Head of ICE: “Rubio Absolutely Knowingly Mislead the American People”

cartoonmarcorubiogangof8Listen, I’m a politician which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies I’m stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open. – Jeffrey Pelt, “The Hunt for Red October”

The President of ICE, Christopher Crane, recently gave an Exclusive Interview to Breitbart News

in which he detailed his behind-the-scenes interactions with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), as Crane sought to protect the nation’s ICE officers and national security.  Crane was integral to stopping Sen. Rubio’s amnesty plan from passing the House—which, as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) recently explained, “was a near-run thing.”

…In his responses, Crane addresses an incident—first detailed by Breitbart News— in which Marco Rubio stood idly by as Crane was ejected from a Gang of Eight press conference for trying to ask a question on behalf of law enforcement.

Crane, an active duty ICE officer, has served as an officer for approximately 13 years and has been elected by his peers as the president of their union, as thus their voice on the national stage. Prior to joining ICE, Crane was a United States Marine.

Here is an excerpt from that interview…

BREITBART NEWS: It is well known that the Gang of Eight reached out to big business groups and amnesty groups in the process of writing the bill. When Sen. Rubio started writing his bill, did he reach out to you and other ICE officers for your ideas and input?

CRANE: Sen. Rubio never reached out to us. He surrounded himself with big business and amnesty groups, most of which were more interested in cheap labor and their own political agendas, and had no real concern for the welfare of immigrants, public safety, or the security of our nation. This while he ignored boots on the ground law enforcement officers who work within our broken immigration system every day and know better than any what’s needed to fix it. Common sense dictates that law enforcement be at the table when creating a bill like this. I think Sen. Rubio knew that, but actively chose to exclude us because of his own personal agenda.

BNN: Did Sen. Rubio meet with you voluntarily or did he have to be pressured into doing so at the last minute? Do you remember how you were ultimately able to secure the meeting? Did it take a long time?

CHRIS CRANE: It was definitely last minute as we met in the evening and they introduced the bill a few hours later that same night. It doesn’t get much more last minute than that. Was he pressured? I definitely think so. Not just by the public, but by some in the media as well. I think appearances on the Greta Van Susteren and Gov. Mike Huckabee shows are what tipped the balance and got us in. I think Gov. Huckabee was especially important in making the meeting happen, he was genuinely concerned that law enforcement was being excluded from the process and reached out to Sen. Rubio on our behalf. Many thanks to him for his attempts to help us.

BNN: What happened in the meeting? Did Sen. Rubio make any promises to you? Did he keep them?

CRANE: To start, even though I had requested to bring someone with me, Sen. Rubio denied the request and demanded that I come alone, which I still believe was highly peculiar and inappropriate.

He, of course, had what appeared to be his entire staff in his office with me. Most of his staff stood behind me as there was no place for them to sit. I raised a series of strong concerns with the bill, and as I raised each issue, Sen. Rubio would look to his staff and ask if that was what the bill said. Each time his staff agreed with my interpretation, and Sen. Rubio would shake his head in disbelief and indicate the bill had to be changed.

Sen. Rubio talked very specifically and very directly to me and his staff saying that the changes I suggested had to be made and specifically said that other Gang of Eight members wouldn’t be happy, but “Oh well.” Obviously the changes I suggested were all serious enforcement related issues, such as establishing a biometric entry-exit system, and cracking down on sex offenders, gang members, violent criminals and other criminal aliens.

When I walked out of his office that night I definitely thought the bill would undergo significant changes, but of course absolutely no changes were made.

BNN: Almost immediately after you met with Sen. Rubio, he introduced bill. Did it include any of the changes you asked for?

CRANE: Not one of the changes we suggested was made to the bill before Sen. Rubio introduced it.

All of his strong statements during our meeting about making the changes we suggested were apparently all just a dodge to get rid of me. It quickly became obvious why he didn’t permit me to take anyone with me to the meeting— he didn’t want any witnesses.

BNN: What happened during the press conference when you tried to ask Sen. Rubio and Chuck Schumer to take a question?

CRANE: I was polite, professional and respectful at all times. I didn’t interrupt anyone or cause a scene. The press was there, but Sen. Rubio and the rest of the Gang of Eight had also filled the large room with amnesty supporters and open borders people to cheer and applaud the Gang of Eight every time they said something. It was a real dog and pony show, sort of a circus.

Because it wasn’t your traditional closed press conference, it didn’t seem at all out of place to me, as an American citizen, to politely ask these elected officials a question about the legislation they were there to discuss. After all, I thought that Congress was the People’s House.

When the floor was opened to reporters to ask questions, I too politely raised my hand and asked, “Will you take a question from law enforcement?”

The amnesty folks immediately started making hateful comments like: you’re not welcome here, you need to leave, you have no right to speak here. A commotion took place on the stage with the Gang of Eight Senators. Sen. Rubio did look directly at me, and it appeared that he told Sen. Flake who I was.

Yet, despite having looked directly at me, Sen. Rubio did absolutely nothing to allow me to ask a question on behalf of the nation’s ICE officers, sheriffs and front line law enforcement.

I was able to ask the same question approximately two more times, before a Senate staffer accompanied by Capitol Hill police approached— demanding that they escort me out.

As I was escorted out by police, some within the amnesty groups applauded, laughed at me, and made hateful remarks. Once police escorted me outside of the main room, police informed me that I was not free to go and that I was to be taken somewhere for questioning.

As a law enforcement officer I knew that their actions met the legal standard for an arrest. At that point I demanded to know the charges against me and why I was being arrested. Television cameras, reporters and microphones came swooping in, and as they did the Senate staffer scurried away like a cockroach, leaving the Capitol Hill police on their own. I was allowed to leave the area, but I think it was only because the police were afraid to handcuff me with reporters filming them.

Senator Rubio and the Gang of Eight stood there and watched it all happen. Anyone of them could have jumped to the mic and yelled for the Senate staffer and the police to stop what they were doing to me, but none did. Sen. Rubio just stood their silently and watched it happen. I am told that Sen. Rubio later stated that I should not have been removed, but he never reached out to me to say that or apologize. To my knowledge he and the Gang of Eight never called for an investigation.

If it had been Mark Zuckerberg in the crowd asking questions the Gang of Eight Senators would have been tripping over themselves to kiss his backside, but as a normal citizen without the means to filter money into their campaigns they had me forced out by police

BNN: What did you mean when you said in Congressional testimony: “Never before have I seen such contempt for law enforcement officers as what I’ve seen from the Gang of Eight”? CRANE: As ICE officers, we wrote a letter to Congress expressing strong concerns with the Gang of Eight bill. The letter was endorsed by approximately 150 Sheriffs, to include Sheriff Sam Page of the National Sheriffs Association Border Security and Immigration Committee, as well the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers and other law enforcement groups. Law enforcement officers were screaming for help from the Gang of Eight to make changes to the bill that would better provide for public safety and national security, but the Gang of Eight ignored all of them. The Gang of Eight not only ignored law enforcement, but actively fought to keep our input out. Only wealthy special interests like the Chamber of Commerce were permitted to be a part of the process. It was dirty D.C. politics at its worst.

BNN: Sen. Rubio touted his bill as “The Toughest Border Security & Enforcement Measures In U.S. History,” do you believe this was an honest representation of the bill?

CRANE: I think that’s absolutely false – there was no real promise or guarantee of stronger border security. The bill actually relinquished Congress’ authority to establish border security measures to the head of DHS. The head of DHS then had something like so six months to unilaterally develop a border security plan after the Gang of Eight bill passed.

So not only was there no real plan, but Sen. Rubio apparently thought that giving a presidentially appointed bureaucrat god-like powers over America’s immigration system was the answer to border security, this as other Republicans are fighting corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats in agencies like the IRS and Secret Service, not to mention the unlawful policies on immigration enforcement enacted by the current President. Rather than being touted as the toughest border security and enforcement plan in history, it could more accurately be touted as the worst.

BNN: Sen. Rubio pledged his bill would provide enforcement first, do you believe this was an honest representation the bill?

CRANE: No, I don’t believe it was an honest representation. Protection from deportation, a type of de facto amnesty, came almost immediately as the first step in a much broader amnesty like process provided in the bill. There was no real promise of border security in the bill, and the bill provided nothing for interior enforcement, but instead made legalization of criminal aliens and gang members a priority. People need to understand that this bill was written by pro-amnesty and open borders groups that have no concern for America’s borders or the safety of its communities. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the bill was such a lopsided mess.

BNN: Sen. Rubio’s bill legalized sex offenders, drunk drivers, and others with criminal records. From an ICE officer’s perspective, how do you feel about his decision to legalize illegal immigrants with criminal convictions?

CRANE: Under the Obama Administration, ICE released estimates stating that approximately 2 million criminal aliens resided in the U.S. That’s 10 times the size the U.S. Marine Corps, at least when I was in. And I think ICE’s estimates are low.

People need to wake up. We can’t continue to keep taking millions of the world’s criminals without expecting serious repercussions to public safety and expense and burden to our legal system. Local and state jurisdictions are already overwhelmed by the criminal alien problem in our country. To turn this around and get things back under control, the U.S. must take the opposite approach. We must send criminals back to their countries. Especially sex offenders. I can’t understand why any lawmaker or special interest group would support legalizing sex offenders, but it shows how out of control the bill really was.

BNN: In your letter, you specifically protested that the bill would legalize gang members. As an ICE officer, how do you feel that this provision was left in the bill?

CRANE: It disgusts me. Violent street gangs were literally able to lobby Sen. Rubio and the Gang of Eight more effectively than law enforcement, they had more influence on the bill than we did. Gangs were able to get provisions in the law to protect themselves. It’s absolutely insane. What on earth are our lawmakers thinking? I think it’s this type of utterly stupid lawmaking that has caused most Americans to lose faith in Congress.

BNN: Sen. Rubio was on television and radio constantly promoting his bill, which was backed by powerful special interests. What did you learn about Sen. Rubio’s character during that time?

CRANE: In my opinion, Sen. Rubio absolutely knowingly mislead the American people regarding the bill. He was not telling the American public the truth about what that bill contained.

I realize that was a lengthy excerpt. However, I felt that it was important to keep as much of Crane’s remarks intact, as possible.

Marco Rubio , judging by his Campaign Appearances and Stump Speeches, appears to be in the throes of a “mea culpa” as regards his sucking up to the Establishment (Vichy) Republicans…and the Democrats…during his tenure as a card-carrying member of “The Gang of Eight”.

My question to you: DO YOU BELIEVE HIM?

History records that, “The Gang of Eight Bill” came up for a final Senate vote on June 27, 2013. Rubio, as a key author of the legislation, voted for its passage. Cruz voted against it.

