Posting the first 5
Faced with political division regarded by some as worse than at any time since the Civil War, a broken economy, unprecedented national debt, abuse of executive power, an out-of-control judiciary and collapsing public morals, American voters overwhelmingly backed the Republican Party in the midterm elections, clearly signaling a desire to return to the nation’s founding principles.
Yet before the new Congress could even be seated – with the largest GOP House majority in 70 years and a new Senate majority – Republicans conceded to Democrat desires and passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill, forgoing opportunities to shut down President Obama’s executive amnesty and curb Obamacare.
boehner
House Speaker John Boehner
That “betrayal,” as many conservative activists have called it, is the No. 1 underreported story of 2014, as selected by the WND editors with the help of the news site’s readers.
At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news stories of the previous 12 months. WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here are the 2014 picks:
1. Republican betrayal of midterm voters
For longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie, the Republican congressional leadership’s budget deal with President Obama after historic GOP gains in the 2014 midterm elections was nothing short of a monumental betrayal.
“I don’t know any other way to say it than that they lied to the American voters,” Viguerie told WND.
A conservative leader for more than 50 years, he often is called the movement’s “funding father” because of his innovative work with direct mail fundraising.
The U.S. Capitol is reflected in water on the morning of June 11, 2014 in Washington, DC.“The first impression they made was to betray the voters, betray their landslide victory and surrender,” Viguerie said. “They just absolutely surrendered to an exceedingly unpopular president; so, shame on them.”
In response, more than half-a-million Americans have joined a WND campaign to urge GOP members of the House to replace Speaker John Boehner
A letter from each participant in the campaign will go to each Republican member stating that two issues have “prompted Americans to turn in droves to the Republican Party in November 2014.”
The issues were Obama’s “blatantly unconstitutional executive action to provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and the deliberately deceptive restructuring of America’s health-care system through Obamacare, which threatens to unravel the greatest health delivery system in the world.”
2. Obamacare lies
By the time videos of the candid admissions of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber surfaced, it already was clear to many Americans that Obama wasn’t truthful when he promised they could keep their doctor, they could keep their health-care policy, their costs would go down $2,500 a year and the annual deficit and the overall debt would drop.
Now, here was the mind behind the Affordable Health Care Act admitting not only that Obama’s declared promises weren’t true but that the crafters of the law knew that the only way the bill could pass would be to mask its features and hide the true intent of its authors.
GRUBER-HEALTH
Jonathan Gruber
Despite previous praise of Gruber as the architect of their plan, Obama and fellow Democrats desperately tried to distance themselves from him after the video excerpts were exposed, dismissing him as someone who “never worked on our staff.”
Obama suggested he barely knew Gruber, but a PBS interview shows Gruber revealing the president was present in sessions in which deception was discussed as a political tool.
When Gruber was called to testify before a House panel in December, Democrats scheduled a press conference at the same time to unveil a highly partisan report of “torture” by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration.
And when establishment media reported Gruber’s testimony, the focus was on his apology for calling Americans “stupid,” as if that were the real offense.
Largely lost in the coverage was the fact that Gruber’s “glib” talk, as he put it to the House panel, made it clear that a small group of highly educated elitists believe it’s necessary to deceive the people, because the people would foolishly reject what’s good for them. The elitists, in their minds, only want the best for the country, and, some day, the people may come to realize the brilliance of their plan and thank them for benevolently rescuing them from their ignorance.
you_lieIn the first of at least seven videos that surfaced in 2014, Gruber admitted Obamacare “was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes” and declared “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”
“Basically you know call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass,” he said.
Just before the New Year, an October 2009 policy brief by Gruber was unearthed in which he admitted the Affordable Care Act would definitely not be affordable. Produced while he was writing the bill and while Obama was declaring premiums would drop dramatically, the brief said Obamacare had no cost controls in it.
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, saw a major lie at the heart of Obamacare that had gained little notice.
He pointed to a Gallup poll that found 70 percent of Americans “remain generally positive about the quality of health care they personally receive, their health-care coverage and what they pay for health care.”
OBAMACAREThat means, Limbaugh explained, that the stated reason for Obamacare – the claim that the whole health-care system is broken and unfixable – was wrong.
