‘Critical Infrastructure’: Feds Plan Special Declaration to Takeover Elections, Nationwide

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Even before the FBI identified new cyber attacks on two separate state election boards, the Department of Homeland Security began considering declaring the election a “critical infrastructure,” giving it the same control over security it has over Wall Street and and the electric power grid.

The latest admissions of attacks could speed up that effort possibly including the upcoming presidential election, according to officials.

“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

“There’s a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others critical infrastructure,” he said at media conference earlier this month hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

DHS describes it this way on their website: “There are 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.” (Read more from “‘Critical Infrastructure’: Feds Plan Special Declaration to Takeover Elections, Nationwide” HERE)

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BOOM: Here Are the 25 Questions Hillary Clinton Must Answer — Under Oath — by Sept. 29th

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There are only a few groups dedicated to the tireless pursuit of corruption in Washington.

I’m not talking about the various Ethics or Oversight committees in Congress. Those feckless clowns seem more interested in protecting the status quo than in any real investigation. No, I refer, of course, to the patriots at Judicial Watch who have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s criminal activities like a starving greyhound after five pounds of filet.

We’re at the point in various judicial activities that Hillary Clinton is now compelled to answer a series of 25 questions — under oath — related to her pernicious, illegal and outrageous use of a home-brew email server to intermingle official State Department business with that of the Clinton Global Graft Initiative. Annnd the questions are:

1. Describe the creation of the clintonemail.com system, including who decided to create the system, the date it was decided to create the system, why it was created, who set it up, and when it became operational.

2. Describe the creation of your clintonemail.com email account, including who decided to create it, when it was created, why it was created, and, if you did not set up the account yourself, who set it up for you.

3. When did you decide to use a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business and whom did you consult in making this decision?

4. Identify all communications in which you participated concerning or relating to your decision to use a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business and, for each communication, identify the time, date, place, manner (e.g., in person, in writing, by telephone, or by electronic or other means), persons present or participating, and content of the communication.

5. In a 60 Minutes interview aired on July 24, 2016, you stated that it was “recommended” you use a personal email account to conduct official State Department business. What recommendations were you given about using or not using a personal email account to conduct official State Department business, who made any such recommendations, and when were any such recommendations made?

6. Were you ever advised, cautioned, or warned, was it ever suggested, or did you ever participate in any communication, conversation, or meeting in which it was discussed that your use of a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business conflicted with or violated federal recordkeeping laws. For each instance in which you were so advised, cautioned or warned, in which such a suggestion was made, or in which such a discussion took place, identify the time, date, place, manner (e.g., in person, in writing, by telephone, or by electronic or other means), persons present or participating, and content of the advice, caution, warning, suggestion, or discussion.

7. Your campaign website states, “When Clinton got to the Department, she opted to use her personal email account as a matter of convenience.” What factors other than convenience did you consider in deciding to use a personal email account to conduct official State Department business? Include in your answer whether you considered federal records management and preservation requirements and how email you used to conduct official State Department business would be searched in response to FOIA requests.

8. After President Obama nominated you to be Secretary of State and during your tenure as secretary, did you expect the State Department to receive FOIA requests for or concerning your email?

9. During your tenure as Secretary of State, did you understand that email you sent or received in the course of conducting official State Department business was subject to FOIA?

10. During your tenure as Secretary of State, how did you manage and preserve emails in your clintonemail.com email account sent or received in the course of conducting official State Department business, and what, if anything, did you do to make those emails available to the Department for conducting searches in response to FOIA requests?

11. During your tenure as Secretary of State, what, if any, effort did you make to inform the State Department’s records management personnel (e.g., Clarence Finney or the Executive Secretariat’s Office of Correspondence and Records) about your use of a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business?

12. During your tenure as Secretary of State, did State Department personnel ever request access to your clintonemail.com email account to search for email responsive to a FOIA request? If so, identify the date access to your account was requested, the person or persons requesting access, and whether access was granted or denied.

13. At the time you decided to use your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business, or at any time thereafter during your tenure as Secretary of State, did you consider how emails you sent to or received from persons who did not have State Department email accounts (i.e., “state.gov” accounts) would be maintained and preserved by the Department or searched by the Department in response to FOIA requests? If so, what was your understanding about how such emails would be maintained, preserved, or searched by the Department in response to FOIA requests?

