Trey Gowdy

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News/Politics 3-2-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. A new Trey Gowdy bill would dismantle Obama’s amnesty plan.

From RightWingNews “Named after Michael Davis, Jr., a sheriff’s deputy in California who was killed in the line of duty last year by an illegal immigrant, Gowdy’s bill would also provide a work-around for state and local governments to reinforce federal immigration laws while also implementing an annual review of the executive branch’s use of prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases.

“If we are serious about finding a long term solution to our immigration system, we must address interior enforcement,” Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee, said in a statement announcing the measure.

“This bill, which is one part of the Committee’s step-by-step process to address our broken immigration system, will ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past and help us earn back the trust of the American public,” he added.

If enacted, the bill would completely dismantle what Gowdy describes as Obama’s “unilateral, constitutional actions on immigration” by cutting off any and all funds to the initiative. It would also strip Obama and all future presidents of any power to unilaterally shut down immigration enforcement by allowing state and local governments the authorization to enforce federal immigration laws.”

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2. Rand Paul is proposing tax cuts for all.

From WashingtonExaminer  “Sen. Rand Paul promised a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday that he will soon “propose the largest tax cut in American history.”

“I propose we cut everyone’s taxes, from the richest to the poorest,” Paul said.

Paul’s senior adviser Doug Stafford did not have further details to offer on Paul’s tax-cut proposal, but said it would be ready in “a few weeks.”

As Paul gears up to run for president, with plans to make his candidacy official in early April, he has had no problem attracting support from libertarians, who showed up Friday as usual to cheer Paul at CPAC.”

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3. The Inspector General of the IRS has confirmed a criminal investigation into the lost/destroyed, but not really, Lerner emails.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.

Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.

“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.”

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4. Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks the Helms Amendment is being misapplied, which is exactly what you would expect from a politician funded in large part by the abortion industry.

From CNSNews  “Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) urged Secretary of State John Kerry this week to look into what she says is the misapplication of 42-year-old legislation that bans U.S. foreign aid from being spent on abortions.

“There has been, not on the part of the administration, but an issue surrounding the misinterpretation of the Helms Amendment that prohibits the use of funds ‘for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning,’” she told Kerry during a House Appropriations’ subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

“But it’s been incorrectly implemented, essentially to become a total ban on funding for abortion.”

The Florida Democrat said she hated “to use the term ‘nuance,’ but there’s a difference between prohibiting abortion entirely and prohibiting its use as a method of family planning.””

Of course Kerry has promised to look into it.

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5. I guess the irony of having foreigners process unemployment claims is lost on the people who run California. I guess we have to add this to the list of jobs Americans won’t do?

From ABCNews10  “It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.

It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.

Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.”

“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.”

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6. Some Democrats might be skipping Bibi’s speech, but the tickets are still a hot item.

From RollCall  “Plenty of outsiders — from lobbyists to constituents — are eager to see Netanyahu speak; an aide for Speaker John A. Boehner told CQ Roll Call that at least 350 requests are being fielded by the Ohio Republican’s office.

“I don’t expect many empty seats on the floor,” the aide said. “This is a big draw.”

But the fact that many Jewish, progressive and African-American Democrats are protesting the speech has set off something of a frenzy for extra tickets (each member gets at least one to give to a constituent or other guest).

A House Democratic aide said the lawmaker she works for has fielded multiple calls from colleagues asking whether the member is attending and, if not, if that ticket is available.”

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News/Politics 6-24-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. What Congress can do about Obama’s constant re-writing of laws.

From TheNYPost  “Regarding immigration, health care, welfare, education, drug policy and more, Obama has suspended, waived and rewritten laws, including the Affordable Care Act.

That law required the employer mandate to begin this year. But Obama wrote a new law, giving to certain-sized companies a delay until 2016, and stipulating that other employers must certify they will not drop employees to avoid the mandate. Doing so would trigger criminal perjury charges; so, he created a new crime, that of adopting a business practice he opposes.

Presidents must exercise some discretion in interpreting laws, must have some latitude in allocating finite resources to the enforcement of laws and must have some freedom to act in the absence of law.

Obama, however, has perpetrated more than 40 suspensions of laws. Were presidents the sole judges of the limits of their latitude, they would effectively have plenary power to vitiate the separation of powers, the Founders’ bulwark against despotism.”

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2. The man who broke the Middle East.

From PoliticoMag  “There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.

