VA Scandal: This Is What Death Panels Look Like

My article from the May 21, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

VA Scandal: This Is What Death Panels Look Like

By Matthew Vadum

The Veterans Administration hospital scandal that has claimed the lives of at least 40 U.S. military veterans continues to expand, adding to the image of a president who neither knows nor cares what happens to those who shed their blood on the battlefield for their fellow Americans.

With a little under six months before the crucial midterm elections, it is a helpful reminder to voters of the horrors that are not glitches, but essential features, of government-provided health care. The problems at the VA are omens, sneak previews of what the delivery of all health care in America will look like under Obamacare, and so it is fortuitous that the scandal should surface now.

President Obama is predictably, perfunctorily, outraged about these bad things that have been happening in the government he controls. He is shocked and promises to get to the bottom of the issue and do better in the future. It is tedious stuff.

The happenings at the VA are also more evidence, Obama critics say, that the president despises the military. Obama has been moving to reduce soldier pay and benefits and hollow out the military to mid-century staff levels. He has also been going on a human resources rampage, firing flag officers at a rate that alarms military observers. And like any good leftist, Obama believes that the only good American soldier is one who is functioning as a social worker, not a war-fighter.

Meanwhile, Obama VA officials have been working overtime covering up the various waiting list atrocities that have been popping up cross the country.

Big Labor Taking Over Soros Piggybank

My article from the May 8, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Big Labor Taking Over Soros Piggybank

By Matthew Vadum

An ultra-secretive left-wing money machine for super rich radicals is bringing more representatives of Big Labor into the fold in order to prevent the likely Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate this November.

Thanks to a Democracy Alliance member’s oversight, Americans are getting a sense of what the nation’s wealthy left-wingers have in store for the fall elections and beyond.

As Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon reported, leftist billionaire George Soros’s son Jonathan left behind a partial membership list of the Democracy Alliance at a meeting in a fancy Chicago hotel last week.

The names on the document suggest that organized labor is becoming increasingly influential within the left-wing plutocrats’ invitation-only club.

New Democracy Alliance members from the labor movement include Noel Beasley, president of Workers United, a textile union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Keith Mestrich, president of the union-owned Amalgamated Bank. 

Other new members from Big Labor include Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. CWA senior director George Kohl and Michelle Ringuette, Weingarten’s assistant, also secured memberships in the Democracy Alliance.

But not all new members are professional parasites. Business people joining the Democracy Alliance recently include Adam Abram (insurance and real estate), Rick Segal (financial services), and Paul Boskind (psychology, behavioral health).

Hillary, the Left-Wing Money Machine and a New IRS Crackdown

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

Hillary, the Left-Wing Money Machine and a New IRS Crackdown

By Matthew Vadum

The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the charitable status of a conservative nonprofit group that disseminated statements critical of Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry a decade ago.

This is President Obama’s unambiguous warning shot calculated to intimidate conservative activists ready to work against Hillary Clinton if she decides to seek the presidency.

And it is the latest outrage committed by an administration that 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. And yet, absurdly enough, President Obama claimed in a Super Bowl weekend interview that there has not been even “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS under his watch.

All of this is a sobering reminder of how the scales are tipped in favor of the Left. Left-wing nonprofit groups, many of which rely on radical billionaires for funding, vastly outspend conservative groups, which tend to rely more on grassroots donations. Leftist organizations operate with almost complete impunity nowadays, unimpeded as they influence and pervert American politics in an effort to fundamentally transform our republic.

No Mere “Hate Crime”

My article from the April 17, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

No Mere “Hate Crime”

By Matthew Vadum

Former KKK leader Frazier Glenn Cross’s Sunday shooting spree that left three dead outside a Jewish retirement home and a Jewish community center in the Kansas City, Mo., suburbs was a heinous atrocity, and the reflexive “hate crime” label being applied to it diminishes the true scope of the evil at its core. 

Calling Miller’s acts hate crimes trivializes anti-Semitism, the evil that was Nazism and the monstrosity that was the Holocaust. The “hate crime” designation is over-relied on nowadays and this overuse has diluted its meaning. Spray-painting graffiti on a church or defacing a statue can be considered hate crimes.

The bar has been set so low that refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple is a hate crime in the eyes of many left-wingers. Miller’s acts hardly belong in the same category.

Although all three apparently randomly selected victims were Christians, not Jews, the feds appear to be leaning in the direction of a hate crime prosecution. The attack “strikes at the core fundamental freedoms … of how our country was founded and what we live by every single day,” said FBI agent 

Michael Kaste. “We’ve now determined that the motivation behind this was a hate crime. The acts that this person committed were the result of beliefs … that he had.”

