Feds Recommend Mandatory Psychiatric Evaluations for All Americans

oped: Just for the record Sen Ted Cruz led the fight for the 2nd amendment Feb 2013  
http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/2013/02/sen-ted-cruz-leads-fight-to-defend-2nd.html

Also read more on the 2nd amendment battle: http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=2nd+amendment

by:Suzanne Hamner 

At this point in time, the Constitution for the united States of America is very close to ruin. In some areas, the administration and Congress have already shredded much of it. All that is left is a few individual God-given unalienable rights for the government to usurp away and this nation as a free republic ceases to exist. While many citizens of this great nation seethe in anger and focus on the dog and pony show 2016 presidential candidate nominee debates by both parties, this administration is moving rapidly closer to infringing on the one right through the back door that will leave this nation's citizenry defenseless – the Second Amendment. 

With the government gaining control over the health care insurance agency, it has the power to make the rules on what is mandatory to have concerning coverage as well as what evaluations every individual is mandated to have according to the core coverage requirements. According to Infowars.com, "Next time you visit your doctor, be careful how you respond to his questions, or you may just be branded "mentally ill" and subjected to "treatment."
That is because a panel advising the Obama administration, in partnership with Big Psychiatry, wants to make doctors subject all American adults and children over age 12 to screening for alleged "mental health" disorders — particularly depression, at least to start with. Then, anyone found to harbor any alleged mental disorder, including children as young as eight, should undergo "therapy," often including powerful psychotropic medications that experts say have dubious value but often come with well-documented and highly dangerous side effects.



Remember, this will not be optional. Obamacare health plans will be forced to cover the service and pay for it. While the panel is limiting coverage to children over age 12, one can take to the bank the age requirement will go lower and lower for mental health evaluations and "behavioral health services," whether you as a parent want it or not. There will be no choice in the government's eyes – agree or face the wrath of Big Brother. "School teachers, social workers, and more are all already being enlisted in the federal government's search for supposed 'mental and behavioral health' issues — a list that is perpetually expanding as psychiatrists invent new 'illnesses'." Naturally, this could be a back door into gun control and confiscation, as well as denying future adults the right to keep and bear arms due to having a mental disorder or illness.
The American Psychiatric Association relies heavily on the DSM-V and has added new "mental health disorders" that would include American patriots, such as Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), while removing disorders such as homosexuality. This "listing" is entirely subjective and constantly expanding "as psychiatrists vote to create new ones, literally, as part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the 'Bible' of psychiatry that has been widely criticized, even by leading psychiatrists." All health care insurance plans are required to conform to the minimum standards of mandatory coverage of Obamacare. Whether you want it or not, Big Brother will subject you to a mental health evaluation as well as your children over the age of 12.

However, the ACA did leave the door open to include children under the age of 12.
The New American reports:
The latest demands come from the United States Preventive Services Task Force, or USPSTF. The influential outfit, appointed by the Obama administration's increasingly radical Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recommends various unconstitutional federal health policies for Big Brother to decree into pseudo-law via regulation.

Its latest recommendations for children and adolescents 12 and older were published earlier this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "The USPSTF recommends screening for major depressive disorder (MDD) in adolescents aged 12 to 18 years," the HHS task force said in the summary of its position. "Screening should be implemented with adequate systems in place to ensure accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, and appropriate follow-up."

The outfit also left the door open for recommending such "screening" for children under 12, too. "The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for MDD in children aged 11 years and younger," the Obama HHS panel wrote. The recommendations also call for using controversial medications such as Prozac to drug children between 12 and 17, while advocating powerful psychotropic substances such as Lexapro for children as young as eight. 


In the movie, Prozac Nation, based on the book of the same name by Elizabeth Wurtzel, "We are living in a Prozac nation – the united States of Depression." How apt and appropriate that statement will be when the "mandatory" evaluations for mental illness begin in earnest. Big Pharma and Big Brother have tag-teamed the citizens in order to produce a nation of "pill poppers" easily controlled through psychotropic medication. Big Pharma gets richer as more of the citizens are medicated and Big Brother garners the ultimate control over a zombie population.

Many may not realize that one in 10 "American school-aged boys has been labelled and drugged under the guise of 'Attention Deficit Disorder' (ADD) and 'Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder' (ADHD). Known as the "father of the diagnosis," the now deceased Dr. Leon Eisenberg admitted in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel before his death that the supposed "disease" is a "prime example of a fabricated disorder." American citizens are witness to more and more normal behaviors being listed as symptoms of "alleged "disorders, which critics claim is a troubling trend. The supposedly "independent advisory panel" wants to cast a much wider net.

"The USPSTF recommends screening for depression in the general adult population, including pregnant and postpartum women," said the outfit, which adds that its views should not be construed as the official position of the "Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality" or Obama's HHS. "Screening should be implemented with adequate systems in place to ensure accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, and appropriate follow-up."

In its "rationale" for recommending that all U.S. adults be screened for depression, the panel claims that the "illness" is "common in patients seeking care in the primary care setting." It also cites "adequate evidence" allegedly showing some "improvements" if its advice is followed.

Not surprisingly, this "panel" downplays the risks cited by The New American as well as other sources – including Big Pharma and the government. "For instance, the panel admits that antidepressants are 'associated' with harms, including an increase in suicidal behavior, an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, fetal harm, and more. But despite that, the task force 'concludes with at least moderate certainty that there is a moderate net benefit' to screening all American adults. And by all, the task force means all: 'The USPSTF recommends screening in all adults regardless of risk factors,' it said."

Those who attempted to warn the citizenry about this unconstitutional Affordable Care Act were maligned as "heartless," "uncaring," and "selfish," among more unsavory terms, because liberals accused those individuals of wanting to deny health care services to those without insurance. These individuals never stopped to truly evaluate Obamacare or review the information many gathered and presented to inform the public of the invasiveness and loss of control in an individual's health care. Their only goal was the destruction of a free nation under the guise of an egalitarian utopia.
Although, there are individuals that claim to support the Constitution who accept and applaud "mandatory" health procedures – court ordered blood draws to determine whether someone is drunk driving comes to mind, court ordered colonoscopies, and roadside strip searches. Now, it will be mandatory for adults to endure a mental health illness evaluation. If you refuse, citing individual "rights," you can be diagnosed with ODD, meaning you will become a member of the Prozac Nation. Your children will be subjected to the same, whether you agree or not. Congratulations.
The moment the government realizes individuals accept it crossing one line, the government invariably expands its authority, unlawfully, and crosses into all areas. We, the citizens of the united States, are witness to this expansion of totalitarianism.

The new mandatory evaluation will go along nicely with the "National Adult Immunization Plan" (NAIP) "to track Americans' vaccination records, wage a massive propaganda campaign to 'encourage' more inoculations, and force more controversial vaccines on adults against their will. Critics noted the agenda includes eventually imposing vaccines at gunpoint." Let that sink in for a moment. The government will impose vaccines upon you at gunpoint.

