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Posted by Amy Miller on March 14, 2015 14 Comments
Putin spokescomrade Dmitry Peskov has the worst job in the world this weekend. Vladimir Putin hasn't been seen in public since March 5, and the public is starting to ask questions. Some of Putin's most vocal opponents are dropping off the map in the wake of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov's murder; Putin's absence has done nothing to quell the fears of critics. Others are speculating that Putin has fallen ill (or even died), claims that have been summarily rejected by Peskov and other Putin insiders:
“No need to worry, everything is all right. He has working meetings all the time, only not all of these meetings are public,” Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday in an interview with Echo of Moscow radio. He added that the president is “absolutely healthy” and that “his handshake is so strong he breaks hands with it.” Shortly before the radio interview Peskov dismissed the rumors of Putin’s possible illness in an interview with TASS. “As soon as the sun appears in spring, when the smell of spring is in the air, some people suffer from crises. … Some have hallucinations about the government dissolution and some cannot see Putin on television for several days,” he said. “We have a calm attitude to such crises and keep answering all questions in a patient manner.”
My favorite rumor so far comes from Swiss newspaper Blick. Blick contends that Putin snuck away to Switzerland to witness the birth of his love child with ex-gymnast Alina Kabaeva: [caption id="attachment_119755" align="aligncenter" width="500"]Screenshot via http://www.blick.ch/ Screenshot via Blick[/caption] The New York Post explains (in English---thanks):

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Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 14, 2015 7 Comments

and the cops are on the phone and minutes away....

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 20 Comments
The scandal swirling around Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account just keeps getting worse. Earlier this week, the press savaged the former Secretary of State at a press conference where she attempted to explain the logistics governing her private e-mail server. Then, a report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that one of Clinton's key claims---that all of her e-mails were somehow captured by the State Department---is completely baseless. Now, advocacy organization Judicial Watch has laid into the feeble argument that Hillary never used her private e-mail account to deal with classified information. They focus on a previous JW investigation showing that top State Department officials circulated sensitive and classified e-mails amongst themselves during and in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. Judicial Watch explains:
It’s hard to believe that the Secretary of State was completely out of the loop on this material, which was disseminated among her top aides as Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first diplomat to be killed overseas in decades, and three other Americans were murdered in the violent ambush.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 13, 2015 8 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....

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Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 13, 2015 62 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™.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 13 Comments
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:

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 19 Comments
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, 2015 5 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.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 18 Comments
"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, 2015 42 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.
Here's a video report from ABC News:

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 15 Comments
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

ted_kennedy_and_the_soviets-620x382 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.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 12, 2015 32 Comments
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.
I'm not entirely sure where a group of racist twenty-something idiots comes into a discussion about police officers getting shot and/or using deadly force to protect themselves, but hey, might as well drag everything into the pot while the fire's hot. MSNBC's Ed Schultz isn't helping, either. On Monday, he suggested disarming the Ferguson PD entirely, and today, he asked whether or not police really needed to be at these protests to begin with. Because they're so peaceful. No, really.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 12, 2015 51 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

This excerpt comes from a long piece in TIME:
“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:

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, 2015 3 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, 2015 5 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."
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