John Hammar, like Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens – not a priority to our State Dept.
The parents of Jon Hammar, the former Iraq and Afghanistan War Vet who is being held in Mexico on gun charges, were on with Bill O’Reilly, Tuesday night to discuss his plight.. The parents told O’Reilly that the State Department had told them”over and over” that “they can’t do anything” to help them.
As I reported on Monday, the 27 year old Hammar has been languishing in a Mexican prison cell in Matamoros since August, confined to solitary confinement and now is chained to his bed as our nation’s leaders do nothing to help him.
Bill O’Reilly has been on the case for weeks, determined to move authorities to act on his behalf. He was shocked when Mr. and Mrs. Hammar told him that they had been in contact with the State Dept. and had been told repeatedly that they couldn’t help them.
“Is that right?! O’Reilly exclaimed, “they said they can’t do anything?! Oh that’s a bunch of bull, he added, certainly they can do something! Certainly Obama can do something!”
Hills might want to get on this, ASAP, now that the cat is out of the bag. If this soldier Marine! ends up dying in a Mexican prison because once again, her department failed to act – all the stomach viruses and fainting spells in the world won’t be enough to save her legacy.
Via Katie Pavlich of Townhall, Greta Van Susteren makes an excellent point:
Last night Greta Van Susteren made the point that governments fight to get their people out of foreign countries all the time, pointing out the Lockerbie bomber’s release back to Libya after killing hundreds but in this case, the U.S. government has done very little to help.
What you can do to help:
Please sign the White House petition to exert pressure on the Obama administration to demand that Mexico Authorities release Hammar immediately.
Total number of signatures on this petition as of Tuesday night, 10:06 pm is 21,650 and counting. 25,000 signatures are needed by January 06, 2013 for the request to be taken up by Obama. Help bring Jon Hammar home.
God willing, this Marine could be home in time for Christmas.
UPDATE:
Jon Hammar’s mother told KFI’s John and Ken Show (LA) that he may be released from a Mexican jail later this week – possibly Friday.
So sure they are that the Republicans will get full blame for the carnage, Dems are willing to send the country over the fiscal cliff. I’ve been advocating for weeks that Republicans give Obama his stupid tax hike on small businesses, and wash their hands of it – vote present or walk out rather than vote for it so it would be clear to the American people that Republicans let the President have his way against their better judgement, so HE and the Obamacrats in Congress get the blame when the economy heads South – as it surely will.
But now, I say to hell with that. The Dems are making it so painfully obvious that they don’t want a deal, I say – let it burn and let the chips fall where they may. It will be very difficult to blame the fiasco on Republicans after Boehner worked so hard, and made so many concessions.
“The question for us is real simple: How do we stop as many of those rate hikes as possible?” Boehner plans to tell House Republicans. “For weeks, Senate Republicans — and a growing number of you — have been pushing for us to pivot to a ‘Plan B,’” he will say. “I think there’s a better way. But the White House just can’t seem to bring itself to agree to a “balanced” approach, and time is running short. Taxes are going up on everyone on Jan. 1. They’re baked into current law. And we have to stop whatever tax rate increases we can. In the absence of an alternative, as of this morning, a ‘modified Plan B’ is the plan.”
“It’s really hard to imagine why they even came up with it,” Pelosi said of Boehner’s plan in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, “unless they just wanted to prove to their members that unless 218 of them were ready to raise rates, it’s not going to pass. The Democrats are not going to give them that success.”
“It’s a tactic, but it’s not a serious proposal,” she added.
Boehner’s plan would raise rates for income over $1 million, which Pelosi advocated for in 2012. Pelosi said her support for that threshold was an effort to “smoke out” Republicans on tax rates this year in the Tuesday interview.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller noted Tuesday the tax plan proposed by Boehner was backed repeatedly by Pelosi this year…
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney issued a statement saying the president remains willing to work with Republicans to reach a bipartisan solution to the fiscal cliff and he is “hopeful” they will.
The president, however, “is not willing to accept a deal that doesn’t ask enough of the very wealthiest in taxes and instead shifts the burden to the middle class and seniors,” Carney said. “The Speaker’s ‘Plan B’ approach doesn’t meet this test because it can’t pass the Senate and therefore will not protect middle class families, and does little to address our fiscal challenges with zero spending cuts.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was also swift to reject the plan.
“It will not protect middle-class families because it cannot pass both Houses of Congress. The Senate bill is the only ‘plan B’ that can be signed into law and prevent taxes from rising by $2,200 on the average middle-class family,” Reid said in a statement.
In case you’re confused about how a bill that only raises taxes on those making over a million dollars doesn’t protect the middle class, Krauthammer helpfully explains:
There was this hilarious response by Carney today rejecting this – saying, “The Speaker’s plan doesn’t meet the test protecting the middle class because it can’t pass the senate” Now, think about that, how idiotic that is. It obviously, demonstrably and irrefutably protects the middle class because it affects everybody up to a million dollars. But, he’s saying it can’t protect the middle class because Democrats will reject it which will not enable it to protect the middle class. I don’t know what Carney is being paid, but it really isn’t enough.
This man has no interest in keeping the government solvent. Just the opposite: He obviously wants it to spend, spend, spend, and grow, grow, grow, no matter what. He’s playing a long-term game, for total federal-government control, no matter what the short-term damage he does.
One can easily be forgiven, based on this record, for thinking he really is trying to enact the Cloward-Piven strategy of causing economic collapse so bad that the only institution left with any power is the central government, which then can reformulate the entire system under its own, all-powerful auspices. Hence, also, Obama’s assault on the intermediary institutions of society, including faith-affiliated social services.