How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power. “As a boy,” Obama told his listeners, “I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Nice touch, but Arab rulers were more interested in knowing whether as a man he heard the approaching sound of gunfire, saw the growing threat of al Qaeda from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, and understood the ambitions of the ayatollahs as Iran moved closer and closer to a bomb.

Obama began with the view that there was no issue in the Middle East more central than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Five years later he has lost the confidence of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and watched his second secretary of state squander endless efforts in a doomed quest for a comprehensive peace. Obama embittered relations with America’s closest ally in the region and achieved nothing whatsoever in the “peace process.” The end result in the summer of 2014 is to see the Palestinian Authority turn to a deal with Hamas for new elections that—if they are held, which admittedly is unlikely—would usher the terrorist group into a power-sharing deal. This is not progress.”

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3. Once again liberals resort to fuzzy math and falsified data to push their agenda.

From TheTelegraph  “When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”

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4. Keep in mind what a hypocrite Harry is next time you hear him bashing the Koch brothers. If he’s so worried about billionaires buying elections, perhaps he should look in his own party as well.

From HotAir  “If you think that only Republicans have deep-pocket donors for PACS, your name is increasingly likely to be Harry Reid. Everyone else seems to have figured out that Tom Steyer, George Soros, and plenty of other One Percenters cough up big bucks for progressive candidates and causes, just as the Koch Brothers do for libertarian and free-market causes. Last week, Yahoo’s Matt Bai made it explicit, looking at the inner workings and financing of the Democracy Alliance and its “superrich Democrats.” Today, Politico’s Ken Vogel catches up:

Picture this: millionaires and billionaires gathering under tight security in fancy hotels with powerful politicians and operatives to plot how their network of secret-money groups can engineer a permanent realignment of American politics.

Only, it’s not the Koch brothers. It’s the liberal Democracy Alliance.

The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.

Vogel emphasizes throughout the piece that the Koch Brothers are in a class by themselves when it comes to fundraising, but that’s only because they’re more adept at it. Progressives pillory the Kochs for their use of money in politics and its supposedly corrupting influence, but Vogel’s report shows that progressives are perhaps more adept at corruption and influence-peddling:”

This story is older, but it fits in nicely for exposing the hypocrisy from Reid and Democrats. They only have a problem with it when the money goes to their political enemies. When it fills Democrat coffers, they’re fine with it.

From TheFreeBeacon  “The Democracy Alliance takes pains to ensure that its work disbursing millions of dollars to top left-wing organizations remains secretive and free from public scrutiny. But a document left on the floor of the group’s recent gathering reveals for the first time the names of a number of individuals involved in the effort.

It lists new Democracy Alliance “partners,” individuals who every year must pay $30,000 in dues and contribute at least $200,000 to the groups that DA supports. It also reveals names of DA “advisers,” foundation participants, and individuals getting a “sneak peek” at the group’s activities. Among its new partners are top labor union bosses, financial and business leaders, and heirs to billion-dollar fortunes who have made names for themselves as high-dollar Democratic donors.”

“The Democracy Alliance does not actually accept donations. Instead, it solicits contributions from left-wing millionaires and billionaires, and serves as a “pass through” between those donors and top liberal advocacy groups, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, and Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA.

The group emphasizes secrecy in all of its operations, even as its members and the DA “favored organizations” to which they donate decry the role of “dark money” in American politics. DA does not disclose details of any of the transactions it facilitates, and its members and donation recipients are prohibited from speaking publicly about the organization and its operations.”

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5. I love this guy.

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News/Politics 5-5-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. First up today, the problems at the VA are spreading. And in typical Obama fashion, they’re trying to cover it up.

From TheFreeBeacon “The Department of Veterans Affairs purged more than 1.5 million medical orders without ensuring patients received medical care, the Washington Examiner reports:

Since May 2013, veterans’ medical centers nationwide have been under pressure to clear out 2 million backlogged orders for patient care or services.”

“What happened to other 1.5 million appointments is something that no one, including top officials at the veterans’ agency, can answer.”

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The cover-up.

Also from TheFreeBeacon  “Whistleblowers say officials have been destroying evidence at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital where at least 40 patients died from delays, despite requests from Congress to preserve records.

Dr. Katherine Mitchell came forward to the Arizona Republic with records that show the hospital was using a secret list to hide the long wait times veterans faced. According to the Republic, Mitchell sent the documents to the paper after receiving a call from a coworker that evidence was being destroyed.

