Occupy Wall Street and its hundreds of offshoots, cost the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars in a few short months. Cleanup costs, police overtime, lost and disrupted production and countless smaller issues hit cash strapped communities at a time they could least afford it. If, as some (including myself) predict, the movement expands and becomes better [...]
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Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
It has always saddened me that two of our greatest presidents, one who risked everything to create our beloved Republic and another who gave his all to save it, should have to ‘share’ a day to honor them while others who arguably contributed far less, have a day all to themselves to honor them because it’s politically expedient. That’s particularly true in my home state, where someone who was essentially a mere labor racketeer is so honored.
And let’s not even mention another president born this month who in living memory saved this nation from decay and defeat by sheer force of his principles, character and personality.
This goes beyond the question of a mere day off. As I’ve often written, usually vis a vis the people who identify themselves as ‘Palestinians,’ you can tell a great deal about a people by whom and what they honor and hold up as heroic.
Ah, well! To the business at hand…
Council News:
This week, The Grouch, Capitalist Preservation, The Pagan Temple and Right Truth took advantage of my generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members, while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
So, let’s see what we have this week…
Council Submissions
Honorable Mentions
Non-Council Submissions
Enjoy! And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!
By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media
While the mainstream media are still overwhelmingly intent on seeing Barack Obama reelected as President, a number of journalists and news organizations are apparently having second thoughts. Or at least they are willing to examine the claims and representations that the Obama administration continues to put forth. This has been the surprising case regarding Obama’s State of the Union address in late January and the budget that he proposed in mid-February. Hopefully this may mark a turning point in how the media allow themselves to be used by the Obama administration, but don’t count on it. More likely it is isolated incidents of self-respect, and an acknowledgement that they can differentiate between normal political spin and outright lies.
The double standard still could not be more clear. During the many Republican debates there has been a constant effort to get the candidates to provide sound bites for Democratic ads during the general election, calling each other liars and flip-floppers, moderates, liberals, influence peddlers, and plutocrats. The ABC New Hampshire debate in which George Stephanopoulos spent a substantial amount of time on the burning issue of whether or not states have the right to ban contraception seemed like a Saturday Night Live skit in how it attempted to make the candidates appear radical. But now it looks more like coordination with the White House in preparation for their battle to make contraception a “free” entitlement for all under ObamaCare.
President Obama rarely faces such questions. He has been able to largely stay above the fray, managing the news flow, picking softball interviewers like NBC’s Matt Lauer before the Super Bowl, and ABC’s Diane Sawyer a few days before that. But what is new, and has the ability to change the dynamics, is that some of the loyal left in the media have begun to actually directly challenge Obama’s claims and narrative. Not enough of them, but it is starting to happen.
There are still hard-to-believe spectacles such as the Super Bowl on February 4 that played like an infomercial for the reelection of President Obama, in front of an audience estimated at 110 million people. But what is new is that within a day of the President’s State of the Union (SOTU) address, the Associated Press (AP) and The Washington Post were both out with detailed refutations of some of Obama’s signature claims—claims to do with the auto industry, the green energy industry, job creation, the size and scope of government under his term in office, Afghanistan, tax fairness, energy production, and relations with Israel.
During halftime of the Super Bowl was the much talked about two-minute Chrysler ad, with Clint Eastwood, calling it “halftime in America” and seeming to endorse a second Obama term, while suggesting the President was in the middle of a great accomplishment, namely saving America’s auto industry and with it the city of Detroit, Michigan.
Eastwood denied that he intended anything political with the ad, and it’s hard not to take Dirty Harry at his word. But the political overtones were clear, even to some of the giddiest of Obama’s allies in the media. For example, Frank Rich, formerly of The New York Times, currently with New York magazine, was on CNN the following night with Piers Morgan on his weekday show. Here was their take on the ad:
MORGAN: I mean, I don’t care what Chrysler says or Clint Eastwood, if you’re Barack Obama watching the Super Bowl, as I’m sure he was with his family yesterday, and up pops Clint Eastwood, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, highlighting one of your big success stories in this financial crisis, the successful bailing out of the car industry, and saying we’re halftime, America, well, the message is pretty clear, isn’t it? Give the guy another half.
