The Obama Administration’s Homeland Security Hypocrisy

My article from the July 15, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

The Obama Administration’s Homeland Security Hypocrisy

By Matthew Vadum

After years of working hard to comfort America’s terrorist enemies and erase U.S. borders, the nation’s perpetually embattled attorney general is suddenly concerned that Middle Eastern jihadists are working together to create undetectable explosives that could be used to blow up U.S. airliners.

Intelligence reports suggest Islamic terrorists in Yemen and Syria have joined forces to make the stealthy bombs and this development is “more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general,” Eric Holder said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The collaboration between Islamist militants in the two Muslim countries is a “deadly combination” of those who have technical skills and “people who have this kind of fervor to give their lives in support of a cause that is directed at the United States and directed at its allies.”

“It’s something that gives us really extreme, extreme concern,” Holder said.

Holder’s comments come as the U.S.Department of Homeland Security announced it was ratcheting up security measures at international airports. Individuals will now be made to demonstrate that their electronic devices such as cellphones and laptop computers are not bombs by turning them on at security checkpoints.

Such measures are “prudent steps that are necessary to protect the flying public,” Holder said.

Yet while Holder pretends to be a responsible adult, at the same time evidence has surfaced that security measures have been all but suspended at U.S. airports for newly arrived illegal immigrants in the southern states.

Breitbart Texas reports that illegals are being allowed to board commercial airliners without valid ID. “The aliens who are getting released on their own recognizance are being allowed to board and travel commercial airliners by simply showing their Notice to Appear forms,” said Hector Garza, a spokesman for Local 2455 of the National Border Patrol Council. (NBPC is the labor union representing about 17,000 Border Patrol agents and support personnel assigned to that law enforcement organization.)

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

My article from the July 11, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

By Matthew Vadum

Amidst internal dissent, George Soros’s shadowy political funding powerhouse is planning to execute a $200 million fundraising campaign this election cycle in order to benefit key groups pushing for a permanent radical left-wing Democrat majority.

The billionaire members of the elite fundraising empire known as the Democracy Alliance have reportedly funneled $500 million or more into leftist and pro-Democrat organizations. The goal of the Alliance is to foster a permanent political infrastructure of left-wing nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups.

Among the groups benefiting from the Alliance’s largesse are the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, America Votes, and Organizing for Action (an outfit that grew out of the Obama campaign and used to be known as Organizing for America).

Much of the money being spent by groups that enjoy support from the Democracy Alliance is being devoted to class warfare and the vilification of right-leaning billionaires Charles and David Koch in order to distract from President Obama’s failed policies. Members of the Alliance are “obsessed with” the Kochs’ funding network, according to Politico‘s Ken Vogel.

“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages [sic] than in recent election cycles,” according to a 62-page briefing book Democracy Alliance donors received before the annual spring of the group at Chicago’s luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel.

“The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine,” Vogel writes, “that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.”

As Vogel reports, the Democracy Alliance is embracing a series of projects its leadership believes help to advance the leftist cause.

According to internal documents, at the Chicago meeting the Alliance recommended increasing annual funding of the alleged “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America from last year’s level of $2.4 million to $3 million in order to back the group’s “Metis” software for “tracking conservative smears.”

The Alliance also supports training for “acts of civil disobedience” by groups such as the New Organizing Institute, and funding for the Progressive Leaders Network, which has been described as the left-wing counterpart to the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, which writes model legislation that it promotes in state legislatures, suffered mightily in past years as a result of false accusations of racism that the Van Jones-founded group Color of Change level at it based on ALEC’s previous support for voter ID laws.

Supreme Court: Obama is Out of Order

My article from the July 3, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Supreme Court: Obama is Out of Order

By Matthew Vadum

The Supreme Court has wrapped up its 2013-2014 term by handing stinging defeats to the increasingly unpopular President Obama.

Doing its job for a change, the high court reined in the power of the Executive Branch of the federal government, striking down a forced unionization scheme, an abortifacient mandate, and improper recess appointments. The Court also rejected the Obama administration’s contention that police be allowed to search Americans’ cellphones without warrants.

In the nearly five and a half years Obama has been president, the Supreme Court has now ruled against the government 9-0 an astonishing 20 times, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) points out. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton lost on unanimous votes 15 times and 23 times, during their respective eight years in the Oval Office.

This means that as measured by judicial losses, the Obama administration is on track to surpass its two immediate predecessors.

“The importance of the unanimous cases is that you can’t say, ‘Well, there are five Republican appointees on the court and four Democrats,’” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.

