A Conservative Perspective On: *Current Events* *Sports* *Movies and TV* *Popular Culture* Follow Me On Twitter: @drawandstrike
Thursday, June 28, 2012
In One Swift Stroke,
The Supreme Court Changes
ObamaCARE Into Nifty New
ObamaTAX
Alternate Headline: Progressive Left Loudly & Proudly Celebrates Largest Single Tax Increase In American History 5 Months Before November Elections
Yes, this is really going to work out well.
Wait a minute, don't I remember somebody loudly & proudly insisting the Affordable Care Act WASN'T any kind of a tax or a tax increase?
Why.........YES! I believe I do!
Obama & the Dem leadership in Congress knew if they wrote ObamaCare as a huge new tax increase, it had exactly 0% chance of passing the Congress. At it was, even with Democratic control of both the House of Reps & the Senate they had to fight for 9 long ugly months to get it passed as a 'fee'.
Then, when the ACA was challenged by many of the States in the courts, all of a sudden the Democrats shifted the goal posts 180 degrees and insisted the ACA was in fact a tax and not a fee.
And today in a 5-4 decision, 5 of the Supreme Court justices agreed that ACA is in fact a new tax and is legal under the Congress' power to tax.
But few people are noticing what ELSE the Supreme Court did in it's decisions today. While finding that the ACA is a tax, it ALSO found that the enforcement mechanism that the Federal Government was going to use to force states to be in compliance with the ACA was unconstitutional. That is, the Federal Government was going to withhold Medicare funds from states that refused to comply with the ACA.
By a 7-2 vote, the Court found that enforcement mechanism illegal under the law.
So states can still opt out of this thing and the Federal Government's attempts to force compliance took a big hit.
Also, as a 'fee' imposed from Washington nationally it would be harder to repeal ObamaCare. As a nifty new tax under the Congresses' power to tax? Congress can repeal ACA under it's own authority. Because only Congress has the power to tax - or rescind taxes it has passed - this makes control of the Congress more vital than ever.
The only way to get rid of ObamaCare now is to get rid of the people in Washington that are enforcing it. That means replacing Obama with Mitt Romney & flipping the Senate to Republican control while holding the House of Representatives. That way in early 2013 we can finally flush this turd down the toilet.
Given that the Supreme Court just turned the ACA into the biggest single tax increase in American history just over 4 months from the election this November, the American people are going to have 4 months to realize this, see the effect this would have on the economy and on job creation, especially for small businesses.
Given the way they are crowing & celebrating this decision today, I'm pretty sure most of the Progressive Left hasn't figured this out yet.
Internet humorist & all around gadfly David Burge aka 'Iowahawk' gives them a not-so-subtle reminder:
Some other things to consider:
1. We're still stuck in what experts call the 'worst economy since the Great Depression' so of course this is the perfect time to hit the voters over the head with a huge tax increase, right after they got done kicking your ass over ObamaCare the last time they got the chance.
2. Chief Justice John Roberts just pulled the pin on the ObamaCare grenade and lobbed it straight into Obama's lap. Like it or not, THIS is the issue that's going to decide the 2012 Presidential election. Oh yes. I'd LOVE to see what kind of distractions Obama tries to get people's eyes off this sudden transformation of ObamaCare as a huge tax increase.
Obama & the Democrats will NOT be able to run away from this or stick Republicans with the blame for this. They own it. Totally. Mitt Romney is going to have an incredible amount of fun reminding everybody ObamaCare is now a tax imposed on Americans by the very people who spent almost a year swearing it wasn't a tax.
3. The costs of ObamaCare already more than doubled since it was passed, from $940 billion to over $1.76 trillion in just the first decade. So they lied about it being a tax, they lied about how much it would cost, and they lied about the effects the new law would have on health care, that premiums would go down and 'if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor'. Virtually EVERYTHING they promised about this turd of a bill has turned out to be a lie.
AND NOW IT'S BACK. They barely got this thing passed back in 2009, then suffered huge voter outrage over it in 2010, and just in time for the big run up to the 2012 election, like a zombie rising from the dead to haunt them, HERE COME OBAMACARE AGAIN. Now they have to talk about it again, and Obama is going to be forced to RUN ON IT.
