The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

On January 29, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, January 30th, 2013….but before we begin, be sure to visit our home page to catch today’s Cover Story, as well as our featured videos; #4, On the Lighter Side, forwarded by John Berry, is a must-see.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off today’s line-up, it’s the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment. Submitted for your approval, three video clips of the same event; first, the version NBC and other Leftist fronts would like you to believe:

Now, the undoctored truth:

Any questions?!? We respect Mr. Neslin’s grief….as did those in the room who disagree his son’s death constitutes grounds to overturn the 2nd Amendment….until he claimed their silence as assent! We find it laughable those running the hearing allow Heslin to ask a question, but prohibit any response.

And as we detailed previously, not every father who lost their son to a maniacal killer shares Mr. Heslin’s views regarding the Right to Bear Arms:

These people truly have NO shame.

Next up, courtesy of WaPo via AEI, Marc Thiessen reports on what, were this a Republican Administration, would be the lead story of every MSM outlet in the nation:

ObamaLeaks in the White House

After highly classified details of a U.S. cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program were made public, President Obama went to the White House press room to denounce those who suggested the leaks were coming from his top national security aides. “The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive [and] it is wrong,” the president declared.

Well, the Federal Bureau of Investigation may disagree. The Post broke the news Sunday that the FBI has launched an “aggressive” investigation into “current and former senior officials suspected of involvement” in the leak that Obama personally ordered cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear program using a computer virus called Stuxnet. The New York Times story which first revealed the details of the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program cited as sources “members of the president’s national security team who were in the [Situation Room]” and even quoted the president asking during a top secret meeting: “Should we shut this thing down?” Only Obama’s most trusted national security advisers would have been present when he uttered those words.

Now several members of that inner circle are receiving promotions. Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough has just been named the new White House chief of staff. And John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, has been nominated to be next director of the CIA. With the investigation reaching the top echelons of the administration, it is time for the White House to come clean and tell the American people which of Obama’s senior advisers is under investigation. There are no confirmation hearings for the chief of staff post, but Brennan will soon appear before the Senate on Feb. 7 for his confirmation hearings. If confirmed, he will be responsible for protecting our nation’s secrets. Congress has a right to know what he knows — and if he is being questioned by the FBI in the leak probe.

And the Stuxnet inquiry is only the beginning. The Justice Department is also investigating the disclosure of the role played by a double agent, recruited in London by British intelligence, in breaking up a new underwear bomb plot in Yemen. How far up the chain of command has that investigation gone? And how about the disclosure of classified details of the CIA drone campaign, including the fact that Obama personally selects the names on a terrorist “kill list”? Or leak to the New York Times of classified details of yet another covert operation in which “C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government”? Or the revelation last summer that the U.S. was considering launching secret joint U.S.-Afghan commando raids into Pakistan against the Haqqani network? Or the disclosure of classified operational details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — which prompted then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to visit Obama National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in the West Wing and advise the White House to “Shut the [expletive] up”?

Taken together, these are not leaks — they are a flood. Indeed, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper declared last year that the torrent of disclosures is the worst he has seen in his 30-year intelligence career. Also last year, Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein of California, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I’ve been on the Intelligence Committee for 11 years, and I have never seen it worse.” At the time, she traced the leaks right back to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., declaring “I think the White House has to understand that some of this is coming from its ranks. I don’t know specifically where. But I think they have to begin to understand that, and do something about it.”

Now it appears the FBI is doing something about it. Amazingly, an official cited in The Post story actually complained about the “chilling effect in government due to these investigations” which has people “feeling less open to talking to reporters.” Good! It’s about time something got this administration to finally “shut the [expletive] up.”

The officials behind ObamaLeaks have made WikiLeaks look like rank amateurs — exposing intelligence sources and methods on a scale Julian Assange can only dream about. Those responsible need to be held to account — even if they have a seat in the Situation Room next to the president.

Particularly if they have a seat in the Situation Room….anywhere. By the end of his second term, the damage Tick-Tock’s will have delivered to America’s economy and her heritage will take decades to repair. We fear the injury he’ll have inflicted on our national security may well prove irreparable.

Case in point, courtesy of The New Media Journal and the Washington Free Beacon:

Obama to Cut Health Benefits for Active Duty, Retired Military

Take THAT, evil forces of Fascism!

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to US officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.

The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.

Let’s noodle on this a bit; unionized government bureaucrats tend to vote Dimocratic, while a significant majority of our Armed Forces traditionally opt for (R). Lower recruitment and retention would serve to further undermine a Military already threatened by budget cuts and weakened by social experimentation.

Anyone else detecting a pattern here?!? Then again, like any good Socialist, National or otherwise….

….BO’s only following orders!

For more on The Dear Misleader, we turn to Wes Pruden, courtesy of The Washington Times and Speed Mach:

Obama: The skeet shooter among the pigeons

Barack Obama is really just one of the guys. He wants to take away Joe Sixpack’s guns, but he wants everybody to know that he’s a shooter and intends to keep his own shootin’ iron.

Mr. Obama hunts pigeons, not deer or ducks or even pigeons with feathers, but clay pigeons. He’s quite a marksman in a sport that attracts even the country-club elites. “Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” he says. “I have a profound respect for the traditions that trace back in this country for generations, and I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”

No more about “God and guns” this week. He learned his lesson about that one. This ain’t San Francisco. In an interview with The New Republic magazine, he sounded like he might join the National Rifle Association if only someone would ask him. “If you grew up, and your dad gave you a hunting rifle when you were 10, and you went out and spent the day with him and your uncles and that became part of your family traditions, you can see why you’d be pretty protective of that.”

