tagged w/ Obama Administration
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The Obama administration just released its first major fracking policy--the Bureau of Land Management’s proposed rules for fracking on 600 million acres of public land. And it’s even worse than we feared.1
In a major concession to the fracking industry and its lobbying efforts, the proposed rules are even weaker than previous drafts of the rules.2 3 And they do nothing to close Dick Cheney’s infamous “Halliburton loophole,” which exempts fracking from key parts of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.4
Of course, it’s become clear that there is simply no safe way to frack. So even worse than the specific concessions made to industry in the draft regulations is the assumption that fracking should be allowed to continue on federal lands despite overwhelming evidence that it endangers our air, water and climate.
The BLM is accepting public comments on its proposed fracking rules for 30 days. We need to let the administration know that these rules are totally inadequate. The administration needs to ban fracking on public lands – not cave to the industry and endanger our health and safety.
Submit a public comment telling the Bureau of Land Management: Ban fracking on federal lands.
An area of federal land larger than the entire state of Florida is currently under lease for oil and gas extraction, so this is one of the most important fracking policy decisions the Obama administration will make.5
Unfortuanately, every indication is that the White House is still putting the interests of oil and gas companies before the health and safety of American communities. The proposed regulations let the industry keep secret the toxic chemicals it injects underground by designating them as "trade secrets" without oversight from the BLM. The rules allow the industry to store contaminated waste in massive open pits, which can release dangerous air emissions and leak toxins into groundwater. And the rules do nothing to prevent the industry from fracking wells right next to homes and schools.
And of course, the harm fracking does to local communities is compounded by its significant contribution to the climate crisis.6 As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere passes 400 parts per million--well beyond what many scientists say is safe--the Obama administration should be working to keep its promise to confront climate change, not encouraging the extraction of vast new reserves of dirty oil and gas.
Submit a public comment telling the Bureau of Land Management: Ban fracking on federal lands.The Obama administration just released its first major fracking policy--the Bureau of... more
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Following a full court press by the Obama administration, and specifically gun tzar Joe Biden, to legislate "stronger" gun law in the last several months ever since the Sandy Hook massacre, the initiative may have just suffered a terminal defeat following a failure to even pass a bipartisan background check amendment in the democrat-controlled Senate.
CBS reports that "In a major setback for gun control advocates, the Senate Wednesday voted down a key amendment to the embattled Democratic gun bill, signaling the increasingly dim prospects of any meaningful legislative action aimed at strengthening America's gun laws. The bipartisan Manchin-Toomey amendment, a background check expansion devised by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and a handful of other lawmakers, earned only 54 votes, falling six votes short of the 60-vote threshold. Vice President Joe Biden, who led the Obama administration's months-long lobbying effort on behalf of stronger gun laws, presided over the vote...
Continued at:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-17/background-check-amendment-fails-pass-senate-gun-control-tatters-obama-make-statemenFollowing a full court press by the Obama administration, and specifically gun tzar... more
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Dagum
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Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed.
On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.
Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.
That was a lie.
Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.
Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.
Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A. officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.
Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.
Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.
As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”
From Car Thief to Militant
By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.
Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.
Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.
When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.
For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.
C.I.A. officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.
But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.
A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.
Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”
Read more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/world/asia/origins-of-cias-not-so-secret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed.
On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun... more
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Excerpt: "When I see people talking today about 'protecting Social Security' while (a) starting to dismantle it, and (b) ignoring one of the biggest sources of real revenue — removing the income & salary cap — I can only pick the second choice above, certainly for the post-1980s crowd. Heck, if Clinton had looked at wealth inequality and simply raised the salary cap to its original level — to capture 90% of all income, as it did in 1984 — the Trust Fund would have $1.2 trillion more today. But that wasn’t going to be his solution. Pete Peterson and Alan Simpson were on Clinton’s commission for a reason, and we all know what Peterson and Simpson want — dismantlement and benefit cuts. The knife.
"It’s one thing to say you need revenue and then misallocate it. It’s another to start cutting the program itself. At the level of the deciders today (and them only, not the great economists and experts lower down), this is not at all about Social Security; it’s about the political effect of having and using the Trust Fund, and only that.
