Tag: spring break

Malia’s Spring Break…on Our Dime

On By kingsjesterIn Politics3 Comments

“Over the last several years, we’ve been able to strike up a friendship. And, you’ll notice that even though technically it is not Saint Patrick’s Day, we like to prolong the party around here,” President Obama said at a press event following a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny.

We’ve noticed, Mr. President….No matter how you try to hide it.

Breitbart.com has the story:

An AFP story, linked at the Huffington Post and elsewhere, reported on Malia Obama’s visit to Mexico despite a Texas public safety warning, she’s reportedly accompanied by 12 friends and 25 Secret Service agents. The Huffington Post story link now directs to the main page and the AFP item is fast disappearing from view.

The Yahoo News link now diverts to a completely different story, in contrast to the url: http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-daughter-spends-springbreak-mexico-145031176.html. The headline now reads: Senegal music star Youssou Ndour hits campaign trail.

The International Business Times, among others, still has the story live – for now.  [It has since been scrubbed, too.]:

President Barack Obama’s 13-year-old daughter, Malia Ann Obama, will be spending her spring break in the Mexican city of Oaxaca with 12 friends and 25 Secret Service agents. The young tourists will be in a downtown hotel in the city known for its colonial architecture and native traditions, reported a state police official.

“We are here to block access to the hotel by other people and escort the vehicles that are carrying the visitors to tourism sites,” the police official told the AFP under the condition of anonymity.

Along with the 25 secret service agents, Obama and her friends will protected by a slew of Mexican police officers, according to the AFP.

The group arrived in Oaxaca on Saturday and reportedly visited the architectural site of Mitla.

They also visited the tree of El Tule, believed to be approximately one thousand years old. The group also plans to travel to Monte Alban, which is known for its archeological research as well as the artisan sections of the city.

The report comes at the same time the Texas Department of Public Safety has issued a warning, advising students on Spring Break to not travel to Mexico due to increased violence.

AUSTIN, Texas — A law enforcement agency in Texas has raised safety concerns and advised students on spring break to avoid Mexico.

The Department of Public Safety on Tuesday issued the advisory, citing continued violence throughout Mexico.

The U.S. State Department last month recommended that Americans avoid travel to all or parts of 14 of 31 Mexican states. It’s the widest travel advisory issued by the U.S. since Mexico stepped up its drug war in 2006.

DPS Director Steven McCraw says Mexican drug cartel violence and other criminal activity represent a significant safety threat, even in some resort areas.

So far, only one of the Republican Candidates for Nomination has had enough courage to say anything about Malia’s taxpayer-funded Spring Break Par-taaay.

News.Yahoo.com reports that

Rick Santorum criticized President Obama during a radio interview Tuesday for reportedly allowing his daughter, Malia, to go on a spring break trip to Mexico in an area of the country which Santorum believed had been placed on a warning list for American tourists by the State Department.

“What I would say is that the president’s actions should reflect what his administration is saying,” Santorum told Beck, according to the Blaze. “If the administration is saying that it’s not safe to have people down there, then just because you can send 25 Secret Service agents doesn’t mean you should do it. You should set an example. I think that’s what presidents do. They set an example. And when the government is saying this is not safe, then you don’t set the example by sending your kids down there.”

…An earthquake hit Mexico Tuesday, but the White House released a statement saying Malia was unharmed.

According to CBSnews.com:

The Monday reports prompted the first lady’s office to reach out to media outlets and ask them to pull the stories, which many elected to do. In order to protect the “privacy and security” of the first daughters, the first lady’s office said, it was reiterating its longstanding request that news organizations not “report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest.”

You mean, like when they reported Dubya’s daughters were out partying?

Was there any “vital news interest” there?

The truth is, the Obama Administration knows that the optics are bad in this situation…and they ordered a cover-up, courtesy of their sychophantic Media Lapdogs.

A 13 year old, in Mexico, on Spring Break with 12 of her classmates, and without her parents?

Shoot.  I didn’t get to go on a “school trip” without my folks until I was a Junior in High School….and that was to Washington, DC, riding for days on a Continental Trailways bus with my classmates, over the Thanksgiving holidays.

Well…I was excited, anyway.  And my parents paid for it.

Sandra Fluke, Anita Dunn, and Chairman Mao

On By kingsjesterIn Politics7 Comments

The second week into the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh dust-up, things are beginning to tumble like a house of cards, regarding this Democratically-engineered controversy.

Bill O’ Reilly reported the following on foxnews.com on March 8th:

As we reported last night, “The Factor” believes that the Sandra Fluke contraception controversy was manufactured to divert attention away from the Obama administration’s disastrous decision to force Catholic non-profit organizations to provide insurance coverage for birth control and the morning after pill. That might very well be unconstitutional.

