In the summer of 1988, while still at Harvard, Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) landed a job as an intern in the Chicago office of the influential law firm of Sidley Austin. ( How does a first-year law student get an internship at such a prestigious law firm?)  He was dating Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer from a working-class family in the South Shore area of the South Side.  She also just happened to be his mentor at the firm. The lovebirds got married in 1990, and settled in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side along the lakefront.  Built around the University of Chicago, both black and white  affluent families lived among the middle class and the poor.  Hyde Park boasts a strong base of independent voters who are committed to political reform, which influenced Obama’s political message. 

He worked for seven months in 1992 on a voter registration and education project that helped elect Bill Clinton as president and Carol Moseley Braun as the state’s first African-American female senator.  

You may have heard of it:  Project Vote.   In 2008,  Project Vote and ACORN were responsible for a voter registration drive targeting battleground states Obama needed to win the White House.

Though officially non-partisan, the ACORN/Project Vote voter drive focused on groups that they thought would vote Democratic in the presidential contest: African-American, young, Latino and low-income earners.  They referred to these groups as “historically underrepresented in elections” in a press release they issued, in an attempt to justify what they were doing.

ACORN/Project Vote operated voter registration drives in 21 states in 2008; including the battlegrounds Colorado, Florida, Michigan (since move to Obama) Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  They were very instrumental in Obama’s victory.

Also in 1992, Scooter went to work for Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a firm specializing in civil rights law and other forms of public advocacy.   Working there provided him with the opportunity to make many contacts in the Chicago Political Machine.   The longtime fire he had in his gut concerning a political career found inspiration through the changes being made in Chicago by Harold Washington, its black mayor.   African-Americans were finally getting the power and control that they hadn’t had before, and Obama decided that politics was the career for him. 

Obama started another part-time gig in 1992.  Per the University of Chicago:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. 

Why didn’t they just call him a Part-time Lecturer?

In 1995  “Bomber” Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadette 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.

Around this same time, at a Bill Clinton White House event, philanthropist Walter Annenberg announced that he was making a $500 million grant to cities across the nation to put towards the reform of public schools.   Bill Ayers was the head of the Chicago group that, with$49.2 million in hand,   formed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  The launch party in 1995 was attended by the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago, as well as anybody was influential among the Chicago Political Elite.   Guess who the  first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was?  You guessed.   Obama held the post until 1999.  At that time, he stepped down and remained on the board.   Bill Ayers worked closely with the Challenge as a leader of the newly formed Chicago School Reform Collaborative. 

 They also both served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago from 1999 to 2002.   Just a “guy from the neighborhood”.  Huh, Scooter?

Additionally, Scooter served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002.  This foundation started as the financial back-up plan of a widow whose family had made millions in the lumber industry.

After her death, it was run by philanthropic people who increasingly dedicated their giving to Liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.  It has grown over the years until it is now bigger than the TIDES Foundation and actually funds it.

The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the capital outlay to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, believe it or not, air.

What a coincidence, that, as president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities, huh?

While he served in the State Senate in Springfield, Illinois, Obama wrote more than 40 columns for his neighborhood Newspaper, The Hyde Park Herald.  He also received extensive coverage in the Chicago Defender, an over-one hundred year old newspaper of record serving Chicago’s black community.

Per Howard Kurtz, writing for weeklystandard.com, from an article published August 11-18, 2008:

What they [the newspaper articles] portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

You’re a prophet, Mr. Kurtz.

Obama remained in the Illinois State Senate until 2004, when he became the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate seat from Illinois.   We’ll examine this period of his life tomorrow, as we finish this series.

Sources:  usnews.com, suntimes.com, uchicago.edu, michellemalkin.com, pajamasmedia.com, weeklystandard.com

Like several parts of Barack Hussein Obama’s (mm mmm mmmm) life story, little is known about his college experience.  He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981.  The move receives a small mention in Mr. Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father”.   Instead, he devoted that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York.  I’m shocked.

An article in Columbia College Today, a publication of the university, reported that Scooter portrayed Columbia as a period of buckling down following a troubled adolescence.   Obama said that he did not socialize much, instead spending a lot of time in the library, “like a monk.”  Yeah, right.  He has also said that he was involved to some extent with the Black Students Organization.

Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Scooter’s time there. A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that  Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science.   He did not receive honors and specific information on his grades is sealed.   A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists him as a graduate.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama studied, while at Columbia, under the late Edward Said, an Arafat devotee. That alone really does not mean a whole lot.  Said was a popular professor and hundreds of students took his comparative literature courses.   However, Scooter evidently maintained some sort of tie with Said.   A photo that made the Internet rounds before the election shows Obama talking to the professor at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.