Violating and ignoring the Constitution comes at a price. The price is freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and at times, life itself. It's a high price to pay. Yet, many Americans are willing to pay that price. And, they are willing for you to pay it as well. The noose is tightening around the neck of freedom each day unconstitutional laws, such as Obamacare, and agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services are allowed to continue to exist. No authority is given to the federal government to mandate health care, mental health of its citizens or to establish unconstitutional agencies. Yet, it is being done. The threat is becoming clearer and the solution more urgent. If violations of the Constitution are allowed to continue, the united States will be the Prozac nation Elizabeth Wurtzel so declared and the united States of Depression will be the reality.

Doctors Who Discovered Cancer Enzymes in Vaccines all Found Murdered

oped:It also involves Big Pharm,FDA and the AMA  SEE: http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=cancer+chemo+radiation

by:Rory Hall  

Nagalese prevents vitamin D being produced In the body 

Not long ago, Neon Nettle reported on the epidemic of doctors being murdered, most of which were in Florida, U.S. The scientists all shared a common trait, they had all discovered that nagalase enzyme protein was being added to vaccines which were then administrated to humans.(SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO)
Nagalese is what prevents vitamin D from being produced in the body, which is the body’s main defence to naturally kill cancer cells.

According to Thebigriddle.com: Nagalase is a protein that’s also created by all cancer cells. This protein is also found in very high concentrations in autistic children. And they’re PUTTING it in our vaccines!!
This prevents the body from utilizing the Vitamin D necessary to fight cancer and prevent autism. Nagalese disables the immune system. It’s also known to cause Type 2 Diabetes. So basically…they weren’t killing these doctors because they had found the cure to cancer or were successfully treating autism… they’re killing them because these Dr’s had been researching and had the evidence that the vaccines they’re injecting our precious children with are CAUSING our current cancer and autism crisis!!
And that it’s obviously being done knowingly and on purpose! The Dr’s they killed in FL had been collaborating and were getting ready to go public with the information.

Depopulation 101..add poison to vaccines…make it law that all children must be injected to attend school. Slow kill methods. They think they’re being fair w/ their “survival of the fittest” type mentality. Only the best genes survive? These people have no souls.
Dr Ted Broer broke it on The Hagmann & Hagmann Report and it took them a whole hour just to get him on air b/c their 3 hour show was brought down and every line they tried to use kept disconnecting…and then their servers were brought down.

They asked a bunch of ppl to pray against the attack and then finally got him on a secured line..and so a full hour into the show they were finally back on the air and connected to Dr Broer and the first thing he said was “I am in no way suicidal.” He was super nervous holding onto this info…afraid he’d be taken out Hastings style before he got a chance to say it publicly. So listen to this short clip of him breaking the story.
It’s a 19 min clip but the most important info is heard within the first 10 min. It is def some of the most important news Ive ever heard. And it needs to go viral.
https://youtu.be/XYvLPCze_So

Donald Trump at Wharton ..ha The X -Files

[ Donald Trump with his father, Fred Trump, after graduating from Wharton in 1968.]

oped: Yes indeed...people need to do their homework and research candidates before carte'blanche supporting and voting...don't rely on pundits nor MSM... they have their own agendas not fair and balanced as they claim! Ha X-Files "The truth is out there"

By Matt Viser 

PHILADELPHIA — The new student arrived at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school in 1966, driving a Ford convertible and sporting a mop of blond hair as outsized as his ambitions. A junior transfer from Fordham University in the Bronx, the young man was an outsider on the Ivy League campus in Philadelphia, with few friends.

But that did not temper his swagger.
When a professor asked students in his small class why they had chosen to study real estate, the new student stood up.

“I’m going to be the king of New York real estate.”
The professor peered over his glasses and said, “What’s your name, son?”


“I am Donald Trump.”
Some of the other students rolled their eyes.
“Sit down, you [expletive],” Louis Calomaris recalled thinking, with a laugh. “That was our introduction to Donald Trump.”
The brash, blunt, and sometimes bombastic personality that has helped Trump upend the early stages of the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign — and which has been a hallmark of his business and reality TV entertainment careers — was already in full bloom during his college years, according to more than a dozen Wharton classmates interviewed by the Globe.
“I recognize this person,” said Joseph Cohen, who was in Trump’s tightknit group of real estate students. “He was certainly verbal, and unequivocal. If he had something to say, he said it. Like he says today.”

Calomaris agreed, “The same style, same outspokenness, same braggadocio. It’s quintessentially Don.”
But while Trump frequently boasts that his undergraduate degree from the elite Wharton School demonstrates that he has the brains and knowledge to lead the nation — “like, super genius stuff,’’ in his words — he appears to have left little impression on the school itself, outside a small orbit of fellow students.
His former classmates said he seemed a student who spoke up a lot but rarely shined in class, who barely participated in campus activities, shunned fraternity parties, and spent most of his spare time pursuing his dream: using his advantages as the son of a prominent New York real estate developer to get an early start on the business career that would make him very, very rich.
Unlike many of the students around him, who hoped to enrich themselves the old-fashioned way — that is, quietly — Trump had an in-your-face attitude about his quest for money from his first day on campus, said his former classmates.
“Was he a little into himself? Yeah, he was the Donald,” said William Specht. “Even then, he was a little into himself. He had the confidence.”

Yet even as he trumpets his connections to the school, he is anything but legendary on the campus. Few people there today even realize he attended and, having made no major donations to the school he and three of his children attended, there is no Trump Hall or Trump-titled anything at Penn.
“I had a really great experience. They were terrific people, a lot of smart people,” Trump said in an interview with the Globe about his college years. “One of the things it does is it gives you confidence. You’re with the smartest people, and you’re able to do very well with the smartest people. When you come out, you feel good about yourself.”
Told that the Globe had contacted a number of the nearly 300 members of his graduating class, Trump said, “I hope they said good things about me generally, huh? They should. I mean what’s not to say good about?”



Donald Trump in the living room of his penthouse apartment on New York's Upper East Side in 1976.

Forthrightness valued

Even before arriving on the leafy campus at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump had some cause for confidence. During his high school years at New York Military Academy, a boarding school for boys 60 miles north of Manhattan, he stood out as an athlete, pitching for the baseball team and playing tight end on the football team. He also played soccer on a team dominated by students from Latin America, and was voted class “Ladies Man’’ by his all-male peers.
Among his duties was storing and maintaining the M1 rifles for the cadets on his dorm floor. He was so meticulous about cleanliness that one former roommate remembers him folding his underwear into squares and stacking them neatly on the shelf.
Some of his childhood friends said Trump’s blunt speaking style may be rooted in his years at the military academy, where he was sent at age 13 after some disciplinary issues. (He punched his second-grade music teacher, he wrote in a 1987 book, because he didn’t think the teacher knew enough about music.)
“Honesty and straightforwardness was the rule of law” at the academy, said Ted Levine, one of Trump’s high school roommates who now runs a packaging and supply company in New Jersey. “It got ingrained in us that you don’t lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do . . . You just say the way it is.”

