Archives for June 2013

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says the nomination of Samantha Power to serve in his former position is an act of defiance to Republicans and a sign that Obama could be moving further to the left now that he doesn’t have to face the voters again.

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America discuss the good, the bad, and the crazy. The public debate on security vs privacy with whistleblower Edward Snowden begins and the State Department is covering up some scandals of their own. Peter Mayhew of “Chewbacca” fame was inspected by the TSA because of his light saber cane.

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The Capitol Steps salute the Rolling Stones and their 50th anniversary U.S. tour with an updated version of their classic parody “The Rolling Kidney Stones”.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Daniel Foster of National Review Online discuss reports that the government is constantly collecting our phone, internet and credit card data through the PRISM program.  They’re pleasantly surprised to see the New York Times slam President Obama for the program and they’re amazed as liberals say the real villain here is George W. Bush.

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China is claiming control over the vast majority of the South China Sea in it’s latest effort to challenge U.S. authority and President Obama has to make it clear that cannot happen, according to retired U.S. Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons.

The New York Times reported last weekend that China is quietly distributing official maps to foreign diplomats showing it controls 80 percent of the South China Sea, considerably more than it has publicly claimed in the past.  Six different nations have competing claims for various parts of the sea, which is rich in oil, gas and minerals.  If China were recognized as controlling 80 percent of the sea, foreign planes and ships would have to seek permission to enter those critical waters.

Lyons, who served 36 years in the U.S. Navy and completed his career as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, says this simply cannot be allowed to happen and it’s incumbent upon President Obama to stop it.

“President Obama has to be very clear and let China know we will not tolerate their illegal claims to these vast ocean areas that have been recognized for centuries as international waters,” said Lyons, who says Obama has a golden opportunity to set things straight this week, when he meet with the Chinese leader in California.  “This will probably be one of the first issues discussed at the summit and I’m sure that our allies will be watching carefully how President Obama handles this issue.”

According to Lyons, the U.S. Navy policy on the South China Sea has been consistent from the beginning of our nation and he says China benefits from the longstanding policy as well.

“The United States Navy has stood for freedom of navigation and the right of innocent passage for over 236 years and we’re certainly not going to change course now.  And we’re certainly not going to back down on that recognized principle.  China has to recognize they’ve benefited greatly from that principle,” said Lyons.

The admiral says this move by the Chinese is a major step toward a larger, more disturbing goal:  surpassing the United States on the high seas.

“China has built a navy specifically to fight the United States Navy.  You know, their anti-ship ballistic missile is not to go against the Bangladesh Navy,” said Lyons.  “We should consider that an unfriendly act.  By their actions, they have thrown down the hatchet.  They really are signaling to us that we are entering the 21st century where we’re in another Cold War with another communist, totalitarian regime,” said Lyons.

So what would the best U.S. strategy be to make the Chinese reverse course?

“First of all, we have to make clear to China that we will stand by our mutual defense treaty with our allies over this issue should hostilities develop,” said Lyons, who is very critical of what he sees as decreasing of our military might.

“We have to stop this unilateral disarmament that we’ve been going through.  When we have five carriers tied up at the piers in Norfolk, Virginia, that’s unconscionable because we don’t have the funds to operate them.  So sequestration has got to be reversed,” said Lyons.

Most of America’s nuclear focus since the end of the Cold War centered on the Asian subcontinent, North Korea, Iran and other rogue states.  Lyons says the U.S. needs to appreciate just how much of an arsenal China likely holds.

“The Russians estimate that the Chinese have over 1,800 strategic warheads.  That’s much more than the 300 we give them credit for.  So when we sit down with the Russians on any future arms limitations talks, the Chinese need to be forced to participate and be at the table,” said Lyons.  “And to further put teeth in that, President Obama has to live up to the commitment that he made when he got Congress to sign off on the last arms treaty agreement with the Russians and that was to modernize our strategic infrastructure and the development of a new warhead.”