RICH: Yes, I mean, for instance, one thing about this ad that’s just fascinating, is it has a “Morning in America” Reagan ad feel to it. It feels almost like a Reagan ad and yet you’re exactly right. It’s basically saying it was a good thing to bail out Detroit, and let’s not forget that Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee actually wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times saying “let Detroit fail. Let these companies go bankrupt.” And so you have Clint Eastwood, who isn’t at least normally a Republican and may well not have had any political motives, lending his incredible prestige and classic American voice and face to this Reaganesque message that’s in favor essentially of Democratic policies during this recession. It’s amazing.
MORGAN: I don’t know who they’re going to try—how they’re going to try and pretend this is not a political ad. And if it is, it really ratchets up this whole Obama-Hollywood thing. Most of the Hollywood stars I’ve been talking to appear to have gone a bit lukewarm with Barack Obama. But you can’t get better than Clint Eastwood, I don’t think.”
And what about Frank Rich’s statement about Mitt Romney’s op-ed in the Times—that Romney said, “let Detroit fail? Let these companies go bankrupt.” What Romney actually wrote in that piece for the Times was this:
“A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk…In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”
Yet Rich was repeating what Obama and others have said in characterizing Romney’s approach. The choice Obama made was a federal bailout of about $85 billion (including the $20 billion the Bush administration had offered as a bridge loan before he left office) in which for the first time, the secured bondholders, the people who had invested their dollars with the assurance that they were first in line should the company fail, got pushed to the back of the line, while the United Auto Workers came to own 55% of Chrysler, with no wage cuts.
But apparently Joe Klein of Time magazine didn’t see it the same way Frank Rich and Piers Morgan saw it—as a Democratic dream ad. Instead Klein cited Karl Rove, “the master Republican strategist,” as having been “offended” by the ad. Klein said that “any normal person watching this ad had to be thrilled—Eastwood’s voice, the rousing script, the fighting spirit: ‘This country can’t be knocked out with one punch we get right up again when we do the world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.’” Klein said that Rove saw the ad as “a Chicago style payback from Chrysler to Barack Obama for bailing out the company.”
Then Klein went off unhinged into a hyperbolic, left-wing rant saying that Rove lives in a world in which “Obama is the Antichrist…and maybe even, who knows, a secret Muslim immigrant.” At least Klein’s liberal brethren, Frank Rich and Piers Morgan, understood exactly what this ad was about, and they were in full agreement with Rove, though obviously from a different perspective.
Klein went on to peddle the same falsehood as Frank Rich—that Romney took the position that “Detroit should be allowed to fail.”
In the end, both Chrysler and GM went into and came out of bankruptcy only after the $85 billion bailout, with the U.S. government owning 61% of GM and the UAW pension fund owning 55% of Chrysler. The only way either can be considered profitable is by factoring in a $45 billion tax credit granted by the government, and still, the taxpayers are more than $23 billion in the hole.
The unknowable is how the companies would be doing if they had gone through managed bankruptcies, without setting unfortunate precedents related to secured bondholders and crony capitalism.
But that is far from the only falsehood or misrepresentation put forth by the Obama administration. Most are allowed to pass, and receive little examination by the media as to their accuracy.
A word or two on the so-called fact checkers. In December of last year The Weekly Standard ran an article called “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking.’” While pointing out that “Media fact checking endeavors have never been more popular and influential than they are now,” they argued that too often they represent a liberal ideological bias rather than “providing an impartial referee to help readers sort out acrimonious and hyperbolic political disputes.” Perhaps The Weekly Standard provided a service, pushing some of the fact checkers, like The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, the AP and Bloomberg, to become more objective.
Here are some examples from both the January SOTU and the February budget released by the President, as analyzed by these fact-checking services:
The Washington Post
From Glenn Kessler, the Post Fact Checker, on the State of the Union (SOTU) address:
OBAMA: “Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.”
KESSLER: “This is fanciful budget math. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were funded with borrowed money, so what Obama is really asking for is an increase in domestic spending relative to the Pentagon. The United States is still running huge deficits, so none of this imagined savings would “pay down the debt” until the United States once again began running surpluses. Instead, his proposal would continue to add to the debt.”
OBAMA: “Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not the message we get from leaders around the world, all of whom are eager to work with us. That’s not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin; from Cape Town to Rio; where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years.”