Doesn't matter if he WANTS to. He's going to be FORCED to. And Pelosi & Reid and other top Dems will have to circle the wagons around him and try to sell this tax increase to the public in order to get Obama re-elected.
I almost feel sorry for them.
Almost.
Monday, June 25, 2012
NBC New's Brand Continues
To Plummet:
Caught Making ANOTHER
Deceptive Edit To A News Story
Steve Capus, Head of NBC News/MSNBC
Time to fire himself?
Ever since Steve Capus took over NBC News/MSNBC they've been caught time and again deceptively editing audio and video to give their viewers false propaganda:
1. In 2009 MSNBC was caught deceptively editing videotape of a man legally carrying a rifle at an Arizona Tea Party rally. The man was black, but Contessa Brewer and friends wanted to chat about.......white Tea Party racists with guns. So.....a little fancy editing and presto! There's your story!
First of all, here's the guy carrying the rifle at the rally talking to the local ABC News affiliate:
Now watch how MSNBC covered this and what kind of story they tried to turn it into:
2. In August 2011 Ed Shultz deceptively edited a speech by Texas Governor Rick Perry to make it appear that he was making a racist comment about President Barack Obama. Perry's actual comment was that the national debt was a big black cloud hanging over the country. Watch what Ed Shultz & NBC news did with that clip:
3. Earlier this year both on NBC's Today show and on MSNBC they were caught deceptively editing the audio of George Zimmerman's 911 call to make it as racially inflammatory as possible. MSNBC put up a transcript on it's website that had been edited to leave out the fact it was the 911 operator that brought up Trayvon Martin's race, not George Zimmerman:
What MSNBC changed their report to read after they knew they'd been caught:
Then, even worse, later on both MSNBC & The Today Show both aired selectively edited audiotape of the 911 call that EXACTLY MATCHED THE DECEPTIVE TRANSCRIPT EDIT PUT EARLIER BY MSNBC:
Yet even after this - and FIRING THREE PEOPLE over this issue - NBC News & Steve Capus continued to insist this was just an 'error' and a 'mistake'.
4. Just the past week, while reporting for NBC News about Mitt Romney on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Andrea Mitchell deceptively edited his speech to make it look like he was freaking AMAZED by the touch-screen ordering system of sandwiches at a local WaWa. Then Mitchell immediately tied this to the totally debunked myth of George H.W. Bush being astounded by a simple grocery store scanner.
Only problem: the entire speech Mitt gave was up on Youtube and blogger SooperMexican saw what the editing had done. Caught red-handed trying to create a new myth & then tie it to an old myth to make Romney look out of touch, Mitchell has steadfastly refused to apologize.
First the video clearly showing just how deceptive this editing was:
Called out on the carpet over this by numerous other news organizations, here's how Mitchell responded to the criticism:
John Ziegler pointed out a likely reason why Mitchell refused to apologize for deliberately misleading viewers with a false story is......this is part of her regular bag of tricks:
So the past few days it comes out that NBC News deceptively edited an interview with now-convicted child sex predator Jerry Sandusky, and that edited interview could play a key role in Sandusky's appeal:
(Reuters) - Lawyers for Jerry Sandusky sought a mistrial before his conviction for child sex abuse on the grounds that prosecutors showed jurors an inaccurate version of a bombshell NBC News interview with the former football coach, and the mistake may now form part of the basis for an appeal.
In response to a subpoena, NBC News turned over three versions of Bob Costas' NBC News interview with Sandusky, which aired last November on different NBC shows.
One of those versions, which was broadcast on the 'Today' show, contained an erroneous repetition of a key question and answer - about whether Sandusky was sexually attracted to young boys, Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general said on Sunday.
The repetition, Sandusky's lawyers contend, made it appear to jurors that he was stonewalling.
"It wasn't noticed by (NBC News), it wasn't noticed by us, but it became obvious when it played in court," Frederiksen told Reuters. NBC News spokeswoman Amy Lynn confirmed this account on Sunday.
OK, I'm gonna have to call BS on this 'it wasn't noticed by NBC News' excuse.
Should be obvious by now this is no 'error', this is deliberate policy at NBC News. Just like in the Zimmerman 911 call, there is no way you 'accidently' end up taking out only those words that leave you with the most inflammatory version possible.
