Texas Congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul continues to champion constitutional rights. His latest endeavor is a bill that would abolish “gun-free zones,” ultimately permitting teachers to carry firearms on school grounds. Predictably, anti-gun groups are calling the legislation “extremist.”
CNS News reports, “H.R. 2613, the Citizens Protection Act of 2011, would repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and remove all federally created criminal safety zones.”
The Gun-Free School Zones Act was first enacted as section 1702 of the Crime Control Act of 1990. The text of the act reads, “It shall be unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone.”
Paul’s bill will permit individuals, including teachers, to carry firearms onto high-school and middle-school campuses.
The Gun-Free School Zones Act faced adamant opposition from Second Amendment advocacy groups like Gun Owners of America, which has indicated its support for Paul’s legislation.
According to a news release from Gun Owners of America, the Gun-Free School Zones Act protects criminals. The release points to attacks at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood, all of which are “government facilities where the private possession of firearms was prohibited.”
The release continues, “It’s time to say NO to criminal safe zones. And a great place to start is the blatantly unconstitutional Gun-free School Zones Act.”
A number of pro-gun groups argued that the shootings at Columbine High School and Platte Canyon, two high schools in Colorado, necessitated the repeal of the School Zones Act so that campuses would be safer.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said that despite the intentions of the School Zones Act, it ultimately created “target-rich, no-risk environments for monsters who have no fear of encountering an armed teacher or administrator, or a legally armed private citizen who might happen to be in the building.”
"This sort of thing didn't happen before the advent of gun-free school zone laws," Gottlieb said. "You never saw such an outrage in the days when high schools typically had rifle teams, and — particularly in the West — where it was common in the fall to find both teachers and students with hunting rifles or shotguns locked in their cars.”
Gun control groups, on the other hand, believe Paul’s legislation to be dangerous and extreme.
Ladd Everitt, communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said of the bill, “It’s a horrific piece of legislation that will present a direct threat to public safety. ‘Gun-free zones,’ despite the gun lobby’s propaganda, are far and away the safest places in our country.”
Everitt asserts that the bill will likely garner support only from extremist groups:
Rep. Paul’s legislation is the latest in a series of extreme pieces of legislation to come from the National Rifle Association. Bills like this have no public support whatsoever and seek to elevate the interests of the gun industry and a tiny minority of gun owners over the wishes, well-being, and safety of American families in communities across the United States.
But Gun Owners of America points out that the federal government’s efforts have unintended consequences:
No one — including politicians, the police, or the individual citizen — can predict where the next deranged serial killer will attack. And yet politicians continue to create “criminal safe zones” such as schools, churches, parks, restaurants that serve alcohol, etc., where the law-abiding are disarmed.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said gun-free school zones have “disarmed the wrong people and left our schools, and the children inside, vulnerable to this kind of atrocity.”
The most recent example may be the developing story at Virginia Tech, where students are on lockdown after three students attending a summer camp spotted what they believed to be a gunman on campus near the student dining facility. Some fear it may result in a repeat of the tragic 2007 shooting rampage that left 33 people dead.
If passed, Paul’s legislation could allow students and teachers to be armed and prepared in incidents such as these.
For now, Paul’s legislation has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
In an attempt to seize total control over national security and bypass congress, a frightening new step by the Obama Administration is coming into play. As noted in Friday’s Wall Street Journal in an op-ed by John Bolton and John Woo, a State Department advisory group that is run by former Secretary of Defense William Perry is advising that the U.S. and Russia both reduce nuclear weapons without a treaty, as a treaty would require ratification by Congress. This would allow Obama and his executive branch to unilaterally cut our nuclear weaponry and ignore the treaty clause of the Constitution.
As Bolton and Woo point out, the US has a greater global responsibility than Russia; Iran and North Korea, neither of which is far from Russian interests, can only be countered by U.S. military strength. In addition, they note that Russia is not a trustworthy partner in weapons reduction; it has violated many arms-control agreements, such as the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.
Some of the inherent problems in the seizure by this executive branch of decision-making power is Barack Obama’s desire to deeply cut our nuclear forces. A joint decision with Russia would place long-term limits on our cache of arms, thus placing constraints on us catching up if Russia decides to go ahead and build and the blurring of the lines deliberately drawn by the Constitution’s Framers separating the executive and legislative branches power.
Obama has made no secret of his desire to dismantle our nuclear capacity; the New Start Treaty he championed in 2011 forced the U.S. to observe a ceiling of 700 strategic delivery vehicles and 1,550 strategic warheads, and this past March he stated his desire to cut our arsenal further:
“ … a step we have never taken before – reducing not only our strategic nuclear warheads but also tactical weapons and warheads in reserve.”
It is naïve to assume that Obama is simply blind to the results of his actions and trusts the world around him to act with generosity. There has been too much evidence of Russia’s support of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and Russia has cunningly avoided supporting sanctions on North Korea for its rocket launches; in December, Georgy Toloraya, Director of Korean Research at the Institute of Economics, simply said:
"In Russia we believe that resolutions must be observed and UN decisions must be implemented. We think that North Korea has the right for space explorations but only after all the issues linked with the UN sanctions banning rocket launches with the use of ballistic technologies are settled. It is necessary to divide two aspects - we support the discussion of the rocket launch issue by the UN Security Council but we don’t think that this must automatically mean tougher sanctions against Pyongyang.”
Obama knows all this. His step-by-step evisceration of the United States is not confined to its economic system but its national defense as well.
There has been lots of talk over the past few months about gun control by the main stream media and liberals in general. This was anticipated following the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado theater at the opening of The Dark Knight Rises. It escalated over the next couple of months until the shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Because so many young children were killed, the emotional response was increased, but I’ll bet most people never heard of a shooting that took place at a theater just two days after the one in Newtown and for good reason; it didn’t go with the liberal’s agenda.
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 a man entered a movie theater in San Antonio, Texas for the sole purpose of killing his ex-girlfriend, because she had broke up with him. The gunman, 19 year old Jesus Manuel Garcia, apparently did not complete his task. He opened fire in the theater which caused mass panic. People were running for cover and rushing towards exits, according to police and witnesses.