Lyons admits China holding a sizable chunk of our debt hurts U.S. efforts to demand policy changes, but he says it’s not as big of a factor as some suggest.

“I think that works both ways.  That’s one side of the equation but we also have leverage on the other.  I believe China needs us more than we need them.  They need this market here and they can’t afford to lose it,” said Lyons.

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America discuss a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that show people are still unhappy with ObamaCare. They rail against the National Security Agency’s obtaining millions of phone records from Verizon service holders. And they laugh at the latest discovery of man caves in an EPA warehouse.

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A military judge had no choice but to allow Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan to represent himself at trial and probably couldn’t stop Hasan from turning the courtroom into a platform for his radical Islamic views, according to former U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy.

McCarthy, who led the successful prosecution against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, also says the Obama administration looks increasingly bad for refusing to call the Ft. Hood attack an act of terrorism now that Hasan is admitting why he carried out the massacre.  The attack in November 2009 killed 13 people and injured 32 others.

Earlier this week, Hasan was granted permission by Judge Col. Tara Osborn to act as his own counsel in the upcoming trial.  McCarthy says Osborn really had no choice.

“I don’t see how the judge could avoid it.  As the Supreme Court has held, if you make a knowing and intelligent decision before the trial starts that you want to represent yourself, you have an absolute constitutional right to do that,” said McCarthy.  “I think that the objections that people have or the fears they have that by representing himself he’s going to turn the proceedings into a circus are a little bit overblown.  Let’s face it, even if he weren’t representing himself he could try to turn the case into a circus if that’s what he was determined to do.

“Whether he’ll be able to do that or not is really going to be a function of how strong the judge presiding over the trial is, not whether (Hasan’s) just a defendant at the table or the defendant who represents himself,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy says Hasan’s strategy is most likely to lay the grounds for an appeal of a likely death sentence.

“What a defendant is always trying to do is sow error into the record because that’s the best chance you have of getting the outcome reversed on appeal.  I think what he’s really trying to accomplish here is get the death penalty off the table one way or the other.  This is a way that makes the trial a little bit more chaotic,” said McCarthy, who says if Hasan is convicted and sentenced to death he has a good chance of finding a sympathetic appellate court that could save his life.

Another issue in the case is what discovery evidence Hasan will have access to as he prepares his defense.  McCarthy says the government’s cautious charges in this case should limit the amount of sensitive information provided to Hasan.

“It would concern me more if he were being accused as an Al Qaeda operative because then there would be an argument that he should be given the discovery about the overall Al Qaeda conspiracy,” said McCarthy.  “The way the prosecution has a way of regulating how much or how little a defendant is entitled to in terms of discovery is how you plead the case.

“In this case, the prosecution has plead the case narrowly.  They’ve gone out of their way not to accuse him of terrorism, which I think is a mistake but I think they have made it a simple, straightforward homicide case.  Therefore, I would say that he should not be entitled to any discovery about our enemies,” said McCarthy, who says the only Al Qaeda-related content the prosecution will likely mention is Hasan’s relationship with radical cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Hasan is also asking for a delay in the start of the trial because of his intent to pursue a new, “defense of others” strategy.  When asked by Judge Osborn who he was defending, Hasan mentioned the leadership of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.  McCarthy says he would not delay the trial any further and hopes the judge will rule that way.  He also says Hasan’s admission of carrying out the killings and why he did it put the Obama administration in a bad light for refusing to call the Ft. Hood attack an act of terrorism and referring to it instead as “workplace violence”.

“It was always preposterous for the U.S. government to claim that they couldn’t acknowledge that this was terrorism because to do so would prejudice his trial.  It wouldn’t have had any bearing on his trial whatsoever.  To make an accusation that’s simply accurate is never something that is prejudicial to a trial,” said McCarthy, who believes Hasan is trying to make the government squirm as a result of its reticence to accurately describe his actions.

