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“At least what he is doing is an act of heroism,” Beck said of Snowden. “What he is doing, coming out and speaking to the press, he has issued himself a death warrant.”
“He’s at least lost his life, and he may have his life taken from him,” he added.
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Suitably, the story of how it happened begins with infidelity.
The Beginning
On May 3, 2011, U.S. Senator John Eric Ensign (R. NV.), first elected to the Senate in 2000, formally vacated his office just as the Senate Ethics Committee had begun to investigate his 2007-2008 extramarital affair with a married, female staff member.
Earlier, on April 25, 2011, Nevada Republican Governor Brian Sandoval appointed third-term U.S. Congressman Dean Heller (R. 2nd CD.) to complete Ensign’s Senate term. Sandoval set September 13, 2011 as the date for a special election to fill Heller’s now vacant House seat.
At the time, Nevada had three CDs. The map shows how the 2nd CD encompassed a majority of the land mass of Nevada, while the other two CDs covered the more densely populated urban areas.
The pending special election surfaced a generous list of candidates from both major political parties, and triggered two court battles between Nevada’s Democrat and Republican Parties.
The GOP Candidates
On Monday, May 9, 2011, Mark Amodei, Chairman of the Nevada State GOP, announced his candidacy for the 2nd CD.
For 14 years, Amodei had represented Carson City, in the Nevada Assembly (1996-1998) and in theNevada Senate (1998-2010). He’d been a Republican candidate in the 2010 U.S. Senate race, but withdrew before the GOP Primary Election Day. Sharron Angle won the GOP primary (with 40.1%) against Sue Lowden (26.1%) and Danny Tarkanian (23.3%). Angle was defeated by Sen. Harry Reid in the General election.
By the time Amodei entered the 2nd CD race, several other GOP candidates had already announced – most notably: Angle; former USS Cole Commander Kirk Lippold; and State Senator Greg Brower. All three sought support from Republican conservatives, and Tea Party organizations. Amodei did not have a reputation for being particularly conservative.
The entry of Amodei into the GOP race prompted speculation concerning back-story political motives offered by local and national media sources, including these:
Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 9, 2011: “GOP leaders who fear a victory by a Democrat or Angle — an outsider who enjoys a tea party following — have sued Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat who set the free-for-all special election rules. Republicans contend that because there’s no primary, the parties’ central committees should nominate one candidate each.”
Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2011: “Sharron Angle, a former Reno assemblywoman and ‘tea party’ favorite, carried the [2nd] district in her losing 2010 campaign against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and figures in much of the intrigue surrounding the special election…Angle has never gotten on well with establishment Republicans, and many were infuriated by her bumbling campaign against Reid. They hope that Miller will allow party leaders to pick their nominee, which would almost certainly mean that Angle would be passed over, perhaps in favor of Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, State Sen. Greg Brower of Reno, or Mark Amodei, the state GOP chairman. On the Democratic side, party leaders are hoping to coalesce behind a single candidate, with State Treasurer Kate Marshall an early favorite.”
The Court Battles
At the outset, it was unclear as to how Nevada would conduct its first ever special election. Two courts, first the Carson City District Court and then the Supreme Court of Nevada (SCONv), were called on by the Democrat and Republican Parties to interpret the application of, primarily, two Nevada election statutes.
The key issue, in the minds of the party officials on both sides, was whether or not both parties would run a single candidate or multiple candidates in the special election. The Democrats wanted multiple candidates for each party. The Republicans wanted one.
On May, 2, 2011, Nevada Democrat Secretary of State Ross Miller interpreted the NRS (Nevada Revised Statues) to indicate that the special election would be an open contest wherein multiple names would appear on each major party’s list of candidates on the Election Day ballot.
The Nevada Republican Party, chaired by Amodei, sued Nevada Secretary of State Miller claiming that a nominating process that resulted in just one candidate per party, exercised through the central committee of each party, was the proper interpretation of Nevada’s election statutes.
