WASHINGTON — President Obama had a tough message for theAmerican Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel group that is furiously campaigning against the Iran nuclear accord, when he met with two of its leaders at the White House this week. The president accused Aipac of spending millions of dollars in advertising against the deal and spreading false claims about it, people in the meeting recalled.
So Mr. Obama told the Aipac leaders that he intended to hit back hard.
The next day in a speech at American University, Mr. Obama denounced the deal’s opponents as “lobbyists” doling out millions of dollars to trumpet the same hawkish rhetoric that had led the United States into war with Iraq. The president never mentioned Aipac by name, but his target was unmistakable.
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Karibu Kenya, President Obama. Welcome to Kenya.
For many Kenyans, the Swahili-language slogan will be more than just a polite greeting when the American president visits the country where his father was born, his first trip to Kenya since he was a U.S. senator in 2006. They see it as a homecoming for Obama, who has written with depth and emotion about his Kenyan roots but might not have time to explore them this time, enveloped as he will be by official duties and the White House security structure.
“They take it really personally,” Nelly Ngugi, customer relations manager at Cafe Deli in downtown Nairobi, said Wednesday of fellow Kenyans. Obama’s visit is like “a brother coming back,” she said.
“Welcome Home Sir…” says a message on a fake cake (made of Styrofoam) with red, white and blue icing in a display case at the cafe. A large cardboard cutout of Obama sits at the entrance. Ngugi led an Associated Press reporter to an upstairs table where she said Obama sat many years ago, before he was a public figure and when the restaurant was called Green Corner.
Nearly two weeks after 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle was murdered on San Francisco’s Pier 14 by an illegal alien and convicted felon who was released from prison earlier this year, President Barack Obama has failed to contact the victim’s family or mention her in public. Yet Obama took the time to write (and release) 46 personal letters this month to felons imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses whose sentences he has commuted.
US sellout
By Julian Hattem – 07/14/15 08:30 AM EDT
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scolding negotiators in the U.S. and around the world for agreeing to what he is calling a terrible deal that has only empowered Iran.
“Judging by the initial reports that have emerged, one can now reach the conclusion that this agreement is a historic mistake for the entire world,” Netanyahu said at the start of a meeting with the Dutch foreign minister on Tuesday, shortly after a deal was announced from Vienna.
“Whenever there is a readiness to make a deal at any cost, this is the result.”
“In every area that was supposed to prevent Iran from gaining the capacity to arm itself with nuclear weapons, far-reaching concessions were made,” he added. “In addition, Iran will receive hundreds of billions of dollars which it can use as a means to fuel its terror machine, its aggression and its expansionism in the Middle East and around the world.”
Netanyahu seemed to aim his ire at Washington, where President Obama is already hailing the historic deal as a triumph for global peace.
“It is impossible to prevent an agreement where those negotiating it are willing to make more and more concessions to those who during the talks are chanting ‘Death to America,’” Netanyahu said. “We knew very well that the desire to sign an agreement was stronger than anything else, so we did not promise to prevent an agreement.”
VIENNA (AP) — Negotiators at the Iran nuclear talks plan to announce Monday that they’ve reached a historic deal capping nearly a decade of diplomacy that would curb the country’s atomic program in return for sanctions relief, two diplomats told The Associated Press on Sunday.
The envoys said a provisional agreement may be reached even earlier — by late Sunday. But they cautioned that final details of the pact were still being worked out. Once it is complete, a formal, final agreement would be open to review by officials in the capitals of Iran and the six world powers at the talks, they said.
Senior U.S. and Iranian officials suggested, however, there might not be enough time to reach a deal by the end of Sunday and that the drafting of documents could bleed into Monday.
All of the officials, who are at the talks in Vienna, demanded anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly.
(AP) Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, talks to journalist from a…
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“We are working hard, but a deal tonight is simply logistically impossible,” the Iranian official said, noting that the agreement will run roughly 100 pages.
The senior U.S. official declined to speculate as to the timing of any agreement or announcement but said “major issues remain to be resolved.”
Despite the caution, the negotiators appeared to be on the cusp of an agreement.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who on Thursday had threatened to walk away from the negotiations, said Sunday that “a few tough things” remain in the way but added “we’re getting to some real decisions.”
