RUTHFULLY YOURS

Banks should brace for assault as Arthur Andersen annihilator now controls world’s largest criminal conviction machine
Meet Leslie Caldwell. President Obama has installed Ms. Caldwell, known as a “terror of a prosecutor,” as head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. It has been over a decade since Ms. Caldwell destroyed Arthur Anderson, and with it, 85,000 jobs—only to be reversed by the Supreme Court nine to nothing (well after she went into private practice). Now the president has brought her back—with a big promotion—and the vengeance of DOJ already aimed at Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas and others.

Ms. Caldwell and her then right hand man, Andrew Weissmann, viewed businessmen and bankers as “wise guys on Wall Street,” deserving of brutal prosecutorial tactics. Their prosecutions proceeded on the theory that the “end justifies the means.” Winning was the sole goal. They forgot that the job of a federal prosecutor is to seek justice—not convictions.

Arthur Andersen LLP was Ms. Caldwell’s first target in the wake of the collapse of Enron amid allegations of financial and accounting irregularities and secret-off balance sheet deals and partnerships. Andersen accountants were actually embedded at Enron, and the energy company paid the consulting firm millions in fees every year. Enron changed to mark-to-market accounting, lawful at the time, and was pushing the envelope.

Ms. Caldwell’s task force terrorized Arthur Andersen partner David Duncan with life in prison. Ms. Caldwell would walk into the room, take command and bark at a potential witness: “You’re going to tell us this, this and this (specifying the statements she wanted) or you’re going to be indicted.”

Ms. Caldwell and Mr. Weissmann persuaded Duncan it didn’t matter that he believed his conduct was lawful; it didn’t matter that he was following the policies of corporate counsel, that the accounting rules could be interpreted different ways, or, that Andersen had retained hundreds of thousands of documents—including anything it was supposed to keep. Ms. Caldwell and Mr. Weissmann virtually bludgeoned him into a guilty plea that required his testimony against his firm. Mr. Duncan acquiesced, but all the while maintained that he believed his conduct was lawful.

The Republican Party is nothing more than the servile junior partner of an entrenched bipartisan political establishment in Washington DC that does everything in its power to extinguish representative government and thwart the will of the American people.

In the Mississippi Republican primary run-off, Senator-For-Life, 76-year-old Thad Cochran was declared the winner over Tea Party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel by just over six thousand votes.

To secure his slim victory, Cochran not only received the full-blown backing of the Republican establishment and the amnesty-supporting US Chamber of Commerce, but he shamelessly solicited cross-over votes from traditionally Democratic voters, blacks and union members, who, like himself, support big spending and big government.

During the campaign, Cochran also adopted Democratic Party talking points about Tea Party candidates, leveling personal attacks against McDaniel, calling him an “extremist” and “dangerous.”

Having acquired their candidate, the Republican establishment will, in November, attempt to intimidate conservatives with the usual general election blackmail, vote for Cochran or risk a Democratic majority in the Senate.

If turnabout is fair play, then Mississippi conservatives would be justified in using the same tactics that Cochran used against them, voting for his Democratic opponent Travis Childers.

There is a Cold Civil War underway between Americans who want to adhere to the Constitution and adopt responsible fiscal policies, and the party leaders, who wish to continue the practices of political expediency and crony capitalism.

Politicians now seek election, not to uphold the rule of law and serve the American people, but to obtain power. Both Republicans and Democrats parlay that power into influence, privilege and personal affluence by redistributing the wealth generated by ordinary Americans into their own pockets and those of their supporters.

All the traditional means for the American people to seek the redress of grievances have been largely blocked by self-absorbed, unaccountable permanent political elites.

The Republican establishment’s investment in our corrupt political-media culture explains why they will go only so far in challenging the Constitutional violations and the anti-American policies of the Obama Administration.

Republican leaders will continue to hold hearings about Obama’s mounting number of scandals, but will do nothing.

Surrendering to ISIS in Iraq? — on The Glazov Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/surrendering-to-isis-in-iraq-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Josh Brewster and joined by Michael Hausam, a writer at IJReview.com, Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know, and Ernie White, a civil rights activist.

The Gang gathered to discuss, Surrendering to ISIS in Iraq?

