Obama, Biden, Kerry, Hagel, Clinton Backed ‘Reformer’ Assad During Bush Administration

Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Kerry’s cozy dinner with Syria’s ‘Hitler’: Secretary of State and the man he likened to German dictator are pictured dining with their wives at Damascus restaurant before civil war broke out

By Anthony Bond and David Martosko.

An astonishing photograph of John Kerry having a cozy and intimate dinner with Bashar al-Assad has emerged at the moment the U.S Secretary of State is making the case to bomb the Syrian dictator’s country and remove him from power.

Kerry, who compared Assad to Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein yesterday, is pictured around a small table with his wife Teresa Heinz and the Assads in 2009.

Assad and Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator, lean in towards each other and appear deep in conversation as their spouses look on.

A waiter is pictured at their side with a tray of green drinks, believed to be lemon and crushed mint.

The picture was likely taken in February 2009 in the Naranj restaurant in Damascus, when Kerry led a delegation to Syria to discuss finding a way forward for peace in the region.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: EPA

Photo Credit: EPA

Excerpted from Washington Times: The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.

As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad.

None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.

“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.

But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Read more from this story HERE.

Another View: Men are Winning the War on Women

Photo Credit: People.com

Photo Credit: People.com

Miley Cyrus’ performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards was important.

Cyrus unwittingly transmitted a critical message – Men are winning the war on women. In the 60’s and 70’s, women made a concerted effort to escape the kitchen and achieve workplace and social equality with men. And by many measures, women have made great strides toward that end. But popular culture tells a different story, and it’s the giant teddy bear on stage that we ignore at own peril. Somewhere along the way, men have hijacked the feminist message and rephrased it to their own advantage. This new mantra goes something like this — feminism means sexual freedom, and sexual freedom means having lots of sex – whenever, whenever and with whomever.

The net result of this emergent sexual freedom is feminism turned on its head. Women today are more objectified than ever. With the commitment-free “hook up” culture, sex on a date or in a relationship is an expected part of the deal. If a woman demurs, she is labeled “afraid” or “repressed.” Culturally, a woman’s ability to “say no” is at an all-time low. They’ve been duped into believing that men’s sexual expectations – promiscuity for everyone without commitment or consequences – equal female empowerment. And, in case you somehow missed this development, Cyrus’s “performance” in her flesh-colored bra and panties should’ve gotten your attention.

Look at the performance last weekend. Three fully-clothed men – Robin Thicke along with hip hop artists, 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar – either casually stand around or saunter across the stage with microphones in hand, while nearly two dozen half-naked women gyrate and twerk around them. The Cyrus/Thicke performance liberated no one—not the women on stage nor any woman in the estimated 10.1 million viewing audience.

And don’t kid yourself; Cyrus, Thicke, and the rest of popular media feed and strengthen this prevalent misogynistic mentality. Our culture not only tolerates it, it celebrates it.

Don’t blame Miley. Thank her. At least she got your attention.

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Amy Efaw is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the mother of five children, and a self-described “soccer mom extraordinaire.” A former Army officer and freelance journalist, Ms. Efaw now lives in Denver, Colorado. She has written novels for teens, and she plans to write many more.

Born with Down Syndrome, Newark Man Wins Respect Powerlifting (+video)

Photo Credit: Jennifer Corbett

Photo Credit: Jennifer Corbett

Sitting at the kitchen table in his family’s Newark home, Jon Stoklosa comes across as a laid-back, almost shy guy. He answers questions with a word, preferring instead to look out the backyard window and let his parents, Hank and Liz, do the talking.

But the medal he clasps in his right hand offers a glimmer of the personality that hides beneath his sturdy 5-foot-5 frame.

It’s from a recent powerlifting competition in upstate New York, one where he bench-pressed a personal best of 402.5 pounds and came in third in his age division. He also picked up the “Most Inspirational” award, a unanimous choice by other competitors, many of whom gathered to watch the 31-year-old make his lifts.

Friends and family say Jon, who was born with Down syndrome, is an example of what is possible when people aren’t tethered by labels.

In addition to being able to bench-press more than 400 pounds, Jon can squat 440 pounds and dead-lift an identical amount. He has excelled at the sport, winning a gold medal in the Special Olympics World Games in 1999.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Most Dangerous Domestic Spying Program is Common Core

Photo Credit: ben swann

Photo Credit: ben swann

Earlier this year, revelations about the Department of Justice spying on the Associated Press were quickly followed by revelations that the NSA was collecting phone data on all Verizon, and then all American cell phone, users. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing drew yet more attention to the issue, and domestic surveillance programs have remained a top issue in people’s minds ever since.