Anyway, we’re having trouble tracking down just who is sending Sandra around to the media. It’s very strange. So far, the 30-year-old activist has appeared on eight national news programs where she was not challenged at all. Last week, we called Sandra on her cell phone and invited her on “The Factor.” She didn’t call back, very unusual. There was no other public contact for the woman, just her cell phone.

A man named Mike has booked her on a few programs, but we can’t even get his last name. And Mike doesn’t provide call-back numbers to those with whom he speaks. So Mike, who are you? And why the subterfuge?

Now, late today we found out that Ms. Fluke is now being repped by the progressive PR agency SKDKnickerbocker where Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director is the managing editor… a-ha.

So, this whole deal comes back to the White House, at least indirectly. So, let’s run down what we know. Sandra Fluke is a former head of the group “Georgetown University Law Students for Reproductive Justice.” On February 9th, a group called “The Feminist Majority Foundation” arranged for Sandra to appear at press conference criticizing the Catholic bishops for objecting to President Obama’s contraception mandate.

After that, Congressman Elijah Cummings, the former Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, invited Sandra to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee. But she was turned down by the chair, Congressman Darrell Issa, because she had no expertise in the church/state subject matter.

Nevertheless, Ms. Fluke went to the hearing and afterward complained to ABC News that she had been denied. A week later, Nancy Pelosi staged a mock hearing starring Sandra. After which Rush Limbaugh made derogatory comments elevating her to left-wing martyrdom.

So it seems there is a powerful presence behind Sandra Fluke. And as the polls show the controversy has benefited the President of the United States, who is on the ropes with the church deal. This is all the more amazing because the controversy Sandra is embracing is completely bogus as I explained on “The View” today.

So, what kind of clientele does Ms. Dunn’s law firm handle?

On October 15, 2009, Michelle Malkin reported the following information:

Hat tip: Ace and HA.

***

More: Squier, Knapp, and Dunn — Dunn’s p.r. firm — has clients including:

*SEIU-National

*SEIU-Local 1199

*Ceres-Far Left environmentalists “for sustainable prosperity”

*American Rights at Work-Big Labor outfit chaired by David Bonior

And more from reader Dan:

1. Her firm did the ads for Rod Blagojevich in Illinois in 2002 and 2006. In other words, they used lies to help elect the most corrupt governor in Illinois.

2. She or her partner Squier have widely been speculated to be one of the figures mentioned in Blagojevich indictment as a Washington consultant on a conference call mentioned by Patrick Fitzgerald.

3. Dunn’s husband was also the personal lawyer of Barack Obama related to the Blagojevich matter. Remember, he was questioned by the feds.

And, Ms. Dunn’s personal ideology?  Well…

On October 21, 2009, John Fund, writing for the Wall Street Journal, posted the following:

Anita Dunn, the White House’s communications director who has declared war on Fox News, came under scrutiny herself last week when it was discovered she had told an audience that Mao Tse Tung was one of her favorite political philosophers and quoted Mao on how to “fight your war.” In her speech last June, after she joined the Obama White House, Ms. Dunn said the “two people I turn to most” were Mother Teresa and Mao Tse-Tung. She barely discussed the late nun, but waxed at length about the lessons Mao had taught her.

To call Mao a “political philosopher” is a stretch. As Roger Kimball of the New Criterion reminds us, the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski properly labeled the Chinese revolutionary “one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century.”

Indeed, the Mao revelation prompted William Ratliff, an expert on China with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, to call her statement “outrageous and pathetic” given that Mao’s role in the deaths of some 50 million people “makes it impossible for any serious person” to view him as a great philosopher.

Ms. Dunn is now trying to pin her quote on a dead adviser to President George H.W. Bush. “The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don’t get my progressive friends mad at me,” Ms. Dunn told CNN.

She went on to explain that Fox host Glenn Beck’s criticism was off-base because “the use of the phrase ‘favorite political philosophers’ was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat — at least with a certain Fox commentator whose sense of irony may be missing.”

Ms. Dunn’s lame explanation might have some traction if the videotape of her speech at the time displayed the slightest trace of irony. But it doesn’t. The videos show her speaking in complete earnestness.

So, where is the poor, deprived Sandra Fluke now?

She and her boyfriend, the son of long-time Democrat William Mutterperl, who is a heavy contributor to Democrat candidates, are currently living la vida loca, on Spring Break (at 30 years old) in California.

So, how is it that Fluke can afford a trip across the country, from Georgetown University to California, but she can’t afford to buy her own birth control pills?

Shoot.  I’ll be lucky if I get to drive across the river to West Memphis, Arkansas.

What a racket.