Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on March 13, 20158 Comments
We'd like to briefly interrupt Hillary EmailGate and Foreign Policymageddon to bring you this video full of feels. Plus, it's Friday evening.
Alex is seven and was born with a partially developed right arm. He also has a seriously rad bow tie.
And then there's Albert....
Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on March 13, 201562 Comments
In a speech given yesterday to the Atlantic Council, Secretary Kerry made a few... interesting remarks.
Saying of economic concerns, "this is not a choice between bad and worse. Some people like to demagogue this issue. They want to tell you, “Oh, we can’t afford to do this.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We can’t afford not to do it. And in fact, the economics will show you that it is better in the long run to do it and cheaper in the long run."
He droned on for about 40 minutes, waxing poetic about 'science' before finally reaching his hyperbolic conclusion.
Blaming the end of the world on 'climate skeptics', Secretary Kerry broadly invoked scripture (though no specific scripture was cited), and begged his audience to ignore climate deniers whose actions weren't only wrong, but immoral! And why? For the children™.
It's not every day that a Secret Service agent gets drunk, crashes a government car into the White House security barricades, and almost gets away with it---but when it does happen, you'd better believe Congress is going to tear that guy's boss a new one.
ICYMI, that day happened this week. Two senior Secret Service agents got behind the wheel after a White House party, explored a security barrier with the bumper of their car, and were nearly arrested for it before being saved by a senior supervisor who happened to be on duty.
Oh, and one more small detail---they drove through an active bomb investigation. At the White House. IN FRONT OF PEOPLE.
This is a caps lock-ey kind of post, which we normally frown upon here at Legal Insurrection; but really, what is there to say, and how else should I say it?
New Secret Service director Joseph P. Clancy has only been mopping up agents for a month, but he's already scheduled to testify before a House subcommittee
Watch:
It must be liberating to be a lame duck president---especially when you've had as terrible a week as Obama.
Obama took to the media this week to express some faux embarrassment about the now-infamous "Iran Letter," and play down Republican blowback against the idea that what Tom Cotton and the other 46 senators who signed the letter did was somehow "treasonous" or "unprecedented."
If I were him, I'd cast about for any distraction I could find; he did, and he found it in Jimmy Kimmel. The President stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live this week to talk politics, Ferguson, and read a few mean tweets directed at his office.
Watch:
The scary part about what's happening now is that this could very well be Obama's plan to salvage his presidency. First, he sat down for a YouTube "star"-led interview while Yemen was burning to the ground; now he's reading mean tweets on Jimmy Kimmel like a Hollywood institution and publicly not giving a damn about actual---albeit "mean"---criticism.
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on March 13, 20155 Comments
Yesterday, March 12, 2015, Rasmea Odeh was sentenced to 18 months in prison, stripped of her U.S. citizenship, and ordered deported. None of that will take effect until her appeal is concluded, and she is free on bond pending appeal.
There was a "national mobilization" to bus supporters to the court, and an organized letter writing campaign to the Judge. The supporters apparently filled the court room and designated overflow room, but as this video indicates, their protests were pretty lacking:
(language warning)
Rasmea's crime for which she was sentenced was unlawfully procuring naturalization by falsely stating on her immigration and naturalization applications that she never had been convicted of a crime or been incarcerated. In fact, Rasmea was convicted in 1970 in Israel of a 1969 supermarket bombing in which two students -- Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner -- were killed, and other terrorist activity including the attempted bombing of the British Consulate.
The evidence of Rasmea's guilt on both the immigration and terrorism charges was overwhelming.
Rasmea's supporters continue to claim that Rasmea was found guilty in Israel only because she confessed to the bombing after 25 days of sexual torture.
In fact, Rasmea confessed one day after arrest, there was substantial other evidence against her, and years later her co-conspirators gave interviews to pro-Palestinian filmmakers highlighting that Rasmea was the mastermind of the bombing.
"Is your 401k retirement plan invested in public gun companies?" The "Unload your 401k" campaign wants to know.
