Missouri Governor Jay Nixon called a state of emergency, last week, and announced that he was mobilizing the National Guard in preparation for the expected chaos in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury verdict, so where were they last night while Ferguson was burning?
Guard members were reportedly in place last night at key locations in St. Louis when the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darrell Wilson was announced. But for some reason, none were at the flash point, where you would think, most of the attention would have been focused.
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles toldFOX 2 late Monday night thathe had repeatedlypleaded with the Governor’s office to deploy the the National Guard in his town, but his requests were “completely ignored.”
On Fox News’,America’s Newsroom, Kinder asked, “did the Obama administration lean on Governor Nixon to ignore pleas from Ferguson Mayor to send in National Guard?”
“He (Governor Nixon) declared a State of Emergency almost a week ago and mobilized the National Guard. Then they were kept away at the crucial time while Ferguson burned…
We know they were kept away because they did not come in and stop that from the get-go. They were deployed in other parts of the St. Louis region… Why were they not in there at the first sign of an overturned police car or a smashed police car window with a show of force that would have stopped this?
Here’s my question that the governor must answer – Is the reason that the National Guard was not in there because the Obama Administration and the Holder Justice Department leaned on you to keep them out? I cannot imagine any other reason why the governor who mobilized the National Guard would not have them in there to stop this.”
It’s absolutely chilling that such a question is being asked.
Holder also expressed concerns privately about Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision this week to declare a state of emergency at a news conference and activate the National Guard . . .
A top aide to Holder called the governor’s office earlier this week to express Holder’s displeasure and “frustration,” according to a Justice Department official.
“Instead of de-escalating the situation, the governor escalated it,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “He sent the wrong message. The tone of the press conference was counterproductive.”
UPDATE II:
Kinder was also on the Kelly File with Megyn Kelly Tuesday night:
Authorities responded to a call for an officer shot in north St. Louis County late Saturday night.
St. Louis County Police confirm to News 4 a Ferguson police officer has been shot. A police staging area has been set-up around the area of West Florissant and Stein. Multiple police departments are responding to the scene.
The officer was shot in the arm. The condition of the officer was not released.
Early reports indicated that the officer who was shot is a woman. But his is in fact, a man.
Seems like the unruly mob went from hostile and menacing before the shooting – to docile and well behaved after the shooting as every officer from the surrounding municipalities poured into the area to investigate the crime.
Conservative writer Michael Walsh likes to call modern Democrats a Criminal Enterprise masquerading as a political party. The best way to understand them, he once told Rush Limbaugh, “is as the unholy love children of 1930s big-city political/gangster machines and 1960s Alinskyite Communists — now out and proud.”
Sounds about right. They are out and proud – and the beaten down and demoralized Republicans are perpetually in a defensive posture because that’s the only way they know how to respond to the criminally insane psychos who are currently running things. Recall how they reacted when Ted Cruz tried to go on the offense last Fall on the government shutdown. Crouching, trembling fear. “They’ll blame us!!!!” Meanwhile, the Gangster in Chief was shutting down open air national parks and monuments and booting wounded vets from war memorials. They tried to shut down privately owned hotels and museums.
Because they are criminally insane.
Last week, Al Sharpton and fellow Dems in Cincinnati gave a woman who was convicted of voter fraud a hero’s welcome – — at a voter rights rally.
They are criminally insane.
Dingy Harry rails against private entrepreneurs and philanthropists the Koch Brothers on the Senate floor for a daily two minutes of hate.
President Barack Obama has launched an internal review on how he can provide additional leniency to illegal aliens inside the United States of America, the White House announced on Thursday evening.
Obama “has asked Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to do an inventory of the Department’s current practices to see how it can conduct enforcement more humanely within the confines of the law,” the White House said in a Thursday press release.
Obama’s announcement that he would seek to grant more executive amnesty to illegal aliens came after he met with three Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) members on Thursday — CHC chairman Rep. Ruben Hinojosa and Reps. Luis Gutierrez and Xavier Becerra. Hispanic lawmakers have complained vociferously of late about the number of deportations executed by the Obama administration.
“The president emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system,” the White House said in its readout from the meeting.
Last month, the Obama administration said it lacked “the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period” for Obamacare. Moreover, when embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was asked by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) during testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee if she planned to delay the Obamacare enrollment deadline, Sebelius said flatly, “No, sir.”
On Tuesday, however, the White House announced it has decided to extend Obamacare’s open enrollment period another two to three weeks, marking this at least the 29th Obamacare delay. The White House says it plans to use the “honor system” for those wishing to enroll past the March 31 deadline. According to the Washington Post, the Obama White House will “not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.”