The guests also tackled America’s Border Crisis, Hillary’s Fantasy about Hamas’ Genocidal Technocrats, Benghazi ‘Suspect’ Captured, The IRS’s “Lost” E-mails, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

The term “The thin blue line” is associated with law enforcement, especially the police. The phrase is based on the usual color of the police uniform and the fact that the relatively small numbers of sworn police officers is all that stands between the citizenry of towns, cities and states and criminals.

The uniforms that the members of the United States Border Patrol wear is green. Sometimes the Border Patrol has been referred to as the “Green Machine.” The mission of the United States Border Patrol is to secure America’s borders between ports of entry against the illegal entry of aliens whose presence would be harmful or dangerous to America and Americans. The idea is to make certain that aliens seeking entry into the United States are subjected to the inspections process conducted by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) Inspectors.

The guiding principle behind the inspections process is to make certain that aliens who should be excluded from the United States are prevented from entering the United States. One of the sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182, enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded and includes aliens who suffer dangerous contagious diseases, severe mental illness and are violent, aliens who are convicted felons, human and/or narcotics traffickers, human rights violators, war criminals, spies, terrorists and aliens who would likely become public charges or work illegally therefore displacing American workers or driving down the wages and/or working conditions of American workers.

The law, incidentally, is utterly and totally blind as to race, religion and ethnicity.

While the advocates for open borders describe aliens who evade the inspections process as being “Undocumented,” in point of fact, these aliens are Un-Inspected. In fact, my colleagues and I at the former INS referred to the method of entry of aliens who evaded the vital inspections process as being EWI (Entry Without Inspection).

This is hardly inconsequential. To draw a comparison- would you, or any reasonable person be willing to board an airliner if you observed several passengers sneak past the TSA inspectors and get on the airliner you were about to board? I am very confident you would not.

Why then are we being forced, by our own government, to live among unknown millions of foreign nationals (aliens) whose true identities- including their country of citizenship, possible criminal histories and possible affiliation with criminal or terrorist organizations or medical or mental well-being is unknown and unknowable?

In Jerusalem, Israelis pray for the return of three missing boys and in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers hunt for them and for their captors. But in the midst of all this, it is important not to lose sight of the larger conflict.

Israel made one tragic mistake with the Gilad Shalit deal. That deal, aside from already costing the life of one Israeli, is what led to this kidnapping. One kidnapping turned into three. It can easily become many more.

Defeating terrorist tactics can be more important than defeating terrorists. It is not that hard for a modern nation to kill a terrorist. Drones allow us to kill enemies from a distance at the push of a button. But drones cannot protect the morale of a nation.

Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular block. He is out to change how people think about that city block and the larger conflict.

Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East Jerusalem worth?

However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have that town, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village.

Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end.

Terrorists try to create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.

That is what has been happening to Israel. The entire carrot and stick of the peace process and the suicide bombing, the final agreement that never comes and the final solution that is coming, were designed to wear down Israelis, to make their leaders and people chase down empty hopes.

My dear friend Ali Sina mentioned in his most recent article that a Muslim professor, Hossein Askari, believes that Western nations lead the World in “Islamic values” and that most Muslim nations practice the least Islamic values. I have heard such nonsense before from some Muslims, some of whom were my relatives. I will never forget the strange look on my Christian American husband’s face when an elderly Muslim man visiting from Egypt told him: “You are such a fine young man, you have the character of a true Muslim.”

It is not unusual for Muslims to describe non-Muslims whom they perceive as good as having “Islamic values.” Many Christians in Egypt have to suffer hearing comments by Muslims such as: “You are so good, you must convert to Islam, you have the character of a true Muslim.”

How can educated Muslims professors make ridiculous claims like that Ireland “leads the world in Islamic values as Muslim states lag”? Islamic logic, in that case, says, if Irish people have noses, eyes, arms and legs like Muslims then they must be Muslim. This twisted logic wants to hide the truth: that many Muslims no longer want to live under Islamic values, but since that is considered apostasy in Islam, the only way out is to claim life in the land of the Great Satan is really equal to living the true Islamic life.

