Daily Archives: January, 20, 2016

Our Watcher’s Council Nominations – The Revolution Starts Here Edition

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Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

Council News:

We note with regret the departure of our dear friend Maggie of Maggie’s Notebook, who resigned her seat on the Council to concentrate on other matters. We all wish her well and will miss her, even though she will continue to be a valued part of the Council community.

But we do have some good news. Replacing Maggie in our stellar line up is The Daley Gator, who makes his debut this week.And if you haven’t previously had the pleasure of reading him, you’re in for a real treat.

This week, The Pirate’s Cove, Blazing Cat Fur,and Life News earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning

Simple, no?

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have for you this week….

Council Submissions

Honorable Mentions

Non-Council Submissions

Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that!And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!

El Chapo Found With ‘Fast and Furious’ Rifle Capable of Taking Down Helicopter

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One of the guns funneled to Mexico via the Obama administration’s fatally flawed “Operation Fast and Furious,” was  found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico, sources confirmed to Fox News Tuesday.

The weapon found is a “.50-caliber rifle that can stop a car or, as it was intended, take down a helicopter.”

After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house where Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.

When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Federal officials told Fox News they are not sure how many of the weapons seized from Guzman’s house actually originated in the U.S. and where they were purchased, but are investigating.

Out of the roughly 2,000 weapons sold through Fast and Furious, 34 were .50-caliber rifles that can take down a helicopter, according to officials.

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that ‘El Chapo’ would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids. The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

This marks the third time a weapon from the Fast and Furious program has been found at a high-profile Mexican crime scene, according to Fox News.

Ironically, the purported purpose of Operation Fast and Furious was to see how high up the chain U.S. guns went in the international drug trafficking, crime syndicate Sinaloa Cartel. Now we know.

The operation involved federal agents allowing criminals to buy guns in the United States with the intention of tracking them to the drug cartel in Mexico.

Instead, because the guns lacked tracking devices, and because ATF agents were actually blocked from tracking the guns, they wound up in the hands of the cartels, who proceeded to use them with predictable results.  Ultimately,  the only way for the weapons to be tracked was when they were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico or the United States. The ATF lost track of 1,400 of the 2,000 guns involved in the sting operation. Hundreds of Mexican citizens and at least two Americans have been slaughtered with weapons from this criminally insane program.

 Conservatives have long suspected that Operation Fast and Furious was the Obama Administration’s first attack on the 2nd Amendment.

As Jeff Dunetz reminds us:

Emails released in 2011 revealed that ATF big shots wanted to use the illegal gun sales in operation Fast and Furious to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. The new rule would require  U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” The fancy name, Demand Letter 3 comes from the fact that it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information. If that’s how then name projects, why didn’t they name Fast and Furious, “Asinine Project 1?”

Fast and Furious was a sick attempt to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights by selling guns to Mexican Gun cartels. The program was a train wreck whose effects are still being discovered.

In June of 2012, former Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by Congress after he refused to divulge documents for a congressional investigation into the matter. Not that Holder cared. In February of 2013, he told ABC News the contempt vote didn’t bother him at all considering who voted in favor of it.

“It’s something that I think was unfortunate,” Holder said. “I think it’s a result of this kind of partisan sport that I think we engage in here in Washington far too often.” He added, “but I have to tell you that for me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted in that way, and I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me.”

Now, after three and a half years,  a federal judge has finally rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department’s public disclosures about its response to the so-called “gun walking” controversy undercut Obama’s executive privilege claim.

“There is no need to balance the need against the impact that the revelation of any record could have on candor in future executive decision making, since any harm that might flow from the public revelation of the deliberations at issue here has already been self-inflicted,” Jackson wrote. “The Department itself has already publicly revealed the sum and substance of the very material it is now seeking to withhold. Since any harm that would flow from the disclosures sought here would be merely incremental, the records must be produced.”
“While the decision doesn’t give us access to all the documents, it is an important step forward,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Tuesday. “We will continue investigating until we get to the truth.”
In November of 2014, Jackson ordered the DOJ to turn over 64,280 documents sought by the House Oversight Committee – which Justice did — in heavily redacted form.

FBI and DHS Investigating Kent State Professor for Supporting ISIS

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The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating a Kent State associate history professor for his alleged involvement with the Islamic State.

A joint terrorism task force has been investigating a Muslim convert for the last year and a half, an FBI special agent told KentWired.com. “There is no direct threat to the university,” according to the agent.

The agent said they interviewed several faculty members and more than 20 of Pino’s students Tuesday about his alleged involvement. He is also being investigated for allegedly recruiting students to join ISIS.