En route to Mass at Vienna’s gothic St. Stephens Cathedral, Kerry said twice he was “hopeful” after a “very good meeting” Saturday with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had Muslim services Friday. The two met again early Saturday evening.
(AP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry walks in the garden of Coburg where closed-door…
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French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius also was cautiously optimistic, telling reporters Sunday: “I hope that we are finally entering the last phase of this negotiation.”
In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani said an agreement was close, but not quite done, describing the negotiations as “still steps away from reaching the intended peak.”
Welcome to the age of vanity politics and campaigns-for-hire. What would our founders make of this nightmare?
Four qualities have distinguished republican government from ancient Athens forward: the sovereignty of the people; a sense of the common good; government dedicated to the commonwealth; and resistance to corruption. Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.
From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.
By that standard, can anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? There have been Teapot Domes and financial scandals of one kind or another throughout our nation’s history. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.
What brought us to this? A sinister system combining staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, most of all, the rise of the lobbying class
President lectures about Racism , then uses the N-Word
By Jordan Fabian
President Obama has no regrets about using the N-word to make a point during a recent discussion on race, the White House said Monday.
“He does not,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “The president’s use of the word and the reason he used the word could not be more apparent.”
The president’s phrasing renewed a debate over who is allowed to use the word and when it’s appropriate to say.
In a podcast released Monday, the president urged the nation to deal with the enduring problem of racism, saying it has not been “cured” simply because it is no longer acceptable to utter racial slurs publicly.
“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n—– in public,” he said on Marc Maron’s “WTF Podcast.”“That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
President Obama admits HealthCare.gov was a “well-documented disaster,” but says it helped the federal government better understand how to handle technology.
“With all the crises we were dealing with — the economy collapsing, the auto industry on the verge of collapse, winding down wars — this did not get the kind of laser-focused attention until HealthCare.gov, which was a well-documented disaster, but ended up anyways being the catalyst for us saying, ‘Okay, we have to completely revamp how we do things,’ ” Obama said in aninterview with Fast Company published Monday.
Obama’s comments come as he’s trying to promote his administration’s efforts to overhaul the government’s ancient technology infrastructure.
The president said outdated procurement rules and a lack of technological expertise hampered large-scale government projects, such as HealthCare.gov. But he said his administration has adopted new rules and recruited staffers from Google, Facebook and Twitter to beef up its tech efforts.
“If we are able through the U.S. digital team to recruit a baseline of talent and create a — pipeline — on a regular basis … what I do believe will happen is the government as a whole will start thinking about its relationship to citizens differently,” Obama said.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The trade defeat in Congress was an ominous sign in a month of challenges that could help determine President Barack Obama’s standing for the rest of his second term.
Fellow Democrats rebuffed last-minute appeals to rescue his global trade agenda, and the House seriously damaged Obama’s chances of capping his presidency with a groundbreaking economic pact involving Pacific Rim countries.
Obama also is awaiting a Supreme Court decision that could upend his health care law, and he faces a June 30 deadline to conclude an accord that aims to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Friday’s setback was the result of a complicated legislative strategy that linked passage of trade negotiating powers for the president with a measure that would provide training and assistance to American workers who lost jobs because of trade.
A narrow House majority voted to give the president the right to negotiate deals that Congress can approve or reject, but not change. Then a large majority of Democrats, eager to kill that negotiating power, joined a majority of Republicans to vote against the aid for workers.
The White House drew attention to the close passage of the trade negotiation piece and noted that the legislation had overcome similar difficulties in the Senate.
Fall of Ramadi Raises Questions About Obama’s Strategy to Defeat ISIS in Iraq
James Phillips / May 19, 2015
The seizure of the city of Ramadi by the Islamic State (or ISIS) on Sunday was a major setback for the Iraqi government and for the Obama administration.
Although U.S. officials downplayed the significance of the defeat, saying that Ramadi was not “strategic” in a military sense, Ramadi is a very important political symbol because it is the capital of Anbar province, the predominantly Sunni Arab western province that has been a stronghold for the Islamic State and its predecessor organizations, ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The panicked retreat of Iraqi police and security forces from Ramadi underscores the continued weakness of the Iraqi army and police. It also raises questions about the viability of the Obama administration’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq.
