Category Archives: News

Obama administration sent $400 million cash ransom to Iran for hostage release

Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people and our allies?

Why do civilized countries have a policy of not paying ransom to terrorists for hostages? Because if you pay them once, then it emboldens them to kidnap again and again. Anyone who knows anything about national security and foreign policy knows this: we do not negotiate with terrorists.

But what happens if you elect a drugged-up community organizer who never released his college grades to be the first “affirmative action President”?

The Wall Street Journal explains:

The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

[…]“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

[…]Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense officials describing the cash as a ransom payment. The Iranian foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

[…]Since the cash shipment, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. Tehran has also detained dual-nationals from France, Canada and the U.K. in recent months.

[…]The Obama administration has refused to disclose how it paid any of the $1.7 billion, despite congressional queries, outside of saying that it wasn’t paid in dollars. Lawmakers have expressed concern that the cash would be used by Iran to fund regional allies, including the Assad regime in Syria and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization.

[…]Iran has acknowledged providing both financial and military aid to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and deploying Iranian soldiers there.

Of course. Because appeasement of tyrants emboldens tyrants to be more aggressive. Anyone with the basic moral sense of a functioning adult knows this.

Republicans called the entire $1.7 billion Iran deal a ransom for hostages:

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Barack Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”

“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.

[…]Members of Congress are seeking to pass legislation preventing the Obama administration from making any further cash payments to Iran. One of the bills requires for the White House to make public the details of its $1.7 billion transfer to Iran.

“President Obama’s…payment to Iran in January, which we now know will fund Iran’s military expansion, is an appalling example of executive branch governance,” said Sen.James Lankford (R., Okla.), who co-wrote the bill. “Subsidizing Iran’s military is perhaps the worst use of taxpayer dollars ever by an American president.”

Republicans are trying to get answers, but the Democrats are hiding everything – just like they did with the gun-running to Mexican drug cartels, the unsecure Hillary e-mail server, the Benghazi cover-up, the IRS persecution of conservatives, and so on.

The Washington Free Beacon explains:

“It has been seven months since President Obama announced that he was giving the Islamic Republic of Iran almost $2 billion,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Free Beacon on Wednesday.  “And we are just now finding out damning details about how $400 million, which is less than half of the total, was sent to Iran using foreign aircraft and foreign currencies.”

Pompeo led several unsuccessful inquiries into the cash payout. He said the administration has been stonewalling efforts to obtain a full readout of the exchange in both classified and unclassified settings since January.

[…]“That is far too long of a timeline, especially as it is in the face of the Obama administration totally stonewalling congressional inquiries into this matter since January,” Pompeo said.

None of this is surprising, given Obama’s other anti-American actions. We’ve already seen Obama release dozens of known Islamic terrorists who were captured on the battlefield – many of whom returned to battlefield to kill more Americans and innocent civilians.

Obama spokesman admits that the money is being given to a nation that supports terrorists:

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during Wednesday’s press briefing it is possible the $400 million that the Obama administration airlifted to Iran could have been spent on funding terrorism.

“The president was quite forward-leaning in advance of the nuclear deal even being completed in acknowledging that we know that Iran supports terrorism,” Earnest said. “We know that Iran supports Hezbollah and the Assad regime, and it is certainly possible that some of the money that Iran has is being used for those purposes, too.”

What does Obama care? It’s not his money, it’s your money. Pass the selfie stick and the golf clubs.

New leaked documents reveal IRS discriminated against conservative groups

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Staff at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., buried conservative groups’ tax exemption applications beginning in 2010 and lasting through President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, according todocuments released this week by Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group.

The group released 105 pages of FBI documents, which included interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees who disclosed that applications by Tea Party groups were automatically denied approval and assigned to a special group until they heard from the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The FBI’s 302 interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees reveal that the agency adopted a series of policies assuring that Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election,” according to a statement from Judicial Watch.

[…]Additionally, the IRS began a “BOLO” or “Be On the Lookout” list in 2010, adding Tea Party groups to that list in July or August 2010.

The IRS had a bucketing system, which determined whether applications were quickly approved or would be delayed. If an application was put into the “merit close” bucket, it meant the application met all criteria and was approved quickly.

According to the documents, IRS officials directed that no one on the BOLO list, which included Tea Party applications, could be put in the merit close bucket. This means that Tea Party applications would never be quickly approved.

“The BOLO was used as a tool for the screeners/classifiers and all revenue agents were expected to know what was on the list,” the documents read. “If an item was on the BOLO list, then that case could not be merit closed by the screeners/classifiers.”

[…]“IRS officials described for the FBI unlawful and purposeful bureaucratic delays orchestrated by top IRS officials in Washington, D.C.,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “One IRS official details how concerns about the Obama IRS targeting of conservatives were ignored. We hope a future Justice Department follows up on this information in a renewed criminal investigation.”

More documents obtained by Judicial Watch revealed that Justice Department attorney Barbara Bosserman, who investigated the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups, is an Obama campaign and Democratic Party donor.

Bosserman donated $6,750 to Obama campaigns and the Democratic National Committee from 2004 to 2012.

