrust laws and the growing power of Big Tech -- in the piece below.

Thanks,
Rachel
 Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly After Google Execs Helped Obama Get Re-Elected

Leaked documents from the FTC's 2012 investigation of

Google show exactly what is wrong with the state of American antitrust enforcement.

Eight years ago, the Federal Trade Commission had the chance to face down Google — the giant of Silicon Valley whose power now alters the free flow of information at a global scale, distorts market access for businesses large and small, and changes the nature of independent thought in ways the world has never experienced.

Instead, the FTC blinked — and blinked hard, choosing to close the investigation in early 2013. A remarkable leak to Politico of agency documents about the 2012 Google investigation reveals that, despite ample evidence of market distortions and threats to competition presented by the agency’s lawyers, the five commissioners of the FTC deferred instead to speculative claims by their economists.

Records and reporting about the 2012 investigation suggest the FTC did so while bending to political pressure from the Obama White House — which was, in turn, bending to political pressure from Google. William Kovacic, a former FTC chair under President George W. Bush, reviewed the more than 3,00 pages of documents leaked to Politico and concluded the agency overlooked “what many experts and regulators would consider clear antitrust violations,” calling the specificity of issues outlined “breathtaking.”

In short, where we find ourselves today — with Google as the primary filter of the world’s information, engaging in a network of exclusionary contracts and anti-competitive conduct, and subject to an antitrust lawsuit led by the Department of Justice and joined by 48 state attorneys general — could have, and should have, been avoided.

That it wasn’t, however, provides key takeaways about where we are now with Big Tech, and, in particular, the method of enforcement of our antitrust laws, whose application has become too tightly wrapped around the axle of price, and captured by the speculative science of economic forecasting. It also reveals just how politicized antitrust enforcement has become — influenced by the siren song of internet exceptionalism and the powerful tug of Google, one of the world’s richest companies.

The Economists Were Wrong

Perhaps the most stunning takeaway in the 2012 documents is the extent to which the recommendations of the FTC’s lawyers sharply differed from those of the agency’s economists, on whose judgment the FTC commissioners ultimately relied in their decision to drop the investigation into Google.

The FTC’s antitrust attorneys concluded that Google was breaking the law by “banishing potential competitors” with a series of exclusionary contracts on mobile phones — much of which forms the basis for the lawsuit brought nearly a decade later by the Trump Department of Justice. The FTC’s economists, however, demurred, insisting that claims of Google’s market dominance were unfounded and would soon give way to competition. This required a markedly un-curious treatment of key facts.

The economists claimed, for example, that Google only represented 10 to 20 percent of the referral traffic to retail sites — disregarding statements from Google itself that those numbers were unreliable, as well as evidence from staff attorneys that Google’s referral traffic to retail provided closer to 70-90 percent. A pair of FTC economists made what Politico deemed “questionable assertions” about Google’s dominance of the advertising markets, citing as their evidence a study by Google and two academic papers funded by grants from Google.

Among other claims, two economists also alleged that Google’s grip on the market for mobile devices would fall in the face of competition from Amazon and Mozilla — and that the mobile distribution channel for search was too small a market to be relevant.

History has borne out how spectacularly wrong the economists were. This brings forward a key element of the over-reliance on an ever-narrowing set of criteria around which our antitrust laws are now enforced. It over-emphasizes speculative economic forecasting over hard market realities.

Coherent economic principles are central to antitrust enforcement for good reason — otherwise, justification for enforcement would swing wildly on ideological ballasts. But, like the consumer welfare standard’s current application, which is narrowly fixated on price (as opposed to a broad application that considers other factors, like consumer choice and innovation), economic forecasting has taken a premier and unquestionable seat among antitrust enforcers.

In particular, an over-reliance on a cost-benefit tool called the error-cost framework has made enforcers gun-shy about acting at all. Enforcers now largely defer to benefit claims made by the merging parties – and the economists these companies can afford to hire, who conveniently produce speculative analysis to buttress their points – while appearing to ignore hard evidence by senior executives clearly stating an anticompetitive intent behind a merger or business strategy.