The fact that the Baghdad government now is considering moving Shiite militias to Ramadi, a predominantly Sunni city, suggests that Iraq’s central government still lacks adequate support from Iraq’s Sunni Arabs to defeat the Islamic State, a Sunni revolutionary movement. This spells trouble for Iraqi and American plans to defeat the Islamic State.
Those plans included the building of an inclusive ruling coalition in Baghdad that would unite Iraq’s Shiite majority with the Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities, who would contribute militia fighters to aid the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army.
Earlier this month, the first 1,000 Sunni recruits joined a pro-government Sunni tribal militia that is slated to grow to 6,000. But the arming of Sunni militias in Anbar province has been delayedby the opposition of Shiite political leaders who doubt the loyalty of many Sunni Iraqis in an increasingly polarized sectarian atmosphere.
The fall of Ramadi also has weakened Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who became Iraq’s top leader last year with strong backing from the United States.
Abadi, a Shiite political leader who promised to lead a more inclusive government, reached a deal on sharing oil revenues with Iraqi Kurds and pushed for arming Sunni tribesman to fight against the Islamic State. But Abadi’s plans to arm Sunni militias have been trimmed back by rival Shiite leaders backed by Iran, who favor the ruthless employment of Iranian-trained Shiite militias.
Now Iran’s preferred militias are building up in preparation to retake Ramadi. Their presence is likely to further exacerbate sectarian tensions which the Islamic State has exploited to gain support from Iraqi Sunnis fearful of Shiite domination.
A military victory for Iran’s surrogate militias in Ramadi would amount to a political defeat for the United States and for Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi. And such a victory could trigger a Sunni backlash that could boost the Islamic State and prolong, rather than shorten, Iraq’s civil war.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/12/2015 23:45 -0400
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Samuel Hersh claimed yesterday that the Obama administration lied to the American peopleabout certain aspects aspects of the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. According to Hersh, the United States did not act alone when Navy SEALs were sent to capture or kill the world’s most wanted terrorist. The real story, according to the report, is that members of Pakistani intelligence services were privy to the raid months before it happened and that it was a “walk-in” Pakistani intelligence officer who gave up the location of Bin Laden rather than a CIA operation that tracked him down by following various couriers. Further, it has been claimed that Bin Laden was not buried at sea the way the Obama administration said, but rather, his limbs were simply thrown from the helicopter after the mission (suggesting that some portion of his body, perhaps his head, were retained for posterity’s sake).
It’s a markedly different story than the one President Obama told on the night he announced Bin Laden’s death. In that nationally televised speech the President took credit for ordering the raid and made it clear it was a unilateral action involving only American assets.
The Obama administration has spent the last 24 hours working to discredit the story. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said the report from Hersh was “largely a fabrication” with “too many inaccuracies.” The White House says the Hersh’s investigation is riddled with inaccuracies.
But according to NBC News, which has reportedly been conducting their own investigation for the last several years, Hersh’s claims aren’t that inaccurate after all.
Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding – and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.
The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden’s presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The NBC News sources who confirm that a Pakistani intelligence official became a “walk in” asset include the special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI’s awareness, saying twice, “They knew.”
Source: NBC News
The one thing that President Obama could hail as a success during his tenure as President has now been exposed as an outright lie.
It looks like all those ‘conspiracy nuts’ who took issue with the “official” story following the President’s original announcement of bin Laden’s death were not so crazy after all. There’s a reason millions of Americans have lost trust in their government, and especially with the sitting President of the United States. It’s because we have been consistently lied to about anything and everything of any significance.
An expose published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Author Seymour M. Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death.
This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.
“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.
Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”
Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.
In addition, the source said that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission.
“Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.
“This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,” he added.
“This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.
The Barack Obama administration has estimated for years that Iran was at most three months away from enriching enough nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb. But the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.
Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment, Moniz said: “Oh quite some time.” He added: “They are now, they are right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that together it’s very, very little time to go forward. That’s the 2-3 months.”
Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) says President Obama is wrong to “give the Cubans just about everything they want” without getting “something significant in return.”
“I think the president has a misguided calculation that if you open your hands to dictators that they will unclench their fists,” Menendez told “Fox News Sunday.”
“And while Raul Castro may have said some nice things about President Obama, at the same time, just last month, we had 600 arrests of innocent people inside of Cuba who were detained, many political activists and human rights activists who were not allowed to leave the country to go to the Panama Summit.
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