“Everybody’s been sold a bill of goods,” he said. “Most people are and have been very happy with the current health-care system.”
His brother, WND columnist and author David Limbaugh, wrote that the lies undergirding Obamacare were chronicled years ago, noting that before the bill was passed in 2009, the chief actuary of the Medicare program estimated “14 million people would lose their employer coverage under Obamacare, even though many will want to keep it.”
Gruber’s glibness also exposed that fact that the purpose of the “Cadillac tax” on premium health insurance plans was to discourage employers from providing health insurance. The goal would be achieved, Gruber said, by “mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”
Obama had insisted, in a 2009 interview with ABC News, the individual mandate was not a tax. But in 2012, White House attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that it was tax, which was the only way it could comply with the U.S. Constitution.
WND columnist Jack Cashill recalled Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was widely reviled for shouting to Obama during the 2009 State of the Union address, “You Lie!” in reaction to the president’s declaration that his proposed health law would not insure illegal aliens.
Cashill noted Wilson “had to feel vindicated when a report surfaced in 2014 that 42 percent of new Medicaid signups were immigrants, legal and otherwise.”
3. President Obama’s sleight-of-hand to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens
Everyone knows that after repeatedly insisting he didn’t have the power to change immigration laws and effectively grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, President Obama went ahead and signed executive orders doing just that.
AMNESTYTRAINOr did he? The reality, as first reported by WND senior staff reporter Jerome Corsi, is that Obama used a sleight-of-hand in an apparent attempt to avoid constitutional conflicts, ordering a series of memoranda instead, including a key memo by Department of Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a leading opponent of Obama’s immigration policy, caught on to the president’s maneuvering, ridiculing the administration for not carrying out the action through an executive order.
“I guess they just whispered in the ear of Johnson over at Homeland Security, ‘Just put out a memo. That way we don’t have to enforce the law,’” Sessions said:
As a result of the president’s use of a memo instead of an official order, the senator observed: “We don’t even have a really significant, direct, legal direction that we can ascertain, precisely what the president is doing. It’s a stunning event in my view.”
Sessions believes the result was “the creation of a new, alternative immigration system” despite the fact the president “is not empowered to do that.”
He noted the president had publicly acknowledged more than 20 times in recent years that he did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally implement amnesty. As the senator read excerpts of Obama’s own words, members of the audience laughed aloud at how much those words differed from the president’s actions.
The president should simply uphold the Constitution as it is, Sessions said, “not as he wishes it would be.”
4. President Obama’s ‘enemies list’
In 2013, the Obama administration drew heat for seizing two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press. Then came the revelation of extensive Obama Justice Department spying on Fox News reporter James Rosen, including tracking his movements and seizing two days of his personal emails.
Sharyl Attkisson
Sharyl Attkisson
This year, an explosive new book by former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attikisson put more of the pieces together, presenting evidence that the Obama White House, not unlike the notorious Nixon administration, has an “enemies list” of reporters and activists who threaten its agenda.
Attkisson, who has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, said in an interview an internal email indicates “reporters who were working with leakers in government agencies or perceived as enemies of the White House are being targeted.”
Attkisson’s complaint alleges the Department of Justice and the White House monitored her because of her investigations into the Fast and Furious scandal.
In her book, “Stonewalled,” she said she obtained information from a government-linked source that the FBI, among other agencies, “had hacked into both her personal and work computers over a lengthy period of time.”
Attkisson, who has won an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting, said both her CBS computer and personal iMac were repeatedly hacked and its files accessed, including one on Benghazi. She said “the interlopers were able to co-opt my iMac and operate it remotely, as if they were sitting in front of it.”
obamawaveThe Fast and Furious gun-running scandal produced another member of Obama’s enemies list.
The Justice Department’s inspector general found that a high-ranking Obama political appointee destroyed the credibility and career of John Dodson, a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who infuriated his superiors by alerting Congress about the scheme.
WND CEO Joseph Farah saw Obama developing an enemies list at the beginning of his administration. Austan Goolsbee, then chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, let it slip that he knew more than he should about the tax structure of Koch Industries, one of the primary funders of tea-party activity, including Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks.