In the case of Google, for example, one top executive bragged in an email that Google could “own the U.S. market” with its exclusive contracts with major phone makers and carriers. The FTC’s attorneys concluded Google was breaking competition laws. The agency’s economists, however, said there was no issue because they “expected” the mobile search to remain a small market.

In the FTC’s ultimate judgment, speculative analysis and complex econometric modeling reigned supreme over pragmatic facts regarding anti-competitive market behavior. This flips the intended calculus on its head.

Judge Robert Bork, one of the progenitors of the consumer welfare standard, explicitly warned against pushing economics beyond its competence. In his seminal book, “The Antitrust Paradox,” Bork wrote that “antitrust must avoid any standards that require direct measurement and quantification of either restriction of output or efficiency. Such tasks are impossible.”

He goes on, “The real objection to performance tests and efficiency defenses in antitrust law is that they are spurious. They cannot measure the factors relevant to consumer welfare, so that after the economic extravaganza was completed we should know no more than before it began.” Finally, Judge Bork notes that “the judge, the legislator, or lawyer cannot simply take the word of an economist in dealing with antitrust, for the economists will certainly disagree.”

Economic analysis, in other words, is a component, not the whole, of the analysis. Antitrust economics can help assess, but cannot ultimately determine, the scope of antitrust policy in its most rational form: determining who is being harmed, and how.

In 2012, the FTC made the critical error of letting economic speculation subsume the hard market evidence that former FTC chair William Kovacic called “specific, direct, and clear about the path ahead.” In its final judgment, the agency prioritized the “economic extravaganza” that Judge Bork explicitly warned against. They were wrong, and the market consequences have been severe.

Google’s Thumb on the Scale

The FTC was not acting in a vacuum, however. Although an independent agency, four of the FTC’s five commissioners voting on the Google probe were appointed by the Obama administration, which was notably close to Silicon Valley and very much bought into the notion of America’s internet exceptionalism.

According to The New York Times in 2016, President Obama was “America’s first truly digital president,” the leader who “routinely pushed policy that pleases the tech-savvy” and boasted “deep and meaningful connections” with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.

In 2012, Google employees were the second-largest source of campaign donations by any single U.S. company besides Microsoft. Google employees were senior aides at the White House and Google executives served on White House advisory panels. On Nov. 6, 2012, the day Obama was re-elected to a second term, Eric Schmidt, Google’s then-executive chairman, “personally oversaw a voter-turnout software system for Mr. Obama,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The frequent contact between Google and the White House continued during the FTC’s investigation. A report published in 2015 by the Wall Street Journal detailed the “unusual” depth of Google’s engagement with the Obama administration, finding the company had clocked 230 meetings with senior White House officials, roughly one per week. Their top lobbyist Johanna Shelton darkened White House doors for more than 60 meetings. By April of 2016, according to another report, Shelton had notched 128 White House meetings.

Google has reportedly also attempted to dictate how the FTC discusses both the company and the dropped antitrust case. When the Wall Street Journal published a partial leak of the FTC’s Google investigation documents in 2015 (later fully leaked to Politico) demonstrating the depth of disagreement between the agency’s staff and the final commission vote, Shelton emailed the agency’s chief of staff to state Google was “troubled” and “puzzled” by the FTC’s non-response. She asked the agency to issue a statement that “set the record straight.” A statement was issued two days later.

Congressional Oversight Is Desperately Needed

Thanks in part to the FTC’s whiff on Google in 2012, the power of Big Tech has continued to grow, unchecked and largely unrivaled. Antitrust enforcement is once again emerging as a key remedy to the anti-competitive and market-distorting elements of what is undeniably oligarchic power.

But to avoid the mistakes of 2012, congressional oversight is desperately needed: over how our antitrust laws are being enforced, if that enforcement aligns with the congressional intent of the statutes, if the enforcement agencies are adequately resourced for the task, and whether statutory interpretation needs clarification for the digital economy.