14. On March 6, 2009, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric J. Boswell wrote in an Information Memo to your Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, that he “cannot stress too strongly, however, that any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving email, and exploiting calendars.” A March 11, 2009 email states that, in a management meeting with the assistant secretaries, you approached Assistant Secretary Boswell and mentioned that you had read the “IM” and that you “get it.” Did you review the March 6, 2009 Information Memo, and, if so, why did you continue using an unclassified BlackBerry to access your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business? Copies of the March 6, 2009 Information Memo and March 11, 2009 email are attached as Exhibit A for your review.

15. In a November 13, 2010 email exchange with Huma Abedin about problems with your clintonemail.com email account, you wrote to Ms. Abedin, in response to her suggestion that you use a State Department email account or release your email address to the Department, “Let’s get a separate address or device.” Why did you continue using your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business after agreeing on November 13, 2010 to “get a separate address or device?” Include in your answer whether by “address” you meant an official State Department email account (i.e., a “state.gov” account) and by “device” you meant a State Department-issued BlackBerry. A copy of the November 13, 2010 email exchange with Ms. Abedin is attached as Exhibit B for your review.

16. Email exchanges among your top aides and assistants in August 30, 2011 discuss providing you with a State Department-issued BlackBerry or State Department email address. In the course of these discussions, State Department Executive Secretary Stephen Mull wrote, “[W]e are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued BlackBerry to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning (possibly because of her personal email server is down). We will prepare two versions for her to use – one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests).” Similarly, John Bentel, the Director of Information and Records Management in the Executive Secretariat, wrote, “You should be aware that any email would go through the Department’s infrastructure and [be] subject to FOIA searches.” Did you request a State Department issued Blackberry or a State Department email account in or around August 2011, and, if so, why did you continue using your personal device and clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business instead of replacing your device and account with a State Department-issued BlackBerry or a State Department email account? Include in your answer whether the fact that a State Department-issued BlackBerry or a State Department email address would be subject to FOIA affected your decision. Copies of the email exchanges are attached as Exhibit C for your review.

17. In February 2011, Assistant Secretary Boswell sent you an Information Memo noting “a dramatic increase since January 2011 in attempts . . . to compromise the private home email accounts of senior Department officials.” Assistant Secretary Boswell “urge[d] Department users to minimize the use of personal web-email for business.” Did you review Assistant Secretary Boswell’s Information Memo in or after February 2011, and, if so, why did you continue using your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business? Include in your answer any steps you took to minimize use of your clintonemail.com email account after reviewing the memo. A copy of Assistant Secretary Boswell’s February 2011 Information Memo is attached as Exhibit D for your review.

18. On June 28, 2011, you sent a message to all State Department personnel about securing personal email accounts. In the message, you noted “recent targeting of personal email accounts by online adversaries” and directed all personnel to “[a]void conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts.” Why did you continue using your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business after June 28, 2011, when you were advising all State Department Personnel to avoid doing so? A copy of the June 28, 2011 message is attached as Exhibit E for your review.

19. Were you ever advised, cautioned, or warned about hacking or attempted hacking of your clintonemail.com email account or the server that hosted your clintonemail.com account and, if so, what did you do in response to the advice, caution, or warning?

20. When you were preparing to leave office, did you consider allowing the State Department access to your clintonemail.com email account to manage and preserve the official emails in your account and to search those emails in response to FOIA requests? If you considered allowing access to your email account, why did you decide against it? If you did not consider allowing access to your email account, why not?

21. After you left office, did you believe you could alter, destroy, disclose, or use email you sent or received concerning official State Department business as you saw fit? If not, why not?

22. In late 2014, the State Department asked that you make available to the Department copies of any federal records of which you were aware, “such as an email sent or received on a personal email account while serving as Secretary of State.” After you left office but before your attorneys reviewed the email in your clintonemail.com email account in response to the State Department’s request, did you alter, destroy, disclose, or use any of the email in the account or authorize or instruct that any email in the account be altered, destroyed, disclosed, or used? If so, describe any email that was altered, destroyed, disclosed, or used, when the alteration, destruction, disclosure, or use took place, and the circumstances under which the email was altered, destroyed, disclosed, or used? A copy of a November 12, 2014 letter from Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy regarding the State Department’s request is attached as Exhibit F for your review.

