Category: Obama

Top Former Obama Official Praises Trump. Twice.

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date March 2, 2020
2 Comments on Top Former Obama Official Praises Trump. Twice.

The top State Department official under Barack Obama who negotiated the Iran deal has praised President Trump on two foreign policy points — both of which should be easy for Democrats who are not obsessed with removing or damaging the President over supporting what is demonstrably good for America.

But of course they aren’t interested in that. If Democrats ravaged by Trump Derangement Syndrome immediately leap to blaming the Coronavirus on President Trump, then all lunacy is possible.

The first point of praise was the proposed Afghanistan peace deal to end the 18-year war the U.S. has been bogged down in. The peace plan included a negotiated ceasefire.

“This is a good, useful, first step,” said former Ambassador Wendy Sherman, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the State Department. This simple, true sentence is so rare among Democrats today it’s actually newsworthy, which is why the local newspaper led with it under the headline: “In Sarasota, Obama official praises Trump’s Afghanistan deal”

Sherman, who was the lead negotiator for the Obama administration on the terrible Iran nuclear deal that President Trump wisely pulled out of, was speaking last week at the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall lecture series in Sarasota, Florida.

“If we get this agreement to move forward with Afghanistan, this is a very good thing,” Sherman said. There now. Was that so hard? Of course it is a good thing.

Sherman, who naturally laced her speech with withering criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy — she is an Obama Democrat after all — qualified her comments on the Afghanistan peace talks, saying that any final agreement must include protections for women and girls — who are second-rate human beings under the Taliban’s Islamic theocratic rule.

The irony is that the Trump administration is probably more likely to press this point than the Obama administration would have been because of Obama’s sympathies toward Muslim nations. Looking at the contrasting actions of the two administrations, Trump policies have benefitted women, children and minorities more than Obama’s.

On the second point of praise, Sherman said that the “controversial” missile strike ordered by the President to kill Iranian terrorist leader General Qasem Soleimani while in Iraq would probably act as a deterrent to Iranian aggression in the region. She called the move risky in moving the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war, but considering how it has played out, the attack was probably a good action.

It’s highly improbable that the killing actually moved the two countries to the brink of war as Iran’s leaders have everything to lose in a direct war with the U.S. military — and they know it well. No traditional army has been able to stand against the U.S. military for more than a couple of weeks. The Mullahs prefer to work through their network of terrorist proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

While it is clear that Sherman has gigantic differences with the Trump administration on a range of foreign policies, and probably domestic ones also, kudos to her for being willing to say publicly that the actions taken by Trump on two fronts that are unarguably in a good direction for Americans — are indeed a good thing.

Rod Thomson is an author, past Salem radio host, ABC TV commentator, former journalist and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act.

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REWIND: When Obama Created A Humanitarian Crisis

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date June 28, 2018
1 Comment on REWIND: When Obama Created A Humanitarian Crisis

Rod Thomson

When conservatarian talk show host Glenn Beck, accompanied by Sen. Ted Cruz, took soccer balls and teddy bears to the waves of children illegally swamping the southern U.S. border, conservatives were somewhat conflicted.

Many appreciated the compassion but sharply criticized the move for potentially adding to the problem by making it more attractive for more children to come (be sent) which would swell the problem. Many liberals considered it a cheap publicity stunt. The media yawned and barely covered it except to question Beck’s motives.

The year was 2014. Barack Obama bestrode the halls of the White House. And U.S. policy at the border was chaotic at best. But Beck didn’t create the situation. He responded to it. The Obama Administration’s lax enforcement of national laws and insinuations of a warm welcome had prompted the humanitarian crisis of tens of thousands of Central American children stacking up at the border.

Of course, as has been the case in recent years, Mexico was a bad actor in this. As this terrible neighbor is doing today, it created a secure path for the children to be ushered straight through from their decrepit and corrupt countries to be dumped at America’s steps.

The media covered the crisis as a humanitarian one that just sort of arose, and put the Obama administration in a tough spot. How would they deal with it? But this did not simply happen like a hurricane or tornado. It was man-made in Central America, Mexico and Washington, D.C. — exactly like the current family separation issue, except add in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals mandating that families cannot be kept together.

About 18 months before this, President Obama unconstitutionally, and probably illegally, granted blanket amnesty to about 800,000 mostly Central Americans who came to the country illegally. He did not follow the law or enforce the law. He simply bypassed it. Further, he began releasing illegal aliens into the interior of the country.

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News of changes to American border policies travel like wildfire through Mexico and Central America.

“One of the consequences we’re seeing on the border is a humanitarian crisis that is a direct consequence of Obama’s lawlessness,” Cruz said at the time. He was making the totally plausible case that by granting amnesty to such large numbers of illegal aliens and relaxing border enforcement, Obama sent a message throughout Central America that precipitated a “change in behavior” — sending children northward.

