When I read this one, I was just a tad flabbergasted. Just a tad, mind you, but still…

From the Investigative Project On Terrorism

Special Travel Benefit for Saudis a “Slap in the Face”

Saudi Arabia, the nation which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks, is about to become one of a handful of countries whose travelers can bypass normal passport controls at major U.S. airports. Sources tell the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) that this will mark the first time that the Saudi government will have a direct role in vetting who is eligible for getting fast-tracked for entry into the United States.

An agreement to accept Saudi Arabian applicants into the Global Entry trusted traveler program drew little notice when it was announced in January. Now, some officials question why the country merits such a benefit – which is similar to a theme park “fast pass” to avoid long lines – when other allies like Germany and France are not yet included. A program for Israeli travelers was reached last May but has not been implemented.

An agreement to accept Saudi Arabian applicants into the Global Entry trusted traveler program drew little notice when it was announced in January. Now, some officials question why the country merits such a benefit – which is similar to a theme park “fast pass” to avoid long lines – when other allies like Germany and France are not yet included. A program for Israeli travelers was reached last May but has not been implemented.

Travelers approved for the program can skip the normal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lines starting next year and enter the country after providing their passports and fingerprints at a kiosk. Only Canada, Mexico, South Korea and the Netherlands currently enjoy the benefit, although pilot programs could expand it to a handful of others.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the agreement in January after meeting with Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. It “marks another major step forward in our partnership,” Napolitano said at the time. “By enhancing collaboration with the Government of Saudi Arabia, we reaffirm our commitment to more effectively secure our two countries against evolving threats while facilitating legitimate trade and travel.”

Maybe we should also give our “partners” from Saudi Arabia an exemption to carry small arms and, say, a rationed quantity of personal use explosives aboard U.S. based commercial aircraft. That would mark still another step forward in our partnership.

Let’s see.

We’ve got legislation going on the acceptance here of the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, we’ve got the U.N. upgrading the terrorist enclave “Palestine’s” status (over the protests of the U.S. and Israel, though in the former case it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that President Obama is merely playing politics and is secretly full of unholy glee), we’ve got a much larger police (including many in combat gear) presence in New York, along with National Guardsmen deployed at transportation centers and the Obama Administration mandating extra training for the National Guard. Then there was the willingness of the Obama Administration to allow the U.N. to send observers to our elections last month, there’s the U.N. Smallarms Treaty, the attempts at pushing through a U.N. Law Of The Sea Treaty….

With all the above, one has to wonder if perhaps the following is a practice run for something.

From Chuck Norris writing at Guns & Patriots:

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” — President Ronald Reagan

Those wise and yet haunting words spoken by one of our nation’s greatest presidents couldn’t ring more true — especially today, as winter sets in on an estimated 130,000 of our fellow Americans who are still struggling without power. Many live without heat, hot water or inhabitable homes and question the government’s efforts to alleviate their condition.

Amid the election frenzy, several mainstream media outlets instantly praised the Obama administration’s response to the Hurricane Sandy devastation in the Northeast. But let’s look beneath the congratulatory headlines to see the real and horrifying picture of what’s happening.

Right now, homeless Americans are literally freezing, wrapped in blankets and trash bags as they struggle to survive in FEMA tent cities such as New Jersey’s “Camp Freedom,” which reportedly “resembles a prison camp.”

“Sitting there last night, you could see your breath,” displaced resident Brian Sotelo told the Asbury Park Press. “At (Pine Belt), the Red Cross made an announcement that they were sending us to permanent structures up here that had just been redone, that had washing machines and hot showers and steady electric, and they sent us to tent city. We got (expletive).”

Sotelo said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies “all day and night,” and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. According to the story, reporters aren’t even allowed in the fenced complex, where lines of displaced residents form outside portable toilets. Security guards are posted at every door, and residents can’t even use the toilet or shower without first presenting ID.

“They treat us like we’re prisoners,” Ashley Sabol told Reuters. “It’s bad to say, but we honestly feel like we’re in a concentration camp.”

Snow and icy slush seep into living areas through the bottoms of the government tents.

Meanwhile, officials are said to be banning residents from taking pictures and even cutting off Wi-Fi and power access.

