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Report: Obama Campaign Trying to Block “Bombshell” Story on Campaign Finance Fraud

October 6, 2012/6 Comments/in Featured, News /by The Washington Examiner

President Obama’s reelection campaign, rattled by his Wednesday night debate performance, could be in for even worse news. According to knowledgeable sources, a national magazine and a national web site are preparing a blockbuster donor scandal story.

Sources told Secrets that the Obama campaign has been trying to block the story. But a key source said it plans to publish the story Friday or, more likely, Monday.

According to the sources, a taxpayer watchdog group conducted a nine-month investigation into presidential and congressional fundraising and has uncovered thousands of cases of credit card solicitations and donations to Obama and Capitol Hill, allegedly from unsecure accounts, and many from overseas. That might be a violation of federal election laws.

The Obama campaign has received hundreds of millions in small dollar donations, many via credit card donations through their website. On Thursday, the campaign announced a record September donor haul of $150 million. Read more from this story HERE.

Syrian-Turkish Cross-Border Artillery Strikes Continue, Sparking Fears of Regional War

October 6, 2012/4 Comments/in Featured, International /by Bassem Mroue and Suzan Fraser

Turkey and Syria traded artillery fire for the fourth day in a row Saturday as rebels clashed with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces near the border, heightening fears that the crisis could erupt into a regional conflict.

Also Saturday, Syrian Defence Minister Gen. Fahd Jassem al-Freij vowed to crush the rebellion and bring the violence that has engulfed the country to an end.

The diplomatic crisis began on Wednesday, when a Syrian shell killed five civilians in a Turkish border town and triggered unprecedented artillery strikes by Turkey. Ankara has deployed more troops to its southern border with Syria and has responded to each shell that has struck Turkish soil with its own artillery barrage.

On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cautioned Damascus not to test Turkey’s “limits and determination” and said Ankara was not bluffing in saying it won’t tolerate such acts.

Saturday’s cross-border exchange began when two mortar shells fired from Syria landed in rural areas near the Turkish village of Guvecci, prompting Turkish return fire, Turkey’s media reported.

A New Low for CNN: Accepts Foreign Funding In Exchange for Positive Stories

October 6, 2012/12 Comments/in Featured, From Joe's Desk, International, Original /by Joe Miller

In a story that few in this country have heard about, the UK Guardian reported that CNN refused to broadcast an award-winning 2011 documentary, “iRevolution.” The documentary featured CNN’s on-air correspondent Amber Lyon and was highly critical of the regime in Bahrain for brutally suppressing peaceful protests by its own citizens.

Why didn’t CNN broadcast its own correspondent’s production? The reason might shock you.

According to the Guardian, “CNNi’s pursuit of and reliance on revenue from Middle East regimes increased significantly after the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the network to suffer significant losses in corporate sponsorships. It thus pursued all-new, journalistically dubious ways to earn revenue from governments around the world. Bahrain has been one of the most aggressive government exploiters of the opportunities presented by CNNi.”

The Guardian story continues, “These arrangements extend far beyond standard sponsorship agreements for advertising of the type most major media outlets feature. CNNi produces those programs in an arrangement it describes as ‘in association with’ the government of a country, and offers regimes the ability to pay for specific programs about their country. These programs are then featured as part of CNNi’s so-called ‘Eye on’ series (‘Eye on Georgia’, ‘Eye on the Philippines’, ‘Eye on Poland’), or ‘Marketplace Middle East’, all of which is designed to tout the positive economic, social and political features of that country.”

To the average viewer unaware of these government sponsorships, CNN’s stories all falsely appear to be the result of standard, unbiased reporting.

Back to the award-winning documentary that CNNi never aired. As noted above, “iRevolution” was critical of the Bahrain government for using violence against its own people. During the time the documentary was considered, Bahrain was highly invested in CNN’s “sponsorship” opportunities. The Bahrain-CNN relationship was so strong, “official agencies of the regime often boasted of how their extensive involvement with CNN was improving the nation’s image around the world.”

Bahrain’s image was apparently improving because Bahrain got what it paid for: “multiple examples of CNN International producing plainly propagandistic coverage of the regime, often without any minimal disclosure of the vested interests of its sources.” And Bahrain wasn’t the only country with the CNN “sponsorship” arrangement.

Essentially, CNN’s approach to government sponsorship of CNN content represents a merger of advertising and news. Frankly, CNN should drop any pretext that such stories are “news” and, instead, clearly label the pieces what they are: government-sponsored advertisements.

This recent revelation appears to be another nail in the coffin of CNN’s loss of public trust.

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Video: A View from Overseas – Here’s What the Taiwanese Thought of the Debate

October 6, 2012/7 Comments/in Featured, Original, Video /by News Editor

American politics are followed closely overseas, especially in countries with close relationships to the U.S.

Taiwan is no exception. In this animated clip, the Taiwanese show Obama taking a real beating. Unlike most US commentators, the creators of the video point out that Obama received more time than Romney and, contrary to a recent Democratic political ad, suggest that Obama was more of a bully to the moderator than his opponent.