KESSLER: “Obama’s self-congratulatory tone aside, the most striking thing about this list is that it does not include any cities in the Islamic world. Obama had made a high-profile speech in Cairo in 2009 designed to bolster the U.S. image; judging by recent polling, his effort has been a failure. The Pew Research Center in May said that both the U.S. favorability rating and confidence in Obama had fallen sharply since 2009. In Turkey, a NATO ally, for instance, the confidence in Obama fell from 33 percent in 2009 to 11 percent in 2011; in Jordan, another key ally, the favorability rating for the United States fell from 25 percent in 2009 to 13 percent in 2011…The survey said that Obama’s handling of the political change spawned by the Arab Spring was a key factor in the slumping numbers.”
OBAMA: “Our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program.”
THE FACTS: “That’s only half true. About half of the more than 30 million uninsured Americans expected to gain coverage through the health care law will be enrolled in a government program. Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people, will be expanded starting in 2014 to cover childless adults living near the poverty line…The other half will be enrolled in private health plans through new state-based insurance markets. But many of them will be receiving federal subsidies to make their premiums more affordable. And that’s a government program, too.”
OBAMA: “The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.”
THE FACTS: “Obama is more sanguine about progress in Afghanistan than his own intelligence apparatus. The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan warns that the Taliban will grow stronger, using fledgling talks with the U.S. to gain credibility and stall until U.S. troops leave, while continuing to fight for more territory. The classified assessment, described to The AP by officials who have seen it, says the Afghan government hasn’t been able to establish credibility with its people, and predicts the Taliban and warlords will largely control the countryside.”
BUDGET: “It counts on phantom savings [about $850 billion] from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s underpinned by tax increases Republicans won’t let happen and program cuts fellow Democrats in Congress are all but certain to block…And it assumes rates of growth that the economy will have to become strikingly undead to achieve.”
REALITY: “There is no direct peace dividend from ending the wars because the government borrowed to pay for them. The government would have to keep borrowing that amount of money to have it to spend on something else.”
BUDGET: “Forecasts healthy growth in years ahead, with GDP growth predicted to reach 4 percent in 2014 and 4.2 percent in 2015.”
REALITY: “It’s obviously too soon to know, but reputable private forecasts are not nearly as rosy as the administration’s assumptions, and their track record tends to be better. They are generally forecasting a percentage point lower or close to that, a huge difference, and don’t see reaching 4 percent growth in the foreseeable future…Last year, the administration built its proposed budget on a projection of 2.7 percent growth in 2011; it turned out to be 1.7 …Such projections are key because the government’s spending and debt plans rest on how much revenue can be expected to come in.”
Investor’s Business Daily—Fairness (SOTU):
OBAMA: “We need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes.”
IBD: “The claim that the rich don’t pay their fair share is simply untrue. The current tax code is extremely progressive, more progressive in fact than it was back in 1979, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the richest 1% today accounts for 36% of all income taxes paid, while nearly half of taxpayers owe nothing at all, or get cash back. If that isn’t fair, Obama owes it to the country to describe just what sort of distribution would be fair.”
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in early February that the unemployment rate had fallen to 8.3%, that was great news, right? But the report showed that in that same month, a record 1.2 million Americans left the labor force. And according to an article in SmartMoney.com last December, “the real unemployment figure including all discouraged workers who stopped looking for work is closer to a staggering 22.6%.”
The Washington Times
(From an article titled “Obama’s Made Up Jobless Numbers,” by Joseph Curl:)
When the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent in December, the Financial Times wasn’t convinced. “According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11%.”
Curl argues that the BLS has been “busy rewriting the rules” for counting the unemployed, presumably to make sure that come election time, the official unemployment rate will be 8% or less, allowing Obama to hit his mark.
These are just a few of many examples of phony and misleading claims by the White House that are beginning to be challenged by the mainstream media, but which still are not getting nearly the attention they deserve. Fact checking should be a process reflected in every article or story. The problem is that these stories don’t have any traction in the broadcast media, and thus, are largely ignored.•
Roger Aronoff is the Editor of AIM.
Dear Fellow Media Watchdogs:
AIM returned to CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, from February 9-11. As we’ve done for the past several years, we presented the annual Reed Irvine Awards, one for investigative journalism to CBS’s intrepid investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, and one for grassroots journalism to Dana Loesch, a blogger turned Tea Party activist who is now the Editor-in-Chief of Andrew Breitbart’s BigJournalism website.
We received a lot of attention from articles in The Washington Post, Politico, Big Journalism and other sites when the far-left, George Soros-funded Media Matters for America attempted to browbeat CBS News into rejecting the award for Ms. Attkisson. Though it turned out that she was unable to attend because of an assignment, they did send the Washington bureau chief of CBS News, Chris Isham, who graciously accepted the award on her behalf.