Back in January, before the Iowa Caucus, The Washington Examiner filed the following report,

Following his rapid-fire assault on Sen. Ted Cruz’s record during Thursday evening’s debate, Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign in Iowa kept up his line of attack by calling out Cruz as a follower of the political winds.Rep. Kristi Noem, a South Dakota Republican and Rubio supporter, told reporters after the debate that Cruz is nothing more than a political opportunist who supports “whatever’s popular that day,” continuing Rubio’s line of attack that the Texas senator engages in “political calculation” and not “consistent conservatism.”

“From what I heard come from Donald Trump, from what I’ve seen of actions coming from Ted Cruz, they’re not the right people for the job,” Noem told reporters after a Rubio watch party. “Ted Cruz says whatever’s popular that day. He votes one way, and then a month later will vote another way. He’ll take a position, write an op-ed on something as critical as our economic future and trade with foreign countries, and he’ll change his mind because the political winds are blowing a different direction.”

“I don’t want another president like that. I don’t want a president like the one that we have that knows how to talk, but doesn’t walk the walk,” Noem continued. I want one that will actually follow through on what he says he will do.”

Irony is embarrassed.

There are no angels in the 2016 Presidential Primaries, on either side.

For each and every candidate, including Donald J. Trump, unlike the Syrian Refugees, who Obama is attempting to force on us, there is an abundance of information out there, which shows their past thoughts, words, and deeds (or, lack thereof).

In Rubio’s Case, just as in the case of the current “Political” Pope’s insult of Donald J. Trump, as regards to calling Ted Cruz as “opportunist”, Marcio forgot that

People in Glass Houses should not throw stones.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

Pope Attacks Trump for Promise to Build Wall to Protect Our Sovereignty. Vatican Wall Still Stands.

Vatican-wall8 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

2 Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down and taught them. 3 Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say? 6 This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.

7 So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” 8 And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 10 When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?”

11 She said, “No one, Lord.”

And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” – John 8: 1-11

In a related story…

Foxnews.com reports that

Pope Francis questioned Donald Trump’s Christianity Thursday over the Republican presidential hopeful’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, but the pontiff himself lives behind massive stone walls.

Speaking from Mexico as he departed from a weeklong tour in which he spoke before millions, His Holiness took a direct shot at Trump, who has made his plan to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it a centerpiece of his campaign.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis said. “This is not in the Gospel.”

Trump supporters quickly took to the Internet, noting the irony of the pope’s comment.

One tweet read: ‘”People who build walls are not Christians,” said Pope Francis, who lives in Vatican City, which is essentially a giant fortress.”

The pope said he’d “give the benefit of the doubt” since he hasn’t heard Trump’s plan himself, according to AP, adding, “I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.”

Trump has proposed the border wall to combat illegal immigration. The developer, who is Presbyterian, shot back at the pope after having his faith questioned.

“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” Trump said in a statement. “I am proud to be a Christian and, as president, I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current president.”

The Vatican’s walls, which do not completely surround the enclave, date back more than 1,000 years, to the time of Pope Leo IV, who commissioned the construction of what is known as the Leonine Wall following the sacking of Old St. Peter’s Basilica by Islamic Saracens in 846.

Regarding his comments concerning building a wall to keep out “immigrants”, the Pope left out a very important word: ILLEGAL.

The last bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform happened during President ill “Bubba” Clinton’s tenure. Bubba appointed former congresswoman and Democratic icon Barbara Jordan as its chair. Jordan came from humble beginnings to become a lawyer and the first Southern black woman elected to the House of Representatives. A DEMOCRAT, she was a leader in the civil rights movement, a professor of ethics, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a world-class orator (two of her speeches are considered among the greatest of the 20th century). Her appointment gave the commission instant credibility. According to Jordan, she believed her responsibility as the head of the commission was to restore credibility to the U.S. immigration system. On the issue of illegal immigration, Jordan was very clear and succinct:

Unlawful immigration is unacceptable. Those who should not be here will be required to leave.

I understand that people want a better life for themselves and their children. We are all immigrants in this land, except for American Indians, and they got here by crossing the Bering Straight. But there is a huge difference between immigrating here legally and sneaking in illegally, between assimilating into an existing culture, and insisting on replacing a country’s existing culture with that of the country you left.

Do you want to have access to the blessings of American Citizenship, such as the right to attend our schools? Fine. Become an AMERICAN CITIZEN.

According to the website, churchauthority.org, the Pope has three main duties:

He is the Supreme Pastor.

That means that he represents Christ’s love and concern for every single individual. That is why the Pope’s priority lies in getting to know people, understanding how they live, listening to their interests and sharing their sufferings and their joys. On no account should the Pope allow his contact with ordinary people to be obstructed by a multitude of administrative duties.

He is the Unifier of the People of God.

Because of the international character of the Church, this will create many demands. The good of the world-wide Church and the autonomy of local Churches need to be balanced. That is why the Pope should guide and inspire the Central Synod of Bishops so that it can efficiently work out agreements and general Church policies.

He is the Prime Witness to Faith.

This includes both preaching [= announcing the message to non-Christians] and teaching [= explaining an element of Christ’s message in today’s context]. On very rare occasions the Pope is the main exponent of the infallible understanding of faith [=inerrancy] that is carried by the whole people of God. The Pope can only do so after listening to the People of God and discerning the faith they carry in their hearts.

Nowhere in his Job Description, does it say that the Pontiff gets to interfere in the Elections held in any nation, much less, those held in the Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth.

Pope Francis is the first Pope who represents the Far Left Political Viewpoint, which encompasses Modern Liberalism and the failed Marxist Political Ideology of Socialism.

He also comes from Latin America. It is not a coincidence that the recent invasion of underage illegal “immigrants” comes from that area, as well.

I had a poster on a Facebook Political Page scold me yesterday for pointing out Il Papa’s Political Ideology. I informed them that the Pope, while being “Christ’s Representative” on Earth, is not himself, the Son of God, and, is therefore, an imperfect man, like the rest of us.

I do not believe that Jesus would be a part of the Social Justice Movement, which is so popular among Liberal Churches, today. His was and is a soul-saving movement. One that still brings hundreds of thousand of people to individual salvation on this terrestrial ball every day. A movement that, in fact, was embraced by the founders of this cherished land.

The Pope is the Leader of the Catholic Church.

No disrespect meant, but shouldn’t he be more concerned about winning individual souls for God, than “saving the Collective” and advancing the Political Ideology of Marx?

Until He Comes,

KJ

Justice Antonin Scalia, Chick-Fil-A, and Petulant President Pantywaist

D-Wounded-600-LIWe are now at a point in our nation’s history, where a Fast Food Chain is showing more deference to the death of a Senior United States Supreme Court Justice than the President.

Christianpost.com reports that

Chick-fil-A restaurants that display the American flag are flying them at half-staff in memory of recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. 

The fast food chain that specializes in chicken sandwiches and headed by a conservative Southern Baptist family asked their restaurant managers to lower the American flag in remembrance of Scalia, who died Saturday of natural causes. 

“Anytime the president orders the flag be flown at half-staff, Chick-fil-A restaurants do so — as is the case with honoring Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,” read a statement sent to The Christian Post by the fast food company.

“Honor”.  A word that, in the case of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, seems to be virtually nonexistent.

Politico.com reports that

President Barack Obama is preparing for a fierce battle with the Senate over the Supreme Court vacancy, but he’s not planning to attend Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral — a decision that puzzled even some of his allies and incensed conservative media.

“If we want to reduce partisanship, we can start by honoring great public servants who we disagree with,” Obama’s former “car czar” Steven Rattner tweeted with a link to a headline about Obama skipping the funeral.

Fox News host Sean Hannity blasted out his own site’s article that dismissed the decision as disappointingly expected: “Obama To SKIP Scalia Funeral, Here’s A List Of OTHER Funerals He Was Too Busy To Attend.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest revealed the president’s plans during the

daily briefing, saying Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will go to the Supreme Court on Friday “to pay their respects to Justice Scalia” while the justice lies in repose in the Great Hall. Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden, who share Scalia’s Catholic faith, will be at the services instead.

Earnest refused to be drawn out about why the president would not attend the funeral, saying he didn’t know what the president plans to do on Saturday, and Scalia’s son, Eugene, did not immediately respond to a question about whether the family requested that Obama not attend the funeral.

“The president, obviously, believes it’s important for the institution of the presidency to pay his respects to somebody who dedicated three decades of his life to the institution of the Supreme Court,” Earnest said, adding that Friday marked an “important opportunity” to pay those respects.

Inspite of the criticism, people close to the Scalia family said Obama was making the right choice. “I wouldn’t have expected President Obama to attend the funeral Mass, and I see no reason to fault him for not attending,” said Ed Whelan, a former Scalia clerk who now heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “The ceremony at the Supreme Court seems the most apt opportunity for the president to pay his respects, but he obviously might have severe competing demands on his time.”

There’s not substantial historic precedent for presidents attending the funerals of sitting justices. President George W. Bush not only attended, but also eulogized Supreme Court chief justice and fellow conservative William Rehnquist in 2005. But before him, the last justice to die in office was Robert H. Jackson in 1954.

Still, the decision to forgo the funeral on Saturday was played up by some as a partisan snub.

Tim Miller, the communications director for Jeb Bush, simply tweeted “Same.” in response to a message from MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who said, “Some amazing advice my mom gave me once: ‘If you’re wondering whether you should go to the funeral, you should go to the funeral.”

The optics of paying his respects to Scalia are tricky for Obama, who would have been the subject of constant cutaways to his reactions and interactions with members of Congress during the funeral, distracting from memorials for the giant of American legal thought.

Obama so far has taken pains to show reverence for Scalia, even as he urged Republicans to keep an open mind about a replacement. In the immediate aftermath of Scalia’s death last weekend, Obama praised his wit and predicted that he would be remembered as one of the “most consequential judges and thinkers to serve.”

Confronted with a series of questions during a press conference on Tuesday about Republican plans to block a nominee, Obama was careful to again express gratitude for Scalia’s service before launching into a Constitutional lecture directed at the opposing party.

Scalia’s death ripped open a political seam that has suddenly consumed both the presidential race and the Senate, especially after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately issued a statement calling for Scalia’s replacement to be delayed until the next president is in office. Obama almost as quickly announced he would not be deterred, and pronounced his intent to nominate a fair-minded legal heavyweight to replace Scalia.

Former justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Wednesday appeared to back Obama’s decision to move forward with a nomination, telling a Fox affiliate, “We need somebody in there to do the job and just get on with it.”