23. After your lawyers completed their review of the emails in your clintonemail.com email account in late 2014, were the electronic versions of your emails preserved, deleted, or destroyed? If they were deleted or destroyed, what tool or software was used to delete or destroy them, who deleted or destroyed them, and was the deletion or destruction done at your direction?

24. During your October 22, 2015 appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi, you testified that 90 to 95 percent of your emails “were in the State’s system” and “if they wanted to see them, they would certainly have been able to do so.” Identify the basis for this statement, including all facts on which you relied in support of the statement, how and when you became aware of these facts, and, if you were made aware of these facts by or through another person, identify the person who made you aware of these facts.

25. Identify all communications between you and Brian Pagliano concerning or relating to the management, preservation, deletion, or destruction of any emails in your clintonemail.com email account, including any instruction or direction to Mr. Pagliano about the management, preservation, deletion, or destruction of emails in your account when transferring the clintonemail.com email system to any alternate or replacement server. For each communication, identify the time, date, place, manner (e.g., in person, in writing, by telephone, or by electronic or other means), persons present or participating, and content of the communication.

I just have two words for the Clinton Kamp.

Ruh.

Roh. (For more from the author of “BOOM: Here Are the 25 Questions Hillary Clinton Must Answer — Under Oath — by Sept. 29th” please click HERE)

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EX-CLINTON STAFFER: Hillary Very Ill; Sleeping up to 18 Hours a Day; Health Records Will NEVER Be Released

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The Clinton 2016 campaign machine consists of around 1,000 people.

The pace and expectations are unforgiving. A single mistake can get you booted in a nanosecond. According to a report at TruePundit, one well-placed staff who worked with Clinton on a daily basis made just such an error and came forward to reveal what’s really going on in the campaign:

Only a small group of people running her campaign know the specifics of Hillary’s health issues. But she is suffering from something. She sleeps approximately 18 hours a day. And some days, she sleeps more.

I’m serious. This is why no one sees her.

The campaign will never release her medical files to the public. In contrast, they feel if the opposition continues to hammer the issue, it will create a backlash of sympathy…

…That press conference everyone is waiting for? It’s been 270 days since she gave a press conference or 280 days. Whatever it is. Hillary will not be giving any press conferences before the election.

Why? She doesn’t have to, according to campaign handlers. Her poll numbers have not suffered from not talking to the press but more importantly, Hillary acknowledges that the media has become more of a wild card amid all her scandals and campaign staffers agree it is highly unlikely she could field questions competently without giving Trump fodder to boost his campaign. Think of Clinton in her orange pants suit making wipe-the-server jokes…

It would therefore appear that the Democrats have nominated a very sickly woman who won’t speak to the press for fear of putting her foot in her mouth. Not to mention a person who is as crooked as a corkscrew.

But that’s the Democrat Party for you, ain’t it? (For more from the author of “EX-CLINTON STAFFER: Hillary Very Ill; Sleeping up to 18 Hours a Day; Health Records Will NEVER Be Released” please click HERE)

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Bad Karma for the Clintons at Last?

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Hold on; we may finally be getting some fireworks in this lackluster presidential campaign — as the Clinton Foundation scandal seems to be gathering steam.

Could the Clintons finally have to face the music for their adult-lifetime of corruption? Is it possible that Hillary Clinton’s lifelong scheme to be America’s first female president could be derailed by this power couple’s wanton venality?

I’ve watched closely through the years the Clintons’ uncanny agility at hurdling real scandals and coming out almost unscathed. Yes, Bill Clinton was impeached, but what a dud that turned out to be, with Clinton rising to the figure of beloved statesman among Democrats and his accusers being painted as petty partisans.

There has been no justice, and they have made off like bandits ever since. One might argue that it’s unfair to impute Bill Clinton’s misdeeds to his wife, but it’s not a matter of imputation. Hillary Clinton has been integrally involved every step of the way — from enabler to enforcer to joint participant. Don’t ever forget her complicity, such as her leading role in destroying the train of women who dared to blow the whistle on him.

From the beginning, these two have stepped all over people (Travelgate) and mutually abused and destroyed Bill’s harassment victims. But do you remember the grating mantra of the Clinton-guarding media? “These are private matters that have nothing to do with his public life. Private conduct is irrelevant to one’s fitness for public office.”

Well, these disgraceful hacks don’t have that excuse in their arsenal of dodges this time. There is no way even a journalism school valedictorian could credibly argue that the Clinton Foundation graft didn’t directly involve the public interest.