Like other animations from Taiwan, this video is not designed for kids. There’s a pretty graphic portrayal of a Romney attack on Sesame Street’s Big Bird – due to his proposed cuts to PBS. Additionally, both candidates engage in animated combat, similar to the portrayal of Romney and his GOP competitors in the Moral Kombat video posted several days ago.

In short, the Taiwanese who created this video considered Romney the overwhelming victor in the first 2012 Presidential Debate:

Lawsuit: EPA Conducted Gas Chamber-like Experiments on Elderly, Infirm at University of North Carolina

October 6, 2012/105 Comments/in Featured, News /by News Editor

An Eco-Fascist Gassing Experiment with Diesel Fumes at the EPA

By Mark Musser. [T]he EPA has been conducting human experiments on people by piping diesel fumes from a running truck mixed with air into their lungs at a North Carolina university. The agency has ginned up yet another green crusade — the lethal dangers of diesel fumes. They even had a gas chamber set up to accommodate the environmental research project that shockingly recalls the death camps in Poland.

Not surprisingly, the EPA is now in the process of being sued for conducting dangerous experiments on human guinea pigs. The courts will decide whether or not serious laws and practices were violated, including the international Nuremberg Code that was set up after sixteen Nazi doctors were executed for medical terrorism. After the barbaric fallout of Nazi Germany, where many people were treated like experimental animals, the Nuremberg Code was designed to be an international governing set of principles to regulate the practice of human experimentation. The whiff of the Jewish holocaust is therefore unmistakable.

When the Nazis found out how difficult it was in practice to shoot so many Jews on the Eastern Front at the outset of the war, they switched to gassing them en masse at death camps with engine fumes. Such gassing methods became notorious at Treblinka, where almost one million Jews were killed.

In the early part of the war, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, visited Treblinka. Hoess testified at Nuremberg that the Treblinka motor room used tank and truck engines to pipe diesel fumes into the gas chambers. According to Hoess, it usually took about half an hour before the gas chambers fell silent. Another half-hour passed before the doors were opened.

Hoess commented that the engine fumes at Treblinka were not always entirely effective in killing the Jews. While all the victims fell unconscious, many of them were still alive and had to be shot afterwards. Adolf Eichmann told Hoess that they were experiencing the same problems in other death camps at the time. Auschwitz used Zyklon B, which was far more effective. Read more from this story HERE.

The EPA’s Disturbing Human Experiments

By Arnold Ahlert. If the shocking allegations contained in a lawsuit filed last Friday by responsible science advocate Steven Milloy are accurate, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a major scandal on its hands. As reported by the National Legal and Policy Center, Milloy initiated litigation in U.S. District Court in Virginia, based on evidence he accumulated via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). He alleges that the EPA engaged in disturbing experimentation that deliberately exposed human beings to airborne particulate matter the agency itself considers lethal. The experiments were conducted at EPA’s Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “That EPA administrator Lisa Jackson permitted this heinous experimentation to occur under her watch shocks the conscience,” said Milloy.

The suit accuses the EPA of paying as many as 41 participants $12 an hour to breathe in concentrated diesel exhaust, for as long a two hours at a time. The exhaust was directly piped in from a truck parked outside the Chapel Hill facility. According to the lawsuit, the fine particulate matter, called “PM2.5,” was piped in at levels 21 times greater than what the EPA calls its “permissible limit.”

Yet even that phrase is misleading. In testimony delivered to Congress in September of 2011, EPA chief Lisa Jackson claimed that exposure to fine particulate matter of 2.5 microns–or less–was lethal. ”Particulate matter causes premature death. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” she testified at the time.

Milloy learned about the experiments last year, after reading about them in a government-supported scientific journal. In June, he filed a complaint with the North Carolina Medical Board, accusing Drs. Andrew Ghio and Wayne Cascio, both of whom were employed by the EPA, along with Dr. Eugene Chung, who worked for the University of North Carolina, of violating EPA standards of conduct in human research and the Hippocratic Oath. “During these experiments, the study subjects were intentionally exposed to airborne fine particulate matter (‘PM2.5′) at levels ranging from 41.54 micrograms per cubic meter to 750.83 micrograms per cubic meter for periods of up to two hours,” Milloy wrote to Dr. Ralph C. Loomis, president of the NC Medical Board. “The EPA also believes that PM2.5 is carcinogenic to humans,” he added.

Dr. David Schnare, a former EPA litigator who is now director of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit, painted a detailed and chilling picture of exactly how the experiments were conducted. “EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building,” he revealed. “The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects. EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.” Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Rejected Security Request For Libya in May

October 6, 2012/0 Comments/in Featured, International /by Jake Tapper

ABC News has obtained an internal State Department email from May 3, 2012, indicating that the State Department denied a request from the security team at the Embassy of Libya to retain a DC-3 airplane in the country to better conduct their duties.

Copied on the email was U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in a terrorist attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012, along with three other Americans. That attack has prompted questions about whether the diplomatic personnel in that country were provided with adequate security support.

No one has yet to argue that the DC-3 would have definitively made a difference for the four Americans killed that night. The security team in question, after all, left Libya in August.