Their website is full of scare stats: did you know that almost $2 billion of investor money is partially buried in three gun companies? That number is followed by statistics highlighting gunshot wounds, the cost of gun violence, and even a nod to Columbine.
The Unload your 401k backers are ramping up the effort to get investor money out of the gun industry, and they're using celebrities to do it. Watch:
From CNN Money:
Snoop Dogg might seem like an unusual choice as an anti-gun advocate. He once exalted gun violence through songs like "Bang Out" about gangsters. In 2006 he was charged with felony gun possession. And in the 1990s he was tried -- and acquitted -- of murder charges.
But Snoop Dogg has changed his tune. Last year, he released a song called "No Guns Allowed," which he produced with Drake and his daughter Cori B. (The B stands for Broadus.) The song contained references to the massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary and Columbine High School.
Posted by Mike LaChance
on March 13, 201542 Comments
If you haven't been reading College Insurrection lately, you may not know that students at UC Irvine recently voted to ban the American flag in their campus center. Their plan was ultimately vetoed and the students who were responsible have since apologized.
Considering all of that, this story is absolutely baffling.
Allahpundit of Hot Air reports:
Time for a huge food fight over whether this photo is disrespectful to the flag
When I saw the photo, I assumed the “controversy” was between conservatives who found it touching and anti-war liberals/libertarians who found it ominously nationalistic. (“It’s a metaphor for how we’re indoctrinated to equate patriotism with militarism!”) In other words, I thought it was a star-spangled version of The Dress. But those aren’t the sides here. The sides are people who find the photo touching and people who find it disrespectful to the flag insofar as it displays Old Glory in violation of the Flag Code (subsections 176(c) and (h), to be precise). If you believe the photographer, she’s gotten messages telling her she should kill herself over this.
She’s a Navy veteran, by the way. Her husband is active-duty Navy, as is the baby’s father. The baby’s mother? An Army veteran.
Rep. Jared Polis started calling Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton "Tehran Tom" after word got out that the Senator had led a coalition of 47 Republicans in the drafting of a letter to Iran. The "#47Traitors" hashtag took off on Twitter, and over 200,000 people have signed a petition accusing those senators of violating the Logan Act.
You'd think we'd never seen anything like this before, right? Well, that's exactly what progressives want you to think.
Tom Cotton may have caused a scandal, but he hasn't come close to the misdeeds of Democrats who came before him.
1983: Kennedy appeals to Moscow
In 1991, the London Times published a memo pulled from the Soviet archives offering proof that in 1983, Senator Ted Kennedy worked with an old law school friend by the name of John Tunney to relay a message from himself to Yuri Andropov, a top official in Russia's Communist regime.
Ferguson is falling apart again, and the police are once again in the crosshairs. Officials are still trying to calm things down in the wake of the targeted shooting of two police officers tasked with supervising a protest earlier this week.
Here's how the AP covered the shooting:
The officers were quickly released from the hospital, but St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said they could have easily been killed and called the attack "an ambush." Several people were taken in for questioning after a SWAT team converged on a Ferguson home near the shooting site, but they were later released, and no arrests were made.
The shootings marked the first time in eight months of tension in Ferguson that officers were shot at a protest, and the bloodshed threatened to inflame the already fraught relationship between police and protesters just as the city seeks reforms in the wake of a withering Justice Department report on racial bias in its law-enforcement practices.
The attack also seemed to create another layer of race-related mistrust after a week in which an unarmed young black man was killed by a white officer in Madison, Wisconsin, and a University of Oklahoma fraternity chapter was thrown off campus after a video surfaced showing members singing a racist chant.
Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on March 12, 201551 Comments
Whew, boy. It is not looking pretty.
There are several developments on both fronts -- the email scandal, and the Clinton Foundation foreign government sugar daddy scandal. But we'll start with the email.
1. No one read Hillary's emails before they were presumably destroyed
“For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be ‘private, personal records.’”
And to make matters worse:
You know what doesn't show up in a key word search? Any words contained in a file attachment...or an embedded image.