During rides home from school on a Port Authority bus, the young Donald would point out all the buildings built by his father, Fred Trump, a well-known developer who specialized in apartment complexes.
“We’d go through Queens and he’d say, ‘My dad, he built all those homes over there,’ ” said Specht, a Trump classmate in high school as well as at Wharton who went on to a career in investment banking. “He’d look out, very proud.”
Trump said in the interview that it was his having spent so much time away from home that led him not to apply to Wharton as a freshman. Instead, he spent his first two college years living at home in Queens and commuting to Fordham.
“I had very good marks. And I was a good student generally speaking,” Trump said. “But I wanted to be home for a couple of years because I was away for five years. So I wanted to spend time home, get to know my family — when you’re away, you’re away right?”

After two years at Fordham, “I got in quickly and easily” to the Wharton undergraduate program, Donald Trump said.
After two years at Fordham, “I got in quickly and easily” to the Wharton undergraduate program, Trump said. “And it’s one of the hardest schools to get into in the country — always has been.”
Around the time Trump was admitted, there were 8,000 candidates vying for 1,700 spots in the freshman class, according to school records. The process could be more difficult for transfer students like Trump. Tuition was $1,770 for the academic year.

Flipped properties in college

Trump arrived on a campus dotted with elm trees and featuring a prominent statue of Benjamin Franklin, surrounded by a combustible and violent city. The campus was gripped by anger over the Vietnam War. Trump received draft deferments while in college and, just after graduation, he was granted a medical deferment for what Trump has since said was bone spurs in his heels.
Trump said he did not participate with his fellow Penn students in antiwar demonstrations. “I wasn’t a fan of the Vietnam War, that I can tell you,” he said. “But I wasn’t a marcher.”
Trump rented an apartment close to campus in a four-story row house that a fellow tenant remembers being infested with cockroaches. The area was so run down that a burned-out car sat out front for weeks before the city finally removed it.
His senior year, Trump lived a few blocks away in an old building about to be condemned and torn down. The rooms were small, with little more than a bed, a closet, and a kitchenette with a small refrigerator and a two-burner stove. It sat across from a popular bar called the Bull and Barrel that offered hamburger specials for 20 cents.

“They weren’t great,” Trump says of his accommodations. “They were old townhouses with 12 units in each, small units.”
He drove a green Ford Fairlane convertible, and had a fondness for fried oysters from an off-campus Howard Johnson’s. He stuck out by carrying a briefcase on campus while most students toted books under their arms.
“I could tell he was different,” said Ted Pollard, who transferred to Wharton the same year as Trump and later founded a health information company. “We were all preppies in our tweed coats and polka dot ties. He was dressed up in a nice sports coat and jacket. He was just more businesslike.”
“He was cut from a different cloth, and it was quite obvious,” he added. “He was more aloof. More focused than we were . . . We were wondering what we wanted to do when we grow up. He was already there.”
Trump had one clear advantage over his peers: a financial head start from his father. With about $2 million in loans from his dad, he confirmed, he started buying up properties in Philadelphia soon after he arrived at Wharton. 

“It’s always been a natural instinct,” he said. “I would fix up houses, fix up little buildings. Fix them up and sell them, rent them and live in them, and do all sorts of things with them. Made a little money during college.”
In a review of Philadelphia property records in the 1960s, the Globe couldn’t locate any with Trump’s name, but he said that even then he used aliases to hide his involvement.
“I didn’t want people to know I was buying, because I started to develop a good reputation for being a good buyer,” he said. “Once they start knowing your name, the price goes up. So I would use corporate names or I would use different names. I developed a little reputation for making good deals and I didn’t want them to charge me. If they knew my name, they would have charged me more money. Some things never change.”
Trump said his good track record of flipping properties pleased his father.
“He was always impressed — he was a strong guy, my father — he was always impressed I never failed. I would always buy them and sell them for more than I bought them for.’’

Absent from campus life

Trump the undergraduate declined invitations to attend frat parties. He didn’t drink alcohol then, and says he still doesn’t. He did not join any extracurricular groups. The man who would later promote his image around the world did not even show up for his college yearbook photo.
In the yearbook’s “class prophecy,’’ with its predictions on where classmates would end up — gossip columnists, surgeons, Olympians, Supreme Court justices, were among the professions named — Trump isn’t mentioned.
“You know, I wasn’t Trump then, you understand?” Trump said. “I was Trump, but I wasn’t Trump.”
One reason for his low profile in campus life was his work schedule and his off-campus ambitions. “He always complained that every weekend he had to go home to New York and work like a dog for his dad. He whined about that,” said Terry Farrell, who had an introductory economics class with Trump. “Every weekend, he’d vanish . . . I felt sorry for him.”

Trump was, however, around enough to take note, like most other men on campus, of one particular student: Candice Bergen, the homecoming queen who would soon trade campus life for Hollywood glamour, before later becoming famous as TV’s Murphy Brown.
“I had seen him around campus,” Bergen recalled in a 1992 address at Penn. “He was pretty hard to miss — he wore a two-piece burgundy suit with matching burgundy patent leather boots and, a particularly nice touch, a matching burgundy limousine.’’
The Donald asked Candice out. She turned him down.
“It’s true,” Trump said in an interview.
“She was so beautiful,” he said. “She was dating guys from Paris, France, who were 35 years old, the whole thing. I did make the move. And I must say she had the good sense to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

[ Candice Bergen, then 18, posed after being named Miss University of Pennsylvania in 1963.]

Did not stand out academically

Trump did make a big impression on the small group of fellow real estate students. They describe him as cocky but fun, boastful but with a bit of tongue-in-cheek.
“He had strong opinions. He was a confident person. There were only five or six of us in the [real estate] major and a lot of us had strong opinions,” said Cohen, a sports television executive who has continued to work with Trump over the years. “The difference was he had access to real money to make his dreams come true.”

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Trump posed with his Cadillac in New York in 1976.

Trump was focused on building a real estate empire, one that would exceed the one his father had already amassed.

“He loved real estate, and loved to talk about it,” said Ted Sachs, who sat next to Trump in finance class and would drive him to HoJo’s. “And he did most of the talking.”
“But he knew a direction and I had none,” added Sachs, who is now a financial adviser working in Illinois and Florida. “He had it. That’s clear.”
Trump says he was well liked. But he himself did not think much of his peers.
“It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates,” Trump wrote in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” “I could compete with them just fine.”