"Note that I twice said 'political effect' of the Trust Fund. This is not about numbers either; numbers are just the shell game, the fog. It’s about power, staying in power, keeping people who keep them in power happy. It’s about not raising taxes while screaming about the deficit. Manipulating the Trust Fund has a role to play.
"The Republican Party’s owners (their donors) want to loot the Fund and will say so. Again, recall the Bush Push of 2005. The present owners of the Democratic Party includes Wall Street, and they too would like to confiscate the Trust Fund (by “investing” it for you and depleting it with fees). But Democrats can’t say they are looting, because 'starve the beast' (and feeding on the flesh) has to be sold differently to Democratic voters.
"Democratic voters have to be told they’re 'helping,' serving the interests of the next generation. So from the “left” the idea that cutting benefits (shrinking the program itself) trumps cashing in any of the Trust Fund … that has to look like 'reform,' not just straight theft, or it won’t begin to fly."Excerpt: "When I see people talking today about 'protecting Social... more
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Cabal
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Vice President Joe Biden threw caution to the wind Friday as he shockingly declared, “The affirmative task we have now is to actually create a new world order,” adding yet another admission to an already long list of documented globalist bragging of plans for a centralized, one-world global government.Vice President Joe Biden threw caution to the wind Friday as he shockingly declared,... more
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Excerpt: "In its simplest terms, 'free trade' means one thing only — the ability of people with capital to move that capital freely, anywhere in the world, seeking the highest profit. ...
"At its heart, free trade doesn't mean the ability to trade freely per se; that's just a byproduct. It means the ability to invest freely without governmental constraint. Free trade is why factories in China have American investors and partners — because you can't bring down manufacturing wages in Michigan and Alabama if you can't set up slave factories somewhere else and get your government to make that capital move cost-free, or even tax-incentivized, out of your supposed home country and into a place ripe for predation.
"Can you see why both right-wing kings (Koch Bros, Walmart-heir dukes and earls, Reagan I, Bush I and II) and left-wing honchos (Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Barack Obama) make 'free trade' the cornerstone of each of their economic policies? It's the song of the rich, and they all sing it."Excerpt: "In its simplest terms, 'free trade' means one thing only... more
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Cabal
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Illustrative of his contempt for the truth, Mitt Romney's campaign website continues to host the following statement: "Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history."
On Friday, we discovered yet another reason why this is a super-colossal lie.
With the end of fiscal year 2012, the Congressional Budget Office announced the 2012 federal budget deficit: $1.1 trillion. Taken purely at face value, this number is enormous. Yet every Democrat, and especially the Obama campaign, ought to be telling anyone who will listen: Not only has the president cut the deficit by $312 billion during his first term (so far), but he's cut the deficit by $200 billion in the past year alone. And the CBO projected that the 2013 Obama budget, if enacted as is, would shrink the deficit to $977 billion -- a four year total of nearly $500 billion in deficit reduction.
Okay, yeah, I get it. It's risky to mention the deficit, but not when you couch it in math and the facts.
As I've documented before, the CBO reported in January, 2009 that the federal budget deficit for that fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2008, was already $1.2 trillion. President Obama's additional '09 spending added another $200 billion to the deficit, bringing the total to $1.412 trillion. Unprecedented and huge, but given the enormity of the financial crisis and the depth of the recession, there weren't many other options on the table. Add two wars into the mix and there you go.
But since then, deficit spending has dropped precipitously. Why? Chiefly because President Obama signed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in February, 2010, which mandates that new spending be offset with spending cuts or new revenue. Yes, a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed this legislation. Guess how many congressional Republicans voted for the law. Zero. Not one. Perhaps during this week's debate, Vice President Biden could ask Rep. Paul Ryan who voted against the bill.
Consequently, the president is responsible for the lowest government spending growth in 60 years, according to the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch.
Once again, Mitt Romney's website still contains the words: "Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history." Pants on fire times a thousand.
Fact: the president's record is exactly the opposite of what Romney says. And how long ago was this statistic released by the Wall Street Journal and subsequently affirmed by fact checkers? Five months ago. On September 26, when asked about his record of mendacious claims, Mitt Romney told CNN's Jim Acosta, "We've been absolutely spot on. And any time there's been anything that's been amiss, we correct it or remove it." Oh yeah? Well, Mr. Romney, you missed a whopper.
