Tag Archives: Obama administration

News

Trump will cut $60 million of taxpayer-funding of Planned Parenthood

7 Comments
Barack Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood
Barack Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood

The money will instead be given to women’s health care providers who do not perform abortions. I looked around to find an article that didn’t just report the decision, but also what PP would do about it, and how that was likely to work out for them. In cases like this, it really matters how the policy is phrased. That determines whether it can stand up to a court challenge.

Life News reports:

The Trump administration is announcing new regulations today to partially defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses of tens of millions of tax dollars. This is the second time Trump has taken steps to revoke taxpayer funding for the nation’s biggest abortion business — after yanking taxpayer from from International Planned Parenthood during his first week in office.

The United States spends about $260 million in Title X funds annually for family planning for low-income individuals, and Planned Parenthood is a huge recipient of those funds, as much as $50-$60 million annually.

But under the proposed “Protect Life Rule,” Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses would not receive any of those tax dollars unless they completely separate their abortion business from their taxpayer-funded services, The Washington Examiner reports. That would mean housing their family planning services elsewhere — potentially in separate buildings and coordinated by separate staff and organizations from its abortion enterprise.

“This proposal does not necessarily defund Planned Parenthood, as long as they’re willing to disentangle taxpayer funds from abortion as a method of family planning, which is required by the Title X law,” a Trump administration official said. “Any grantees that perform, support, or refer for abortion have a choice – disentangle themselves from abortion or fund their activities with privately raised funds.”

Of course, Planned Parenthood is unwilling to do so. Abortion is its primary focus, and it already is threatening a lawsuit to stop the defunding. However, the proposal is modeled after similar Reagan administration rules that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in Rust v. Sullivan in 1991.

The Life News article also had some helpful paragraphs about how this new policy builds on the previous pro-life policies of the Trump administration:

The Trump administration has cut several other streams of funding to Planned Parenthood as well. Soon after Trump took office, he signed the Mexico City Policy to prevent the funding of groups that promote or perform abortions overseas. This includes the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which received tax dollars under the Obama administration.

In addition, in 2017, the Trump administration cut millions of dollars in grants to Planned Parenthood through the failed Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. HHS spokesman Mark Vafiades told the New York Times last year that there is very little evidence that the program was successful. However, the abortion chain recently filed a lawsuit challenging the cuts.

Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion business in America, aborting approximately 320,000 unborn babies every year. Its most recent annual report showed a record income of $1.46 billion, with about half a billion dollars coming from taxpayers.

In addition to reversing the Obama administration’s funding of abortion, the Trump administration is reversing the Obama administration’s policy of forcing Christian organizations to provide health insurance coverage for abortion.

Life News reported on that, as well:

A federal district court issued an order Tuesday that permanently prevents the federal government from enforcing the Obamacare abortion-pill mandate against four Christian universities in Oklahoma represented by Alliance Defending Freedom. The order also declares that the mandate violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Obama-era mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception through their health plans under threat of heavy penalties. The Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, abandoned its defense of the flawed mandate, which the Department of Health and Human Services implemented during the previous administration.

“Religious organizations have the freedom to peacefully operate according to their beliefs without the threat of punishment by the government. Today’s order fully affirms that freedom and provides permanent protection from the mandate,” said ADF Senior Counsel Gregory S. Baylor.

“These universities no longer have to fear being forced to pay fines for simply abiding by the Christian beliefs they teach and espouse, and they are no longer required to fill out forms authorizing coverage for abortion-inducing drugs,” Baylor explained. “The government has many other ways to ensure access to these drugs without forcing people of faith to violate their deepest convictions.”

ADF attorneys represent Southern Nazarene University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Oklahoma Baptist University, and Mid-America Christian University, all of which specifically object to providing abortifacients.

I don’t think most Democrats realize just how pro-abortion the Obama administration was. But they should have been able to predict it from the multiple times that Obama voted for abortion born-alive infants when he was a state senator in Illinois. Although Trump’s record on abortion was mixed before the election, he’s been good at canceling out some of Obama’s pro-abortion policies. Good for him.