“These cases where they haven’t gotten the votes of either of the two Obama nominees means the arguments being presented by the Justice Department to the court are just out of left field,” he said.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were appointed by Obama. Kagan served as Obama’s solicitor general, arguing cases before the Supreme Court.

In a ruling that has sent shock waves through Big Labor, the Supreme Court struck down a scam that was being run by the grifters at the president’s favorite labor union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The Court ruled 5-4 in Harris v. Quinn (full text of decision) that SEIU cannot compel people who care for their loved ones to become union members. Nor can SEIU deduct member dues from the government checks of the people for whom they care.

Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness

My article from the June 27, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness

By Matthew Vadum

In a humiliating rebuke to President Obama, the Supreme Court affirmed in a labor relations case yesterday that there continue to be constitutionally prescribed limits to the powers of the nation’s Chief Executive.

The Court invalidated three recess appointments the president made in an attempt to unconstitutionally manipulate federal labor relations policy.

Justices held unanimously in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning Thursday that Obama overreached on Jan. 4, 2012 when he recess-appointed three members to the NLRB without bothering to wait for the U.S. Senate to recess. Obama’s goal was to pack the under-staffed NLRB with likeminded leftists and give the board the quorum it previously lacked to conduct official business.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lauded the Court’s clampdown on “President Obama’s unlawful abuse of the president’s recess appointments power.”

“This marks the 12th time since January 2012 that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s calls for greater federal executive power,” Cruz said.

A delighted Michael Savage said on his radio show: “America just won a 9-to-0 victory over an emerging dictatorship.” (The full opinion is available at the Supreme Court’s website.)

In this post-constitutional era in which the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the nonsensical ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, the vile pro-Obamacare decision that has been aptly compared to an infamous slavery-reinforcing ruling that helped to precipitate civil war, it remains to be seen what, if any, other limits to governmental power the Court will see fit to recognize. Ben Shapiro correctly characterized the tortuously reasoned Obamacare decision as “the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings.”

The lawsuit disposed of yesterday was brought by Noel Canning of Washington state, the owner of a soft drink bottling and distribution company who was displeased by a ruling the board made against him after its quorum was restored by the purported recess appointments. The NLRB found that Canning’s firm engaged in unfair labor practices by declining to sign a collective bargaining agreement. Canning argued the board had no legal authority to render the decision because the president’s recess appointments, made when the U.S. Senate did not consider itself to be in recess, were improper.

The Mounting Proof of an IRS Cover-Up

My article from the June 25, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

The Mounting Proof of an IRS Cover-Up

By Matthew Vadum

More proof the Obama administration is covering up the political persecution it inflicted on its conservative political enemies through the Internal Revenue Service emerged yesterday as a federal official accused the White House of breaking the law by hiding emails.

Whenever the records, including emails, of federal agencies are destroyed — whether intentional or inadvertent — the law requires that the National Archives be notified. But that did not happen when the computer hard drives of a former IRS official and six of her IRS subordinates allegedly crashed in 2011, destroying records of emails now at the heart of a congressional corruption probe.

“They did not follow the law,” Archivist of the United States David Ferriero said of the IRS during testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

It has also been revealed that the IRS suspiciously backed out of a circa 2005 contract with an email storage contractor named Sonasoft mere weeks after Lerner reported losing personal files and before other IRS officials allegedly experienced hard drive crashes as the Tea Party-targeting investigations got underway.

As Investor’s Business Daily explains,

Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.
Lerner’s computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS concealed from the American public and congressional investigators for two years.
This event, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and recycled, occurred just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.

Sonasoft runs ads stating the company provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” In a 2009 tweet it bragged: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Why not — indeed.

Under hyper-partisan, left-wing Democrat Lois Lerner, the tax-exempt organizations branch singled out for harassment the heroic Catherine Engelbrecht, leader of the Houston-based good government group True the Vote. Earlier this year the IRS revoked the charitable status of Manassas, Va.-based Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, because it disseminated criticism of Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry a decade ago. In recent years the federal agency also subjected conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to heightened scrutiny, harassment, and extended processing delays that may have hindered their activities during the previous election cycle.

It is the latest outrage from the Obama administration which has been on a vindictive rampage in recent years, using the feared tax collection agency to vex and annoy its political enemies, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement.

Republicans say the White House has been less than helpful in efforts to investigate the IRS scandal. “They haven’t done a damn thing to get to the truth of what happened,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said yesterday.