Another whopper: during Romney's "winning" debate against the president last week, he claimed, "The president said he'd cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it." Another lie. Yes, the president said he'd cut the deficit in half -- but he absolutely did not double it. As I've outlined here, he's cut the deficit by 22 percent so far -- 35 percent by the end of 2013.
Furthermore, I can name two Democratic presidents who've cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. And what about Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? No. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower. By the way, I'm sick of hearing the farcical line about Congress "controlling the purse strings." Any six-year-old child who's watched a Schoolhouse Rock cartoon knows the president signs all legislation before it becomes law, including appropriations bills. The House can't magically spend money without a presidential signature. Besides, if the president is to be blamed for the size of the deficit -- and the Republicans have been merciless on the president in this area in spite of reality, and their own party's record -- it's only fair that he should get credit when the deficit is reduced.
Yet without objections, the Romney campaign and the Republicans continue to champion their status as "fiscal hawks" even though the facts prove that to correlate "fiscal responsibility" and "Republican Party" is absurd on its face. Even though Romney's plan for the deficit and the economy is as shifty, murky and ambiguous as he is, there appears to be nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about the Romney plan that's any different from every Republican presidential plan in recent history, but we're supposed to believe that Romney will cut the deficit anyway. In fact, as we all know by now, Romney is proposing $5 trillion in un-funded tax cuts, as well as massive increases in military spending, and, if Romney wins, you can bet the Republicans will jettison their deficit and debt hawkery into the next nearest memory hole to be forgotten until another Democrat enters the White House.
If the Obama campaign and the Democrats can talk about the deficit in these terms, it undercuts one of the leading Republican attacks and becomes a winning issue for the president. Plus it helps to cement the reality of Mitt Romney The Pathological Liar.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/repeat-after-me-obama-cut_b_1955561.html?utm_hp_ref=twIllustrative of his contempt for the truth, Mitt Romney's campaign website... more
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The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a "four-year low" of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down? After all, you would think that it should be. The Obama administration has "borrowed" more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to "stimulate" the economy. So have those efforts been successful? Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that "236,000 jobs" were added to the economy in February, but what they didn't tell you was that the number of Americans "not in the labor force" rose by 296,000. And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down - by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don't want jobs. Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis. For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this "economic recovery" that they keep talking about?
Full Story: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-chart-that-proves-that-the-mainstream-media-is-lying-to-you-about-unemploymentThe mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a... more
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A popular hunting shotgun could be banned under one of the bills moving through the state Capitol.
A pump or semi-automatic shotgun is the gun most hunters in Colorado use. It’s a gun state Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, says could be banned under a bill that’s already passed the House and Gov. John Hickenlooper says he’ll sign.
“They’re coming after the standard shotgun,” Brophy told CBS4 Political Specialist Shaun Boyd.
Brophy says if Democrats succeed in passing a bill limiting large capacity magazines in Colorado, they’ll outlaw the most popular selling firearm for hunting.
“Hundreds of thousands of pheasant hunters are probably going to be carrying around a gun they won’t be able to replace after July 1 this year,” he said.
Brophy points to a section of the bill that defines a high-capacity magazine as one capable of accepting or — that can be readily converted — to accept more than 15 rounds or eight shotgun shells.
“This is where shotgun shells go inside this tube here,” Brophy showed Boyd, “You can screw this part off the top and screw on an extender to this tube to allow it to hold more than eight rounds. It is readily convertible, which by definition in the bill, makes the whole thing a high-capacity magazine.”
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2013/03/01/popular-standard-shotgun-could-be-banned-under-proposed-bill/A popular hunting shotgun could be banned under one of the bills moving through the... more
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prominent Washington journalist said in interviews on Wednesday a senior White House official warned him he would "regret" publishing a story challenging the White House's account of how the idea for automatic spending cuts originated.
Bob Woodward said in interviews with Politico and CNN that when he informed the White House he was writing a story critical of the White House's handling of a debate over the origin of the cuts, known as sequestration, the official reacted angrily.
The aide "yelled at me for about a half hour," Woodward told Politico, and then followed up the tirade with an email.
