A Double-Trouble Scandal for Obama

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Photo Credit: Reuters

The verdict is still out on how much political damage the current trio of scandals will inflict on the Obama White House. For now, the one that might hurt most is the one the public cares about least.

A new Quinnipiac poll shows President Obama’s job approval falling to 45%, but the survey also ranks the public’s focus on today’s Washington controversies. Nearly 45% of voters said the IRS scandal is most important, followed by 24% who picked Benghazi. A mere 15% thought the Justice Department’s seizure of press records was a big deal.

No surprise. The IRS is an agency that touches nearly every American, and both the IRS and Benghazi scandals revolve around the sort of big, breathless questions—Did the White House lie? Was the administration targeting enemies?—that rivet public attention. Most Americans don’t much care what happens to the press, and if anything wouldn’t mind seeing it get some grief.

What this verdict misses, however, is two important realities. The first is that—unlike the IRS and Benghazi scandals—the facts of the DOJ’s press intrusions are clear and uncontested. We know Justice has seized records of reporters, that Attorney General Eric Holder himself signed onto a warrant that suggested a journalist was a “co-conspirator” in a national-security leak. We also know that government has violated its own guidelines on probing journalists.

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Congressman: Christianity ‘Will Restore our Nation’

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Barack Obama, shortly before he moved into the Oval Office, said, “Whatever we once were, we’re no longer a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

But Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, believes he’s wrong. That America remains a nation based on the Judeo-Christian foundations on which it was launched, and those values will return.

“I think if you are going to reverse engineer America, go back through history … you could not build America without Christianity,” he told WND reporter Taylor Rose is an interview that focused on faith, not politics.

“Whether it shows up on our sleeve or in our heart, it’s what will restore our nation,” he said.

The congressman explained that the rule of law on which free societies function today is traceable back to the Ten Commandments, given to Moses by God.

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The Cost of Losing: A Thousand Years of Darkness

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Photo Credit: Moyan_Brenn

Imagine trying to fight a war against an enemy led by ruthless tyrants, while granting that enemy authority to train your own military. After all, you reason, sending your soldiers to the enemy’s training centers frees up your time and resources for other priorities. Moreover, the tyrants have graciously promised to train your men in good faith, so denying them this privilege might seem ungrateful.

What are your chances of winning that war? You might win a skirmish here and there, if a few of your soldiers remain independent enough to question the lessons in surrender they were taught by the enemy. But your long-term prospects are, of course, dismal, since after their rare provisional successes, your soldiers will only use their newly-gained territory to set up a tent for conciliatory peace talks with the other side, in accordance with the rules of engagement they have learned in training.

Civilization — all of it — is currently under the domination of progressive collectivism in ethics, authoritarianism in politics, irrationalism in epistemology, and nihilism in metaphysics. The architects of this calamity have paved the road to the devil’s dominion over several generations. Their recent boldness, moving in for the kill on the last, crumbling bastion of principled resistance, America, shows that they believe ultimate victory is at hand, which, in human terms, means we face a thousand years of darkness.

We who reject the progressives’ knee-jerk historicism, however, need not accept the inevitability of this result. Doom does not follow necessarily from any mechanism beyond human control. It does, however, follow necessarily from inaction and resignation. That is to say, civilization is doomed unless she begins to mount a deliberate and determined defense.

The first step to mounting an effective defense is to understand how progressivism has won so much territory, geographical and spiritual, over this multi-generational war. I mean, specifically, how they have done it in practice, for concrete results derive from concrete actions. The nations of the semi-free world have, over the course of generations, voted themselves into servitude, voted away their property rights, acquiesced in the breakdown of the family, and willingly given over their souls en masse to the rule of all the wanton and stupid desires and fears that men for millennia knew they had to control in order to remain men; they have forsaken the human heritage for the false promises of tyrants.

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Mark Steyn: Michele Bachmann ‘Could Have Been America’s Mrs. Thatcher’

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Filling in Rush Limbaugh on his radio show Wednesday, National Review columnist Mark Steyn defended Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, who announced earlier in the day she will not seek re-election in 2014.

Steyn explained he would always have a soft spot in his heart for Bachmann because she touted his 2008 book “America Alone” in a speech. He also said she significantly contributed to race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

“I was saddened by this for a couple of reasons — one, I thought actually Michele Bachmann was a great addition to the presidential campaign and the debates above anything else got extremely boring once she was off the panels,” Steyn said. “But the other thing I like about her is she took a ton of — she’s like a lot of successful Republican women — she took a ton of heat about everything, because there’s something about successful Republican women that so-called liberal feminists seem to absolutely loathe, and they hammered Michele Bachmann. She was portrayed as crazy.”