Muslims are trained to adjust reality to Islamic propaganda; thus everything good must come from Islam and everything bad comes from the Kafir non-believer. So it is Islamic logic to believe that if Christians are good then they must be Muslim, but they just don’t know it yet.

The Muslim dilemma about the West gets more complicated when over 70% of Muslim youth are desperately trying to leave the Muslim world to immigrate to Western nations. Many Muslims are stunned, disappointing and filled with envy when they compare infidel and Islamic nations and discover that infidels have achieved what Muslims could only dream of. Such an awakening by Muslims flies against the Islamic propaganda that has indoctrinated generations into believing that Islam is the solution.

So if Islam is the solution, how come Muslims are happier in the West? Simple: Muslims discovered what the West failed to understand about their own values; According to Muslims, it is Islamic values — so “Allahu Akbar” anyway.

A devastating oversight report from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) reveals that the combination of malpractice and bureaucratic ineptitude infesting the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is far deadlier than previously acknowledged. “Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance, and the VA has paid out nearly $1 billion to veterans and their families for its medical malpractice,” the report states.

The death total dwarfs the 23 fatalities for which the VA has taken responsibility. Coburn, a physician and three-time cancer survivor, notes the problems at VA facilities go “far deeper” than the phony scheduling schemes that brought this scandal to the national stage. “The waiting list cover-ups and uneven care are reflective of a much larger culture within the VA, where administrators manipulate both data and employees to give an appearance that all is well,” the report reveals.

According to Coburn, that culture is one in which veterans “are not always a priority.” Much of that is attributable to the reality that even as the VA suffers from a shortage of healthcare providers, VA nurses are paid to perform union duties and doctors are allowed to leave work early rather than care for patients. The report further explains that good employees who try to bring attention to the Department’s shortcomings “are punished, bullied, put on ‘bad boy’ lists, and transferred to other locations.”

The report also blows away the VA’s fallback excuse, namely that it suffers from a lack of funding. Coburn notes that spending has increased rapidly in recents years, an assertion backed up by federal budget figures. Inflation-adjusted federal spending shows that the VA budget has increased 92.2 percent over the last decade, skyrocketing from $73.3 billion in FY2003 to $140.9 billion last year, measured in constant 2014 dollars. According to Military.com the VA spends more in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did following WWII and the Vietnam war, when millions of troops were returning home from the battlefield.

Coburn reveals that as much as $20 billion of that spending over the last dozen years has been on “junkets, generous salaries, bonuses, and office renovations for its employees,” even as the Department ends every year with billions in unspent funds. He further notes that most of the construction projects undertaken by the VA are over budget and behind schedule. And even when state-of-the-art facilities are finally constructed, the VA is unable to staff them with a sufficient number of doctors. This reality has forced them to spend millions of dollars sending veterans to clinics in other cities and states, wasting veterans’ time and taxpayers’ money.

Some of the details of patient care illuminated by the report are truly disturbing. One Navy veteran, forced to wait months to see a doctor, died of Stage 4 bladder cancer. He had been rushed to the hospital in September 2013, but was sent home despite a medical chart saying his situation was “urgent.” His daughter made effort after effort to get him an appointment but was constantly rebuffed. He finally got an appointment on December 6—one week after he died. Another veteran received a tooth extraction, despite having dangerously low blood pressure. On his way home, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed. In another case, doctors never spotted a growing lesion on a veteran’s lung during an annual chest x-ray. He died as the result of that carelessness.

The warmists have their models, grants and tidings of doom, but the researchers whose tree ring data has best predicted recent temperature trends see the mercury dropping, perhaps by as much as 4 degrees. If they are right, then there is reason to be worried, very worried indeed

There was a time in climate science when tree rings were used for good instead of evil, a time of innocent enquiry, a time that ended in the corruption of science. From that time, one of the best predictions of climate ever made (weighted for distance and accuracy) was by two Californian researchers, Leona Libby and Louis Pandolfi. In 1979, they used tree ring data from redwoods in Kings Canyon to make a remarkably accurate forecast1. From a Los Angeles Times interview of that year,

When she and Pandolfi project their curves into the future, they show lower average temperatures from now through the mid-1980s. “Then,” Dr. Libby added, “we see a warming trend (by about a quarter of 1 degree Fahrenheit) globally to around the year 2000. And then it will get really cold—if we believe our projections. This has to be tested.”