"I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today," the official wrote Woodward. "You're focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. ... I think you will regret staking out that claim."
Politico reported that Woodward saw the statement as a veiled threat.
"I've tangled with lots of these people," said the journalist, who established his reputation by breaking the story of the Watergate break-in under President Richard Nixon and has written a series of best selling books about Washington politics.
"But suppose there's a young reporter who's only had a couple of years — or 10 years' — experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ‘You're going to regret this,'" Woodward said. "You know, tremble, tremble. I don't think it's the way to operate."
Full Story: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50988772WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prominent Washington journalist said in interviews on... more
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Learn more about President Barack Obama's family background, education and career. Find out how he became the first African-American U.S. president at http://www.premiumessays.netLearn more about President Barack Obama's family background, education and... more
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Obama administration “believes that a gun ban will not work without mandatory gun confiscation.”
DOJ memo states: “Buybacks are ineffective unless massive and coupled with a ban.”
The National Rifle Association has obtained a Department of Justice memo calling for national gun registration and confiscation. The nine page “cursory summary” on current gun control initiatives was not officially released by the Obama administration.
The DOJ memo (downloadable here as a PDF) states the administration “believes that a gun ban will not work without mandatory gun confiscation,” according to the NRA, and thinks universal background checks “won’t work without requiring national gun registration.” Obama has yet to publicly support national registration or firearms confiscation, although the memo reveals his administration is moving in that direction.
The memo stands in stark contrast to the administration’s public stance on so-called gun control. White House spokesman Jay Carney said last month that laws proposed by Obama would not “take away a gun from a single law-abiding American.”
The NRA declined to explain how it obtained the document. The memo was written by the acting director of the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, Greg Ridgeway. It is dated January 4, two weeks before Obama mounted his attack on the Second Amendment following the Sandy Hook massacre. Ridgeway came to the Justice Department from the RAND corporation.
The memo says universal background checks on firearms purchases may help the government push to control and eventually outlaw firearms, but it would lead to an increase in illegally purchased guns.
It pointed out that banning high capacity ammunition clips would be ineffective due to the fact there is a large number of them already in circulation.
A Justice Department official said the memo is an unfinished review of gun violence research and does not represent administration policy.
The DOJ memo arrived a few weeks prior to a letter sent out by the Department of Veterans Affairs. “A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition,” the sent to military veterans states. “If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2).”
“US veterans are receiving letters from the government informing them that they are disabled and not allowed to own, purchase or possess a firearm. If the veteran does decide to purchase a firearm he will by fined, imprisoned or both,” the Gateway Pundit remarked.
NRA’s Chris Cox talks about the DOJ memo:
http://www.infowars.com/doj-memo-outlaw-and-confiscate-all-guns/Obama administration “believes that a gun ban will not work without mandatory... more
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday that he is demanding the White House answer “serious constitutional questions” about whether the administration can order a drone strike on American soil.
“We’re talking about someone eating at a cafe in Boston, or New York, and a Hellfire missile comes raining in on them,” Paul said during an appearance on Fox News. “There should be an easy answer from the administration on this. They should say, ‘Absolutely no, we will not kill Americans in America without an accusation, a trial and a jury.’ ”
The Kentucky senator said he had sent a letter to John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, but had not yet received a response.
“I’ve asked serious questions, serious Constitutional questions,” Paul said. “I’ve gotten zero response. And that is sort of the way this administration is treating Congress. The Senate has the right to advise and consent and approve nominees. I’ve not got one word of response from the administration on this.”...
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http://thehill.com/video/senate/284437-rand-paul-white-house-should-pledge-no-drone-strikes-in-usSen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday that he is demanding the White House answer... more
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The Justice Department "white paper" purporting to authorize Obama's power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration - including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan - has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer.
Brennan has been asked the question several times as part of his confirmation process. Each time, he simply pretends that the question has not been asked, opting instead to address a completely different issue. Here's the latest example from the written exchange he had with Senators after his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee; after referencing the DOJ "white paper", the Committee raised the question with Brennan in the most straightforward way possible:
More at link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/obama-brennan-paul-assassinations-filibusterThe Justice Department "white paper" purporting to authorize Obama's... more
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The Department of Homeland Security considers returning veterans a threat to the established order.