Said knew a lot of radical operatives.   Among those radicals were Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  When they emerged from wherever they were hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers enrolled in education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights.  He then earned his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.  Said liked Ayers so much, he wrote a paragraph for the dust jacket of the bomber’s 2001 book, Fugitive Days, in which Ayers brags about being a part of the Weather Underground.

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.

Obama was hired by Jerry Kellman, a New Yorker who had gotten into organizing in the 1960s.  Kellman was trying to help laid-off factory workers on the far South Side of Chicago, in a nearly 100% black community.   He led a group, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, that had been created by several local Catholic churches in the industrial community.   Kellman was advised to hire a black organizer for a new spinoff from CCRC.  They called it the Developing Communities Project, designed to focus solely on the Chicago part of the area.

One of Obama’s projects while he was there, was to try to build an alliance of white and black churches and enlist them in the cause of social justice.  Obama had a problem, though.   He didn’t go to church himself.   And that, brothers and sisters, is how Obama, drawn to the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and a political opportunity), joined Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street.

If you ask Obama’s fellow Community Organizers what his most 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 attempt 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.

During his time at Harvard, Obama met and started dating Michelle Robinson, the future First Lady.  I don’t know if he was attracted to her arms or not.

He also managed to get himself elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Bruce Spiva, a former review editor who now practices civil rights law in Washington, said that the law review is:

fairly disconnected from the breadth and the rough and tumble of real politics.  It’s an election among a closed group. It’s more like electing a pope.

As the president of the review, Scooter had to walk a delicate line. He served on the board of the Black Law Students Association, often speaking passionately about the hot topic of the week, but in a way that would not make white classmates defensive.   He kept away from fiery rhetoric.  He even did a spot-on impersonation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he came to speak on campus, according to Franklin Amanat, now a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.  Obama’s  brashest public speaking moment came at a rally for faculty diversity, where he compared Professor Derrick Bell, who had resigned after agitating for greater faculty diversity,  to Rosa Parks.

Most of the time, young Scooter stayed away from the fiery rhetoric of campus debate, choosing safer topics for his speeches. At the black law students’ annual conference, he fervently told students to remember the obligations that came with their privileged education.

Barack Hussein Obama graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Law School.  We don’t know anything about his actual courses or grades.   The records have been sealed.

Now, law degree in hand, Obama was ready to return to the Windy City. 

During this period of Barack Hussein Obama’s (peace be upon him) life, we see the seeds planted during his childhood and teen-age years start to take root and grow into a full-fledged, Alinsky-inspired Socialist ideology.

In tomorrow’s blog, we’ll explore his adventures among the Chicago Liberal and Academic Elite and the path that led him to his first political campaign.

Sources:  nysun.com, nationalreview.com, nytimes.com

The rags to riches fable (supported by a cast of thousands) of Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) begins like any other, with his parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. They met in a Russian language class in 1960, right in the middle of that time of history known as the Cold War, when America and Russia were poised to start lobbing missiles at each other.   In 1961 they were married and later that year Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (peace be unto him) was born.

When Barack, Jr. was 3-years-old, his parents divorced.  Obama only saw his father one time after that.  Dad moved to Kenya and his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro.  From ages six to 10, Barack Obama, Jr., attended a private school for well-off families in Jakarta.

At age 10, he moved back to Hawaii and lived with his grandparents.  As kids his age often do, young Barack eventually took up with a family friend named Frank, also known as Frank Marshall Davis. 

Frank Marshall Davis (1905 – 1987) was an author, liberal activist, Stalinist agent, and self-admitted pedophile (Would you let your children hang around him?) .  Davis was involved in Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, “a meeting place for young African-American writers and artists during the 1940s”.   Coming out of the New Deal Federal Art Project, the Art Center was a hangout for the “Culture Group,”  a circle of Communist Party members and sympathizers including Richard Wright, Margaret Burroughs, Marion Perkins and Arna Bontemps. Another guy who hung out at the center was a young journalist named Vernon Jarrett. Davis and Jarrett worked together on the black run newspaper, the Chicago Defender.  Vernon Jarrett is the father of Obama’s closest advisor and administration member, Valerie Jarrett.   

Davis was in the FBI’s security index.  This meant he could be arrested and detained in the event of a national emergency.  Davis stated singer Paul Robeson, (He sang Ol’ Man River in the movie, Showboat.) a secret communist, was instrumental in helping him move to Hawaii.

Robeson suggested Davis contact Harry Bridges, head of the International Longshoremen and Workers’ Union, the most powerful labor union in Hawaii.  Bridges then suggested that Davis get to know Koji Ariyoshi, Editor of the Honolulu Record, a newspaper that supported the policies of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.  