Big Tech is pouring big money into the policy and academic arguments that claim such efforts would “politicize” antitrust enforcement, away from the pristine science of economic analysis. But if FTC’s actions in 2012 are any indication, antitrust enforcement is already well-politicized, and economic analysis, while a useful guidepost, is not a compass. In fact, an over-reliance on the error-cost framework can render our antitrust laws completely moot in the face of real market threats.

In many areas, Congress has largely abandoned its role as the lawmaking body, preferring instead to outsource policy development to bureaucrats and the courts. It is encouraging, therefore, to see both the House and Senate engaging in scrutiny of antitrust enforcement for Big Tech.

The FTC of 2012 has given them a helpful guide by highlighting the areas of weakness in our current enforcement analysis, and the capture by billion-dollar interests that can defer it. In other words, the leaked FTC memos are a flashing red light that all is not well in the world of American antitrust enforcement. The antitrust agencies have effectively privatized antitrust law. Congress must democratize it again.

Rachel Bovard is the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

NEW DHS DIRECTOR AND DACA ‘CHIEF ARCHITECT’ ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS ENDORSED BY LA RAZA, OTHER PRO-AMNESTY GROUPS

BY RENEE NAL

SEE: https://rairfoundation.com/new-dhs-director-and-daca-chief-architect-alejandro-mayorkas-endorsed-by-la-raza-other-pro-amnesty-groups-watch/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

On Tuesday, Alejandro “Ali” Nicholas Mayorkas was sworn in as Director of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the newly-installed Joe Biden. Mayorkas, who was born in Cuba, has been referred to as the “chief architect” of former President Obama’s amnesty plan known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

This, on the same day Joe Biden signed three new executive orders reversing President Trump’s immigration policies. As reported at RAIR, Joe Biden intends on increasing the number of “refugees” by 700 percent.

Mayorkas has engaged in cronyism for his entire career, protecting those in positions of power. For example, Alejandro Mayorkas was infamously involved in the Clinton-era pardon of the drug-trafficking son of Democrat donor Horacio Vignali. Along that vein, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also criticized the new swamp leader:

“As a high-ranking official in the Obama administration, Mr. Mayorkas did his best to turn US Citizenship and Immigration Services into an unethical favor factory for Democratic Party royalty — governors, the DNC chair, Hollywood executives, a Senate majority leader from Nevada, they all received special treatment to a degree that stunned and disturbed the Obama administration’s own inspector general.”

Mayorkas vowed to “end construction of the Mexico border wall in accordance with Biden’s directive, even though Congress in December approved $1.4 billion in new funds for the project,” as reported at the New York Post. Mayorkas continued to say that he will look into what can be done with the wall that has already been built, signaling that the newly installed lunatics in the federal government would actively remove the border wall.

The White House tweeted about the Mayorkas appointment last month, which featured a list of pro-amnesty endorsers (see video below), including big unions United Farm Workers, SEIU and AFL-CIO, as well as radical groups such as the Soros-Funded UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza), the Coalition for the American Dream, and Community Change.

Watch:

It appears that the swearing in video has a disproportionate amount of “dislikes” on YouTube, which is representative of other official White House videos, as reported at RAIR.

*UPDATE: In the few short hours since this article was published, another 4k “dislikes” were added to the video.

*Funny, at 11:42 PM, the “dislikes” were drastically deflated. Huh.

Source

*11:42 PM.

Source

Watch as Red Diaper Baby Kamala Harris swears In Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security. What a slap in the face that this man is swearing on a Bible to defend America against foreign and domestic enemies as he plans to flood the borders with illegal aliens.

Support our work at RAIR Foundation USA! We are a grassroots activist team and we need your help! Please consider making a donation here: https://rairfoundation.com/donate/

Trump Should Have Pardoned This Pro-Family Hero~He Didn’t

Philip Zodhiates is a Christian who was aggressively railroaded for a phony "crime" by the Obama Justice Dept, the LGBT lobby, and the SPLC.