“After everyone started complaining, and they found out we were contacting the press, they brought people in,” Sotelo said. “Every time we plugged in an iPhone or something, the cops would come and unplug them.”

Read the entire column here.

THIS IS HAPPENING TO LAW ABIDING AMERICANS ON U.S. SOIL, AT THE HANDS OF OUR GOVERNMENT?

Since Obama was first sworn in, we seem to have descended gradually into some kind of nightmare into which the Constitution was not invited, while, with the blessing of Obama and the Democrats, the U.N. has gone into overdrive with thinly veiled attempts at entering the arena of world control.

It’s plain to see why the Democrats in various states don’t want to give our military personnel stationed overseas, particularly in combat theatres, elbow room to vote when time permits:

From Michelle Malkin –

What About the Camp Bastion Attack?

Three days after the bloody 9/11 siege on our consulate in Benghazi, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The murderous jihadists released video exactly one month ago this week showing off their training exercises in preparation for the assault. Where are the questions?

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the Obama administration? Where’s the press? Where’s the outrage?

Two heroic U.S. Marines were killed in the battle. Their names — Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and Sgt. Bradley Atwell — have not been uttered publicly by the commander in chief. Their arrival back in the U.S., in flag-draped coffins, was not broadcast on network TV. But their brothers-in-arms did not and will not forget. And neither must we.

Read On…

And then, there’s this one from Weekly Standard:

Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, reveals details of meeting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the publically broadcast memorial service for the slain Americans at Andrews Air Force Base only days after the attack. And, in a recent radio appearance, Woods publicly questions who made the call not to send in back-up forces to possibly save his son’s life, as well as the three other Americans killed in Benghazi (which includes the American ambassador to Libya).

“When [Obama] came over to our little area” at Andrew Air Force Base, says Woods, “he kind of just mumbled, you know, ‘I’m sorry.’ His face was looking at me, but his eyes were looking over my shoulder like he could not look me in the eye. And it was not a sincere, ‘I’m really sorry, you know, that your son died,’ but it was totally insincere, more of whining type, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Woods says that shaking President Obama’s hands at his son’s memorial service was “like shaking hands with a dead fish.”

“It just didn’t feel right,” he says of his encounter with the commander in chief. “And now that it’s coming out that apparently the White House situation room was watching our people die in real time, as this was happening,” Woods says, he wants answers on what happened—and why there was no apparent effort to save his son’s life.

“Well, this is what Hillary did,” Woods continues. “She came over and, you know, did the same thing—separately came over and talked with me. I gave her a hug, shook her hand. And she did not appear to be one bit sincere—at all. And you know, she mentioned that the thing about, we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video. That was the first time I had even heard about anything like that.”

Yes, the indifference of this administration to our nation’s military, the people who put life and limb on the line on our behalf, is once again manifesting itself, not surprisingly, as it did when a campaigning B. Hussein Obama went to Afghanistan back in 2008 to talk to some brass, blatantly ignored troops who stood waiting to greet him after he arrived, then staged a fake photo op basketball shoot by himself that was supposed to look as though he were “shooting hoops” with the troops.

What an insincere hemorrhoid a whole lot of uninformed, flat out ignorant or simply America hating *ss#0!es subjected us to when they voted this creature into the White House four years ago.

Let’s hope we don’t see the same mistake made again!

I wasn’t planning to post a second time today, and then I ran into this idiocy.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) told a recent gathering of the Women’s Political Committee that the spirits of suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul spoke to her at the White House.

Pelosi said she heard them say: “At last we have a seat at the table”.

A video recently posted on Youtube shows Pelosi speaking in May describing her first meeting with President Bush in the White House after becoming part of the Democratic House leadership.

In the video Pelosi says, “He’s (Bush) saying something to the effect of we’re so glad to welcome you here, congratulations and I know you’ll probably have some different things to say about what is going on–which is correct. But, as he was saying this, he was fading and this other thing was happening to me.”

“My chair was getting crowded in,” said Pelosi. “I swear this happened, never happened before, it never happened since.”

“My chair was getting crowded in and I couldn’t figure out what it was, it was like this,” she said.

“And then I realized Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, you name it, they were all in that chair, they were,” said Pelosi. “More than I named and I could hear them say: ‘At last we have a seat at the table.’ And then they were gone.”

