Democrats and the liberal media are playing psychological mind games with Republicans. They’re saying it is useless to try and stop leftist judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court because she is a shoe-in.
Listening to these pundits, you would think that Sotomayor is as guaranteed to be confirmed to the Supreme Court as Albert Pujols is to be on the National League’s All Star Team. AP summed it up this way, “strategists in both parties agree that Republicans will have to tread carefully – and won’t likely be able to stop her.”
On MSNBC, Chris Matthews congratulated Obama advisor David Axelrod on pitting this confirmation battle against only “wack jobs” and “crazies” such as Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Matthews contends that Republican senators would likely not fight hard to stop her.
Obama enters this battle with a vast numeric advantage. He has 59 Democratic votes in the U.S. Senate, plus, ethnic identity politics has reached the pinnacle of success in the five months since his inauguration.
Sadly, even many Republican strategists have preemptively declared defeat. Ed Rollins, writing for CNN said, “The confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor is not the battle to be waged, and it won’t be won.”
Strategist Lionel Sosa said: “Republicans would be idiots for opposing her. … It would be one more nail in the Republican image coffin.”
So with all the forces of power arrayed against them, why should Republicans fight? The simple answer is it is the right thing to do in defense of the U.S. Constitution.
Is our prosperity based on free markets being undermined?
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.
Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.
The incident – which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube – had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.
Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is losing the credibility battle, but that’s not all she stands to lose — her speakership is on the line.
“We were not, I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi emphatically told the American people on April 23. Three weeks later when that statement unraveled, Pelosi’s behavior became bizarre, insisting her congressional colleagues, the director of the CIA and government personnel are all lying…while only she is telling the truth. “They mislead us all the time,” she said referring to the CIA. However with that statement, she tightened the noose on her own career.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich described Pelosi’s actions as “despicable” and “dishonest”, calling for her to step aside from Congress. “I think she has lied to the House, and…I think this is a big deal. I don’t think the Speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters.”
Gingrich went on to say: “She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior… This is really, really dangerous, and it is going to get a lot of people killed, if we don’t call a halt to it.”
CIA records show Pelosi and Congressman Porter Goss, along with the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were briefed in September of 2002 on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (including waterboarding). The CIA’s version is verified by Goss, who later became the head of the CIA from 2004-2006. Goss writes in The Washington Post, “Since leaving my post as CIA director….I have remained largely silent on the public state. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage.”
Pelosi then admitted that she was briefed by an aide in 2003. This is an abrupt change from her previous statements about water boarding, but she still alleges the CIA was lying about the September 2002 briefing.
Increasingly, Pelosi is caught in a web of deceit of her own spinning. Current CIA Director Leon Panetta’s statements also confirm what she knew, and when she knew it. “As the agency indicated previously in response to congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing the enhanced techniques that had been employed.”
Why is this discussion significant? George W. Bush and his people did what their hearts and heads told them was essential to protect American lives in 2002. Aggressive interrogation was absolutely essential to getting information that would keep Americans from being slaughtered by mass murderers like Zubaydah and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who was also water boarded with good results.) The Democrats’ storyline says the Bush administration was secretly practicing “torture” by water boarding, without any congressional oversight or approval. Liberal Democrats are portraying the Bush administration as rogue war criminals, while their party bears no responsibility, and had no knowledge of what was going on. But as the old expression goes, “Facts to liberals are like crosses to vampires.”
Rather than addressing the issue and apologizing for lying about our intelligence professionals, Pelosi is hoping the public will forgot about the whole controversy and it will fade into the night. Yet that is not likely.
Pelosi is quickly becoming a political liability. Her approval rating stands at 39 percent, well below her party’s congressional approval rating of 51 percent. Pelosi has weathered political scandals in the past, but this time her luck may have run out.
If Obama and Democrats in Congress don’t force her to vacate her post, they are being incredibly hypocritical. They will be standing by a woman in leadership who passively supported enhanced interrogation techniques, “torture” — and then lied about it — while blasting a former president who was truthful about his support for water boarding.