But Trump was not an exceptional student. He did not graduate with honors. Some in his classes don’t recall him raising his hand all that often.
“Don was a bright guy, but I’d say a disinterested student,” said Calomaris, who now works as a restaurateur, business consultant, and professor. “What he was really interested in was how to make deals, and leverage financing. He was always looking for the quick deal, the fast kill. He looked with disdain at the grunt work.”
“Tact wasn’t his strong suit then and it isn’t now,” he added. “He was always kind of disdainful of the academic process.

“I could tell half the time he didn’t read the assignment,” he added. “He’d bluff his way through it.”
Trump says he was a good student, but he declined a request to release his transcripts — something that he called on President Obama to do in 2011 — saying he would only release his if Obama does first.
“I’d love to do it, if he does it,” Trump said. “I never understood why he didn’t do it. I actually offered him $5 million to do it, if you remember . . . He still didn’t do it.”

Donald Trump's name in the 1968 Wharton yearbook, on a page of those who were not photographed.

Trump was named entrepreneur of the year by Wharton in 1984, he was on the school’s oversight board in 1987, and his photo used to hang on a Hall of Fame wall honoring highly successful alumni (it was stolen in 1991, according to the school newspaper, and a spokesman for the school said he is not aware of any current Hall of Fame).
But there is no physical reminder on campus of Trump’s presence there, in part because he has not donated enough.
“I may at some point. I have great feeling for the school,” Trump said. “It’s something I could conceivably do. I’ve donated, but nothing very substantial.”

Poised to build an empire

On graduation day, Trump and his Wharton classmates were seated near the front of the auditorium. The commencement address was given by William S. Paley, a Wharton alum who was a pioneer at CBS in a medium that Trump would later master: television.
Trump, dressed in a black gown and yellow sash, paused with his father outside a granite building for a photo. Fred Trump is beaming, and his son would soon begin working with his father, building his own real estate empire.
Trump would attempt to become, as he said when he first arrived on campus, the next Bill Zeckendorf, a legendary Manhattan developer known for flamboyance.
“The weather was beautiful, my parents were there, and it was a nice day,” Donald Trump remembers. “You graduate from a great school. I did well. That was the beginning right? The real beginning was that day. It was terrific.”

LOL..gotta admit Marco Rubio is on a roll in Georgia~Shredding el Trumpo'

Yes indeed Marco just took away The Donald's title *Cut King*
Marco: 'The Donald is perpetuating a massive fraud'
He is so cracking me up: Yup he finally got the message 'ya can't fight a forest fire with a squirt gun' he took out the 4" fire hose and is hosing the #FatBastard good...rofl 

Oklahoma Democrats want Christian Business Owners to Wear a Scarlet Letter

By Onan Coca 

Democrats legislators in Oklahoma are tired of all this religious liberty talk, and they’re ready to fight against the 1^st Amendment.
Democrat state Rep. Emily Virgin believes that Christian businesses should be forced to post a public notice that they will be discriminating against homosexuals, if those businesses are to be allowed to claim the right to refuse service based on religious beliefs.
That’s right, if you’re a Christian businessman in Oklahoma and you don’t believe that you should be forced to participate in a gay wedding, Democrats want to force your business to post a public scarlet letter detailing your “bigoted” beliefs!

Here’s what Oklahoma’s HB 1371 says:
“Any person not wanting to participate in any of the activities set forth in subsection A of this section based on sexual orientation, gender identity or race of either party to the marriage shall post notice of such refusal in a manner clearly visible to the public in all places of business, including websites. The notice may refer to the person’s religious beliefs, but shall state specifically which couples the business does not serve by referring to a refusal based upon sexual orientation, gender identity or race.” 


Virgin introduced the measure in response to a bill that Oklahoma Republicans have pushed that would allow Christian owned businesses, to deny services that ran contrary to their religious beliefs. Oklahoma state senator Joseph Silk argues that laws protecting religious liberty have become necessary due in large part to the tremendous pressure being applied by fascist LGBT groups who are actively destroying the 1^st Amendment. “The L.G.B.T. movement is the main thing, the primary thing that’s going to be challenging religious liberties and the freedom to live out religious convictions,” Silk told the New York Times.

Folks, this is a big deal.
The right to practice your faith as you see fit (as long as you aren’t infringing on the rights of others) is the cornerstone of our nation’s stability and health. Along with that, the right to choose who we do business with and when we do business is the very foundation of free market capitalism. The moment we allow the government (or some fascist group of rabid socialists) to force us to act against our religious beliefs, or force us to work as indentured servants at the beck and call of others… that is the moment that we have LOST our nation.
Rep. Virgin tries to provide cover for her bigoted, anti-Christian bill by adding in that it protects against racism as well, but does anyone really believe that this is still a problem in Oklahoma? It’s not. If there were businesses openly discriminating against people due to racism… they’d go out of business and that is how these things should be handled, not by government coercion but by local consumers refusing to spend their dollars.

The point is this: it’s not the government’s job to create equality. It’s the government’s job to protect liberty and when the government stops doing this, as in the case with Oklahoma’s Democrats, it is the duty of the citizens to overthrow that government. Think I’m being extreme? Then you should read what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." --Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776.

That about sums it up. The people of Oklahoma now have a duty to attend to, evicting any politician who supported Rep. Virgin’s ridiculous and tyrannical bill. Get to it.

Our Ally Egypt Sends 4 Christians to Prison for Mocking Muslim Prayers!

oped: Those moderate Muslim folks sure are nice. They’re not violent or radical at all, like the terrorists we’re fighting! Well, they’re not radical until you do something they don’t like… then they get real radical, real quick.  
note: As Egypt President Mohamed Morsi issued a controversial decree Thursday, reports emerged that his Twitter account was blocking those who criticized him. 

@EgyPresidency

By Julian Robinson for MailOnline

Three Christian teenagers have been jailed for five years in Egypt after they were deemed to have mocked Muslim prayers in a video.

The Coptic Christians were sentenced for contempt of Islam by a judge in the central Egyptian province of Minya while a fourth defendant, 15, was handed a juvenile detention for an indefinite period. 

Defence lawyer Maher Naguib said the four had not intended to insult Islam in the video, but merely to mock the beheadings carried out by ISIS jihadists. 

The video was filmed on a mobile phone in January 2015 when the three teenagers, who were sentenced to five years, were aged between 15 and 17.

Their teacher who is also seen in the video has already been sentenced to three years in jail.  

The four teenagers were still free as of Thursday and Naguib said he planned to appeal the judgement.

'They have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife,' Naguib told AFP.

'The judge didn't show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment.'

In the video, one teenager can be seen kneeling on the ground and reciting Muslim prayers while others stand behind him, laughing  

Later one of them is seen making a sign with his thumb to indicate the beheading of the one who is kneeling.

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent rights group, said ahead of Thursday's judgement that it watched the video and found that the four teenagers were performing scenes 'imitating slaughter carried out by terrorist groups'. 