It’s no secret that the Department of Homeland Security considers returning veterans a threat to the established order. They said as much back in 2009 when they wrote in a report exposed by Alex Jones and the alternative media: “Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to right-wing extremists… DHS/I&A is concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize veterans in order to boost their violent capacities.”
Following the case of veteran Brandon Raub, who was abducted and held in a psychiatric ward for Facebook posts the government considered subversive, police in Ohio seized a veteran’s guns after he was adjudged to be mentally incompetent despite the fact a Veterans Administration psychiatric evaluation determined he was not mentally ill.
“Since the veteran is active in the so-called truth movement or patriot community, it is assumed that his involvement in this field is part of the reason why he has been targeted for psychiatric evaluation,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on August 24, 2012.
According to constitutional attorney Michael Connelly, the government is now moving to strip veterans it determines to be mentally incompetent of their Second Amendment right to own a firearm. Connelly cites a letter “sent by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of America’s heroes.”
“A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition,” the VA letter states. “If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2).”
“This must be Barack Obama’s way of thanking our veterans for serving,” writes the Gateway Pundit. “US veterans are receiving letters from the government informing them that they are disabled and not allowed to own, purchase or possess a firearm. If the veteran does decide to purchase a firearm he will by fined, imprisoned or both… This comes on page 2 of the VA letter.”
Connelly explains that the letter provides no specifics on the reasons for the proposed finding of incompetency and is based on a determination by a bureaucrat at the VA. “In every state in the United States no one can be declared incompetent to administer their own affairs without due process of law and that usually requires a judicial hearing with evidence being offered to prove to a judge that the person is indeed incompetent. This is a requirement of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” he writes.
Obviously, the Department of Veterans Affairs can’t be bothered by such impediments as the Constitution, particularly since they are clearly pushing to fulfill one of Obama’s main goals, the disarming of the American people. Janet Napolitano has already warned law enforcement that some of the most dangerous among us are America’s heroes, our veterans, and now according to this letter from the VA they can be prohibited from buying or even possessing a firearm because of a physical or mental disability.
The federal government is targeting veterans because it realizes that when martial law is declared and people are rounded up for political reasons – REX 84 and other military contingency plans demonstrate that the government has long planned for such an inevitability – the military experience of veterans will be crucial to any effective resistance.
“The reality is that Obama will not get all of the gun control measures he wants through Congress, and they wouldn’t be enough for him anyway,” Connelly concludes. “He wants a totally disarmed America so there will be no resistance to his plans to rob us of our nation. That means we have to ask who will be next. If you are receiving a Social Security check will you get one of these letters? Will the government declare that you are incompetent because of your age and therefore banned from firearm ownership. It certainly fits in with the philosophy and plans of the Obama administration. It is also certain that our military veterans don’t deserve this and neither do any other Americans.
http://www.infowars.com/federal-government-moves-to-disarm-veterans/The Department of Homeland Security considers returning veterans a threat to the... more
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Obama is orchestrating and staging an anti-gun push in Chicago’s South Side. It is his way to build an emotional basis for gun legislation. Several MSNBC commentators are making highly emotional pitches against guns as they cover this event.
Naturally this elicits counter-reactions from those many, many millions who oppose the government on the gun issue and hear the coverage. Among his gun opposition, Obama’s push reduces respect for him, his office and all government authority. Clearly, against these millions upon millions of gun owners, he would use raw power to get his way if he could, and not authority gained from their cooperative consent. They recognize, if only implicitly, this substitution of power for authority. Obama would use executive orders if he could. He’d issue bans if he could. He’d twist the gun issue into a public health, safety and welfare, or even terrorist issue, if he could. He would have the agencies of government issue constraining rules. He would use many means to disarm Americans, and they’d all be means of POWER.
A state that relies upon power to govern, not authority bestowed on it from those it governs, is illegitimate. It loses its justification to govern. This is the case today in America on the gun issue and many other issues. The government has again and again legislated against the wills and support of millions and millions and millions of Americans. It has relied on power to enforce its laws.
http://www.infowars.com/msnbc-anti-gun-propaganda-in-full-swing/Obama is orchestrating and staging an anti-gun push in Chicago’s South Side. It... more
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To those people who want a ban on all guns, knock it off. Honestly, you annoy the fuck out of me almost as much as the crazy people who think that Obama and the woefully ineffective United Nations are going to send confiscation squads to take their guns. You're also just bolstering the argument of the wingnuts. If you don't want a gun, you don't have to have one.