Robeson, Bridges^[45] and Ariyoshi were all Communist party operatives. Ariyoshi gave Davis a regular weekly column in the Honolulu Record entitled “Frankly Speaking.” When Davis’ column first appeared in May 1949, the Record bragged that he was a member of the national executive board of the Civil Rights Congress, which had been named as a Communist subversive organization by Truman Attorney General Tom Clark.  While sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, Davis signed a statement in defense of Gerhart Eisler, a notorious Comintern agent who escaped jail for passport fraud by fleeing to East Germany.

I’m sure that Barry and Frank just talked “hoops” all the time, aren’t you?

At 19, Scooter enrolled at Occidental College.  Guess how he spent his time there?

From Obama’s Book, Dreams of My Father:

Political discussions, the kind at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conference I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.

And when he wasn’t going to socialist conferences, Obama hung out around campus and decided to make friends:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Chandoo is now a financial consultant who was formerly a broker at Oppenheimer & Co. He  contributed to Obama’s campaign and helped raise more than $100,000 for him as a bundler.

A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that will give President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Bill sponsors, including Senator Joe Lieberman,  have denied charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.”   They claim that the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934.     This was the act that created the Federal Communications Commission “for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio”.   A breakdown of the bill  can be found on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.

The committee unanimously approved an amended version of the legislation by voice vote last Thursday.   A vote by the full Senate has not yet been scheduled.

The bill would create a White House Office for Cyberspace Policy and a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications.  This office would work with private US companies to create cybersecurity requirements for the electrical grid, telecommunications networks and other critical infrastructure.

This bill would all Obama to take emergency actions to protect critical parts of the Internet.  He would be able to order owners of critical infrastructure to implement emergency response plans, during a cyber-emergency (including a possible shutdown of their services).    Obama can declare a national cyber-emergency for 120 days by Executive Order.   The president would need congressional approval to extend a national cyber-emergency beyond 120 days under an amendment to the legislation approved by the committee.

Joe Lieberman said that the legislation would give the US Department of Homeland Security (headed by Big Sis) authority that it does not now have to respond to cyber-attacks:

Our responsibility for cyber defence goes well beyond the public sector because so much of cyberspace is owned and operated by the private sector.  The Department of Homeland Security has actually shown that vulnerabilities in key private sector networks like utilities and communications could bring our economy down for a period of time if attacked or commandeered by a foreign power or cyber terrorists.

Other sponsors of the bill are Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat.  I’m shocked, I tell you.

One critic said Thursday that the bill will hurt the nation’s security, not help it.  Wayne Crews, vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulation think tank said that security products operate in a competitive market that works best without heavy government intervention.

 Crews wrote in an e-mail:

Policymakers should reject such proposals to centralize cyber security risk management.  “The Internet that will evolve if government can resort to a ‘kill switch’ will be vastly different from, and inferior to, the safer one that will emerge otherwise.

Cybersecurity technologies and services thrive on competition.  The unmistakable tenor of the cybersecurity discussion today is that of government steering while the market rows.  To be sure, law enforcement has a crucial role in punishing intrusions on private networks and infrastructure. But government must coexist with, rather than crowd out, private sector security technologies.

Last Wednesday, 24 privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter expressing their concerns about the legislation to the sponsors.  The bill gives the new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications “significant authority” over critical infrastructure, but doesn’t define what critical infrastructure is covered, the group wrote in their letter.

The letter, signed by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups also said:

Without a definition of critical infrastructure there are concerns that “it includes elements of the Internet that Americans rely on every day to engage in free speech and to access information.

Changes are needed to ensure that cybersecurity measures do not unnecessarily infringe on free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties interests.

In more administration messing with the Internet news:

The White House outlined a massive program to make online transactions more secure on Friday. This move is the most ambitious scheme to emerge from a cybersecurity policy intended to blunt the growing menace of online crime.

Howard Schmidt,Obama’s cybersecurity co-ordinator since early 2010, released the strategy paper after 12 months of discussions led by the National Security Council and involving scores of private sector groups, critical infrastructure owners and privacy advocates.

A set of standards would let multiple vendors offer authentication services, while people whose identities have been verified would be able to move from website to website without resubmitting information.  A cyber version of a National ID card?  Papers.  Let me see your papers, please.

Privacy protections would require companies involved to limit their collection and dissemination of personal data, for example confirming that a consumer is over 21 without passing along the person’s birth date.  Uh huh.

The government would take the lead by establishing the standards and subscribing to authentication services.  Yeah.  I feel safer already.