So far, however, the president has not tipped his hand as far as top candidates, or even whether he will considering picking a moderate who could be palatable to the Republican-controlled Senate.

The White House said no nomination is expected this week while Congress is in recess, but there’s still been plenty of speculation and tea-leaf reading about both Obama’s and the Senate’s intentions.

On Tuesday, some Republicans signaled they’re open to at least holding hearings, if not also allowing a confirmation vote. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in an interview with POLITICO bristled at the suggestion that his party would completely ignore a nomination, saying, “It’s amazing how many words are being put in everybody’s mouth.”

Also on Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, whose panel would evaluate any potential Obama pick, said he wouldn’t rule out holding hearings. 

On Wednesday, Nevada GOP Sen. Dean Heller broke with his party’s strategy and called on Obama to put forward a consensus candidate. “The chances of approving a new nominee are slim, but Nevadans should have a voice in the process,” said Heller, a purple state senator, in the most direct rebuttal to McConnell’s plans to complete block a Supreme Court nominee.

But McConnell is still making hay of the Senate’s oppositional force, penning a letter on Wednesday afternoon for the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm that told donors that their “support means everything at this pivotal moment in American history.”

“Senate Republicans have made a commitment to ensuring that the American people have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell wrote. “Stand with Senate Republicans as we hold our ground in waiting to confirm a new justice until after 2016, the time by which the American people will have chosen a new president and a new direction for our country.”

At the press briefing on Wednesday, Earnest also tried to clarify Obama’s view on his own decision as a senator to filibuster against President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, in 2006. Earnest said Obama “regrets” the decision. But, he said, the situation was different.

“The president considered the qualifications and world view and credentials and record of the individual that President Bush put forward and then-Sen. Obama raised some objections,” Earnest said. “And what the president regrets is that Senate Democrats didn’t focus more on making an effective public case about those substantive suggestions.”

According to the Media Research Center,

President Obama will become the first U.S. president to skip the funeral of a sitting Supreme Court justice in at least 65 years when he skips the funeral service for Justice Antonin Scalia, scheduled to be held this Saturday.  

While Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, in recent history most have retired from the bench prior to their deaths.

Most recently, President George W. Bush gave the eulogy at the funeral of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who passed in 2005 while still on the bench.

Prior to Rehnquists’ death, Dwight D. Eisenhower was photographed attending the funeral of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who served on the court until he passed away in 1953. 

The funerals of sitting Supreme Court Justices were far more common before the 1950s, but it is unclear if sitting presidents attended the funeral services of those sitting justices or if not as few records of attendance exist. 

Why is the President not attending the funeral of the Senion Justice on the Supreme Court/

Petulant President Pantywaist couldn’t be holding a grudge, could he?

Does the very thought of Hillary Clinton and Yoko Ono having a “fling” make you want to hurl?

On February 12, 2014, usatoday.com reported that

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the annual State of the Union ritual Tuesday night, calling the presidential speech something worth skipping because it is a “rather silly affair.”One of three justices who did not attend President Obama’s speech at the U.S. Capitol — along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — Scalia bemoaned that “it has turned into a childish spectacle, and I don’t think that I want to be there to lend dignity to it.”

“The State of the Union is not something I write on my calendar,” Scalia said during his own remarks before the Smithsonian Associates at George Washington University. But he quipped, “I didn’t set this up tonight just to upstage the president.”

Scalia’s views are shared by Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, both nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush. Roberts once said the presidential speech has “denigrated into a political pep rally” and added that it was “troubling” to expect members of the high court to sit there expressionless.

Indeed, Alito was seen on TV cameras during Obama’s 2010 remarks shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true” when the president criticized the high court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the right of corporations and unions to make unlimited, independent political expenditures.

Next to a presidential inauguration, the State of the Union Address has similar stagecraft and drama. The president speaks before a joint session of Congress, and the justices, Cabinet members, foreign diplomats and assorted guests are in attendance in the packed House chambers.

 

Petulant President Pantywaist, as I dubbed him, years ago, behaves as if the world should genuflect when he enters the room, hanging on his every syllable in rapt attention.

Justice Scalia, appointed by an AMERICAN PRESIDENT by the name of Ronald Reagan, was a man’s man, a Christian and a Constitutionalist, who believed in American Exceptionalism and Traditional American Values.

His Legal Writings were brilliant in scope and interpretation.

By contrast, Obama was the first Editor of the Harvard Law Review, who never contributed to that publication.

Obama’s childish snubbing of Justice Scalia’s Funeral tells you everything that you need to know about him.

History will remember Justice Scalia as a Giant Among Men.

It will not be as kind toward Petulant President Pantywaist.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

 

 

Obama Attacks Trump During Presidential Press Conference. Throws Stone From Glass House.

Obama-Shrinks-2Yesterday, President Barack Hussein Obama held a Press Conference….and further demeaned the Office, which he presently holds.

CNN.com posted the following article…

Washington (CNN) – President Barack Obama has a message for Donald Trump — being president is tougher than being on a reality show and the American people are too “sensible” to elect him.

“I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama said at a news conference in California after a meeting with southeast Asian leaders. “And the reason is that I have a lot of faith in the American people. Being president is a serious job. It’s not hosting a talk show, or a reality show.”

He went on: “It’s not promotion, it’s not marketing. It’s hard. And a lot of people count on us getting it right.”

Obama offered surprisingly frank assessments of the campaign to replace him, taking shots at Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. He also hinted hint that he was sympathetic to Hillary Clinton’s position on the difficulty of enacting political change, as she faces a tough challenge from a candidate in Bernie Sanders, who has fired up Democratic primary voters who are demanding sweeping reform.

But it was the potential of a Trump administration that Obama seemed most eager to critique. 

The presidency isn’t “a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day. And sometimes, it requires you making hard decisions even when people don’t like it,” Obama said, adding that whoever succeeds him needs to be able to reflect the importance of their office and give foreign leaders confidence he or she knows their names and something about their nations’ histories. Obama also appeared to raise the question of whether Trump was prepared to be commander-in-chief.

“Whoever’s standing where I’m standing right now has the nuclear codes with them, and can order 21-year-olds into a firefight, and (has) to make sure that the banking system doesn’t collapse, and is often responsible for not just the United States of America, but 20 other countries that are having big problems, or are falling apart and are gonna be looking for us to something.”

He added: “The American people are pretty sensible, and I think they’ll make a sensible choice in the end.”

Trump responded to Obama during an event in Beaufort, South Carolina.

“He has done such a lousy job as president,” Trump said, before adding that he didn’t mind being targeted by Obama, saying he took it as a “great compliment.”

Trump wasn’t the only Republican who took a shot from the President.

When he bemoaned Republican warnings that his nominee to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court would not even get a hearing, Obama rebuked people who claim to be “strict interpreters” of the Constitution — except regarding his right to propose a nominee.

That seemed to be a clear jab at Cruz, who has helped lead calls to prevent the president installing a nominee who could tilt the ideological balance of the court to the left.

Rubio also came under fire when the president mocked “a candidate who sponsored a bill, that I supported, to finally solve the immigration problem, and he’s running away from it as fast as he can.”

The President stepped more carefully when he was asked about the Democratic race. He opened by making it look like he was delivering a veiled endorsement of Clinton, who is facing a stronger than expected challenge from Sanders.

“You know, I know Hillary better than I know Bernie, because she’s served in my administration, and she was an outstanding secretary of state. And I suspect that, on certain issues, she agrees with me more than Bernie does,” Obama said.

But then added: “On the other hand, there may be a couple issues where Bernie agrees with me more. I don’t know, I haven’t studied their positions that closely.”

Obama who, like Sanders, once wowed young Democrats with soaring calls for change in the 2008 election, also appeared to give credence to Clinton’s election argument that pushing through fundamental reforms is harder than it looks.

“Ultimately, I will probably have an opinion on it, based on both — (having) been a candidate of hope and change and a President who’s got some nicks and cuts and bruises from — you know, getting stuff done over the last seven years.”

Obama was clear on one thing — he’s happy not to be in the race himself.

“The thing I can say unequivocally,” he said, “I am not unhappy that I am not on the ballot.”

Considering that you are about a popular with Americans as Michael Moore is with All-you-can-eat Buffets, I’ll bet you’re not, Mr. President.

That’s a nice Glass House you’ve got there, Skippy.

Let’s take a moment and look at your less-than-stellar track record before your “Sponsors” cleaned you up and foisted you upon the American People. shall we?

The following FACTS are contained in my post, “The Great Disconnect: The Whole, Ugly Truth About Barack Hussein Obama”…

From 1985 – 1988, Obama was a Community Organizer in Chicago.  What does a Community Organizer do?  I’m glad you asked.

Per Byron York in an article found at nationalreview.com:

Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising.

If you ask Obama’s fellow Community Organizers what his significant accomplishments were, they’ll say two things: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area’s oldest housing projects.  Those  were his biggest victories.

So, after 3 years of Community Organizing, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School at the age of 27.  The question is:  How did he get the money for this?  In my article Why Haven’t I Heard of Khalid Al-Monsour? ,  I attempted to answer that question:

President Obama attended Harvard Law School from 1988 – 1991.  The average tuition during that time was $25,000 per year.  It would have cost $75,000 to attend there for 3 years.  As president of the Harvard Law Review, he received no stipend from the school, according to Harvard spokesman Mike Armini in a interview with Newsmax.

If numbers cited by the Obama Presidential Campaign for Scooter”s student loans are accurate, that means that Obama came up with more than $32,000 over three years from sources other than loans to pay for tuition, room and board.  Hmmmmm.

Along with the funding issue, very little is known about Obama’s time at Harvard Law School,and his sycophants in the Liberal hierarchy, Main Stream Media,  and even Harvard Law School Administrators have done a remarkable job in running interference against anyone trying to find out about it.

From Jodi Kantor’s article at nytimes.com:

He arrived there as an unknown, Afro-wearing community organizer who had spent years searching for his identity; by the time he left, he had his first national news media exposure, a book contract and a shot of confidence from running the most powerful legal journal in the country.

In 1995  “Bomber” Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn hosted a fund-raiser for Obama prior to Obama’s run for Alice Palmer’s seat in the state Senate  and Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s upcoming state Senate campaign.

In 1996 at age 34, he ran for the state Senate in dubious campaign that is barely known of, outside of Chicago.   Alice Palmer, the incumbent, had decided to run for Congress and supported Obama as her successor.   But after Palmer’s congressional campaign ran into trouble, she changed her mind and decided to run for re-election to the Illinois Senate after all. Obama refused to step aside and the melee ensued.  One of Scooter’s volunteers challenged whether Palmer’s nominating petitions were even legal.  Obama’s campaign pulled the same chicanery concerning the petitions of other candidates.  Palmer dropped out, and the other candidates were disqualified.   So,  Obama won unopposed in the Democratic primary—guaranteeing his victory in the general election.  This was truly an example of Chicago-style politics at it’s finest…or dirtiest.