It appears Secretary Sebelius was not telling the truth.
House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R-MI) and Congressman Kevin Brady (D-TX) have discovered the administration has been collecting the data, despite telling Congress they do not have the information. The Hill reported:
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday saying she had been “evasive and perhaps misleading” in her testimony before the committee earlier this month.
Administration officials have repeatedly said they’re not able to break down enrollees by who has made a payment because they only have access to information about those selecting plans on the HealthCare.gov website, as consumers are expected to pay the insurers directly after enrolling.
Sebelius reiterated that claim in her March 12 testimony to the House panel.
But Reps. Camp (R-Mich.) and Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) say they have uncovered “new evidence” that “strongly suggests that the administration knows who has enrolled and paid their first month’s premium.”
One day story – tops.
Ever wonder how the Regime manages to stonewall everything until no one remembers or cares about the scandal anymore? Remember how Obama told Bill O’Reilly in calming dulcet tones that there had been hearings on all of those “phony scandals” (as he calls them.) They’ve all been litigated. There ain’t nothing there, sucka.
ORLY? In every case, those hearings had been stonewalled by his Regime. And he knows it.
The Obama administration has a standard response to all scandals: it stonewalls. Getting information from the administration is like pulling teeth, only slower. Document requests and subpoenas go unanswered, or inadequately answered, for years.
So far Obama’s stonewall strategy has worked quite well. After a year or two, a scandal is treated as old news, even though the administration has never produced the information that would allow Congressional committees, reporters or the public to evaluate it. If the administration stalls long enough, it wins.
In perfecting the art of the stall, Obama has done something that has been tried by no previous president: he has put the White House into the loop when federal agencies respond to subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. A group called Cause of Action has uncovered an April 15, 2009 memo by White House Counsel Greg Craig that lays out the administration’s unprecedented stonewall strategy. Craig’s memo went to every executive department and federal agency. You can read it here. The memo says, in part:
This is a reminder that executive agencies should consult with the White House Counsel’s Office on all document requests that may involve documents with White House equities. …
This need to consult with the White House arises with respect to all types of document requests, including Congressional committee requests, GAO requests, judicial subpoenas, and FOIA requests. And it applies to all documents and records, whether in oral, paper, or electronic form, that relate to communications to and from the White House, including preparations for such communications.
The phrase “White House equities” is undefined. It is not a legal term; it cannot be found in the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently a document has “White House equities” if it potentially could embarrass the Obama administration.
Forced by the Federal Election Commission to explain where $17,000 from his campaign went, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledged giving the money to his granddaughter for “holiday gifts” in late 2013, and finally reimbursed the money to his campaign. The FEC sent the treasurer for Friends of Harry Reid a letter asserting that the treasurer “must include a brief statement or description … to clarify the following description: ‘holiday gifts.’” Reid’s campaign operation had listed the “holiday gifts” as two separate payments to Ryan Elisabeth of Berkley, Calif., on Oct. 23, 2013. One payment amounted to $5,416.93; the other was $11,370.00.
You’ll be shocked to learn that this is not Reid’s first run-in with the FEC. In 2006, Reid used campaign funds to pay out bonuses to the staff at the Ritz-Carlton where he resides in Washington, D.C. (It is illegal under federal election law to use campaign funds for personal use.) Here’s an Associated Press story that contains additional examples of Reid’s general shadiness:
Questioned about the campaign expenditures by The Associated Press, Reid’s office said Monday his lawyers had approved them but he nonetheless was personally reimbursing his campaign for the $3,300 he had directed to the staff holiday fund at his residence. His office said he got the money to buy the Ritz condo from an earlier house sale.
Reid also announced he was amending his ethics reports to Congress to more fully account for a Las Vegas land deal — highlighted in an AP story last week — that allowed him to collect $1.1 million in 2004 for property he hadn’t personally owned in three years.
In that matter, the senator hadn’t disclosed to Congress that he first sold land to a friend’s limited liability company back in 2001 and took an ownership stake in the company. He collected the seven-figure payout when the company sold the land again in 2004 to others.
Reid portrayed the 2004 sale as a personal sale of land, not mentioning the company’s ownership or its role in the sale.
Meanwhile, Reid continues to attack libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch for allegedly using their wealth and status to enrich themselves and those around them. Keep it up, Harry!
Collusion of the criminally insane with the criminally insane.