The Commission said in a statement that the four were detained for 45 days and subjected to 'ill-treatment' before being released pending trial.

The group warned that there was a return 'of using contempt of religion as accusations against writers and religious minorities'.

Another rights group, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said that between 2011 and 2013, 42 defendants were tried in similar cases and of them 27 were convicted. 

 

[Writer Fatima Naoot (pictured) was recently jailed for three years for insulting Islam after she criticised the slaughter of animals during a major religious festival ] 

Egypt's constitution outlaws insults against the three monotheist religions recognised by the state -- Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Copts, who comprise up to 10 percent of Egypt's 90-million population, are the Middle East's largest religious minority. They have long suffered sectarian violence including attacks on churches.

In 2014, a Coptic Christian teacher was jailed for six months after parents of her students accused her of evangelising and of insulting Islam.

In a separate case the same year, a Coptic man was sentenced to six years for insulting Islam, after posting a picture of prophet Mohammed on his Facebook page with an insulting comment.

Thursday's judgement comes a month after female writer Fatima Naoot was jailed for three years for insulting Islam after she criticised the slaughter of animals during a major religious festival.

And in December, an Egyptian court jailed controversial Muslim scholar Islam al-Behairy for one year for remarks he made on his television programme, in which he called for reforms in 'traditional Islamic discourse'.

Ok gonna be honest~I can't vote in GOP primaries

[ The Conservative Party - Strong leadership. A clear economic plan. A brighter, more secure future.]

Being that I am a registered Independent Conservative...however I mostly vote GOP in the generals...never DNC...If I am not satisfied with the GOP General candidate and my one vote is not needed to stop a DNC candidate I vote whoever my party  puts up... if any... or holds my nose as a protest vote....it now appears as if Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate. I would have a hard time holding my nose and voting for him...to be honest after doing all the research and paying attention to what he says vs what his record shows...I am not comfortable.

I have a feeling he is just another #Obama all rhetoric,hype,and slogans telling everyone what he perceives  they want to hear rather than what he will do if elected...I called Obama out 2008 after doing the research and I was correct...I knew what he would do...never fell for the I am your savior crap! I am not guilty of voting for a fake and fraud and won't be again... Y'all do what ya want..I remain skeptical for good reason...not caught up in the moment...ya would think others learned the lesson 2008 2012 just *SMH*


Shania Twain sang it Best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqFLXayD6e8

The candidates we deserve

by Ben Crystal 

All right, kids. Before we go a step further down the rabbit hole, I just have to ask: Are we really doing this?
With 330 million Americans wandering about our vast fruited plain, at least 1 million or 2 million of whom might not be a complete presidential catastrophe, are we really going to choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the position of Leader of the Free(ish) World?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not necessarily averse to the idea. After all, eight years of President Barack Obama has me pretty well inured to the idea that the Oval Office could double for the main stage at the “Ha Ha Hut.” The Prince of Grant Park, propelled by unshakable belief in the teaching of such worthies as Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Karl Marx, has bumbled from scandal to scandal like an amateur Benny Hill. In fact, the only aspects of his tenure that have been less ridiculous than his ham-fisted attempts at dictatorin’ have been his marble-mouthed excuses therefore.

So maybe it’s appropriate that the two people vying for the title are likely to be:

1. A loud-mouthed billionaire who has been bankrupt nearly as often as he’s been a Democrat; and campaigns – and lives – as if his entire existence is a reality TV show starring himself.
2. A possibly-brain-damaged sociopath who has turned being married to an alleged rapist into an enormous amount of power and influence which she has neither earned nor shown any aptitude for handling in a positive manner.      

At least Donald Trump’s ascendancy is entertaining. Say what you want about the man’s variable politics, apparent ignorance of serious governmental matters and dalliances with both the Clintons and the anti-life abortion movement, he is the living embodiment of Joseph de Maistre’s prescient axiom. An America that allows the constitutional excesses of the Obama administration, the fiscal excesses of the Bush administration and the everything excesses of the Clinton administration deserves the personal excesses of a guy who once hawked bottled water with his own picture on the label.

Under any other circumstances, Trump might be viewed as a brilliant buffoon; a fame-seeking savant who has erected a gaudy glass tower of a life (with his own name in lights, of course) through force of shameless will. As a presidential candidate, he’s a retort to the open warfare Obama and the political elite have waged on the rest us. They built a wall around Obama, deflecting every criticism of his disgraces with coded racial invective and outright dishonesty. In their zeal, they also built a candidate who is seemingly immune to their tactics.
Trump has lived at the center of a tabloid tornado for nearly 40 years. Stand or fall, succeed or fail, Trump has done it all by the credo that all publicity is good publicity. He hosted the Clintons at one of his weddings. He played a part in a long-running WWE storyline. He was even a Democrat. He’s about to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States. And he doesn’t care how you feel about that.

So what if a President Trump makes the rest of the world treat us like we’re their weird cousin? The rest of the world is already looking at us funny. Our Nobel Prize-winning president has spent seven years accusing law-abiding Americans being racist religious wacko terrorists, while sending their hard-earned money to actual racist religious wacko terrorists. That created a world in which we’re literally paying people to hate us. At least Trump won’t pretend to care what the rest of the world thinks when he tells them to get bent.
However, that could create a world in which America ends up more isolated than Kim Jong Un at NBA tryouts. And this is where I get hung up on Trump. While I like the idea of a president who is unapologetically brash, I’m not wild about the idea of a president who is unapologetically boorish. It’s a line Trump tends to see only in the rear view mirror. We need a thoroughbred. Trump often appears to be only the south end of the horse.

Of course, the only alternative the two major parties are offering is a woman who veers between being foggier than a retired bare-knuckles prizefighter and being meaner than the guy wearing the hockey mask in a teenage slasher flick.
On the plus side, she might not be criminally responsible for national security leaks which led directly to multiple murders. Unfortunately, that would require her being either one more bump on the head from drooling in her pudding, or as far behind the curve as a Victrola salesman in an Apple store.
She earned obscenely heavy stacks of cash from the fattest cats at Goldman Sachs and the bankster class, but somehow embarked on her latest presidential journey “dead broke.” That would require her being either greedier than George Soros, or as fiscally irresponsible as Kanye West.

After two and a half centuries of America, we’re down to a self-obsessed publicity hound who used to be a Democrat, or a self-important power hound who used to be a Republican. Neither one would be the first choice on any sane person’s presidential ballot. We’re probably not going to get the government we want. But don’t we deserve better?

Chomsky: Trump’s success signals ‘breakdown of society’

by Sam Rolley 
Famed linguist, MIT professor and polemicist Noam Chomsky believes that Donald Trump’s success in the presidential primary is a sign that Americans feel hopeless and society is falling apart.
Chomsky made the remarks in an interview with AlterNet’s Aaron Williams.
Williams asked Chomsky to explain his opinions on the “surprising progress of Donald Trump?”
“Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period,” Chonsky replied. “People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence.”