He “served” as a United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 – 2008.

Obama sponsored 121 bills as a senator, of which 115 never made it out of committee and 3 were successfully enacted.   He co-sponsored 506 bills during the same time period.

Barack Obama missed 314 (24%) of 1,300 roll call votes.  He did not have the option of voting “Present” as he did 130 times in the Illinois State Senate.

One and one half years after taking his seat in the U.S. Senate, Obama declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination as their representative in the 2008 Presidential Election.

And now, after 7 years of a failed presidency, Obama has the temerity to attacked a self-made billionaire, further degrading the Office of the President in the process.

Trump responded to Obama’s comments Tuesday from Beaufort, SC, saying,

This man has done such a bad job. He has set us back so far, and for him to say that is a great compliment, if you want to know the truth. A network called and wanted a response. I said, ‘You’re lucky I didn’t run last time when Romney ran, because you would have been a one-term president.’

The man may have a point.

According to the latest Reuters Poll, he still has a commanding lead over the other Republican Candidates, including Senator Ted Cruz…

  • Donald Trump 40.8%
  • Ted Cruz 16.9%
  • Ben Carson 11.5%
  • Marco Rubio 9.8%
  • Jeb Bush 8.0%
  • John Kasich 7.1%
  • Wouldn’t vote 5.4%
  • Jim Gilmore 0.6%
  • Carly Fiorina –%
  • Chris Christie –%

With November rapidly approaching, the Democrat Party, including the President himself, are beginning to show signs of desperation and panic.

Look at their two top candidates, can you blame them?

You have a crazy old Socialist, who looks like Doc Emmett Brown from “Back to the Future”, who hasn’t held a real job in over 40 years and a Former First Lady/Carpetbagger New York Senator/Failed Secretary of State, with obvious Health Issues and no personality whatsoever, who is so dadburn mean that grass never grows again where she spits.

It’s really no surprise that the President of the United States attacked the Leading Presidential Candidate of the Opposition Party, yesterday.

Liberals will tell you whom they fear.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

Since Paris: Obama Has Imported 605 Muslim Syrian “Refugees”, 2 Syrian Christians. THIS is “Not Who We Are”.

Refugees-NRD-600During the G20 Summit, held in November of 2015, the President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, made the following two Statements…

  1. Here at the G-20, our nations have sent an unmistakable message — that we are united against this threat. ISIL is the face of evil. Our goal, as I’ve said many times, is to degrade and ultimately destroy this barbaric terrorist organization. As I outlined this fall at the United Nations, we have a comprehensive strategy using all elements of our power, military intelligence, economic development, and the strength of our communities. We have always understood that this will be a long-term campaign. There will be setbacks and there will be successes. The terrible events in Paris were obviously a terrible and sickening setback. Even as we grieve with our French friends, however, we can’t lose sight that there is progress being made. – courtesy of whitehouse.gov
  2. …And when I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims. when I hear political leaders suggesting that there     would be a religious test for which person is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted. When some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion. When Pope Francis came to visit the United States and gave a speech before congress, he didn’t just speak about Christians who were being persecuted. He didn’t call on Catholic parishes just to admit those who were of the same religious faith. He said protect people who are vulnerable. So I think it is very important for us right now, particularly those who are in leadership, particularly those who have a platform and can be heard, not to fall into that trap, not to feed that dark impulse inside of us. – courtesy of breitbart.com

As we have all come to realize…as far as Obama is concerned…HYPOCRISY ABOUNDS.

CNSNews reports that

The government has admitted 605 Syrian refugees for resettlement in the United States since last November’s Paris terrorist attack, two of whom are Christians.

The rest are 589 Sunni Muslims, 10 Shia Muslims, three other Muslims, and one refugee identified in State Department Refugee Processing Center data as “other religion.”

At the same time, the proportion of Christians among the total cohort of Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. since the conflict began five years ago has now dropped below two percent.

Just 55 Christians (1.9 percent) are among the 2,769 Syrian refugees admitted since March 2011, while a large majority – 2,594 (93.6 percent) – has been Sunni Muslims.

Christians accounted for about 10 percent of Syria’s population when the civil war began and Sunni Muslims for an estimated 74 percent.

Christians and other non-Muslim minorities have been targeted specifically by ISIS and other radical groups, and monitoring group estimate that more than 700,000 Christians have fled Syria since then.

Other non-Muslims among the Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. since the war began include small numbers of Baha’i (2), Yazidis (1), Jehovah’s Witnesses (8), Zoroastrians (6), atheists (3) and Syrians who have self-identified as having no religion (7).

The administration has rejected calls by some Republican lawmakers, and some GOP presidential candidates, for Syrian Christians to be prioritized in the refugee admission process.The ISIS terrorist attack in Paris on November 13 fueled concerns that the terrorist group was exploiting the flow of refugees and migrants as cover to send jihadists into the West to carry out attacks.

French authorities said two of the attackers had been carrying fake Syrian passports and warned European Union partners that “some terrorists are trying to get into our countries and commit criminal acts by mixing in with the flow of migrants and refugees.”

Last Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper affirmed during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that ISIS has done so.

“Isn’t it already proven that Mr. Baghdadi is sending people with this flow of refugees that are terrorists that – in order to inflict further attacks on Europe and the United States?” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked him, referring to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“That’s correct,” Clapper replied. “That’s one technique they’ve used is taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow.”

In addition, he continued, ISIS has become “pretty skilled at [producing] phony passports, so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers as well.”

In December, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said the U.S. intelligence community “has identified already individuals tied to terrorist organizations in Syria that want to exploit and get into the United States through the refugee process.”

Obama’s defense for America admitting undocumented and un-vetted Syrian “Refugees”, who have, literally, as documented, torn apart Europe, is the scolding comment, which he makes time and time again,

That’s not who we are.

“We” who, Mr. President?

Americans have been aware, for the last 7 years, that there is a great disconnect between the citizens of the United States and their president.  It’s not just his stand-offish behavior.  There’s something else going on.
He was not raised like the majority of Americans.
He didn’t have rubber dart gun wars in the neighborhood backyards.  He didn’t play Nerf football in the front yards.  He didn’t go to Vacation Bible School.  I don’t know if he was ever told to stand with his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance.
It is this disconnect that is at the heart of the distrust that Americans have experienced and are experiencing, regarding the Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.
Hope and Change have turned into despair and disbelief.  Obama has never understood the shared values of average Americans, because the people who raised him did not share those values, either.  It is the concern that we feel for one another, that shared American value system, that has caused a great awakening.
Allow me to tell you who “we”, the average Americans, who have been watching you tear OUR country apart for the last 7 years, are, Mr. President.
We are the men and women, who landed on the shores of an unknown, uncivilized land, in order to be free from a tyrant and, in order to be free to worship the God of Abraham as we pleased.
We are the people who defeated that same tyrant and began a nation that, despite growing pains, and a war which pitted brother against brother, became the Greatest Nation on the Face of God’s Green Earth.
We are that small band of Tennessee Volunteers, who, with Davy Crockett at the Alamo, though hopelessly outnumbered, gave their lives in defense of freedom.
We are the sons and grandsons of those brave men who landed on Normandy Beach, turning the tide of World War II.
We are the people who are the most charitable people on Earth, contributing millions upon millions of our hard-earned money to private and faith-based charities, and, who personally help our family friends, and neighbors out, when disaster strikes…OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF OUR HEARTS, NOT PRESIDENTIAL DECREE.
.
We have taken in millions of immigrants, who came here legally, to start a new life in this blessed land, eager to assimilate into the American Way of Life, where, by God’s Grace…and hard work, they , too, could achieve the American Dream.
And, we are a nation, comprised of a population, of whom 75% STILL identify themselves as CHRISTIANS.
That’s who WE are, President Obama.
President Abraham Lincoln once said,
If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
That is the situation that you find yourself in today, Mr. President.
Judging by your past actions, including the clandestine dissemination of the “youths” from Central and South America, who arrived here, parentless, last year, throughout our country, we “average Americans”, do not trust you and your people, when you say that you will “vet” these Syrian “Refugees”. Especially, since the overwhelming majority of them are well-fit young men with cell phones, who look like soldiers.
And, that is why we and our states’ Governors’ are standing up to your plans to disseminate these Syrian “Refugees” among us.
And now, you wonder why the majority of Americans oppose you at every turn, including calling for our Senators to block your Supreme Court Nominations in this, your last year in office?
It’s a matter of SURVIVAL.
Until He Comes,
KJ

Republican Establishment Stacks SC Debate Audience in an Effort to Derail Trump and Cruz

gop-debate-north-charleston-680x365A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. – Ronald Reagan, March 1, 1975

Yesterday, on Facebook Political Pages and Political Websites, a lot of Americans were talking about Republican Presidential Hopeful Donald J. Trump and the less-than-supportive reaction that he received during the Republican Primary Candidate on Saturday Night, which was held in South Carolina, the state which will hold the next Primary Elections.

It turns out that there was a logical reason for that, and it wasn’t just his mercurial personality.

Breitbart.com reports that

GREENVILLE, South Carolina — The chairman of the local Republican Party here confirmed to local television that 2016 frontrunner billionaire Donald Trump’s concerns—and those of his closest competitor Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) —with the Republican National Committee (RNC) allocation of debate audience tickets are well-placed.

Chad Groover, the chairman of the Greenville County Republican Party here, told WYFF—the local NBC News station—that party donors get tickets to the debate.

“You’ll have a good mix of people who are donors, people who are donors and workers, and people who are just workers,” Groover said, noting that he got “a couple of dozen” of tickets to hand out to the party’s faithful donors.

“I didn’t have hundreds of tickets. I had a couple of dozen tickets,” Groover said.

That means a significant proportion of his stack of approximately 24 tickets went to monied interests backing the GOP—not to actual voters in the upcoming election.

Sources close to the process who work for the RNC, but are not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed to Breitbart News throughout the evening on Saturday that that is standard operating procedure for the RNC and the party as a whole for all debates: Donors get tickets while voters have to watch on TV at home.