News

Obama administration hid 470,000 Osama Bin Laden compound documents from the public

1 Comment
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Was Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

Stephen Hayes writes for The Weekly Standard primarily on foreign policy issues. His latest article explains what we’ve learned from the CIA’s decision to release 470,000 documents captured in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Although the Obama adminstration claimed to have released all the documents, they only released 571 documents. Why would Barack Obama hide the other documents from the public? And what caused them to pick the 571 documents that they did release?

Only 571 documents released by Obama:

On the penultimate day of the Obama administration, less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office. “Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made public to 571.

Why not 470,571 – why only 571?

In the weeks following the bin Laden raid, the documents went through an immediate interagency triage for actionable intelligence. That initial scrub yielded valuable information that led to the capture and killing of key al Qaeda associates. But then the documents sat, largely untouched, for months at a time. From that point on, the Obama administration’s interest in the Abbottabad documents didn’t extend much beyond their public relations implications. Simply put, a fuller release of the cache would have fatally undermined the message that al Qaeda had been decimated and that the war on terror was being reduced to a few mopping-up exercises.

[…]After Obama’s reelection, the administration repeatedly shut down requests from Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, for access to the documents. Then the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act turned those requests into a demand backed by law. That’s the only reason the 571 documents were released. And that’s where matters stood through the early months of the Trump administration.

The Trump administration has finally released ALL the documents.

What’s in the documents?

As Thomas Joscelyn details elsewhere in these pages, among them can be found documents describing al Qaeda’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban; videos and photographs of senior al Qaeda operatives, including those running the terror network and its affiliates today; letters with new information on al Qaeda’s web of relationships inside Pakistan; documents explaining the ways in which al Qaeda was adapting to U.S. targeting of its leaders; and the 228-page handwritten journal of the jihad kept by Osama bin Laden himself.

The Thomas Jocelyn piece is here, but I can’t cover that, because I want to talk about the Iran – Al Qaeda connection.

It’s not just the number of documents that’s interesting, it’s the fact that the Obama administration lied to the American public by trying to separate Al Qaeda from Iran.

This is important:

The new materials make clear that ODNI sought to mislead the country not only about the size of the collection but about its contents, too. The January ODNI press statement claimed that the batch of 49 documents it was then making public “mirrors the themes in previous releases,” chief among them Osama bin Laden’s “hatred, suspicion of Iran.” It was true that this was what previous ODNI releases claimed. But it is misleading in the extreme to pretend that the story of Iran and al Qaeda told through the captured bin Laden documents is solely one of hostility.

Bin Laden had described Iran as the “main artery” for al Qaeda in one of the previously released letters recovered in Abbottabad. The details on Iran’s support for al Qaeda, some of them buried until now, led to terrorist designations by the Treasury Department and even caused some intelligence analysts to revisit the assumption that the Shiite radicals in Iran wouldn’t back the Sunni al Qaeda. In a 2011 interview, David S. Cohen, a senior Treasury Department official who went on to become deputy director of the CIA, described the intelligence, which detailed a network of financial support for al Qaeda that operated out of Iran: “There is an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda to allow this network to operate,” Cohen said. “There’s no dispute in the intelligence community on this.” Iran was providing a “core pipeline” of support that included safe haven for al Qaeda members and the facilitation of travel and the flow of money and weapons.

Al Qaeda accepted this help warily, it is true, and the al Qaeda-Iran relationship is based on mutual interest rather than ideological or doctrinal affinity. But to ignore the secret agreement altogether—to set aside the years of collaboration and to elide bin Laden’s own description of Iran as the “main artery” for al Qaeda, all in order to downplay the threat such an alliance presents—is a textbook case of cherry-picking.

 

The Obama administration covered up the Iran – AQ link so that they could make a deal to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. And give them $400 million of unmarked cash on pallets to help them along in their sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East. This was the foreign policy of the last eight years under Barack Obama. And when you see people being raped and murdered by radical Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, you need to understand that this is what Democrat voters voted for. They wanted this to happen, and they voted for Obama to make it happen. It’s very important that voters inform themselves carefully about national security and foreign policy matters, because how we vote affects so much of what happens in the world. We can’t just be clowning around with ignorant liberal comedians on the Comedy Channel. We have to be more serious than that. This is America.