The hearing yesterday followed a previous hearing the night before at which lawmakers unloaded on the increasingly arrogant IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, questioning him aggressively. The normally mild-mannered Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) excoriated Koskinen for his bad attitude in testifying before the congressional panel. On Friday Koskinen set the stage for conflict. He angered lawmakers when he told them at that hearing that the IRS had nothing to apologize for in the missing Lerner emails scandal.

Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Koskinen a Monday hearing: “We have a problem with you and you have a problem with credibility.”

At a hearing yesterday, Koskinen told Issa that he had honored his vow to the panel to give it all of Lerner’s emails, adding it is impossible to recover the emails lost in 2011.

“If you have a magical way for me to do that, I’d be happy to hear about it,” a sarcastic Koskinen told Issa.

“I’ve lost my patience with you,” Issa shot back.

The IRS’s ‘Lost’ Email Deception

My article from the June 20, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

The IRS’s ‘Lost’ Email Deception

By Matthew Vadum

Emails from disgraced former IRS tax-exempt division chief Lois Lerner that could throw light on the Obama administration’s thuggish crackdown on conservative nonprofit groups have been sucked into an electronic black hole, IRS officials now claim.

It is the latest outrage from the Obama administration which has been on a vindictive rampage in recent years, using the feared tax collection agency to vex and persecute its political enemies, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement.

Under hyper-partisan, left-wing Democrat Lois Lerner, the tax-exempt organizations branch singled out for harassment the heroic Catherine Engelbrecht, leader of the Houston-based good government group True the Vote. Earlier this year the IRS revoked the charitable status of Manassas, Va.-based Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, a conservative nonprofit group, because it disseminated old statements critical of Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry a decade ago.

Although President Obama claimed earlier this year that there has not been even “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS under his watch, it is clear that “the dog ate my homework,” is becoming the excuse of choice for his lawless administration.

But in March the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee published an in-depth report detailing IRS targeting of right-of-center 501c4 nonprofit advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. (The full report is available in PDF form at the committee’s website.) Congressional investigators determined that Lerner orchestrated an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation.

As political pressure builds on Capitol Hill, it can finally be revealed that a mysterious, politically progressive electromagnetic pulse may have hit the hard drives of Lerner and six of her IRS underlings. Obama officials now claim the emails of all seven government employees to outside organizations and agencies including the White House have been consigned to oblivion.

Benghazi ‘Suspect’ Captured

My article from the June 18, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Benghazi ‘Suspect’ Captured

By Matthew Vadum

A man the Obama administration claims orchestrated the deadly attack on the American diplomatic complex in Benghazi, Libya, on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities is now in U.S. custody.

This means that — abracadabra! — a suspect is in U.S. custody even before anyone knew there was a suspect. After all, it was supposed to be a video that no one saw that mocked the Islamic prophet Mohammed that sparked spontaneous riots complete with attackers armed with military-grade weapons.

After the administration orchestrated a massive campaign of deception, spoon-feeding lies to its lapdog allies in the media, suddenly Ahmed Abu Khatallah, a senior leader of the Ansar al-Shari’a terrorist militia in Benghazi, is in American hands. Khatallah, who was not in hiding in Libya and who made himself available to visiting journalists, was  charged by U.S. authorities last year with murder in connection with the assault, according to newly unsealed court documents.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said he “anticipated” that the raid seizing Khatallah would happen but suggested that the importance of the capture is overblown.

“The administration would like to say, all right, we apprehended someone, isn’t that great, to deflect the attention away from the real Benghazi problem—that is, the president and, through [Ambassador Susan] Rice and the rest of them, knew full well that it was all a terrorist attack, and they tried to cover it up and got caught in a lie.”

“The big deal here,” said Inhofe, “is we have a president who lied to the American people.”

Whether Khatallah had anything to do with the attack on the diplomatic facility has yet to be shown. Khattalah told the New York Times in October 2012 that he was not part of the violence at the U.S. facility.

President Obama, who apparently went to sleep after being informed of the ongoing attack on Sept. 11, 2012, said yesterday he authorized a military operation to seize Khatallah.

Lionizing the Enemy

My article from the June 17, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine

Lionizing the Enemy

By Matthew Vadum

A project is underway to rehabilitate the self-exiled Sixties radical, anti-Semite and “black power” advocate Stokely Carmichael.

The opening salvo in this revisionist project of the Afro-centrist Marxist Left in academia is Stokely: A Life, by Peniel E. Joseph, which was recently published by BasicCivitas Books.

