Obama Appointee funded Terrorist’s Group

June 28th, 2010

By Aaron Klein, World Net Daily-

A scholar and charity head appointed to President Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission served as a point man in granting $49.2 million in startup capital to an education reform project founded by Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and chaired by Obama.

Documentation shows the White House fellow, Vartan Gregorian, was central in Ayers’ recruitment of Obama to serve as the first chairman of the project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC – a job in which Obama worked closely on a regular basis with Ayers.

Obama also later touted his job at the CAC as qualifying him to run for public office, as WND previously reported.

Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corp. charitable foundation, was appointed by Obama last year as a White House fellow. Born in Tabriz, Iran, Gregorian served for eight years as president of the New York Public Library and was also president of Brown University.

Read More

Durbin asks Obama to appoint carp czar or maye crap czar

Durbin asks Obama to appoint carp czar

June 25, 2010 8:17 PM | 18 Comments | UPDATED STORY

As concerns mount about the presence of Asian carp near Lake Michigan, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin today urged President Obama to appoint a carp czar to oversee efforts to keep the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

“We need to have one person who coordinates the efforts of the federal, state and local agencies that are doing everything they can to keep the Asian carp out of Lake Michigan,” Durbin said during a news conference at the Shedd Aquarium. “We believe it’s absolutely essential.”

Durbin was responding to the discovery of a bighead carp, a variety of Asian carp, during routine sampling this week in Lake Calumet, just six miles from Lake Michigan. Standing beside environmental advocates who have championed closing Chicago-area locks as a way to prevent carp from entering Lake Michigan, Durbin called the finding a possible “game changer” and said “we have to take it very seriously.”

Durbin said scientists will try to determine where the carp came from, whether it was likely dumped there or whether it reached the lake by swimming up the Chicago water system. That’s a critical question as biologists try to figure out how many Asian carp may be lurking below the water’s surface.

Durbin said he plans to introduce a bill next week that will ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to look at “hydrologic separation” between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, a potentially massive engineering feat that would require severing the 100-year-old, man-made shipping corridors that now link the two waterways. Durbin expects the Army Corps to deliver its report within 18 months.

“This isn’t just a matter of the Asian carp, but any other invasive species that would find its way up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers into our Great Lakes ecosystem,” Durbin said.

— Joel Hood

Glenn Beck on FDR’s New Deal Agencies ane Obama’s new agencies

 Glenn Beck reviews FDR’s agencies created under the New Deal and then lists the agencies created under Obama. He preludes this by referring to how FDR and Obama both talked about how they were for the small business owner, when in fact, they actually only cared/care about big business and big government.

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their substance.” – Declaration of Independence, 1776

Glenn Beck on FDR’s New Deal Agencies ane Obama’s new agencies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42aCY1BBeI

Obama Nominee for Deputy Attorney General Says 9/11 Attacks Not Acts of War

June 15th, 2010

On the heels of Obama comparing the oil spill to 9/11, it appears that Obama’s nominee for the second to the top spot at the Justice Department compared the 9/11 attacks to domestic crimes like murder and rape. It’s beginning to seem like it is the Obama administration’s game plan to denigrate the tragedy of 9/11. 

Obama Nominee says 9/11 attacks weren’t acts or war 

  

By Fred Lucas, CNS News.com 

Despite a resolution by Congress authorizing war against those responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Obama’s nominee to be the number two official at the Justice Department, James Cole, wrote an op-ed in 2002 likening the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to the domestic crimes of murder, rape and child abuse, while arguing that the attackers ought to be treated like domestic criminals.
“But the attorney general is not a member of the military fighting a war–he is a prosecutor fighting crime,” Cole wrote in a Sept. 9, 2002 article in Legal Times that critiqued the way then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was handling the 9/11 case.
“For all the rhetoric about war, the Sept. 11 attacks were criminal acts of terrorism against a civilian population, much like the terrorist acts of Timothy McVeigh in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, or of Omar Abdel-Rahman in the first effort to blow up the World Trade Center,” said Cole. “The criminals responsible for these horrible acts were successfully tried and convicted under our criminal justice system, without the need for special procedures that altered traditional due process rights. 

Read More 

Lincoln Won With Anti-Union Message

June 9th, 2010 Posted By Pat Dollard.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) – Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln survived a bruising Democratic runoff thanks to former President Bill Clinton’s starpower and her argument that labor unions were trying to interfere in state politics.