The video appears in the linked article, as it wouldn’t embed properly, herein, for some reason.

UNbeLIEVable! Only from the lips of a loony liberal.

Naturally, all the liberals who see this video will nod sagely, swoon and believe every word Pelosi says.

Idiots…

It’s beginning to seem — no, actually it began to seem a long time ago — like the T in TSA stands for “Tragedy”.

If Seth, being the security professional hereabouts and the most loudly vocal critic of the Transportation “Security” Administration I have the pleasure of knowing, were posting this one, I’m sure he’d have some choice epithets.

From CSN News:

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.

Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.

I wonder if “Gadzooks!” would be considered sufficiently strong to cover this piece of news…

Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Ala.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said he found the GAO’s findings “amazing.”

Indeed!

“We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said Rogers, “and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check.”

Stephen Lord, who is the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers’ subcommittee. Rogers asked him: “Isn’t it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?”

Lord responded: “At this time, no.”

Although the illegal alien who owned the Massachusetts flight school had not undergone a required TSA security threat assessment and had not been approved for flight training by the agency, he nonetheless held two Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pilot licenses, also known as FAA certificates.

Read the entire article here.

What kind of government are we running here, exactly? More to the point, what kind of people are these politicians we elect to protect us hiring to supervise these efforts? Can you imagine such incompetent people holding a job, for any length of time, in the private sector?

Seth has long advocated extracting the politics from the business of protecting the people and placing qualified, dedicated professionals in charge of these efforts, people who have literally been there and done that, rather than PhDs owed political favors by career politicians for getting their worthless hides elected.

As taxpaying citizens, a form of paying customer, we are surely entitled to some bang for our buck, and I’m not referring to the kind of “bang” we’ll get if these idiots don’t start doing what we pay them to do.

We all know that liberals are capable of some pretty farfetched things, and that Barack Hussein Obama’s probably one of the most shameless of the bunch, BUT THIS!?

When it comes to the 2012 campaign, team Obama has made more than their fair share of embarrassing gaffes. Chronicling them would take thousands of words, though certainly such hits as Attack Watch and the Life of Julia stand out. However, those gaffes, idiotic though they may have been, at least had a rationale behind them that was discernible, if stupid.

This is most unequivocally not the case when it comes to the Obama team’s most recent fundraising initiative. It is impossible to dream up a rationale for it without sounding silly. It can‘t really be set up in any way that softens the incredulity you’ll feel looking at it. So we’ll just repost an image below and let you see:

OBAMA EVENT REGISTRY

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?

Let your friends know how important this election is to you - Register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the president on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate - and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.

Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy - so get it started today.

Is this real? Is this even believable, or are we about to be contacted by a white rabbit in waistcoat, bearing a pocket watch?

So many questions abound after reading this short message, “Why” being chief among them. Why should a wedding correlate with donating to the President? Along with “saving jobs,” is the President now claiming credit for every wedding officiated on his watch? How does he statistically measure “wedding creation” if he is? If you divorce, does that mean you can ask for your money back? Why do anniversaries correlate to donating? Why do birthdays? Why, why, why?

Oh, and did you notice that creepy “It’s a gift we can all enjoy” part, as though by giving money to the President, you’re giving a gift to the entire country? Talk about a sinister idea. No matter how much of a patriot you are, we doubt you want the entire country crashing your wedding party, asking for a gift they can “all enjoy.” It’s your anniversary/wedding/birthday, after all, not theirs. If you want a gravy bowl instead of four more years of gravy for lobbyists, that’s your right.

Sheesh!

Of all the…

The ATF has promoted three key supervisors of a controversial sting operation that allowed firearms to be illegally trafficked across the U.S. border into Mexico.

All three have been heavily criticized for pushing the program forward even as it became apparent that it was out of control. At least 2,000 guns were lost and many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and two at the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

Promoted them!

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office.

McMahon and Newell have acknowledged making serious mistakes in the program, which was dubbed Operation Fast and Furious.

“I share responsibility for mistakes that were made,” McMahon testified to a House committee three weeks ago. “The advantage of hindsight, the benefit of a thorough review of the case, clearly points me to things that I would have done differently.”

Three Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives spokesmen did not return phone calls Monday asking about the promotions. But several agents said they found the timing of the promotions surprising, given the turmoil at the agency over the failed program.