Pino said neither the FBI nor Homeland Security has notified him of any sort of investigation.

According to Fox News, “an independent probe” turned up some “disturbing posts” on his Facebook page “praising Usama bin Laden and urging Al Qaeda fighters to merge with the black-clad terror army.”

“Sheik Osama (May Allah be Pleased with Him) was the greatest, and desrves (sic) praise for kicking off this jihad,” one post from an account in Julio Cesar Pino’s name begins. The post, which has since been deleted, was preserved in a screenshot by The Clarion Project, a New York-based research institute that monitors international terrorism.

It continues: “However, the organization he left behind is not the same AQ he founded. The brave warriors of AQAP and the Nusraf Jabbat should join #IslamicState.”

An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to the Akron Beacon Journal that the bureau was looking into Pino, an associate professor of history, for ties to the terrorist group. Pino is also known by the Muslim name Assad Jibril Pino, according to his essay “Born in The Fist of the Revolution: A Cuban Professor’s Journey to Allah.”

Some students’ expressed concern…..that Pino’s rights were being violated.

Raishel, a sophomore, said: “There isn’t more proper research done on whether he is or is not involved in ISIS, then I feel like it is extremely discriminatory, and … that the University should not be posting his picture around, embarrassing him in front of his students, (especially) if there is not evidence that shows he is involved in ISIS.”
Her friend Summer, a freshman agreed and added,  “I feel the same way about it (as Raishel), and if he’s a different ethnicity, it could be considered racist.”

Pino told KentWired.com that he does not support the Islamic State, nor does he discuss the terrorist organization in his classes.

“I’ve not broken the law,” he said. “I don’t advocate that anyone else break the law, so I’ll stand by that statement that I fulfill my duties as an American citizen by speaking out on issues that some people find controversial, of course, but no, I have not violated any laws that I’m aware of or that anyone has informed me of.”

Here is a video from 2010 of Pino in full taqiyya mode – sounding more like a hippy-drippy, new-age Gaia-worshiper than an ISIS fanboi.

Good Lord. How low are the standards at Kent State University that they have this moron employed as an associate professor?

“Kent State is fully cooperating with the FBI,” said University Spokesman Eric Mansfield. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we will have no further comment.”

Mansfield would not comment on whether or not Pino would continue to teach at the university as he’s investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for supporting ISIS and recruiting students to join the terror group. However a Kent State spokesperson told FoxNews.com that Pino is still teaching classes.

“The FBI has assured Kent State that there is no threat to campus,” Mansfield said.

Pino, a Cuban-born convert to Islam, said “he supports the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestine conflict and said he is outspoken about his viewpoints.”

That is putting it mildly.

For example, in 2011, he shouted “death to Israel!” during a lecture from an Israeli diplomat.

Via e-mail to Inside Higher Ed, Pino gave his rationale as follows: “What I spoke was for the sake of the children of Palestine, and no other reason. The only politics I have are ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger.’ ” Asked about the controversy over his comments, he quoted the Koran: “They try to put out the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will allow nothing but the perfection of that light, though the disbelievers dislike it.”

Lester A. Lefton, president of Kent State, issued a statement in which he said that the way Pino had treated Khaldi was “reprehensible, and an embarrassment to our university.” Lefton said that while it “may have been” Pino’s right to speak out, “it is my obligation, as the president of this university, to say that I find his words deplorable, and his behavior deeply troubling.”

In 2002, Pina wrote a guest column in the Kent State campus newspaper praising Ayat al-Akhras, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had killed two people in Jerusalem a month earlier.

The tribute column was called “Singing Out Prayer for a Youth Martyr” and he wrote the teen “died a martyr’s death in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.”

He also wrote for the now-defunct website Global War, which called itself a “jihadist news service.”

Pino was investigated by the Secret Service in 2009 after he wrote the White House would “need more body bags” in an email to other professors.

Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, wrote at Townhall in Feb. of 2007:

He was drawing a paycheck from the people of the State of Ohio while trying to launch a Jihad against people like me. In fact, just five minutes before I called he posted an entry under the title “Crusaders Can’t Take Anymore in Afghanistan!”

Pino began his morning of not going into his office at Kent State by penning a post under the title “Frightened British Crusaders Rush More Troops to Occupied Afghanistan.” Using terms like “occupation” and “Crusaders” it isn’t really necessary to read these posts in order to ascertain who this employee of the State of Ohio is rooting for in the War on Terror.