ALT TEXT

ABOVE: Philip Zodhiates and his wife Kathie Lee Zodhiates

Note: This article first appeared in American Thinker.

BY BRIAN CAMENKER

SEE: https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen4/21a/Free-and-pardon-Philip-Zodhiates/index.html;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

We have all seen the corrupt US Justice Department aggressively prosecute and imprison political opponents such as General Michael Flynn and former Texas Congressman Steve Stockman on the flimsiest of “crimes.” Meanwhile, left-wing figures such as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, who commit serious crimes remain untouched. The full truth is worse than most people are aware. Here is just one case we’re familiar with.

Philip Zodhiates is recognized as one of America’s best direct-mail professionals for conservative and Christian non-profits. His company, Response Unlimited, has sent out tens of millions of fundraising letters regarding the homosexual agenda and other anti-Christian movements. (Several years ago his company helped us!) Prior to and during the Obama administration his company sent out over 80 million fundraising letters targeting various suspect issues concerning Barack Obama, including his status as a “natural born citizen” and his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, Zodhiates operated the Conservative Petitions website that generated impactful feedback and millions of email messages opposing leftist programs.

Zodhiates is a committed Christian who adopted six children from Central America and has generously donated money to, and volunteered for, Christian causes.

On Sept. 21, 2009, Zodhiates gave a young woman he knew from church, Lisa Miller, a car ride from Virginia (where they all lived) to New York. At the time, Miller was under emotional stress and was accompanied by her 7-year-old daughter Isabella.

That was the beginning of Zodhiates’ nightmare. The Obama Justice Dept. and major liberal and LGBT groups used the incident to manufacture an outlandish charge against him, leading to a tremendously expensive trial, and landing him in federal prison where he is today.

But the story began almost ten years earlier. It’s not surprising that a “gay rights” dispute is involved.

In December 2000, Lisa Miller and another young woman, Janet Jenkins, were in a lesbian relationship. They traveled from home in Virginia to Vermont to enter into a “civil union” which was not legally recognized in Virginia.

Lisa wanted to have a child and was artificially inseminated. Janet did not participate in that. In April 2002 when Isabella was born, Janet was not listed as a parent on the baby’s birth certificate. Since then, Jenkins also declined to adopt Isabella on at least two occasions, according to published documents.

In July 2002, the couple and child moved from Virginia to Vermont. But in September 2003, the relationship broke up and Lisa and Isabella moved back to Virginia. In November 2003, the domestic partnership was dissolved. After that, according to documents, Janet only saw Isabella once in 2003 and twice in 2004. Soon after, Lisa became a Christian. In 2004, a Virginia judge officially recognized Lisa as Isabella’s sole parent. Lisa decided not to allow Janet to have any further visits with Isabella. And according to published papers, Janet expressed little interest in Isabella.

Then the LGBT movement stepped in.

The ACLU along with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund sought to make it a test case to establish that same-sex partners in civil unions could have “parental rights” over children – even if they were not biologically related and had never legally adopted them. In addition, according to documents, the Southern Poverty Law Center convinced Janet to allow them to make this case the precedent-setting attempt to nullify the Virginia Marriage Amendment and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Starting in 2007, these groups funded Janet Jenkins’ protracted custody battle over Isabella in the courts of Virginia and Vermont. A Vermont judge ordered that Janet should be allowed unsupervised overnight visits with Isabella, even though at that time she had not seen Isabella for 2½ years.

Lisa initially complied with these orders. But then she noticed that Isabella was acting very disturbingly after these visits. According to published documents, after one visit in 2007 (when Isabella was 5 years old) Lisa noted (published later in an affidavit):

Isabella has been crying at night asking me to promise that she doesn’t have to take a bath or shower with [Janet] … Since I picked her up on Sunday, Isabella has been exhibiting severe behaviors of stress, including pushing a comb against her stomach and telling me she is going to kill herself. She has been excessively and openly masturbating since she returned on Sunday and at one point tried to put a pen in her vagina.