As such, the same appears to have been true party-wide. One well-placed source who works for one of the GOP presidential campaigns and was in attendance at the debate on Saturday evening here—but was not authorized to speak on record about the matter—told Breitbart News that Sen. Lindseey Graham (R-SC) and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley were personally given scores of tickets to distribute. Both despise Trump and have said so publicly–Haley even using the platform of the official GOP response to the State of the Union to do so–and it would be no surprise if they did aim to stack the audience with anti-Trump sentiment.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said another source in the audience, someone who has attended several of the GOP debates. That source said the anti-Trump and anti-Cruz audience members—who were thoroughly cheering for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and his mentor former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush when they made passionate cases for amnesty for illegal aliens, something entirely non-representative of South Carolina’s electorate—were behaving unlike any audience he’d ever seen in his lifetime of attending GOP presidential debates.

The Republican National Committee’s Sean Spicer confirmed to Breitbart News pre-debate that the RNC proper distributed 367 tickets while the state party and locally elected officials received 550 tickets. Meanwhile the debate partners—CBS News, the Peace Center, and Google—received another 100 tickets. That means more than 1000 tickets—1,017 by Spicer’s admission—went not to voters in the upcoming election and not to campaigns for equal distribution to their supporters but to special interest distribution of those connected to the party, mostly high dollar donors. Only 600 tickets were distributed equally among the six remaining GOP campaigns, which to be fair to the RNC is the highest number of tickets distributed as such so far this election cycle.

But Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is calling for the RNC to drop all donor tickets and stop handing them out to special and monied interests entirely. Lewandowski says at all the rest of the debates from here on out, Spicer and the RNC must equally allocate all tickets among the various campaigns so they can distribute them equally and fairly to their supporters—and cut out all the donors and special interests who get tickets.

“I think the RNC does a terrible job in allocating the tickets, to be honest with you, There’s an opportunity—there’s 2,000 seats out there, there’s six candidates on stage, they should just divide them evenly so everyone has them, but instead they just give them to the donor class, they give them to the lobbyists and to all the special interests,” Lewandowski said in the spin room. “It’s not fair, it’s not equitable. So I think what they should do moving forward is take the total number of seats available, allocate them across the board and let the candidates bring their people in, because that’s who should be here, not the donors.”

Spicer has refused repeatedly over the course of several emails on Saturday and Sunday morning to answer whether the RNC will comply with Lewandowski’s request to drop all RNC and state and local party ticket allocation and just allow the campaigns to equally distribute all debate tickets fairly to their supporters in the future.

Trump’s and Cruz’s concerns are even being confirmed by many across the political spectrum. In fact, even the left-of-center Huffington Post confirms that the RNC’s ticket allocation system seems to have been “behind” the excessive and unwarranted booing of Trump and Cruz—and cheering of the donor class supported Rubio and Bush.

“The audience at Saturday’s CBS News Republican presidential debate was more boisterous than unusual — booing, clapping and generally making its feelings known during several exchanges between candidates on stage in Greenville, South Carolina,” the Huffington Post’s Igor Bobic wrote. “At various points, attendees seemed to favor former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and to be very much against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and real estate mogul Donald Trump — the two candidates currently leading the race. The way the Republican National Committee distributed the tickets may have been behind the heightened reactions.”

Vox, another left-of-center outlet, ran a headline that made it even clearer: “The Republican establishment packed the debate audience with Donald Trump haters.” In the piece, author German Lopez noted that the audience’s pro-Rubio and pro-Bush cheering was “very peculiar” as was the booing of Trump and Cruz.

“Something very peculiar happened at the Republican debate on Saturday night: When Donald Trump talked, the audience booed. Yet when Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and even John Kasich talked, they got loud cheers and applause,” Lopez wrote. “This happened again and again. It even led a spike in Google searches for ‘Why are people booing?’”

Vox even admits that Trump’s claim on stage that the odd—and unrepresentative of the party’s voting base—audience was made up of “Jeb’s special interests and lobbyists” was really not “that far-fetched.”

“Prior to the debate, the Republican Party decided not to use a lottery system to decide who should be in the audience,” Lopez wrote. “Instead, most tickets went to elected Republican officials, donors, and other workers for the party picked by local, state, and national party officials. The result, it seems, is the room was packed with Republican voters who overwhelmingly dislike Trump.”

That seems to be why Lewandowski is calling for a new system for fairness, one that cuts the RNC completely out of the process. It remains to be seen if other campaigns will get on board with this, but earlier in the cycle–due to the RNC’s ineffectiveness in dealing with biased moderators–the entire field of campaign managers met privately to cut the RNC out of the process of negotiating with the networks. It is only logical that the next step is that the campaigns work to ensure fairness in debate audience selection, something the RNC clearly failed at providing.

Well, gosh. Why would the Establishment Republicans want to stack the audience like that?

Could they be desperate?

Did the ignorant, disrespectful CBS Television Series “Angel From Hell” featuring Jane Lynch, a Conservative-hating Atheist, get cancelled…quickly?

You betcha.

Speaking of CBS…

According to CBS News…

The CBS News Battleground Tracker poll shows that Donald Trump keeps a large lead in South Carolina, bolstered by support from conservatives and also from evangelical voters, who make up a large share of the electorate here.

Ted Cruz is in second place, but well behind Trump. Cruz has the support of those who consider themselves very conservative, but trails Trump among all conservatives as well as moderates.

John Kasich has gotten a little bounce out of his surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire, but he may be limited here by the fact that evangelical voters are not as strongly in support of him as non-evangelicals.

For Trump voters, who have been relatively steadfast in their support over the last few months, the percentage who say they’ve firmly decided on Trump has increased. Trump’s lead among evangelicals is up from January, and he has widened his lead among conservatives, too.

In a contest marked by divisions among so-called “insiders” and “outsiders,” South Carolina Republicans show a strong preference for campaigns running as the latter, and this poll helps illustrate why. By four to one, South Carolina Republicans describe the “establishment” as a bad thing, and few describe it as a group that knows how to get things done.

On the metric of being “prepared” to be president, Trump and Cruz do well, and Jeb Bush and John Kasich do relatively well, but Marco Rubio trails in this regard, suggesting that last week’s debate in New Hampshire may have had an impact.

Hillary Clinton keeps her large lead in South Carolina, which has narrowed only slightly from last month, and she is bolstered by strong support from the African American voters who comprise most of the Democratic electorate here.

This is what I don’t understand about the Republican Establishment.

They run around telling everybody how Conservative they are, when in reality,they actually hold the same beliefs as Liberal Democrats.

The public wants new ideas. We are tired of dancing to the Washington Two-Step.

That is the reason for the popularity of Trump and Cruz. They have been saying the things that Americans have been wanting to hear for some time now.

That is the reason that they are the Leaders in the Republican Primary.

Contrast them to the candidates whom the Democrats are offering: old white folks from the Northeast Corridor, one who is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and the other, a demented old socialist, who resembles Doc Emmett Brown from “Back to the Future”.

The “Vichy Republicans” as I refer to them, are looking a Gift Horse in the mouth.

They are positioned to sweep the nation, on the way to placing their candidate in the Oval Office, buoyed by a Grassroots Movement, the likes of has not been seen since the 1980 Presidential Election, which put into office the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

All the Republicans have to do to be successful is something that they seem to have forgotten how to do, since they themselves were swept into Congressional Power in the 2010 and 2012 Mid-Term Elections.

They need to pay attention and actually listen to the voters who gave them their cushy jobs.

The need to stop backing the wrong “horse”.

They are showing their color to be Liberal Blue, while they claim to be Conservative Red.

It is almost as if they believe that the Political Tsunami, which resulted in Republicans holding both Houses of Congress, came about because they made themselves look like Democrats.

They need to come down off of Capitol Hill every now and then.

And, visit Realityville.

Average Americans, like you and me, living from paycheck to paycheck in America’s Heartland, do not need another Democratic Party.

If we wanted to continue to put up with their Liberal Stupidity, we would have left all of them in office.

Instead, in November of 2014, we showed them the door.

The overwhelming majority of average Americans are tired of the empty promises and spineless behavior of Professional Politicians, including Squishy Moderates, who have more in common with the Democrats in the Northeast Corridor, than they do with average Americans in the Heartland.

If the Republican Establishment continues this war against Trump and Cruz, they will go down to defeat again in 2016.

They will never achieve victory by trying to push the jello of “Liberal Moderation” up a hill.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

The Death of Justice Antonin Scalia: Time to Start “Borking”

Pendulum-NRD-600Last night, President Barack Hussein Obama addressed the nation concerning the passing of Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As he showed during a State of the Union Address, several years back, to say that he did not care for this Judicial Giant, would be putting it mildly.

In fact, as his remarks, courtesy of whitehouse.gov reveal, ol’ Scooter is positively chomping at the bit to replace him with a Far left Extremist Judicial Activist of his own choosing.

Good evening, everybody.  For almost 30 years, Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia was a larger-than-life presence on the bench — a brilliant legal mind with an energetic style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.     He influenced a generation of judges, lawyers, and students, and profoundly shaped the legal landscape.  He will no doubt be remembered as one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court.  Justice Scalia dedicated his life to the cornerstone of our democracy:  The rule of law.  Tonight, we honor his extraordinary service to our nation and remember one of the towering legal figures of our time.

     Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey to an Italian immigrant family.  After graduating from Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, he worked at a law firm and taught law before entering a life of public service.  He rose from Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel to Judge on the D.C. Circuit Court, to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

     A devout Catholic, he was the proud father of nine children and grandfather to many loving grandchildren.  Justice Scalia was both an avid hunter and an opera lover — a passion for music that he shared with his dear colleague and friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Michelle and I were proud to welcome him to the White House, including in 2012 for a State Dinner for Prime Minister David Cameron.  And tonight, we join his fellow justices in mourning this remarkable man.

     Obviously, today is a time to remember Justice Scalia’s legacy.  I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time.  There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.  These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone.  They’re bigger than any one party.  They are about our democracy.  They’re about the institution to which Justice Scalia dedicated his professional life, and making sure it continues to function as the beacon of justice that our Founders envisioned.

     But at this moment, we most of all want to think about his family, and Michelle and I join the nation in sending our deepest sympathies to Justice Scalia’s wife, Maureen, and their loving family — a beautiful symbol of a life well lived.  We thank them for sharing Justice Scalia with our country. 

God bless them all, and God bless the United States of America.

The Liebrals, over at The Washington Post elaborated on the situation facing our nation and Obama’s possible choices.

President Obama declared Saturday that he intends to nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a move aimed at deepening his imprint on the nation’s highest court.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” Obama said, adding that there’s “plenty of time” for the Senate “to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote. These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone. They’re bigger than any one party — they’re about a democracy.”

But the president faces a fierce and protracted battle with Republicans who have already signaled that they have no intention of allowing Obama to choose a nominee to succeed Scalia.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that Scalia should not be replaced until the next president has taken office. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) rejected that position. “It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” he said in a statement. “Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

Obama has nominated two justices to the court in the past, and he has expressed the desire for jurists with empathy. He did not discuss his thinking about that on Saturday night. Instead, he used the moment to pay tribute to Scalia, whom he described as an “extraordinary judicial thinker.”