Internet companies and government agencies have been behind the idea of multipurpose identification systems for a while now, but it never has been implemented in part because of limited incentives for participation. As a result, a bank will have one set of protocols for establishing a client’s identity, while a state agency and hospital have others. 

Obama and his administration will rely on Congressional and private sector support to push forward this new effort.

Aris Schwartz, vice-president of the Center for Democracy and Technology said:

This is a vision and you need that, but they’re going to need to work with Congress and get government agencies to test out different pieces of this.  

Legislation involving internet security issues is hard to draft because it overlaps into so many political areas.  However, in the maddening push by Obama and his adminstration to go full Alinsky with his ideological plans, his minion, Sen Dinghy Harry Reid, is doing all he can to keep the pedal to the metal, along with some seemingly oblivious accomplices.

Does anyone have a used CB radio they want to sell?

Sources:  drudgereport.com, techworld.com, ft.com, criminalgovernment.com

The Vice-President of the United States had an interesting visit to a Milwaukee Frozen Custard Shop yesterday and had some choice words for the manager who told him to “lower our taxes”.

Vice President Joe Biden also took time to share a defeatist view of the American Economy Saturday, telling an audience of supporters:

There’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.

While appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, Biden said that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost. (How many times can they blame Bush?)  

Singing the same song that he and Obama have perfected through repetition, Biden complained:

We inherited a godawful mess…[there was] no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost. 

Claims for jobless benefits fell by the largest number in two months last week, but were said to signal weak job growth.  (Where?)   Meanwhile, the Senate on Thursday failed to pass an extension of unemployment benefits. 

Vice-President Biden said Saturday that the economy is improving and bragged that in the past four quarters, there has been 4 percent growth in the economy. Over the last five months, more than 500,000 private sector jobs were created. 

The vice-president admitted:

We know that’s not enough.  So do we.  

The White House put out a Recovery and Reinvestment Act update last week, claiming that between 2.2 million and 2.8 million jobs were either saved or created because of the stimulus as of March 2010. In signing the Recovery Act into law on Feb 17, 2009, Mr. Obama said the measure “will create or save 3-and-a-half million jobs over the next two years.”

So far, it hasn’t done much of anything.  Here are some interesting facts from gop.com:

3.5 MILLION: Jobs Obama Promised Stimulus Would Create By End Of 2010.

3.3 MILLION: Jobs Lost Since Obama Made That Promise.

  

6.8 MILLION: Jobs Obama Must Now Create To Keep Promise By End Of 2010.

  

1.1 MILLION: Jobs Obama’s Economists Project Will Be Created By End Of 2010.

  

5.7 MILLION: Jobs By Which Obama’s Economists’ Projection Leaves Him Short In Keeping Promise. 

  

6 PERCENT: Not Surprisingly, Number Of Americans That Say Obama’s Stimulus Created Jobs. 

 

7.7 PERCENT: Unemployment Rate When Obama Was Selling Stimulus In January 2009.

 

8 PERCENT: Unemployment Rate Obama Pledged Stimulus Would Prevent Us From Reaching.

 

9.7 PERCENT: Current Unemployment Rate.

 

16.5 PERCENT: Current Unemployment Rate When Underemployed And Discouraged Workers Are Included.

 

334,000: Americans That Have Given Up Looking For A Job Since Stimulus Was Signed.

 

47: States That Have Lost Jobs Since Stimulus Was Signed. 

 

10: States That Moved From Single-Digit To Double-Digit Unemployment Rate Since Stimulus Was Signed. 

 

$862 BILLION: Updated Cost Of Stimulus, $75 Billion Increase From Last Year’s Cost Estimate.

 

440: Number Of Nonexistent Congressional Districts That Received Stimulus Funds.

 

$6.4 BILLION: Amount Of Stimulus Funds That Went To Nonexistent Congressional Districts.

 

$18 MILLION: Cost Of Stimulus Website, Recovery.gov.

 Don’t worry, boys and girls, Scooter has a plan.

Fresh from the exhilaration of  the all night Congressional piracy of the Dood-Frank Bill, a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations, yesterday Obama urged Congress to take up his proposal for a $90 billion, 10-year tax on banks as the next step in reform. (This is sure going to encourage economic recovery, isn’t it?) 

Scooter wants to impose a 0.15 percent tax on the liabilities of the biggest U.S. financial institutions, supposedly to recoup the costs to taxpayers of the financial bailout.

Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address:

We need to impose a fee on the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer assistance at the height of our financial crisis — so we can recover every dime of taxpayer money.

Obama is in Canada to attend gatherings with leaders of the world’s biggest economies.  He took a moment of his weekly address to praise a deal by congressional negotiators on a historic rewriting of U.S. financial regulations.

