By Floyd Brown, Western Journalism

 Interpol now has free reign in the US

With the signing of an under-publicized amendment to Executive Order 12425, Barack Obama has fundamentally altered your constitutional rights. His actions are undermining your rights to protect personal privacy from a foreign internationalist police agency named Interpol. A one-paragraph executive order may seem inconsequential to many, but this action has far-reaching implications and threatens the sovereignty of America.

Obama’s secretive executive order amended an order issued by President Reagan in 1983. Reagan’s order recognized Interpol as an international organization and gave it privileges and immunities commonly extended to foreign diplomats. Reagan opened the door to allow Interpol to operate in partnership with the U.S. but with significant constitutional safeguards. Specifically, Interpol’s property and assets remained subject to search and seizure by American law enforcement, and its archived records remained subject to public scrutiny under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Interpol had to answer to the FBI and U.S. courts under Reagan’s order. These safeguards were stripped away by Obama’s action the week before Christmas without debate or explanation. Obama picked the holiday season to make this radical change, to minimize media coverage.

This order marks a significant change in federal policy and usurps the constitutional power of our government by yielding it to an international organization. Michael van Der Galien writes, "This foreign law-enforcement organization can operate free of an important safeguard against government and abuse. Property and assets, including the organization’s records, cannot now be searched or seized. Their physical operational locations are now immune from U.S. legal and investigative authorities."

Obama has given an international organization unsupervised freedom to investigate Americans on our own soil without recourse or the supervision of our own government.

Obama has given an international organization unsupervised freedom to investigate Americans on our own soil without recourse or the supervision of our own government.

Andy McCarthy writing for the National Review asks some very significant questions: "Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media and the American people to scrutinize?"

Interpol is the enforcement arm of the International Criminal Court, or ICC. The United States never signed onto the Rome Treaty, which created the ICC, because of the potential for abuse by foreign interests. Obama has signaled he may sign the treaty over these objections and subject Americans to prosecution overseas in the ICC. This is harmful for two reasons. First, the U.S. Constitution clearly states that it is the supreme law of our land, and allowing the ICC to supersede the U.S. Constitution violates America’s sovereignty. Second, the War on Terror is unpopular with Europeans, and the ICC may attempt to prosecute heroic American soldiers with trumped-up war crimes. Obama is putting brave American men and women at grave risk.

An added wrinkle to this executive order is that Interpol’s operations center for the United States is housed within our own Justice Department. Many of the agents are Americans who work under the aegis of Interpol. This order has potentially created the new civilian security force that Obama proposed during his campaign. This group of law-enforcement officials is no longer subject to the restraints enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The order guarantees that Interpol officers have immunity from prosecution for crimes they may commit in the United States. Ironically, some Interpol nations are attempting to try American intelligence agents for their work abroad in the War on Terror.

This order shows blatant disregard for the U.S. Constitution. While Obama is extending due process rights to terrorists he is weakening those same rights for American citizens. If a citizen were to be prosecuted by Interpol, their newly granted immunity would interfere with the discovery process. Since Interpol files are immune to disclosure, a citizen could be denied his right to see the information used to prosecute him or her.

Obama’s executive order has done more to weaken civil liberties than the much-maligned Patriot Act. The silence in the mainstream media on this issue should scare all freedom-loving Americans. Obama just signed away parts of our precious legal protections.

By Monte Kuligowski, American Thinker

  Obama always sets up false choices

"Let me be clear," "Failure is not an option," and "I reject that false choice" appear to be three of Barack Obama’s top phrases. They are the hallmarks of Obama-style rhetoric. Of the three, let’s consider the Obama tactic of false choices.

From war to foreign policy to the economy, Obama is constantly setting up his "false choices" in order to soundly "reject" the false choice at hand. The gimmick works well to make Obama appear really smart, as one who thinks outside the box. In the "fallacy of false choices," Christopher Beam notes that Obama often sets up straw men and appears to create wiser third options in rejecting the false choices.

To the faithful, the false choice is obviously immature, and Obama’s third choice is strikingly brilliant. Bush had been giving us false choices for eight years, but Obama rejects those false choices.

A cursory analysis of the choice to set up false choices to make one’s point, however, reveals that it’s sort of childish. Anyone can play the game, but only a certain personality profile would choose to do so.

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Wall Street Journal

 Returning Gitmo’s detainees to Yemen defies common sense.

President Obama has belatedly declared that the near miss above Detroit constituted "a catastrophic breach of security" and ordered a review of America’s intelligence efforts. We’re glad to hear it, but let’s hope the Commander in Chief also rethinks his own approach to counterterrorism.

Recent events have exposed the shortcomings of treating terror as a law enforcement problem and rushing to close Guantanamo Bay. A new wave of jihadists is coming of age, inspiring last month’s deadly attack at Ft. Hood and nearly bringing down Northwest Flight 253, and next time we may not be so lucky.