In selecting Supreme Court nominees, Obama has relied heavily on the advice of Vice President Biden, a former Senate Judiciary chairman. Biden has demonstrated again and again a strong working relationship with McConnell, having previously negotiated several tax and budget deals. The court nomination may hinge on Biden’s ability to reach a deal with McConnell again.

But the fate of the nomination would clearly be in Republican hands. While Democrats were able to change the rules in 2013 to make it easier to approve lower court judges with a simple majority, Supreme Court nominations still require 60 votes to advance past an opposition filibuster. To derail or delay the nomination, McConnell could simply not schedule a vote, but even if he allows Senate consideration of the nomination, Democrats do not have the numbers to overcome a GOP filibuster.

Although the Republican-controlled Congress could easily thwart an Obama nominee, such a decision could reverberate across the presidential campaign and into in the November elections, in which several GOP senators face tough, competitive races.

The most immediate outcome of the Scalia vacancy is that it offers Obama the chance to draw sharper battle lines with Republicans during an increasingly acrimonious presidential election.

The administration now faces a chaotic political and legal environment in which the president must prepare for a bitter confirmation fight or embrace the prospect of a deadlocked Supreme Court divided evenly between liberals and conservatives.

Scalia’s death also throws into doubt the outcome of some of the most controversial issues facing the nation in cases before the court this term: abortion, affirmative action, the rights of religious objectors to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, and the president’s powers on immigration and deportation.

A deadlocked court could leave appellate decisions in place without setting a precedent. That would please the administration on a case involving union membership, for instance, but would keep Obama’s executive action on deportation from being implemented.

White House officials would not comment Saturday evening on their deliberations about a potential nominee, but the administration has an extensive list of possible candidates to choose from, including some who would change the face of the court by virtue of their race or sexual orientation.

“Blocking a strong person of color, a woman or an historic LGBT candidate for the Supreme Court might cause conservatives more trouble than they think they’re preventing,” said Robert Raben, a Democratic consultant and lobbyist who served as a senior Justice Department official under President Clinton. “The perception of unfairness or bias at the height of a national election could seriously backfire.”

One former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the president was likely to look to someone young enough to make a mark on the court over several decades. Obama has appointed several such jurists to U.S. appellate courts, the person noted, providing him with a relatively deep bench to from which to choose.

Among the leading candidates would be Sri Srinivasan, a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was confirmed to seat in a 97-to-0 Senate vote in May 2013. Srinivasan would be the first South Asian American on the court. He worked in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office under both Obama and President George W. Bush, and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Other contenders from that same court include its chief judge, Merrick Garland, who is well liked by conservatives and was a finalist for such a nomination when Obama selected Justice Elena Kagan in 2010. Patricia Ann Millett, who won confirmation to the D.C. Circuit in December 2013, may also be considered.

Obama could also look to current or former administration officials, said those familiar with the president’s thinking, or even to the Senate. Among those officials are Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Eric Holder, the former attorney general.

Other potential choices could include Deval Patrick (D), the former governor of Massachusetts, or Paul Smith, who chairs the appellate and Supreme Court practice at Jenner & Block and, if confirmed, would be the first openly gay justice.

Beyond the D.C. Circuit, there are many other appellate judges the president could look to in selecting a nominee. Those include Paul Watford and Mary H. Murguia of the 9th Circuit; Albert Diaz of the 4th Circuit and Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson of the 1st Circuit.

Regardless of whom Obama selects, the combination of the timing of the opening, the stark division on the court and deeply partisan passion being evoked in both presidential primaries would make this confirmation battle unlike any of the past 40 years.

The last confirmation in the eighth year of a presidency was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose 97-to-0 vote in February 1988 came after two failed nomination efforts by President Reagan in the face of a Democratic-controlled Senate in late 1987. Kennedy is seen as a traitor among conservative activists, who view his rulings on abortion and gay rights with the liberal bloc as an example of GOP leaders choosing political expediency over ideological rigidity.

The only other attempt to fill a vacancy during a presidential election year came in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson tried to elevate Abe Fortas to be chief justice. The Senate blocked Fortas. Subsequently, the other nomination to fill Fortas’s spot as associate justice was withdrawn during the final months of Johnson’s presidency.

Under normal circumstances, the nomination of a justice takes about 75 to 90 days, the first 60 or so involving a thorough vetting process by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Typically, the panel does not consider judicial nominees after mid-May, under a tradition established by the late Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). While chairing the Judiciary Committee, Thurmond declared that he would not take up new judicial nominations within a few months of a presidential election.

Filling the post of Scalia, however, will be anything but normal. He was the outspoken champion for the court’s conservative wing and had many admirers in the Senate, including McConnell. Obama’s first two appointments to the court were relatively easy because Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan were replacing liberal-leaning justices.

Senate conservatives, already predisposed to not approve of Obama’s choice, might be loath to allow him to replace their judicial hero with a liberal jurist who would tip the court in a left-leaning direction. As of now, Sotomayor and Kagan often sided with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer in the most ideologically driven cases, with Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. providing the tie-breaking votes.

If Republicans leave the Scalia seat vacant for any lengthy time, that sets up the chance of a series of 4-to-4 votes in which the ruling of the lower federal court would stand as the law of that particular region of the country.

That political math in the Senate means Obama will need the support of all 46 members of the Democratic caucus and at least 14 Republicans to end a filibuster and successfully appoint Scalia’s successor. In the president’s previous Supreme Court nominations, just nine and then four Republicans voted to confirm Sotomayor and Kagan, respectively.

So, what now? I will tell you “What Now”.

Time for McConnell and the Senate Republicans to grow a spine and do some “Borking”.

What do I mean by “Borking”?

On October 23, 1987, The New York Times printed the following article…

One of the fiercest battles ever waged over a Supreme Court nominee ended today as the Senate decisively rejected the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.The vote was 58 against confirmation and 42 in favor, the biggest margin by which the Senate has ever rejected a Supreme Court nomination. [ Roll call, page 10. ] Judge Bork’s was the 27th Supreme Court nomination to fail in the country’s history, the sixth in this century, and the first since 1970, when the Senate rejected President Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell by a vote of 51 to 45. There have been 104 Supreme Court justices in the nation’s history.

The vote came two weeks after Judge Bork, in the face of expected defeat, said he would not withdraw his name and wanted the full Senate to vote on his nomination. In a statement issued from his chambers at the Federal courthouse here, where he still serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Bork said he was ”glad the debate took place.”

”There is now a full and permanent record by which the future may judge not only me but the proper nature of a confirmation proceeding,” the 60-year-old judge said.

President Reagan, in a statement released by the White House, said, ”I am saddened and disappointed that the Senate has bowed today to a campaign of political pressure.” The Next Nominee? In the final hours of the three-day debate on the Senate floor, senators turned their attention to the next nominee for the vacancy on the court. The White House is not expected to name a new candidate before the middle of next week.

The President has publicly vowed to find a nominee who will upset Judge Bork’s opponents ”just as much” as Judge Bork himself. Mr. Reagan said today, ”My next nominee for the Court will share Judge Bork’s belief in judicial restraint – that a judge is bound by the Constitution to interpret laws, not make them.”

Meanwhile, senators on both sides of the debate urged the President to adopt a less confrontational tone.

Now, in the last year of the Obama Presidency (Praise God), it is imperative for the United States Senate to adopt president Reagan’s “confrontational tone”.

Why? Well, here is a quote for you…

In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation. Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?

Who said that?  Karl Marx?  Vladimir Lenin?  Danny Glover?  George Clooney?  Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm)?  Nope.  It was the Obama-appointed and Senate-ratified, Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan.  The quote was a part of her senior thesis, written almost thirty years ago while an undergraduate at Princeton. The title of the thesis: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”.

The Senate must “Bork” every single Supreme Court Nomination of this Lame Duck President.

He has done enough damage to our country, already.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

A View From a Christian American Conservative Son of the South: The Politicians Don’t Need Us…Until It’s Time to Vote

Banning-Flags-600-LIAs a Son of the South, I am continuously amazed at some folks’ attitudes toward our beloved Dixie and all of us Followers of the Son of God, contained therein.

With all eyes focused on the South Carolina Primar Election, McClatchyDC.com has posted the following article…

ROBERTA, Ga.- Inside the Sunshine Coin Laundry near the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, Lagretta Ellington removed her family’s clothes from one of the large dryers and began to neatly fold them on a nearby table.

The air was moist and smelled of detergent. The floor was concrete. Her views of the presidential race were anything but. She was unsettled, and distrustful. The candidates just seemed like entertainers.
“I’m going to pray on it,” the 48-year-old Ellington said. “Hopefully, God will lead me in the right direction.”

In the South, now the pivotal battlefield of the 2016 presidential campaign, faith and politics walk the aisle together. And while Christians have always dominated American politics – Bernie Sanders this week became the first non-Christian ever to win a presidential primary in U.S. history – conservative Christians feel under siege.

Marriage is being redefined, and they’re being forced to go along. A new health care law mandates free contraception, even if it violates their core beliefs. Even the greeting “Merry Christmas” feels under assault.

Their anxiety and anger help explain the rise of Republican outsider candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas (“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief”) and even billionaire Donald Trump (“If I’m president, you’re going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores, believe me”), perhaps the unlikeliest of vessels for such support.

And their clout is at its peak right now.

In South Carolina, white evangelicals account for 51 percent of the likely Republican vote in the coming GOP primary. Six more Southern states, including Georgia, will vote on “Super Tuesday” March 1. Nearly 600 of the delegates chosen the first week of March will come from states where white evangelical Christians are a majority of the electorate, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a political newsletter from Larry J. Sabato and the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

And whether they pray at small chapels or sprawling megachurches, Christian conservatives across the South are driven by worries that their values are being threatened.

“Biblical values we would not be willing to compromise,” explained Dennis Lacy, lead pastor of North Highland Assembly of God in Columbus, Georgia.

“Do we not have any moral compass anymore?” said Dr. Randy Brinson, an evangelical Christian and physician in Montgomery, Alabama, who founded a group, Redeem the Vote, encouraging young people of faith to register and participate.

“Are we to say to people who have a more liberal viewpoint, ‘Does everything go?’ If there are no boundaries to things of moral behavior as Christians believe, if we throw out everything . . . there’s no more faith.”

June Bond, 61, a children’s advocate in Spartanburg, South Carolina, said many evangelical Christians “feel extremely pressured.” But she also tries to imagine what it must be like on the other side of the cultural divide.

