Issa: Obama Benghazi Cover-up was for Political, not Classified Reasons

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Photo Credit: NewsmaxRep. Darrell Issa of California charged on Sunday that the Obama administration made a political decision to deny that terrorists were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“We can’t find a classified reason for it. We can’t find a diplomatic reason for it,” said the Republican, appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will begin hearings on Wednesday to find out whether there was a cover-up by the Obama administration of the attack that resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Gregory Hicks, who was second in command at the Benghazi mission, will testify along with Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism, and Eric Nordstrom, diplomatic security officer and former regional security officer in Libya.

“I thought is was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” Hicks was quoted as telling investigators. “I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Clinton Sought End-Run Around Counter-Terrorism Bureau on Night of Benghazi Attack, Witness will Say

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Photo Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Creative CommonsOn the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Fox News has also learned that another official from the counterterrorism bureau — independently of Thompson — voiced the same complaint about Clinton and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to trusted national security colleagues back in October.

Extremists linked to Al Qaeda stormed the American consulate and a nearby annex on Sept. 11, in a heavily armed and well-coordinated eight-hour assault that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans.

Thompson considers himself a whistle-blower whose account was suppressed by the official investigative panel that Clinton convened to review the episode, the Accountability Review Board (ARB). Thompson’s lawyer, Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, has further alleged that his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress.

Read more from this story HERE.

Even With 70% of Hispanic Vote, Romney Still Would Have Lost

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Photo Credit: APAfter six months of mulling over November’s election results, many Republicans remain convinced that the party’s only path to future victory is to improve the GOP’s appeal to Hispanic voters. But how many Hispanic voters do Republicans need to attract before the party can again win the White House?

A lot. Start with the 2012 exit polls. The New York Times’ Nate Silver has created an interactive tool in which one can look at the presidential election results and calculate what would have happened if the racial and ethnic mix of voters had been different. The tool also allows one to project future results based on any number of scenarios in which the country’s demographic profile and voting patterns change.

In 2012, President Obama famously won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mitt Romney’s 27 percent. If all other factors remained the same, how large a percentage of the Hispanic vote would Romney have had to win to capture the White House?

What if Romney had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, the high-water mark for Republicans achieved by George W. Bush in 2004? As it turns out, if Romney had hit that Bush mark, he still would have lost, with 240 electoral votes to 298 for Obama.

But what if Romney had been able to make history and attract 50 percent of Hispanic voters? What then? He still would have been beaten, 283 electoral votes to 255.

Read more from this story HERE.

Arizona Governor Vetoes Bill Making Gold, Silver Legal Tender

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Photo Credit: Reuters Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a measure on Thursday that would have made gold and silver legal tender in the state, saying the legislation could have resulted in lost tax revenue.

The Republican-controlled state legislature voted through the measure last month in a response to what backers said was a lack of confidence in the international monetary system.

The bill called for Arizona to make gold and silver coins and bullion legal tender beginning in mid-2014, joining existing U.S. currency issued by the federal government.

“While I believe the concern over a devalued dollar as a result of an unsustainable federal deficit is justified, I am unable to support this legislation,” Brewer, a Republican, said in an open letter to state Senate President Andy Biggs.

Brewer noted that the “administrative and fiscal burdens” for taxpayers and the revenue department “remain vague.” She also cited uncertainty over whether the legislation would have required the state to exempt transactions involving collectable coins and bills that were authorized by Congress and could be used as legal tender.

Read more from this story HERE.

Common Core: The ‘State-led’ Myth

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Photo Credit: wickendenSince its introduction in 2008, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, or “Common Core” (CCSSI) has been touted as a “voluntary, state led” initiative to adopt a common set of academic standards for all states in the country. As it turns out, the development of Common Core was not state-led, and participation, while technically voluntary, was very strongly coerced.

Our research into the standards themselves is ongoing, but frankly that is a secondary concern. ParentalRights.org stands opposed to the process by which Common Core has come to be. Its creation and administration have violated constitutional principles and rob parents of the right to oversee the education of their children.

Private Roots

In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation pledged $60 million dollars into a campaign to infuse education into the 2008 political racei. In May, 2008, the Gates Foundation awarded a $2.2 million grant to the Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership and Policyii which, one month later, hosted a symposium alongside the National Governors Association (NGA) on education strategies.

Later the same year, NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) began accepting federal grants with which to launch Common Core. In December, 2008, NGA, CCSSO and Achieve – their contractor in Washington, D.C. – laid out a vision for Common Core standards in a document called Benchmarking for Success. This report, like so much of the process leading to it, was funded by the Gates Foundationiii, and it was given to the Obama administration as part of his transition to the White House.

According to a 2012 white paper from the Pioneer Institute and the American Principles Project (upon which this article is based), “Through 2008, the Common Core Initiative was a plan of private groups being implemented through trade associations, albeit trade associations that have ‘official’-sounding names. Since 2007, NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve accepted more than $27 million from the Gates Foundation alone to advance the Standards and the connected data-collection and assessments.”