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Why the US Dollar is Going Extinct

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Is the Dollar Dying? Why US Currency Is in Danger

By Jeff Cox. The US dollar is shrinking as a percentage of the world’s currency supply, raising concerns that the greenback is about to see its long run as the world’s premier denomination come to an end.

When compared to its peers, the dollar has drifted to a 15-year low, according to the International Monetary Fund, indicating that more countries are willing to use other currencies to do business.

While the American currency still reigns supreme — it constitutes $3.72 trillion, or 62 percent, of the $6 trillion in allocated foreign exchange holdings by the world’s central banks — the Japanese yen, Swiss franc and what the IMF classifies as “other currencies” such as the Chinese yuan are gaining.

“Generally speaking, it is not believed by the vast majority that the American dollar will be overthrown,” Dick Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets, said in a note. “But it will be, and this defrocking may occur in as short a period as five to 10 years.”

Bove uses several metrics to make his point, focusing on the dollar as a percentage of total world money supply.That total has plunged from nearly 90 percent in 1952 to closer to 15 percent now. He also notes that the Chinese yuan, the yen and the euro each have a greater share of that total. Read more from this story HERE.

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The Dying Dollar and the Rise of a New Currency Order

By Anthony Migchels. For years now, the collapse of the dollar has been in the cards. Recent developments show mounting pressure on the dollar’s reserve currency status. With a major international deflation going on, the threat of inflation through money printing is unreal. However, should the dollar’s reserve currency status end, the repatriation of trillions of petro- and eurodollars could lead to a strongly inflationary scenario.

The roles of a reserve currency are to finance international trade and to function as a store of value for Governments. Until the second world war it used to be the British pound, but with the demise of the British Empire, the pound lost its international relevance and was overtaken by the dollar. This was formalized in the 1944 Bretton Woods system. All other currencies were fiat currencies, but pegged to the dollar, which in turn was pegged to Gold at 40 dollars an ounce and redeemable for international trading partners.

The Eurodollar
With the dollar as the reserve currency, the US had to export dollars. In the early years after the war especially for Europe, the famous Eurodollars. This sounds great: print money and buy whatever you like. But with the Gold window it was also risky: overprinting could mean excess dollars would be exchanged back to Gold, depleting US Gold reserves.

This was also a weakness that those annoyed with American Hegemony could exploit. In 1967 the leftist press mogul Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber penned a famous screed called ‘le défi Américain’ (the American challenge’), arguing Europe was being colonized economically by superior American competition.

France, at the time, was run by de Gaulle, who never was impressed with Anglo-American supremacy. He made a point of exchanging every dollar he could lay his hands on as a means to undermine it. Read more from this story HERE.

Americans Deserve the IRS

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Individually, Americans do not deserve to be subservient to such a fear-mongering, intimidating and powerful agency as the Internal Revenue Service; but collectively, we do. Let’s look at it.

Since the 1791 ratification of our Constitution, until well into the 1920s, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product never exceeded 5 percent, except during war. Today federal spending is 25 percent of our GDP. State and local government spending is about 15 percent of the GDP. That means government spends more than 40 cents of each dollar we earn. If we add government’s regulatory burden, which is simply a disguised form of taxation, the government take is more than 50 percent of what we produce.

In order to squeeze out of us half of what we produce, a government tax collection agency must be ruthless and able to put the fear of God into its citizens. The IRS has mastered that task. Congress has given it powers that would be deemed criminal if used by others. For example, the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protects Americans against self-incrimination and being forced to bear witness against oneself. That’s precisely what one does when he is compelled to sign his income tax form. However, a Fifth Amendment argument can’t be used as a defense in a court of law. The IRS will counter that you voluntarily provided the information on your tax return.

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Don’t Fool Yourselves, the Media will Always Love Obama

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

Some conservatives think that the elite media are finally turning on Barack Obama and his administration.

The argument goes like this: The trio of scandals that have burst forth in the last couple of weeks—the events before, during, and after the deadly attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi; the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups; and especially the Department of Justice’s secret subpoenas of Associated Press phone records and targeting of Fox News reporter James Rosen as a potential co-conspirator in a leak investigation—will mark an inflection point. From here on out, journalists will apply far more scrutiny to President Obama. His free ride is over.

Don’t believe it.

In saying this, we don’t mean to suggest that journalists won’t ask tough questions or say critical things about the administration from time to time. But sooner or later they will—with a few impressive exceptions—revert to their ways. We are, after all, dealing with deeply ingrained habits and ideological commitments.

Take the New York Times. On May 17, in a story about how President Obama is trying to move beyond his current problems, the Times declared, “In the last few days, the administration appears to have stopped the bleeding. The release of internal e-mails on Benghazi largely confirmed the White House’s account.”