“I had no doubts they were capable of destroying evidence, or altering evidence,” she told the Republic. “So there I am, a 47-year-old doctor with two degrees, trying to figure out where to hide stuff.”

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And now we know the problems are more widespread than just one rogue office, so that excuse is out.

From USAToday  “A VA investigation of one of its outpatient clinics in Colorado reveals how ingrained delays in medical care may be for an agency struggling to rapidly treat nearly 9 million veterans a year amid allegations that dozens have died because of delays.

Clerks at the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Fort Collins were instructed last year how to falsify appointment records so it appeared the small staff of doctors was seeing patients within the agency’s goal of 14 days, according to the investigation.

A copy of the findings by the VA’s Office of Medical Inspector was provided to USA TODAY.

Many of the 6,300 veterans treated at the outpatient clinic waited months to be seen. If the clerical staff allowed records to reflect that veterans waited longer than 14 days, they were punished by being placed on a “bad boy list,” the report shows.”

This is system wide.

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2. And since I mentioned cover-ups……

They picked a good one to lead the select committee. That happened after this interview.

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More here, from TheWashingtonTimes  “House Republicans accused the Obama administration Thursday of “perhaps criminal” behavior for having withheld for months key email that sheds light on how the administration framed its post-Benghazi talking points, potentially violating a congressional subpoena.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Secretary of State John F. Kerry will have to come before Congress to explain why his department refused to release the email until forced to do so by a judge.”

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And now that Kerry has been subpoenaed,  Hillary is probably getting a little nervous, as she should.

From TheNYPost  “Because the Obama administration ignored legal requirements and a pursued a possibly criminal cover-up, they’ve just ensured Congress is going to talk about nothing but. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Friday he’ll be forming a select committee to investigate Benghazi.”

“The Rhodes memo is just the beginning. It and other e-mails were obviously selected from a much larger set of internal administration communications on the Benghazi cover-up that remains hidden from the public and from Congress. The person who should worry most is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For example, until now we have seen zero documentation to explain how Clinton out of the blue concocted the statement she issued on the evening of the attacks, which first raised the notion that the attacks came “as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

In all the material released by the administration to date, there are no notes, e-mails or drafts of Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2012 statement similar to the back-and forth e-mail chain released last year showing how the CIA talking points evolved during three days of inter-agency discussion.”

Now why do you suppose that is? 🙄

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I won’t get my hopes up, but maybe it’s time to mention the I word.

All of this to cover up an Iran Contra style gun running operation to Syria by the CIA, at the order of the White House.

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3. Funny, this seems to have been left out of most coverage.

From Fox5Vegas  “An emotional crowd gathered for a town hall meeting on Thursday evening in Bunkerville.”

“Residents and council members praised militia members gathered there in support of embattled rancher Cliven Bundy, but had nothing but vitriol for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie and the local and national media.

“The day the militia [came] was the day I felt safe again in Nevada,” one meeting attendee said.

The meeting was standing-room only. City council members had harsh criticism for the media’s take on the standoff between Bundy and the BLM.

“I heard things said down there. And then when it came out on the air it was a completely different animal,” Bunkerville Councilman Duane Magoon said. “Tell the whole truth. Don’t spin things to get your ratings,” another council member added.”

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News/Politics 3-14-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Trey Gowdy hammered the Obama admin from the House floor yesterday, in protest of the President refusing to enforce legally passed laws.

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2. John Kerry has issued a warning and deadline to the Russians.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “Secretary of State John Kerry warned of serious repercussions for Russia on Monday if last-ditch talks over the weekend to resolve the crisis in Ukraine failed to persuade Moscow to soften its stance.

Kerry will travel to London for a Friday meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ahead of a Sunday referendum vote in the Crimea region to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

U.S. and European officials argue that Moscow is orchestrating the referendum and waging an intimidation campaign with thousands of Russian troops controlling the region. If Russian-backed lawmakers in Crimea go through with the Sunday referendum, Kerry said the U.S. and its European allies will not recognize it as legitimate under international law.”

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3. I don’t think the Russians are intimidated.

From TheNYTimes  “With a referendum on secession looming in Crimea, Russia massed troops and armored vehicles in at least three regions along Ukraine’s eastern border on Thursday, alarming the interim Ukraine government about a possible invasion and significantly escalating tensions in the crisis between the Kremlin and the West.

The announcement of the troop buildup by Russia’s Defense Ministry was met with an unusually sharp rebuke from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who warned that the Russian government must abandon what she called the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries or face diplomatic and economic retaliation from a united Europe.”