Their latest sanctuary lies in unruly Yemen, headquarters for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which last year pulled off a series of local bombings, including at the U.S. embassy in the capital Sana, killing 13. The al Qaeda chapter in Yemen has re-emerged under the leadership of a former secretary to Osama bin Laden.

Along with a dozen other al Qaeda members, he was allowed to escape from a Yemeni jail in 2006. His deputy, Said Ali al-Shihri, was a Saudi inmate at Gitmo who after his release "graduated" from that country’s terrorist "rehabilitation" program before moving to Yemen last year. About a fifth of the so-called graduates have ended back on the Saudi terror most-wanted list, according to a GAO study this year.

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by Publius, Big Government

 ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis is close with Obama

This afternoon, on arguably one of the slower news day of the year, the Obama White House released another document dump of “visitor records.” According to the White House, today’s batch total more than 25,000 records, covering meetings between September 16-September 30th.

You can scroll through the list of records on the White House site OR you can download the raw data. Interestingly, the full download uncovers almost 30,000 records, including many from outside the mid-September time-frame detailed on the White House site. In other words, only the records from the specific two week time period are viewable on the White House site. Many other visitor records were released today…they are just much harder to find.

Like, for example, the visitor records for Bertha Lewis.

According to the visitor logs, on September 2nd Bertha E. Lewis made an appointment on to visit the White House on September 5th at 12:30. (We usually need to plan further ahead to get our hair cut.) On the evening of the 4th, that appointment was cancelled so Bertha could move her appointment earlier, to 10am.

And it doesn’t seem to have actually been a work visit, as her appointment indicates she was visiting the Residence within the White House. Also, September 5th was a Saturday. Nice.

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By Michael D. Shear, Washington Post

 Anna Burger with the SEIU is one of Obama’s most frequent visitors

Tens of thousands of people poured through the White House in September, including many who visited as part of organized outreach by the Obama administration to particularly important constituencies, according to visitor logs that were released Wednesday.

The records, made public as part of President Obama’s effort to keep his promise of government transparency, include almost 25,000 entries from the computerized visitor logs, primarily covering the last two weeks of September. It was the latest of three such releases, and the first of what are expected to be large-scale monthly reports by the White House.

The growing list of names of White House visitors, which now totals almost 30,000, offers a fresh, if imperfect, window into the efforts of Obama and his staff to use the White House as a tool for bringing key groups together in the historic venue.

Thousands of entries remain somewhat mysterious, offering no explanation for the reason for the visit, and some visits are not disclosed at all, including those of visitors whose known presence at the White House would pose a national security risk.

The list also highlights the continuing influence of the labor unions: A senior official for the Service Employees International Union, Anna Burger, was one of the most frequent visitors to the president himself.

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By Dan Weil, Newsmax

 Obama differentiates himself from Bush’s tough on terror stance

Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., says President Obama’s response to the terrorist attacks on Fort Hood and the airplane headed to Detroit is irresponsible.

The congressman serves on the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on terrorism.

“There wasn’t the sense of concern, urgency and just horror at what happened in both situations,” he told Kathleen Walter of Newsmax.TV.

“One of the things the president is trying to do is distance himself from the reputation the Bush administration had as being ultra tough on terrorism.”

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 Obama is looking a little older these day…

Washington Times

 the planet did not immediately heal as Obama had promised…

"The economy may be growing and the recession may be over, but on Main Street, people who are unemployed are not happy and people who are worried about being unemployed are not happy," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Only 44 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, compared with 59 percent in February, when he signed the $787 billion stimulus package, according to National Journal’s Pollster.com.

Support for Mr. Obama’s handling of his marquee health care initiative, now nearing final approval in Congress, stands at 41 percent – down from 57 percent in February.

Democratic leaders and the White House have suggested that the lack of public backing for the health care bill will change once it has been passed and blame Republicans for spreading misinformation about what’s in the legislation. Republicans, meanwhile, are banking on voter opposition to the plan to hold firm throughout next year.

Democratic pollster Tom Jensen said he doubts Mr. Obama will see any short-term gain from signing health care reform into law, arguing that independents and Republicans who overwhelmingly oppose the bill are not likely to be swayed.

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By SHELBY STEELE, Wall Street Journal

People voted for Obama in order to not be racists

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

The essence of our new “post-modern” race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor’s new clothes. The emperor was told by his swindling tailors that people who could not see his new clothes were stupid and incompetent. So when his new clothes arrived and he could not see them, he put them on anyway so that no one would think him stupid and incompetent. And when he appeared before his people in these new clothes, they too—not wanting to appear stupid and incompetent—exclaimed the beauty of his wardrobe. It was finally a mere child who said, “The emperor has no clothes.”

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor’s flagrant nakedness.

America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (“diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

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