There's plenty of us gunowners who aren't brainwashed by the NRA and Fox News. We keep our pistols and shotguns out of the reach of children. We don't allow mentally ill people to get access to our firearms and we don't mind undergoing a background check to purchase a weapon. We own them because we use them to shoot targets, hunt and defend our homes. I got a .22 at the age of 7 and I've shot thousands of rounds from nearly every pistol, rifle and shotgun made since then, and never at another human being.
There's a firearm for every man, woman and child in the United States, so stop trying to push an outright ban. It's just not going to happen, and every time you bring it up, you just hurt an adult conversation that the rest of us are trying to have.
We can have a honest discussion about what a private citizen should own but not everyone who has a gun wants to shoot an unarmed minority kid or take on an imagined tyrannical government. Gun shows may not be your thing but folks like me enjoy them and we aren't there to buy ammo for the next mass shooting.
If you want to actually make a difference, how about getting behind sensible regulations that will actually work? How about getting away from the ideology of a world without guns and easing towards something more realistic like universal background checks and licensing for high capacity weapons without stirring up the NRA idiots?
However, if you really want to freak out some gun nuts, I suggest showing up to gun shows wearing an Obama shirt and buy up what you can afford. Maybe then, if they think liberals are arming themselves, perhaps they'll finally scream for some regulations.
And finally, if a ban on all firearms is ever proposed, I will stand against it. Until that point, let's not let a bunch of wingnuts on either side hijack our freedoms or this discussion.To those people who want a ban on all guns, knock it off. Honestly, you annoy the fuck... more
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In the clip above Jon Stewart rails the hosts of the television show Crossfire (no longer on the air) claiming they don’t ask the “tough” questions, and that because of this their show is “hurting America”. Jon is certainly correct in his point, but when the hosts try to turn those same questions back to him (at minute 4:00) Jon claims he is just a comedian on a comedy show and that it isn’t his job.
Any respectable comedian knows that the jester was the only person who could speak truth in the Kings court and that speaking truth to power is a fundamental characteristic of a good political comedian.
The jester was the only person permitted to tell the king the plain, unupholstered truth about things as he saw them, even about royalty itself and the most intimate matters pertaining to royalty; and he was not only permitted but expected to do this. The jester criticized State policies in a full-mouthed way that would have insured anybody else a life sojourn in the Bastille; and he got praise and favor for it. He could tell the king that his favorite mistress was a mercenary old rip who should be thrown to the sharks and, as our phrase goes, he could get away with it, and be applauded for it, which no one else could do, either in the court or in the kingdom at large.
The truth is Jon Stewart has a very important job to do but he never wants to hold himself to his task and that is what is “hurting America”.
Tom McKay of PolicyMic.com http://bit.ly/UvH8aa points to a perfect example of Jon shirking his comedic responsibilities during a recent interview with a ‘drone expert’.
Full Story: http://libertycrier.com/politics/foreign-policy/jon-stewarts-softball-drone-interview/In the clip above Jon Stewart rails the hosts of the television show Crossfire (no... more
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President Obama said that he and his guests go skeet shooting at Camp David “all the time” and that gun control advocates need “to do a little more listening” to understand why so many Americans are wary of government limits on firearms.
In an interview released Sunday morning, Mr. Obama acknowledged that getting his package of gun proposals through Congress could be tough, and he expressed empathy for the strong sentiments of gun owners. Like Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has mentioned that he owns two shotguns, Mr. Obama tried to associate himself with those who enjoy firing guns.
“Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” he told The New Republic in the interview, conducted Jan. 16, just after he unveiled his gun proposals.
Asked about his family, he said, “Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”...
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https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/politics/obama-says-gun-control-advocates-should-listen-to-owners.html?hp&_r=0President Obama said that he and his guests go skeet shooting at Camp David “all... more
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Dagum
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4 months ago
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PBS‘ Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.PBS‘ Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one... more
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