The media and Democratic Party’s joint alibis for the Clintons through the years have puffed the Clintons up with a sense of invincibility. The couple have to believe there is nothing they could do that would bring them down.

When I first heard about the foundation’s influence peddling, I had little doubt there was truth to it, but I had no expectation that anything would come of it. In a sense, the Clintons have benefited from the plethora of charges leveled against them over the years. After a while, these allegations — no matter how credible — become just noise and are easily characterized as another chapter in a decades-long partisan witch hunt.

It’s awfully convenient for the Clintons and their liberal hatchet men to paint every scandal as a politically motivated slander, but when the media and the Democratic Party themselves always refuse to put truth above their own ideological and political interests, it’s inevitable that only Republicans would bring these charges.

But the Clinton Foundation scandal seems to be different. It is objectively true that the Clintons have become mega-millionaires since the close of Bill’s second term — and they’ve done it through exorbitant speaking fees, which, absent other consideration, couldn’t possibly benefit the payers commensurate to their payments, and bizarre contributions to their foundation by foreign interests that had unusual access to Hillary’s State Department.

Bill Clinton flippantly dismissed the suggestion of any quid pro quo, saying there is no evidence that any of the donors received anything for their donations. When asked whether there is at least an appearance of impropriety, he said, “I’m not responsible for anybody else’s perception.” It couldn’t be more fitting that he was the first postmodern president. He lent Oval Office credence to the demonic lie that words have no meaning apart from what people choose individually to assign to them. He’s unctuously transitioned from “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” to “I can’t be held accountable for your accurate perception that my wife and I are wholly corrupt and have not only used our public positions to financially profit but also compromised and damaged the nation’s interests in the process.”

Just think about the charge that Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain secured a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that led to her approval of certain extremely controversial arms sales to Bahrain after his kingdom donated up to $150,000 directly to the Clinton Foundation and some $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative. This alone would be enough to bring down a deified Roman emperor.

The Associated Press reported that more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state donated to the Clinton Foundation either individually or through related entities. Clinton apologists are already trying to tell us there’s nothing to see here, but sentient human beings know better.

No president in modern history, including Richard Nixon, has been the scandal virtuoso that both of the Clintons are in their own right. The jig just may be up.

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange promises more email dumps that will bring Hillary Clinton down. Wouldn’t it be the profoundest poetic justice if the Clintons were done in by the very emails Hillary thought she had deep-sixed months ago? (For more from the author of “Bad Karma for the Clintons at Last?” please click HERE)

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Billionaire George Soros Tries to Mastermind the Leftward Slide of Catholics

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Writing about billionaire currency speculator and international leftist moneyman George Soros is always risky. Just coolly describing who the man is and what he does can make a writer sound like a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Soros is an obscenely successful capitalist who wants to destroy capitalism; a Jewish Holocaust survivor who funds Israel’s harshest, most unjust critics; an irreligious Hungarian citizen who wants to manipulate churches in America.

Just a few of the organizations Soros underwrites, according to Discover the Networks, include:

Al-Haq: This NGO produces highly politicized reports, papers, books and legal analyses regarding alleged Israeli human-rights abuses committed against Palestinians.

Alliance for Justice: Best known for its activism vis a vis the appointment of federal judges, this group consistently depicts Republican judicial nominees as “extremists.”

American Immigration Law Foundation: This group supports amnesty for illegal aliens, on whose behalf it litigates against the U.S. government.

Catholics for Choice: This nominally Catholic organization supports women’s right to abortion-on-demand.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good: This political nonprofit group is dedicated to generating support from the Catholic community for leftwing candidates, causes and legislation.

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement: This group views the U.S. as a nation replete with racism and discrimination against blacks. It seeks to establish an independent black nation in the southeastern United States, and demands reparations for slavery.

NARAL Pro-Choice America: This group supports taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, and works to elect pro-abortion Democrats.

Sojourners: This evangelical Christian ministry preaches radical leftwing politics.

Soros Spent $650,000 Trying to Hijack Pope Francis’ U.S. Visit

New documents from Wikileaks reveal that Soros has tried to suborn the political sympathies of Catholics in America. To do so, he hoped to tap into Pope Francis’ perceived political and economic views, via a leftist Central American cardinal who has made harshly anti-American and anti-Semitic statements, and aligned himself with allies of Fidel Castro.

