John Perazzo

The Philadelphia Bulletin reports that attorney Heather Heidelbaugh recently informed a House Judiciary subcommittee that The New York Times had killed a story last October — shortly before the U.S. presidential election — that would have revealed the Barack Obama presidential campaign’s intimate ties to the infamous voter-fraud group ACORN (and to ACORN’s sister group, Project Vote, which has been similarly implicated in far-ranging voter fraud).

 

In October a former ACORN worker, Anita Moncrief, told Heidelbaugh that she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.” The Bulletin story, penned by Michael Tremoglie, fleshes out the details:

 

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

 

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

 

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

 

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel: “Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, ‘it was a game changer.’”

 

This post was written by Claude Cartaginese.

 

According to our “Blame-America-First” Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Mexico’s drug war is entirely the fault of the United States. “Our [America’s] inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians,” said Clinton yesterday. According to her, illegal drugs have been coming from Mexico into the U.S. to feed “our insatiable demand,” and in exchange American weapons have been flowing south. There’s only one problem with Mrs. Clinton’s characterization: it’s hogwash.

 

Before Felipe Calderon became President of Mexico and called on the military to crack down on drug traffickers, the Mexican government’s attempts at eradicating the drug trade were laughable. And despite Calderon’s efforts, the Mexican government is still corrupt—from the low-level law-enforcement officer who moonlights as a hit man for the drug cartels, right up to highly placed politicians on the cartel’s payroll. This is no secret. Our law-enforcement knows it. The average Mexican citizen knows it, too.

 

Here’s an example: Last week, a rogue soldier/drug-gang leader named Octavio Almanza Moreles (alias “El Gori 4”), killed retired Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones and 10 other military men. Quiñones had recently been hired by the Cancun city government to help weed out corruption and revamp the local police force. When Almanza and several others were arrested, the operation netted 23 assault rifles, 20 handguns, 23 grenades, two grenade launchers, and a rocket launcher, among many other items.

 

How much of this arsenal do you think came from the U.S.? Probably none of it. Assault rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, etc. are not available in U.S. gun shops for purchase by the general public. Do you think the cartels, with all of their money and sophistication, would risk smuggling small arms from the U.S., when they can easily purchase their arms on the black market, or from sundry countries around the world (such as Venezuela or Iran), or from Hezbollah-type terror groups wishing to destabilize North America? Why wouldn’t the cartels avail themselves of a worldwide black market full of all types of military weaponry? For that matter, why not just “procure” their weapons from less-than-savory elements within the Mexican military itself—weapons which in all likelihood did come from the U.S. through legal channels?

 

 

The drug cartels can easily afford to fly their weaponry into Mexico from overseas using their own fleet of aircraft, which can land unimpeded on their own remote airfields. They can even import weapons to remote Mexican shores, using any number of their fleet of ships or submarines. The idea that all of this military-type weaponry is somehow finding its way into Mexico via the southern United States is a joke.

 

The Obama administration has turned the Mexican government’s problem into another “blame-America-first” crisis in order to further its gun-control agenda. The only people being fooled by all this rhetoric are those Americans listening to the likes of anti-gun Attorney General Eric Holder and political hacks like Hillary Clinton, who admonishes us: “Clearly, what we have been doing has not worked and it is unfair for our incapacity … to be creating a situation where people are holding the Mexican government and people responsible. That’s not right.” 

 

 

 

This post was written by Claude Cartaginese.

Not surprisingly, Barack Obama’s attempt to snuggle up to the Iranians via YouTube has been shot down by Tehran with blinding speed. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unimpressed by Obama’s direct appeal to the Iranian people and the supposed “moderate” elements of the régime, has made it quite clear that his government is not particularly eager to work toward improved relations with the West.

With a crowd chanting “Death to America” in the background, Khamenei dismissed the Obama overture as nothing more than a poorly disguised attempt at getting Iran to abandon the principles and the political tone it set for itself with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And, to be sure, Khamenei made it plain that the Iranian theocracy has no intention of doing anything of the sort. Consider some of the demands Iran has identified as prerequisites for any future negotiations with the United States:

• a complete overhaul of U.S. foreign policy;
• the release of all frozen Iranian assets;
• an end to America’s “unconditional support” for Israel;
• the lifting of all U.S. sanctions against Iran;
• a U.S. apology for having organized the ousting of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, and for other U.S. “involvements” in Iran;
• an end to America’s allegations that Iran is seeking nuclear arms; and
• the cessation of “hostile propaganda” and accusatory remarks directed against Iranian leaders.