NBC News tried to float the excuse that the Zimmerman editing was 'accidental', a claim laughable on it's face. And here they are doing it again. Another totally 'accidental' editing that inflames a story to create the worst impression possible of the target.
They dealt with this the other night on the Fox News Watch program. The part about NBC's editing of Sandusky's interview starts at about 14 minutes in:
How many times are they going to get caught doing this before some sense of professional self-respect kicks in?
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Obama White House Spends
$10 Billion Tax Dollars
To Create.....
355 Permanent Jobs
Alternate Headline: If A Republican President Had Wasted This Much Of Our Money, It'd Be A Huge Scandal Already
"I'm so much smarter than all those business owners in the private sector
that sometimes it hurts."
Want to see rank stupidity in action? The biggest lie Progressives ever foisted on the public is that ivory tower academics & politicians who have never run a business or met a payroll know far more & are far better at 'creating jobs' than private sector business owners.
That is not just untrue, it's stupidly untrue.
And for all time, the Obama White House has now demonstrated it beyond all dispute.
Whereas private sector businesses are risking their OWN money when they choose whether or not to expand, hire new people, open up new facilities, etc., Government bureaucrats & academics in Washington are risking OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY, tax money.
Consumers that generate profits for businesses that lead to hiring and expansion are CHOOSING to use that businesses services. Taxpayers don't have the luxury of refusing to pay taxes to the Federal & State & Local government.
You would SUPPOSE this would mean that the government servants that get this tax money would be MORE responsible and careful with how they spend it. But that isn't the case.
While Progressives want to obsess over what greedy rotten capitalists choose to do with their own profits, they totally ignore the huge amount of waste, corruption and fraud that goes on when government flunkies get billions of other people's money to spend.
It's not THEIR money so why should they give a crap how carefully it's spent?
When Obama & Co. came into office, they had a detailed strategy - which Obama has expounded upon at length at every opportunity - about scaling back on oil, coal and natural gas fossil fuels while pumping up and encouraging the development of alternative sources of energy like wind & solar power. They even have a cool phrases they threw around to sell the strategy, like 'green tech', and 'green jobs'.
Now if they'd just left it at encouragement, that's fine. But they didn't. They not only decided to deliberately ramp down American domestic production of fossil fuels, they also decided to pour billions and billions of tax dollars into green tech firms in the hopes this would create a big wave of new 'green jobs' that would force the market to shift from the fossil fuels to be more favorable to green sources of energy.
Now it's 3 1/2 years later after they started pursuing this strategy. What are the results?
First, from last week, here's a Congressman getting a Department of Energy spokesman to admit what the Obama White House now calls a 'green job':
Keep that in mind when you hear this administration boast about how many 'green jobs' have been produced in the last 3 1/2 years due to the billions of tax dollars they've poured into these green tech companies. Almost ANYTHING counts as a green job to these people because they realize how truly awful the numbers are and so they try to artificially inflate their abysmal results.
"I don't understand your question. Just because we've wasted billions of the
taxpayer's money on failed green loans, you want to know if we'll stop
pouring tax dollars into failing green tech companies? Why would we stop?
It's not like this is our own money or anything. We don't see the problem here."
How abysmal are the results? Try this on for size:
The Obama administration spent $10 billion to create 355 renewable energy jobs per year, according to testimony offered Tuesday before Congress by a Congressional Research Services expert.
Asked by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) “how many jobs were created” in 2009 and 2010 under the 1603 renewable energy grant program authorized by the Obama administration, a CRS specialist in public finance admitted that $10 billion was spent to create 3,666 construction jobs over a two-year period–and only 355 jobs per year going forward.
Dr. Molly Sherlock, the CRS specialist, first said the jobs total would depend on the type of job–and differentiated between “induced,” “direct,” and ”indirect” jobs–before Gardner asked for a straight number.
“I just want to know how many jobs were created,” Gardner said during the hearing.
“If you’re looking at the direct jobs, this one estimate has direct jobs created at 3,666 in the construction phase, and direct jobs created at 355,” Sherlock said. “Direct jobs would just be the construction jobs and the ongoing operations and maintenance jobs. But if you wanted to look at the supporting jobs in other industries then you’d want to look at the other figures.”