How cold? “Easily one or two degrees,” she replied, “and maybe even three or four degrees.”

Sure, the Prophet’s gun-toting, plane-hijacking, head-lopping adherents represent only a small minority in the ranks of ‘the religion of peace’, but what of the largely mute majority? If silence gives consent it also confirms that Islam is antithetical to the secular values and traditions of the West.

Even on Fox News they still refer to ‘radical Islamists’, presumably to distinguish them from the overwhelmingly vast multitude of moderate Muslims who mind their own business as they go about practicing their religion of peace. They got one thing right. They certainly mind their own business. There is nothing to see here as the hands and heads come off and the bombs go off; nothing to do with us.

What really impresses me is the inoffensive, head-scarfed, top-to-toe covered, Muslim lady who regularly fronts the cameras to explain how moderate and peaceful she and her community are. I assume she is sped from place to place in a very fast jet. Of course, maybe there is more than one of them? I can’t tell. What I suspect is that she (or they) will be beaming and cheering when the Islamic flag is raised aloft over some Western European parliament building.

OK, where is this going? Let me explain by way of analogy.

When Liverpool Football Club brought home the first of its European Cups in 1977 half of the city was out on the streets to welcome the returning heroes. It is likely the overwhelming majority of those cheering and clapping had never been to a match. And of those who attended matches perhaps only a quarter were fanatical.

Half-a-million people were on the streets. Only two per cent were fanatics; the other 98 per cent were moderates. They were all cheering. The representatives of their tribe had tasted victory. It was a heady brew.

Who are these sporting fanatics and what drives them? ‘I don’t know’ is my answer, but what is abundantly clear is that they wear their fanaticism like a badge of honour. It distinguishes them from the crowd. And the crowd acknowledges their commitment. They are congratulated personally by their workmates and friends when their team wins.

They simply couldn’t be fanatics without the tacit approval and acknowledgement of the much greater number of the non-fanatical. The head couldn’t live without the body. How do I know all of this? I was a fanatic in my youthful days, suffering serious funk when Liverpool lost and exhilaration when they won.

A community stops illegal-immigrant kids from being held in its town.

California suburbanites are engaged in a fight with the federal government over its attempt to turn a residential building into a detention center for illegal-immigrant children.

The Department of Health and Human Services submitted an application to the city of Escondido’s Planning Commission to use a 35,200 square-foot facility to house almost 100 children. On Tuesday night in this suburb of San Diego, the city commission held a hearing to review the request and unanimously voted to oppose the application. Several hundred people filled the chamber hall to make their voices heard, and people at the meeting say the overwhelming majority opposed the application. The standing-room-only crowd spilled over into an adjacent room and nearby hallways, and onto the grass outside.

“You couldn’t park within two blocks of city hall,” says Jeff Weber, the chairman of the Escondido City Planning Commission. “One of our commissioners was late because he couldn’t get a parking place.” Weber says the event required a police presence, and one officer coached him on how to respond in case of a disturbance.

If Kitty Demry had missed a notice about the application placed on the building during a walk around the neighborhood with her husband, the application might have received less scrutiny. Demry, a longtime Escondido resident who lives about a third of a mile away from the facility’s proposed location with her young family, says that, at first, she didn’t think anything of it. She says she decided to pursue the matter only after discussing it in greater detail with her husband.

After speaking with a city official to gain more information and discovering that local officials did not know much about the shelter, Demry says she grew concerned. “Really, nobody knew about it,” Demry says. “And that more than anything is what terrified me.” Demry then created a flyer, made 150 copies, and began knocking on doors to spread the word. The information gained traction on social media, and soon public officials began to weigh in.

Mayor Sam Abed says he’s concerned that the children would not receive proper health screening and criminal-background checks before arriving at the proposed facility. “We feel that the federal government should keep housing them in federal facilities and not [be] sending them to the local small communities where land use is very limited,” he says. The Republican mayor emigrated to the U.S. from the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, and worked as an IBM engineer before entering political life. He’s running for re-election in November.