In the midst of the debate that followed, the more fundamental issue of whether or not the Nevada election statues cited were being properly used went unaddressed by both parties in the law suit, as the court’s attention focused on NRS 304.240 and 293.165.
NRS 304.240: “Procedure for filling vacancy in major or minor political party nomination or nonpartisan nomination. 1. If the Governor issues an election proclamation calling for a special election pursuant to NRS 304.230, no primary election may be held.”
This law, bypassing the primary process, was passed in response to the 9/11 attack and was intended to define the process to fill a vacancy caused by a “catastrophic” cause resulting in the vacancy of at least one-fourth of the U.S. House of Representatives. District Judge James Todd Russell ignored the legislative intent by, first, not ruling that the Governor couldn’t make such a proclamation because there was no catastrophe, and, second, by disallowing a primary. The only time the primary process is to be removed is when a catastrophe has caused the vacancy of at least a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives.
To be specific: In the NRS, “catastrophe” is defined as “a natural or man-made event that causes, by death or disappearance, a vacancy in at least one-fourth of the total number of offices in the United States House of Representatives, including any number of offices representing the State of Nevada, or at least one-half of the total number of offices representing the State of Nevada.” Obviously, no catastrophe was involved in this case.
That begs the question: Why did Governor Sandoval call for a special election in the absence of a “catastrophe”? (Might the intent have been to assure that the candidate most favorable to the Nevada GOP was selected?) In 2004, upon the recommendation of Senator Harry Reid (D. NV.), Sandoval was nominated by President George W. Bush to the bench of the United States District Court for the District of Nevada. The Governor surely would have been aware of the intent of the NRS 304.230.
NRS 293.165: “Procedure for filling vacancy in major or minor political party nomination or nonpartisan nomination. 1. Except as otherwise provided in NRS 293.166, a vacancy occurring in a major or minor political party nomination for a partisan office may be filled by a candidate designated by the party central committee of the county or State, as the case may be, of the major political party or by the executive committee of the minor political party subject to the provisions of subsections 4 and 5.” (Subsections 4 and 5 refer to calendar matters.)
This statute pertains to a vacancy in the nomination that occurs after a primary-elected party nominee drops out, or dies. In those cases, so that the party is not bereft of a candidate on Election Day, the party central committee may select a new nominee to run in the general election. In the 2nd CD case there was no need to fill the office before the 2012 election when a primary would have routinely occurred before the general election.
Continued in Part 2: The Nevada GOP Central Committee elected its chair to the House in 2011 (Part 2)
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Since 2007, Lee Cary has written hundreds of articles and blogs for several conservative websites, including the American Thinker and Breitbart’s Big Journalism & Big Government (as Archy Cary), been quoted on national television (Sean Hannity) and on nationally syndicated radio (Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin). His articles are cited in Jerome Corsi’s The Obama Nation and in Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny. Cary now writes for the Texas-based site teaparty911.com.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
“The day when Americans could take the Founders’ understanding of religious freedom as a given is over,” said the archbishop. “We need to wake up.”
Chaput, who leads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, pointed to Obamacare’s sterilization-contraception-abortifacient regulation as one example. The regulation, issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, requires almost all health-care plans in the United States to provide coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to all women of reproductive age–even if the person or employer providing the insurance coverage and even if the female beneficiaries themselves do not want the coverage and believe it is morally wrong and violates their religious beliefs.
“[T]he HHS mandate can only be understood as a form of coercion,” the archbishop wrote in a recent column posted on the website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The column is entitled, “Religious Freedom and the Need to Wake Up.”
Last year, the Catholic bishops of the United States unanimously approved a statement describing the HHS regulation as an “unjust and illegal mandate.” The unanimous bishops said the regulation not only violated the religious freedom of religious institutions but also the “personal civil rights” of individual Americans who will be forced to comply with it either as employers or employees.
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Naturally, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission suspect Wall Street investors and fed workers engaged in insider trading.
The April 1 decision was about increasing funding to Medicare Advantage by $8 billion
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said last week that his office “reviewed the e-mail records of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and found that 436 of them had early access to the Medicare decision as much as two weeks before it was made public,” the report notes.