Cruz was not alone. Many Republicans and Americans saw in the President’s actions an open invitation to all aspiring illegal aliens. So did the human-trafficking cartels and coyotes who run people across the border. So did the Mexican government that created the corridor for passage as long as they did not stop in Mexico. They would be America’s problem — just like Mexico’s poor.

The result was the 2014 humanitarian crisis on the border that captured considerable attention without assigning any substantial blame to Obama.

Yet the conditions that resulted from Obama’s actions were arguably much worse than the conditions in which children were separated from their families and placed in the care of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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But the media did not blame Obama for the human suffering and misery. He was not called a cruel animal, racist and xenophobe. No mass protests erupted. No groups targeted his staff in restaurants, at movies or other public places. No Republican Congressmen urged political opponents to harass Obama staffers wherever they found them.

Trump has played his role in the poison in our society right now, but it is not the major one. Trump is in many ways a response to the slow-drip poison injected by a deeply agenda-driven media that alternately lectured or vilified conservative, traditional Americans and ran interference for the endless scandals throughout the Obama administration. It’s a response to the ceaseless demonstrations and protests against traditional America, and Republicans’ inability or unwillingness to fight back.

It’s worth remembering Obama’s role in generating a full-scale crisis — and the lack of responsibility attached to him.

Rod Thomson is an author, former journalist and current TV talking head, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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Freed: Independent IGs Are Being UnShackled From Obama’s Muzzling

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date June 15, 2018
6 Comments on Freed: Independent IGs Are Being UnShackled From Obama’s Muzzling

Rod Thomson

In light of Thursday’s bombshell IG report on the corruption, malfeasance and incompetence in the FBI and Department of Justice, it’s worth remembering what was largely ignored during the Obama years:

President Obama’s administration actively muzzled the independent Inspectors General in multiple federal agencies. In fact, it became so bad that six years into the Obama administration, more than half of the 73 federal IGs — the majority of whom were Obama appointees — signed a letter stating that the Obama administration had stonewalled the IGs “ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.”

The IGs cited a long list of examples of the Obama administration refusing to turn over incriminating documents necessary for the IG to conduct fair investigations — from the EPA to Amtrak to OMB to the TARP bank bailout. These were not classified or secret documents, simply held in the trust of various Obama department heads.

This meant that the Obama administration was systematically putting up walls around its actions to keep the independent federal watchdogs from seeing what it was actually doing. Of course, this is not what honest, “scandal-free” administrations do.

The frustrated nonpartisan IGs cited systematic Obama administration refusals to turn over what was likely incriminating evidence and basic documents that were central to their investigations. When 47 Inspectors General sign a letter complaining of a pattern of roadblocks and obstruction in their efforts to do their job, there’s a pretty good chance bad things were being done.

That is an astonishing level of condemnation from generally staid and nonpartisan IGs, and one almost no one knows about because of the media’s chronically soft and protective coverage of President Obama. That both IG Michael Horowitz and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have been allowed to pursue their investigations with largely unfettered cooperation from the White House is particularly refreshing.

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If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, considering the laundry list of scandals and corruption in her past, it seems likely we would never have had this investigation or seen any such report. Nor would we have had the IG’s previous report that ended up being a criminal referral for fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. At least six other FBI employees retired, resigned or were fired resulting from that report — which also likely would not have seen the light of day under a President Hillary Clinton.

Ironically considering the unfounded charges of Trump and fascism and threat to the Republic nonsense, his administration is allowing all of the investigations and light to be shone on them. And that is a substantial departure from the Obama years and is a step toward saving the Republic.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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Alienage Discrimination Is Now A Thing. And It’s Really Bad

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date May 7, 2018
1 Comment on Alienage Discrimination Is Now A Thing. And It’s Really Bad

Rod Thomson

“Alienage discrimination” is exactly what is sounds like; the discrimination against people specifically based on them being in the country illegally. It’s little known, but it is fatally dangerous for America.

Right up front, the threat here is that if alienage discrimination gains the same legal civil rights protections as, say, racial discrimination, then we can shut down ICE and any deportations. Once someone slips into the United States they will have essentially the full legal protections of any legal resident. Which is approximating insanity.

But traveling the remaining distance into the nationally insane, there would be standing and precedent to ultimately require “undocumented residents” the actual right to vote. If you are looking for the signs of America’s ultimate downfall from within, this would be in flashing neon.

Not surprisingly perhaps, this affront to legal, rational reasoning and national sovereignty comes courtesy of President’s Obama’s pen when he created DACA after Congress would not do what he wanted. Also not surprising, it is finding some foothold with Obama-appointed judges who act solely as policymakers, not arbitrators of law. (If political leaders are seeking appropriate places to use impeachment, these judges are prime targets.)

This is not a one-off.

Twice now in the past few years, a federal court has ruled that illegal immigrants have legal standing to sue American employers that won’t hire them because they are here illegally. The companies require their workers to be U.S. citizens or legal residents such as green card holders. Not that long ago, this was seen as the responsible way to limit illegal immigration; by businesses not hiring them.

The latest blow to the rule of law was delivered by an Obama-appointed federal judge in South Florida, who handed an open-borders group a huge victory in a case accusing a giant U.S. company of alienage discrimination against an illegal immigrant by not hiring him because he was in the country illegally.

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The lawsuit was filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a radically leftist, anti-American group that launches lawsuits on behalf of illegal immigrants. MALDEF has an extensive political agenda, including pushing for free college tuition for illegal immigrants and lowering educational standards to accommodate new illegal immigrants. MALDEF officially labels American immigration enforcement as racist and xenophobic, going so far as to charge that it is racist for English to be the country’s official national language. And naturally, it violates civil rights to wall off the southern border.

Judicial Watch has been following these cases. It reports:

In the recent Florida case a Venezuelan immigrant, David Rodriguez, living in Miami is suing consumer goods corporation Procter & Gamble for refusing to give him a paid internship because he is not a legal resident or citizen of the United States. MALDEF filed the lawsuit last year in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Procter & Gamble requires citizenship and immigration status information on its applications and warns that candidates “must be a U.S. citizen or national, refugee, asylee or lawful permanent resident.” Rodriquez is neither and he quickly played the discrimination card after getting nixed as a candidate. In a statement MALDEF’s president reminds that “work-authorized DACA holders are valuable contributors to our economy” and “should not have to face arbitrary and biased exclusions from employment, especially by large and sophisticated corporations like Procter & Gamble.”

In 2014, MALDEF filed a lawsuit against Northwestern Mutual insurance company in New York because the company required a Mexican illegal alien protected by DACA to have a green card. MALDEF claimed that requiring Ruben Juarez, a Mexican national, to provide proof of legal residency resulted in “alienage discrimination.” The judge ruled in favor of Juarez.

In the most recent case, Judge Kathleen Williams, a 2011 Obama appointee, cited that 2014 ruling in her ruling in favor of Venezuelan Rodriguez. In denying Procter & Gamble’s motion to dismiss Rodriguez’s lawsuit, Judge Williams ruled the Venezuelan immigrant’s claims are “strikingly similar” to Juarez’s.

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What this means is that DACA is clearly not seen as a temporary measure to help the “kids” — although Rodriguez is 34 years old, meaning he was nearly an adult when he slipped illegally into the United States. It’s obviously being used to create a pathway for permanent, legally-protected status and citizenship-level rights for people who came here illegally. And it’s being accomplished without any elected official ever taking a vote or making a decision. It’s all through activist judges.

But this alienage discrimination method/precedent has vaster implications. First, it could — and will with legal successes — turn into class action lawsuits against every major U.S. corporation that has policies in place for only hiring people in America legally. That would likely include all Fortune 500 companies plus thousands of others who have high training costs for new employees. It’s unknown what the total financial costs of that would be, but unarguably deep into the billions of dollars that American companies following American laws might be required to transfer to people who are in America illegally.

Second and most serious, establishing the concept of alienage discrimination would cripple America’s efforts to maintain internal order among its citizens. A nation that cannot regulate or deport people who come to the country illegally, or overstay illegally, is a country that is quickly enroute losing its sovereignty.

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If “undocumented residents” are given special civil rights discrimination protections currently afforded to certain minorities — which is what MALDEF is asking for and these rulings are beginning to confer — then they have a case for proportional representation in employment, university acceptance and so on; against alienage profiling by law enforcement; and ultimately a case for voting rights. If it is illegal to discriminate against blacks, for instance, in voting rights and illegal aliens are protected by the same civil rights, then voting must follow.

If that sounds absurd and extreme, please see the history of the past few years.

This is not how the United States continues as a functioning, sovereign nation. Many have long said that America will not fall from without, but from within. This would be a pathway in accomplishing that fall.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever, and a lot of sources are not trustworthy. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time from good sources.

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The Calamity That Was Obama’s Foreign Policy Is On Full Display

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date May 2, 2018
1 Comment on The Calamity That Was Obama’s Foreign Policy Is On Full Display

The Full Wreckage Of Obama’s Foreign Policy Becomes Clear

Rod Thomson

That President Barack Obama’s foreign policy was weak and destructive has been evident to most non-partisan observers for a long time.

But with Israel’s bombshell announcement on Iran’s ongoing nuclear weapons program, the scale of the failure is coming into full light. Only his most ardent and blinded supporters can still be defending the Iran deal and the rest of his foreign policy disasters.

We knew the Iran deal was bad for regional safety and good for an expansion of terrorism. But there was still the thin thread of hope that it could work for at least delaying Iran’s nuclear weapon program. That hope is now revealed as a fool’s errand.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs during his blockbuster news conference, outlining Iran’s duplicity and threat. His presentation of the evidence (verified by U.S. intelligence services) found that Iran lied repeatedly to the IAEA about its weapons program before and during the Iran deal. It showed how after the deal, Iran continued and continues to pursue nuclear weapons research under the fiction of scientific research. And he showed that Iran maintained its atomic research archives for when it could continue building its nuclear weapons program full-scale.

Netanyahu said: “The mission statement is to design, produce and test five warheads with 10 kiloton of TNT yield for integration on missiles.”

So as suspected and now proven, the Iranian nuclear deal was a sham from the beginning. But the deal is just one piece of the disastrous puzzle of Obama’s foreign policy. Here’s the rest of the calamities that must be dealt with.

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➙ Syria. When Syrian President Assad crossed Obama’s red line on the use of chemical weapons and Obama did nothing, that emboldened Assad to be more aggressive and let ISIS know that the United States was toothless under Obama. They were free to slaughter at will and they did. Further, it was an invitation to Putin’s Russia to return to Syria with military force.

➙ Iraq. The precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops after finally stabilizing the country at the cost of considerable amounts of American blood, opened the door to ISIS’ bloody expansion from northern Syria into Northern Iraq, and Iran’s movement into the country from the east. Iran’s cash windfall from the nuclear deal has helped fund its aggression in Iraq, along with Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. The cost in lives has been staggering.

➙ Libya. Obama, leading from behind with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used American air power to help overthrow the only dictator who had voluntarily given up his nuclear weapons program after 9-11. Learning nothing from Iraq, Obama and Clinton amazingly had no plan for what would come after the overthrow. So what the world got was another failed state and haven for ISIS and other terrorist groups, and a launching point for Muslim refugees into Europe.

➙ Israel. The one free, democratic ally of America in the Middle East was abysmally treated by Obama as one of several key relationships with our allies he degraded. Further, and ironically, he meddled in an Israeli national election with the goal of defeating Netanyahu and created a toxic taste in this vitally important relationship.

And this was all just in the Middle East.

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➙ North Korea. The kick the can down the road, do-nada approach to foreign policy with North Korea allowed for the continued expansion of a new generation of nuclear weapons and missile delivery options that has put America’s West Coast under a nuclear threat. This should never have been allowed, but a weak president with no foreign policy plan and no will to do anything difficult or risky, just ignored it.

➙ Russia. The Russian reset is one of the most spectacular, high-profile failures of the Obama administration. There was the infamous red button that the Russian foreign minister and Hillary Clinton jointly pushed that was supposed to reset the supposedly terrible relationship left by Bush (and tweak Bush in the process.) Instead, it opened the door to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. It’s not even clear if that was just incompetence as Obama’s also infamous 2012 “more flexibility after the election” comment to Russia’s president was caught on a hot mic and indeed, his flexibility apparently meant let Russia do whatever it wanted.

➙ China. Obama’s do-nothing foreign policy with America’s enemies continued in Asia where he acquiesced to China’s military expansionism and failed to respond in any real way to China cheating on trade agreements and blackmailing American companies at the cost of billions of dollars and who knows how many American jobs. This one doubles as a foreign and domestic policy failure.

➙ Venezuela and Cuba. Cuddling up to, and praising Cuba and Venezuela as the Socialist/Communist countries spiraled into economic chaos and even starvation showed a certain cluelessness, or socialist sympathy. Obama did not cause their disasters — socialism and tyranny did that — but he seemed blind to this reality. His admiring speeches and gestures towards the Castros and Hugo Chavez enabled the strongman regimes to continue to oppress their people and sustain the grueling and unnecessary poverty.

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This is hardly an exhaustive list, but large enough to make the case painfully clear that the Obama administration was an abysmal failure on the foreign policy stage. As we saw in the Jimmy Carter years, the world cannot afford such incompetence and miserable worldviews from America.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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Trump Dismantling Terrible Obama Policy That Spiked School Violence

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date April 11, 2018

Trump Dismantling Obama School Policy That Enabled Parkland Shooter

Rod Thomson

The Trump Administration is methodically working its way through the reams of poor decisions, terrible policies and total failures haunting us from Obama’s eight years — from Syria, Iran, Russia and ISIS on the international front to crushing regulations, taxes and IRS/AG corruption on the domestic front. It’s a Herculean task.

The most likely next target on the list is the appalling Obama Department of Education policy on penalizing schools for having “disparate” rates of discipline, which has turned too many school districts across the country into increasingly violent zones because administrators cannot rid the schools of dangerous students. This policy may have played into why no law enforcement actions were ever taken against the Parkland shooter, even with all of the now known evidence.

The disparate impacts concept is a terrible philosophy and worse policy. It assumes that any racial disparity from what the averages would dictate is a result of racism, either by individuals or systemically. So if 40 percent of a school’s students are black, but blacks make up 60 percent of suspensions, that disparity is assumed to be the result of racism at the school. It discounts the possibility of action resulting in consequences and blames prison time on the arrest and not the crime for which the person was arrested.

As we wrote recently, this disparate impact concept works hand in glove with the Progessive Left’s constant stoking of racial tensions for political power and social justice agendas.

So the Obama administration, chock full of such progressives from the top down, issued a federal directive in 2014 from both the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice threatening schools that receive federal funding — which is most public schools — with loss of funding and federal investigation if they failed to reduce such disparities in their schools. The disparities range from discipline to suspension to arrests and criminal charges.

“The premise underlying this Obama policy was completely false,” said Heather MacDonald, an education expert at the Manhattan Institute. “It assumes without even trying to prove that there can be no behavioral disparities between black and white students.”

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Most public schools will jump through any hoops they must in order to not lose some money, and so most responded in the worst possible way, but possibly the only way, by simply not disciplining, suspending or maybe even arresting students they normally would have.

As the New York Post reports, more than 300 schools are now under investigation because of this policy, even while many are responding accordingly by allowing dangerous and disruptive students to remain in class in order to not lose some federal money.

New York City schools had such disparate impacts (as do virtually all city school districts in the nation) and responded accordingly.

Max Eden, another education policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, said surveys show schools with predominantly minority students have been hit hardest by the resulting breakdown in discipline, with violence and chaos mushrooming out of control in urban districts. Yes, because one of the few constancies with modern liberalism is that the people supposedly intended to be helped by progressive policies are hurt the most.

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The Post reports: “While NYC school suspensions are down, crime has spiked in the city’s public schools, including major crimes such as robbery and arson, new NYPD data show. The current academic year has seen the first school murder in more than 20 years — a stabbing at a Bronx high school — and the first time a gun was fired inside a (NYC) school in more than 15 years.”

New York Education Department data shows that rapes and other sex crimes are soaring at the city’s schools.

Democrats and civil-rights groups say that the policy regulations are a critical tool to protect black students from the systemic racism of teachers and administrators in public schools. Ironically, it only protects bad-behaving black students, while good behaving black and white students suffer the most.

None of this should come as a surprise. Disparate impacts is simply another way of stoking racial fervor — while also teaching young blacks that they are not responsible for their own actions — not actually solving any systemic racism. That is a lesson bound to redound terribly for those young blacks, and for other blacks in their communities.

However, it looks possible that the Parkland school shooter may have been the beneficiary of those policies. In 2013, the Broward County School Board entered into an agreement with local law-enforcement agencies designed to limit the number of school arrests and reduce the so-called “school-to-prison” path. The result was simply not arresting students who otherwise would have been. It explains why no actions were ever taken by the Democrat-run Broward County Sheriff’s Department or the Democrat-run Broward County School District. And that nexus has brought a bright and urgent light on the policy.

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U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has her department lawyers and staffers reviewing the policy and seeking to replace it with a much more narrowly defined policy that does not rely on disparate impact doctrine nonsense. Apparently, just eliminating it, however, could leave schools feeling politically pressured to continue the regulation. So writing a new, narrower, more sound policy is under consideration.

This would be an education reform that would directly help black students in city schools. Undoubtedly, most Americans support getting dangerous students out of schools.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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Kushner Clearance Pales Compared to Ben Rhodes’ Denied Clearance

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date March 3, 2018

Kushner Security Clearance Pales Compared to Ben Rhodes Denial — President Barack Obama works on his address to the nation with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, aboard Air Force One before landing in Afghanistan, May 1, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Rod Thomson

The media is intent on urgently reporting and discussing the importance of the temporarily reduced security clearance of Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

But when Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes was actually denied security clearance in 2008, the media yawned. Actually, it never even reported something this newsworthy and, apparently, if the media doesn’t report it, it doesn’t happen.

Recall that Rhodes was not only a high-level advisor to Obama, but he was the architect of the now-infamous Iran nukes deal involving cases of cash flown on a plane to Tehran while creating a pathway for nukes to the repressive, terrorist, Islamist regime. Further, he was the one who misled Congress and the public on the terms of the agreement.

Yet it was not until January 2017, days before Obama was out of office, that the Washington Free Beacon reported:

Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration’s efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House.

The Washington Times followed up with a report and the Free Beacon did some follow-up stories on the congressional inquiry. Google does not show any mainstream media coverage of this story, even once Congress was looking into it and the issue was fully public.

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This context is hugely important. Because people may think that Jared Kushner not getting his security clearance is not only important, but showing a pattern of chaos, disruption and disreputable characters in the White House. But does it? No, at least not when we look in light of what has happened in previous administrations, even if they were not reported or barely reported.

We reported on this problem previously by comparing Trump’s personal peccadillos to presidents of the past, which were barely reported or not reported until historic biographies told the stories.

From JFK’s stream of prostitutes and drugs into the White House far exceeding anything even in Trump’s past, let alone in his White House, to LBJ’s wild racism and infatuation with telling people about his manly package, to Bill Clinton, Trump comes off looking pretty mild. But you wouldn’t know that by consuming only the traditional media because they are covering Trump differently and thereby misleading the American people.

This continually manifests itself in the hysterically funny claim by many Democrats that the Obama administration was the most corruption-free administration in modern American history. This is so easy to debunk — but not if you only get news from the traditional media. Here we report five scandals from the Obama years that could legitimately require a special counsel and that the media had no real interest in pursuing.

This lack of context due to media reporting double standards pops up everywhere.

I was on an ABC panel last night discussing this and other issues with a Florida Democratic Party Chairman and a Tampa Bay Times political correspondent along with the ABC moderator. None of the three of them had heard anything about this Rhodes story. But they knew all about Jared Kushner.

This, of course, goes to the alternate universe that has grown in the wake of the media’s abdication of any journalistic responsibility. Taking sides as the media did clearly during the Obama years, and then did on steroids since Trump’s election, has resulted in two competing narratives of every story out there. This is a prime example and explains why so much on social media appears to be people talking from different planets.

Censorship by Twitter and Facebook using Snopes and other leftist organizations will hardly fix “fake news” in this sense. It will, however magnify the alternate universe paradigm.

And that means that virtually every new eruption from the media on the Trump White House requires the understanding that this may or may not be much of anything. And that requires some truthful context.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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Forget Trump — Depose Obama, Rice, Clinton And The Rest

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date February 14, 2018

Forget Trump, Depose Obama, Rice and Team

by Rep. Julio Gonzalez, M.D., J.D.

In an unusual development casting further shadows on the motives and dealings of the Obama Administration, Sen. Chuck Grassley released a partially redacted email written by President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and sent to herself, documenting a meeting with Obama where he allegedly stressed “his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect” of the investigation regarding Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election is handled “by the book.”

This is a revealing letter in many respects, and suggests the question of whether to depose or not depose President Trump is the wrong one.

Unquestionably, the planks on the bridge leading to Hillary Clinton and her involvement in the FISA affair and with Russian activity designed to influence the outcome of an American presidential election are multiplying and becoming sturdier with every week that passes, while the ones leading to Donald Trump are rapidly crumbling.

But there also appears to be a new extension emanating from the Hillary Bridge, one leading to former President Obama himself, and one that was just made stronger by the hapless and unwitting actions of the dishonest and often bumbling Former National Security Adviser, Susan Rice.

The mere fact that that Rice would write an email to herself makes the communication unusual, but there is so much more that raises questions.

First, the letter was sent on Jan. 20, 2017, at 12:15:32 PM, from, and to, an official government email address. Of course, this is the date of the new President’s inauguration marking the peaceful transfer of power from the Obama Administration to the Trump team. Although the date of the letter is indeed striking, even more surprising is the time, as it was sent after President Trump had been sworn into office at approximately 11:47 a.m. By 12:15 p.m., the time the email was sent, both President Obama and his White House team, inclusive of Rice, were out of office.

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Why would Susan Rice be sending an email containing classified information and detailing certain aspects of a meeting with the Immediate Past President of the United States using an official government email less than 30 minutes after the new President had been sworn in when she was no longer National Security Adviser? And does the act of handling classified information less than an hour after the expiration of her term in office make Susan Rice criminally liable? After all, she was no longer in any official capacity.

Equally as intriguing, Rice is actually not the only recipient of her self-sent email as she copied one of her staffers, a young man named Curtis Ried, who according to his very scant twitter feed worked for Ambassador Rice for seven years. Why cc Curtis Ried? Did he have a need to know about this meeting? Was the email solicited by Ried? Did someone else ask Rice to send it, and if so, who?

This brings us to the substance of the Jan. 5 meeting documented in the email. Why would the President of the United States, in the last fortnight of his tenure, need to remind the FBI Director, the Deputy Attorney General, the Vice President, and the National Security Advisor, of the need to carry out an investigation regarding suspected Russian hacking “by the book”?

Adding to the incongruity is Rice’s problems with her candor and her lack of credibility. Recall, this is the same Susan Rice that The Washington Times’ David Keene called the Obama Administration’s “go-to liar” largely because of her multiple attempts to sell a fake story to the American people linking the attack on our embassy in Benghazi to a ridiculous and inconsequential movie. She is also the same Susan Rice who called Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl a hero. One must strongly consider that Rice’s email represents another messaging mission given to her by the President Obama.

Admittedly, the public is not in possession of sufficient information to answer the myriad of questions posed by Rice’s actions. But here’s what we do know.

Along with the texts sent by Lisa Paige to her FBI lover and coworker, Peter Strzok, there are now at least two known references regarding the possible direct involvement of President Obama in the covert and illegal investigations of American citizens with the intent to dig up dirt on his party’s political opponent, more than enough to depose the President’s potential direct role in this latest example of the federal government’s abuse of power.

Dr. Julio Gonzalez is an orthopaedic surgeon and lawyer living in Venice, Florida. He is the author of The Federalist Pages and serves in the Florida House of Representatives. He can be reached through www.thefederalistpages.com to arrange a lecture or book signing.

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Student Loan Crisis: Another Obama Legacy of Failure

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date February 13, 2018
6 Comments on Student Loan Crisis: Another Obama Legacy of Failure

Rod Thomson

There is indeed a student loan crisis. And the numbers show it is entirely the doing of President Obama, with an assist from his supporting cast in the Democrat-run Congress.

The crisis has its origins in 2010, when President Obama essentially nationalized the national student lending program by signing a law he had proposed and Congress passed that muscled banks out of the picture as lenders. Banks had been providing government-backed student loans, but Obama, in all of his community organizer wisdom, figured distant government bureaucrats could do it better than bankers and save taxpayers money. It’s laughable, sure, but he and Democrats apparently believed it.

“By cutting out the middleman, we’ll save the American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years,” Obama said during the signing ceremony. “That’s real money.” By the way, that savings number comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which once again shows that a palm reader would probably be more accurate in projecting impacts.

The president assured Americans that anyone who wanted to go to college would be able to get a loan. Again, totally predictably, federal student loan debt skyrocketed, from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion by the end of 2017, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

Eight years. One president. Another unforced crisis.

But that’s just for millions of students that jumped at something they could not afford and many would not finish. Taxpayers are really taking it in the hindquarters.

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A recent U.S. Department of Education report puts it starkly. The report points out that the program had a $25 billion surplus in 2012. That fell to a $5 billion surplus by 2015, was $8.4 billion in the red in 2016 and plummeted to a $36 billion loss last year. Who knows where it will be by the end of this year.

Remember. This was pitched as a way to not only save money, but make money. Why let the banks make the interest when the government can? But government by nature is somewhere between Keystone cops at best and criminal corruptocrats at worst, with much falling somewhere in the middle. So naturally instead of making money, or doing anything positive at all, it cost American taxpayers $36 billion last year and presumably a lot more this year.

In addition to the Keystone Cops-corruptocrat part of the formula, Obama also played magical government money politics with it. Precisely when he directed Washington bureaucrats to run the loan programs, he solemnly intoned in his special way about the burden student loans are to young people and that “we” — meaning American taxpayers — need to help them shed this burden (which, you recall, he was helping heap on them.)

Obama and his pen instituted a series of programs that made it easier for students to get out of paying back their loans. Whatever compassion there may have been in this nonsensical scheme, there was surely more than a heavy dose of politics. Politicians giving away goodies (that are not theirs) to others is a time-tested way to get votes.

One of his programs — called “income-driven repayment” but nicknamed “Obama student loan forgiveness” — allows borrowers to not make payments when their income falls below a specific threshold, then caps payments as a percentage of total family income. Any debt left over at the end of 25 years is forgiven. Because that’s how real life works.

It doesn’t take a genius with an expensive degree in human nature to know the perverse incentives that program provided. Students with debt rushed into the program, minimized income at certain levels, kept income off the books and began running the clock out on the 25 years. Their debts were so massive, it made sense to them — even if it was immoral.

A survey of student borrowers by LendEDU found half do not plan to pay back all their debts because, as Obama and Democrats kept prattling on about, the feds would just forgive them.

Why were the debts so massive in the first place? Again, human nature. Knowing the government was going to make sure anyone could get a loan for college, universities around the nation began ramping up tuitions at a faster rate than their already rapid increase. After all, the windfall was coming, and there were no controls and no market mechanism anywhere because the government was doing everything.

This is all terrible policy from the start, even before Obama turned it into a financial horror flick.

Seriously, explain again why people who do not send their children to college should be working to subsidize and actually pay for those who do? Explain again how this is Democrats looking out for blue collar, hard-working Americans that they suppose are their constituency?

All this shows yet again just how extraordinarily bad a president Obama was — and how bad Democrat policies continue to be.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act.

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever, and a lot of sources are not trustworthy. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time from good sources.

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How The Media Buries The Real Collusion Scandals

Post author By Rod Thomson
Post date February 11, 2018
2 Comments on How The Media Buries The Real Collusion Scandals

Rod Thomson

This is pretty simple from a journalistic perspective. But it’s important, even to those who get their news from non-mainstream media sources because it goes to the growing “two worlds” divide in the nation over what people think is really going on.