One of the reasons why the Trump victory in 2016 was so significant is that it did allow us to finally get the whole story on so many scandals that the Obama administration was covering up. We all know about the familiar scandals that were ignored by the far-left mainstream media: IRS persecution of conservative groups to help Obama get re-elected, running assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels to push a gun confiscation narrative, blaming the Benghazi terrorist attack on a YouTube video, etc. There was no lie too big for an administration run by leftist college students with no real-world experience. But just think of how close we came to never finding out the answers about all of these scandals.

News

Is it true that Obama led a “scandal-free” administration?

6 Comments
Obama claims that his administration has been free of major scandals
Obama claims that his administration has been free of major scandals

When Barack Obama was running for office, he promised to deliver a high degree of integrity and transparency. His teleprompter told him that he was going to be free of corruption and lawlessness, and he dutifully read those words out to his adoring fans. But after 8 years of Obama rule, does reality match his self-congratulating rhetoric?

Consider this article from the Daily Wire.

It lists 11 scandals that occurred during Obama reign of error:

  1. Operation Fast and Furious
  2. Benghazi
  3. The IRS targeted conservative organizations
  4. The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen
  5. The NSA conducted mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant
  6. The Obama administration paid ransom to Iran for hostages, and lied to the American people about it
  7. Hillary’s email scandal
  8. The Environmental Protection Agency poisoned a Colorado river
  9. The EPA also broke federal law in promoting a regulation
  10. The GSA scandal
  11. The Secret Service scandal

Surprisingly, Obamacare is not mentioned, even though Obama knowingly lied to the American people over and over about the true intentions and effects of the law – intentions and effects that are now understood by Americans who are being driven into bankruptcy by the law. The massive stimulus grants to Obama bundlers for “green energy” corporations that later went bankrupt are not mentioned. Giving green cards to refugees from Islamic countries without doing the proper background checks who then went on to kill Americans in terrorist attacks, (e.g. – Orlando, San Bernadino), is not mentioned. And of course the Democrat fascination with illegal immigration caused them to catch and release illegal immigrants who went on to commit crimes, including the murder of Kate Steinle. A lot more could be added to the list.

I think numbers 3 and 4 from the Daily Wire list above really show the character of the Obama administration: (links removed)

3. The IRS targeted conservative organizations. In 2013, Lois Lerner, who directed the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Unit, admitted that Tea Party organizations were targeted under the agency, but blamed it on lower-level employees. Such organizations were heavily scrutinized with invasive questions. Since then, Lerner and IRS commissioner John Koskinen have denied any wrongdoing and have stonewalled congressional efforts to investigate the matter, citing computer crashes for being unable to turn over related emails.

Meanwhile, a federal court concluded in August that conservative groups might still be facing targeted scrutiny from the IRS. It has also been reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) knew about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups as early as 2011.

4. The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen. In the AP’s case, the DOJ was investigating a story involving “a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to set off a bomb on an airplane headed to the United States,” according to the Washington Post. The DOJ seized two months of phone records from the AP without informing the news outlet.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president of the AP wrote to Holder at the time. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

In the Rosen case, the DOJ was investigating a story Rosen did involving North Korea and tracked “his movements and conversations,” according to Fox News, including phone numbers belonging to Rosen’s parents. The DOJ had listed Rosen as a “co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act in regards to the story—allegedly pressing a source for classified information. Rosen was never charged with a crime.

Fox News executive Michael Clemente called the DOJ’s actions against Rosen “downright chilling.” “We will unequivocally defend [Rosen’s] right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press,” Clemente said in a statement, per the Washington Post.

 

The news media has a very short memory. They don’t focus on the scandals for more than a night or two, if at all. But conservatives have a long memory for scandals, especially the ones where government was used as a weapon against us.

News

Did the most unqualified president ever really have a “scandal-free” administration?

1 Comment
Obama claims that his administration has been free of major scandals
Obama claims that his administration has been free of major scandals

When Barack Obama was running for office, he promised to deliver a high degree of integrity and transparency. His teleprompter told him that he was going to be free of corruption and lawlessness, and he dutifully read those words out to his adoring fans. But after 8 years of Obama rule, does reality match his self-congratulating rhetoric?

Consider this article from the Daily Wire.

