Category Archives: News

DHS whistleblower was ordered to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties

Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

This is from The Hill.

Full text:

Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.

Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.

After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.

Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.”  Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.

A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially beforean attack occurs.

As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).

It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.

Has the Obama administration done a good job of preventing terrorist attacks? Does his attitude of blaming America deter terrorist attacks, or does it embolden radical Islamists to perform more attacks?

The Daily Caller lists 7 terrorist attacks that occurred during the 7 years of the Obama presidency, as of July 2015.

Here is one:

In November 2009, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire in an attack at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Hassan killed 13 people and wounded over 30 more.

In a document dated Oct. 18, 2012 obtained by Fox News, Hasan wrote: “I, Nidal Malik Hasan, am compelled to renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend man made constitution (like the constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”

The U.S. government has steadfastly refused to call Hasan’s militant slaughter a terrorist attack. Instead, federal officials have repeatedly characterized Hasan’s actions as “workplace violence.”

A U.S. military court sentenced Hasan, a military psychiatrist, to death in 2013.

And another:

In April 2013, Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev exploded two pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The bombings killed three people including an eight-year-old boy. Hundreds of runners and spectators were seriously injured. Seventeen people saw their limbs blown off.

Three days later, the brothers ambushed and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died when his brother ran over him with a stolen Mercedes SUV in the midst of a shootout with police. In April, a jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of 30 criminal counts. He later received the death penalty.

There is a plan to protect us from these sorts of activities, and it was recently announced by Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

The Daily Wire reports:

Speaking to the audience at the Muslim Advocates’ 10th anniversary dinner Thursday, Lynch said her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech.

“The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence,” she said.

[…]After touting the numbers of “investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred” and “bigoted actions” against Muslims launched by her DOJ, Lynch suggested the Constitution does not protect “actions predicated on violent talk” and pledged to prosecute those responsible for such actions.

This is the same woman who declined to charge Lois Lerner for using the IRS as a weapon to persecute conservative groups in an election year.

Do you feel safe now? Do you think that the Democrats are serious about the threat of Islamic terrorism? Do you think that you should elect the Democrats again in November 2016?

Does Bernie Sanders know a lot about business, finance and economics?

Democrats took control of government spending in 2007
Democrats took control of government spending in 2007

This article from Investors Business Daily takes a look at his record and experience in the areas that are relevant to economic growth.

It says:

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Monday his parents would never have thought their son would end up in the Senate and running for president.

[…]He explained his family couldn’t imagine his “success,” because “my brother and I and Mom and Dad grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and we never had a whole lot of money.”

It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.

“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

This is the man that so many Democrats want to put in charge of our economic policy. He’s never run a damned thing in his entire life, but his words sound nice if you have no understanding of how the world works. Besides, doesn’t a person’s good intentions automatically mean that he will achieve good results? He doesn’t have to know anything if his heart is in the right place, does he?

Here’s an article from the Washington Free Beacon that talks about a non-partisan study from the Tax Foundation think tank, which analyzes Sanders’ plans for the US economy.

Excerpt:

Bernie Sanders proposed tax plan would raise taxes by $13.6 trillion over the next decade and reduce the economy’s size by 9.5 percent, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.

[…]After accounting for reductions in economic growth, Sanders’ plan would lead to 12.84 percent lower after-tax incomes for all taxpayers, 6 million fewer full-time jobs, and an 18.6 percent smaller capital stock.

That’s who just won the Democrat primary in the Live-Free-Or-Die state of New Hampshire on Tuesday night. They used to want freedom in New Hampshire, now they just want free stuff. Free stuff that their neighbor has to pay for. Or maybe their neighbor’s children.

The problem with all these new taxes ($13.6 trillion) is that you can’t get that money from ONLY “the wealthy”. Although ignorant college kids may think that you can get $13.6 in tax revenue from the rich, the truth is that the so-called 1% don’t make that much money.

Let’s say that $13.6 trillion is $1.36 trillion per year.

John Stossel explains why you can’t make $1.36 trillion per year from taxing the rich:

Progressives say, if you’re so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! There are lots of rich people around, squandering money. On my show, David Callahan of the group Demos put it this way: “Wealthy Americans who have done so well in the past decade should help get us out.”

But it’s a fantasy to imagine that raising taxes on the rich will solve our deficit problem. If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion.

[…]My $616 billion assumption above is absurd. Rich people wouldn’t work if government takes all their earnings.

Progressives claim an increase in tax rates won’t stop producers from producing. But they presumably understand that people don’t work for free. When the top marginal rate was 90 percent, actor Ronald Reagan worked just half the year. As soon as he made enough money such that every additional dollar was taxed at 90 percent, he stopped working and went off to ride horses. Reagan later said that woke him up to the damage that high taxes impose.

Maryland created a special “tax on the rich” that legislators said would bring in $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million. Some of Maryland’s rich just left the state. When New York state hiked its income tax on millionaires, billionaire Tom Golisano moved to Florida, which has no personal income tax. “[M]y personal income tax last year would’ve been $13,800 a day,” he told us. “Would you like to write a check for $13,800 a day to a state government, as opposed to moving to another state?”