The longtime political observer went on to compare the current national situation to another period in the country’s history.
“It’s interesting to compare the situation in the ‘30s, which I’m old enough to remember,” he said. “Objectively, poverty and suffering were far greater. But even among poor working people and the unemployed, there was a sense of hope that is lacking now, in large part because of the growth of a militant labor movement and also the existence of political organizations outside the mainstream.”
Asked who he thought would win the election, Chomsky said, “I can express hopes and fears, but not predictions.”
 

All politics is staged ‘reality’

by Bob Livingston 

Politics is not what the people assume it to be.
American voters these days are actively working to elect someone who will right the sinking ship of state. They go to the polls in good faith. They vote in good faith. They caucus and they volunteer to work for campaigns in good faith.
But they believe a lie.
Politics is staged. It’s not reality. To the establishment, politics is both a game and a livelihood. Politicians, consultants, pollsters and campaign operatives are in the game for the money and power and prestige. They have no core values. This applies to the political hacks, especially, who will go from one politician to the next at the drop of a hat.

Just watch, as one candidate after the other drops out, how the consulting-class political operatives who worked to smear one candidate on behalf another jump to the team of the candidate they were smearing just the week before.
The voting people watch town hall events and what passes today for political debates and see crowds and hear cheers, or alternatively, boos, and presume the crowds are passionate supporters or detractors, reacting based on their political beliefs.
It’s all fake. Talent agencies and acting pools supply people for the crowds based on whatever criteria is needed to drive a particular narrative. Need a Hispanic to agitate and make this candidate look like he hates brown people? There’s an ad for that, and an actor to fill the role. Need a black person or two in order to dilute a white crowd and make that candidate look like a champion for black causes – whatever those are? The talent pool has some willing black actors on hand.

A company called Crowds on Demand  is one such “talent agency.” Others include Crowds for Rent and Extra Mile Casting. They provide actors with assignments and scripts and have been doing so for several years.
“I have worked with dozens of campaigns for state officials, and 2016 presidential candidates,” Crowds on Demand CEO Adam Swart told NBC4, adding that he won’t name any names. “I can’t go in to (sic) detail… if I did, nobody would hire us.”
Beyond just paying people to show up, Swart told NBC Los Angeles that sometimes clients want more. “Yes, I have scripted it on some occasions,” he said.

Last year, Personal Liberty’s Sam Rolley interviewed Swart. Swart admitted:

Yes, we do designate specific crowd members to approach members of the press and of course we tell them what to say. Sometimes it’s just a list of talking points, while some campaigns give us an exact script. More often than not, they want a specific type of person to approach the press to get a certain point across.

Read the story, “For some campaigns, political rallies are just commercials… complete with paid actors,” for the whole interview and more on staged politics.
And here are copies of letters from one talent agency looking for actors for a “smear video against Donald Trump.”

Americans are the most propagandized people in the world. Most have no clue.
And it’s not just in political races. The crowds that have been outside fast food restaurants “protesting” for a higher minimum wage were mostly paid actors and some out-of-work union thugs, not real fast food workers. This is true of most “spontaneous” protests these days. It’s all astroturf lobbying.
Donald Trump  used fake crowds at his campaign launch, though  he doesn’t need them now. The “reality TV” star has plenty of his own fans. Fitting, given America’s current “reality TV” culture.
Until people wake up and quit providing “legitimacy” to this failed system of American politics, nothing will change. I have told you before that politicians and their hack handlers are wordsmiths and master persuaders. It’s all salesmanship 101 (Trump is a master salesman), and the American people fall for it hook, line and sinker.

Whoever wins, you lose. Politicians are politicians under any brand. They are paid and pensioned by Washington. Where do you think that their loyalties lie?

Donald Trump goes on a tirade about V.Fox dropping the F bomb #GOPdebate

GOPDebate...Texas
Wow hypocrisy much? I am surprised know one including the media caught this...oh well I suppose they were caught up in the moment and too busy cheering their choice on!

Donald Trump had a four-letter word fest at campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  

'You can tell them to go f--- themselves, because they let you down and they left,' Trump said, directing his ire at American companies that relocated overseas. 

'We're going to knock the s--- out of ISIS,' Trump said at another point. 

And encouraging New Hampshire voters to get to the polls on Tuesday for the country's first primary, Trump dropped another swear word. 

'I don't give a damn, you've got to get out of bed,' he said. 

He also called Ted Cruz a pussy...

The cold hard truth about the Benghazi "StandDownOrder"

The order came down from the Commander in Chief..via the State Department input and e-mails!

Stephen King, Ted Cruz, John Quincy Adams, and John Jay

by Gary DeMar
Horror author Stephen King said that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is “very scary” because he “is a fundamentalist Christian.” He went on to say in an interview with the Daily Beast:

“He’s very scary. I actually think Trump, in the end, would be more electable than Cruz because Cruz is a fundamentalist Christian and it would almost be like electing the analog of an Imam — someone whose first guiding principle would be the scripture rather than the Constitution.”

  <~
oped:comment
 [Yup this sums up Stephen Kings state of mind...needs to keep his day job and stay out of politics..#PERIOD ]

 Is there any evidence in Cruz’s political career that he has in any way acted like an Islamic Imam? He argued before the Supreme Court nine times. Did he argue like an Imam? On what basis did Cruz make his arguments? The Constitution of the United States.
During a Republican debate, Cruz said the following: “I’ve spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Is there any indication that Cruz acted like an Islamic Imam at Harvard? Liberal Alan Dershowitz never mentions it. Dershowitz said the following to CNN’s Piers Morgan in 2013:

“One of the sharpest students I had . . . I’ve had 10,000 students over my 50 years at Harvard . . . he has to qualify among the brightest of the students.”

Many of our nation’s earliest founders were Christians. I suspect that Stephen King would have disparaged them as well except for the fact that they, like Cruz and other politicians who are Christians, understood the role of the Christian religion in political life and how it serves as a foundation for a Constitution that has no greater ultimate authority than “We the people.”
Consider former President John Quincy Adams and Supreme Court Justice John Jay.