At least two people were wounded in the shooting.
So why was there not widespread news footage covering this event? The shooter was stopped. The Santikos Mayan Palace 14 Movie Theater also houses a small restaurant. The shooting began in the restaurant and as people went for cover, Garcia began to fire outside at an unmarked police car. He then moved to the theater where off duty Bexar County Sheriff Officer, Sgt. Lisa Castellano, who was working the theater, chased Garcia to the back of the theater and cornered him in the men’s room, shooting him several times and taking his gun.
Detective Louis Antu, spokesman for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, said, “She took all appropriate action to keep everyone safe in the movie theater.”
Armando Oguin, an off-duty San Antonio Independent School District police officer restrained Garcia with handcuffs. He was then taken to San Antonio Military Medical Center, where he was in stable condition in intensive care the following Monday.
My guess is, because the shooting was stopped by an off duty officer and the fact that the crime was not committed with an AR-15 has something to do with why this did not get mass coverage. The fact that no one killed probably adds to that. So what was used? A Glock 23, according to this report.
This really should speak volumes for the media’s silence. Yes, the person that stopped the shooter was a police officer, but consider they were off duty and allowed to carry their weapon at the theater.
The point is that the good guy, or in this case, the good gal, had a gun to stop the bad guy. Otherwise, everyone else was a potential victim. Sgt. Castellano is to be congratulated for her bravery and ending what could have potentially been a deadly situation.
After contacting the movie theater I learned that they openly display signs, just like at the Aurora theater, that concealed weapons are not allowed. Therefore, it seems that once again a theater takes it upon itself to create victims, rather than empower individuals to protect themselves. Obviously the criminal, Mr. Garcia, paid no attention to the law or the signs.
Garcia was charged with attempted capital murder of a police officer, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. His bail was set at $1 million.
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags were.n't good for the environment.
The older woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."
She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.
We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts when wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint. But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?
Feel free to forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.
Does this seem familiar? From the pages of Milton William Cooper’s 1991 book Behold A Pale Horse:
“The government encouraged the manufacture and importation of firearms for the criminals to use. This is intended to foster a feeling of insecurity, which would lead the American people to voluntarily disarm themselves by passing laws against firearms. Using drugs and hypnosis on mental patients in a process called Orion, the CIA inculcated the desire in these people to open fire on schoolyards and thus inflame the ant-gun lobby. This plan is well under way, and so far is working perfectly. The middle class is begging the government to do away with the 2nd Amendment.” — with Anya Lambert. A complete lecture by Cooper on The Secret Government is available here:
Milton William Cooper (May 6, 1943 – November 5, 2001) was an American conspiracy theorist, radio broadcaster, and author best known for his 1991 book, Behold a Pale Horse, in which he claimed global conspiracies, some involving aliens.
On November 5, 2001 Cooper was fatally shot by a law enforcement officer at his Eagar, Arizona home after confronting deputies trying to arrest him and shooting one of them in the head. Authorities said Cooper was carrying a handgun and fled when Apache County deputies identified themselves and tried to arrest Cooper on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from earlier disputes with local residents. Federal authorities reported that Cooper spent years trying to avoid capture on a 1998 arrest warrant for tax evasion and according to a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, Cooper vowed “he would not be taken alive”
Milton William Cooper
Credit: Wikipedia
Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, writes that Cooper was well known within the militia movement for his book, Behold a Pale Horse and his anti-government shortwave radio program that reportedly included Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh as a fan.
Political scientist Michael Barkun characterized Behold a Pale Horse as “among the most complex superconspiracy theories” and also among the most influential, being much read in militia circles as well as widely sold in mainstream bookstores.
According to Cooper, he served in the US Air Force and the US Navy and was discharged in 1975. He caused a sensation in UFOlogy circles when in 1988 he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the US Navy that referred to government knowledge and involvement with extraterrestrials.
Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the US government, but later rejected these claims. According to Cooper, Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954 and established an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with the aliens and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed the aliens actually “manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult” and that even the Illuminati had become unknowingly manipulated by the aliens.
Cooper wrote of the Illuminati as a secret international organization controlled by the Bilderberg Group that conspired with other individual organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, and Skull and Bones, and whose ultimate goal was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper, the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world.[4] Cooper believed that James Forrestal’s fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee, Majestic-12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.
Cooper claimed the document Protocols of Zion was actually an Illuminati work and instructed readers to substitute the word “Sion” for “Zion”, “Jews” for “Illuminati”, and “Goyim” for “cattle”.
As Cooper moved away from the UFOlogy community in the late 1990s and towards the militia and anti-government group subculture, he became convinced he’d been personally targeted by President Bill Clinton as well as the IRS. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion and an arrest warrant was issued but not executed, resulting in his being named a “major fugitive” by the US Marshals Service in 2000.
According to a ‘mid-level’ FEMA source of John Moore’s, over the next couple of months, 150,000 ‘America hating’ Palestinian fighters will be coming to America, by invitation of our government, to ‘be used against’ Americans. With Russian and other Eastern European troops already here, John believes that this is ‘really serious stuff’.
Will they, too, be used to take away Americans guns when the 2nd Amendment is trashed? John gets into this bombshell information right off the bat in todays show. John also gets into the coming gun confiscation and the roles of foreign troops in confiscating Americans guns within the first 5 minutes of the show. Seriously?! “It fits with everything else we’re hearing…”
Never been a fan of Stone although I agree with some of his views like the Kennedy murder. He’s always seemed to be a typical liberal Hollywood type with communists tendencies' (well, that is the typical liberal Hollywood type isn't it?).
US director Oliver Stone (AFP Photo / Tizina Fabi)
Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration’s disregard for the rule of law.
Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.”
“He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.”
According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. “That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication.”
RT’s Abby Martin in the program Breaking the Set discusses the Showtime film series and book titled The Untold History of the United States co-authored by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.