Obama hopes to brag to the European leaders about these socialist changes to our economic system, offering the Dodd-Frank Bill as a model for other countries at the Group of 20 summit on Saturday and Sunday.

Scooter said:

I hope we can build on the progress we made at last year’s G20 summits by coordinating our global financial reform efforts to make sure a crisis like the one from which we are still recovering never happens again.

The Dodd-Frank Bill would set up a new financial consumer watchdog, create a protocol for dismantling and taking over troubled financial firms, and mandate higher bank capital standards, under the cover of trying to prevent a repeat of the 2007-2009 financial meltdown.

The bill, which would be the biggest changes to America’s financial regulatory structure since the 1930s, still needs final approval from both chambers of Congress.

Obama, who, in a sad bit of irony, hopes to sign the legislation by July 4, has pleaded with Congress to push the bill “over the finish line.”

Obama hopes the financial reform and the bank tax idea will resonate with those of his Liberal base who are upset over perceived Wall Street risk-taking that led to the financial meltdown and the worst recession in decades. With a political massacre to rival Little Big Horn looming in November, Obama wants to get as much of his ideologically driven economic plan in place, before a Republican-led House and Senate are put in place by the American people to thwart him.

Some lawmakers have indicated they are would listen favorably to the bank tax proposal but others are questioning whether it is fair to impose the tax on banks that have already repaid money from the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP) to make up for losses by American International Group Inc and General Motors.

Financial companies with more than $50 billion in assets and hedge funds with more than $10 billion in assets will be clobbered by the new taxes upon enactment and lasting until 2020.

This administration doesn’t get it.  American ingenuity and self-determination is what turned the wheels of our economic engine for decades.  It wasn’t an over-abundance of regulations, stifling taxes, and an enormous federal government trying to run Americans’ daily lives that caused America to grow into the greatest nation in the world.  If this adminstration is allowed to proceed in meeting all its socialist goals, our ill economic system will need Hospice care.  Socialism has never worked, wherever it has been tried.  Those governments that tried it have all been scooped into the dustbin of history.  Obama and his cadre of clueless academics seem to be trying to ensure America’s demise, intentionally or unintentionally.

Sources:  drudgereport.com, youtube.com, cbsnews.com, reuters.com

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer tells President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) how the cow ate the cabbage in the above 60 second spot.  She solidifies the anger felt by the majority of Americans over Obama’s inexcusable dereliction of duty very succinctly.

What does the POTUS do?  Does he handle this egregious situation with alacrity and an overwhelming concern for the safety of U.S. Citizens?  Nope.

Meet the new director for the ICE Office of State and Local Coordination in Washington D.C., former Phoenix and Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt.  

Hurtt was the Chief of  the Phoenix Police Force from 1998 to 2004, when the department had a reputation for being trigger-happy.  Stats at the time put Phoenix at the top of the list for police shootings, on a per-cop basis.

Hurtt was the first police chief in the nation to give Tasers to every officer in the department.  “Experts” say that this move cut the number of shootings by police in half.

He served as Houston’s Police Chief from 2004 – December, 2009. 

Hurtt and former Houston Mayor Bill White were blasted during their tenures because of their attitudes about immigration enforcement.  Much of the conflict during the past year focused on HPD’s lack of cooperation with ICE’s 287(g) program, which trains local law enforcement to assist ICE with immigration screening.

Hurtt and the former mayor announced in spring 2009 that the city would participate in 287(g), nut only if it was confined to the city’s jails.  (Hey, that’s effective.)   Hurtt refused to allow Houston officers to question people in the field about their immigration status.

Some members of the police union and anti-illegal immigrant advocates lambasted Hurtt and the Houston Mayor, but “leaders” in Houston’s “immigrant” community proclaimed that their lack of action was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Wednesday, Hurtt gave the excuse that he was reluctant to allow field questioning of illegals, in part due to HPD’s “resource capabilities.”

I had concerns about officers in the field concentrating their efforts and resources on the enforcement of immigration.

He also claimed that he was afraid that having officers question suspects in the field would result in fewer members of immigrant communities coming forward to report crime.

Hurtt said:

I think that was a legitimate concern and still is.

Hurt and Mayor White decided not to participate in 287(g), but instead chose another ICE program, euphemistically named Secure Communities.  This program runs fingerprint-based immigration history, checks on all suspects booked into the local jails, and notifies ICE automatically of any “hits” in the system. So, if you’re an illegal immigrant who is not in their data base, having not committed a crime, except for being here illegally, do they let you go?

Per ICE, Hurtt will work on “outreach and communication” between ICE and local cop shops, tribal governments, and other groups.