Whatever his real goals — whether Cloward-Piven, or something else — there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest he has any intention at all of getting the problems of deficit and debt under control. And there is no evidence that he is even searching for common ground. Obama’s behavior certainly approaches the sinister; it is like nothing this country has ever seen before. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said his fish-mailing thug aide Rahm Emanuel — and, by extension, never fail to try to foment a crisis, as long as you think you can blame the other side for it.
On PJTV’s Trifecta,last week, conservative commentator, Bill Whittle proclaimed, “I no longer see a pathway where the ruination of this nation can be attributed to incompetence or even rank stupidity. There’s no other explanation left to me now that it’s not a deliberate attempt to destroy this economy…”
Via Tony Katz, Talkers.com announced yesterday that WVKO, a small station with a progressive talk format, will cease operations because of a lack of support from Democrat campaigns – including Obama’s and others in the left-wing community.
“It is with great sadness I must inform WVKO’s listeners that once again, Progressive Talk will be silenced on the Columbus airwaves. Our one-year lease on the station is about to expire, and at this time there is no way that we can continue operating the station. So as of midnight on Sunday, December 16th, the new operators will be airing a gospel format on WVKO. Once again, we had a good run with the station, and we were happy to in some small way contribute to the success that the Democrats enjoyed in November.
Unfortunately, it was not a two-way street, and lack of advertising support from the Obama campaign all the way down to local races ensured that we will be unable to continue into the new year.
I put my time, money, heart and soul into doing what I believed to be important for the country, but those who benefited most from our efforts chose to spend their campaign dollars elsewhere.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice….Well, we can’t get fooled again. Also, a number of advertisers who supported the station in the past chose to turn their backs on us this time. I can’t say why, since they would not return our calls. I want to thank our advertisers, supporters and you the listeners for everything, and i hope that Progressive Talk can somehow return to Columbus in the future.”
Keeping in line with their views on how the economy works, it’s very likely their cheapskate listeners felt that progressive radio should be free. A valuable lesson for anti-Capitalist lefties to learn, of course is – nothing is ever free. As Katz notes “someone must pay to keep the lights on” (etc..)
Perhaps, this is why progressive radio fails abysmally almost everywhere it’s tried.
Marine veteran Jon Hammar enlisted in the service at age 18 and was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq where his unit provided security for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, protected election polls and disrupted insurgent cells.
According to one account, in Fallujah, Hammar’s battalion was hit hard, with 13 killed in action and more than 100 wounded.
Imagine surviving Iraq and Afghanistan only to be jailed a few years later in a notoriously awful Mexican prison, literally chained to a bed — on a ridiculous technicality. Since August, the 27 year old Hammar has been languishing in a Mexican jail in Matamoros, confined to solitary confinement and now is chained to his bed. The look of despair on this man’s face is heartbreaking.
An Iraq War veteran is being held in a Mexican jail, chained to his bed, his life continuously threatened, while his family is extorted for money…and our nation’s leaders appear impotent (or negligent) by their failure to help him.
After you’ve read the story below, please go to the White House petition and sign it to press the Obama Administration to start working to bring Jon Hammar home.
***
In early August, Hammar and McDonough embarked on a surfing trip to Costa Rica.
With their surfboards in tow, Hammar and McDonough made their way South. However, they didn’t get too far.
They made it to only the Mexican border. Hammar is in a Matamoros prison, where he spends much of his time chained to a bed and facing death threats from gangsters. He’s off the grid, for sure, in walking distance of the U.S. border. But it’s more of a black hole than a place to heal a troubled soul.
The reason might seem ludicrous. Hammar took a six-decade-old shotgun into Mexico. The .410 bore Sears & Roebuck shotgun once belonged to his great-grandfather. The firearm had been handed down through the generations, and it had become almost a part of Hammar, suitable for shooting birds and rabbits.
While some might argue, Hammar should have never taken his gun, he was complying with the law–or so he thought:
The pair had crossed the border and handed the paperwork for the weapon to Mexican officials, but police ended up impounding their RV and jailing the men, saying it was illegal to carry that type of gun. Hammar’s friend was later released because the gun did not belong to him.
Bill O’Reilly has taken up Hammar’s cause, and has been reporting on the case for the past couple of weeks. On The O’Reilly Factor, last Friday, he reported that “high level negotiations were taking place and there’s some optimism that Corporal Jon Hammar will soon be free.” He had on Rep Ileana Ros Lehtinen to discuss the case.
She said that according to the Mexican Ambassador she spoke with on the phone, the reason he is chained to the bed is because they had to move him from the general population to an area that is less secure – “so unsecure that they fear he will escape.”
O’Reilly asked how the Mexican Ambassador could justify this travesty, and Ros Lehtinen answered that the Mexican government is somewhat powerless in this case because as she says, “they believe they are under siege by the Mexican drug lords and they have ceded control to these gangsters..” She continued, “The folks who are administering this terrible prison are not the Mexican government, but these drug lords.”
She agreed with O’Reilly that the President of Mexico has the power and authority to release Hammar, but doesn’t have the guts to.
Please sign the White House petition to exert pressure on the Obama administration to demand that Mexico Authorities release Hammar immediately.
Total number of signatures on this petition as of Monday night, 11:35 pm: 19,033 and counting. 25,000 signatures are needed by January 06, 2013 for the request to be taken up by Obama. Help bring Jon Hammar home.
God willing, this Marine could be home in time for Christmas.
Nice Deb 