To this day, “the Standards are owned and copyrighted by nongovernmental entities unaccountable to parents and students in the individual states.”

Federal Coercion

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or “Stimulus Bill”) was enacted on February 17, 2009, and provided the next key component in the drive toward Common Core. Through this bill Congress earmarked $4.35 billion for states that make “significant progress” toward four education-reform objectives.

One week after the bill was passed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rolled out the federal “Race to the Top” program through the Department of Education (DOE). In a C-SPAN interview, Secretary Duncan explained, “We want to get into this game…. There are great outside partners – Achieve, the Gates Foundation, others – who are providing great leadership…. I want to be the one to help it come to fruition.”

From there, the timing was telling:

In March, 2009, the DOE announced that “Race to the Top” funding would be rewarded through two rounds of competitive grants.

On June 1, NGA and CCSSO officially launched their Common Core Standards Initiative.

“Race to the Top” required states to commit to a common set of K-12 standards by August 2, 2009 – at which time the newly-launched “Common Core” was the only such effort in existence. States that did not commit to the program stood no chance of winning any of the grant money.

Phase I applications were invited in November, 2009, with a due date of January 19, 2010. “[A]pplicant states were required to demonstrate their commitment to Common Core without having seen even a draft of the standards.”

On February 22, President Obama in a speech revealed his intent to tie all Title I funding to this same Common Core commitment, essentially cutting off nearly all federal education funding to states that opt out. A March, 2010, DOE report stated that this cut off would occur by 2015.

In March of 2010, two months after applications had been received committing states to the standards, the first draft of Common Core was finally released by NGA and CCSSO.

Phase 2 applications were due June 1 of 2010, and the final draft of Common Core was not released until the following day. Applicants of both phases committed to the standards without even knowing what they would be.

What is more, the Race to the Top application stipulates that states must adopt and implement Common Core word for word. They can add to it only provided the additions do not amount to more than 15% of the material taught, but they cannot take away from it by any means.

Conclusion

In short, far from being state-led, Common Core was developed in such a way as to keep the states completely in the dark. It was created and is still owned and copyrighted by private organizations with no accountability to the parents or students of any state. Neither are they accountable to the states themselves. The federal government used tax-payer monies to coerce the states into adopting the standards sight-unseen, contrary to the interests of the tax-payers.

While proponents advertised Common Core as a “voluntary, state-led” initiative, the states have been following blindly from the start. Not one citizen-elected legislative body has had any input into the standards or the system of development by which those standards came to be.

Read more from this story HERE. You can also learn more about ParentalRights.org HERE and donate to help their cause HERE.

Gov. Perry: Obama Wants to Disarm American Public

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Photo Credit: Washington TimesGov. Rick Perry sat back in shock when I told him President Obama told Mexicans that an upside of his efforts to infringe the Second Amendment would be to make them safer. The Texas Republican, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), pushed back his chair and thought before speaking.

“The idea that a United States president would go to Mexico and make that statement is incredulous,” the 2012 president candidate told me in an interview after his rousing speech at the NRA annual meeting in Houston Friday. “His goal — well before he became president of the United States — was to try to disarm the American public. He just disregards the Constitution…”

Mr. Perry has a very different view of the importance of restricting gun rights in America in order to protect Mexicans. “Nothing could be a greater tragedy for America than to disarm the public,” the Lone Star State chief executive said. “If mothers want peace of mind. If mothers want their children to be safe. An armed, knowledgeable general populace is the way for that to occur.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Michelle Obama Pushes Gun Control: “Every Single Kid Worries About Their Own Death” From Guns

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Photo Credit: Rusty DarbonneFirst lady Michelle Obama said that students at a high school just five miles from her family’s Chicago home told her that “every day they wake up and wonder whether they’re going to make it out of school alive.”

In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that will air this weekend, the first lady said that when she met students after delivering a speech last month on gun violence, she was struck by the extent to which fear dominated the children’s everyday lives.

“I mean, every single kid worries about their own death, or the death of someone, every single day,” Obama said.

The first lady traveled to her hometown to advocate for new gun controls ahead of the Senate’s vote last month on a bill that would expand background checks on gun purchases. The vote fell five senators short of the 60 needed.

In the interview with CBS, Obama said that lawmakers have an “obligation to these kids” to try again.

Read more from this story HERE.

European Fascist, Israel-Hating Groups Linked to Iran Growing Rapidly

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Photo Credit: ReutersInside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future

By Colin Freeman. As the self-declared “capital” of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party, the town of Tiszavasvári prides itself on being a showcase for how the whole of Hungary might one day look.

Since winning control of Tiszavasvári’s local council three years ago on a pledge to fight “Gipsy crime”, the party has been on a vigorous clean-up campaign, banning prostitution, tidying the streets, and keeping a watchful eye on the shabby Roma districts at the edge of town. It even swore in its own Jobbik “security force” to work alongside the police, only for the uniformed militia, which drew comparisons with Hitler’s brown-shirts, to be banned by Hungary’s national government.