“Is it any surprise that this compromised investigation found no reason to prosecute anyone in the Obama IRS scandal?” said Fitton.

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Naturally, the corrupt Obama administration – the most corrupt and deceptive administration in United States history – declined to prosecute anyone in the IRS. Because this is government working as designed – where is the defect? It would only be a defect if the IRS discriminated against gay rights groups or abortion groups or black supremacist groups or groups that promote voter fraud or eco-terrorism groups.

Here is True the Vote’s CEO’s testimony at the House of Representative’s investigation of the IRS:

At the end of the investigation, the corrupt DOJ declined to press charges. Because Obama doesn’t charge Obama.

I just want to say that during the GOP primary, we had two choices. Ted Cruz would have abolished the IRS and reduced the process of filing taxes to filing out a one-page form. Tax rates would have gone down, and government spending would have been curtailed by abolishing several other departments of the federal government.

Here he is talking about the plan with Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

Donald Trump, the Democrat clown, was all in favor of keeping the IRS, and probably was not even aware of the IRS discrimination scandal. We had a choice. We chose the adulterous clown who inherited money from his sugar Daddy.

People who thought that the IRS was a problem to be solved voted for Ted Cruz, and people who thought that the IRS was doing a good job and didn’t need any reform, voted for Donald Trump the adulterous, pro-abortion Democrat.

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Doug Axe on the burden of proof on the Darwinian evolutionist

Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed

An article on what it takes to prove Darwinian evolution, authored by Doug Axe, and posted at The Stream.

It says:

According to Darwin, evolution invents remarkable things like wings and eyes and brains bit by tiny bit — one little change at a time. That part of his idea might sound reasonable to us because we build things bit by bit as well. Essays are composed one letter at a time. Software code is written one instruction at a time. Buildings go up one brick at a time.

But Darwin’s theory runs into trouble when we consider our own inventive activities more closely. Whether essays or software or buildings, we never start a project without having thought about the objective. We always have a plan in mind, and while this plan may be revised as we work, we’re always working toward something. These plans of ours enable us to evaluate our work all along the way. Are we making good progress? If the answer is yes — judged with respect to the plan — then we’re motivated to double or efforts in anticipation of seeing the fruit of our labors. In this way we invest in our creations — pouring into them with the hope of future benefit.

Darwin’s blind evolutionary process has no way to do this. It has no ability to plan or to hope. Natural selection can’t labor in anticipation of future benefit. Instead, it goes with whatever works best now. The patience and foresight and insight we know to be absolutely essential for invention are completely absent from evolution. If things can’t be improved immediately, then they won’t be improved at all. We can dream up fanciful stories where amazing things happen though little Darwinian improvements, but the sober reality is that they are nothing more than that: fanciful stories.

Charles Darwin, to his credit, recognized the problem long before we had discovered DNA and long before mathematicians had crunched the numbers. It’s the key problem he set out to solve. His solution: These biological novelties arose one tiny random variation at a time, with natural selection tending to seize and pass on the useful variations so that they accumulate over thousands and millions of generations until something as blingy as the eye could emerge.

But Darwin’s solution comes at a price. The Darwinian pathway must proceed by a series of tiny, functional variations. Each new step needs to be functional. The Darwinian process can’t look ahead and say, “Hey, this variation doesn’t help Species G a bit right now. But when I get it put together with a few hundred or thousand other random variations, then it will give the little fellow a real boost, so I’m going to keep this presently useless variation on hand till then.” The Darwinian mechanism can’t look ahead like an intelligent agent can. It can only judge the present step in the process.

This is where Nye runs into trouble. If I were to challenge him to come up with actual evidence for his evolutionary interpretation — a series of mutations that improves bird wing structure one tiny, beneficial step at a time — I’m pretty sure he’d come up empty handed, and not just for owl winglets, but for all the stunning inventions that characterize life. Indeed, the most strikingly consistent characteristic of the whole Darwinian evolutionary story is the complete lack of evidence that it could actually work.

It’s worse than that, though. As I explain in my book, there’s plenty of counter-evidence — evidence that the clumsy cost-cutting effects of natural selection prevent even very modest acts of invention. As passionate as Nye is about science, then, why would he choose to ignore all this evidence?

Now I have never seen a gradual genetic pathway from one body plan (phyla) to another body plan (phyla) in any peer-reviewed paper. What I need to see to believe in the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to drive change from one body plan to another is that sequence of changes at the genetic level. And I don’t just need to see the steps, I need to see the probabilities of getting the correct sequence of changes at the genetic level within the time available by chance. That’s what Darwinists assert in their theory – that’s what they need to prove. Talking about how one creature looks like another creature is irrelevant. My winter car looks like my Dads car, because we drive the same model, but different model years – and both cars are designed by engineers.

When people ask our side for evidence for our claims, we are able to produce the evidence to substantiate our claims, e.g. – cosmic fine-tuning factors or protein sequencing probabilities. I would like to see the other side do the same, and not just tell me a story.

Axe needs to challenge Nye to a debate about this, and then we can find out whether there is any evidence for Darwinian evolution at all.