But the question – both for the State Department, which is conducting an internal investigation, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding hearings next week – is whether officials in Washington, D.C., specifically at the State Department, were as aware as they should have been about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, and whether officials were doing everything they could to protect Americans in that country.

Earlier this week, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and another member of the committee wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listing 13 incidents leading up to the attack, ranging from IED and RPG attacks to a “posting on a pro-Gaddafi Facebook page” publicizing early morning runs taken by the late Ambassador Stevens and his security detail around Tripoli.

Extremism in the Defense of RINOism Is No Virtue

October 6, 2012/3 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Tim Dunkin

Politics is a funny thing. Sometimes, the seemingly counterintuitive can become the reality, what you would not expect – based upon common sense – nevertheless is what happens. Much of this has to do with the fact that in a political system such as ours, it is easy for factional interests to become entrenched, pursuing politics for the sake of remaining in power rather than for the good of those they claim to represent. In such cases, you will find the entrenched power acting in ways that, to the uninitiated, often seem obtuse and nonsensical.

Such seems to be the case with the Republican Party. Conservatives have observed time and time again that the Party which supposedly represents their interests in our system nevertheless seems to take them for granted. Worse than this, often the entrenched interests within the Party hierarchy – commonly referred to collectively as the Establishment or the “GOP-E” – seem to be actively hostile to conservatives within the Party, often going to great lengths to stifle and block them at every turn.

There are few places where this becomes more apparent than in the way the GOP-E deals with conservative candidates who defeat moderate, Establishment candidates in primary races, or who misstep and provide an opening to the GOP-E for attack. Indeed, the Republican Party seems to be the only Party in living memory that actively seeks to destroy the electoral chances of its own candidates just to enforce the entrenched Establishment’s vision for the Party. In doing so, they don’t just hurt conservatives within their Party, but they actual help the Democrats retain seats and have greater opportunity to damage the nation as a whole.

The Democrats certainly don’t do this. Instead, that Party is more than happy to run seemingly right-leaning candidates in conservative districts in an effort to bolster their own chances for taking and retaining power. In 2008, a goodly portion of the Democratic wave was made up of quasi-conservative office-seekers attacking Republicans from their right flank, taking conservative congressional districts all across the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West – traditionally areas of Republican strength. The GOP-E, for its part, has no problem reminding conservatives that in left-leaning districts, the Republicans who run need to be more towards the center – and in this they have a valid argument, up to a point. Yet, the GOP-E seems to also want centrist or liberal candidates for the Republican Party even in districts and states that conservatives can easily win. Hence, the seemingly nonsensical push for thoroughly unnecessary “moderate” Republicans, which only ends up undermining conservative enthusiasm, loyalty to the Party, and ultimately donation and turnout on Election Day. The GOP-E goes to great lengths to undercut conservative candidates across the country, placing its own narrow Establishment interests ahead of those of the nation and the Party as a whole.

Take, for instance, the curious case of Todd Akin, running for the Senate in Missouri. Read more from this story HERE.

$4 Gas: Get Used to It

October 6, 2012/4 Comments/in Energy, Featured, News /by Leah Goodman

President Obama may have a lot more to worry about than bombing the debate this week. Traders are starting to get particularly bullish over gasoline prices – and that is bad news for the average driver, who may also be looking to vent his spleen at the voting booth.

Reports of gas shortages along the high-demand west and east coasts may be fleeting – although deeply concerning – but they highlight a problem that’s expected to persist in the U.S.: our refineries are getting old. Given that a new refinery has not been built since 1976, commodities desks on Wall Street are bracing for more refinery outages and fires just as the nation needs to gear up for the busy winter heating season.

What does that mean? Probably more weeks where we’ll see U.S. crude oil inventories hovering above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year, yet gasoline inventories tunneling into the lower half of their average range, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday.

Translated in dollars and cents, retail gas prices likely won’t be moving off the $4 needle anytime soon. In fact, some gasoline buyers think this may even usher in a run to $5 a gallon (especially out west where gas stations are shutting down because they cannot buy gas at price levels low enough to turn a profit).

The firmness in gasoline also is giving oil prices a boost, the knock-on effects of which cannot be understated.

CBO: Fourth Straight Annual Deficit of Over $1 Trillion

October 6, 2012/0 Comments/in Featured, News /by Associated Press

A new estimate puts the deficit for the just-completed 2012 budget year at $1.1 trillion, the fourth straight year of trillion dollar deficits on President Barack Obama’s watch.

The result was a slight improvement from the 2011 deficit of $1.3 trillion.

The bleak figures from the Congressional Budget Office, while expected, add fodder for the heated presidential campaign, in which Obama’s handling of the economy and the budget is a main topic. Friday’s release came as the government announced that the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent last month, matching the rate when Obama took office.

The administration will release the official deficit numbers around mid-October, but they should line up closely with the CBO estimate, which showed that the government borrowed 31 cents for every dollar it spent.

The CBO estimate predicts a modest 3 percent increase over 2011 in both income tax and payroll tax receipts, reflecting the sluggish economic recovery. Corporate income tax receipts are way up — almost 34 percent — but most of that is a result of tax rules governing write-offs of business equipment.