That $13.6 trillion in taxes cannot come from the rich – they will stop producing, or more likely move their production to another country with more reasonable taxes. (Canada’s corporate tax rate is 15% – less than half our 36% corporate tax rate). The tax money Bernie wants is going to have to come out of the pockets of middle-class families, small businesses and other job creators.

Now think, Democrats: how well can your employer afford to employ you if they have to pay much higher taxes? They can’t, and you won’t have a job. Everything doesn’t stay the same when you make these changes to go in a socialist direction. People react to the changes. We have to think beyond stage one. What comes next, for ALL the people who are impacted by the change?

Bush, Rubio and Christie spent $70 million in NH – Cruz beat them and spent $580 thousand

NH primary results early Wednesday morning with 95% counted
NH primary results early Wednesday morning with 95% counted

(Source: Fox News)

According to this tweet from the Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes, here are the totals of combined candidate/Super PAC spending in the New Hampshire primary:

  • $36 Million Jeb Bush
  • $18.5 Million Chris Christie
  • $15.2 Million Marco Rubio
  • $12.1 Million John Kasich
  • $3.7 Million Donald Trump
  • $1.8 Million Carly Fiorina
  • $580 Thousand Ted Cruz

Here are the results of the election with 95% counted:

  • Trump 94,821 (35%)
  • Kasich 42,699 (16%)
  • Cruz 31,425 (12%)
  • Bush 29,851 (11%)
  • Rubio 28,353 (11%)
  • Christie 20,152 (7%)
  • Fiorina 11,248 (4%)

And this is how much each candidate spent per vote:

  • Bush: $1206 per vote
  • Christie: $918 per vote
  • Rubio: $536 per vote
  • Kasich: $283 per vote
  • Fiorina: $160 per vote
  • Trump: $39 per vote
  • Cruz: $18 per vote

Here are the most recent “cash on hand” numbers for the campaigns:

Cash on Hand (12/31/2015)

  1. Ted Cruz $18,734,794.46
  2. Marco Rubio $10,398,592.91
  3. Jeb Bush $7,589,858.03
  4. Donald Trump $6,964,324.88
  5. Ben Carson $6,567,647.25
  6. Carly Fiorina $4,484,307.21
  7. John Kasich $2,537,300.60
  8. Chris Christie $1,126,158.09

Cruz is backed primarily by individual small donors.

So what does it mean?

It means that you can tell a lot about a candidate from the way they spend money that is entrusted to them. You can tell a lot about a candidate by how much they can get done with the least possible expense. These are useful skills.

Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

Ted Cruz’s record of conservative achievements

Ted Cruz is also the most qualified candidate running.

Young Conservatives explains his achievements:

  • Graduated valedictorian in 1988 from Second Baptist High School
  • Graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1992
  • Graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1995
  • 1992 U.S. National Debate Champion representing Princeton
  • 1995 World Debating Championship semi-finalist representing Harvard
  • Served a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, making him the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States
  • Served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008, making him the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas, the youngest Solicitor General in the entire country and the longest tenure in Texas history
  • Partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice
  • Authored over 80 SCOTUS briefs and presented over 40 oral arguments before The Court
  • Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation

Smart guy.

Here are the specifically conservative achievements:

  • In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz assembled a coalition of 31 states in defense of the principle that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms
  • Presented oral arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
  • Defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,
  • Defended the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools
  • Defended the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States

He’s 5 for 9 arguing cases before the Supreme Court. Cruz knows how to convince liberal scholars to come over to his side. That’s what he enjoys – persuading people who disagree with him.

Here’s some of the legislation he introduced:

  • ObamaCare Repeal Act
  • Disarm Criminals and Protect Communities Act
  • Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
  • A bill to amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to permit States to require proof of citizenship for registration to vote in elections for Federal office
  • State Marriage Defense Act of 2014
  • A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit the intentional discrimination of a person or organization by an employee of the Internal Revenue Service
  • A bill to prohibit the Department of the Treasury from assigning tax statuses to organizations based on their political beliefs and activities
  • American Energy Renaissance Act of 2014
  • A bill to deny admission to the United States to any representative to the United Nations who has been found to have been engaged in espionage activities or a terrorist activity against the United States and poses a threat to United States national security interests
  • SuperPAC Elimination Act of 2014
  • Free All Speech Act of 2014
  • A bill to prevent the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program unlawfully created by Executive memorandum on August 15, 2012
  • Sanction Iran, Safeguard America Act of 2014

And he has gotten more legislation passed than Marco Rubio in the Senate:

Laws enacted per year in Congress
Laws enacted per year in Congress

He has done something to address so many of the things I’ve been writing about on this blog – voter fraud, IRS discriminating against conservatives, etc. I am a Cruz supporter because I like Cruz, not because I oppose Trump and Rubio.