In winning the Senate primary Tuesday, Lincoln overcame a flood of outside money from labor unions and liberal groups that had backed Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s challenge. She’ll fight for her seat against Republican Rep. John Boozman in the fall.

“I think this race became bigger than me and bigger than Bill Halter,” Lincoln told The Associated Press on Tuesday night. “It became about whether or not the people of Arkansas, who are great people, were going to continue to be hammered by special interest groups that simply wanted to manipulate them and their vote.”

Playing off that theme, national Democrats pivoted to the fall campaign by casting her as a free-thinking champion of her state. Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine hailed her victory, calling her “a strong, independent voice who fights for what she believes in.”

In the final days of the campaign, Lincoln’s campaign increasingly relied on an ad from Clinton, the former governor who remains popular in his home state, that warned about special interests.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes,” Clinton said in ad, which featured a clip of a speech the former president made at a rally for Lincoln last month.

Lincoln’s campaign said it believed the former president’s clout helped further an argument that Lincoln had made for weeks, that outside groups and labor unions were trying to buy Arkansans’ votes.

“It really did help frame the race,” Lincoln campaign manager Steve Patterson said last week. “Coming from our campaign, it wasn’t quite as resounding and I think it was viewed by people in your profession as whining.”

Lincoln’s next-to-last ad also featured the incumbent senator telling voters she heard their anger at Washington when they sent her into a runoff with Halter on May 18. She added: “I’d rather lose this election fighting for what’s right than win by turning my back on Arkansas.”

“I think she pulled it out because I think people realize, one, what she meant to Arkansas and that she had been a fighter for Arkansas and she was willing to tell them, ‘I’m willing to lose this race rather than turn my back on Arkansas,’” Lincoln strategist Jim Duffy said Tuesday. “She made it clear she got the (anti-Washington) message from the primary. And I think Clinton framing the race in the sense that the unions were making her a poster child. Those two messages made all the difference.”

Lincoln also used the clout she had gained in Washington as one of her chief selling points, reminding voters in the farm-heavy state that she was the first Arkansan to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee.

That argument sealed the deal with some voters.

“She’s head of the Agriculture Committee, which is one of the most important committees we have in Washington,” Lori Ritchie said after voting in the library of an elementary school west of Little Rock. “It’s all about power and what committee you’re on. It will take Halter eight to 11 years to get to the position Blanche is at now.”

Added Stephanie Jackson, who cast a vote for Lincoln in Little Rock: “She’s been up there and knows how it works. But she’s not too much Washington.”

After months of distancing herself from the Obama administration and national Democrats, Lincoln tacked left in the runoff campaign. She ran ads portraying herself as a parter with Obama on health care reform, and another showing a liberal talk show host talking about the financial overhaul legislation she worked on.

Lincoln said Tuesday that she hoped the labor unions and other groups backing Halter would now support her in the general election, but it remained unclear if they would do so. Labor leaders said they hoped the incumbent senator learned a lesson from the pressure they applied in the 14-week campaign.

“Tonight, Senator Lincoln won a narrow victory after a bruising runoff election where each and every day she was reminded that her success is only measured by doing right by working people and their families,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union

Ax the hacks, Obama

June 9th, 2010

By Kirsten Powers, NY Post

 Rahm needs to go

The flap over the job offers to Joe Sestak in Pennsylva nia and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado shows that it’s time to move electoral politics out of the White House. Rahm Emanuel, this means you.

President Obama’s first step should be to shutter the Office of Political Affairs. Then he should jettison the various political henchmen — starting with Rahm — who’ve infested the West Wing and put them on the Democratic National Committee, where they belong.

Since President Ronald Reagan created it, the Office of Political Affairs has become a taxpayer-funded campaign office that has helped administrations of all stripes consolidate their power.

Its current head, Patrick Gaspard, has used his perch to try to push Gov. Paterson from running this fall (Paterson later forced himself out), to push Doug Wilder to support Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial race (Deeds would up losing the general) — and to persuade GOP state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava to endorse the Democrat after she lost her primary in the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District (which helped keep the seat in Democratic hands).