McMahon was promoted Sunday to deputy assistant director of the ATF’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations — the division that investigates misconduct by employees and other problems.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF’s acting director, said in an agency-wide confidential email announcing the promotion that McMahon was among ATF employees being rewarded because of “the skills and abilities they have demonstrated throughout their careers.”

Newell was the special agent in charge of the field office for Arizona and New Mexico, where Fast and Furious was conducted. On Aug. 1, the ATF announced he would become special assistant to the assistant director of the agency’s Office of Management in Washington.

Voth was an on-the-ground team supervisor for the operation, and last month he was moved to Washington to become branch chief for the ATF’s tobacco division.

I’ve heard of agencies “looking after their own”, but this is just plain ridiculous. These people should, at the very least, be shown their walking papers if not merely disciplined into the next century, not rewarded! Promoted, no less, so they are in positions wherein their incompetence can promote even larger scale disasters.

Steve Martin, an ATF deputy assistant director, said he urged McMahon as far back as January 2010 to end the operation, and was met with silence. “I asked Mr. McMahon, I said, what’s your plan?” Martin told the House committee. “Hearing none, I don’t know if they had one.”

Newell spent a decade on the border. As Operation Fast and Furious was unraveling, he insisted that his agents never allowed guns to “walk.”

The statement angered many agents. “Literally, my mouth fell open,” said Agent Larry Alt, who worked under Newell. “I am not being figurative about this. I couldn’t believe it.”

Newell has since acknowledged that “frequent risk assessments would be prudent” for operations like Fast and Furious. He also said the slaying of Terry “is one I will mourn for the rest of my life.”

Voth supervised the crew of ATF agents under the operation. As they questioned the wisdom of allowing illegal purchases, he countered that because the weapons were turning up at Mexico crime scenes, cartel leaders had to be involved. He told his crew members they were “watching the right people.”

His agents did not buy it.

“Whenever we would get a trace report back,” said Agent John Dodson, Voth “was jovial, if not giddy, just delighted about that: Hey, 20 of our guns were recovered with 350 pounds of dope in Mexico last night. … To them it proved the nexus to the drug cartels. It validated that were really working a cartel case here.”

Here’s the article.

Just unbelievable…

I was new to America during the Carter Administration and not really cognizant of the former Georgia governor’s blunders as president, though I used to hear quite a bit of belly-aching about them from the big, bad Wolf (my beloved hubby). The consensus among conservatives I knew then seemed to be that a president couldn’t get any worse than Carter was, though in hindsight, I think they were a little premature along that line. But then, they had never heard of Barack Obama, either. For that matter, neither had Barack Obama, at least in the context we now know him.

Every time I think the present administration has outdone itself where idiocy, too-far-leftism or simply complete failure to embrace reality is concerned, I read something like…

From the Washington Times:

Why did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let criminals buy firearms, smuggle them across the Mexican border and deliver them into the hands of vicious drug cartels? The ATF claims it launched its now-disgraced Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 to catch the “big fish.” Fast and Furious was designed to stem the “Iron River” flowing from American gun stores into the cartels’ arsenals. The bureau says it allowed gun smuggling so it could track the firearms and arrest the cartel members downstream. Not true.

During the course of Operation Fast and Furious, about 2,000 weapons moved from U.S. gun stores to Mexican drug cartels - exactly as intended.

In congressional testimony, William Newell, former ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division, testified that the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were “full partners” in Operation Fast and Furious. Mr. Newell’s list left out the most important player: the CIA. According to a CIA insider, the agency had a strong hand in creating, orchestrating and exploiting Operation Fast and Furious.

Wasn’t it only a couple of decades ago that the liberals in media and government were attacking the CIA for taking what one might term “initiative” in their pursuit of projecting U.S. policy? Well, now an extremely liberal administration may be using what Wolf smilingly calls Christians In Action to intercede, albeit only semi-directly, in the internal political affairs of another country.

If, that is, this report is correct.

The CIA’s motive is clear enough: The U.S. government is afraid the Los Zetas drug cartel will mount a successful coup d’etat against the government of Felipe Calderon.