“It’s one thing to listen to what our leaders say to us, but we also need to look at the other side and say, ‘What if . . . ?’ ” she said. “The South sometimes looks at things just kind of like, ‘This is what I was told.’ ”

Many say their objections to same-sex marriage are misunderstood.

It’s not “rooted in hostility and animus toward other people,” but because Christian conservatives believe marriage involves one man and one woman, said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM
David Cooke Jr., the Georgia district attorney for Bibb, Crawford and Peach counties, doesn’t buy the “under siege” mentality of his more conservative brethren. He’s an evangelical Christian, and a Democrat, which he said was not as rare as you might think.

“When you limit the gospel to gays and abortion, there’s not a whole lot of talk about taking care of the stranger and the orphan,” Cooke said, seated in his courthouse office in downtown Macon. “I think it shows that for so many folks it’s not really about the message of the faith. It’s about cultural Christianity.”

Religion has always been part of the South’s DNA, a legacy of its rural past.

It was the lifeblood of many communities, a cornerstone of the culture. In “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” author John Berendt’s widely popular book about a Savannah, Georgia, murder, he wrote, “If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, ‘What’s your business?’ In Macon they ask, ‘Where do you go to church?’ ”

It would never occur to someone that you didn’t, added Cooke, who met his wife at a Macon church.

When you limit the gospel to gays and abortion, there’s not a whole lot of talk about taking care of the stranger and the orphan. David Cooke Jr., an evangelical Democrat and Macon, Georgia, district attorney

Even today, the states of the old Confederacy – along with Utah and Oklahoma ‑ make up the most religious states in the country, according to a 2013 Gallup survey.

“Now change is on the doorstep, and many are worried about what it’s doing to their communities,” said Marc Farinella, a Democratic strategist who oversaw President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign in North Carolina. “There is a sense that their way of life is under attack.”

Christian conservatives feel it deeply, and resent it.

“We live in a society that has a lot of respect for diverse opinion and views, but it seems like anytime Christians express theirs, they can be lampooned,” said Lacy, the Columbus pastor. “We’re kind of open game. You can criticize any Christian and not get into trouble. But you try to criticize any other sect or group, that’s politically incorrect.”

Pastor Lacy is absolutely correct. In fact, as a Former Radio News Director in College, I can detect a condescending tone in this whole article.

In every single presidential election, since I first voted for Future President Ronald Reagan in November of 1980, the voters of the South have proven to be the linchpin upon which all presidential candidates’ victory depended upon.

If you were able, as a Democrat or a Republican, to get the voters of the South to cast their ballots for you, you became the President of the United States of America.

The South, to this day, remains essential to winning the White House.

The Liberals in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, alike, or the Vichy Republicans, as I call them, are all too aware of this political fact.

However, those who believe that the South, in the Year of Our Lord 2016, is still backwards, or somehow inferior to their point of view, or political ideology, jump at every opportunity to negate a period of our history in which American blood on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line was shed in combat.

For example, since we are on the subject of South Carolina…

Why did these Professional Politicians, Democrat and Republican,  shiftd the focus of the nation away from the mental illness of the sociopath who gunned down 9 innocent Christians at a Wednesday Night Church Service in Charleston, South Carolina, shifting our  country’s attention, instead, to the perceived offensive nature of the Battle Flag of the Army of Virginia?

Simple: Political Expediency.

By marginalizing the South through this effort, American Liberals, from President Barack Hussein Obama on down the line, were hoping to diminish and possibly negate the leverage that Southern States have in molding the Political Landscape of America.

Even after 7 plus years under a Far Left President, America is still a Center-Right Nation, in which Christians comprise 75$ of the population.

Through their efforts to make an inanimate object responsible for the death of the Pastor and 8 members of Emanuel AME Church, these politicians and their minions were hoping to swing the Political Pendulum toward their side of the Political Aisle.

They thought that, if somehow, they could place the Southern States in a “bad light” and at a Political Disadvantage, that perhaps our voice in the political affairs of this nation, would not carry as much weight.

Plus, between you and me and the water cooler, Liberals in the Northern and Western States remain ticked off that both American and International Businesses are still relocating to the South, where the climate is friendlier, the Unions have not made the cost of doing business unprofitable, and, where Old-Fashioned American Work Ethic still exists.

Just sayin’.

But, I digress…

Unfortunately for all of the Establishment-Preferred Presidential Hopefuls, being a Christian Conservative, including being one of us dreaded “Evangelicals”, means that while we all worship Christ as our Savior, we also each possess our own FREE WILL.

Unlike Modern Liberals, including Socialism-embracing Millennials, we are not a part of a Hive-Mind. We think for ourselves, voting for the candidate whom we believe will be the best leader for our nation and who will be able to be more effective in cleaning up the unholy mess that Barack Hussein Obama has created, during his time in office.

As a Christian American Conservative, living in Northwest Mississippi, I have watched, like those featured in the article, as our viewpoints here in “Flyover Country”, have been scorned and ridiculed.

And now, the Professional Politicians (i.e., the “usual suspects”) want us to give them permission to continue their mistreatment of us.

Guess what?

It ain’t happenin’ this time, Skippy.

Check out the poll numbers.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Clinton/Sanders “Love-In” Debate: “All We Are Saying Is Give Socialism a Chance”

Berni-Treasure-600-nrdLast night, two living fossils from a bygone era, representing a failed Political Ideology, staged a Love-in with each other…championing the Political Ideology which destroyed the Soviet Union, and which has brought the teen-weeny country of Denmark to the verge of Economic Ruin.

Foxnews.com reports that

While Hillary Clinton launched her harshest debate attacks yet on Bernie Sanders Thursday in a clear attempt to distinguish their differences to voters, the Democratic candidates spent almost as much time uniting in their criticism of America’s criminal justice system, the financial sector and more.

The debate fell at a time when Sanders is trying to build his momentum after his big New Hampshire win, while Clinton is trying to regain hers.

As Sanders pointedly reminded her, “You’re not in the White House yet.”

But the candidates at times offered a similar message. This was evident as they vociferously called for an overhaul of local police departments that they suggested are unfair to black people.

“We need fundamental police reform,” Sanders said, adding he’s “sick and tired” of seeing unarmed black people shot by police. He likened heavily equipped police departments to “occupying armies.”

Clinton, meanwhile, echoed those themes, joining Sanders in calling for sentencing reform while saying the country’s “systemic racism” goes deeper and must be addressed – in education, housing and the job market.

“We are seeing the dark side of the remaining systemic racism that we need to root out,” she said.

The comments were part of each candidate’s revived appeal to minority voters, a key voting bloc as the Democratic presidential primary heads to South Carolina.

But even as they stressed those issues, differences were laid bare at the PBS-hosted debate in Milwaukee. And Sanders came prepared to counter Clinton’s attacks, showing a feistier side than he did at their last showdown.

When Clinton used her closing remarks to suggest Sanders was taking shots at President Obama, Sanders called it a “low blow” and countered: “One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate.”

He even underscored his critique of Clinton’s foreign policy by pointing to a book where Clinton said she was mentored by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

“I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Sanders said, calling him “one of the most destructive” American diplomats.

Clinton fired back that “we have yet to know” who Sanders listens to on foreign policy.

“Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger,” Sanders said.

The two also clashed sharply over Sanders’ high-cost, big-government plans.

“We are not England. We are not France,” Clinton said.

Clinton accused Sanders of pushing programs that would grow the federal government by 40 percent. She suggested his health care promises “cannot be kept “and will be far more costly than he admits.

“We should level with the American people,” she said.

She also said Sanders’ plans would upend ObamaCare – though Sanders said he would not “dismantle” it.

“That is absolutely inaccurate,” he said, when she claimed his plans would leave many people worse off. 

“In my view, health care is a right of all people … and I will fight for that,” Sanders said, adding it would take “courage.”

Clinton also criticized Sanders for voting against a 2007 immigration reform bill backed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Sanders explained that the bill had a guest-worker program that progressive groups opposed.

“I think Ted Kennedy had a very clear idea of what needed to be done,” Clinton said.

Yet the candidates agreed in their joint criticism of the Obama administration’s recent deportation raids.

Sanders, meanwhile, once again hammered Clinton for her Wall Street ties, suggesting the financial sector’s big donations are meant to buy influence.

“Let’s not insult the intelligence of the American people. People aren’t dumb,” Sanders said. “Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess just for the fun of it.”

They sparred on the issue as Sanders touted the fact he’s “the only candidate up here” who has no super PAC supporting him. A super PAC backing Clinton, he said, recently raised $15 million from Wall Street.

Clinton countered by noting that Obama took Wall Street donations too, but “when it mattered, he stood up and took on Wall Street.”

“Let’s not in any way imply here that either President Obama or myself would in any way not take on any vested interest,” she said, calling for more regulation of the financial sector.

The showdown comes as Clinton tries to reset the race, which heads next to Nevada and South Carolina. Her narrow victory in Iowa and resounding defeat in New Hampshire have raised fresh questions about her candidacy, which at one point was seen as a sure thing for the Democratic nomination.

Publicly, the Clinton campaign is voicing confidence. The campaign has been refocusing on the battle to lock down minority voter support, asserting that with their help, the former secretary of state can easily make gains against Sanders. But Sanders is at the same time making a bid to expand his own support beyond rural, white voters — who largely decide Iowa and New Hampshire.

While the Clinton campaign is banking on minority voters as it heads into South Carolina and other delegate-rich states down the primary calendar, Tuesday’s contest exposed serious problems for her. She lost in New Hampshire across almost every demographic, including women.

Overall, she lost to Sanders by more than 20 points.

During the past several years, there has been an undeniable escalation of the Rhetoric of Racial Animus and Class Warfare, the origin of which can be traced, with very little effort, to the President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, the “one”, who was supposed to unite us as a nation and make the oceans “rise and fall” and the Democrat Party, which has been taken over by a bunch of Godless Far Left Extremists.

Did you know that 76% percent of Americans were living from paycheck to paycheck?

When I first read that, I thought to myself, how can that be possible? We live in the richest country on God’s green Earth. We have been the leader of the free world and the country most admired by the world’s population for quite some time now.

How did all this come about?

I believe it is a mixture of events, both internally and externally, that has caused the economic plight that we now find ourselves in.

Starting all the way back with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and all of the government programs which he began with the express purpose of bringing us out of the Great Depression, Americans have grown more and more dependent on a nanny state government.

This blind trust was cemented by JFK’s hopeful optimism and national push for Americans to commit to serving their country.

By the time President Johnson came into office, after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the majority of Americans totally believed that our government always had our best interest at heart.