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4. Why am I not surprised?

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “Make no mistake, there is always a deeper agenda whenever a seemingly innocent campaign pops up overnight.

On Sunday, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg launched a new campaign, known as ‘Ban Bossy,’ which would – as you can imagine – encourage people to ban the word “bossy.”

Is there some kind of epidemic of that word being used to keep girls from achieving? Many of the surveys cited by the Ban Bossy campaign are decades old, and a more recent survey by the Girl Scouts of America found that girls are more likely than boys to see themselves as a leader or have the desire to be a leader.

So, why start a national campaign? For starters, Sandberg is an ally of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.”

Astroturf sold as grassroots.

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5. Looks like it’s gonna be your typical Democrat/Clinton campaign.

From TheAmericanSpectator  “Hillary Clinton has her own private NSA.

American Bridge PAC spent last week spying on the private conversations of attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).”

“American Bridge was founded by Clinton ally David Brock and is funded by longtime Clinton supporter and billionaire George Soros. American Bridge PAC president Brad Woodhouse boasted that the group’s “trackers” at CPAC had been “in the hallways capturing conversations and that kind of thing.” Meaning? Meaning Hillary’s American Bridge is about invading privacy. CPAC’s today, someone else’s tomorrow. Yours.

“The group has been transformed from an ordinary political action committee into the political version of the NSA, its staffers working out of a room littered with computer monitors that will flash the latest privacy invasion for dissemination.”

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6. More illegal changes from the Obama admin, this time to the sequester deal, but for the benefit of ObamaCare.

From NationalJournal  “The Obama administration has decided that the sequester’s mandatory spending cuts no longer apply to part of Obamacare.

The health care law provides subsidies to help low-income people cover some of their out-of-pocket costs. Last year, the administration said those subsidies were taking a 7 percent cut because of the sequester, which imposed across-the-board reductions in federal spending.

But now, the White House has changed its mind. It removed the cost-sharing subsidies from its list of programs that are subject to the sequester, eliminating the 7 percent cut for 2015.                                            

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which noticed the change, said the reversal would likely restore about $560 million to the subsidies—and require $560 million in cuts to other programs to make up for it.”

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7. Sure. Why not? After all, they’ve seen the type of access, influence, and policy writing capabilities this has gained them with this administration. So why not put all the money in one big pile and see what it can buy ya’? I guess terrorist funding groups and sympathizers need lobbyists too nowadays. 🙄

From CNSNews  “Ten U.S. Islamic organizations have formed a new umbrella group to serve as a “representative voice” for  American Muslims, and one of their first tasks will be to carry out a  census of the community.

Other focus areas for the new U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations  (USCMO), according to speakers at the body’s launch in Washington on  Wednesday, include enhancing Muslim political engagement and participation in forthcoming elections, civil rights issues, combating  “Islamophobia” and having an impact on U.S. foreign and domestic policy.

Participating organizations include high-profile groups that have  been dogged by controversy, such as the Muslim American Society (MAS), founded by Muslim Brotherhood members, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which  was named by the Justice Department in 2007 as “unindicted  co-conspirators” in its case against the Holy Land Foundation in Texas,  subsequently found guilty of raising money for Hamas.”

““The new national council’s first priority will be to build on Muslim  citizenship rights by conducting a census of American Muslims to create  a database that will be used to enhance civic and political  participation in upcoming elections,” USCMO said in a statement.”

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8. And last for today, an interesting story. A judge in NJ has said fathers do not have the right to be present during the birth of their children. I could see why in some cases it might not be appropriate, but like with abortion, it’s not fair that the father has no say in the matter.

From Philadelphia/CBSLocal  “A New Jersey court decision makes it clear, it may take two to tango but not to give birth. “It’s well established under federal and state law that there is a privacy right when a woman’s in labor.”

Rutgers professor and family law expert Sally Goldfarb says a Passaic County judge made the right call last November in his decision, which was published this week, when he sided with pregnant woman that her ex-fiancee had no legal right to be in the delivery room.

“What this man was seeking to do was really interfere with the woman’s ability to exercise her own choices about giving birth in privacy and that to me falls outside of the rights that a father is legitimately entitled to.”

In the decision, believed to be the first of its kind, the father was also told he didn’t have a right to know when the baby was born.”

So never mind his rights to visitation? Is he supposed to wait until the child support papers show up and that can be like a birth announcement? Even if he can’t be present, he should have the right to be notified, and to visit the child in the hospital. Thoughts?

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