A major development occurred today in the scandal surrounding the Washington Post’s attempt to advance Democratic Party talking points by falsely linking Koch Industries to the Keystone Pipeline. In the unlikely event that you are not already familiar with the story, you should begin by reading this post and this one, as well as the one from last October where I dismantled the International Forum on Globalization report that was the basis for the Washington Post’s story of March 20.
The facts, very briefly, are these: Koch Industries has no interest in the Keystone Pipeline; it has not lobbied in favor of the pipeline; if the pipeline is built, Koch will make no use of it to ship oil from Alberta or anywhere else; and construction of Keystone would actually damage Koch’s economic interests by raising the price of midwestern oil that flows to Koch’s Pine Bend refinery. The reporters who wrote the Post article that tried to portray Koch as the driving force behind the Keystone pipeline, Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, did not dispute any of these facts.
After my first post appeared, Eilperin and Mufson tried halfheartedly to respond to it. They posed the question, why did they write the article, given all of the facts that Power Line pointed out? Their answer was: “[I]ssues surrounding the Koch brothers’ political and business interests will stir and inflame public debate in this election year.” So their intention in writing the article was explicitly political.
But it may have been even more political, and more nakedly partisan, than we suspected. Today Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman wrote a letter to David Robertson, President and COO of Koch Industries. The Democrats’ letter was premised almost entirely on the Washington Post’s discredited article; it repeatedly footnoted that article and the IFG report on which the Post story was based. The two Democrats concluded by requesting that Koch answer questions and produce a long series of documents relating in various ways to the Keystone pipeline.
The Democrats’ letter raises an obvious question: did the Washington Post publish its article attempting to link Koch to Keystone at the request of Whitehouse and/or Waxman, or at the request of other Democrats who were coordinating with Whitehouse and Waxman? Given the blatantly political purpose to which the Post’s article has now been put, it is reasonable to inquire into its genesis: was it a Democratic Party plant from the start?
I keep wondering when and if the public at large will ever wise up to how dirty, rotten, nasty and corrupt the modern Democrat party has become. Never-mind the fact that as a party they’ve veered so far to the left in recent years that they are in virtually indistinguishable from the Communist Party USA. Lot’s of Democrats don’t have a problem with that, I guess.
But don’t they even care that their party is criminally INSANE?
Certainly, at a minimum it’s safe to say that Democrats were rather active on the nation’s police blotters today. Since this is one narrative the MSM will never assemble (as they’re in on the fun), it’s up to the Blogosphere — so here we go.
It what would surely place his likeness prominently on the Mt. Rushmore of hypocrisy if the allegations are proven in a court of law, famously anti-gun California state Senator Leland Yee has been charged with, in addition to bribery and public corruption…yes…gun running. Specifically conspiring with known organized crime lord Kwok Cheung “Shrimp Boy” Chow to illegally import firearms and sell them without a license . . .
The affidavit charges that the $2 million worth of weapons to have been secreted into the country from the Philippines included rocket launchers and machine guns, some of which Yee himself had fired while on Mindanao. A portion of the weapons Yee conspired to bring into the U.S. through New Jersey were to have been forwarded on to North Africa via Sicily.
I really do hate to be the one to tell you, Gentle Reader, but, as my favorite fictional protagonist once said, we’re in the deepest of deep shit and sinking fast. Liberty and justice are no longer reliable conditions of American life, evende facto.
Each and every American lives under the threat of the sort of random oppression the Hartes experienced. Anyone of a conservative or libertarian inclination who dares to make his views public is vulnerable to the sort of assault Tyler Cowen experienced. Ordinary passers-by on public streets must go in fear of “knockout game” gangs, about which the police seem disinclined to concern themselves. Businesses of any size that don’t kowtow to unions are constantly watchful for “union representatives,” who are protected from prosecution under federal law for anything they might do “in furtherance of union objectives.” The IRS seeks the power to discriminate among advocacy groups on the basis of their political stances, while its top man has defied Congress’s demand for the evidence that it’s already done so. The EPA is about to rule that your backyard is a “federally protected wetland,” because it’s damp for a day or so after a rainstorm. ObamaCare has proved to be a “law” written in water, for whose failure its principal promoter and his co-partisans seek to evade all responsibility. Meanwhile, scores of politicians — “our representatives,” remember? — are going down on charges that range from bribery to conspiracy to violate the firearms importation laws.
Shortly after Barack Obama rose to the presidency, the Right became fascinated by Saul Alinsky, and in particular by the philosopher and community organizer’s “Rules for Radicals.” Many on the right focused their attention on Alinsky’s Fourth Rule: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
The strategy of “making them live up to their own book of rules” is frequently mentioned and discussed these days at Breitbart.com, Instapundit, Ace of Spades, and just about every other conservative website and blog.