Then, on Sunday, February 12, The Daily Caller (DC), co-founded by Tucker Carlson, last year’s winner of the Reed Irvine Award for grassroots journalism, broke part one of an explosive series about Media Matters. They reported that “Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. [David] Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by The DC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.”
And that was just the beginning. Memos discussed plans to hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News personnel, and others in the conservative movement. A source told The DC that Media Matters staff “were pretty much writing their prime time” talking points for the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff,” they bragged. There were also reports of erratic behavior by the group’s founder, one-time conservative journalist David Brock.
AIM also gave a Reed Irvine Lifetime Achievement Award to Capt. Charles Rozier (USN Ret.), who still volunteers as head of the Speakers Bureau at AIM at age 91, after 15 years. Charlie is a veteran of D-Day, the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and was the Captain of the ship that raised the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine during the Cuban missile crisis. Contact him if you need a speaker•
For Accuracy in Media
Roger Aronoff
Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org.
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
Patrick J. Buchanan, who has been a major figure in the conservative movement for over 40 years, was fired from MSNBC after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) concluded in Washington, D.C. Buchanan was not a featured speaker at CPAC, but his former colleague, Joe Scarborough, was. Scarborough, the co-host of a little-watched MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” is a former Republican congressman who pleases the liberals by making sure he doesn’t sound too conservative on the air. He takes shots at conservatives to make himself palatable to the left.
Many were astounded that Scarborough was the emcee of a major CPAC event. Scarborough’s real mission was to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin at a banquet sponsored by Newsmax but he couldn’t resist taking shots at GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, such as saying something about a moon base, one of Gingrich’s more controversial proposals. Gingrich, of course, wasn’t there to defend himself; he spoke to this CPAC on another occasion. Conservatives at my table agreed that Scarborough’s cheap shots at Gingrich were in bad taste. I felt bad for Ryan being introduced in such a tawdry manner.
In order to rub salt in the wounds, Scarborough brought along his liberal MSNBC sidekick Mika Brzezinski, who sat at one of the up-front banquet tables. She posed for pictures with a number of young conservatives who must have thought she was a Hollywood starlet of some kind. For his part, Scarborough has posted photos of himself at CPAC, under the title, “Morning Joe Invades CPAC.” The use of the term “invasion” is the correct one. They invaded the conservative space.
All of this is background information for what has happened to Buchanan and his place in the conservative movement. It’s bad enough that he was fired from MSNBC. In fact, he had been “suspended” weeks before the firing became official. While Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative was at CPAC, Buchanan was not.
Buchanan seems to be considered anathema by some newcomers to the conservative movement, mostly because of his criticism of America’s foreign wars and pro-Israel foreign policy under George W. Bush. One can criticize those stands and his occasional use of inappropriate language on sensitive issues while acknowledging Buchanan’s stature and place in the conservative movement.
An editorial writer at a young age who was trained in journalism, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. politics. He has written a number of books, some more controversial than others, as a look at the top of his website will attest. He crossed into government service by working for Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and later ran for president himself. At Reagan’s service, Buchanan was a fierce advocate for freedom against communism.
I first met Buchanan while working for Accuracy in Media. AIM founder Reed Irvine admired and respected Buchanan. This was the norm among conservatives who recognized Buchanan as a fighter against liberals in the media and elsewhere. Buchanan asked me to write an article for his newsletter, “Patrick J. Buchanan From the Right,” about the rise of conservative talk radio. I had hosted a radio show in the early 1990s.
While Buchanan was in the Reagan White House as communications director in the 1980s, I had the opportunity to fill in as the conservative co-host of a then-popular CNN program, “Crossfire.” Buchanan had been the conservative co-host and Tom Braden was the liberal co-host. The “crossfire” aspect also included the fact that there were conservative and liberal guests who sat in the middle, getting questions from both sides. I joked that the slogan of the program was, “Don’t talk while I’m interrupting.” I got into trouble with the producers when I asked the Ambassador from Libya to “please shut up” after he insisted at length that Libya was not involved in international terrorism. Nevertheless, the show had a lot of educational value and was great fun. It was advocacy journalism at its best.