"Obama was a great hope for change"
RT: It took both of you almost five years to produce this series. And in it you have a chapter called Obama: Management of a Wounded Empire. You give a harsh critique of the Obama administration. What in your eyes has been the most troubling aspect of his presidency, Oliver?
Oliver Stone: I think under the disguise of sheep’s clothing he has been a wolf. That because of the nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him, people forgave him a lot. He was a great hope for change. The color of his skin, the upbringing, the internationalism, the globalism, seemed all evident. And he is an intelligent man. He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them. That is what is sad. So we are going into the second administration that is living outside the law and does not respect the law and foundations of our system and he is a constitutional lawyer, you know. Without the law, it is the law of the jungle. Nuremburg existed for a reason and there was a reason to have trials, there is a reason for due process – ‘habeas corpus’ as they call it in the United States.
RT: Do you agree Peter?
Peter Kuznick: I agree, if you look at his domestic policy, he did not break with the Bush administration’s policies. If you look at his transparency – he claimed to be the transparency president when he was running for office. There has not been transparency. We have been actually classifying more documents under Obama than we did under Bush. All previous presidents between 1970 and 2008 indicted three people total under Espionage Act. Obama has already indicted six people under the Espionage Act. The surveillance has not stopped, the incarceration without bringing people to trial has not stopped. So those policies have continued.
Then there are war policies, militarization policies. We are maintaining that. We are fighting wars now in Yemen, Afghanistan, we are keeping troops in Afghanistan. We have not cut back the things that we all found so odious about the Bush administration and Obama added some of his own. The drones policy – Obama had more drone attack in the first eight months than Bush had his entire presidency. And these have very dubious international legality.
OS: Peter was hopeful that the in the second term there will be some more flexibility, we hope so. But, there is a system in place, which is enormous – the Pentagon system.
RT: It almost seems that they took the odious CIA policies and just branded them, so it is now acceptable – the assassinations, the extrajudicial executioner without the due process. It is fascinating.
"We are all ultimately watching ourselves"
PK: We complained during Bush years that Bush was actually conducting surveillance without judiciary review. Obama is killing people, targeted assassinations without judiciary review. That to us is obviously much more serious.
RT: You also cover Pearl Harbor, which of course led to the internment of Japanese American citizens. I do not think a lot of people acknowledge that once again underreported aspect of really what that meant. When you look at the surveillance grid in America today it almost seems like it is an open-air internment camp, where they do not need to intern people anymore because we have this grid set up in place. What do you guys think about that?
PK: The US government now intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day from American citizens. That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication. Can you imagine: 1.7 billion? We’ve got this apparatus set up now with hundreds of thousands of people, over a million of people with top security clearances in this kind of nightmarish state, this 1984 kind of state.
OS: One million top security clearances. That is a pretty heavy number. In other words, we are living in a fish pond and I think the sad part is that the younger people accept that. They are used to the invasion. And that is true, how can we follow the lives of everybody? But the truth is that we are all ultimately watching ourselves. It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.
Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone (right) and historian Peter Kuznick
"US fears things,we fear the rest of the world"
PK: And it can be oppressive on the surface. One of the things we feared after 9/11 was that if there was a second serious attack like 9/11 then the constitution would be gone. The crackdown would be so outrageous at that point. And there is still this obsessive fear. The US fears things, we fear the rest of the world. We spend as much money on our military security intelligence as the rest of the world combined. Do we have enemies that we feel so threatened by? Do we really need this anymore? Is this what our priorities should be? No we think not, we want to turn that around. RT: The evisceration of the rule of law, especially the National Defense Authorization Act, which eradicates due process – our basic fundamental freedom in this country. I wanted to bring up another interesting point that really struck me in the film series, which are the kamikaze pilots. They were brave, that was the bravest act that you could do and then I can’t help but think of suicide bombers today and Bill Maher, he goes out and loses his show for saying these people are brave. And you have people like Ron Paul get up there and talk about blowback as a reality and he is ridiculed. How did we get here, where the discourse is just so tongued down when we can’t even acknowledge the truths such as that?
OS: Primitive of course. There has been a blind worship of the military and patriotism. I strongly believe in the strong military, but to defend our country, not to invade other countries and to conquer the world. I think there is a huge difference that has been forgotten: morality. Once you take the laws away, as Einstein once said famously, the country does not obey its laws, the laws would be disrespected. So it seems that the fundamental morality has been lost on us somewhere on the way recently and now it is what is effective. Can we kill Bin Laden without having to bring him to trial, can we just get it done? And that ‘get it down’ mentality justifies the ends and that is where countries go wrong, and people go wrong. All of our lives are moral equations. Does the end justify the means? No, it never did.
PK: And the other side of what you are asking is about the constraints upon political discourse in this country. Why are people so uninformed? That is what we are to deal with in the series. If people don’t understand their history, then they don’t have any vision of the future and what is possible. If they think what exists now – the tyranny of now – is all that is possible, then they can’t dream about the future. They can’t imagine the future that is different from the present. That is what I am saying – people have to understand the past because if you study the past then you can envision a future that is very different.
We came really close on many occasions to going into very different direction in the future. We came very close in 1944-1945 to avoiding atomic bombing and potentially not having the kind of Cold War that we had. We came very close in 1953 upon Stalin’s death to ending the Cold War. We came close in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated to ending the war in Vietnam, to ending the Cold War, to heading into a very different direction. Then there were the Carter years, again a possibility of a different direction. And at the end of the Cold War in 1989 Gorbachev was reaching out to Bush. Did Bush take that olive branch that Gorbachev was giving him? No, very much different. What did we do instead? We applaud the Soviets for not invading when countries were liberating themselves from the Soviet Union and then we immediately go and invade Panama and then we invade Iraq.
So we are saying that “it is great that you are showing restraint, but we are not going to because we are the hegemon.” As Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under {Bill] Clinton, says “if the US uses force it’s because we are the United States of America; we are the indispensable nation. We see further and stand taller than other nations.” That is the attitude that Oliver and I are challenging. This sense of American exceptionalism that the US is a city on the hill, God’s gift to humanity, if we do it, it is right. And that is not acceptable.