“This simply underscores that this was a a jihadist terror attack.  It should never have been looked at in any other way.  And it’s kind of embarrassing for the Obama administration to be insistent that this is workplace violence or to bend over not only backwards but to contort themselves unrecognizably in order to avoid acknowledging what’s perfectly obvious, which is that this is Islamic supremacist-driven terrorism,” said McCarthy.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Dan Foster of National Review Online are encouraged that Sen. Marco Rubio does not believe there are 60 votes to pass the Senate immigration bill and that he will not support it unless much tougher border security measures are added.  They scold New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for calling a special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat instead of appointing a Republican through 2014.  And they have fun with the story of a postal worker claiming worker’s compensation, whose fraud was uncovered because of her appearance on ‘The Price Is Right’.

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The House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony Tuesday from multiple leaders of grassroots conservative groups who were heavily scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service when they applied for tax-exempt status and also began to hear the first Democratic contentions that the congressional investigation is now political.

Several leaders of liberty-oriented groups and Tea Party organizations told lawmakers about the intrusive, exhaustive questions imposed by the IRS, often after months of hearing nothing about their applications and often with only a couple of weeks to comply with all the demands for information.  Questions focused on donors, the background of all people affiliated with the groups (including children) and detailed requests for politically-related literature, whether any leaders ever planned to run for public office and even the content of group prayers.

“These people are victims in my opinion and what I found most striking in their testimony was the fact that they were just shocked, surprised, amazed – I don’t know what other adjectives you could use to describe the feelings they had when the IRS came back with questions,” said Washington Rep. Dave Reichert, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee who gained attention for his dogged questioning of IRS officials at previous hearings in his pursuit for specific people responsible for the IRS policies.

“When you watch Americans come in and testify in a hearing like this and the government is prying into your life to the point the IRS has done in this case, to hear it testified to verbally, out loud by the people affected who were the victims was, I think, absolutely striking today,” said Reichert, who believes there are still more conservative groups and donors who have not come forward because they still feel threatened by the government.

Reichert says he is getting information from organizations in his district that simply don’t want to call attention to themselves.  He asked the attorney for one of Tuesday’s witnesses how far-reaching the scandal goes.  He says the attorney claimed to have 25 clients now and expected many more to seek counsel.

Democrats had expressed great frustration and outrage at IRS officials last month for failing to remember countless details and not having any idea who was ultimately responsible for this.  On Tuesday, the tone changed.  Democrats contend there was no political aspect to this IRS policy that can be traced to high-ranking officials.  Washington Rep. Jim McDermott lashed out at the Tea Party leaders for expecting no scrutiny from the government for their politically-related activities, expecting taxpayers to fund their work and offering no suggestions for questions are appropriate.  Reichert says McDermott was way off base.

“There’s two points really that I think Mr. McDermott was incorrect in,” said Rechert.  “The 501 (c) 4 contributions are not tax deductible, so no one’s looking for a tax deduction when they form the 501 (c) 4’s.  People do expect to be held accountable.  They expect to answer questions from the IRS regarding their status but not to the degree that these folks testified to.

“Second, this is not about politics.  What Mr. McDermott fails to clearly understand here, and I think some of our other Democratic colleagues made similar statements today, is that this is an issue that has already been decided by the Supreme Court.  This is the law of the land,” said Reichert, who says Democrats need to abide by decisions they don’t agree with just as Republicans strongly disagree with last year’s Obamacare ruling.

Reichert says there really haven’t been any major consequences for this abuse of Americans’ rights, although he is somewhat encouraged that he and California Rep. Devin Nunes were able to draw several names from the witnesses who were involved in the targeting of conservative groups.  He says to expect those figures to be called before Congress soon.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are thrilled to see Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor embracing Obamacare in a state where the plan is loathed.  They also slam the Obama administration for once again revealing secret Israeli plans.  And they have fun with the news that taxpayers are paying to help Guantanamo detainees spruce up their resumes.

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