Homeland Security assistant secretary for ICE, John Morton, praised Hurtt’s appointment:

Chief Hurtt is a respected member of the law enforcement community and understands the concerns of local law enforcement leaders.

Of course, John Morton, also said, in regard to Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law:

We’ll wait to see what the attorney general and his team decides.  In the meantime, we’re not going to approach enforcement in Arizona any differently than we do now, which is on the merits and [within] the resources that we have.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said:

I believe today, under the circumstances that we’re facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in.

There’s strong information to us that they come as illegal people wanting to come to work. Then they are accosted and they become subjects of the drug cartel.

Jaime Farrant, policy director for Tucson-based Border Action Network, responded:

We have some stories of people being forced to carry drugs  We disagree with the assessment that people are crossing (to carry drugs). We have no evidence that’s the truth. We think most people come in search of jobs or to reunite with their families.

In a related story, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca  June 7 while in the process of trying to arrest illegal immigrants crossing the muddy bed of the Rio Grande.  According to witnesses, a group of people on the Mexican side were throwing rocks at the agents.  The Border Patrol has been given the right to use lethal force against rock throwers.

Hernandez, as he is known, has now been revealed to be among El Paso’s most wanted juvenile immigrant smugglers.

Federal arrest records show that Hernandez had been arrested at least four times since 2008 and twice in the same week in February 2009 on suspicion of smuggling illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Hernandez was repeatedly arrested along the U.S. side of the border near downtown El Paso,close to where he was killed, but was never charged with a crime by federal prosecutors.

The records also show that in at least one case, Hernandez was to be paid $50 a person for smuggling four people into the U.S.

Illegal Immigration Activists blasted the Border Patrol concerning this incident.

However, the viewpoint of these people and  the Obama Adminstration, including ICE, is definitely not the viewpoint of the majority of Americans.

A recent Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of U.S. voters oppose the federal Government filing a lawsuit against Arizona over its’ Immigration Law. 

Only 26%  of Americans believe the Justice Department should challenge the legality of Arizona’s law in court. Eighteen percent (18%) are undecided in the survey conducted May 26 and 27.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters favor passage of a law like Arizona’s in their own state.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters believe a police officer should be required to check the immigration status of anyone stopped for a traffic violation or violation of some other law if he suspects the person might be an illegal immigrant.

I understand that people want a better life for themselves and their children.  We are all immigrants in this land, expect 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.

I’m all for assisting anyone in becoming a legal citizen of the United States, if that is their wish.  But, it must be done the right way, and they must accept responsibility for their illegal entry, show a willingness to learn our language, and embrace our American way of life, including respecting the American Flag.

A wide-open Southern Border is as big a threat to the sovereignty of the United States as anything that our enemies can throw at us right now.  Mr. President, quit playing political games.  The safety of America is at stake .  SECURE THE BORDER NOW.

Sources:  drudgerepot.com, phoenixnewtimes.com, chron.com, mywaynews.com

John Harris, Gov Rod Blagojevich’s former chief of Staff, testified Wednesday that he believed Barack Obama knew of Blagojevich’s plot to win himself a presidential Cabinet post in exchange for appointing Valerie Jarrett to the U.S. Senate.

Harris said on the stand in the former governor’s corruption trial that three days after the Nov. 4, 2008, presidential election, Blago told Harris he felt confident Obama knew he wanted to swap perks.

In the tape, Blagojevich is heard talking about another idea — to ask Obama to ask Warren Buffett or Bill Gates to throw $15 million into a health-care related charity account that Blago would manage and live off. In exchange, he’d appoint Valerie Jarrett to Obama’s Senate seat.

Blago had just seen on the news that Obama had changed his mind about putting Valerie Jarrett in the Senate.  Instead, he was considering her for a cabinet post.   But Blago’s not convinced, and he advances his new fund-raising idea.

Rod: This is one of those things where you’re the president-elect of the United States. His people, they go get the money.
Harris: I think that’s a lot easier for them than an appointment, sure…
Rod: You go to these big Democratic multi-billionaires … and you ask them all to give 2, … a couple million each … That’s all they got to do for Valerie Jarrett… that’s not hard for them.

Harris had his doubts. The Obama camp “may have higher priorities,” he related from the stand. But he went along anyway.

Harris told the court:

I was just being agreeable with him.   Just keeping the conversation moving along. There was other matters i was hoping to get to.

Later on the tape, Blago says he wants Harris to find some other Senate candidates.

Blago asked:

Why don’t we start looking for an African-American Tammy Duckworth?  We can, can’t we?