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)
Sixth President of the United States
Member and Vice President of the American Bible Society

“The hope of a Christian is inseparable from his faith. Whoever believes in the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, must hope that the religion of Jesus shall prevail throughout the earth. Never since the foundation of the world have the prospects of mankind been more encouraging to that hope than they appear to be at the present time. And may the associated distribution of the Bible proceed and prosper, till the Lord shall have made “bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”¹

 Joel McDurmon writes that “in 1839, in a speech to the New York Historical Society on the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, then representing Massachusetts’s 12th district in Congress, drew from the biblical tradition of the Jubilee to combine an ideological history of the formation of the United States with a stylized biography of our first President under the Constitution.”
Two years before, Adams wrote the following:

“Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon the earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity, and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfilment of the prophecies, announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Savior and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets six hundred years before?”² 


There was a time in his political career when Adams put the Christian religion above the Constitution, and for a very good and appropriate reason:

“Nicknamed ‘The Hell-Hound of Slavery’ for relentlessly speaking out against slavery, John Quincy Adams single-handedly led the fight to lift the gag rule that prohibited discussion of slavery on the House floor.
“In 1841, John Qunicy Adams defended 53 Africans accused of mutiny aboard the slave ship Amistad. He won their case before the Supreme Court, giving them back their freedom, stating: ‘The moment you come to the Declaration of Independence, that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is decided. I ask nothing more in behalf of these unfortunate men than this Declaration.’
“African slaves brought to America were purchased at Muslim slave markets, where over Islam’s centuries of history an estimated 180 million were enslaved.”³

And what is the source of those rights? They are, as the Declaration of Independence states, an endowment from the Creator, a point not made directly in the Constitution but indirectly in the closing section just above the signature of George Washington.


John Jay, Appointed by George Washington as the First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

John Jay (1745-1829)
First Chief Justice of the United States 

“Almost all nations have peace or war at the will and pleasure of rulers whom they do not elect, and who are not always wise or virtuous. Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” – John Jay, First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (Letter to John Murray (October 12, 1816), published in William Jay, The Life of John Jay: With Selections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 2 vols. (1833), 2:376.)

In a letter to John Bristed dated April 23, 1811, John Jay wrote the following about a conversation he had with an outspoken atheist:

“He . . . very abruptly remarked that there was no God, and he hoped the time would come when there would be no religion in the world. I very concisely remarked that if there was no God there could be no moral obligations, and I did not see how society could subsist without them. He did not hesitate to admit, that if there was no God, there could be no moral obligation, but insisted that they were not necessary, for that society would find a substitute for them in enlightened self-interest.”

Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Hugo Chavez considered themselves to be acting in terms of “enlightened self-interest.” On what basis does a society determine what constitutes the right kind of self-interest in the era of Darwin?

Kremlin In Turmoil After Trump Letter To Putin Suggests...

 oped: Interesting read...not sure about it though, maybe Donald Trump and or Vlad Putin can validate the authenticity of this report!

 By: Sorcha Faal  

A sobering confidential report released in the Kremlin today by the Office of the President (OP) shows that Russia’s top leadership is currently in turmoil after having received from US presidential candidate Donald Trump a private letter addressed to President Putin wherein this American billionaire appears to have predicted yesterday’s death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and which further suggests that this death may have possibly been a politically motivated murder. 


According to this report, on 12 February, the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, located in New York City, received a “delivered by hand” “communication package” from The Trump Organization that contained a private letter from Donald Trump to President Putin and requested its immediate “secure transmission” to Russia’s leader in Moscow.  
Though having never met Donald Trump, this report says, President Putin had previously praised this American billionaire by calling him “bright and talented” due to Trump’s apparent distaste for further involving the United State in wars around the world—and by Trump’s knowing, like all top global business titans do, the correct “protocol/procedure” for sending direct secure communications to the Kremlin, his letter to President Putin was sent. 



The main focus of Donald Trump’s letter to President Putin, this report details, were his concerns relating to the then presently ongoing 12 February Military-Industrial Commission meeting being held in the Kremlin reviewing the 2015 defence procurement programme results and examining the current and future outlook for the Federation’s defence industry’s development—a rather ordinary meeting that was then pushed into global prominence after Prime Minister Medevdev, while speaking to reporters in Germany just an hour before this meeting started, warned that world powers must force all sides to sit down at the negotiating table and “not start yet another war on Earth.” 



With the Western propaganda media then proclaiming that Prime Medvedev was threatening World War III, this report continues, Donald Trump in his letter to President Putin “appealed for calm” from Russia’s leadership and explained in detail his personal views on the current US presidential race that he foresees himself winning—and upon his becoming President, he told President Putin, it would user in a new era of “peace and prosperity” for both Russia and America. 



However, this report grimly notes, while explaining his private analysis to President Putin “showing/proving” that he, Trump, would become the next American President, he further expressed his “grave concerns” regarding the present US government structure, and the Bush Family specifically, who he warned may attempt to harm him, or other supporters of his, as the reality of his winning became fact.
While this report does note that Donald Trump in the past has exhibited “controversial/conspiratorial” tendencies (such as his “birther” stance that President Obama is not an American citizen), his argument to President Putin outlining his “grave concerns” in this letter do deserve to be further examined.
Particularly, this report says, was Donald Trump’s stating in this letter that his “main adversary”, Jeb Bush, comes from a family whose wealth was made prior to and during World War II when their families patriarch, Prescott Bush, colluded in the financing of the German Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler.  





Adolph Hitler (left) and Prescott Bush (right) 





From the wealth the Bush Family acquired from financing Hitler, this report continues, Donald Trump in his letter further noted that Prescott Bush’s son, George H.W. Bush, rose through the ranks of America’s secret elite families via his association with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—and that George H. W. Bush was directly involved, if not the leader of, the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. 




Even worse, this report says, Donald Trump in his letter further states that the reward given to George H. W. Bush for masterminding the assassination of President Kennedy was the directorship of the CIA, in 1976, by President Gerald Ford—who himself was one of the main conspirators covering up the assassination of President Kennedy in what is now known as the Warren Commission Report.
Once in control of the CIA, this report continues, Donald Trump in his letter then states that George H.W. Bush helped in the establishment of the offshore Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that managed the finances of America’s blackest operations—including the funding of Osama bin Laden and the bin Laden Families payment of millions of dollars directly to the Bush Family.  




After becoming even more wealthy due to the millions of dollars given to him by the bin Laden Family, Donald Trump’s letter to President Putin further details, George H.W. Bush, in 1980, attempted to become US President but was defeated by Ronald Reagan—but who barley three months after taking office, in March, 1981, President Reagan was nearly assassinated when he was shot by the mentally ill son, John Hinckley, of George H.W. Bush’s former business partner.   

 

Though the accumulated prima facie [based on the first impression] evidence against the Bush Family generating the “grave concerns” Donald Trump has that his life may be in danger from them, this report says, his ending of this letter to President Putin is what has become concerning after he, Trump, stated: “I can promise you this, I will NEVER hold a meeting with you in Texas, neither one of us might not come out alive!”
To if Donald Trump in making this statement to President Putin was intending to be “darkly humorous”, this report concludes, isn’t fully known until further clarification can be made—but what is known is that in less than 24 hours after President Putin’s receipt of Trump’s letter, the US presidential race was thrown into chaos and confusion after the sudden and unexpected death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia…in Texas.    