All that sounds more like an episode of NBC’s The Blacklist than a sober headline in black and white, so look at the facts for yourself. As the reliable pro-life news source LifeSiteNews has reported:

Leaked emails through WikiLeaks reveal that billionaire globalist George Soros — one of Hillary Clinton’s top donors — paid $650,000 to influence Pope Francis’ September 2015 visit to the USA with a view to “shift[ing] national paradigms and priorities in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign.” The funds were allocated in April 2015 and the report on their effectiveness suggests that successful achievements included, “Buy-in of individual bishops to more publicly voice support of economic and racial justice messages in order to begin to create a critical mass of bishops who are aligned with the Pope.”

The monies were granted to two US entities that have been engaged in a long-term project, according to the report, of shifting “the priorities of the US Catholic church.” Grantees were PICO, a faith-based community organizing group, and Faith in Public Life (FPL), a progressive group working in media to promote left-leaning ‘social justice’ causes. Soros has funded left-wing causes the world over and was just found to have been funding an effort to eliminate pro-life laws around the globe.

Board Minutes from the May 2015 meeting of Soros’ Open Society Foundation in New York reveal that in the planning stages of the papal visit initiative, the group planned to work through one of the Pope’s key advisors, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, naming him specifically in the report. In order to seize on the opportunity provided by the Pope’s visit to the US, says the report, “we will support PICO’s organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using the influence of Cardinal Rodriguez, the Pope’s senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.”

LifeSiteNews links to a Spanish-language 2013 video in which “Cardinal Rodriguez endorsed PICO’s work … during a visit from PICO representatives to the cardinal’s diocese. ‘I want to endorse all the efforts they are doing to promote communities of faith,’ he said, ‘… Please, keep helping PICO.’”

Castro’s Cardinal?

In case you haven’t heard of Cardinal Rodriguez-Maradiaga, he is one of Pope Francis’ chosen “Gang of Eight” tasked with fundamental reform of the governance of the Catholic Church. In October 2013, while visiting the University of Dallas, the cardinal gave a major address purporting to explain Pope Francis’ economic views, as found in the document Evangelii Gaudium. As The Catholic Thing reported, attendees might have been shocked when Rodriguez-Maradiaga quoted “as an authority on the morality of international investment the Swiss radical Jean Ziegler – a longtime defender of Fidel Castro, who has called the United States an ‘imperialist dictatorship.’” The cardinal repeated and endorsed Ziegler’s charge:

The globalization of the exchange of services, capital and patents has led over the past ten years to establish a world dictatorship of finance capital. … The lords of financial capital wield over billions of human beings a power of life and death. Through their investment strategies, their stock market speculations, their alliances, they decide day to day who has the right to live on this planet and who is doomed to die.

The cardinal elaborated on Ziegler’s attack on the U.S., asserting:

The effects and consequences of the neoliberal dictatorships that rule democracies are not hard to uncover: they invade us with the industry of entertainment, they make us forget about human rights, they convince us that nothing can be done, that there is no possible alternative. To change the system, it would be necessary to destroy the power of the new feudal lords. Chimerical? Utopian?

The Church decidedly bets on living the globalization of mercy and solidarity.

As one of us observed about this speech:

So democracies like ours are ‘neoliberal dictatorships,’ which the Church will help reform through the ‘globalization of mercy and solidarity,’ that is, by helping governments to seize wealth from some people, skim its own share off the top, and distribute that wealth to others. Those ‘others’ will doubtless be grateful, as Hugo Chavez’s supporters were in Venezuela; indeed, they will form powerful voting blocs dependent on state redistribution of wealth, as directed by humble clergymen.

Cardinal Rodriguez-Maradiaga is no stranger to conspiracy theories. In May 2002, as the clerical sex abuse scandal was erupting all around the world, the cardinal dismissed it as an invention of Jews in the media who resented the Catholic Church for defending the rights of Palestinians — earning a condemnation in the Jewish Journal by Alan Dershowitz, who called Rodriguez-Maradiaga an “overt anti-Semite.”

Not So Much a Conspiracy as a Tsunami

It is unclear what concrete effects George Soros’s expenditures had on the progress of Pope Francis’ visit to America. We have no reason to think that Pope Francis, or even Cardinal Rodriguez-Maradiaga, had any knowledge of the financier’s involvement. But you don’t have to think very hard to wonder why Soros would consider Rodriguez-Maradiaga the ideal entry point for an effort to skew American bishops toward the political left. The two men have a great many views in common.