“So for direct jobs—just if we look at the first year, this is average jobs per year, it’s 355 jobs per year—in two years, 355 jobs created a year, $10 billion?” Gardner asked.
“That would be jobs per year going forward,” Sherlock responded, “so these would be jobs that would be retained, average jobs per year going forward, yes.”
“For $10 billion?” Gardner clarified.
“Yes,” Sherlock said.
Realizing how bad this testimony made the loan program look, the DOE sent a statement to the Washington Free Beacon:
“The highly successful 1603 tax program has played a critical role in the dramatic expansion of America’s renewable energy industry over the past three years – supporting more than 30,000 renewable energy projects, leveraging more than $25 billion in private sector investments and creating tens of thousands of jobs in installation, construction and operation, as well as up and down the manufacturing supply chain,” said DOE spokesperson Jen Stutsman. “This program has helped to build infrastructure that will spur economic development and job creation in the country over the long-term and ensure the United States can compete in the global clean energy economy.”
Uh, Jen Stutsman? Didn't your OTHER official spokesperson just testify before Congress that the program produced 355 direct jobs per year? It's nice you want to fudge the figures by adding in temp construction jobs and all, but 'tens of thousands'?
Molly Sherlock wouldn't even venture above 5,000 jobs total including all the temporary construction jobs. Permanent, direct jobs were only 355 a year.
I also question the claim that this gov't loan program shelling out billions of taxpayer cash to these green tech companies has resulted in the 'leveraging [of] more than $25 billion in private sector investments because if private investors were rushing $25 billion dollars of their own hard-earned cash into these green tech companies, why the hell does this gov't loan program exist in the first place?
They've reached a point where they are simply going to tell us all huge whoppers and hope we swallow them.
The only good thing to come out of this when the final accounting is done after these present clowns are all thrown out of office by the voters this November?
The final tally of just how much of our money they burned up on these stupid projects will be an eternal warning to the American public once and for all what happens when you listen to stupid Progressives who never worked in the private sector talk about how awesome they are at creating jobs and want billions of tax dollars to prove it.
Friday, June 22, 2012
The 'Fluke'ing' Of The
Public Continues!
CNN Portrays
Washington Lobbyist
As 'Undocumented
College Student'
Duped by a clever lobbyist? Or playing along willingly?
One of the favorite underhanded tricks the MSM uses is deceptively presenting some sympathetic figure to drive a narrative they want to emphasize to their viewers.
One problem: with the advent of the New Media, deceptively palming off a person as something they're not is getting harder than ever.
Several months ago, a reproductive rights activist who specifically chose to attend Georgetown U because it's insurance didn't cover birth control was trotted out by the Democrats to address the Congress as some kind of ordinary college student. Because they waited too long to trot out this show pony, Fluke didn't actually get to testify before Congress about the terrible burden of being forced to pay for her own birth control.
That led to a press conference staged by Democrats to make it LOOK like she was giving some kind of testimony before Congress:
Here's the intrepid Sandra Fluke, not testifying before Congress.
As usual, the street theater comes apart when you take a closer look.
Ms. Fluke carefully studied Georgetown's policies before enrolling. She carefully noted that contraception was not provided in insurance coverage. And then she carefully enrolled at Georgetown anyway.
She enrolled there anyway to deliberately pick a fight with the administration and get them to change their religion to suit her.
They have refused to do so, and so I understand she's now some kind of victim because of this.
Ah. OK, got it. So at first she was just a '23 year old coed'. Then she was a '23 year old coed who also happened to be a 'reproductive rights activist'. Then she was a '23 year old coed who also happened to be a 'reproductive rights activist' who carefully investigated Georgetown's policies and decided to enroll specifically to fight the University over contraception insurance.
And now? The '23 year old coed' who also happened to be a 'reproductive rights activist' who carefully investigated Georgetown's policies and decided to enroll specifically to fight the University over contraception insurance turns out to be.............30 years old. And working as a women's reproductive rights activist before she decided she wanted to go to college.
All Georgetown U had to do to make Sandra happy was
cease to be Catholic or something. No biggie.
The great thing is, this kind of street theater doesn't stand up nearly as long as it used to. It used to be months and months, sometimes YEARS before the public figured out how it had been played. Usually after some reporter in a news magazine did some digging after the issue was all over, and then wrote a book about it.