Three years later came the revelation that in the heat of his re-election campaign, Obama’s Internal Revenue Service was impeding the fundraising of conservative and tea-party political action groups by targeting their applications for tax-exempt status with intensive scrutiny.
5. Racial strife created by Obama administration
As an African-American who rose to the pinnacle of his profession as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Ben Carson is in a position to assess racial relations in America, and he thinks that despite the hope of a great leap forward with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, relations actually have gotten worse.
Al Sharpton and President Obama
Al Sharpton and President Obama
“I actually believe that things were better before this president was elected. And I think that things have gotten worse because of his unusual emphasis [on race],” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Carson, regarded as a possible 2016 presidential candidate, cited, among other examples, Obama’s pre-judgment of the police incident with black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates incident, the Trayvon Martin case and the effort of progressives to “manipulate, particularly minority communities, to make them feel that they are victims.”
The president “absolutely” plays the race card, he said.
WND columnist Larry Elder pointed to Attorney General Eric Holder’s insertion into the Ferguson, Missouri, case before a grand jury eventually chose to bring no charges against police officer Darren Wilson for the death of black teen Michael Brown.
Holder told a group of black leaders in Ferguson: “I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. … I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”
Elder pointed out the long-believed claim of “racism” by officers on the New Jersey Turnpike had been investigated and debunked twice.
The columnist noted that more than 20 years ago, black liberal Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said: “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations … is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa.”
Holder, however, Elder wrote, sees an America mired in the 1950s when it comes to race.
In another column, Elder offered a summation of how many blacks who once had high hopes for their future under Barack Obama now assess their situation.
FERGUSONPROTESTS
Rioting in Ferguson, Missouri
A black 82-year-old grandmother, a lifelong Democrat, called C-SPAN to explain why she “voted straight Republican” in the midterm election.
“I have noticed … what the Democratic Party has done to my people,” she said. “Unemployment is high in the black community – we are double with unemployment – than it is anywhere else. … And I’m not talking about the people that need help – because with so many people getting help that doesn’t need help, it prevents the people that really need help from getting it.
“I hear my people calling in all the time saying that every time you say something against the ideology of President Obama, that you’re doing it because he is black,” she continued. “We need to stop that foolishness.
“This man is destroying this country, and it’s what he intended to do. He said he was going to transform America, and that’s what he’s doing.”
In the wake of the murder of two New York City police officers in December, a former NYPD officer who also served as a Secret Service agent for President Obama didn’t mince words.
Dan Bongino blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Obama, Holder and activist Al Sharpton as race “hustlers” who are partly to blame for the assassination.
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio attend a NYPD graduation ceremony
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio attend a NYPD graduation ceremony
“The people who have made their careers off of political division and implying racism where it doesn’t exist, No. 1, have really destroyed credibility in actual cases of racism that should be investigated, should be pursued to every extent legally possible, and then secondly, they’ve incited people,” Bongino said in a Fox News interview. “Yes, I do put some of this on them.”
He noted that de Blasio, in his speech following the death of Eric Garner, who died of a heart attack after a police officer held him around his neck because he was resisting arrest, emphasized historical examples of racism in America.
Bongino acknowledged the history but argued that in “the context of a police-involved incident, the Garner incident … there’s zero evidence whatsoever that that incident had any element of racism in it at all.”
“Oddly enough,” Bongino said, “he’s implying that all police officers, all, were judging people on the color of their skin. And then he’s telling people to go out and judge police officers on the color of their uniform?
“I mean, this is not leadership, these people have no credibility anymore.”
WND’s Gina Loudon, who went to Ferguson for a week to report, found that within days of the death of Michael Brown, leftist activists from outside of Ferguson set up a protest campaign office in the city, which enduring days of looting and violence both after the shooting and after the grand jury cleared the officer.
“Almost immediately, what started as ‘peaceful protests’ escalated into rampant looting,” she wrote. “The local state senator, a black Democrat, took to the airwaves demanding justice. She would later make the ominous promise that violence would ensue were Officer Darren Wilson not charged and convicted – he wasn’t, and it did.”
6. Militarization and nationalization of local police
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/top-10-major-media-cover-ups-of-2014/#PpHCrqHPD0J8XQS5.99
|
No comments:
Post a Comment