Harris explained the recording this way:

The president understands that the governor would be willing to make the appointment of Valerie Jarrett as long as he gets what he’s asked for. . . . The governor gets the Cabinet appointment he’s asked for.

Harris stated that Blago had the impression that Obama knew what he wanted after talking to a local union representative, who in turn spoke with labor leader Tom Balanoff, with whom Blagojevich met to discuss a Jarrett appointment. 

Harris’ testimony contradicts the government’s previous public statements that Obama knew nothing about deal-making involving the Senate seat appointment, according to Blago’s attorneys.

Wednesday, the defense moved to force the prosecution to turn over FBI reports of the president’s interview with federal agents in December of 2008.   At this time, he is not accused of any wrongdoing.

From the lawyers’ filing:

Testimony elicited by the government from John Harris and wiretaps played in court raise the issue of President Obama’s direct knowledge and communication with emissaries and others regarding the appointment to his Senate seat.

This filing came on the trial’s third day of the lengthy playback of recordings in which Blagojevich is heard over and over again talking with others about ways to personally capitalize on his Senate seat appointment power.

Blagojevich could also be heard cussing and snapping at his wife, Patti, and negating the possibility of a federal position that pays $190,000 a year.

Blagojevich tells national Democratic consultant Fred Yang:

I make $170 . . . So Fred, that has no appeal to me . . . I want to make money. I might as well go out and find a way to make money.

The 2008 internal report from Obama about his staff’s contacts with Blagojevich at the time shows that Balanoff told Valerie Jarrett that Blagojevich was interested in a Health and Human Services Cabinet post.

Recordings also related that Blago had tried to get the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board canned after it ran a series of less-than-flattering stories about the then-governor.

Harris testified that he ignored Blagojevich’s firing directive.

U.S. District Judge James Zagel refused to gag the talkative Blagojevich as prosecutors had asked.  Zagel said Blagojevich keeps proclaiming his innocence, and that anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

The repetition, Zagel said, has made Blagojevich’s out-of-court talk unnewsworthy.

Thursday, the jury got a look  at a short list of candidates President Obama had chosen to replace him in the U.S. Senate.
Harris tells Blago “He doesn’t want to say who he doesn’t like,” adding that if a person Blagojevich was considering was not on Emanuel’s list, “he’s not high on them.”  Harris let Blago know that the message from Emanuel was that Illinois Senate President Emil Jones was not a favored candidate for the U.S. Senate spot.

Federal prosecutors played a tape of the first official message from the new Obama administration about who the president supported for his Senate seat. 

Blago’s chief of staff, John Harris, tells his boss on the phone that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s future guard dog, had called him to give him a list of four people who Obama would be okay with as his successor in the Senate.  They were Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.; injured Iraq War vet Tammy Duckworth; U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Illinois State Comptroller Dan Hynes.

Under oath Harris said that Emanuel told him that no one else in the Obama camp was authorized to talk about the Senate seat. That contradicted previous messages from a union official that Jackson Jr. was not one of Obama’s preferred candidates.

But Blago doesn’t seem to buy the fact that the list Emanuel provided is a genuine list of Obama’s preferences for the Senate seat.  He says:

It’s a *.*. list.  Expletive Initials deleted.

Harris went on to say that the list appeared to be a political maneuver to show that Obama backed a diverse crop of candidates for the Senate seat. The four names included an African-American male, Jackson; a white female, Schakowsky; an Asian-American female, Duckworth; and a white male, Hynes.

Of course, if Blago’s attorneys can get Obama’s interview with the FBI and  the report collaborates Harris’ testimony, things could get very interesting.  Unfortunately, until that happens it is still just hearsay.

Until then, it’s still one of those things that make you go:

Hmmmm. 

Sources:  drudgereport.com, suntimes.com, cbs2chicago.com

Tens of thousands more gallons of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday.  This new setback happened after an undersea robot bumped a venting system, forcing BP to remove the cap that had been containing some of the crude.

The setback, one of many in the nine-week effort to stop the gusher, came as Pensacola Beach in Florida was invaded by thick globs of oil washing up on the formerly pristine sands.  At the same time, the clueless Obama administration was trying to figure out how to side-step a Federal Judge’s ruling overturning Obama’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Gas escaped through the vent that carries warm water down to prevent ice-like crystals from forming, when the robot bumped the system just before 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Crews were inspecting the well to see if crystals had formed before putting the cap back on.   BP is unsure how long it will be until the cap is back in place.

The containment cap had collected about 700,000 gallons of oil in 24 hours and sucked it up to a ship on the surface before the incident.   The oil that was collected is now pouring into the Gulf.  Another 438,000 gallons was burned on the surface by a different system.  Thankfully, this system was not affected by the issue with the cap.