James O’Keefe, the activist and journalist behind the famous ACORN videos,articulated the approach directly: “The Left doesn’t care about the laws or the rules. They are hypocrites, and the only way to win is to make them live up to their book of rules. I have found that the only thing they care about is racism, sexism and exploitation.”
Not to take away from O’Keefe’s work, which generates must-watch videos and scandal-inspired resignations with metronomic regularity, but there may be a flaw in this strategy. Ultimately, not that many liberals care whether their brethren are following their own book of rules. They’ve demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another’s hypocrisy.
Which brings us to his video at the JuiceVox Media website. He tries to explain the National Debt and out of the gate beings with a lie. He claims the national debt is $5 trillion less than the U.S. Treasury says it is.
Then he uses deficit and debt interchangeably.
Then he claims the U.S. Government can never run out of money.
He goes through all of this to conclude that the national debt, which he understated, is just not anything to worry about.
This isn’t education. It is not explaining. It is left-wing propaganda. It is also sponsored by General Electric. Why is General Electric sponsoring left-wing propaganda?
Perhaps they don’t know. After all, Yglesias himself says it is okay for the left to lie in order to win an argument.
And they all practice this left-wing version of Muslim taqiyya. Why? Because they’re criminally insane, silly.
***
Neil Cavuto had a little pep talk for the Stupid Party – Get off your Grand Old Ass:
So here is the game: the White House wrote regulations to insure that the maximum number of people were terminated from their old policies, thus intentionally breaking its oft-made promise.
The White House and Democrats now wish to claim it’s the insurance companies who are doing this.
And the insurance companies are being told to shut up and take it — or else….
And since the US government is now their largest insurance customer, they have to take it. “The customer is always right.”
How did they not see this coming???
Why did they agree to play ball with him in the first place? Didn’t they realize they were sealing their own doom?
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is allergic to the truth. She is the ruthless enforcer of Obamacare’s Jenga tower of lies upon lies upon lies. Now that this fatally flawed government edifice is collapsing, you can expect Sebelius to do what she has done her entire career: blame, bully and pile on more lies.
Three years ago, when insurers and other companies had the audacity to expose Obamacare’s damage to their customers and workers, Sebelius brought out her brass knuckles. Remember? As I reported at the time, the White House coordinated a demonization campaign against Anthem Blue Cross in California for raising rates because of the new mandate’s costs. Obama singled out the company in a “60 Minutes” interview, and Sebelius sent a nasty-gram demanding that Anthem “justify” its rate hikes to the federal government.
A private company trying to survive in the marketplace was forced to “explain” itself to federal bureaucrats and career politicians who have never run a business (successful or otherwise) in their lives. Sebelius went even further. She called on Anthem to provide public disclosure of how the rate increases would be spent — a mandate that no other private companies must follow.
In an even more heavy-handed effort to suppress criticism, Sebelius wrote America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association of health insurers, “calling on their members to stop using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act.” The threatening cease-and-desist letter commanded: “I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases. … Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.”
And of course, the type of thuggery Sebelius has been engaged in is par for the course in Obama’s Gangster government.
On both the slowdown and the debt ceiling, the President has throughout flatly stated “I will not negotiate.”
If the guys and gals on the other side of the aisle won’t sit down at the other side of the negotiating table – that’s their failing, not yours. Negotiation isn’t a one-way street. Republicans – having no one else with whom to negotiate – have for weeks been one-way-street negotiating with themselves.
The New York Post reported that Ms. Jarrett held several late-night sessions with Mr. Obama at his residence and from there came the strategy of “no negotiation,” Mr. Klein believes.
The latest on the debt ceiling negotiations via The National Journalshow outmaneuvered Republicans with no cards left to play. Beaten and humiliated they are.
Speaker John Boehner is considering letting the House take the initial vote Wednesday on a Senate-prepared bill to lift the debt ceiling and restart funding for the shuttered federal government–apparently even if House conservatives object.
If they do object, it would mean Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats could become critical to its passage.
***
According to the aide, Boehner and the House would act first on Wednesday on a bill put together overnight in the Senate, will extend the debt limit until Feb. 7, and include a continuing resolution until Jan. 15, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.
Needless to say, this is the unconditional surrender Chi(town)Coms Obama and Jarrett played hardballto achieve. House Republicans are throwing in the towel.
They’ll merge their ideas with Mitch McConnell’s ideas. The result will be a funded government, raised debt ceiling, and nothing done with Obamacare.