“The number of federal employees with advance knowledge is surely higher; the figures Grassley’s staff compiled did not include people at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget who also saw the information,” the report adds.
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Photo Credit: Stephanie Sinclair/Special to The Washington Times
The measure also would have banned “baad, [the] traditional practice of buying or selling women to settle disputes,” and outlawed criminal charges being imposed on rape victims, Breitbart reported. Rape victims in Afghanistan often are charged with fornication or adultery.
President Hamid Karzai reportedly supported the measures, but opponents said they “violate[d] Islamic principles,” Breitbart reported.
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Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Tehran was “very close” to crossing the red line laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
But he said it was biding its time and building uranium-enrichment facilities before making the final push for weapons-grade material.
“The Iranians are getting very close now to the red line… They have close to 200 kilos — 190 kilos (418 pounds) — of 20 percent enriched uranium,” Steinitz said.
“Once they have 250 kilos, this is enough to make the final rush to 90 percent,” the level of enrichment required for a nuclear warhead, he said in a presentation to the Foreign Press Association.
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Last week, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice voted on a party-line vote 6-4 for the bill, with Republicans supporting the ban on late-term abortions and Democrats opposing it.
During the hearing, former abortion practitioner Anthony Levatino told members of the committee the gruesome details of his former abortion practice and how he became pro-life following the tragic automobile accident of his child.
Another bombshell dropped during the hearing came from Dr. Maureen Condic, who is Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She testified that the unborn child is capable of reacting to pain as early as 8-10 weeks. This is when most abortions in America take place.
The committee also saw graphic pictures of babies who were killed by Douglas Karpen, who is considered the second Kermit Gosnell.
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Rothhaar is the final of the four major players in the film to be announced. He joins Rob Lowe (John F. Kennedy), Ginnifer Goodwin (Jacqueline Kennedy) and Michelle Trachtenberg (Marina Oswald).
The upcoming two-hour original factual drama, Killing Kennedy by Scott Free Productions, will premiere on the National Geographic Channel later this year. It is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; it will air in the United States and globally in 171 countries and 38 languages.
According to National Geographic:
“Based on the best-selling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Kennedy begins in 1959, at major turning points for both the future president and his assassin. John F. Kennedy is in Washington, D.C., announcing his presidential candidacy, while Lee Harvey Oswald finds himself in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, renouncing his U.S. citizenship. These two events start both men — one a member of one of the United States’ most wealthy and powerful families, the other a disillusioned former Marine and Marxist — on a cataclysmic track that would alter the course of history. Throughout we see their highs and lows, culminating in not one but two shocking deaths that stunned the nation.”
Bill O’Reilly’s mastery of storytelling artfully woven into his fact based books, is proving to be a goldmine for the Fox News Anchor. His last book, Killing Lincoln, was a blockbuster best seller and made into a movie as well.
O’Reilly has already announced he is working on a third “killing book,” this one titled “Killing Jesus.” National Geographic Channel has already confirmed it is set to adapt this third partnering with the author and Ridley Scott’s, Scott Free Productions on its network.
Production on Killing Kennedy begins this week in Richmond, Va.
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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.
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Both intense exchanges surrounded the federal government’s data collection of phone and internet records and the administration’s handling of the issue.
Carney’s back-and-forth with Henry was the most notable. The journalist asked a number of pointed questions, especially about Obama’s claim on Friday that “every member of Congress” had been briefed on the NSA’s program involving monitoring of phone calls and Internet service.
“Why then are not just Republicans but Democrats like Keith Ellison saying ‘I’ve heard nothing about this.’?”
Carney responded by saying he couldn’t speak to “individual members,” and then launched into a prepared statement saying that the chair and ranking members had made clear that “every member” had been “advised of this” and “had the opportunity for briefings.”
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“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk,” Paul said in a statement posted on the website of Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit political organization which focuses on educating about constitutional issues, which he chairs. “They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”
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