It lists 11 scandals that occurred during Obama reign of error:

  1. Operation Fast and Furious
  2. Benghazi
  3. The IRS targeted conservative organizations
  4. The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen
  5. The NSA conducted mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant
  6. The Obama administration paid ransom to Iran for hostages, and lied to the American people about it
  7. Hillary’s email scandal
  8. The Environmental Protection Agency poisoned a Colorado river
  9. The EPA also broke federal law in promoting a regulation
  10. The GSA scandal
  11. The Secret Service scandal

Surprisingly, Obamacare is not mentioned, even though Obama knowingly lied to the American people over and over about the true intentions and effects of the law – intentions and effects that are now understood by Americans who are being driven into bankruptcy by the law. The massive stimulus grants to Obama bundlers for “green energy” corporations that later went bankrupt are not mentioned. Giving green cards to refugees from Islamic countries without doing the proper background checks who then went on to kill Americans in terrorist attacks, (e.g. – Orlando, San Bernadino), is not mentioned. And of course the Democrat fascination with illegal immigration caused them to catch and release illegal immigrants who went on to commit crimes, including the murder of Kate Steinle. A lot more could be added to the list.

I think numbers 3 and 4 from the Daily Wire list above really show the character of the Obama administration: (links removed)

3. The IRS targeted conservative organizations. In 2013, Lois Lerner, who directed the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Unit, admitted that Tea Party organizations were targeted under the agency, but blamed it on lower-level employees. Such organizations were heavily scrutinized with invasive questions. Since then, Lerner and IRS commissioner John Koskinen have denied any wrongdoing and have stonewalled congressional efforts to investigate the matter, citing computer crashes for being unable to turn over related emails.

Meanwhile, a federal court concluded in August that conservative groups might still be facing targeted scrutiny from the IRS. It has also been reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) knew about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups as early as 2011.

4. The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen. In the AP’s case, the DOJ was investigating a story involving “a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to set off a bomb on an airplane headed to the United States,” according to the Washington Post. The DOJ seized two months of phone records from the AP without informing the news outlet.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president of the AP wrote to Holder at the time. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

In the Rosen case, the DOJ was investigating a story Rosen did involving North Korea and tracked “his movements and conversations,” according to Fox News, including phone numbers belonging to Rosen’s parents. The DOJ had listed Rosen as a “co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act in regards to the story—allegedly pressing a source for classified information. Rosen was never charged with a crime.

Fox News executive Michael Clemente called the DOJ’s actions against Rosen “downright chilling.” “We will unequivocally defend [Rosen’s] right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press,” Clemente said in a statement, per the Washington Post.

Basically, Obama has been running the United States like a little Banana Republic, similar to his atheist Marxist buddies Chavez (Venezuela) and Castro (Cuba). He has no respect from laws, and just used government as a weapon to attack his enemies. He truly was the first person to be president who knew nothing about the rule of law or the Constitution.  But when I raise these concerns to Democrat voters, they have no idea what I am talking about.

One of the reasons why Obama’s supporters are able to believe that he had a scandal-free administration is because they do very little critical thinking themselves, but merely rely on the words of the leftist mainstream media to tell them what reality is. Democrat voters literally have no idea about the fiscal situation and the foreign policy situation that Obama is leaving Trump, because they watch TV, and TV doesn’t tell them anything that is critical of Obama. I know that it is fun for leftists to tune in Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and think that they are informed about the world, but they really are not informed. They live in a bubble – a safe space where they only hear voices that agree with them, and voices that tell them how smart and special they are compared to those imbeciles who disagree with them. Feelings, not facts. That’s the Democrat way.

News

Hillary Clinton deleted 32,000 e-mails, refuses to turn over her home-based server

3 Comments

The Washington Times reports on her press conference, which only featured questions from reporters handpicked by her spokesman Nick Merrill.

Excerpt:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton deleted nearly 32,000 emails she deemed private from her time in the Obama administration and refused Tuesday to turn over her personal email server, insisting she “fully complied” with the law and that voters will have to trust her judgment.

Answering questions for the first time about her emails, Mrs. Clinton said she’s turned over to the State Department 55,000 pages of emails she deemed work-related, but said she got rid of the rest last year. She defended her decision to keep control of her emails by using a private account, saying previous secretaries did the same thing, and saying it was more “convenient” for her this way.