Even if neither Rodriguez-Maradiaga nor George Soros existed, the leftward slide among many Catholics would still be a problem. There is ample home-grown support among Americans for the “Seamless Garment” doctrine that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin invented, which leftists have used ever since as a poison pill to kill off the pro-life movement. Leave aside elderly bankers and aging Liberation Theologians; there are Joe Biden and Tim Kaine-style Catholics honeycombed through Catholic universities and bureaucracies who wish to submerge our concern for unborn life and religious freedom in a sea of Progressive platitudes. There are leading U.S. bishops eager to carry their banner, like Chicago’s Archbishop Blaise Cupich.

American Catholics who hold to the Church’s traditional social teaching, which elevates innocent life and human freedom, face a long and determined battle against the utopian forces who will ally with the pro-choice left to further their “long march” through Catholic institutions. (For more from the author of “Billionaire George Soros Tries to Mastermind the Leftward Slide of Catholics” please click HERE)

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3 Ways Obama’s New Overtime Rule Will Hurt Employees

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In an alleged attempt to increase the income of certain salaried employees, the Obama administration issued a new overtime rule, set to take effect Dec. 1., that will almost certainly do more harm than good for the employees it seeks to help.

Currently, employers only have to pay the overtime time-and-a-half rate to salaried employees who make less than $23,660 per year (as well as some who make more but don’t have sufficiently advanced job duties). The new rule more than doubles the pay level subject to overtime to $47,476.

This effectively means that many salaried employees can’t be paid to get a job done, but must instead be paid based on their hours.

Beginning in December, employees who make less than $47,767 a year must keep track of their hours and their employer must pay them time-and-a-half for any work over 40 hours per week.

Seems like it could benefit employees through higher pay, right? That’s what the Obama administration thinks. It claimed the rule will increase pay by an average of $1.2 billion per year across roughly 4.2 million workers (an extra $285 per worker).

But that assumption defies the economic literature. It effectively assumes employers have an extra $1.2 billion in spare change that they can dole out to employees without consequence.

Even left-leaning economists Jared Bernstein and Ross Eisenbrey acknowledge that’s not the case. They write that additional overtime costs “would ultimately be borne by workers as employers set base wages taking expected overtime pay into account.”

Another option for keeping total costs constant is to shift employees to hourly rates.

In the end, employees are likely to lose desired job flexibility and income dependability, and will likely have no additional income (maybe even less) to show for it:

1. Lost Flexibility. In today’s more service-oriented economy, the previous eight-hour work day has become less common as employees shift hours between days and weeks, and often perform work—such as responding to emails—outside the office and outside normal business hours. This flexibility gives employees greater autonomy and a better work-family balance. If employers must keep track of their employees’ hours and pay them time-and-a-half for any work over 40 hours in a given week, employers will limit employees’ flexibility. No more staying late a few nights one week in exchange for leaving early the following week, no more working from home where hours are more difficult to track, no more logging extra hours to cover for a co-worker (who would do the same in exchange), and potentially no more—or fewer—paid vacation days.

2. Less Stable Incomes. Salaries are beneficial for employees and employers alike. Salaries provide certainty of cost for employers and certainty of income for employees, allowing both to properly budget their resources. Salaries also allow employees to be paid to get a job done as opposed to having to log a certain number of hours. Many workers log fewer than 40 hours during less busy weeks or seasons and more than 40 hours in busy periods. Because most employers can’t afford—at least not without consequence—to pay employees with variable hours their existing base salaries as well as time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours, they will likely shift those employees to an hourly rate that results in roughly the same income for the year. But most employees prefer a regular paycheck over variable ones. After all, their mortgage or rent and most other expenses don’t vary from month-to-month.

3. Excessive Compliance Costs Likely to Reduce Wages. The Obama administration estimated employers will spend $295 million per year complying with the new regulation. The rule is unlikely to raise average wages as employers will reduce base pay or shift employees to hourly pay. But even if the rule raises wages by the administration’s unlikely estimate of $1.2 billion per year, $295 million in compliance costs amounts to an outrageously high 25 percent administrative fee. Those compliance costs will almost certainly be passed onto employees through lower wages.