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Read More:

Colorado Dem: Actually, the White House offered me three jobs to quit the primary

posted at 9:34 pm on June 2, 2010 by Allahpundit

Not only does he name names — as the Denver Post originally reported, it was indeed deputy chief of staff Jim Messina who contacted him about dropping out — but he’s actually released Messina’s e-mail from last year describing the jobs they had in mind for him. The one key omission? Any acknowledgment by Romanoff that he himself lied to the Post when initially asked whether anyone had offered him a position.

U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff acknowledged tonight that he discussed three possible jobs with the deputy chief of staff of the Obama administration — all contingent upon a decision by Romanoff not to challenge U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

Romanoff said none of the jobs was formally offered, but said the only reason they were discussed with Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina was if Romanoff stayed out of the Senate race.

“Mr. Messina also suggested three positions that might be available to me were I not pursuing the Senate race,” Romanoff wrote in a statement. “He added that he could not guarantee my appointment to any of these positions. At no time was I promised a job, nor did I request Mr. Messina’s assistance in obtaining one.”

Here’s the full text of Romanoff’s statement, together with the description of the available jobs. Is Messina guilty of a crime for having made this kinda sorta offer, even without any formal “promise”? Let’s see:

Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

I think we can get this one to the jury! Seriously, though, I don’t want Messina charged, partly because he was obviously acting at Rahm Emanuel’s behest (no deputy COS would be authorized to bribe a senate candidate on his own initiative, I assume) and partly because I’m sure this really is D.C. business as usual for both parties. The point of bringing up the statute again and again is simply to remind people that it’s the same sort of unrealistic “good government” aspiration that Captain Hopenchange used to such cynical effect during the campaign and which he’s now happily willing to violate in the most flagrant ways. Remember when he promised to put Congress’s health-care deliberations on C-SPAN? That was pure garbage aimed at idealistic young voters, which he duly abandoned as soon as he was elected save for that “health-care summit” dog-and-pony show earlier this year. Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t include this angle in his campaign platform: “We won’t deny primary voters a choice with dirty deals!” sounds like precisely the sort of pap he was pushing at his nomination speech in front of the Temple of Zeus or whatever. Although, to be completely fair, I wonder in hindsight how many lefties really bought it or even cared whether he’d keep his “Change” promises or not. The point was to win an election and that mission was accomplished. Who cares if he’s turned out to be every inch the Chicago politician that he is?

As for the politics of Romanoff putting out this statement, I agree with Ben Smith: This sure looks like a middle finger towards the White House, aimed at casting his primary opponent, Michael Bennet, as the puppet of a very cynical political machine. No wonder Joe Sestak’s suddenly ducking joint appearances with The One.

White House ‘explanation’ suggests criminal ‘evasion’

June 3rd, 2010

By Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily

 

Three members of Congress say the White House explanation of a “job offer” to Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., really didn’t explain very much, but it did suggest that on top of the apparently illegal attempt to convince Sestak to leave the Democratic senate primary in his state in return for a “job,” there were other crimes possibly involved.

“Rather than definitively resolve this matter, the memorandum had precisely the opposite effect: it appears to catalog a violation of the federal criminal code, the tampering of evidence, witness tampering and evasion of the legal process,” Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.; Lamar Smith, R-Texas; and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said today in a letter to the White House.

The questions were raised because Sestak repeatedly and on the record has stated since February the White House had offered him a job in return for leaving the primary race against White House favorite Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. Sestak refused and ultimately defeated Specter in the primary.

Last week, heading into the Memorial Day weekend, White House counsel Robert Bauer released a memo suggesting an explanation – that the job offer was from former President Clinton and it was only for an unpaid advisory post.

At the time, it was clear the words did nothing to remove critics’ doubts, and one commenter on the blog of conservative columnist Michelle Malkin may have touched a nerve when he wrote, “When you are telling the truth you do not have to prepare a response. The truth does not have to be manipulated. It does not have to be reviewed by attorneys. It does not have to be prepared. Calls don’t have to be made to get the story straight.”

Read More:

NYT: White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race

By Doug Powers  •  May 28, 2010 12:02 PM

**Written by guest-blogger Doug Powers

Bill Clinton met with President Obama yesterday — reportedly to discuss how to handle damage control from the oil spill in the Gulf — but it’s a good guess that a heaping helping of “getting our stories straight” was the featured item on the lunch menu:

President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of a Senate primary if given a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position, people briefed on the matter said Friday.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Clinton to explore the possibilities last summer, according to the briefed individuals, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the politically charged situation. Mr. Sestak said no and went on to win last week’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary against Senator Arlen Specter.