“I wanted to use just one device for both personal and work emails instead of two,” she said in a hastily called press conference after she spoke at the U.N. Conference on Women.

She lied about Benghazi, claiming it was a protest caused by a Youtube video. So we know that she is capable of lying for gain.

Well, is she telling the truth this time?

But her explanations are already coming under fire. One conservative group, America Rising PAC, said Mrs. Clinton has previously said she keeps both a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

Mrs. Clinton also said the email server was set up for her husband, former President Clinton, but his office told The Wall Street Journal that he has only sent two emails in his life, and both were during his time as president, which ended in 2001, or eight years before the private server was created.

It’s not a “conservative group” that said that she had two devices – it’s Clinton herself:

Read about that video here.

She deleted half her e-mails:

Of the 62,320 emails in her account, her office said 30,490 were deemed public business, while the remaining 31,830 were deemed private.

And she won’t let anyone see the private server she kept in her home:

Congressional Republicans said Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t take credit for turning over her emails since it was only done under pressure from the House committee probing the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.

[…]The former first lady flatly rejected turning over her server, saying she’s already done enough in her mind to comply with her obligations.

This is just plain stupid:

Some cybersecurity analysts have said maintaining a private server was an invitation to hacking, but Mrs. Clinton said the system was kept on property guarded by the Secret Service, and she asserted there “were no security breaches.”

Secret Service people walking around outside a home do not prevent penetration attacks.

We have to have the actual server and check to see whether it was secure or not. If she doesn’t give it to us, along with ALL the e-mails, then we don’t know whether it’s been compromised, and we don’t know what the enemies of the United States would have seen in the event of a breach of security. This is not a case where we can “trust” her – we have to know for certain.

Another thing – why is she printing out e-mails and giving it to the State Department for them to then give it to Trey Gowdy’s Select Committee? Why not just give them the server? It’s not easy to conduct an automated search on pieces of paper, that’s why. She is deliberately slowing down the Benghazi investigation by refusing to provide searchable electronic copies.

The concerns about a security breach are not idle. We already KNOW FOR CERTAIN that State Department e-mails were hacked.

In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail hacked by “Guccifer” — the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush’s paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the “clintonemail.com” domain. The content of some of those e-mails was published by RT.com.

The hacked e-mails are the reason why we know that she intentionally set up her domain on the day she took office. This was not done by accident – it was deliberate.

What difference does national security make?
What difference does national security make?

Investor’s Business Daily reminds us other mysteries that the e-mails would shed light on:

What we do know, as Catherine Herridge of Fox News has reported, is that emails scattered through those obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that there existed a “Benghazi Group,” a code phrase used inside the State Department for a Benghazi damage-control operation led by Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines, who has been described as Hillary Clinton’s “gatekeeper.”

The two ran interference for Hillary during the 2012 Benghazi attack and were involved in what has been dubbed “Operation Basement” — going through documents and emails and turning over only those not damaging Hillary Clinton’s reputation or political future.

“Cheryl Mills was instrumental in seeing the big lie was put out there,” says Judicial Watch head Tom Fitton. “What’s notable thus far is we received no emails from or to (Clinton). You have to wonder whether these aides went offline and were using secret accounts to communicate with her about the Benghazi attack.”

You also have to wonder if Hillary and her State Department staff were also busy concocting the inflammatory Benghazi video lie.

Ron Fournier of the National Journal advises that the emails may help us “follow the money” that has flowed into Clinton Foundation coffers, a tale of possible “pay for play” involving unknown promises in exchange for donations.

Fournier writes that “Hillary Clinton’s secret communications stash is a bombshell” whose “greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton’s work at State and any donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.”

But there is more here than just the Benghazi cover-up and the Clinton Foundation donations – there are real national security concerns. We need to get our hands on that server and all the e-mails in order to know whether we have a breach, and if so, what has been breached. It is incredibly unprofessional and a firing offence (in my opinion) for her to tell us “just trust me”. That is not in the best interest of the security of the United States. And it shows why we ought not take Hillary Clinton seriously as a candidate for the Office of the Presidency. She is in it for herself, not for the good of her country. This is all about her – her ambitions.

UPDATE: Two of her top aides were also using personal e-mails, not State Department e-mails.

Related posts