In exchange, what does Tehran offer in furtherance of better bilateral relations? Nothing. Indeed, the Iranians want all of the aforementioned changes implemented before they will even sit down to negotiate!

And yet the Obama administration has even more plans for begging Iran to be our friend. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, for example, has announced that “many more” initiatives are expected. Officials have also raised the possibility of regular diplomatic contacts between U.S. and Iranian diplomats around the world—presumably whether the Iranians are interested or not. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having just returned from her mission of cozying up to the Syrian dictator in Damascus, is excited about having an opportunity to meet with Iranian envoys at an upcoming U.N.-led conference on Afghanistan at The Hague.

And of course, the foreign-policy gurus in whom Obama has placed his greatest trust in recent times – the pro-Arafat advisor Robert Malley, the anti-Israel Samantha Power, and UN ambassador Susan Rice – are similarly predisposed to tracing the roots of Mideast conflicts generally to the foreign policies of the U.S. and Israel.

 

 

While the Obama administration continues to depict free-market capitalism as the disease and government intervention as the cure, Americans would do well to maintain some sense of perspective rather than succumb to the Obama-Rahm Emanuel mentality which views any crisis, real or exaggerated, as “a terrible thing to waste.”

 

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and economics professor Kevin Murphy report today (in the Financial Times) that between 1980 and 2007, the world’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by about 145 per cent, or 3.4 per cent annually. During that span of time, hundreds of millions of people around the globe climbed out of poverty and achieved a standard of living entirely unknown outside of free-market economies. Becker and Murphy explain:

 

“The role of capitalism in creating wealth is seen in the sharp rise in Chinese and Indian incomes after they introduced market-based reforms (China in the late 1970s and India in 1991). Global health, as measured by life expectancy at different ages, has also risen rapidly, especially in lower-income countries.”

 

The authors further point out:

 

“Even if the recession is entirely blamed on capitalism,… the [current] recession-induced losses pale in comparison with the great accomplishments of prior decades. Suppose, for example, that the recession turns into a depression, where world GDP falls in 2008-10 by 10 per cent, a pessimistic assumption. Then the net growth in world GDP from 1980 to 2010 would amount to 120 per cent, or about 2.7 per cent a year over this 30-year period.”

 

Before we willingly let Obama transform mankind’s greatest economic success-story into an experimental laboratory for his collectivist, redistributionist vision of “social justice,” let’s remember the big picture.

This post was written by Claude Cartaginese.

The online reference source, Wikipedia, has abandoned any pretense of seeking to be an objective and comprehensive source of information about its political sacred cows, most notably Barack Obama. Indeed Wikipedia has transformed Obama’s profile into a glowing hagiography that is all but stripped of any controversial or unflattering information about the President. In this regard, it is reminiscent of what Thomas Bowdler did in 1818, when he published an edition of Shakespeare that he felt was a vast improvement upon the original. You see, Bowdler was uncomfortable with many of Shakespeare’s coarser references, so he cut and edited and eventually came out with a “family” version of Shakespeare which was an emasculated facsimile of the original. To this day, to remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable in someone else’s work is known as “bowdlerizing.”

Wikipedia, which proudly claims to be written and edited entirely by its own users, has taken bowdlerizing to the next level when it comes to the background and past associations of Barack Obama.

Removed from Obama’s Wikipedia profile, for example, are references to any questions that have been raised about Obama’s eligibility for office as a native-born American. His 20-year association with the racist demagogue Jeremiah Wright has been stripped down to a single sentence. No longer mentioned are his affiliations with America-hating Marxist terrorists like the former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who literally helped launch Obama’s political career in Chicago. Nor is there any mention of Obama’s Muslim upbringing. No mention of the radical voter-fraud organization ACORN. No mention of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago Marxist whose political tactics of confrontation and infiltration had a profound influence on Obama.In short, Wikipedia has taken on the role of Guardian of the Presidential Reputation. Anything which its army of “volunteers” determine to be harmful to Mr. Obama’s holy aura is promptly deleted, and the authors of the offending information are blocked from re-posting. Some entries were actually removed within two minutes of posting!