— Morgen (@morgenr) March 12, 2015
2. Hillary won't confirm she signed mandatory form indicating she'd turned over all classified documents (including emails) to the State Department
Posted by David Gerstman
on March 12, 20153 Comments
In a lengthy report, investigative journalists Richard Behar and Gary Weiss exposed the various ways that the Associated Press (AP) discounted Israeli claims and promoted Hamas propaganda in its investigation last month into civilian casualties that occurred during last summer's Operation Protective Edge.
Among the sins and omissions documented by Behar and Weiss are (1) misidentifying terrorists, (2) using children as props, (3) failing to acknowledge that pictures are posed, (4) cherry-picking quotes from Israeli officials, and (5) failing to disclose the anti-Israel bias of their sources.
One incident recounted by Behar and Weiss involves the interactions between Reuven Ehrlich and an AP reporter; Ehrlich is the head of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC). Following Operation Protective Edge, ITIC carefully reviewed martyr claims made by Gaza-based terrorist organizations in order to identify which of the dead were terrorists and which were civilians. ITIC also kept a count of those whose status was unknown.
A few days before the AP article was published, one of its reporters, Karin Laub, telephoned Mr. Erlich of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which has documented in several of its own probes that the Hamas-generated numbers for Gaza civilian casualties are grossly inflated. The organization found that Hamas is obfuscating the actual lists and affiliations, partly because of objective technical difficulties (poor paperwork and a lack of access to some bodies), and as part of its propaganda campaign against Israel. Thus, Meir Amit’s experts are closely examining the deaths, one by one, and its final tally won’t be available for many months—if not years. For now, the ratio of civilian-to-terrorist deaths has been averaging roughly 1:1 in its reports.
Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on March 12, 20155 Comments
The recent move from the Texas Governor's Mansion hasn't quelled Governor Perry's passion for all things American.
Since creating RickPAC last year, Governor Perry has travelled the country spreading his message. Securing the border and as a byproduct, national security, are part of Perry's message.
Yesterday, RickPAC released a video calmly hammering President Obama for his 'weakness and fecklessness' on the international stage:
"There's a lot of talk in America today about leadership and America's role and security on the international stage. As someone who believes America is the greatest force for freedom and prosperity in the world, it's frustrating to see the president shuffle from one crisis to the next, and to hear his words ring hollow when there should be unwavering resolve. But let's step back for a minute and imagine the view from the outside. Imagine how the president's weakness and fecklessness are received by both our friends and our enemies. Imagine the view from Tehran, as they're trying to negotiate a nuclear agreement with the United States. They see the leader of the western countries scrambling to get Vladimir Putin to sign a piece of paper that he'll completely ignore within hours."
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on March 12, 201511 Comments
The U.S. government just filed a Motion for an Emergency Stay in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing Obama's immigration executive action to proceed. A full copy of the motion (without Exhibits) is embedded at the bottom of this post.
Here's the opening paragraph of the Motion:
The Federal Government seeks an immediate stay pending appeal of a nationwide preliminary injunction against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary) seeks to effectively prioritize the removal of aliens who have recently crossed the border, committed crimes, or threaten public safety and national security by, inter alia, establishing guidelines for considering requests for temporarily deferring removal of other aliens who pose no such threats and have longstanding and close family ties to the United States. The preliminary injunction restrains the exercise of that prosecutorial discretion, a quintessentially executive function that is traditionally unreviewable. In so doing, it undermines the Secretary’s authority to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws by disrupting the Secretary’s comprehensive effort to effectively allocate limited enforcement resources.
This takes place against the backdrop of the District Court scheduling a hearing on March 19 into whether the feds lied about implementation of the immigration executive action, and possibly were in violation of the District Court's injunction. That meant that the District Court injunction was in effect at least until March 19, and likely beyond.
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on March 12, 20157 Comments
[Note: We will add video and a report from a Legal Insurrection correspondent at the court house as an Update later.] (Video here)
Rasmea Odeh was convicted in Israel of the 1969 bombing of the Super Sol supermarket in Jerusalem, in which Hebrew University students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner were killed, in addition to the attempted bombing of the British Consulate.