Fluke was exposed as anything but a ordinary 23-year-old co-ed struggling to pay for birth control while attending a $23,000 per year law school while the issue was still being discussed.
You're not supposed to remember that the Dem's got caught
red-handed engaging in street theater with Sandra Fluke. No,
the only real takeaway is that Rush called her a 'slut'.
This greatly impacted the facts of the issue, though Rush Limbaugh's 'slut' joke ended up being turned into the 'real story'. The Dems were caught red-handed using a plant to try to generate sympathy for a difficult sell. They knew aside from the very real RELIGIOUS problem with this, most Americans would also have a problem creating a brand new entitlement funded by the government, so trotting out a show pony with a sob story was a great way to make anybody who resisted the ploy look like a hard-hearted mean skin-flint.
Just this week, CNN was caught using this tactic AGAIN.
Ann Coulter proved right again: Dem's use crying, hysterical victims -
After being asked if Romney might have suspected she was ambushing him, she told Political Pulse that she works for DRM Capitol Group, a Washington-based lobbying group that appears to exist specifically to push for the DREAM Act, according to the group’s website. In fact, DRM’s website statement about Romney includes this sentence: “Undocumented youth will escalate our actions against Mitt Romney until he supports the President’s new immigration policy.”
Once more, a sympathetic show pony is trotted out with a ready-made sob story to sell a narrative the Democrats & their MSM media mouthpieces want the public to embrace.
Watch the inevitable spin begin! OK sure, SHE'S fake, but
the ISSUE she's illustrating is real, so STFU, wingnutz!
An 'undocumented college student' crying over mean ol' Mitt's immigration stance turns out to be a paid employee of a Washington lobbying firm! Imagine that!
Anybody think CNN got played here, or were they doing the playing?
UPDATE: Just occurred to me: Hidalgo admitted to Political Pulse that she works for a Washington lobbying firm. Is she really an undocumented worker then? They hired her illegally? The only way this story would get better would be if she turned out to really be a legal citizen PRETENDING to be an illegal.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Stupid New Liberal
Talking Point:
Obama's Fast & Furious
Gun Walking Program Was
JUST LIKE
Bush's Operation
Wide Receiver!
"I have no idea what's in those Fast & Furious documents, I've never
read them, I didn't know anything about the program, and no,
you can't see them & WHY ARE YOU ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS?"
After President Obama waited until the 11th hour to suddenly declare Congress could not see Dept. Of Justice documents [that Holder wasn't turning over anyway] related to Operation Fast & Furious because he was claiming Executive Privilege, Liberals realized attempts to contain and downplay this scandal until after the election in November is now officially over.
Holder's been found in contempt of Congress after stonewalling for a year and a half over who designed, authorized, and then disavowed any knowledge of the ATF's Fast & Furious program, even after it's been shown to have resulted in over 300 deaths.
"After our careful internal investigation, we've discovered we're either
a bunch of incompetent boobs or I'm in deep, deep trouble.
Can I have that letter back?"
At issue is a letter the DOJ sent to the Congressional Committee, a letter purporting to sum up a very careful internal DOJ investigation, in which it was claimed nobody at the DOJ had any knowledge of the F&F program and certainly did not know about, much less authorize, the deliberate walking of thousands of high powered firearms over the border to Mexico's incredibly violent drug cartels.
Between 3 and 2 1/2 years ago, the huge uptick in violence in Northern Mexico was getting major US news coverage. As bad as it had been, all of a sudden there was a huge new explosion of deaths, with gun battles growing even bloodier and more frequent.
And now we know why: The ATF had been instructed to walk thousands of firearms across the border to these drug cartels.
And then Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot to death with a F&F gun in Arizona.
This guy is still dead. & the DOJ isn't talking.
It was like somebody flipped a switch.
All of a sudden the rapidly escalating gun violence in Northern Mexico ceased to be news as far as the MSM was concerned. While the violence continued to grow worse - today it's even worse than it was 2 years ago - the Old Media over here has no interest in covering it with the exception of the most outrageous and gruesome mass murders - such as 35 dead people found under a bridge in Vera Cruz:
The more common 'ordinary' events like 7 people being shot to death in one cartel related attack gets passed over without comment since that level of violence is now so commonplace.