Yet Gipsies are not the only bogeyman that Jobbik has in its sights, as a sign on the well-trimmed green opposite the Communist-era mayoralty building suggests. Written in both Hungarian and Persian, it proudly announces that Tiszavasvári is twinned with Ardabil, a town in the rugged mountains of north-west Iran.

On the face of it, there is no obvious reason why a drab rustbelt town in Hungary’s former mining area should seek links to a city in a hardline Islamic Republic 2,000 miles away. But this is no ordinary cultural exchange programme, and friendship has very little to do with it. Instead, the real purpose of Jobbik’s links to Iran is to show their mutual loathing of the Jewish state of Israel, which the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notoriously declared should be “wiped from the pages of history”. Read more from this story HERE.

Dangerous Times: Europe’s New Fascist Movements Don’t Hate Islam

By James Lewis and Justine Aristea. There is something strange about the fast-rising European “crypto fascist” movements. They are peas in a pod — with similar political programs, and similar nationalist and anti-capitalist rhetoric. They all hate the two Satans of Iranian propaganda, Israel and America. Yes, the Persian Gulf supplies 40% of Europe’s oil and therefore has vast political power in all the countries where the cryptos operate. But they are realy monomaniacal about Israel, which has nothing like the power of the oil states. Most peculiarly, all those anti-foreigner movements don’t have a bad word to say about 50 million Muslims who now populate the capital cities of Europe. Not one bad word.

All the cryptos use the web to recruit and direct their followers. Just as the invention of radio led to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s mass appeal, the web is doing so for Giuseppe Grillo and all the others. Some of the cryptos therefore want the voting age to be lowered to 16, so they can catch ’em while they’re young.

These movements recruit many thousands of grossly ignorant teens, surfing the web. They use mystery names — Golden Dawn, Red and Black, Five Stars — as if they came from a single cookie cutter. They all try to absolve the faded Nazi and fascist parties of the 30s and 40s.

But most important, while the crypto cults rage against foreigners, none of them criticize mass immigration of Muslims. They treat Muslim immigration the way the U.S. media treat Obama.

This is too much of a coincidence. Human beings are not all alike. When we act like carbon copies, something else is going on. The Communist International (Comintern) has run look-alike parties in Europe since 1900. Local communist parties never criticized Comrade Lenin or smiling Uncle Joe. You could tell their loyalties by their blind spots. Read more from this story HERE.

Why Liberals Hate Men Who Won’t Give Up Their Guns

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism I don’t know why many Americans on the political left are embracing a system that has persistently failed throughout history. They love to cradle this system in words that sound warm and fuzzy and very appealing: cooperation, collective effort, common ownership, and mutualism. It reminds one of a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Why are they convinced that they (modern progressives) can finally make this failed system work? They are in a collective stupor because they have overdosed on a drug called arrogance.

Their movement is full of contradictions. They vehemently oppose the western tradition of supporting “rugged individualism” and wish for all to join the herd and allow the government to shepherd us toward ‘greener’ pastures. The independent ones who choose to paddle upstream rather than go with the flow are ostracized and hated. However, they will compromise their own collective principles if an individual or minority group can bring political benefit to the progressives.

Thomas Jefferson defended the rights of the individual in the Declaration of Independence. He diligently studied the great British political philosopher John Locke. He practically quoted Locke word for word in his original version of the Declaration when he wrote that all individuals have a right to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” This comes from John Locke’s writings on natural law. Perhaps Jefferson was wishing to paint with a broader stroke when he chose to edit Locke’s statement when he penned the words “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The primary property John Locke was referring to was a man’s right to his own person. “Though the Earth…be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.” (First Treatise on Government) Some of Locke’s contemporary philosophers (Hume, Hobbes, and Rousseau) believed that property was created by the state and that therefore the state has sovereignty over the individual. Modern progressives embrace the idea of sovereign government over the natural rights of the individual.

The modern anti-individualism movement is clearly on display in the left’s hatred for guns. An individual in possession of a gun expresses an independence that drives leftists nearly insane. The gun owner is expressing his individual right to protect himself, not only from other individuals of ill intent but also from a power-mongering government. The liberal senses an attitude in the “bitter clinger” that declares himself to be owner and defender of his own self. The gun control freaks are frosted when an individual refuses to call on and trust a collective government to protect him.

Read more from this story HERE.

Maher: Obama Would Still Be a Community Organizer If He’d Been Busted for Smoking Pot (+video)

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Photo Credit: NewsBusters Bill Maher said something on HBO’s Real Time Friday that Barack Obama’s fans in the media didn’t consider when they promoted the former junior senator from Illinois to the White House.

“This president wouldn’t be president if they had caught him” smoking pot. “He’d still be a community organizer” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Read more from this story HERE.