Rather than intervene in mutually advantageous salary arrangements between employers and employees, the government should let employees agree to be paid to get a job done. The Obama administration’s paternalistic approach will ultimately hurt the employees it aims to help by limiting job flexibility, reducing income certainty, and potentially reducing incomes through excessive compliance costs. (For more from the author of “3 Ways Obama’s New Overtime Rule Will Hurt Employees” please click HERE)

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Did Obama Just Betray Syrian Christians to Please the Turks? Seems So.

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American policy in Syria has been marked by a long list of flip-flops and failures. Remember Obama’s “red line” meant to stop the Assad regime from using chemical weapons? That was quickly erased when Congress made it clear there was little public support for using U.S. forces to topple another secular dictator in favor of rebel groups whose radical Islamist views made them no less dangerous to our interests. The “moderate” rebels to whom the U.S. was airdropping weapons proved to be virtually mythical creatures, and those weapons ended up in the hands of al Qaeda’s allies. Then we learned that a rebel group the Pentagon had backed was fighting another that the CIA had armed.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has executed on Russia’s behalf a clear and consistent policy, which has helped keep Assad in power — to the benefit of Russia’s Mediterranean influence, and to the benefit of the beleaguered Christian minority in Syria, who find him less of a threat than the Islamist alternatives.

There was one policy, just one, that the U.S. had engaged in which seemed to be working out well: Our government’s backing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led militias that are allied with local Christians (the Syriac Military Council and the Nineveh Plain Force), that with growing success are taking territory away from ISIS. In those liberated regions, the SDF has established enclaves where Christians have religious freedom and their own armed militias, and women take part in government (unlike in most of the Middle East). As religious freedom activist Johannes de Jong reported here at The Stream:

The successes of the Syriac Military Council and the Nineveh Plain Forces changes the picture we may have of the Syriac-Assyrian Christians in Iraq and Syria. It also challenges us to rethink our strategy to support them. No more than you or I do these Christians aspire to live in refugee camps on care packages. They ask for our assistance in standing up and defending themselves in their own country, where their families have kept the Faith for almost 2,000 years.

But now the U.S. government has decided to abandon the Kurds and their Christian allies, as Michael Horowitz reported in the International Business Times:

Five days ago, US jets were scrambled to protect Kurdish forces in their self-declared Northern Syria Federation from Assad’s air force in the eastern city of Hasakah.

Today, in the aftermath of a limited Turkish intervention on Syrian soil, the US is demanding the Kurds leave the northern city of Manbij, which the Kurds fought and died to capture during the past two months – backed by US warplanes.

That these two events happened less than a week from another is astonishing, even in such an unpredictable and volatile environment as the Syrian civil war. That the US is letting down its only remaining ally in Syria, at a time when other powers, namely Russia and Iran, have acted aggressively to protect theirs, is damaging to the overall US position in the region. …

By demanding the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) leave Manbij, the US took the strategy it itself initiated, nurtured and supported, and dumped it into the trash.

Why?

What motivation does the Obama administration have for turning against its erstwhile allies, the best hope in a desolate region for establishing something like a free and pluralist government? According to Horowitz, we are currying favor with Turkey — the former secular democracy which is morphing before our eyes into an Islamist dictatorship, in the wake of a failed coup that has proved a pretext for a massive purge of secular-minded dissidents.

This is the same Turkey that has gone from provoking Russia (by shooting down a plane that was fighting ISIS) to cozying up to Putin. Turkey is also blackmailing the European Union for huge cash payments and visa-free travel throughout the continent, with the threat that if these demands are not granted, Turkey will dump hundreds of thousands more Syrian migrants across the EU border into Greece and Bulgaria.

So concerned are U.S. generals over Turkey’s untrustworthiness that they have pulled U.S. nuclear weapons out of their longtime Turkish base of Incirlik.

Turkey has for decades savagely repressed its large and growing Kurdish minority, and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, would rather see ISIS prevail in Syria than the creation of a free, democratic Kurdish region that might serve as a magnet for armed Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

To patch up relations with that regime, the Obama administration has apparently decided to throw its Kurdish and Christian allies to the wolves — and embark on a campaign of flattery aimed at Erdoğan. On August 24, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Ankara and told Erdoğan:

The attempted coup went to the heart of who your people are — principled, courageous and committed. And for a people who have struggled so long to establish a true democracy, this was, from my perspective and the president’s perspective, the ultimate affront. So my heart goes out to not just the government, but to the Turkish people.