 

According to an article in WorldNetDaily, “the entire Wikipedia entry on Obama seems to be heavily promotional toward the U.S. president. It contains nearly no criticism or controversy, including appropriate mention of important issues where relevant.”

This from an encyclopedia?

Contrast this to the far more factual, far more complete entry on the President here, at DiscoverTheNetworks. The Wikipedia version pales in comparison and will leave you as confused as the readers of Bowdler were in 1818, when they no longer recognized Shakespeare.

This post was written by Claude Cartaginese.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy initiatives are off to a bad start. For example, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s recent visit with our President was marred when Obama, in the traditional gift exchange, gave Brown an armload of cheap DVDs while the Prime Minister, for his part, gave Obama gifts of true historical significance. Next, Obama dispatched a delegation to make nice with the pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-al Qaeda Syrians. And now, the Obama administration has turned its attention to making overtures to the Taliban.

Yes, Obama is looking to negotiate with Taliban “moderates” (assuming he can find any). The Taliban themselves admit that this may be difficult, and a spokesman told the English newspaper The Guardian that “They will not be able to find such people because we are united around the aim of fighting for freedom and bringing an Islamic system to Afghanistan.”

Naturally, Obama’s friends over at the Center for International Policy (CIP)—which is co-chaired by Senator Tom Harkin and Rep. Don Fraser, whose sympathies for Marxist causes are no secret—are enthusiastic about this idea and want Obama to go even further and start sending friendly signals to everybody from Hugo Chavez to Raul Castro (brother of the longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro). The CIP’s Wayne Smith—a notorious State Department shill for Castro—advises that “with the stroke of a pen” Obama could remove all travel and trade restrictions and thereby normalize relations with Cuba.

What must the leaders of Iran and North Korea be thinking? Perhaps if they play their cards right, they too, like the Syrians and the Taliban, can have their past antics overlooked in the name of “normalization” of relations.

Stay tuned for more foreign policy based on historical fiction.

President Barack Obama used his health-care summit Thursday to underscore the many lies he has consistently told about the American health-care system. Most notably, he echoed his favorite canard—the notion that there are “nearly 46 million uninsured” in the United States. Of course it is politically shrewd to grossly inflate and distort the actual figures, and to thereby give the impression that the health-care “crisis” is too large for any entity other than the long arms of government to effectively wrap themselves around. But in actuality, the figure Obama cites is pure fiction. Stated more succinctly, it is a lie. And if Obama is indeed the kind of genius that his disciples have proclaimed him to be, then he knows quite well that it is a lie.

Here is the reality, as explained by Sally Pipes in her monumentally important book, The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care—a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how health care can be made “universal” via free-market approaches rather than by handing over the reins to government bureaucrats:

First, about 14 million of the uninsured are low-income Americans who are fully eligible for government assistance programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP—but who simply haven’t gotten around to enrolling in these programs. This is really nothing to worry about, however, since they could visit a doctor, clinic, or hospital anywhere in the country and enroll in those programs on the spot and receive treatment. Can any honest person really argue that these 14 million people are “uninsured”?

Another 10 million of the uninsured are not even U.S. citizens; many of them are illegal aliens. Is it good public policy to burden American taxpayers with the health-care costs of non-citizens and illegal immigrants?

And, while Obama broadly paints the uninsured as people who are financially unable to afford health insurance of any kind, the fact is that 28 million of the 46 million uninsured earn more than $50,000 annually. This is well above the national median income. Many of these 28 million are healthy young adults who are not insured by their employers and choose not to buy health insurance because they would rather use their money for other things. Americans aged 19 to 29 represent one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the uninsured population.

The demographic groups cited above are not mutually exclusive; there is some overlap. And indeed some people do “fall through the cracks.” These are mostly people who earn less than $50,000 per year but too much to qualify for government assistance. There are roughly 8 million of these chronically uninsured, and they are indeed in need of assistance.

Obviously, there’s an enormous gulf between 8 million and 46 million. But if a chronically dishonest political opportunist like Barack Obama were to present his case with real numbers rather than fictitious ones, he wouldn’t be able to frighten the public into agreeing that we must hurriedly dismantle the most effective and innovative health care system the human race has ever known.