Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.
Showing posts with label UnAmerican Republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UnAmerican Republicans. Show all posts
"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
Due to some possible copyright issues readers will have to finish the rest at the link.
It was hidden in plain sight as a Bain press release in July 1999. Here's how it described Romney's position at Bain when he says he had no responsibility whatever, despite remaining CEO, Chairman and Sole Owner as far as forms filed with SEC testify:
Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee for the 2002 Games said ...
So Bain now contradicts Romney. And one of the men mentioned in the press release, Marc Wolpow, described his relationship with Romney when Romney was on a previous part time leave in 1994 when running for Senate (while remaining CEO of Bain):
“I reported directly to Mitt Romney . . . You can’t be CEO of Bain Capital and say, `I really don’t know what my guys were doing,’” Mr. Wolpow said of Mr. Romney role at the company during his leave.
So this much is now obvious.
1. Romney didn't quit Bain in 1999 for good, as he claims. He remained the CEO throughout, as SEC files show, and as the Boston Globe reported back in 2002.
2. He stayed active in Bain, but at a much reduced level, the entire time.
3. In any case, everything that occurred at Bain up to 2002 is completely fair game for criticism, since he was the formal CEO at the time and therefore responsible for the whole company. The SEC filings are dispositive. He has been lying about this in order to deflect some very dangerous stories about Bain in that period which shows it is knee deep in outsourcing and off-shoring, and because his signature is on a filing with respect to a company that Bain owned that disposed of aborted babies.
Romney basically said what was the most convenient for his self-interest at every juncture - and finally all the contradictions and changing stories caught up with him.
This SEC filing list Romney as "As member of the Management Committee of each of BCIP and BCIP Trust". How does one get to be on a management committee and have absolutely no knowledge of what is going in in a company in which Romney is the sole owner. Now we have Romney playing liar's bluff - calling out President Obama for an apology. Romney owes Obama and the America people for dumping a truckload of deeply deceptive and immoral lies. Exactly who or what country is Romney loyal to - Unanswered questions about Romney’s UnAmerican offshore finances - he seems have set himself up to avoid paying his fair share of America's infrastructure ( multimillionaire conservatives always think they're too good to pay their way. They're VIPs and should get everything for free). Mitt might have a good excuse - he has the mental temperament of a bratty 8 year old - Romney’s Top Six ‘I Know I Am But So Are You’ Moments. Romney clearly does not have the moral backbone or maturity to be president.
Since Fortune published "The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal" on June 27, thousands of comments have been posted on Fortune.com either praising or vilifying the article. Among the questions often raised by critics of the article (including Sen. Charles Grassley) concern assertions that the ATF encouraged gun dealers to sell weapons to known traffickers. If the ATF was encouraging such sales, the argument goes, it would be proof that the agency had a policy to allow weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, the core contention in what is known as the Fast and Furious scandal.
In the six months of investigations that led Fortune to conclude that the ATF had no policy to intentionally permit weapons to be trafficked, we examined 2,000 pages of ATF records, Congressional reports and testimony, and interviewed 39 people involved in or knowledgeable about the case. That body of evidence shows the ATF did not have a policy of encouraging gun dealers to sell to traffickers. Until now, the alleged encouragement of gun-dealers has not been a central focus of the Fast and Furious scandal. As a result, we did not address those points in the article. However, given the interest in this question, we thought it was worth taking readers through the evidence on this point.
It should be noted at the outset that the Congressional committee investigating Fast and Furious has never claimed the ATF had any official, written policy to encourage gun dealers to sell to traffickers. No documents, emails, or testimony mentioned in Congressional reports show signs of an agency-wide policy, or even a policy within Phoenix Group VII, the unit that worked on Fast and Furious.
What the allegations in the Congressional hearings and reports boil down to are two specific situations. In one, as we'll see, the allegations are true -- but misleading and incomplete -- and in the second, the evidence is contradictory. It's possible that the Congressional investigators have other evidence, but these two episodes are the only ones that have surfaced to date.