When Lisa could see that Isabella was obviously being sexually abused during the visits with Janet, she declined to yield to the orders of the Vermont court. She continued trying to fight, but the massive legal force of the national groups was no match for Lisa’s meager resources.

Three licensed social workers in Virginia submitted affidavits stating that they believed Isabella was in danger with these visits, but that did not sway the courts. The Vermont court would not even allow those affidavits to be introduced as evidence.

The Virginia courts were persuaded to go along with the Vermont decision on visitation. In 2008, Lisa fought it all the way up to the Virginia Supreme Court. The court ruled in favor of continuing visitation rights for Janet!

Lisa still refused to comply. In 2009 a judge warned that if Lisa did not allow the visitations, he would transfer full custody of Isabella to Janet. In November 2009, the judge followed through with his threat and ordered Lisa to hand Isabella over to Janet.

But by then it was too late. Lisa and Isabella had left the country.

On Sept. 21, 2009, Lisa asked her friend from church, Philip Zodhiates, to drive her to Buffalo, NY. The next day Lisa and Isabella took a taxi across the border to Canada. They apparently flew from there to Central America, but their exact whereabouts are still unknown, according to reports.

At that point, the LGBT groups got the Obama Dept. of Justice (DOJ) to get involved, which they did with enthusiasm. They charged Zodhiates with International Parental Kidnapping and Conspiracy. The two-week jury trial was largely a sham. Among other things:

  • The DOJ got the jury trial moved from conservative Lynchburg, Virginia to liberal Buffalo, New York. But the supposed “kidnapping” took place in Virginia. Buffalo was simply the endpoint of the ride.
  • Lisa had full legal custody of Isabella, they had legal passports, and there were no travel restrictions.
  • Virginia's Defense of Marriage Amendment to its Constitution forbade the Virginia courts from recognizing the Vermont civil union, and Isabella's Virginia birth certificate lists Lisa as her only parent. Lisa lived in Virginia when Isabella was born.
  • The trial was largely on ad hominem characterization, not points of law. During the trial, the SPLC helped introduce “evidence” that Zodhiates was a horrible Christian bigot. But the judge refused to allow evidence of Zodhiates’ philanthropy and charitable work.
  • The jury never heard any evidence of the horrible sexual abuse regarding Isabella (or the affidavits from the social workers) which was the reason Lisa was escaping with her daughter. More important, fear of sexual abuse is a legal defense for alleged “parental kidnapping.” But Zodhiates’ lawyers purposefully chose not to tell the jury about that – an act of apparent legal malpractice which Zodhiates brought up in his appeal.

By any normal measure, Philip Zodhiates committed no crime. And certainly, by the normal standards of today’s legal system, he wouldn’t have been charged even if he had. But that’s not how things turned out.

The massive DOJ, SPLC, and LGBT legal team was too overwhelming, and Zodhiates’ lawyers were frankly unimpressive. The jury convicted Zodhiates.

The appeal was also shameful. The court rejected all of the problems with the trial that Zodhiates brought up. Petitions to the US Supreme Court were also rejected. In 2018 he was sentenced to three years in federal prison, where he sits now until the end of 2021. They would not even let him out early for Covid, even though thousands of other inmates were released.

Philip Zodhiates is also hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for legal fees and lost income. It is likely that the SPLC will bankroll a further lawsuit against him on behalf of Janet for “damages.”

In December 2019, Zodhiates filed a Petition for Pardon to President Trump. Since then, there were numerous letters and emails from the Trump administration. On Dec. 23, 2020, President Trump pardoned 15 people and commuted the sentences of 5 others. Then on Jan. 20, 2021, President Trump granted 73 pardons and commuted the sentences of an additional 70 people. Philip Zodhiates was not among them.

Many of these people had been convicted of drug trafficking, securities fraud, and similar crimes. A friend of a famous rapper got pardoned.

But no one who got pardoned, that we could determine, had committed a transgression against the LGBT movement. We have a disturbing feeling that President Trump – or his staff – did not want to offend that “constituency.” It’s a terrible shame, and bad for America.

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