President Johnson came into office and immediately started his push for the Great Society. These programs were designed to make Americans even more dependent on the Federal Government for their very survival.

As the Vietnam War grew more and more and unpopular, Americans’ trust in the government became more and more compromised.  Protests against the Federal Government became more and more common and it became cool to be a rebel or “hippie”.

Time passed, and while rebellious Americans calmed down, Americans’ dependence upon government programs became generational, as multiple family members from one generation to the next, relied on Uncle Sugar for their daily existence.

Meanwhile, the rebels of the 1960’s got older and began to work within the system, taking jobs within the private and public sectors.

Eventually, they moved into positions of power, becoming heads of corporations and local and national politicians.

It is not really necessary to tell you what the political ideology of these rebels was, is it?

As the last century ended and the new one began, these hippies and their offspring, solidly in place in the halls of power, began to pass more more legislation designed to keep generations of Americans enslaved to Uncle Sugar.

Ironic, huh?

And, then it happened.

From the state of Illinois, came the messiah that both the hippies in power and the dependent class they made careers out of enslaving had been waiting for, Barack Hussein Obama.

With both a liberal controlled Congress and a Far Left president, a pathway was cleared for an all-out assault against capitalism.

Immediately upon his ascension to power,  Obama set out, with the help of his minions, to pass an massive Stimulus Bill , which was designed to reward their supporters, while buying and paying for some new ones.

Meanwhile, corporations continued their trend of leaving the country, begun with the rise of the Liberal Congress, due to high taxes and the anti-capitalist policies of the ruling class.

Even after a strong showing by Conservatives in 2010, the ruling class made sure that their new messiah would remain on the throne for a second term, by manipulating the shallow minded Republican Establishment into nominating an ambivalent legacy as their Presidential Candidate.

Preying on the government dependency of 47 percent of Americans, the Liberal Democrats secured a second term For Barack Hussein Obama.

And, that brings us to our current situation.

We are a nation badly in need of another Gipper to help us reach the goal line.

On January 20, 1981, newly-elected President Ronald Wilson Reagan said these words to a weary nation…

These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we’re not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we’ve had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick — professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truckdrivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this breed called Americans.

Well, this administration’s objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this “new beginning,” and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy. With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong and prosperous America, at peace with itself and the world.

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

President Reagan understood that

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

And, for Americans to prosper, capitalism must not be stifled by over-taxation and an unfriendly Federal Government.

When the private section prospers, the power of the Government to control our daily lives diminishes.

So…why are 76 percent of American living paycheck to paycheck?

Because our national politicians have to protect their phony-boloney jobs…and, it is easier to control us this way.

In this present situation, what we are seeing is the result of anti-establishment rhetoric, spewed forth by those who are now actually “the Establishment”, taking hold, and spreading Class Envy and Racial Animus in such a way as to inspire violent retaliation for perceived “grievances”, by a fictional “White Establishment”, which is actually no longer in power, and the Police, who are seen as the emissaries of “The Man”.

It’s reminiscent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Look it up, y’all.

In conclusion, I believe that the popularity of entrepreneur and showman Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz are a result of an American Citizenry who are fed up with watching our “House” being divided against itself by adherents to the failed Political Ideology of Marxism, for the sake of Political Expediency.

In Marxist Theory, Socialism is the step before Communism.

President Reagan once asked

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

The majority of Americans, living out here in the Heartland…understand.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Obama’s DOJ Suing City of Ferguson on Behalf of the Rioters. Welcome to Bizarro World.

untitled (28)The longer the reign of King Barack the First drags on, the more I become convinced that we are living in an old Superman Comic Book, stuck in Bizarro World.

USA Today reports that

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is suing the city of Ferguson in an attempt to forcibly overhaul the city’s troubled police and court operations, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Wednesday.

The decision comes hours after city leaders sought to revise a long- negotiated settlement, citing prohibitive costs of executing such a deal.

“There is no cost for constitutional policing,” Lynch said late Wednesday.

“Painstaking negotiations lasted more than 26 weeks as we sought to remedy literally years of systematic deficiencies,” she said of the government’s action, which followed a public announcement last month of a tentative agreement that the attorney general described as “both fair and cost-effective . . . Last night, the City Council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators; their decision leaves us no further choice.”

Lynch said the residents of Ferguson have been waiting “decades for justice,” having endured civil rights breaches that established a pattern and practice of racially biased policing .

“I think the city of Ferguson had a real opportunity to step forward here,” a visibly disappointed attorney general said. “Instead, they have chosen to step in the past.”

Earlier Wednesday,  Ferguson Mayor James Knowles signaled that the city was ready to take on the Justice Department in federal court. He defended Ferguson’s unanimous decision to revise the agreement by removing language from the agreement, which local leaders asserted, mandated big raises for police officers.

Local leaders also sought to free the city from its obligations under the agreement should Ferguson seek to shutter the police department altogether and enlist another agency to provide public safety services.

“The ball is in their court,” Knowles said at a hastily called news conference in Ferguson. “We’re sitting and waiting to talk. If they want to threaten legal action, then that’s what they’re threatening.”

The threat became reality within hours of the mayor’s appearance when the Justice lawsuit was filed in a Missouri federal court, alleging local law enforcement conduct routinely violated the Constitution.

“The residents of Ferguson have waited nearly a year for their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe,” Lynch said. “They have waited nearly a year for their police department to accept rules that would ensure their constitutional rights and that thousands of other police departments follow every day.”

“I don’t know if I’d characterize it as an absolute agreement in principle,” Knowles said. “Also an agreement in principle doesn’t allow you to assign a numerical value of every piece of the agreement.”

The push to amend the deal comes after Knowles and council members raised concerns it could cost nearly $10 million over the next three years to implement.

The city of 21,000 has a budget of about $14 million and is facing about $2.8 million in debt after the August 2014 police shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, sparked weeks of sustained and often violent protests. Much of the debt accrued from police overtime during the unrest following Brown’s death and lost tax revenue from businesses destroyed or badly damaged in rioting.

A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, the officer involved in the incident, and the Justice Department said it would not pursue federal civil rights charges against him. But the incident and subsequent protests led Justice to launch a wide-ranging investigation, concluding nearly a year ago that the city’s police and municipal court unfairly targeted African-American residents, who make up about 70% of the population.

Ferguson’s troubles and similar problems in cities across the country prompted a national discussion on police tactics and the appointment of a special White House panel, which in part urged the adoption of new strategies to rebuild a broken trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

In Ferguson, city leaders hosted a series of emotionally-charged hearings this month on whether it should ratify the tentative Justice settlement. Some residents urged the City Council to reject the deal and take their chances in court. Others favored the agreement as a way for the city to regain the trust of a wary African-American community.

Wesley Bell, a Ferguson council member, said members of the council felt it was important present their concerns about the costs of implementing the deal. He said the amendments to the agreement were not meant to be a “take it or leave it” offer.

“We hope the Justice Department is willing to sit down and talk to us and continue negotiations,” Bell said. “If this case goes to court, it will not be because of the city of Ferguson.”

Proponents of Justice agreement noted that fighting a legal battle would be costly and could prove more expensive in the long-term than settling now. Knowles disputed that notion Wednesday, saying the city’s analysis shows “the agreement, as it currently stands, will cost more to implement than it would be to fight a lawsuit.”

“Substantially more,” Knowles added.

Meanwhile, in my Hometown of Memphis, TN, 4 Black Americans died yesterday, killed by other Black Americans.

And, this past month, in the Windy City of Chicago, which has some of the strictest Gun Control Laws in the nation, newsmax.com reports that

Chicago’s homicide rate jumped to a 15-year high in January after authorities recorded 51 murders in the first month of the year.

The homicide increase was a sharp rise from the 29 murders reported in January 2015, and 20 in 2013, according to USA Today. Overall, there were 241 shooting incidents in  January, an increase from 119 such incidents last year.

The “unacceptable increase in violence was driven primarily by gang conflicts and retaliatory violence,” said Chicago’s interim police superintendent, John Escalante, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. 

Well, I realize that I’m just an ig’nant old cracka’, living down here in the Bible Belt, but, it occurs to me that if the Ferguson, New York City., and Baltimore Rioters, murders, and other assorted lawbreakers  (paid and unpaid…thank you, George Soros) had jobs, they would not have been “so mistreated ” at the hands of those mean ol’ Police Officers (White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic).

So, perhaps the President of the United States should focus his attention to giving “his people” (who are actually supposed to be all of us) educational training and the cultural impetus to exercise personal responsibility, in order to gain employment, be men and women, support their families, and thrive as Americans.

A few years ago, I worked at our county’s State Employment Center Office.

While at the Employment Office, I was able to observe Americans, both Black and White, down on their luck, struggling to find work and survive in this economy. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of “unemployed ” who came to this particular office were Black.

I saw Black American Families whose existence living on the Government Dole, had become generational.

It is these people whom Obama and the Democrats have hypnotized into believing that Uncle Sugar loves them, and is their only solution to surviving a stifling existence.

They are so, so wrong.

The strength and vitality of America does not come from the benevolence of a Nanny-state Federal Government.

As the greatest American President of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan said:

The nine words you never want to hear are: I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.

Being enslaved to the Government Dole steals one’s ambition. It takes away any impetus or desire to create a better life for yourself and your family, to challenge yourself to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and pursue the American Dream. It makes you reliant on a politically motivated spider’s web full of government bureaucrats who view you and your family as job security.

I watched American citizens trapped in this web of government bureaucracy, so numbed of any initiative that they once had, that they seemed offended that they actually had to prove that they inquired about three jobs that week in order to keep their “benefits”. Others seemed puzzled that they had to search through the state data base and pick out a job that they wanted to talk to an interviewer about receiving a referral to, and weren’t just simply handed a job when they walked through the door.

Instead of moving forward, by exercising the self-reliance that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached so well, these people I saw, were content on being “taken care of” by Uncle Sugar, as if being held down by their own poor, miserable circumstance, was a good thing.

Dr. King, I am sorry to tell you that racism and injustice is still going on in America. Unfortunately, it will not end any time soon, There are two many race-baiters profiting off of it.

Including, the President of the United States.

The part of your magnificent speech about “the content of their character” has been purposefully ignored by the professional race-baiters and assorted politicians (but, I repeat myself) for the entire 7 years that the “Firt Post-Racial President” has been in office.

Dr. King, your call for self-reliance took a back seat to the self-serving agenda of Professional Race-Baiters, such as “Community Organizers” and Politicians, a long time ago.

And, those who sacrifice themselves, while serving and protecting us on the streets of America everyday, make convenient scapegoats, for the Political Failure of the Great Society.

Until He Comes,

KJ