"We want the country to begin thinking about the big questions again"
OS: It is very funny because the book has been out a few weeks, series have been playing for the fifth week now. We go to TV shows, we sit in these beautiful sets and they are always rushing and rushing. They got news in Gaza, they got Obama. And they ask us what are you talking about? History? What does it have to do with today? What is your point? We sit there very patiently and it is very bizarre to me that they say the past is prologue, that is all happened before and if we are smart you will see it more calmly and won’t overreact. We also argue that this kind of media is driven by dollars, the greed. You have a show and it is really not a news show, it is about rating and how you can get that – with a lot of speed, a lot of zoom and a lot of fancy sets and people watch. Goal is to keep it moving, don’t think, just keep it moving.
PK: A show like this, we can actually discuss the issues at a little more depth, a little more critically.
RT: If both of you are to make a film about this generation right now, what is one facet that you think is the most underreported or misrepresented?
OS: I don’t know about the younger generation, I have three children. I think it is an eternal story in some degree. People no matter what have a similar morality and consciousness, patterns re-emerge again and again. The young men and young women want to make their way into the world. And it is not that far off from what we went through. So I believe in cyclical history and I think my children are going through what I and my father and mother went through. I always look for those patterns first beyond the superficiality.
PK: I find that my students care very passionately about what is going on in the world. They are all doing lots of volunteer work. But what I find in this generation, like Oliver’s and my generation, is that they treat the symptoms. They are not asking the questions about the root cause of all of these problems. They care, they try to change things, but it is more superficial.
What we are challenging them to do is look at the patterns. Look at what has happened from the 1890s all the way through to today. Look at the consistency of the wars, interventions, the military expenditures, the paranoia, they fear of outsiders, the oppression. And get it to the root, what is making the system as a whole sick in a certain ways and how can we root out those deeper causes.
Now that we understand that, we can begin to change that. The Occupy movement did some of that there have been times in the 1930s, 1970-80s, 1960s when people were challenging on that scale. We want the country to begin thinking about these big questions again. What is our past, how did we get here, what are the possibilities for the future, what have we done wrong and what can we get right?
RT: Do you think these superficialities in the conventional wisdom that we hear are perpetuated to keep us in a perpetual state of war?
PK: I don’t know if it is quite so deliberate, but that seems to be the effect – dumbing down the population to the point where they cannot think critically and then you can pull anything over their eyes. They have a five-minute attention span and a five-minute memory of what happened in the past. We are saying learn your history, study it and think about what the alternatives are, think in utopian ways how different the world could be, how better it could be if we start to organize it rationally in the interest of people, not in the interest of profit, not in the interest of Wall Street, not in the interest of military, in the interest of our common humanity, the six billion of us who occupy this planet.
OS: The model of the series of The World at War, which was made by the BBC in the 1970s about WWII. Ours are 10 feature films, cut with care, an hour each, pure narration, music, and sometimes clips of films that make our point or don’t make our point. Either way we try to keep it flowing like a young person could enjoy it like a movie, I am glad you did.
The government has abandoned the constitution as a document to protect the people’s rights. That is the purpose of the constitution, to protect the people from the government! The government has become the enemy of the freeman.
Whether you think 9/11 was an inside act or not, the government used 9/11 to warp speed their power over the people. The Patriot Act was already written before 9/11. It is the opposite of freedom as enumerated in the founding documents. DHS and FEMA were already in the plans before 9/11, they just needed a big crisis to institute them.
I know that look, that’s the ‘look who’s in charge now’ look!
While Obama’s Justice Department has set a record for the number of cases it filed on behalf of Muslims, particularly in defense of the discriminatory Hijab, the same administration has not only failed to stand up for religious freedom of Christians, it has actually taken the lead in attacking the religious freedom of Christians.
The Supreme Court denied a request by Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned company, to shield the company from the controversial contraceptive mandate. Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected a request for an emergency injunction that would have shielded employers from the mandate. Hobby Lobby could face fines of up to $1.3 million a day if they do not comply to the Obama mandate.
And Hobby Lobby has indeed announced that they will not comply with the mandate.
Yet, as Laura Ingraham pointed out, in a previous case Sotomayor ruled for a Muslim inmate who was denied Ramadan meals. In Ford v. McGinnis, 352 F.3d 582 (2d Cir. 2003), Sotomayor wrote an opinion that reversed a district court decision holding that a Muslim inmate’s First Amendment rights had not been violated because the holiday feast that he was denied was not a mandatory one in Islam. Sotomayor held that the inmate’s First Amendment’s rights were violated because the feast was subjectively important to the inmate’s practice of Islam.
Forcing Catholics to violate their religion is unimportant, but allowing a Muslim to maintain an optional practice is.
This is what religious freedom in America looks like under Barack Hussein Obama.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.
We’ve been trying to keep you aware of what has been taking place with the talks concerning the 2013 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We’ve covered the Feinstein amendment, which effectively did nothing, except to empower Congress to authorize the military at their whim to violate people’s 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights. But now the talks are all done and the legislation is headed for Barack Obama’s desk to be signed into law soon, just as it was nearly one year ago today, including provision to use the military to indefinitely detain US citizens.
Previously, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for the Feinstein amendment to the NDAA. But then there came the hashing out of language in the bill and Paul blasted Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for stripping away the amendment.
“We had protection in this bill. We passed an amendment that specifically said if you were an American citizen or here legally in the country, you would get a trial by jury,” Paul said. “It’s been removed because they want the ability to hold American citizens without trial in our country. This is so fundamentally wrong and goes against everything we stand for as a country that it can’t go unnoticed.”
The problem with Paul’s assertion is that there was no protection for anyone, whether they are a citizen of the US, a permanent resident or a visitor. Rights that are supposed to be protected under the Constitution be damned! Neither the NDAA, nor the amendment proposed protected one person who is on American Soil.