Founded by ex-Mexican special forces, the Zetas already control huge swaths of Mexican territory. They have the organization, arms and money needed to take over the entire country.

Former CIA pilot Robert Plumlee and former CIA operative and DEA Director Phil Jordan recently said the brutally efficient Mexican drug cartel has stockpiled thousands of weapons to disrupt and influence Mexico’s national elections in 2012. There’s a very real chance the Zetas cartel could subvert the political process completely, as it has throughout the regions it controls.

In an effort to prevent a Los Zetas takeover, Uncle Sam has gotten into bed with the rival Sinaloa cartel, which has close ties to the Mexican military. Recent court filings by former Sinaloa cartel member Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, currently in U.S. custody, reveal that the United States allowed the Sinaloas to fly a 747 cargo plane packed with cocaine into American airspace - unmolested.

The CIA made sure the trade wasn’t one-way. It persuaded the ATF to create Operation Fast and Furious - a “no strings attached” variation of the agency’s previous firearms sting. By design, the ATF operation armed the Mexican government’s preferred cartel on the street level near the American border, where the Zetas are most active.

Operation Fast and Furious may not have been the only way the CIA helped put lethal weapons into the hands of the Sinaloa cartel and its allies, but it certainly was an effective strategy. If drug thugs hadn’t murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry with an ATF- provided weapon, who knows how many thousands more guns would have crossed the U.S. border?

This is beginning to sound more and more like the kind of thing the Democrats are always accusing Republican administrations of being up to, from Watergate to Contragate.

The ATF has never been an “approved agency” in our household, nor has the BATFE Gestapo been an object of respect or admiration here at Hard Astarboard. I wonder why…

To be sure, Operation Fast and Furious suited the ATF’s needs. It was all too willing to let guns walk to increase its power, prestige and budget in Washington. It actively recruited so-called straw purchasers and happily used American gun dealers as pawns. And it was only one agency in a mosaic of federal agencies helping the CIA actualize its covert plans.

The article in its entirety is here.

From the Washington Times:

Neighborhood lemonade stands have for generations served as a training ground for budding young capitalists. Boys and girls eager for their first taste of success have recently watched their dreams dissolve as rulebook-toting authoritarians demand little Timmy and Sally show their permits and papers or face the wrath of the state. Americans are fed up with this nonsense. It’s time for a little lemonade liberation.

I had no idea things had gotten this bad in what was once called the Land of the Free. What’s next, the Tonton Macoute?

It’s nice to know that a few of our fellow Americans out there are demonstrating that they’re fed up!

I am in Manhattan for a couple of days (I can’t really stand the place anymore, it’s become so much more abrasive, overpriced and less pleasant since my first experience with the borough, but that’s another story).

Earlier today I was walking across one of the many parks (one of Manhattan’s few saving graces), Madison Square Park at 23rd Street and Broadway, when a scene on one of the benches caused me to stop and, well, rubberneck.

There was a man sitting there eating a sandwich. He appeared totally inoffensive (clean shaven, well groomed and neatly dressed). There was a small backpack sitting on the bench beside him and there were no other people sitting anywhere nearby.

There were five N.Y. Police officers standing around him, four patrolmen and one whose uniform included a white shirt who I think must have been a lieutenant, and they seemed to be giving him a hard time.

As I listened, the situation became apparent: In New York City, on top of the recently enacted law against smoking in city parks, on beaches or on city owned public concourses, there is also a law against placing ones backpack on a bench, thereby occupying a second space. It evidently doesn’t matter whether there’s anyone sitting nearby or anyone wanting, or not wanting, to sit where the backpack is sitting.

The police were threatening to give the man a ticket if he didn’t place the backpack on the ground.

This seems rather excessive to me in terms of the authority of the law, or whatever it’s called.

If my knowledge of American History is at all accurate, I could swear that a war was fought back in the 1770s to free Americans of such oppressive micromanagement, just as it was fought to liberate the people from the kind of overbearing taxation, including taxation without representation, as we are experiencing today.

I only hope those police officers don’t DARE have the nerve to expect extra pay for working the 4th of July or to barbecue and otherwise enjoy having the holiday off, because their in any way benefiting from Independence Day would be profound hypocrisy, just as would be the lawmakers who come up with such laws and, of course, the weasel named Michael Bloomberg.