Read More: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/

Fast and Furious Court Victory for Judicial Watch

By Tom Fitton 
This is an important story about Judicial Watch’s complicated and complex investigation into the Obama administration’s deadly Operation Fast and Furious scandal.  And this is one story that should be shared far and wide.
Earlier this week Judicial Watch was pleased to announce that we scored a victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit regarding a September 5, 2013, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for all records of communications between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on settlement discussions in the Committee’s 2012 contempt of Congress lawsuit against former Attorney General Eric Holder. The contempt citation stemmed from Holder’s refusal to turn over documents to Congress related to the Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal.  The appeals court decision was issued last week, on February 12.

On June 28, 2012, Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives over his refusal to turn over records explaining why the Obama administration may have lied to Congress and refused for months to disclose the truth about the gunrunning operation in which the Obama administration allowed weapons to “walk” across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, directly resulting in the death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and countless Mexican citizens.  The House vote against Holder marked the first time in U.S. history that a sitting Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress.
A week before the contempt finding, to protect Holder from criminal prosecution and stave off the contempt vote, President Obama asserted executive privilege over the Fast and Furious records that the House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed eight months earlier.

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 12, 2012, for all of the records the Obama White House was withholding from the House of Representatives under its June 20, 2012, executive privilege claims.  The House had been separately litigating to obtain the records before U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson.  We figured, correctly it turns out, we’d have better success in court than the hapless Congress.
Initially, the House lawsuit stalled our litigation.  On February 15, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Bates stayed the Judicial Watch case, in part to allow ongoing settlement discussions between the DOJ and the House Committee to continue.

Judicial Watch was skeptical that the “settlement discussions” were serious and that they were merely an excuse to keep the records secret to protect Holder and the Obama administration from any Fast and Furious fallout.  Judicial Watch sought records about the alleged settlement talks and sued in federal court for them in September 2013.  As last week’s appellate decision details, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that a statement Judge Jackson made in the House lawsuit was a lawful reason to withhold the documents from the public:

“I don’t know what you said. I don’t want to know.” – was “an explicit statement from Judge Jackson instructing the parties to keep the substance of their settlement discussions private,” so “there can be no doubt that there was a valid court-imposed restriction prohibiting disclosure.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that Judge Leon erred in concluding that Judge Jackson’s comment – about not wanting to know about the settlement – should be construed as an order to seal the records requested by Judicial Watch:

“[T]here is no extrinsic evidence that was what the judge intended; indeed, that concern is nowhere mentioned in the record in this case, and it is equally plausible that Judge Jackson wanted simply to preserve her objectivity in case she ultimately were to preside over a trial. Nor has the Department pointed to extrinsic evidence, such as information that the district court customarily protects the confidentiality of settlement discussions before a case is referred to mediation, that supports its preferred reading.
“Accordingly, the intended effect of Judge Jackson’s order is ambiguous. An ambiguous court order does not protect a record from disclosure pursuant to the FOIA.”

 The appeals court directed the issue be taken up again by the lower courts:

“At oral argument, Judicial Watch raised no objection to our remanding the case for clarification and acknowledged that Judge Jackson’s explanation would be dispositive.  Accordingly, we vacate the judgement for the district court and remand this matter to Judge Leon in order to give the Department an opportunity to seek clarification from Judge Jackson regarding the intended effect and scope of her order.”

The “mediation” and the House effort to obtain the Fast and Furious documents went nowhere until after Judge Bates in the Judicial Watch litigation ruled that the Obama Justice Department had to disclose directly to Judicial Watch information that Congress was seeking.
After a lengthy 16-month delay of its lawsuit because of this “mediation,” Judicial Watch finally obtained a July 18, 2014, ruling from Judge John D. Bates that lifted a stay of our open records lawsuit and ordered the production of a Vaughn index by October 1, 2014.  Judge Bates noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” President Obama’s unprecedented executive privilege claims in the Fast and Furious matter.  Typically, a Vaughn index must: (1) identify each record withheld; (2) state the statutory exemption claimed; and (3) explain how disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption.

On September 9, 2014, Judge Jackson, citing Judicial Watch’s separate success, ordered the Justice Department to produce information to Congress by November 3, 2014.
On September 23, Judge Bates then denied the DOJ’s request that it be given more than a month, until November 3, to produce the Vaughn index.  As Judge Bates noted: “at best, it means the Department has been slow to react to this Court’s previous [July 18, 2014] Order.  At worst, it means the Department has ignored that Order until now.”
Holder announced his resignation two days after Judge Bates denied a Justice Department request it be given over an extra month to produce the Fast and Furious information.  JW took due credit for forcing Holder out of office, noting it was “no coincidence that Holder’s resignation comes on the heels of another court ruling that the Justice Department must finally cough up information about how Holder’s Justice Department apparently lied to Congress and the American people about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, for which Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives.”

I hope the latest Judicial Watch court victory over the Obama gang in the Fast and Furious scandal is some solace to the families of Brian Terry and the families of countless other Fast and Furious victims.  The body count, thanks to Barack Obama’s Fast and Furious gunrunning operation, will only rise over time – so every bit of accountability Judicial Watch can claw from the courts is well worth the effort.
You can see how this latest court victory was the result of a remarkable and tenacious effort by our legal and investigative teams.  And the appellate ruling is one of a string of victories.
Judicial Watch’s FOIA litigation also forced President Obama to retreat from his abusive assertions of executive privilege.  (It probably won’t surprise you to learn that separate litigation by the House for the Fast and Furious documents continues, with Judge Jackson ruling last month against Obama’s assertions of executive privilege.)

In 2011, then-Attorney General Holder admitted that guns from the Fast and Furious scandal are expected to be used in criminal activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years to come.
Holder was right on that, at least.  In 2014, Judicial Watch announced that, based upon information uncovered through a public records lawsuit, the U.S. Congress confirmed that an AK-47 rifle was used in a July 29, 2013, gang-style assault on an apartment building that left two people wounded.  Judicial Watch litigation also obtained crime scene photos of the Phoenix attack that raised new cover-up questions.  Despite the fact that the crime scene photos clearly revealed a serial number that shows that the AK-47 used in the commission of the crime was a Fast and Furious weapon, the City of Phoenix and Department of Justice failed to turn over the incriminating photos to Congress, despite longstanding requests for such information.  According to Judicial Watch sources, investigators at the scene and subsequently knew that the AK-47 was a Fast and Furious weapon.

Just last month, a Fast and Furious weapon was found at the hideout of infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.  The .50 caliber rifle reportedly is capable of taking out a car or a helicopter.
This decrepit city may yawn at the deaths of Brian Terry and myriad other innocents (here and in Mexico) caused by this administration’s Fast and Furious insanity, but Judicial Watch is still on the case, our litigation will continue and I tell you that we’re still investigating new leads on the issue.