UPDATE: People are asking when the House passed NDAA for fiscal year 2013. The links have been provided. This one comes from the one at the end of the article, “Obama’s desk.” Here’s the screenshot. They passed it first in May and then the final passage took place one day before the Senate passed it; December 20.
SEC. 1033. PROHIBITION ON THE INDEFINITE DETENTION OF CITIZENS AND LAWFUL PERMANENT RESIDENTS.
Section 4001 of title 18, United States Code, is amended–
(1) by redesignating subsection (b) as subsection (c); and
(2) by inserting after subsection (a) the following:
‘(b)(1) An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.
The following is a list of Facebook accounts operated by individuals in the alternative media that have been shut down by Facebook staff over the past 24 hours. Infowars writer Aaron Dykes and political dissident Brandon J. Raub have also had their accounts deleted. Raub was snatched by police and forcibly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward earlier this year for posting political content on Facebook. Infowars editor Kurt Nimmo also had his account suspended this morning.
Kurt Nimmo (account suspended) Aaron Dykes (account inactive) Amber Lyon (account suspended) Brandon J. Raub (account inactive) Michael F Rivero (account inactive) Anthony J Hilder (account inactive) William Lewis (account inactive) Richard Gage (account inactive) William Rodriguez (account inactive) Infowar Artist (account inactive) We are Change (account inactive) Wacboston At Twitter (account inactive) Michael Murphy Tmp (account inactive) Robert M Bowman (account inactive) Peter Dale Scott (account inactive) Jason Infowars (account inactive) Mike Skuthan (account inactive) Packy Savvenas (account inactive) Sean Wright (account inactive) Katherine Albrect (account inactive)
This is pretty dumb. Plainly put. Neo-nazis and all sorts of extremists have facebook accounts but pro-gun folk get banned? I wouldn’t worry too much, its the hype of the times and Facebook is like a fat kid looking to be popular and will do whatever at the time to gain favor with its ‘big brother’. -Mort
Someone tell Michael that more people in Russia and China were killed by their own government than by foreign invaders…after they had confiscated their guns!
(CNSNews.com) – Documentary-maker and liberal activist Michael Moore said the reason for mass shootings in the United States is largely due to fear and racism, and on Christmas Eve he pleaded, “calm down, white people, and put away your guns.”
“We are a country whose leaders officially sanction and carry out acts of violence as a means to often an immoral end,” Moore said. “We invade countries who didn't attack us. We're currently using drones in a half-dozen countries, often killing civilians.”
“This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to us as we are a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves,” said Moore, a multi-millionaire filmmaker with an estimated worth of $50 million.
Three things, according to Moore, make America unique in its violence: poverty, “fear/racism,” and the “me society.”
“We're an awfully fearful country considering that, unlike most nations, we've never been invaded,” he said. “Why on earth would we need 300 million guns in our homes?”
“I get why the Russians might be a little spooked (over 20 million of them died in World War II). But what's our excuse?” Moore said. “Worried that the Indians from the casino may go on the warpath? Concerned that the Canadians seem to be amassing too many Tim Horton's donut shops on both sides of the border?”
“No. It's because too many white people are afraid of black people,” he said. “Period.”
Moore continued: “The vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are sold to white people who live in the suburbs or the country. When we fantasize about being mugged or home invaded, what's the image of the perpetrator in our heads? Is it the freckled-face kid from down the street – or is it someone who is, if not black, at least poor?”
“I think it would be worth it to a) do our best to eradicate poverty and re-create the middle class we used to have, and b) stop promoting the image of the black man as the boogeyman out to hurt you,” he said.
“Calm down, white people, and put away your guns,” said Moore.
Gun control has become a dominant news story since the shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. President Barack Obama and Democrats have since called for stricter laws. House Democrats have proposed a bill that would ban high-capacity gun clips of 10 rounds or more.
In his blog, Moore said that Connecticut’s tough gun laws “did nothing to prevent” Adam Lanza from killing 20 children and 6 others at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Tough gun laws “won't really bring about an end to these mass slayings and it will not address the core problem we have,” Moore said. “Connecticut had one of the strongest gun laws in the country. That did nothing to prevent the murders of 20 small children on December 14th.”
He said a “dirty little fact” liberals do not want to discuss is that the “killer only ceased his slaughter when he saw that cops were swarming onto the school grounds – i.e, the men with the guns.”
“When he saw the guns a-coming, he stopped the bloodshed and killed himself,” Moore said of Lanza. “Guns on police officers prevented another 20 or 40 or 100 deaths from happening.”
“Guns sometimes work,” he said.
Despite those views, Moore supports stricter gun-control laws in the wake of the massacre, including a ban on “automatic AND semiautomatic weapons” and magazine clips that hold more than seven rounds.
“These gun massacres aren't going to end any time soon,” he said.
“I'm sorry to say this,” he said. “But deep down we both know it's true. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing forward – after all, the momentum is on our side.”
“We need a ban on automatic AND semiautomatic weapons and magazine clips that hold more than 7 bullets,” Moore added. “We need better background checks and more mental health services. We need to regulate the ammo, too.”
In Connecticut, residentsmust apply for a local permit to buy a gun, have their fingerprints taken, and submit to a state and federal background check with a 14-day waiting period. A gun safety course is required to buy a handgun. The state is also one of seven that has an assault weapons ban.
Gun sales have soared since the massacre, including in Connecticut where retailers are selling three times more guns than a year ago
The 31st annual “Christmas in Washington” concert on TNT December 21 suffered a dramatic 25 percent loss in viewers from the previous year, according to Nielsen Media Research. The 2011 cablecast of “Christmas in Washington” drew 1.5 million viewers. The 2012 showing had only 1.136 million viewers.
The concert, traditionally attended by the President and his family, drew international attention over the scheduled appearance by Gangnam Style rapper PSY (given name Park Jae-sang) when it was revealed the South Korean entertainer had made highly inflammatory, anti-American performances the previous decade.
In an insult to America’s troops and their families, President Barack Obama confirmed his attendance at the taping of the concert several hours before PSY issued a written apology the afternoon the news broke of his anti-American past on Pearl Harbor Day.