It is more infomercial than biography, calculated to transform its negligible subject into a towering figure of historic importance, and to whitewash the damage he did. Joseph’s central argument is that Carmichael was a “rock star” activist who inspired generations and who singlehandedly changed the course of American history.

Perversely, Joseph calls Carmichael a civil rights leader. If that fairly summarizes Carmichael’s work, he was a civil rights leader only in the bizarre modern sense that racial arsonist like Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader.

It is difficult to imagine an American civil rights leader making common cause with ruthless African dictators but that is what Carmichael did. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor two of them. 

In his self-imposed exile he was a courtier to brutal racist tyrants. He was a friend of Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, and rationalized away the relationship by reminding himself that Amin was anti-American and anti-Zionist. Carmichael even accepted Ugandan citizenship.

He was also a friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya came closest to accomplishing Carmichael’s vision of a socialist state, according to Joseph.

It is difficult to image an American civil rights leader going abroad to help hostile powers, but this is what Carmichael did.

Carmichael visited Communist Cuba, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies abroad. While there he called Abraham Lincoln a racist and helped Cuba’s propaganda effort against the United States. 

After spending three days with Fidel Castro he told reporters that the conversations he had with him were the “most educational, most interesting, and most enlightening of my public life.”

Carmichael praised the world’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “a great Chinese leader, the greatest Chinese leader there is.” He palled around with Communist Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and called for the U.S. to be defeated in Vietnam.

Shinseki’s Last Stand?

My article from the May 30, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Shinseki’s Last Stand?

By Matthew Vadum

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki is one step closer to falling on his sword as the deadly, politically explosive VA health care scandal forces even Democratic lawmakers to demand his removal.

The added political pressure came after a new interim report by the VA’s inspector general determined that the agency’s officials were involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up the long, life-threatening delays that America’s veterans have been subjected to in the assembly-line abattoir that is the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

In the words of the report, which followed audits of 216 health-care centers, there was a “systemic” push by VA officials to conceal the long wait times veterans faced. Veterans in Phoenix, Ariz., waited 115 days on average for a primary care appointment, which far exceeds what official VA statistics indicated. At least 40 veterans have died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system. Many of the dead had been put on secret waiting lists.

It’s the latest chapter in this sad but entirely predictable unfolding of events. The needless deaths, doctored documents, and all-around incompetence, are what necessarily happen when the government runs a single-payer health care system. The VA health care scandal provides real-life examples to the American public of the unspeakable horrors that await them if the Obamacare train is not soon derailed.

After the report came out Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had resisted demanding Shinseki step down, joined the growing, bipartisan chorus seeking the secretary’s removal.

Billionaire Leftists Attack Your Gun Rights

My article from the May 28, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Billionaire Leftists Attack Your Gun Rights

By Matthew Vadum

Gun control advocates hoping to capitalize on the tragic incident this weekend in Santa Barbara, California have a powerful asset in their corner this year: Second Amendment-hating billionaires led by George Soros are gearing up for a fresh assault on your constitutional right to defend yourself, your family, and your property.

The Democracy Alliance, a donors collaborative of well over 100 far-left venture capitalists, heirs and heiresses, Hollywood moguls, and unethical bankers, is throwing millions of dollars at left-wing gun-control groups in hopes of preventing the increasingly likely Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate this November.

Soros and other progressive plutocrats plan to send upwards of $175 million to leftist organizations this year to push gun control and the rest of the Left’s agenda, according to documents left behind at a recent Democracy Alliance meeting in Chicago.

Some of the left-wing groups slated to receive hefty donations from Democracy Alliance members include: America Votes ($4 million); American Constitution Society ($1.5 million); Brennan Center for Justice ($2.7 million); Catalist ($750,000); Center for American Progress ($5.5 million); Center for Community Change ($3 million); Center for Budget and Policy Priorities ($2.5 million); Media Matters for America ($3 million); New Organizing Institute ($1 million); Organizing for Action ($1 million); Progress Now ($1.9 million); and State Voices ($2 million).

The mentally unstable head of fake watchdog group Media Matters, former journalist David Brock, himself reportedly has paranoid fantasies that conservatives are trying to kill him. Brock, whose group beats the drum loudly for gun control, also flouts the District of Columbia’s tough gun restrictions. Brock armed his assistant with weapons to protect him from would-be right-wing assassins, a felony in D.C. 

Other groups, many of which focus on the Second Amendment, were listed in a found document called “Democracy Alliance Progressive Infrastructure Map.” The document contains a roster of groups that have previously been approved for funding by the Alliance or that appear to have been deemed eligible for such funding.