The days of “Crossfire” are gone. The show was cancelled and a true “crossfire” on the issues is not permitted any more by some important media organizations which cower in fear when attacked by the left. It is significant that Buchanan has been forced off the air essentially by the same left-wing forces that previously claimed the scalp of Glenn Beck, who departed from Fox News because of his scrutiny of anti-American hedge fund billionaire George Soros. In both cases, the Soros-funded Media Matters and the Van Jones-founded Color of Change played roles in their ouster.
On his Politico blog, Scarborough issued a joint statement with Brzezinski: “Everyone at Morning Joe considers Pat Buchanan to be a friend and a member of the family. Even though we strongly disagree with the contents of Pat’s latest book, Mika and I believe those differences should have been debated in public. An open dialogue with Morning Joe regulars like Al Sharpton and Harold Ford, Jr. could have developed into an important debate on the future of race relations in America. Because we believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Mika and I strongly disagree with this outcome. We understand that the parting was amicable. Still, we will miss Pat.”
Amicable? I see no evidence of that. Buchanan told Sean Hannity on his Fox News program that he had been the victim of an un-American blacklisting for his views on racial matters, as expressed in his new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
It is significant that black agitator Al Sharpton, who made false racial allegations against white police officers in the notorious Tawana Brawley case, continues on the air on MSNBC while Buchanan has been let go. This has everything to do with the fact that Sharpton, a “Morning Joe” regular, is a loyal stooge of Obama and a faithful Democrat. It seems he will remain a member of the MSNBC “family” no matter what he says or does.
But to speak up for the interests of what Buchanan would call European-Americans, in terms of defending the Christian foundations of the U.S., is a grievous sin to the liberals. This is what the blacklisting of Buchanan really means. It is telling that Scarborough apparently felt compelled to denounce Buchanan’s views while lamenting his leaving the MSNBC “family.”
Another difference is that the buffoonish Sharpton has the intellectual depth of a saucer, while Buchanan has a deep knowledge of history. Buchanan has the intellectual ammunition to argue and win his arguments. Taking Buchanan to task for some of his comments should not mean conservatives have to fall into the trap of reading him out of the media and the conservative movement.
Conservatives should be able to disagree with his views and conclusions, without using the language of the left to vilify him.
It is disappointing to see Andrew Breitbart’s usually excellent BigJournalism.com linking to an article that calls Buchanan an anti-Semite. The link was to a Pajamas Media article claiming Buchanan was fired for the wrong reason, implying that he should have been fired for a different reason. But firing is not the proper response for someone who was writing conservative editorials at an early age and taking on the liberal media when the writers at Pajamas Media were truly in their pajamas—and diapers. It seems like the Media Matters mentality exists on the right as well.
Sean Hannity is to be commended for giving Buchanan a chance on his Fox News program to defend himself and explain the reasons why he was fired. The trouble for Hannity is that Buchanan followed Glenn Beck out the door, as a result of the same kind of campaign waged by the same forces.
To be fair, Hannity should not condemn one ouster without examining the other. However, we know that he would be risking his job if he seriously investigated on the air why Fox buckled under to pressure from George Soros by getting rid of Beck. This story goes beyond political pressure to threats against Glenn Beck’s personnel, as we have already revealed and documented. The situation at Fox News, which hired feminist commentators Jehmu Greene and Sally Kohn to keep Media Matters at bay, is actually much worse than the sacking of Buchanan.
The bleak media landscape, as the presidential campaign goes forward, shows Fox News moving to the left and MSNBC moving further to the left.
Some viewers have objected to the cancellation of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show on the Fox Business Network. These complaints should be taken seriously. But his program never had the high ratings that Beck’s show did on the Fox News Channel. What’s more, Napolitano is not completely gone from the channel; he remains as a commentator on Fox News.
As for Joe Scarborough, he realizes that if he goes too far to the right he will meet the same fate as Buchanan. CPAC should repel his “invasion” the next time he tries to breach the gates. A serious conservative when he was elected to Congress, I worked with his staff on a bill to get the U.S. out of the United Nations. But today he is just a “token conservative” who isn’t that conservative at a cable channel that doesn’t believe in free speech and true diversity.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
NoisyRoom
By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and this is not a Constitutional Republic anymore. It is now a dictatorship. Whoops! Already accomplished. Then imagine that you wake up tomorrow and the President and our elites have given away part of the US. Then imagine it was your state and your state and Senators weren’t even consulted on it. In fact the deal was conducted in secret. Well, the nightmare is alive and well and being finalized for Alaska. But, before you go cursing ONLY Obama (as I do every damn chance I get), you better have a really hard look at Progressives on both sides of the aisle. This monstrous act of treason started under Bush Senior in 1990 and was ratified by our Senate in 1991. The only thing holding it back was that Russia had not signed the treaty. Obama is now looking to finish the diabolical deal.