As a purported reaction to the war in Iraq, PSY rapped a song at a show in South Korea in 2004 with lyrics that called for the murder of American troops, their children and their extended families. In an earlier performance PSY smashed a model U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The onstage tantrum was in the context of South Korean anger over GIs not being punished for an accident that killed two school girls walking on the side of a road when they were killed by a military vehicle the men were driving.
It was the lyrics to "Dear American," written by fellow South Korean metal band N.E.X.T., which PSY rapped that caused a backlash against his appearance at the Christmas show, including a White House petition by this author that called for Obama to rescind his invitation to perform at the show:
"Kill those f***ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives Kill those f***ing Yankees who ordered them to torture Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers Kill them all slowly and painfully " (Profanity edited.)
The Obama administration quickly spiked the petition telling the press, which dutifully repeated to the American people, that the most powerful man in the world had no influence over an event to which he lent by his presence the honor and dignity of the office of the commander-in-chief of America’s Armed Forces--even when the star performer had publicly called for the savage murder of the troops under his command and their families.
As the show was taped on Dec. 9 at the National Building Museum, reports came out of Obama warmly greeting PSY on stage. A pool photograph soon followed showing Obama and PSY laughing and shaking hands. Vice President Joe Biden was photographed earlier at the show in a group photo with PSY and other performers.
In an interview after the show, PSY said Obama only talked with him about how his family is embarrassed when he dances Gangnam Style. PSY apparently offered no apology to Obama, nor did Obama rebuke him.
Americans showed more respect for their brothers and sisters in arms than their president. Not only did the PSY “Christmas in Washington” show lose 25 percent of its audience, the show’s key demographic of 18-49 year old viewers was only 300,000, placing it between "Brides of Beverly Hills" and "Fashion Police."
“Christmas in Washington” is a charity event, the proceeds of which went to the National Children’s Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Talk show host Conan O’Brien emceed the show. Other performers included Motown legend Diana Ross, Megan Hilty, Demi Lovato, Chris Mann, the Naval Academy Glee Club and Scotty McCreery.
There were clearly multiple shooters. Consensus in INTELCOM seems to be moving towards three. There is NO consensus that Adam Lanza was one of the shooters. There is no solid forensic trail between him and any of the murders. Gordon may tell you his body was brought in. I incline to the view that he was there, and participated, but I retain an open mind. At least one other shooter appears to have been briefly in custody, before being released. The public statements of the police do not match the radio intercepts.
This does not mean that every officer involved is happy with the cover-up. So far to the contrary it is clear that some of INTELCOM’s intelligence is coming from within the local police and possibly also CSP. Someone is also talking to NYPD, to judge from the leaching of information to the New York Fire Department. There is awareness in New York that they are fighting the same enemy as on 9-11. Well done by the way to the firemen for paying their respects. That was good to see.
I am NOT buying the idea that Lanza killed his mother, on whom he was very dependent. Again the evidence is very weak and consists of little more than statements to that effect. A press release is not evidence, except of the intent of the person pushing out the statement. Her survivalist credentials are a little thin too, although not as paper-thin as Breivik’s ‘extreme right-wing’ credentials.
It is now clear that Lanza was not mentally ill, although he was a loner and an introvert. That is not the same thing as being mentally ill. If he did carry out some of the murders he was clearly not the major player, or the planner of the operation. I am told the SATINT is particularly helpful, but if you want the good stuff word is you’ll have to talk to the Russians. If the President’s Administration in Moscow, or the excellent Russian SVR, could brief in the Russian media that would be extremely helpful. There is NO chance of anyone in Washington or Hartford telling the media the truth. It would not be usual even in the most normal of circumstances, and these circumstances are far from normal.
The evidence that Lanza committed suicide is also pretty thin. It is clear he was shot – the issue is, by whom? There does not seem to have been an independent autopsy.
The poor parents are desperate to prevent this murderous nonsense happening to other families, but with respect they are not thinking straight. The more they go down the line of pushing gun control, the more they play into the COREA Group’s hands. At this time the chances of COREA not being involved are pretty slim. There are deeper things at work here however than pushing gun control.
The Germans may have been sending a message to the Administration over the stolen funds sitting in New York which are being traded to prop up the euro. There was a lot of activity around that in the run-up to the shootings. Whether Lanza’s father was in the loop on the trading, possibly in trying to stop it, could be a legitimate line of inquiry (he comes across with respect as a decent man). Lanza was chosen for this operation for a reason, and it was nothing to do with his allegedly being a pupil at Sandy Hook.
Some one in the Administration must have been in the loop. We may get a clue as to who it was over the next few years. You would be surprised how much damage being involved in the murder of children can do to the mind of even the most evil man or woman, even if they come from Chicago.
The two shooters who survived will almost certainly have been taken down by their own side already. The Good Guys however will want to hunt down and eliminate those higher up the food chain. I have no doubt they will be identified and will find themselves on the wrong end of a Big Sig, in God’s good time. As a lawyer I wish I could say that there was a better way, and I am bound to advise against kinetic methods.
Our legal systems however lack the sophistication to understand a black-op of this nature and the moral fiber to deal with it. Just look at the way Norway’s legal system rolled over for the mass shootings there. Breivik’s trial, with respect (and I take no pleasure in saying this) was little more than a propaganda exercise for the absurd mad, lone gunman theory. It was Norway’s answer to the deeply discredited Warren Commission
The four officials supposedly out of jobs because of their blunders in the run-up to the deadly Benghazi terror attack remain on the State Department payroll — and will all be back to work soon, The Post has learned.
The highest-ranking official caught up in the scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not “resigned” from government service, as officials said last week. He is just switching desks. And the other three are simply on administrative leave and are expected back.
The four were made out to be sacrificial lambs in the wake of a scathing report issued last week that found that the US compound in Benghazi, Libya, was left vulnerable to attack because of “grossly inadequate” security.