It's been proven thus far that the death toll from the Fast & Furious gun walking program is over 300 and counting. We may never know exactly how many people were shot to death with guns the ATF deliberately put into the hands of these violent criminals, but thus far we do know about 300+.
Who came up with Operation Fast & Furious? Who authorized it, signed off on it? Congress has been looking into this for a year and a half, and is still no closer to any answers than they were when they started. Eric Holder continues to insist nobody at the DOJ authorized the ATF to launch this operation, and then went on to claim - under oath and in written documentation - that nobody at the DOJ even KNEW guns were being walked over to Mexico.
And that has now been proven to be a lie. That letter that the DOJ submitted to the Congressional Oversight Committee claiming nobody over there knew a thing about guns being sent over the border was quickly withdrawn when the facts came out.
In other words, evidence showed people at the DOJ did know about F&F and they DID know guns were being sent to these cartels. They lied to Congress. Perjury was committed.
Just the other day in testimony before Congress and also in a letter, Holder claimed Bush's Attorney General Mike Mukasey had been fully briefed on F&F. THAT too was found to be not true, and so the DOJ just withdrew that letter also.
So this is TWICE now that the DOJ supposedly made a careful investigation, then reported it's findings to Congress.....and then ended up having to retract it.
They are either grossly incompetent or they are hiding something.
So in light of the fact Holder has now been found in contempt, and President Obama has shielded the DOJ's documents on Fast & Furious from Congress by claiming Executive Privilege, what exciting new talking point have the Liberals formed to explain why all of this doesn't mean anything?
They've gone back to a failed program from when Bush was President that was called 'Operation Wide Receiver'.
Needless to say, there are key difference between how Wide Receiver was done and how Fast & Furious was carried out. Katie Pavlich points out the obvious after the Associated Press messed up the story and ran with factually incorrect information:
The federal government under the Bush administration ran an operation that allowed hundreds of guns to be transferred to suspected arms traffickers — the same tactic that congressional Republicans have criticized President Barack Obama's administration for using, twofederal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
When Bush, a Republican, was president, the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Tucson, Ariz., used a similar enforcement tactic in a program it called Operation Wide Receiver. The fact that there were two such ATF investigations years apart in separate administrations raises the possibility that agents in still other cases may have allowed guns to "walk."
The problem is, the "same tactic" under heavy criticism by the House Oversight Committee was not used under President Bush. Operation Fast and Furious started in Fall 2009 and was an offshoot of the Project Gunrunner program implemented under the Bush Administration. Project Gunrunner started as a pilot program in Laredo, Texas and went national in 2006.
Project Gunrunner involved the surveillance of straw purchasers buying weapons, but those purchasers were immediately apprehended before crossing back into Mexico or tranferring arms to dangerous criminals. Shortly after Obama took office, Operation Fast and Furious allowed straw purchasers working for Mexican drug cartels to purchase mass amount of weapons in the United States and then take them back to Mexico in addition to allowing them to be lost at stash houses and tranferred to dangerous cartel members.
ATF agents who have testified before Congress about the program said the idea was to "trace" those weapons, but the tracing ended up being a total failure as GPS batteries ran out and thousands of guns were lost in Mexico and only found at final violent crime scenes. Did both operations allow for straw purchasers to buy guns under ATF/DOJ surveillance? Yes, however, the key difference between Operation Fast and Furious under Obama and Project Gunrunner under Bush is that under Obama guns were allowed to go back into Mexico without interdiction or arrests.
Nice going there, AP!
And you know what? The AP is hardly the only one making false claims about Wide Receiver letting guns deliberately walk into Mexico. Look what the Washington Post did here:
Andrew McCarthy points how laughable it is to try to equate ATF agents on the scene engaging in surveillance of an illegal gun purchase with the gun walking of Fast & Furious:
It was left to Republican Senators Charles Grassley and John Cornyn to lay bare some crucial distinctions between to two ATF operations. Wide Receiver actually involved not gun-walking but controlled delivery. Unlike gun-walking, which seems (for good reason) to have been unheard of until Fast & Furious, controlled delivery is a very commonlaw enforcement tactic. Basically, the agents know the bad guys have negotiated a deal to acquire some commodity that is either illegal itself (e.g., heroin, child porn) or illegal for them to have/use (e.g., guns, corporate secrets). The agents allow the transfer to happen under circumstances where they are in control — i.e., they are on the scene conducting surveillance of the transfer, and sometimes even participating undercover in the transfer. As soon as the transfer takes place, they can descend on the suspects, make arrests, and seize the commodity in question — all of which makes for powerful evidence of guilt.