From Drink Your Kool Aid:
On June 1, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker signed a secret executive agreement with Eduard Shevardnadze, the former U.S.S.R. foreign minister. It specified that even though the treaty had not been ratified, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. agreed to abide by the terms of the treaty beginning June 15, 1990. The Senate ratified the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Maritime Boundary Treaty in 1991, which was then signed by President George Bush.
I can hear you saying that this is only about some tiny little islands and that they are closer to Russia than the US – why should we care? These islands are not tiny. And the true issue here is that they have a wealth of oil and resources on and around them. That’s the big deal. Plus, they’re ours – not Russia’s.
Why now, when this treaty has languished for 22 years? Well… Why not? It accomplishes a number of things for Obama. It takes a slap at the conservative state of Alaska and attempts to put her high-profile residents such as Sarah Palin and Joe Miller in their collective places. It caves to one of our biggest enemies, Russia, and weakens the US even more in their eyes. It gives precious energy resources away for nothing, thereby ensuring that energy prices will skyrocket even more in the US when that energy is needed. And who knows what other nefarious goals the deed accomplishes. Progressives are always figuring an angle and it never benefits US citizens – just the elite and powerful.
From WND:
Part of Obama’s apparent war against U.S. energy independence includes a foreign-aid program that directly threatens my state’s sovereign territory. Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. Yes, to the Putin regime in the Kremlin.
The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Russians are also to get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabeds surrounding the islands. The Department of Interior estimates billions of barrels of oil are at stake.
More:
The State Department has undertaken the giveaway in the guise of a maritime boundary agreement between Alaska and Siberia. Astoundingly, our federal government itself drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side. But as an executive agreement, it could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by President Obama or Secretary Clinton.
The agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the public given any opportunity for comment. This is despite the fact the Alaska Legislature has passed resolutions of opposition – but the State Department doesn’t seem to care.
In May of 1881, US explorers spotted the Jeannette and Henrietta Islands and claimed them for the United States. According to numerous sources, including the group State Department Watch, seven Arctic islands currently controlled by Russia are claimed by the United States. However, according to the United States Department of State, no such claim exists. The USSR/USA Maritime Boundary Treaty, which has yet to be approved by the Russian Duma, does not address the status of these islands nor the maritime boundaries associated with them. And of course, the Russians are claiming them for their own. The fight over Alaskan land has been going on since the 1800s and the Russians are claiming and taking any land anywhere they can find it that has oil or gas.
The Obama Administration is reportedly giving away Wrangell, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta islands in Alaska to Russia. They are getting ready to finalize the deal. The federal government drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side with no input from Alaska, her leaders or her residents. How is that Constitutional? And don’t cite the Treaty Clause to me. This oversteps the bounds of that section by a wide margin. Thus the need for secrecy and no transparency on the deal. The founding fathers never envisioned a sitting President and the State Department just giving away American sovereign land.
And as far as a milquetoast, spineless Senate is concerned – every one of them that ratified this in 1991 that is still in office should be shown the door that leads to a rail out of town with a spiffy new coat of tar and feathers. This treaty makes an excellent argument for abolishing the 17th Amendment and returning to the true Constitutional principle in which senators were elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote. This is what you get when you bastardize and supersede Article I, § 3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution.
Who the hell do these people think they are? I’ll tell you… They truly believe they are the elite and that they are above your station – you are the riffraff, the serfs that only exist to serve them. They are royalty and their moniker is Progressive. They are the ruling class and the truly, obscenely wealthy and powerful. For too long we have let them rule as they see fit rather than by the will of the people. Obama is just the culmination of decades of inattention to the evil infiltrating our government’s halls. Time to send them all packing.
The powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, [such] as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.
James Madison – The Federalist
That’s who they think they are; your King, your Lords, your Nobility. They don’t care what happened in 1787, they still think they own you.
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
Fareed Zakaria of CNN has written a column for The Washington Post that serves as an excuse for letting Iran develop and acquire nuclear weapons. MJ Rosenberg, Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network and contributor to Al-Jazeera, was absolutely ecstatic, saying Zakaria had done “a terrific job destroying some arguments for war with Iran,” and that he had done so by “citing history.” But Zakaria’s “history lesson” gets an “F.”