While Americans focus on institutions like the CIA and NSA, though, programs are being implemented which would lead to a much more institutional way of tracking citizens. Obamacare is one of these, but Common Core Standards – the federal educational program – is the most eyebrow-raising.

Bill Gates was one of the leaders of Common Core, putting his personal money into its development, implementation and promotion, so it’s unsurprising that much of this data mining will occur via Microsoft’s Cloud system.

Even the Department of Education, though, admits that privacy is a concern, and that that some of the data gathered may be “of a sensitive nature.” The information collected will be more than sensitive; much of it will also be completely unrelated to education. Data collected will not only include grades, test scores, name, date of birth and social security number, it will also include parents’ political affiliations, individual or familial mental or psychological problems, beliefs, religious practices and income.

In addition, all activities, as well as those deemed demeaning, self-incriminating or anti-social, will be stored in students’ school records. In other words, not only will permanently stored data reflect criminal activities, it will also reflect bullying or anything perceived as abnormal. The mere fact that the White House notes the program can be used to “automatically demonstrate proof of competency in a work setting” means such data is intended to affect students’ futures.

Read more from this story HERE.

Justice Department Bids to Trap Poor, Black Children in Ineffective Schools

Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Joe BidenNine OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.

The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Courtto bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.

There’s no denying the state’s racist history of school segregation or its ugly efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to undermine desegregation orders by helping white children to evade racially integrated schools. These efforts included funneling public money to all-white private schools. But the situation today bears no resemblance to those terrible days. Since most of the students using vouchers are black, it is, as State Education Superintendent John White pointed out to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “a little ridiculous” to argue that the departure of mostly black students to voucher schools would make their home school systems less white. Every private school participating in the voucher program must comply with the color-blind policies of the federal desegregation court orders.

Read more from this story HERE.

US Civil Rights Commissioner: Amnesty Means Special, Not Equal, Treatment

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told Breitbart News that Attorney General Eric Holder’s claims that amnesty for illegal immigrants is a civil rights issue “profoundly ahistorical.”

“If you take a look at the basis of the civil rights movement, it was to have blacks treated in all respects the same as whites or everybody else,” Kirsanow (pictured) said in a phone interview. “What amnesty is doing is setting aside a special class of individuals who are going to put forward and treated more favorably than others. In other words, they’ve already broken the law and are being given amnesty.

“In terms of immigration policy… it would severely affect the rights of blacks generally and all low-income Americans. What it is going to do is displace those individuals from the labor market.”

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Kirsanow said, has held extensive hearings in recent years detailing how amnesty would economically impact American workers, especially the black community.

“We had a hearing before the Civil Rights Commission on the effects of illegal immigration on black employment levels, both wage levels and unemployment rates,” Kirsanow said. “What we had were a number of experts from just about every sphere you can think of: business, academia and immigration experts in general. They spanned the ideological spectrum. We had individuals from the far left, individuals in the middle, individuals on the right.

Read more from this story HERE.

What Obama, Biden Did After ‘Strike Syria’ Speech Even Disgusts Media

Photo Credit: BizPac

Photo Credit: BizPac

Apparently there is no crisis, no threat to national security – nothing – that will stop President Obama from playing golf.

Four American diplomats slaughtered in Benghazi? He played golf. A terrorist attack in Boston that killed four, including a young child? He still played golf. Holy hell reigning down in Egypt? A vacation to Martha’s Vineyard to play lots of golf.

And on Saturday, literally within minutes of announcing he had decided the U.S. should engage in a military strike in Syria and asked Congressional to approve that strike, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden hightailed it out of the Rose Garden to, yes, go play golf.

NBC News’ Carrie Dunn was tweeting on the president’s remarks regarding Syria Saturday afternoon and quoted Obama saying Syria’s chemical attack “is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security.”

Not long after, Dunn tweeted:

Read more from this story HERE.