Biden gushed that “the American people … stand in awe” of Erdoğan and his supporters for beating back the bungled coup. Biden did not mention the ugly crackdown that was taking place all around him as he spoke. As Bridget Johnson reported on PJ Media:

Erdoğan’s purge since the coup attempt has included basically any secular opponent to his Islamist government: more than 40,000 people have been rounded up, from soldiers to jurists to bankers and even teachers and a comedian. Human rights groups have charged that the rule of law has gone out the window as detainees have been kept in makeshift facilities without proper access to legal representation and suffering beatings, rapes and starvation. Erdoğan has also intensified his battle against the free press.

Meanwhile, religious freedom activists concerned for Christians in the region are profoundly worried about the implications of this U.S. flip-flop. Johannes de Jong, who works closely with Syrian Christian leaders, told The Stream:

It is clear that the Turkish push against the [Kurdish-led] SDF is very worrying for the Syriac Assyrian Christians of the area, and even more for the growing number of Kurdish Christians of Rojava. It shows how much influence Turkey can have and it’s obvious that Turkey is the oppressor of Christians and Kurds. Turkey still denies the [1915-21] genocide against Armenians and Assyrians. One major way for the U.S. to restore trust among the Christians is to properly arm the Syriac Military Council. And, obviously, the U.S. needs to make substantial steps to show that it indeed continues to support the SDF. The U.S. needs to stop the ongoing attacks on the SDF and to investigate the claim that Turkey used chemical weapons against the SDF and the civilian population the SDF protects. [emphasis added]

(For more from the author of “Did Obama Just Betray Syrian Christians to Please the Turks? Seems So.” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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50% of Americans Are Skipping Church, but Not Because They Don’t Believe in God

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Most Americans know that 50 percent of the population doesn’t go to church on Sunday. Most probably think that people who don’t go to church are staying away because they don’t believe in God.

But, a large majority of Americans — 89 percent — still believe in God, and a new Pew Research Center study released this week found that a significant portion of people who don’t go to church are actually staying away for practical or social reasons, while others admit they are simply too lazy to make the effort.

Pew found that among Americans who hardly ever go to church, one-in-five claim they are too busy, and one-in-ten claim they are “too lazy” and have “gotten out of the habit.” Another 17 percent claim social concerns as the reason to stay away from church, including that they used to go to church with a friend or family member but don’t anymore.

There is good news though: Pew found that among people who go to church at least semi-frequently, 27 percent are actually going more regularly than they used to. One-in-five of those people told Pew that they have become more religious, while “Others found themselves desiring God or religion in their life or realized religion was important as they got older or grew more mature.”

The common liberal narrative on shifts in American church attendance attributes the decline in worship on unbelief — in the eyes of liberals, a good move toward a secular, post-religious America. But these new Pew numbers show the liberal narrative is wrong. And what’s even more reassuring is that the belief in God and desire for religion in some Americans is getting even stronger. (For more from the author of “50% of Americans Are Skipping Church, but Not Because They Don’t Believe in God” please click HERE)

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Clinton Foundation Witness Removal Vehicle

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Biff Spackle offers this exclusive (to you, at least) photograph of the Clinton Foundation’s Witness Removal Vehicle:

160826-witness-protection

Backstory: here. (For more from the author of “Clinton Foundation Witness Removal Vehicle” please click HERE)

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WIKILEAKS CHIEF: We Have a Little October Surprise for Miss Hillary

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Last night Fox News aired part 1 of a 2-part interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange noted that they are currently reviewing “thousands of pages of material” related to the Hillary campaign which he described as “significant.” When asked whether the new material will be leaked before the November 8th election, Assange responded “yes, absolutely.”

“We have a lot of material, thousands of pages of material. There’s a variety of different types of documents and different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles that are, you know, quite interesting, some even entertaining.”

We now know that Assange planned the timing of the previous leaks to correspond with the Democratic National Convention which has since resulted in the dismissal of 5 DNC officials, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We assume this leak will also be timed to maximize it’s effectiveness with speculation swirling that it could be released before one of the scheduled debates in October.

When asked whether the next release could be a “game-changer” in the November Presidential election, Assange replied:

“I think it’s significant. You know, it depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media.”

(Read more from “WIKILEAKS CHIEF: We Have a Little October Surprise for Miss Hillary” HERE)

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