Senator Schumer’s drawing of an equivalence between “tracing” in a controlled-delivery situation and “tracing” in Fast & Furious is laughable. In a controlled delivery firearms case, guns are traced in the sense that agents closely and physically follow them — they don’t just note the serial numbers or other identifying markers. The agents are thus able to trace the precise path of the guns from, say, American dealers to straw purchasers to Mexican buyers.
To the contrary, Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries — of thousands of weapons. It was an utterly heedless program in which the feds allowed these guns to be sold to straw purchasers — often leaning on reluctant gun dealers to make the sales. The straw purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance; they were freely permitted to bulk transfer the guns to, among others, Mexican drug gangs and other violent criminals — with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms. The inevitable result of this was that the guns have been used (and will continue to be used) in many crimes, including the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. border patrol agent.
In sum, the Fast & Furious idea of “trace” is that, after violent crimes occur in Mexico, we can trace any guns the Mexican police are lucky enough to seize back to the sales to U.S. straw purchasers … who should never have been allowed to transfer them (or even buy them) in the first place. That is not law enforcement; that is abetting a criminal rampage.
As Sen. Cornyn pointed out, there is another major distinction between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious. The former was actually a coordinated effort between American and Mexican authorities. Law enforcement agents in both countries kept each other apprised about suspected transactions and tried to work together to apprehend law-breakers. To the contrary, Fast & Furious was a unilateral, half-baked scheme cooked up by an agency of the Obama Justice Department — an agency that was coordinating with the Justice Department on the operation and that turned to Main Justice in order to get wiretapping authority.
By the time Cornyn was done drawing this stark contrast between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious, Holder was reduced to conceding, “I’m not trying to equate the two.”
In other words, Holder HIMSELF has already admitted how freaking stupid it is to try to say F&F = WR.
That doesn't mean the Liberals won't try, though. So here's a handy chart to point out the key differences between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious:
Not only does Jon Stewart tell an audience inclined towards supporting Obama in November exactly why Operation Fast and Furious was so important to investigate, he also explains that the Obama administration has been refusing to cooperate with subpoenas, giving false information to Congress, and generally stalling for the last several months. On top of that, Stewart then skewers the same Democrats who blasted George Bush in 2007 for hypocrisy in defending Obama’s executive privilege claim in 2012. That’s a hell of a lot more information than NBC provided its viewers this week, that’s for sure:
Guess what? NBC News nightly broadcast with Brian Williams mentioned F&F to his viewers for the 1st time ever just last week. Thus far, now that he's been FORCED to cover it, Williams - like the NYT's - has dismissed F&F as a 'partisan politics', 'nothing to see here, folks, move along....' etc. etc.
Stewart then claims Obama's invoking executive privilege in this case is just like what Bush did himself. As Ed explains...........not exactly:
The issue in 2007 involved the use of non-delegable executive authority specifically granted under Article II to make political appointments — in the event, those of US Attorneys, who like all other political appointees serve at will at the pleasure of the President. As courts have ruled in Nixon and Espy, executive privilege applies in the exercise of non-delegable Article II powers as part of the separation of powers in the government. Operation Fast and Furious was conducted by a federal agency under powers delegated to the DoJ that are shared between Congress and the President. Furthermore, the subpoenas in this case relate to official misconduct and lawbreaking — not just the gunrunning but also false testimony before Congress. Presidents cannot claim executive privilege to shield documents in those circumstances, as Espyexplicitly states.
The White House spin isn’t working. Even Jon Stewart ridiculed it. Maybe NBC might consider following Stewart’s lead and report honestly on the story now.
When a comedian who's honest about the fact he's a 'fake newsman' does a better job of covering an important, controversial topic than a major news outfit like NBC News, you know the MSM is in trouble.