State Department leaders “didn’t come clean about Benghazi and now they’re not coming clean about these staff changes,” a source close to the situation told The Post., adding, the “public would be outraged over this.”
US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 11 attack, originally blamed on a spontaneous demonstration against a US-made anti-Islam video that got out of hand.
That version was dismissed by an Accountability Review Board headed by retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering.
In response to questions from The Post, the State Department would only reissue the carefully crafted statement put out last week.
Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “has accepted Eric Boswell’s decision to resign as assistant secretary for diplomatic security, effective immediately.” What Nuland omitted was that Boswell gave up only the presidential appointment as assistant secretary, not his other portfolios.
The other officials — Deputy Assistant Secretaries Charlene Lamb and Raymond Maxwell, and a third who has not been identified — were found to have shown “performance inadequacies” but not “willful misconduct,” Pickering said, so they would not face discipline.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) told The Post this is “yet another ruse about the tragedy of Benghazi.”
“State Department officials proclaimed . . . that heads would roll . . . Now we see that the discipline is a lie and all that has happened is the shuffling of the deck chairs.”
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said only the federal government should have “high-capacity” gun magazines and that the “state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.”
At a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, Nadler gathered with other House Democrats to push for stricter gun control in the wake of last week’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 26 dead, including 20 children.
The lawmaker told CNSNews.com that he not only supports prohibiting the future sale of 10-round gun magazines, but he would like to confiscate high-capacity clips already legally possessed by American citizens.
After the event, CNSNews.com asked Nadler if the shooting massacre at the Ft. Hood military base in 2009 would have been prevented by the legislation he supports. On Nov. 5, 2009 Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, used an FN Five-Seven semi-automatic handgun, which can hold 11 to 31 rounds, to unload on the military base after reportedly shouting "Allahu Akbar," or “God is Great” in Arabic.
CNSNews.com asked: “Would banning high-capacity clips at Ft. Hood have prevented Maj. Nidal Hasan from killing 13 people and wounding 29 others?”
“I don’t know. It might have,” Nadler said. “Certainly, it was on a military base and he may or may not have had authority to use military weapons. I don’t know whether he did or not.”
“But the point of all this is not that we can prevent every single murder, [or] we can prevent every single even mass murder, but we can reduce it greatly,” he said. “You know, no one would say we shouldn’t use penicillin because some people still die of infections, but a lot fewer do because we have penicillin and other wonder drugs.”
Nadler continued: “Now, the fact of the matter is that Germany has 150 or so people killed a year with guns; Canada, 170; the United States 9,000 to 10,000 a year. We have a murder rate with guns that are 15 to 20 times higher than any other industrialized country. There’s only one explanation and that’s the availability, the easy availability of assault weapons and of high-capacity clips.”
“Now, last Friday we lost 20 children and six adults murdered in a Connecticut school,” he said. “Last Friday a madman attacked a school in China, an elementary school in China. Twenty-two kids were injured, but none killed because he had a knife, not an assault rifle. That’s the difference.”
CNSNews.com then asked, “But if a bill was brought up and passed to ban high-capacity clips would the military still be allowed to use them?”
“Of course, the military would be allowed to use them,” Nadler said.
“So only the government would be allowed to have high-capacity clips?” CNSNews.com asked.
“Yes.”
AR-15 rifle and bullet magazine clips. (AP)
“Well, I think the legislation doesn’t ban existing ones but -- although I would like to do that, too,” he said. “But I think the legislation we’re talking about would prohibit the sale and probably manufacturer sale of high-capacity clips in the future, not those that are in private possession today.”
“But let me say, yes,” Nadler added. “One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.”
“If the premise of your question is that people are going to resist a tyrannical government by shooting machine guns at American troops, that’s insane,” he said.
Since Sandy Hook, President Barack Obama and many Democrats are urging action to address more gun control. Obama has said he will use “whatever power” his office holds to prevent mass shootings in the future. At the prayer vigil for the Sandy Hook shooting on Sunday, Obama mentioned the shootings in Aurora, Co., Oak Creek, Wis., and Tuscon, Ariz., but he did not mention Ft. Hood.
At Wednesday’s press conference, Nadler, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and other Democrats advocated for a bill introduced by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) that would ban magazines for more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The bill would also prohibit the transfer, possession or importation of those magazines that are manufactured after the date of the law being signed.
Following last week’s shooting, Nadler called the National Rifle Association (NRA) “enablers of mass murder.”
“We have a lobby, the leadership of the NRA, who function as enablers of mass murder,” Nadler told CNN Host Piers Morgan. “And that's what they are. They're enablers of mass murder because they terrify the class of political people. And even though polling shows that most NRA members would support reasonable gun controls, every time someone proposes it, they come in.”
“They lie. They say they will take your guns away,” he said. “And they stop any kind of legislation to prevent that.”
A former TSA screener turned blogger who is now causing embarrassment for the federal agency has revealed that TSA officers routinely laugh at and make fun of passengers’ nude body scanner images in back rooms.
In a blog entitled Taking Sense Away, the anonymous ex-TSA worker reveals how he, “Witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers.”
The revelation was in response to a reader who asked, “Tell us, please, what really happens in that private room and why the TSA does not want it seen in public nor recorded.”
The ex-TSA screener also ridiculed the existence of I.O. rooms (image operator rooms) where naked images produced by body scanners are viewed by TSA agents.
“The most ridiculous thing is that these I.O. rooms even exist, to begin with. The backscatter machines are useless, as I and many, many others have previously pointed out. They should never have been put into use to begin with; TSA officers should never have been viewing nude, radiation-rendered images of passengers in those private rooms, period,” he writes.
“That’s why there are federal lawsuits pending against TSA (Ralph Nader, Bruce Schneier, et al) and why TSA is trying to backpedal and sweep the radiation scanners under the rug away from oversight committees and the public at large, as quickly as possible, right now. The entire thing was, as usual, a hare-brained, tax payer money-wasting, disaster of an idea.”