Claim No. 1
In August 2010, after a successful wiretap led Phoenix Group VII to seize 114 weapons in a single month, an employee at a gun dealership informed Group VII supervisor Dave Voth that one of their chief suspects was looking to purchase 20 9mm pistols. Based on evidence it had gathered on the wiretap, the ATF had enough probable cause to immediately arrest the suspect if he purchased the weapons. So -- in the only such instance known to date -- Voth wrote back and asked the dealer to make this particular sale. Voth says he encouraged the sale so that the agents could arrest the suspect outside the gun dealership. In the end, however, the suspect did not make the purchase and the arrest did not take place. No evidence has emerged that Voth ever made such a statement to any other gun seller.
Claim No. 2
This allegation involves a gun store called Lone Wolf Trading Company and shifting assertions made by its owner, Andre Howard. ATF records and Justice Department correspondence show that Voth and federal prosecutor Emory Hurley met with Howard soon after Voth arrived in Arizona. According to those records, Hurley advised Howard that, obviously, he could not make illegal sales (which he wasn't), and needed to use his judgment regarding legal sales, but that the government would appreciate any information about the purchasers and the sales to aid the investigation. Lone Wolf cooperated with the ATF, according to agency documents, regularly providing records of gun sales and permitting the ATF to install a surveillance camera in the store.
Lone Wolf was in a sensitive position. From 2006 to 2011, it was the No. 1 seller in Arizona of weapons that were later found at Mexican crime scenes, according to ATF data. The store, which had been prominently mentioned in a Washington Post article on indiscriminate firearms sales, also sold the weapons found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. On Feb. 1, 2011, six weeks after Terry's death, Howard released a press statement that defended the ATF: "These federal agencies," it noted, "conduct themselves in a very professional and proper manner…. Senator Grassley's office contacted us regarding 'any' impropriety by ATF and we have stated that their [sic] exists no indication to that effect." Howard went on to conclude that people should "stop pointing blame at either Federal or state agencies attempting to do their job" and instead "give them the tools to accomplish this monumental problem confronting them."
However, as the scandal heated up and the ATF was deluged with criticism, Howard revised his account and directed the blame at the agency. In September 2011, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was directed by ATF to sell guns -- as many as possible, regardless of the legality, and that selling so many guns made him feel "horrible and sick." This contention is the second element that backs the claim that the ATF encouraged gun dealers to sell to traffickers.
Fortune visited Lone Wolf in January and requested an interview. The owner declined, but denounced the ATF, accused its agents of murder, and said answers would more likely be found on Constitution Avenue, the address of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
The totality of the evidence -- including the ATF and Justice Department documents that directly contradict Howard's revised position, and his own earlier defense of ATF -- undermines his subsequent claims. And neither the Lone Wolf case, nor the one episode in which Voth encouraged a gun sale in the hopes of making an arrest in the parking lot of the store right after the sale, support the assertion that the ATF had a policy to intentionally permit gun-trafficking to Mexico.
One can see why the gun seller would lie. It is not unusual for people to lie to save their a*s and in this case reputation among the more radical anti-American conservative community. Conservatives - see Iraq's nonexistent WMD and the Iran-Contra scandal - have never been big on taking responsibility for their criminal enterprises. Issa admits he has no evidence of wrong doing by ATF or the DOJ even though Attorney General Holder has handed over 100,000 documents. Not having found any evidence he has accused the AG of withholding information. An old political trick - you have not given me evidence to support the conclusion I would like to come to so you're a bad person. In the justice system - rather than Congress, Darrel Issa R-Ca would be held criminally liable for prosecutor misconduct, but since he is a Republican who heads a political committee, he can get away with just about anything. Congress and the media need to hold Issa accountable for the witch-hunt of AG Holder and the millions of tax dollars he has wasted on his wacky political game show.
Ashleigh, Ashleigh, Ashleigh. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is what evil looks and sounds like.
This afternoon, CNN host Ashleigh Banfield took Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) to task over his comments concerning his opponent, Tammy Duckworth. Walsh responded with a condescending repetition of the host’s name that topped out at 93 times. ThinkProgress has the video, with the counter to confirm. Watch it:
