CajunWin4's Blog

Why Jobless Claims May Not Be as Good as Market Thinks

Published: Thursday, 11 Oct 2012 | 11:10 AM ET

For the second time in a week, a government unemployment report is sowing confusion—and may not be as positive as the markets think.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

 

First it was last Friday's August payrolls report, which showed an unexpectedly large drop in the unemployment rate, that spurred confusion (and conspiracy theories). Now, a sharp drop in the pace of new jobless claims has also left people scratching their heads.

The Labor Department on Thursday said the number of people filing jobless claims last week dropped by a seasonally adjusted 30,000—a pretty sharp decline, and one that left the total number of filings at a four-year low of 339,000.

Financial markets immediately rallied on the news. (Read more: Stocks Rise After Jobless Claims Hit 4-Year Low.)

 

While the government didn’t note any unusual factors in the release itself, a Labor Department official did tell news agencies covering the release about a quirk which partly accounted for the larger-than-expected drop.

 

 

As Dow Jones reported: “A Labor Department economist said one large state didn't report additional quarterly figures as expected, accounting for a substantial part of the decrease.”

The wording of that statement, along with the accompanying headlines, left the impression that one major state didn’t turn in its figures.

Here's what actually happened. The state did report weekly jobless claims but did not process and report its quarterly claims number (when many people have to reapply for benefits for technical reasons as opposed to being newly laid off). As a result, there wasn't the expected spike in claims that normally happens at the start of the quarter.

It is unclear why that happened or how unusual that is. What is clear is that the expected spike in claims around the start of each quarter was smaller this time than usual. Coupled with the seasonal adjustment (that expected a bigger increase), that pushed down the headline figure.

In other words, the drop of 30,000 last week had more to do with the lack of expected re-filings at the start of the fourth quarter than with any particular improvement in labor market conditions.

That also means that the decline which usually follows the spike won’t be as pronounced this time around, so the headline tally of jobless claims is likely to rebound next week.

All told, these two weeks’ worth of jobless claims will end up being more noise than signal. That may frustrate those who follow the series closely for clues into the health of the U.S. labor market. Coupled with last week’s payrolls report, it is also likely to fuel perception that labor market figures in general can’t be trusted.

The Labor Department appears to have had little choice in this matter, however; it couldn’t estimate what the one large state would or should have reported. Still, it may have been able to avoid more confusion had it more clearly articulated that in its weekly press release.

And now, there is one state’s labor department with plenty of explaining to do.

• 
•                 Michael Barone                                    

            Oct 11,  2012

"The Illegal-Donor Loophole" is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at The New Yorker and The New York Times.

The article tells how Obama.com, a website owned by an Obama fundraiser who lives in China but has visited the Obama White House 11 times, sends solicitations mostly to foreign email addresses and links to the Obama campaign website's donation page.

The Obama website, unlike those of most campaigns, doesn't ask for the three- or four-digit credit card verification number. That makes it easier for donors to use fictitious names and addresses to send money in.

Campaigns aren't allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there's no way to know.

The campaign -- as my former boss, pollster Peter Hart, likes to say -- always reflects the candidate. A campaign willing to skirt the law or abet violations of it reflects a candidate who, as president, has been doing the same thing.

Examples abound. Take the WARN Act, which requires employers to give a 60-day notice of layoffs. It was sponsored and passed by Democrats.

The WARN Act requires defense contractors to give notice on Nov. 2 of layoffs that will be necessary on Jan. 3, when the sequestration law requires big cutbacks in defense spending.

The administration has asked companies not to send out the notices. And it has promised to pay companies' WARN Act fines. Why the solicitude? The warnings could cost Obama Virginia's 13 electoral votes.

When did Congress give presidents the power to suspend operation of this law? What law authorizes the government to pay the fines of those who violate the law?

Or consider the welfare waivers that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gives to states that want to relax work requirements. Democratic blogger Mickey Kaus makes a strong case that this violates clear language in the welfare reform act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996.

If Kaus is right, Sebelius and Obama are brazenly rewriting the law -- one of the most successful reforms of the last two decades.

Then there's Obama's promise not to deport young illegal immigrants brought into the U.S. as children who meet certain conditions

-- like going to college or serving in the military.

It's a policy that tests well in the polls. The problem is that Congress, even when controlled by Democrats, refused to relax immigration policy in this way.

You won't hear much about this on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney says he won't reverse it, since it seems harsh to penalize people who came forward in response to a president's stated policy.

Similarly, he's not in favor of reversing the policy allowing open gays to serve in the military.

There's one difference between the two situations. Congress actually passed a law (repealing one signed by Clinton) allowing gays to serve. It was one of the last acts of the outgoing Democratic Congress in 2010.

But neither that Congress nor the current one passed a law authorizing mass non-enforcement of immigration laws. Nor did any Congress pass a law suspending the WARN Act when it jeopardizes a president's chance to carry a target state.

Article II of the Constitution (not Article I, as Joe Biden appeared to say in the 2008 vice presidential debate) sets out the duties and powers of the president. Section 3 states that "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

It does not give him the power to make laws. That's given to Congress, in Article I.

Barack Obama was a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. But he seems to take the attitude familiar to me, as an alumnus of Yale Law School, that the law is simply a bunch of words that people who are clever with words can manipulate to get any result they want.

In public speeches, he has defended such policies by shouting, "We can't wait!" The results are good, or at least politically convenient, so why be held back by a few words written on paper?

The Constitution was written by men who had a different idea. They wanted a government bound by the rule of law. Do we?

Obama’s Lies Unravel In Congressional Hearing On Libya 9/11 Attack

Wednesday, October 10, 2012 15:48

• 
•                 Brent Bozell                                    

            Oct 10,  2012

          Team Obama came out of that disastrous first debate blaming the debacle on one thing after another, finally settling on the most vicious excuse: Mitt Romney only won because he was a brazen liar. David Axelrod was obnoxious enough to cite as his moral witness one Bill Clinton, who is certainly an authority on lying with a barrel full of chutzpah.

 

      Axelrod pledged in every interview that Team Obama would be holding Romney accountable. Fine. That's political theater. But is there anyone in the media who holds Team Obama accountable? Most journalists are too busy hounding Romney. Bloomberg News is an exception. It is willing to look at how Obama's campaign promises are faring.

      Obama came into office pledging to create "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and to "act promptly" to make information public. Surprise, surprise: Obama is just another politician. In June, Bloomberg reporters filed Freedom of Information Act requests with 57 federal agencies. The reporters sought data on a very basic level: taxpayer-supported travel by Cabinet secretaries and top officials. Just eight of the agencies met the 20-day window for disclosure required by law. Of 20 Cabinet-level agencies, only the Small Business Administration responded within the legal time limit. (Who knew that Obama elevated SBA to Cabinet-level status in January? A lot of good it did.)

      The records of five other Cabinet-level departments -- Commerce, Labor, Treasury, the Office of Budget and Management, and the U.S. Trade Representative -- were turned over to Bloomberg past the deadline. "Fourteen either haven't fully complied or haven't responded at all, including the Department of Justice -- whose mandate includes enforcing compliance of disclosure laws."

      Bloomberg acknowledged the government processed over 600,000 FOIA filings last year. "But it was the president and his attorney general, Eric Holder, who publicly designated openness and transparency as the guiding lights of this administration. The benchmark of timely disclosure is their own. And unlike other inaugural promises -- world peace, say, or campaign finance reform -- this one seemed within grasp."

      Some refusals were laughable. The State Department, for example, said it couldn't compile travel records for Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, until July 2013, more than a year after the request was made.

      The media love to march around saying "sunlight is the best disinfectant" and alleging that they're in favor of government transparency. But when Democrats are in power, they don't really believe in spending any time on that "openness" blather.

      Conservative activist and author Christopher Horner has laid out an astonishing case against the Obama administration in his new book "The Liberal War on Transparency." Don't plan on seeing Chris in a big "60 Minutes" piece or a two-hour PBS documentary.

      Remember how the liberal reporters all yammered away about how they were entitled to all of Sarah Palin's emails as governor of Alaska? Media organizations sued to gain access to 13,000 Palin emails. Where are those "reporters" now? Why the silence over Team Obama? Because the media is on Team Obama.

      Horner demonstrates that the Obama administration conducts its public business by avoiding the official email accounts provided by the taxpayer. Jim Messina, currently the campaign manager for Obama, used his private AOL account during his time in the White House to make deals with Big Pharma lobbyists to support Obamacare, where they agreed to buy $150 million in ads and lobby for his bill's enactment.

      Similarly, the head of the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program made infamous by Solyndra, conducted government business on personal email accounts. "Don't ever send an email on DOE email with a personal email addresses," Jonathan Silver wrote August 21, 2011 from his personal account to another program official's private account. "That makes them subpoenable." There's nothing innocent in that sentence.

      The Washington Post reported then that "Silver repeatedly communicated about internal and sensitive loan decisions via his personal email, the newly released records show, and more than a dozen other Energy Department staff members used their personal email to discuss decisions involving taxpayer-funded loans as well."

      Did the Post write an angry editorial on this? Of course not.

      Horner's indictment is blunt: "Transparency is being turned on its head, and by the ideological heirs of its original champions." He means liberals in general. But it's the liberal "investigative journalists" and editorial writers who have proven to be flagrantly hypocritical. "Freedom of information" is only a fancy turn of phrase used to describe a political tactic to be employed against conservatives. With liberals, silence is golden.

In an explosive report set to send shockwaves through official Washington, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) released a 108-page GAI investigation into the threat of foreign and fraudulent Internet campaign donations in U.S. federal elections (visit campaignfundingrisks.com to download the full report).

Breitbart News obtained an advance copy of the bombshell report which reveals that the Obama.com website is not owned by the president’s campaign but rather by Obama bundler Robert Roche, a U.S. citizen living in Shanghai, China. Roche is the chairman of a Chinese infomercial company, Acorn International, with ties to state-controlled banks that allow it to “gain revenue through credit card transactions with Chinese banks.”

There’s more.

The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors to enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.

And still more.

In 2011, Mr. Roche obtained one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in Washington, DC: a seat at the head table for President Obama’s State Dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao. How Roche—a man whose infomercial company hawks fitness equipment, cell phones, and breast enhancement products—landed a seat alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, Sen. John Kerry, former President Jimmy Carter, and Chinese President Hu Jintao remains unclear. 

Since 2009, White House Visitor Logs list the name Robert Roche at least 19 times, despite the fact Mr. Roche’s primary residence is in China. 

Mr. Roche, who is originally from Chicago, is a co-chair of the Technology Initiative for the Obama campaign.

According to Acorn International’s prospectus, the success of Mr. Roche’s company hinges on maintaining access to state-run media and “preferential tax treatments and subsidies” doled out by the People’s Republic of China (PRC): 

Our business depends on our access to TV media time to market our products and services in China….PRC law is vague and is subject to discretionary interpretation and enforcement by PRC authorities…Loss of these preferential tax treatments and subsidies could have material and adverse effects on our results of operations and financial conditions.

In addition to the Obama.com redirect revelation, the Government Accountability Institute report—America the Vulnerable: Are Foreign And Fraudulent Online Contributions Influencing U.S. Elections?—exposes myriad gaping online security holes that stand to threaten the integrity of House, Senate, and presidential elections

The Facts Point to a Failed Presidency

 

On the one hand, you have facts, which are devastating to the Obama re-election effort. We have now learned that only 114,000 new jobs were created in September. Do not let anyone tell you this is a good number. You need to create more than 200,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth, and we haven’t come anywhere near that since April.
Add that to other facts: The official unemployment rate remains an absurdly high 7.8 percent three years into a so-called recovery, while the real unemployment rate (which includes those underemployed and those who have stopped looking for work) remains unchanged at 14.7 percent.
Economic growth was only 1.3 percent in the second quarter, and unlikely to be much better in the third. We have another deficit that will come in well over $1 trillion. The national debt has topped $16 trillion. We have 23 million people unemployed and 46 million people on food stamps.
And a looming fiscal cliff — the dreaded Taxmageddon of new tax increases scheduled for the end of the year — is guaranteed to send us back into a new recession if it is allowed to happen.
These are facts. They add up to one unmistakable picture, which is that Barack Obama is a failed president.
On the other hand, you have stories. Obama likes to tell stories, and actually claims that his biggest failing as president is not telling enough of them. He tells a story about Mitt Romney proposing a $5 trillion tax cut for wealthy people only. He tells a story about Mitt Romney proposing to raise taxes on the middle class, and raising Medicare premiums by $6,000 a month. He even tells a story about the private sector doing fine.
Obama loves these stories because they allow him to create a narrative about a president cruising to re-election. That’s why last Wednesday’s debate may prove to be much more important than your typical presidential debate.
Until Wednesday, many Americans were more familiar with Obama’s stories than they were with the facts. He is allowed to say pretty much whatever he wants on the stump, and in media interviews, and he is not challenged. The media are too busy demanding “specifics” from Romney to deal with the facts about what has happened in the country under Obama’s policies.
I’m not suggesting that the electorate thinks things are good. They know things are not good, which is the reason Obama can’t get past 50 percent even in skewed polls that oversample Democrats. But prior to the debate, Obama was entitled to his own facts. He was able to tell bold-faced lies about Romney’s proposals and spin his own record to make it appear much better than it really is.
And because this has been so easy for Obama to do, he was completely unprepared for the fact that Romney would stand up to his storytelling and throw one fact after another back at him. The image of Obama — head bowed, stammering — was priceless, because it was the picture of a man who was finally being held to account for the truth, and simply had nothing to offer in response.
More than 70 million Americans saw this. For the first time, many of them became familiar with the facts, and with the distinction between the facts and Obama’s stories.
That does not mean we have seen the end of storytelling designed to rescue Obama. Because the new jobs report included a slight dip in the unemployment rate — from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent — you can expect Obama and his media allies to proclaim, “Good news for the president!”
That will be the story. The facts are something else entirely, and Wednesday’s debate was the first time many voters were exposed to the facts. That’s why Romney won the debate, and that’s why Obama is desperately trying to come up with a new story.
Following the conclusion of his presidential campaign, Herman Cain established The Cain Solutions Revolution, an organization whose mission is to educate the public and advocate for the policy solutions that drove his campaign for the presidency. Read more reports from Herman Cain — Click Here Now.

 

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner reported that the Obama campaign has been trying to block a story that reveals a major donor scandal being prepared by a national magazine and web site.

"But," Paul Bedard wrote, a "key source said it plans to publish the story Friday or, more likely, Monday."

According to Bedard's sources, "a taxpayer watchdog group conducted a nine-month investigation into presidential and congressional fundraising and has uncovered thousands of cases of credit card solicitations and donations to Obama and Capitol Hill, allegedly from unsecure accounts, and many from overseas."

"That," he added, "might be a violation of federal election laws."

Bedard said that the Obama re-election campaign has received "hundreds of millions in small dollar donations, many via credit card donations through their website. On Thursday, the campaign announced a record September donor haul of $150 million."

"To raise $150 million in a month, you need an awful lot of donors," a post at Hot Air observed.

A similar problem was unearthed during the 2008 campaign when a Kansas City couple reported a "strange" $2,300 donation to Obama that appeared on their credit card statement.  The couple said they were McCain voters and would never donate to Obama.

Although Chase dropped the charge, further investigation revealed a number of donations from fictional characters like Bart Simpson, Daffy Duck and King Kong, all using prepaid credit cards.  Even "O. J. Simpson" donated $5 to the campaign.

"At the time," Bedard said, "the Washington Post reported that the Obama campaign let donors use 'largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity.'"

In 2008, the Post said that questions were raised when they discovered that Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, MO., had donated $174,800 to the Obama campaign, according to FEC reports.

"Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election," the Post said.

Worse yet, Biskup told the Post she never donated to the Obama campaign and her credit card was never billed for the donations.

Intelligence officials angered by Obama administration cover up of intelligence on Iranian, al Qaeda surge in Egypt and Libya

BY: Bill GertzOctober 5, 2012 5:00 am

Weeks before the presidential election, President Barack Obama’s administration faces mounting opposition from within the ranks of U.S. intelligence agencies over what careerofficers say is a “cover up” of intelligence information about terrorism in North Africa.

Intelligence held back from senior officials and the public includes numerous classified reports revealing clear Iranian support for jihadists throughout the tumultuous North Africa and Middle East region, as well as notably widespread al Qaeda penetration into Egypt and Libya in the months before the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

“The Iranian strategy is two-fold: upping the ante for the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against Iran and perceived cyber operations against Iran’s nuclear weapons program by conducting terror attacks on soft U.S. targets and cyber attacks against U.S. financial interests,” said one official, speaking confidentially.

The Iranian effort also seeks to take the international community’s spotlight off Iran’s support for its Syrian ally.

Two House Republicans, Reps. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), stated in a letter sent this week to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that officials “with direct knowledge of events in Libya” revealed that the Benghazi attack was part of a string of terror attacks and not a spontaneous uprising against an anti-Muslim video produced in the U.S. The lawmakers have scheduled congressional hearings for Oct. 10.

Susan Phalen, spokeswoman for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), said the panel is “reviewing all relevant intelligence and the actions of the [intelligence community], as would be expected of the oversight committee.”

But she noted: “At this point in time it does not appear that there was an intelligence failure.”

Intelligence officials pointed to the statement issued Sept. 28 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that raised additional concern about the administration’s apparent mishandling of intelligence. The ODNI statement said that “in the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo.”

Officials say the ODNI’s false information was either knowingly disseminated or was directed to be put out by senior policy officials for political reasons, since the statement was contradicted by numerous intelligence reports at the time of the attack indicating it was al Qaeda-related terrorism.

Among the obvious signs of terrorism was the arms used by the attackers, who were equipped with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.

A U.S. intelligence official who disputes the idea of an Obama administration coverup said: “Intelligence professionals follow the information wherever it leads.”

“When there isn’t definitive information, it makes sense to be cautious,” the official said. “There has never been a dogmatic approach to analyzing what happened in Benghazi. Staying open to alternative explanations—and continually refining assessments as new and credible information surfaces—is part of the intelligence business.”

Officials with access to intelligence reports, based on both technical spying and human agents, said specific reporting revealed an alarming surge in clandestine al Qaeda activity months before the attack in Benghazi.

Yet the Obama administration sought to keep the information from becoming public to avoid exposing what the officials say is a Middle East policy failure by Obama.

Officials said that the administration appeared to engage in a disinformation campaign aimed at distancing the president personally during the peak of the presidential election campaign from the disaster in Benghazi, where numerous warning of an attack were ignored, resulting in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other officials.

The first part of the apparent campaign, officials said, was the false information provided to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who appeared on Sunday television shows after the attack to say the event was a “spontaneous” response to an anti-Muslim video trailer posted online.

Officials said Rice was given the false information to use in media appearances in order to promote the excuse that the obscure video was the cause of the attack, and not the Islamic concept of jihad.

Rice’s claims provoked concern inside the U.S. intelligence community that intelligence about what was going on in Libya and the region was being suppressed, and led to a series of news disclosures about what would later be confirmed as an al Qaeda attack using the group Ansar al Sharia.

After Rice’s incorrect statements, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney repeated the false assessment of the Benghazi attack.

The final element of the campaign involved comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was the first to give a partial explanation of the intelligence when she said al Qaeda terrorists operating from Mali were possible culprits in the Benghazi attack.

“What she failed to mention was the cooperation of Iran and Egypt in supporting jihadists in Libya,” the official said, who added the events would be investigated in an apparent effort to stave off internal critics in government.

That has led to delays in getting FBI and other U.S. investigators into Benghazi, raising concerns that some in the White House wanted to delay the FBI’s efforts to uncover evidence about the attack.

The FBI did not reach Benghazi until Thursday, ostensibly over concerns about the lack of security to protect them.

“The Obama Administration is afraid to admit al Qaeda is running rampant throughout the region because it would expose the truth instead of what President Obama so pompously spouted during the Democratic Convention” said the official.

The president said during his nomination acceptance speech that “al Qaeda is on the path to defeat,” an assertion contradicted by the group’s rise in the region.

The administration, in particular, wants to keep hidden solid intelligence showing that the terrorist group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans is now flourishing under the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt was among the locations of Obama’s 2009 so-called “apology” tour, when the president criticized past U.S. policies based on what he said was “fear and anger” that prompted actions “contrary to our ideals.” He also promised “a new beginning” for the U.S. and the world’s Muslims and a radical shift in U.S. policy.

The rise of Islamists in the region instead has produced a surge in anti-American protests and riots, culminating in the terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate.

Recent intelligence reports show that Egypt’s Al-Azhar University in Cairo is emerging as a covert base for al Qaeda organizational and training activities for a jihadi network consisting of many nationalities.

The Morsi government has turned a blind eye to both the increased jihadist activity and Iran’s support for it in the region, particularly in Libya and Syria.

However, the administration is keeping the intelligence under wraps to avoid highlighting Obama’s culpability for the democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring being hijacked by Islamists sympathetic to al Qaeda’s terrorist ideology.

Intelligence officials said in Egypt—currently ruled by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood—one of the key al Qaeda organizers has been identified as Muhammad al-Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Muhammad al-Zawahiri was released by Morsi in Marchafter having been sentenced to death for terrorist acts in Egypt.

In recent months Egypt-based al Qaeda terrorists were dispatched to Libya and Syria, where they have been covertly infiltrating Libyan militia groups and Syrian opposition forces opposing the Bashar al Assad regime.

In addition to Egyptian government backing, intelligence from the region has revealed that operatives from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the main spy service, and from Iran’s Quds Force paramilitary group and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are also facilitating al Qaeda terrorists based in Egypt that are preparing to conduct operations to increase instability throughout the region.

The intelligence revealing that al Qaeda is growing in Egypt is said by officials to be one of the reasons behind Obama’s decision to cancel a meeting in New York with Morsi during the U.N. General Assembly meeting last month.

Other news outlets in recent days have revealed new internal U.S. government information that contrasts sharply or contradicts official Obama administration statements that appear designed to minimize the rise of Egyptian-origin terrorism.

The Daily Beast reported Sept. 28 that intercepted communications revealed terrorists belonging to the group Ansar al Sharia were in contact with the group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb regarding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and others.

Communications intercepts revealed that the terrorists in Benghazi bragged about the attack, the news outlet reported.

A group called Ansar al Sharia in Egypt was formed in April 2011 and advocates violent jihad and support for al Qaeda.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that terrorists linked to a former Guantanamo prison inmate, Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad, was one of the individuals who attacked diplomatic facilities in Libya on Sept. 11, and that intelligence reports showed some of the terrorists in the attack may have been trained in Libyan desert camps.

• 
•                 Political  Calculations

President Obama, speaking in Virginia, said, "We don't believe anybody is entitled to success in this country."

 

"This country doesn’t just succeed when just a few are doing well at the top.  It succeeds when the middle class gets bigger. Our economy doesn’t grow from the top down -- it grows from the middle out.  We don’t believe that anybody is entitled to success in this country," said Obama. "But we do believe in opportunity.  We believe in a country where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, and everybody is getting a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share and everybody is playing by the same rules."

• 
• Frank Gaffney                                    

            Oct 04,  2012

Suddenly, the President's new clothes seem embarrassingly transparent.  The contention relentlessly promoted by Team Obama, to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief's performance with respect to foreign policy and national security was simply unassailable, is being seen for what it is: an utter fraud.

The deal-breaker has been the accumulating evidence that President Obama and his subordinates disinformed the American people - to put it charitably - about a present danger: the outbreak of violence against our diplomatic personnel and facilities and other interests in more than 30 countries around the world.  Specifically, they denied that a carefully planned and executed jihadist attack against our consulate in Benghazi was responsible for the murder of the Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues on September 11, 2012.

The party line assiduously pushed for days thereafter by administration spokesmen including, most risibly UN Ambassador Susan Rice, was that the attack spontaneously ensued from a demonstration outside the U.S. compound prompted by an American video, "Innocence of Muslims," which reviles the founder of Islam. And, so the story went, the demonstrators got carried away and wound up sacking the consulate and a nearby safe house, in the course of which the four victims were killed.

It turns out that Team Obama knew early on that such representations were untrue.  In a blog post headlined "Some administration officials were concerned about initial White House push blaming Benghazi attack on mob, video," ABC News' Jake Tapper recounted on September 27th that, "The Daily Beast's Eli Lake on Wednesday reported that intelligence officials said ‘the early information was enough to show that the attack was planned and the work of al Qaeda affiliates operating in Eastern Libya.' ‘There was very good information on this in the first 24 hours,' one of the officials told Lake.

For one thing, on September 10th, al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, had issued a public call for retribution against the United States for a recent assassination by drone strike of one of his senior commanders.  The consulate in Benghazi was low-hanging fruit - a vulnerable facility in a jihadist-infested city with a high-value target, a U.S. ambassador, who had no security.

Insult was added to injury as our Commander-in-Chief - he who has not been able to find time for most of his daily intelligence briefings - reportedly went to bed after being advised that the consulate was under attack.  When he awoke, Mr. Obama made a Rose Garden statement expressing regret at the loss of the four Americans' lives and rejecting "all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." (Astonishingly, he neglected to mention anything about the roughly concurrent attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo.)

Then, on September 18th, President Obama insisted during an appearance on David Letterman's show that the attacks on a number of diplomatic missions "including the one in Libya" were conducted by "extremists and terrorists" who "used...as an excuse" popular anger at the release of the video by a "shadowy character who lives here."  The President could not at that point have been under any illusion about the veracity of that statement concerning the Benghazi bloodletting.  It was, in short, a lie.  Worse yet, it was, as we shall see, a lie that served the interests of America's enemies.

Incredibly, even after his own press spokesman acknowledged on September 20th that the murderous assault in Libya was not the spontaneous work of a mob, Mr. Obama used his speech before the UN General Assembly on September 25th to perpetuate the meme that those offended by our freedom of expression are responsible for such attacks - not jihadists doctrinally obliged to seek our destruction. 

While the President used much of the speech to profess his opposition to such behavior, he declared that, "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam." That is a call for non-Muslims to abide by shariah blasphemy laws that could have been uttered by any Islamic supremacist, including al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief jurist Yusef al-Qaradawi or Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

After all, it has been a top priority of these and our other Islamist foes - notably, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) - to begin establishing their dominion over the rest of us by restricting what we can say, and therefore know and do, about Islam and its totalitarian doctrine known as shariah.  President Obama and his subordinates (notably, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her "Istanbul Process") have been playing directly into such adversaries' efforts to prohibit and criminalize shariah blasphemy with their serial complaints and apologies about the video.  By so doing, the Obama administration is effectively inviting more violence against Americans deemed "offensive" to the Islamists, making the world a more dangerous place for all of us.

Critics of George W. Bush harshly chastised him for allegedly misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to get us into a needless and unjustified war.  They insisted that "Bush lied, people died."  Never mind that it wasn't true.  Mr. Bush acted on the basis of what was known at the time: Saddam had used such weapons previously and had not verifiably eliminated either his remaining stocks or the capacity to make more.

Will those once so vociferous about presidential truth-telling be equally seized with the fact that "Obama lied after people died"?

            President Barack Obama appointed Cheryl Saban, wife of the owner of Univision, as U.S. representative to the United Nations, according to reports from various news blogs.

According to the Politico blog, Haim Saban, owner of the television network, backed Hillary Clinton in 2008, but during the summer donated $1 million to groups supporting the campaigns of Democrats. And according to another blog in Spanish of Yahoo, the appointment of Cheryl Saban to the diplomatic post was made last Wednesday, the day before Obama appeared at a forum at the University of Miami hosted by Univision.

Haim Saban, a  billionaire businessman, took control of Univision in 2006 topping a bid made by media conglomerate Televisa of Mexico.     

      "Mrs. Saban has never worked in diplomatic posts but has been active in philanthropic and non-profit organizations such as CARE USA, Children's Network International, Mercy Corps, Plan USA," stated Yahoo, which said Haim Saban’s fortune is worth $3.6 billion and is listed by Forbes magazine as one of the 100 richest men in America.