In a separate blog post, the whistleblower explains how TSA higher-ups are fully aware of the public’s disdain for the agency and that, the, “TSA is the laughing stock of America’s security apparatus,” with most employees desperate to transfer into a more respected government agency.
The whistleblower also highlights how TSA screeners would punish passengers who displayed a bad attitude by subjecting them to pointless bag searches with zero justification.
In a series of “confessions,” the former TSA screener also rails against the federal agency’s more ridiculous policies, including the ban on snow globes.
“The entire ban on snow globes was just another of the many intelligence-insulting rules that I was often forced to follow during my time at TSA. Imagine having to look, year after year, into the faces of innocent children and tell them and their parents that their Pretty-Princess-in-a-Blizzard snow globe has to go into the trash. “But why,” little Angie would ask, puppy dog pouting, tears trembling,” he writes.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
General Shelton told lawmakers that he was pressured to be less than honest by the White House when he gives testimony before Congress.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
"If an Air Force general blows the whistle on the Obama White House, does anyone in the media hear the corruption?"
A United States Air Force general is blowing the whistle on another alleged White House scandal, but few in the news media seem to be listening.
According to General William Shelton, the commanding officer of U.S. Air Force's space command, he was told to alter his testimony before the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Strategic Forces regarding an Obama White House attempt to award a defense contract to the Lightsquared firm.
Lightsquared is a high-tech company doing business in Virginia that's owned by billionaire Philip Falcone, an Obama friend and campaign contributor.
According to the National Legal and Policy Center, Phil Falcone had visited the White House and made large cash contributions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Soon after, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted his LightSquared a highly unusual waiver that allows the company to build out a national 4G wireless network on the cheap.
Republican lawmakers say that after Falcon's visit, the Obama White House allegedly tried to push through a Lightsquared's proposed wireless network regardless of the objections emanating from military commanders who believed the project could disrupt key U.S. satellite systems.
At a hearing on Thursday, lawmakers on strategic forces subcommittee, especially the Republican chairman, Michael Turner, requested that the House Oversight Committee investigate if Falcone's company garnered any type of special treatment from the White House or from Obama appointees.
The hearing came after a report by a blogger on a news and commentary web site alleged that the Obama White House pressed General Shelton to downplay his concerns about the proposed Lightsquared system.
"Under extremely unusual circumstances, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently granted a company called LightSquared the right to use wireless spectrum to build out a national 4G wireless network. LightSquared will get the spectrum for a song, while its competitors have to spend billions," according to NLPC's Ken Boehm.
President Obama's underlings deny any wrongdoing, and officials at Lightsquared denied the charges that it is receiving preferential treatment from President Obama or his staff.
Republican staff members on the subcommittee say that the decorated General Shelton told the lawmakers that Obama administration officials urged the general to describe Lightsquared's system favorably during his congressional testimony.
During the hearing, General Shelton told committee members that the wireless broadband network manufactured by Lightsquared would have a negative impact on the current Global Positioning System (GPS) relied on by both the U.S. military and private sector users of the GPS.
General Shelton told the committee members: Tests with Defense Department experts, civilian agencies and others "indicate the LightSquared terrestrial network operating in the originally proposed manner poses significant challenges for almost all GPS users."
The general insisted through his spokesperson on Friday that he had not "watered down his testimony due to alleged White House pressure."
According to a source familiar with the Lightsquared probe, many officers at the Pentagon are highly suspicious of the President, the White House staff and even Obama's appointees at the Defense Department.
Another occurrence being probed is that the allegation that Lightsquared at first offered to sell satellite phones on its network, however the Federal Communications Commission allegedly issued a special waiver to the firm thus allowing sell terrestrial-based wireless service to other companies.
Department of Defense officials. such as General Shelton, in the past have raised concerns about interference with GPS users, and the FCC would then promise to disallow a firm to begin operating their network until after intense testing is carried out to ensure there is no disruption to satellite navigation.
The head of the FCC declined to appear before the committee on Thursday, which the chairman, Turner, called an "affront" to the panel.
Meanwhile, Falcone and Lightsquared executives are taking the offensive by giving Obama-friendly journalists at Politico exclusive interviews.
LightSquared CEO. Sanjiv Ahuja, and its billionaire backer, Phil Falcone, denied all allegations that the wireless company used its political pull with the Obama administration to secure approval of its business plans with the Defense Department.
“It’s just very disappointing that people are not seeing the facts here, and [that] this has become a real political issue,” Falcone, a senior executive at the hedge fund firm Harbinger Capital, said during his Politico interview. “It’s not a function of being a Democrat or a Republican, it’s about trying to be an innovator. … It’s very disappointing and frustrating that we are getting stonewalled like this. … I kinda scratch my head every single day and say I can’t believe this is happening.”
Falcone and Ahuja denied receiving special treatment from the White House or the FCC in their ongoing quest to become the nation’s first wholesale wireless broadband provider, according to Politico.
But some observers see things differently. Mike Baker, a political strategist and a former military officer, believes that this investigation needs to be taken to wherever or whomever it leads. He's like to see a special prosecutor appointed.
"This is a very important national security issue, not some politically-motivated witch hunt like the Valerie Plame-CIA case. But we all know that with the news media protecting this president, the chances of anything being done are slim or none," he quipped.
"First of all, we know what motivates politicians and big business. In the middle you have a career officer who is a four-star general. Whom would you believe? What's in it for General Shelton to make up stories?" Baker asks.
"Let's hope General Shelton sticks to his guns and that more Pentagon and Justice Department officials decide enough is enough from this administration," Baker added.
When did it become acceptable for our elected representatives to become a class of people better than the rest? They make laws we have to follow but exempt themselves.
The got tired of voting periodically to give themselves raises so they passed a law that they get yearly raises unless they vote not to.
They send their kids to private schools but won’t allow ordinary citizens to use a portion of the taxes they pay for public schools to help them pay to send their kids to private schools.
I could go on but you know very well what I’m talking about...
Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact.
The school, Sidwell Friends School in Wshington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak.
If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point.
The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC's David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren't used (and weren't even allowed).
Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.