Calling it Treason

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

We stand on the brink of an illegal exercise of military power in a part of the world we have no need to be in, except that we have a president who purposefully keeps us there by suppressing our own development of energy resources and embroiling us in their internecine warfare. We could have walked away from the Middle East already and left them to their own savagery, but the president insists that we remain inextricably tied to their historical need to kill each other so that we can overpay for oil, both monetarily and with American lives. Thus, as technology enables us to break free of dependence upon Middle East oil, our president bends over backwards to ensure that never happens. What sort of leader purposefully compels his country and its people to participate in practices and policies that are detrimental to their safety and survival?

Even worse, when he can be shown to have chosen sides, his allegiance rests with terrorists and psychopaths. His affinity for Islam and its practitioners, as seen in the influence he grants them in the formation and direction of U.S. policy, is well known. Outspoken detractors of the United States and proponents of worldwide Sharia are welcome guests at the White House. They have infiltrated the highest levels of our government. They direct the content of discourse and training about who and what they are. Our blindness toward their hatred and objectives, and perhaps our administration’s shared stake in that hatred of the United States, was manifested in the obscene spectacle of a Muslim cleric insulting and damning our dead special forces troops at their own memorial service. That event was a natural consequence of the sort of brainless political correctness that pervades the left. So too was what Nidal Hasan did at Fort Hood. Such “tolerance” is a top-down phenomena.

Who doubts that what Hasan did was terrorism? Of course, for the terrorist, what he does is soldiering for his cause. It is eternal war for the supremacy of Islam, not terrorism as such, and in the eyes of the jihadist, the enemy always has it coming. To the jihadist, it is no more terrorism than if a U.S. Marine fires on the enemy in battle. But why does the administration not see what Hasan did as terrorism? They had to call it something for public consumption, and since the president does not see a premeditated attack on his own unarmed service men and women in the global advancement of Islam as terrorism, it defaulted to “workplace violence”. Apparently terrorism is defined not by ideology or method, but by location. Still, to so blatantly lie about something so obvious, without the slightest concern over pushback by those who see the lie for what it is, or who suffer its ill effects, is passive aggression on steroids against America.

When the president picks who he will support and who he will condemn on the international stage, he consistently sides with those who hate the United States and the Judeo-Christian principles upon which it was founded. President Obama has willfully enabled Iran to develop a nuclear weapons program entirely without resistance, other than UN sanctions, which have failed. In Egypt, Mubarak’s faults were well documented, but so too were his assets in terms of peace and stability in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the president purposefully aided his overthrow in order to replace him with members of an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Nazis and which has, at its core, goals and objectives that are antithetical to the security and safety of the United States.

Read more from this story HERE.

Snowden Document: NSA Spied On Al Jazeera Communications

Photo Credit: DPA

Photo Credit: DPA

It makes sense that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) would be interested in the Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera. The Qatar-based channel has been broadcasting audio and video messages from al-Qaida leaders for more than a decade.

The United States intelligence agency was so interested, in fact, that it hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal communications system, according to documents from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden that have been seen by SPIEGEL.

One such document, dated March 23, 2006, reveals that the NSA’s Network Analysis Center managed to access and read communication by “interesting targets” that was specially protected by the news organization. The information also shows that the NSA officials were not satisfied with Al Jazeera’s language analysis.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mastermind Behind Benghazi Attack Trained In The U.S. (+video)

Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

It is has been widely reported in Egyptian media that one of the leaders in the attack against the Benghazi consulate on September 11, 2012 was Mohsen Al-Azazi.

According to Ahmed Moussa, a former high ranking intelligence official with the Egyptian government and several other sources, Al-Azazi’s passport was found in the house of Khairat Al-Shater, the Number Two man in the Muslim Brotherhood hierarchy, now under house arrest in Egypt by the Egyptian military.

But according to an ongoing Egyptian investigation by Egypt’s Supreme State Security Prosecution, Muslim Brotherhood second-in-command Khairat Al-Shater was just tangentially involved in the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The actual mastermind of the attack was a man by the name of Tarek Taha Abu Al-Azm, now in the custody of the Egyptian military.

In what is reminiscent of the attack on the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon on 9/11, where some of the hijackers reportedly received flight training on U.S. military installations, per Egyptian investigators, Al-Azm, the mastermind of the attack on the Benghazi consulate, took military courses at a U.S. Air Force base.

Per Muslim Brotherhood researcher Walid Shoebat, citing multiple Arabic news sources, Al-Azm is a seasoned jet fighter pilot and a former Major in the Egyptian Air Force.

Read more from this story HERE.