Labor Fascism in Chattanooga

My article in American Thinker from April 18, 2014:

Labor Fascism in Chattanooga

By Matthew Vadum

As the labor movement tells the story, two months ago, the silly, ungrateful Volkswagen factory workers in Tennessee foolishly rejected the generous invitation of the company and the United Auto Workers to welcome the Detroit-killing union with open arms.

In an election supervised by the federal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the workers in VW's Chattanooga plant rejected UAW representation by a vote of 712 to 626.

Amazingly, the UAW and the automaker both refuse to take the workers' "no" for an answer.  The two sides are acting in unison to overturn the democratically expressed will of the workers.

Nullifying an election by fiat with the collusion of corporate management and organized labor is something we would expect to see in a nation dominated by fascism, a dangerous foreign ideology embraced by President Obama and the so-called progressives of the early twentieth century and today. 

And this push to eviscerate the legal rights of VW employees is yet more proof that the management philosophy of the automobile manufacturer founded by Adolf Hitler hasn't evolved much since the fall of the Third Reich. 

Many Americans don't know that in 1937, Hitler's government created the then-government-owned automobile manufacturer originally called Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (German for "Society for the preparation of the German People's Car").  It was soon renamed Volkswagenwerk (German for "The People's Car Company").

Patriots in Murrieta

My new article in today's FrontPage Magazine:

Patriots in Murrieta

By Matthew Vadum

When President Obama began dumping busloads of newly arrived illegal aliens on small town America to force so-called immigration reform he probably didn’t expect residents of a small California city to take a heroic stand against his lawless assault on the nation’s immigration system.

But grassroots activists in Murrieta, California, near San Diego, have been using the Left’s own playbook against the Community-Organizer-in-Chief’s efforts to force an unprecedented loosening of the nation’s largely unenforced immigration laws. Last week the protesters used the tactics of civil disobedience by blocking federal authorities from bussing in hundreds of illegal immigrants who snuck into south Texas. The feds have vowed to don riot gear in order to transport the illegals to Murrieta but that has not happened yet.

The illegals turned back by angry crowds were bound for what federal authorities called a “housing facility,” but local residents say such a facility doesn’t exist in Murrieta.

Longtime Murrieta resident John Henry said it appeared federal officials intended to place the aliens in the local Border Patrol station, which has only five holding cells.

“There are no showers, and there’s only one toilet in each cell. There’s really no place to give them hot food and no beds. There’s nothing here for them–we literally don’t have any way to take care of these people.”

Henry added, “We additionally don’t have any places for these people to go after they are processed.”

Henry told Breitbart News that the illegals, unaccompanied minors and women from Central America, are being sent to Republican-supporting communities like his city to send those opposed to open borders a political message.

“The administration thinks that if it floods our streets, in small town America, they can force us into immigration reform,” he said. “These immigrants should not be here. The only reason that they are coming here is for political reasons.”

“This is a small town – it’s mostly conservative – and the federal government knows that. The main reason a lot of us are out here protesting is because we do not want these people being dumped into our small town where we do not have programs or the resources to take care of them properly.”

Henry and his fellow protesters have been attacked by left-wingers who prefer hurling epithets to answering arguments.

The Lawless Bergdahl Swap

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

The Lawless Bergdahl Swap

By Matthew Vadum

Virtually no one in the nation’s capital now doubts that President Obama violated the law when he approved an unconscionable prisoner swap that repatriates an American deserter while freeing five Islamofascist terrorist field commanders.

Just throw it on the growing pile of impeachable offenses committed almost daily now by President Obama.

In yet another new historical first that paints a bulls-eye on the backs of U.S. citizens and military service members around the globe, Americans learned this week not only that Obama negotiates with Islamofascist terrorists — but that he does so with all the skill an 18-year-old boy who just won the lottery employs when dealing with a Porsche salesman.

Perhaps Obama thought that the release of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl who was held for five years by the Taliban in Afghanistan would be a sure-fire good news story to distract from the Veterans Affairs hospital waiting list scandal. If so, he guessed wrong.

Bergdahl, it turns out, expressed dismay about the war and walked off his base overseas in search of terrorists to whom he could surrender. There are conflicting reports, but it appears Bergdahl became an active collaborator with America’s enemies and fed them valuable information that helped them strike U.S. military targets in Afghanistan with enhanced efficiency.

Bergdahl, whom one of his former military colleagues described on TV as at best a deserter, and at worst, a traitor, was traded for five high-value Guantanamo Bay inmates in a clandestine transaction that might be the modern-day equivalent of swapping the high command of Nazi Germany’s armed forces for a wartime saboteur like Ernest Peter Burger or Herbert Hans Haupt.

Thanks to Obama and the same people who brought you HealthCare.gov and a growing list of governmental monstrosities, bearded unlawful combatants are now at liberty in Qatar where supposedly somebody is keeping an eye on them. They will, no doubt, return to plotting against the United States and orchestrating plans to kill Americans.