Bush, Cheney and the CIA protected American lives. Pelosi has attempted to undermine the credibility of those who kept us safe, in order to save her own job and status. Furthermore, her behavior flies directly in the face of Obama’s promise of a new era of integrity in politics, and he shouldn’t stand by her while she lies. Pelosi needs to step down, or the Obama administration and their allies in the House should end Pelosi’s disgraceful political career.
By Jonathan D. Salant and Julianna Goldman, Bloomberg
Obama traded money for the Court of St James with this man
Louis Susman has one thing in common with many of his predecessors nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom: money.
Susman, 71, a retired Citigroup Inc. senior investment banker, raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and another $300,000 for his inauguration. On Wednesday, Obama nominated Susman to the post formally known as the Court of St. James.
Like Andrew Mellon, Joseph Kennedy and Walter Annenberg before him, Susman’s credentials stem more from involvement in financing party politics than foreign policy experience.
Even with his pledges to change government, Obama is following the tradition of his predecessors by offering some ambassadorships to top campaign backers, including four of the 12 nominations this week. The president acknowledged in a news conference in January that donors might get plum postings.
“The practice of rewarding donors is a remnant of the spoils system that we abolished in the civil service,” said career diplomat Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy and a former ambassador to Afghanistan. “It is a dismal testimony to the importance of money in our electoral system.”
HE HAS been coaxed, cajoled, censured and sanctioned. Yet whenever it suits North Korea’s boss, Kim Jong Il, he spews out new threats. For years he has managed to extort cash, oil and other goodies for then quietening down, only to behave even more threateningly next time. Can nothing be done to make this serial rule-breaker blink?
With his second nuclear test and multiple missile launchings, North Korea’s Dear Leader has ignored the hand that President Barack Obama has said he is ready to extend to America’s erstwhile enemies. He has also delivered a nuclear-powered slap in the face to China, his semi-backer and the chief proponent for the past six years of a strategy of come-what-may patience, negotiation and perks in an effort to humour Mr Kim out of the bomb business. But patience is not always a virtue in dealing with a regime as practised at blackmail as Mr Kim’s. For unless he now pays a seriously high price for his defiance, the message heard by others, particularly Iran, still mulling how far they should push their own nuclear plans is that they too can have a bomb—if they are prepared to be belligerent enough, for long enough.
Geithner was supposed to save the day? You be the judge?
Timothy Geithner was portrayed as the indispensable man, but now no matter how much the media continue to flack for him, he’s still kissing the floor.
The Treasury Secretary aimed to cure the ills of the financial system by extracting toxic assets from bank balance sheets, replenishing the banks’ capital resources, and bolstering the housing market to prevent further foreclosures so normal lending could resume.
Let us take a look at what he has “accomplished” thus far.
First, following a controversial vetting process and uninspiring beginning of his tenure, the Treasury Secretary finally struck fools gold after he utilized remnants of Henry Paulson’s plans and created the Public-Private Investment Program to remove banks’ toxic assets. The Dow rose, calls for his resignation ceased, and Newsweek immediately declared “Geithner Hits His Stride”.
White House confident Sotomayor supports killing babies
The White House signaled Thursday that President Obama is confident that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor won’t vote to overturn abortion rights.
Obama, a supporter of abortion rights, is “very comfortable with the fact that she shares a similar interpretation to the Constitution” as Obama, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Sotomayor, who has served as a federal appeals court judge for more than a decade, has never ruled directly on a woman’s right to an abortion. Because of her thin record on the issue, pro-abortion rights advocates have called on Sotomayor to reveal her views on a constitutional right to privacy, which has been the legal key to upholding abortion rights.
In answering questions about the groups’ concerns, Gibbs noted that Obama, a former law professor, is familiar with the Constitution and has found Sotomayor to have similar views on it.