An incident like this thwarted the attempt to put a bigger containment device over the blown-out well in May.   BP had to abandon the four-story box it was trying to place over the well after the crystals called hydrates clogged it, threatening to make it float away.

This smaller cap had been in place since early June.   Crews had to slice away a section of the leaking pipe to get it there, meaning the flow of oil could be stronger now than before.

The latest worst-case estimate of the amount of oil entering the Gulf from the well is about 2.5 million gallons a day.  Estimates are that 67 million to 127 million gallons have flowed in the Gulf since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and blew out the well 5,000 feet underwater.   BP PLC had a lease arrangement on the rig from owner Transocean Ltd.

President Barak Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) and his administration were trying to figure out what to do next yesterday after U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans overturned Scooter’s moratorium on new drilling.  The Judge said that the government simply assumed  (and we know what that does) that because one rig exploded, the others pose an imminent danger, too.

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, Judge Feldman has reported investments in the oil and gas industry, including owning less than $15,000 of Transocean stock, according to financial disclosure reports for 2008, the most recent available.

The White House threatened an immediate appeal of his ruling. The Interior Department imposed the moratorium last month, following Presidential orders,  in the wake of the BP disaster.  This halted approval of any new permits for deepwater projects and suspending drilling on 33 exploratory wells.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proclaimed that within the next few days he would issue a new order imposing a moratorium that eliminates any doubt it is needed and appropriate.

This weasel told a Senate subcommittee yesterday:

It’s important that we don’t move forward with new drilling until we know it can be done in a safe way.

Translation:  We don’t care about all the Americans who are out of work.  Obama wants to get cap and trade passed so that he can pay off his investors, including helping Mr. Soros with his investment in Petrobras.

Several companies, including Shell and Marathon Oil, said they would await the outcome of any appeals before they start drilling again.  See?

 BP managing director Bob Dudley said on yesterday’s NBC’s “Today” show that his company will “step back” from the issue while it investigates the rig explosion.

BP announced yesterday that Dudley has been appointed to head the new Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, which is in charge of cleaning up the spill.  He takes over from embattled BP CEO Tony Hayward.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, dozens of workers used shovels to scoop up pools of oil that washed up overnight, turning the sand orange.

Tar balls have washed up as far east as Panama City, Fla.  Thicker oil is predicted to wash ashore further east along the coast line in the coming days.  Oil has already washed up on beaches in Alabama and coated wetlands in Louisiana.

In another brilliant move yesterday, the federal government shut down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.  

The berms are meant to protect the Louisiana coastline from oil. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department is upset about where the dredging is going on. The department says one area where sand is being dredged is a sensitive section of the Chandeleur Islands, and the state failed to meet an extended deadline to install pipe that would draw sand from a less-endangered area.

The ecological damage being caused by this disaster is horrible.   But what about the damage to American citizens?

William Allen Kruse, 55, a charter boat captain, was recently hired by BP as a vessel of opportunity out of Gulf Shores, AL.  He and his two deck hands prepared to set sail on his boat, The Rookie, yesterday morning, as they always did.  The deck hands said that he seemed normal as he sent them for some ice while he pulled around to the gas pumps.   When he did not show up at the pumps, the deck hands found the boat still moored where they left it.  They went inside to find their captain dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Stan Vinson, coroner for Baldwin County, which includes Gulf Shores, said:

He had been quite despondent about the oil crisis.

Vinson said Kruse was in good health, was not mentally ill and was not taking psychotropic medications.

Dr. Vinson said it’s not surprising the oil spill had weighed heavily on his mind, as it has on many local fishermen no longer able to support themselves with deep-sea sport fishing trips for marlin and the like.

All the waters are closed. There’s no charter business anymore. You go out on some of the beaches now, with the oil, you can’t even get in the water.   It’s really crippled the tourism and fishing industry here.

Today is the 66th day since the Deepwater Horizon Explosion.  Procrastination and the lack of a clear plan by the Obama Administration is not only ruining the ecology of the Gulf Coast Area, but irreparably harming the lives of Americans who depend on the Gulf Waters to provide for their families.

If this procrastination is intentional, designed to further his ideology and political power, then Obama is the most cold-hearted and, dare I say, treasonous,  president in American History.  However, even if he is just incompetent, that will not reduce the damage already done by him and his administration’s procrastination in dealing with this crisis.

Whether clueless or calculating, Obama has cemented his place in history through his mishandling of this disaster.

Please keep the American families affected by this crisis in your prayers.  And continue to pray for our country.

Sources:  breitbart.com, wdsu.com, latimes.com