“Did you get Joe Sestak a job yet, Daddy?”

It seems like a believable story — I mean, who wouldn’t be convinced to give up their quest to become a United States Senator in return for a spiffy, uncompensated job title in an administration that may well be swept out of office in just over two years — sooner if nobody buys their explanation for this?

If it’s that easy I’m going to call Nancy Pelosi and convince her not to run for re-election by offering her a job as an unpaid volunteer at her plastic surgeon’s office and give her the title “Queen of the World.”

According to the New York Times, one of the “jobs” being dangled in front of Sestak was a position on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. One of duties of PIAB members is to bring to the president’s attention activities that are not being adequately addressed by the Attorney General — things like, oh I don’t know… the White House orchestrating a bribery to get somebody to drop out of a Senate race.

For those of you keeping score at home, “nothing improper took place” usually bats two or three spots in the lineup ahead of “mistakes were made.”

Rahm Emanuel couldn’t be reached for comment because he was in the middle of a dine-n-dash at an Israeli restaurant.

**Written by guest-blogger Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The Sestak Stonewall

The Sestak Stonewall

Posted By Dick Morris On May 27, 2010 @ 12:01 am In FrontPage | 6 Comments

Rep. Joe Sestak ^[1], the winner of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, says quite openly and repeatedly that he was offered a job by the White House if he would drop out of the race against Sen. Arlen Specter. Having secured Specter’s conversion to the Democratic Party, thus giving the party a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the Obama administration obviously sought to keep its word to Specter that it would do its utmost to deliver the Democratic nomination to him. According to Sestak, that included a job offer.

Who made the offer? What position was offered? And when did it happen? Sestak, who was nominated on a platform of “transparency” refuses to answer any of these questions. The White House ^[1] admits that a conversation took place but won’t provide any details and insists that an “internal investigation” revealed that “nothing inappropriate” took place.

Or did it?

It is unlikely that Sestak was offered a job interviewing people for the census. Only a high-level job offer — a Cabinet post or an ambassadorship to a key country — would have sufficient gravitas to conceivably induce him to drop his primary challenge. Some have speculated that Sestak, a retired admiral, might have been offered the post of secretary of the navy. Others wonder that, since he is fluent in Russian, he was to be tapped for ambassador to Moscow.

And, before an offer of that magnitude were tendered, it would have had to have been cleared with the higher levels of the White House ^[1]. How could an offer of a Cabinet post have been made without consultation with the chief of staff?

And how was the offer made? It would have to have been proffered by somebody who Sestak could reasonably assume was speaking for the president and could deliver on his end of the deal. A lower-level official wouldn’t have that kind of clout.

Could the offer have been tendered by Rahm Emanuel ^[1] himself? It’s clearly his style.

But, could Rahm or anyone else have made such an offer without consulting the president himself? You can’t go around passing out Cabinet posts or ambassadorships without consulting the boss. Whatever position of that level the White House dangled in front of him, it would have to have been approved by the president.

And Sestak must have probed the person who conveyed the offer to ascertain its bona fides. He would reasonably have asked, “Did you clear this with the president?” Otherwise, why would he even consider such an offer?

The White House and Sestak are stonewalling questions from the media, and obviously, a Democratic controlled Congress is not about to go poking around asking about the proposed deal.

So how could the Republicans break it open?

The weak link here is Sestak himself, who claims that he embraces “transparency.” Fueled by his primary victory and the momentum it generated, Rasmussen has him four points ahead of Pat Toomey ^[1], the GOP candidate. This lead won’t hold up for long in the face of a refusal to respond to questions the public is entitled to have answered.

Toomey or the Republican Party or other independent expenditure groups should run ads throughout Pennsylvania asking these basic questions. They should tell Sestak that he ran on a platform of transparency and that its time to reveal who offered what and when.

Either Sestak is lying and there was never an offer, or the White House has skirted very close to having committed a crime or may have stepped over the edge. And, considering the stakes and the nature of what the offer would have had to have been, this scandal could reach very high indeed.

Is it a high crime and misdemeanor to offer someone something of value in return for withdrawing from a U.S. Senate race? We may be about to find out.