But he took pains to say neither of his daughters, 11 and 14, join him and the guys for a round of skeet shooting. He wouldn’t dream of exploiting children, at least not his own. Nevertheless, trapshooting, as hunting for clay pigeons is formally called, is popular with the ladies. The president might not know there’s a Trapshooting Hall of Fame and that many women have been honored with membership.

Some of the loudest and shrillest Democrats in the campaign to disarm those who don’t get to shoot pigeons at Camp David are now discovering repressed memories of happy days with a trigger. Joe Biden, the vice president and the man Mr. Obama put in charge of his disarmament campaign, boasts that he owns a shotgun. No word yet on whether he frightens the clay pigeons in his neighborhood.

More secret gun owners are expected to slip out of the closet in coming days, now that the president has put his seal of approval on hunting and shooting, at least in certain highly restricted and supervised circumstances. We might even see Michael R. Bloomberg and Dianne Feinstein posing with their Red Ryder BB guns. The mayor sometimes gets to hold one of the guns worn on the hips of his bodyguards, and Mrs. Feinstein, who so far as we know does not “carry,” is always at risk of getting smacked with an errant omelet pan when she strolls the streets of San Francisco.

The mayor’s bodyguards recently hassled Talk Radio Network reporter Jason Mattera for asking His Honor whether “in the spirit of gun control, will you disarm your entire security team?” The mayor replied with the familiar eloquence of the politician cornered by an embarrassing question: “Umm, uh, we’ll get right back to you.”

The mayor didn’t, but his bodyguards did, asking the reporter for his identification, his address and the date of his birth, not necessarily to send a birthday present or even a card. Mr. Mattera, famous for asking the impertinent questions that all reporters once routinely asked, once so provoked Mr. Biden that the vice president all but challenged him to pistols or sabers at dawn under the dueling overpass somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey, where almost anything with guns and knives can happen, and often does. “Let’s get it straight, guy,” the veep told him. “Don’t screw with me.”

The natives are definitely getting restless. The White House received a petition Monday from a group called “We, the People” (not necessarily the same We the People in the Declaration of Independence, but a reasonable facsimile thereof) asking that, in the spirit of the times, all government officials, from the president on down, forgo their armed government bodyguards. The idea, obviously, is that if the congregation can’t defend itself with a gun, the preacher shouldn’t, either.

Despite the president’s caution and compassion, the campaign against guns continues. Louis Farrakhan, the eminent divine, noted constitutional scholar and leader of the Nation of Islam, told his congregation Sunday that the Second Amendment is irrelevant and the right to bear arms is a right for the trash bin. It might be dangerous to the government. He’s been building to the idea. “This nation was built on violence,” he said in a sermon a couple of weeks ago. “Uncivilized, uncultivated, brutal, wild.”

And that was just the good part. No wonder the president and his veep have armed themselves against the pigeons.

The only pigeons in this charade are the ones who trust this charlatan.

Moving on, courtesy of the Morning Examiner, Conn Carroll takes us on…

Marco Rubio’s first trip around the amnesty block

“In 1986 Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to 3 million people,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told a Martin County Republican Women’s group in 2009, “You know what happened, in addition to becoming 11 million a decade later? There were people trying to enter the country legally, who had done the paperwork, who were here legally, who were going through the process, who claimed, all of a sudden, ‘No, no no no , I’m illegal.’ Because it was easier to do the amnesty program than it was to do the legal process.”

“I think he did it for the right reasons, but I think it ended up working the wrong way,” Rubio said of Reagan’s 1986 amnesty plan. Rubio is right: Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty was a disaster for both the country and the party. Problem is, Rubio’s current amnesty plan looks to be heading down the exact same path.

One Rubio talking point has already been exposed as a complete fraud: the Southwest border security commission made up of state officials and activists. Rubio’s defenders had been citing the commission as a major concession by Democrats and a trigger for citizenship. But after The Washington Post reported that the commission would “only be advisory” and its recommendations “entirely nonbinding” Rubio has since moved on to emphasizing new employment verification and visa tracking systems.

But Congress has mandated a visa tracking system six times before, most recently in 1996. If the first six visa tracking mandates failed, why would the seventh succeed? Employer verification has an equally spotty history. E-Verify was first created in 1996 and has been fought by immigration advocates ever since. The ACLU is still promising to fight whatever new system is created in court today. There simply is no guarantee any of Rubio’s claimed immigration enforcement measures will work, and history suggests they all will fail. Rubio has given no reason why this time would be different.

And by granting illegal immigrants legal status, while also denying them federal benefits but still promising citizenship in the future, Rubio will have made the Republicans political situation worse, not better. Greg Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, notes that the Senate bill calls for border security to “apprehend every unauthorized entrant.” “If that’s going to be the standard, that’s essentially an unrealistic, impossible standard to meet,” says Chen.

So either those granted legalized status will eventually get citizenship without border security, or they will be stuck in eternal limbo. “Is this citizenship in name only? If so, there is going to be some pretty dramatic backlash,” Mary Giovagnoli, director of the Immigration Policy Center, told The Washington Post.

Come 2016 Democrats will be more than happy to help immigrant communities direct that backlash directly at the Republican presidential candidate, whoever that may be.

For a related item, we turn to today’s Money Quote, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s thoughts on Rubio’s plan for immigration reform:

“I appreciate the good work that senators in both parties have put into trying to fix our broken immigration system. There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration. However, I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.”

And why are illegals of Hispanic heritage the only law-breakers afforded such beneficence?

On the Lighter Side….