Touting the theory of mutually assured destruction, which prevented the U.S. and the Soviet Union from annihilating one another with nuclear weapons, Zakaria suggested that Iran could be deterred from using nuclear weapons. He quoted Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, as saying that deterrence “is less disastrous than preventive war.” Rose is a former National Security Council official in the Clinton Administration and a prominent official of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Zakaria said that “While the Iranian regime is often called crazy, it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime such as Mao’s China. Over the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide bombings by Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a single suicide attack by an Iranian.”
This is deceptive to the point of dishonesty. Why would he go back in history to the time of Mao’s China, but only examine suicide bombings over the last ten years?
The answer is that the facts about Iranian suicide bombings do suggest a craziness on the part of the regime. The strange formulation of “over the past decade” enabled him to ignore the fact that, on October 23, 1983, Iran ordered and carried out the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American military personnel. An Iranian drove the car bomb into the barracks.
I attended and covered the 2003 trial in which the detailed evidence of the Iranian role in this bombing was presented in detail.
As I reported for AIM at the time, the trial involved a case brought against Iran by attorneys Steven Perles and Thomas Fortune Fay on behalf of the families of the Marines who were killed. Under a U.S. law passed in 1996, victims of terrorism can sue state sponsors of terrorism and collect damages from the assets that the terrorist regime may hold in the U.S.
The trial featured a videotaped deposition of a former terrorist insider named “Mahmoud,” who described in detail how Iran ordered the terrorists to attack the U.S. Marines and French troops in Lebanon, and revealed that the driver of the truck carrying the bomb was himself an Iranian.
In a videotaped deposition, former CIA officer Robert Baer testified that there was no doubt, based on the best intelligence information, that Iran was behind it. Baer said this bombing, and a previous bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, were “acts of war.”
Dr. Reuven Paz of Israel testified via videotape that before the Marine barracks bombing Israel had intercepted a message from the government of Iran to its Ambassador in Syria, calling for military attacks on the foreign forces in Lebanon, including the Americans. Paz, who worked for the Israeli security service known as Shin Bet, said the intercepted message was provided to the CIA.
Admiral James Lyons, who was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations at the time, testified that he received a copy of the message, which described the need for a “spectacular action” against the Marines. But he received the message two days after the bombing.
Sergeant Steve Russell, who was guarding the embassy on that fateful day, said he had been warned about a possible car bombing of the barracks literally hours before it happened. He warned others, and stayed alert. But, as a “peacekeeper” under restrictive rules of engagement, he carried an unloaded gun and the compound was surrounded only by concertina wire. The car bomber drove through all of this into the barracks.
This evidence was accepted by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who found Iran liable for billions of dollars in damages.
Not only did Zakara ignore all of this, he stated previously, in a Newsweek article, that “Iranians aren’t suicidal.” This seems to be a common theme of his, in order to justify a do-nothing approach to the Iranians developing nuclear weapons. He wants us to believe that the regime can be rational and calm.
Ironically, the article carried the title, “Everything You Know About Iran Is Wrong.”
The author of The Post-American World, Zakaria seems eager to usher in this state of affairs by permitting the rise of dangerous regimes such as Iran with nuclear capability. Interestingly, Obama was photographed in 2008 carrying a copy of Zakaria’s book.
Frighteningly, his bio promotes Zakaria as “the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation” and one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010. Not surprisingly, he addresses hedge fund billionaire George Soros, funder of Media Matters and other left-wing causes, on a first name basis as “George.”
In a February 2011 interview that covered Iran and other issues, Zakaria asked Soros about the survival of the Iranian regime, which was being challenged by pro-democracy demonstrators. Soros said he was “convinced that the regime will not survive.”
Zakaria asked if the U.S. could do anything to challenge the regime internally. Soros replied, “I think Obama did actually there also a very good job by refusing to get involved and to be instigating regime change. This—this attempt to impose a regime change from the outside is counterproductive, because then the regime can accuse its opponents as being in the pay of a—of a foreign power, right?”
Zakaria replied: “Right.”
Not only has the regime survived, but there are numerous reports that Iran is preparing to use suicide-bomb boats to disrupt shipping in the Gulf.
However, Zakaria assures us that the Iranians are not crazy and don’t engage in such things—at least over the last decade.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
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