Throughout this fight, Harry Reid has outsmarted Mitch McConnell. Repeatedly, Reid used the Senate’s rules to toss aside numerous proposals from the House while McConnell looked on not knowing how to fight back.
Reid knows how to beat McConnell. If Reid fights hard, McConnell backs down and tries to blame others. McConnell’s lieutenants attack Ted Cruz so “the Leader” can deflect from his own legislative impotence. And he continually is one step behind Reid in his knowledge of how to use the Senate’s complicated rules to win a fight.
You will see no defunding of Obamacare because Republicans are giving up.
You will see no delaying of the individual mandate, even though the Obama Administration cannot fix the website. Republicans have given up this.
The deal would also include a Dec. 15 deadline for a budget conference report, as well as an anti-fraud provision designed to verify income for those who receive subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.
Actually – you will see a delaying of the individual mandate. But it will come later – and it will be Obama’s idea. He is a Chicago thug who is hellbent on riding over his political enemies. He doesn’t just want to beat them – he wants to humiliate them – the country be damned. But yeah – it will have to be delayed. Their damn website doesn’t work and nobody knows when it will be fixed. So Obama will be a hero and delay the individual mandate on his own terms.
Mark Levin argues that what Obama is doing is seizing the power of the purse from Congress and taking away their ability to control funding in the government.
In essence, this has been a coup by the Executive to limit the power of all other branches so that there are no checks and balances. Obama will set spending levels and veto any bills that fall short of his demands as he threatens to single handedly push the nation into a default.
GOP lawmaker says that if his party’s leadership gives in to Obama, they will have forever altered the checks and balances of the U.S. federal government.
On the House floor on Monday, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) argued that President Barack Obama’s activities during the government shutdown over Obamacare are a sign to him that Obama would act nefariously to attack the full faith and credit of the United States of America by taking the country into a default in a debt ceiling crisis if the president does not get everything he wants in negotiations.
“Given the ruthless and vindictive way the shutdown has been handled, I now believe that this president would willfully act to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States unless the Congress acquiesces to all of his demands, at least as long as he sees political advantage in doing so,” McClintock said in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. “If the Republicans acquiesce, immediate crisis will quickly vanish, credit markets will calm and public life will return to other matters. But a fundamental element of our Constitution will have been destroyed. The power of the purse will have shifted from the representatives of the people to the executive. The executive bureaucracies will be freed to churn out ever more outlandish regulations with no effective congressional review or check through the purse. A perilous era will have begun in which the president sets spending levels and vetoes any bill falling short of his demands. Whenever a deadline approaches, one house can simply refuse to negotiate with the other until Congress is faced with the Hobson’s choice of a shutdown or a default. The nation’s spending will again dangerously accelerate. The deficit will rapidly widen. And the economic prosperity of the nation will continue to slowly bleed away.”
Here’s McClintock’s full speech on the House floor, yesterday.
This summarizes a good deal of what we’ve been saying here at the Hayride for a while now. Namely, that a sovereign default as a result of hitting the debt limit would not only be a choice by the Obama administration, but an unconstitutional choice and an impeachable offense. McClintock doesn’t use the word impeachment, but he sure does a good job of explaining what this country faces. Particularly his assessment of where the GOP went wrong in its assumptions by choosing to fight on Obamacare…
Well, we’re entering some dangerous territory here, alright. Obama is using his and his supporters’ contempt for the Republican party to allow him to send the economy into a tailspin. He wants this – not only because he thinks he can blame the Republicans….he just wants this.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Monday that President Obama is putting the economy at risk by refusing to negotiate with Republicans over spending and the debt ceiling.
“The president’s refusal to negotiate is hurting our economy and putting our country at risk,” Boehner said on the House floor.
Boehner expressed disbelief at reports that Obama would rather see a debt default than talk to Republicans.
“This morning, a senior White House official this morning said that the president would rather default than to sit down and negotiate,” he said. “Really?”
“The American people expect when their leaders have differences, and we’re in a time of crisis, that we’ll sit down and at least have a conversation,” he added. “Really, Mr. President, it’s time to have that conversation before our economy is put further at risk.”Boehner rarely speaks on the House floor, but this was his third appearance in the last week. It also follows a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week” in which he insisted he would not agree to bring a “clean” debt ceiling hike to the floor, and argued it would not pass.
UPDATE:
Here is Boehner’s speech on the House floor: POTUS Would Rather Default Than Negotiate:
The GOP conference released this video to illustrate the unreasonable position of the White House.
Today, Jay Carney lashed out at ABC’s Jonathan Karl for asking a question about the debt ceiling:
Nice Deb 