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Is Attorney General Eric Holder About to be Thrown Under the Obama Bus?

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Photo Credit: Irish Central It’s getting pretty crowded under the Obama bus, but it looks like there might be room for one more.

In an Ominous sign for embattled Attorney General Eric Holder, longtime Obama confidante and senior campaign advisor David Axelrod, zeroed in on Holders handling of security leak investigations.

Axelrod, a shrewd political operative, would never openly call into question President Obamas closest cabinet appointee without prior approval from the President himself.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Axelrod criticized the Attorney Generals Justice Department’s probe involving a Fox News reporter and said it raises some “very disturbing questions” about the department’s policies on leak investigations.

Axelrod said he was troubled by a search warrant that labeled Fox News reporter, James Rosen, a “co-conspirator” in a case involving national security leaks. “The notion of naming a journalist a co-conspirator is something I find disturbing,”

This is a signal that Holder is a liability for the Obama Presidency and might have to be sacrificed.

Holder was already tainted by being the first Attorney General in history to be censured by the House of Representatives. He had brazenly refused to turn over thousands of key documents to Congress in their investigation into the gun running scandal known as Fast and Furious.

But the Obama administration is now under the pall of three new major scandals, each one getting messier as the days go by. From IRS abuses, to press phone taps, to the explosive Benghazi scandal that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.

In all of these scandals President Obama has expressed outrage and has asserted any malfeasance or wrongdoing was done without his knowledge…..Yet no one has really been fired. This leads many observers to believe Presidents Obamas outrage is of the faux variety.

With new revelations that Attorney General Holder may have lied to Congress while he was under oath while being questioned about press surveillance, President Obama may have to show the country he is taking these scandals seriously and fire someone.

The Attorney General seems to be the likely candidate.

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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.

The Problem of Muslim Leadership

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Photo Credit: Reuters I’ve seen this before. A Muslim terrorist slays a non-Muslim citizen in the West, and representatives of the Muslim community rush to dissociate themselves and their faith from the horror. After British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death last week in Woolwich in south London, Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain, quickly stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were “sickened” by the attack, “just like everyone else.”

This happens every time. Muslim men wearing suits and ties, or women wearing stylish headscarves, are sent out to reassure the world that these attacks have no place in real Islam, that they are aberrations and corruptions of the true faith.

But then what to make of Omar Bakri? He too claims to speak for the true faith, though he was unavailable for cameras in England last week because the Islamist group he founded, Al-Muhajiroun, was banned in Britain in 2010. Instead, he talked to the media from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, where he now lives. Michael Adebolajo—the accused Woolwich killer who was seen on a video at the scene of the murder, talking to the camera while displaying his bloody hands and a meat cleaver—was Bakri’s student a decade ago, before his group was banned. “A quiet man, very shy, asking lots of questions about Islam,” Bakri recalled last week. The teacher was impressed to see in the grisly video how far his shy disciple had come, “standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away.”

Bakri also told the press: “The Prophet said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That’s a beautiful saying. May God reward [Adebolajo] for his actions . . . I don’t see it as a crime as far as Islam is concerned.”

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Remembering What Matters on Memorial Day

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Photo Credit: eddiecoyoteOn Memorial Day, all Americans should think about the sacrifices made by military service members, their spouses, and their children. Instead, many Americans spend it as a day off of work, having a barbeque or watching baseball games. American Thinker asked some former and current members of the military to consider what Memorial Day means to them.

Many military families talk about the importance of the day but do not reflect on the actual meaning of this holiday. As Sam, a military spouse noted, “there are a lot of Gold Star Families in our neighborhood. In seeing that, my children are reminded each and every day that their mom might not come back from Afghanistan. I don’t want the children focusing on the sadness and the specifics of that day.”

A military mom, Lieutenant Colonel Laura Dawson, an Army orthopedic surgeon, currently stationed in Afghanistan, dedicates this holiday to all “the young people who we have lost in this operation as well as the other wars. These are not just young people, but are some of the very best and brightest in America. They willingly go in harm’s way to protect this country, their families, and their fellow soldiers. These are driven young men and women who no doubt would have been successful in our society as civilians: people of strong moral fiber, hardworking, and overall good people who would have continued to contribute to the greatness of this nation after their days of military service were completed. From a medical provider/surgeon perspective, it’s gut-wrenching to see these young people die or become disfigured. It’s crushing to know you could not save them. For me, Memorial Day is dedicated to honor their ultimate sacrifice and reflect on how great a price we have paid with the loss of these incredible young people.”

Jack Jacobs, a retired Army colonel and a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions during the Vietnam War, believes that for a lot of veterans, each and every day is Memorial Day. He was upset that Fleet Week, an outreach to the American people, was canceled because of the budgetary constraints.

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