But, just in case you were curious about the purpose of this site, it is provided in the upper right corner: “We are a jihadist news service, and provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide. All we want is to get Allah’s pleasure. We will write ‘Jihad’ across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message throughout the world.”

 There is also an “Oath of Freedom” in the upper right corner: “We were born free. We will live freely and when death comes to us, we will die freely. Jihad is changing all that can be changed; freeing ourselves through our own efforts; and the conviction that truth will prevail, inshallah.”

Under the entry “Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors” there is a description of a female suicide bomber who recently killed 41 people. Just in case you wondered how the host of the site feels about the suicide bomber, the next line tells you: “Now she lies on the Golden Couch of Paradise.”

In a 2014 open letter to “academic friends of Israel,” Pino wrote:

I hold you directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians over the past month. This is not symbolic or even legally justified homicide on your part but actual, cold-blooded, calculated killing, for which you are culpable. Your names are scrawled on every bullet fired, bomb dropped, body buried and burnt forehead in Gaza.

I curse you more than the Israelis, for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth—-in a segregated university, of course. Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.

Pino closed the letter by saying “Jihad until victory!”

In 2007, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly devoted his “back of the book” segment to Peno’s notorious anti-American antics.

All this – and he still has a job at Kent State. Unbelievable. 

Krauthammer: EmailGate Now ‘Worse than What Snowden Did’

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The Fox News’ Special Report panel reacted Tuesday evening to new revelations from the Intel IG that  several dozen of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s personal server were  “above top secret” classification.

According to the reporting of Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, Clinton’s personal server contained intelligence from the U.S. Special Access Programs, also known as SAP.

The Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson called the new revelations a “smoking gun” and a “pivot point” for Hillary’s campaign.

He pointed out that the intel community believes that Clinton’s server – with at least dozens of highly classified data points, was penetrated by foreign intelligence services.

“If this were a member of the uniformed military who had done this, or a CIA operation’s officer, they’d be in jail,” Carlson said.

Mara Liasson, whose first instinct was to defend Clinton, found herself agreeing that this looks exceedingly bad for her. “If it’s true, it’s extremely serious,” she conceded.

Weak tea, but we’ll take it, Mara.

Krauthammer said, “what people have to understand is that there is nothing higher, more secret than an SAP. From some people I have talked to, this is worse than what Snowden did because he didn’t have access to SAP.”

He explained that the reason the material is so sensitive is because “if it’s compromised, people die.”

Charles continued,  “it also means that operations that have been embedded for years and years get destroyed and cannot be reconstituted. This is very serious. Petraeus, as was mentioned earlier, he pled guilty because precisely this kind of information he shared. And I don’t see, given the fact that he is the inspector general of the intelligence community who was writing this officially to the intelligence committee heads in Congress that there is any way to contradict this. It is not a news story. This is an investigative story. And now it’s in the hands of the FBI. It’s hard to imagine that the Department of Justice will ignore this or wave it away.”

SEE ALSO: 

PJ Media: Is Hillary Clinton ‘Too Big To Jail?’

The SAP in question was so sensitive, “McCullough and some of his aides had to receive clearance to be read in on it before viewing the sworn declaration about the Clinton emails,” an intelligence official  told NBC News. Think about that.

As former NSA analyst John Schindler said on Twitter, “normals go to prison for this.” Ten days ago, Schindler wrote in a bombshell piece, “Hillary’s EmailGate Goes Nuclear,” at the New York Observer that one particular email to Mrs. Clinton from her long-time hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal on June 8, 2011, regarding Sudan had “explosive material in it.”

Remarkably, the report emailed to Hillary by “sbwhoeop,” which was Mr. Blumenthal’s email handle, explains how Sudan’s government devised a clandestine plan, in coordination with two rebel generals, to secure control of oil reserves in the disputed region of Abyei. This is juicy, front-page stuff, straight out of an action movie, about a region of Africa that’s of high interest to the American and many other governments, and the report is astonishingly detailed.

Look, guys, I know it would be funny as hell for Hillary to be indicted, but we really should be hoping that this shitshow drags on until at least the end of summer. The nightmare scenario for us is for Biden and Liz Warren to come riding on a white horse to save the party at the Democrat convention in August. Don’t ask me why, but the left thinks Fauxchauntas is a “rock star.” And everyone loves the amiable dunce, Uncle Joe.

Anyway, as pathetic as things are looking for Republicans, at least we don’t have a 74 year old Commie who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and a ridiculously corrupt, money-grubbing crone on the verge of being indicted, running on our side. As things stand right now, a Rebub could actually win in November. But things could change drastically, so be careful what you wish for.