In carrying out the deal President Obama bypassed most of the congressional leadership and violated a statute he recently signed into law. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), ever the Obama water carrier, took time out from his ambitious hate speech campaign against the Koch brothers to claim the administration let him know of the operation in advance. Apart from Reid, just about nobody else on Capitol Hill makes the same claim.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he was not notified of the unseemly transaction until it had already happened. Boehner said the administration gave congressional leadership a heads-up about a prospective prisoner swap over two years ago but did not revisit the issue with lawmakers.

“Unfortunately, the questions and concerns we had were never satisfactorily answered and they remain today,” Boehner said. “At the time, the administration deferred further engagement because the prospects of the exchange had diminished.”

Voter Fraud: The Left's Tool For Social Justice

My column in today's American Thinker:

Voter Fraud: The Left's Tool For Social Justice

By Matthew Vadum

Why did Democrats applaud the loathsome community organizer Melowese Richardson, a freshly released, unrepentant voter fraud felon, at a recent "voting rights" rally in Ohio?

Because, like Richardson, they believe they are entitled to vote more than once against a system they see as unjust.  Some serial voters do what they do in order to exact revenge against a society they feel did them or their ancestors wrong.  Richardson is far from alone.  Double-voting is distressingly common.

Many leftists have contempt for the electoral process because they don’t believe in the electoral system as it is constituted in capitalist America.  To them, elections are already a fraud – an instrument of the rich, or as Saul Alinsky prefers to call them, the Haves.  If the electoral system doesn’t serve “the people,” but is only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud is justified as the path to a future that will serve the Have-Nots, as David Horowitz has explained.

This belief helps Democrats and the rest of the left rationalize their habitual efforts to suppress and cancel out lawfully cast votes.  It helps to explain the strenuous efforts of leftists like former Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.), now federal prisoner number 32451-016, to assure the public that voter registration fraud is no big deal and that fraudulent registrations almost never turn into fraudulent votes.

This is why liberal fascists inside and outside government routinely excuse electoral fraud – in all its manifestations – arguing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that such fraud is merely a Republican invention created to keep minorities and the poor down.

This is why these enemies of democracy tried with fanatical zeal to silence the heroic Catherine Engelbrecht and her good government group True the Vote.

This is why grandstanding Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) – as we just learned – apparently conspired with former IRS mandarin Lois Lerner to sabotage Engelbrecht's organization, which is America's leading grassroots electoral integrity group.

This is why the 58-year-old Richardson bragged about voting twice for President Obama in 2012.  The well-spoken, seemingly intelligent poll worker clearly knew what she was doing.  She didn't think it was wrong. 

Demonizing SCOTUS

My article in the April 10, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Demonizing SCOTUS

By Matthew Vadum

Left-wing activists and U.S. senators have launched a pressure campaign targeting the more conservative members of the Supreme Court in hopes of forcing them to abandon First Amendment protections in the Constitution.

In the Left’s view, Americans and the corporations they use to make money can’t be allowed to freely express themselves politically by giving money to candidates for public office because that might halt the country’s ongoing slide into leftist chaos. 

American leftists have long believed that if they can’t get what they want through the ballot box, they’ll get it through the judicial system. If they can’t get what they want from the judges, they’ll smear and intimidate those judges, Hugo Chavez-style, until they give in. 

Get ready for Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and others to be viciously attacked and demonized by the Left using the techniques of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky.

In the manner of Soviet era propagandists, these neo-Marxist activists are planning to depict the nation’s highest court as a tool of the wealthy powers-that-be that conspire against middle-class families. Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has taken to the floor of the Senate to denounce wealthy libertarian donors Charles and David Koch, who underwrite many right-leaning causes.

Protest DC RINOs on April 10th in Amelia Island, Florida

Protest DC RINOs on April 10th in 

Amelia Island, Florida

The treasonous Republican leadership in Congress will be holding a fundraising retreat the weekend of April 11th in Florida to benefit the George Soros-supported Republican Mainstreet Partnership PAC, and building a war chest to defeat Tea Party and conservative candidates.

The event will be held April 11-13 at the upscale golf resort in Amelia Island:

The Ritz-Carlton, 4750 Amelia Island Pkwy,Amelia Island, FL 32024 (904)277-1100

Local patriot groups are organizing a rally and a press conference prior to this event to show that the establishment Republican betrayal cannot go unchallenged.

The rally will be held in front of the Ritz-Carlton 

Thursday, April 10th, at 6:30 pm

Come to Amelia Island for our rally, and if you have time and resources,
stay for a weekend of RINO hunting!

* * *

For more information, call Larissa at 727-259-5994

Larissa's email is lazycanoe@gmail.com.