The broad arc of the story is fairly well known now — well, to conservative readers who consume news sources outside the mainstream media: The Trump-Russian collusion story continues to disintegrate, being replaced with a competing narrative that turns the original story on its head.

That’s tricky business for the people, including most of the Washington media corps, who have totally vested themselves in the original narrative of Trump-Russia.

What we have are investigations by five congressional committees into apparently irregular, unprofessional and possibly criminal actions by federal investigators in probably the two most sensitive political inquests since Watergate: Hillary Clinton’s dangerous and probably illegal handling of classified information while Secretary of State, along her 30,000 missing emails; and now the probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russian bad guys to influence the election, which is netting a second narrative.

Further, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice has been running its own investigation of these alleged improprieties within the FBI and DOJ and has come out with more incriminating evidence.

The result so far has been the reassignment, demotion and firing of at least six mid- to high-ranking FBI and DOJ officials. All of these relate to the second narrative of collusion against Trump.

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In recent weeks, well-sourced, named documents have been released that are condemning of the FBI and dramatically build the narrative that far from being the perpetrator of Russian collusion, the Trump campaign may well have been the victim of it.

At the same time, Trump-Russia collusion has gone virtually dormant even in the media that will take any anonymous source to run stories and reactions for 48 hours.

Now, see what happens in this atmosphere when two blockbuster stories on apparent FBI malfeasance come up in the same day that further expands the narrative of government officials working to overtly undermine President Trump, possibly with Russian help.

One of the leading, experienced, careful voices analyzing this issue, former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy, wrote in National Review:

“The Grassley-Graham memo corroborates the claims in the Nunes memo: The Obama Justice Department and FBI used anonymously sourced, Clinton-campaign generated innuendo to convince the FISA court to issue surveillance warrants against Carter Page, and in doing so, they concealed the Clinton campaign’s role. Though the Trump campaign had cut ties with Page shortly before the first warrant was issued in October 2016, the warrant application was based on wild allegations of a corrupt conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Moreover, the warrant meant the FBI could seize not only Page’s forward-going communications but any past emails and texts he may have stored — i.e., his Trump campaign communications.

With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.”

The Nunes memo and the Grassley-Graham memo with its boatload of information are one set of major explosions inside the FBI pointing to high-level collusion. Mammoth stories by any standards — and in this case, the standards are much higher, and met, than the tenuous and fleeting possibility of Trump-Russia collusion. Grassley and Graham (both of them long-time, play-by-the-rules Senators) had to fight tooth and nail to get the FBI to allow the release of the information. And for obvious reasons. The FBI looks terrible in these reports.

So, as a former long-time journalist, I could see tons of juicy news angles on top of the banner stories. Award-winning material to be digging into and investigating. The Grassley-Graham memo is particularly blockbuster-heavy.

Well, let’s look at the big three in national political coverage on the collusion angle where Trump is the victim.

The “all the news that’s fit to print” New York Times did manage to fit one story to print on Page 19A of the newspaper under the snoozy headline, “2 Senators Issue Letter To Support House Memo.” It mostly focused on the Democrats’ response, while glossing over the actually meat of the memo.

The Washington Post never ran a story on it. A Post blogger partisanly mischaracterized the memo, calling it “an effort to breathe life into the deflating Nunes effort.” It was literally a Democratic talking point.

Politico didn’t even bother to have a blogger write something partisan. Just nothing. It’s not news if it’s not reported. (Which is why alternative news sources are just so critically important. Maybe the best aggregator of those sources for conservatives is www.whatfinger.com, an excellent alternative to Drudge.)

In the same day last week, there was the little incident of more texts being discovered and released between the disgraced top FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing” in regards to the Clinton email investigation. This, despite Obama, on the record on video, saying he never asked the FBI about the investigation.

This is another huge story in the unfolding narrative of corruption in the Obama administration, providing more evidence that the President himself was not just aware of the unethical and illegal activities, but perhaps actively a part of them.

But again, it was snoozeville for the media. A few national political reporters tweeted about the “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing” text. And those were mostly questioning the validity of the report or using what sure sounded like more Democrat talking points.

Virtually no coverage by the old media of Obama clearly caught lying on what the old media itself considers the biggest story of 2017.

A good way anyone can gauge the media coverage quickly is by doing a Google search of the relative news terms. In this case, a quote of the text shows every news story in the first pages are conservative sites. One exception, NBC News did a minimal story for online, but not on the air. Conversely, a story furthering the slim-picking Trump-Russia narrative will be a flip on coverage. All of the old media outlets will show up in a Google search, but few conservative ones.

This is driving the two worlds narrative. And more than anything, it rests on the old mainstream media by dishonestly telling their consumers they are providing fair and objective news. Most of us on the right understand there are two sets of competing news options and if we choose the conservative ones, we aren’t getting the other. But those consuming only the old media, think they are getting the full truth.

And we end up with Americans living side by side but in two worlds.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act.

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