Rasmea served 10 years of a life sentence before being released in a prisoner exchange in 1979 for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon. Rasmea later immigrated to the United States, where she has made Chicago her home since the mid-1990s.
In November 2014, Rasmea was convicted in federal court in Detroit of falsely procuring naturalization, by concealing her Israeli convictions and incarceration.
The evidence supporting both the Israeli and Detroit convictions is overwhelming and from multiple sources, as I demonstrated in Rasmea Odeh rightly convicted of Israeli supermarket bombing and U.S. immigration fraud. Rasmea's claim that she confessed to the bombing only after several weeks of sexual torture was contradicted by the fact that she confessed one day after arrest, and by corroborating evidence including a filmed interview years later with a co-conspirator.
The prosecution sought a 5-7 year sentence on the immigration charge, well beyond the 12-21 month guidelines, based in part of Rasmea obstructing justice in the case by lying during testimony and disobeying the Judge's instructions not to testify as to her alleged torture.
The families of the bombing victims submitted letters to the court, one of which called the Judge's attention to my post documenting Rasmea's guilt in the bombing and false claims as to the confession.
The Judge just ruled this morning, sentencing Rasmea to 18 months in prison, revocation of citizenships plus judicially-ordered deportation at the end of prison to Jordan, and fines. (See Twitter stream below)
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on March 12, 201516 Comments
The "John Doe" law in Wisconsin is unique in that is sets up an investigative tool which, while nominally under the supervision of a Judge, gives prosecutors wide ranging power to conduct secret investigations. Targets and those from whom records and evidence is gathered are required to stay silent about what is being done to them.
The Wisconsin John Doe law has been around for a century, but recently has come under intense criticism because it has been used by Democratic prosecutors as a political weapon against Scott Walker and conservative activists. Scroll through our John Doe (WI) tag for more background.
The short version is that there have been two John Doe investigations of Scott Walker, neither of which has found any wrongdoing by Walker. John Doe No. 1 concerned Walker's time as Milwaukee County Executive, and is closed.
John Doe No. 2 concerned alleged illegal coordination between conservative activists and groups and the Walker campaign during the 2012 Recall Election. John Doe No. 2 has been the subject of multiple litigations in which conservative groups allege that prosecutors used meritless legal theories to intimidate and harass the conservative movement into political silence through raids on homes and seizure of emails, texts and other electronic evidence. A whistleblower stepped forward to claim that the investigation was promoted if not instigated by the union-operative wife of the lead prosecutor, something he denies.
John Doe No. 2 is currently stalled, as both state and federal judges have found the legal theories behind the investigation are invalid as matters of law.
I had thought that the press would stand by Hillary Clinton in the same way they've stood by Obama---through thick and thin. After all, Obama has committed acts far worse than Hillary's, has covered up more, and has been just as egregious in his lies. And yet I can't recall Obama having been subjected to questions even remotely as difficult as the ones Hillary faced (and answered poorly) this week, although the press could have grilled him that way any time he appeared before them.
They chose not to do that, but they chose to ask some real questions of Hillary Clinton. Why the differential treatment?
As soon as the email story broke, the NY Times led the attack. Originally it seemed that they may have wanted to get it over with in a perfunctory way and then let her candidacy continue, or that this was being done at the direction of Obama who wanted another candidate for various reasons. But now I've come to think that the first reason isn't operative (at least, not any more), and that although the second may be true, it doesn't account for the fervor of the criticism.
Perhaps part of the reason this thing has gotten bigger is that Clinton has handled it poorly. Perhaps the MSM is piling on because they thought Hillary would be better at dealing with it than she has demonstrated so far, and they're panicking because her performance means she will be a bad candidate come 2016. Or perhaps they know of other scandals, and they want her out before the revelations multiply (and end up reflecting poorly on their favorite, Obama, or on liberalism itself?) If they can't put out this fire they may want to fan the flames so that the sacrifice happens more quickly and a new and more viable candidate is chosen, and they can get credit for "objectivity" (for hurting one of their own) into the bargain.
