With nothing more than a smartphone, one man walks through a neighborhood in Moore, Okla. where homes have been reduced to rubble by a tornado. (May 20)

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Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin says “hearts are broken” for parents who are wondering about the fate of their children after the tornado that devastated suburban Oklahoma City. (May 20)

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IRS Scandal, HHS Fundraising Stir The Health Law Political Pot. US diplomat in spy flap leaves Moscow, Russian TV reports. White House Aide Calls Criticism of Obama ‘Offensive’

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The Christians were standing on sidewalks at an international Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan. In response to their signs and public preaching, a mob of Muslim youth gathered and pelted them with various objects.

Law enforcement officers intervened, but instead of arresting anyone in the mob they warned the Christians to cease their activities or be arrested.

The judge ruled that the mob violence justified the intervention by the officers against the Christians. See the WorldNetDaily story below (highlights added).

In other words, because the Muslim mob reacted angrily with violence, the officers had a duty to muzzle the speech rather than stop the violence.

Stunning.

WND EXCLUSIVE

JUDGE GOES OFF DEEP END TO SHUT UP CHRISTIANS

Suppression of speech fine if Muslims threaten violence

http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/judge-lets-muslim-violence-silence-christians/

A federal judge has issued a startling ruling that suppressing Christian speech is allowed when Muslims threaten violence because they’re upset over the message.

The ruling from Judge Patrick J. Duggan in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan granted Wayne County’s motion for summary judgment of a lawsuit brought by a team of Christians who were badgered, bullied and targeted with garbage thrown by Muslims who disliked their message at last year’s Arab Fest in Dearborn, Mich.

Officials with American Freedom Law Center, who have been arguing the case on behalf of the Christians, also said the judge denied AFLC’s motion requesting that the court issue an order preventing the Wayne County Sheriff and his deputies from restricting the Christian evangelists from displaying their banners and signs on the public sidewalks outside of this year’s Arab Festival.

It is scheduled for June.

In his ruling, Duggan said, “The court finds that the actual demonstration of violence here provided the requisite justification for [the Wayne County sheriffs'] intervention, even if the officials acted as they did because of the effect the speech had on the crowd.”

The case had been filed by the AFLC after several Christian evangelists were violently assaulted by a hostile Muslim mob while preaching at the festival last year in Dearborn, which has the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States.

The lawsuit, which will be appealed to a higher court, alleged the county, sheriff and deputies refused to protect the Christians from the attack, and they threatened to arrest the Christians for disorderly conduct if they did not halt their speech activity and immediately leave the festival area.

Robert Muise, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, said, “The First Amendment was dealt a severe blow today as a result of this ruling. Indeed, this ruling effectively empowers Muslims to silence Christian speech that they deem offensive by engaging in violence. And pursuant to this ruling, the Christian speakers are now subject to arrest for engaging in disorderly conduct on account of the Muslim hecklers’ violent response to their speech. In short, this ruling turns the First Amendment on its head.”

David Yerushalmi, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, added: “This fight for our fundamental right to freedom of speech does not stop here. We have filed an immediate appeal of this ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. While Judge Duggan may have been the first judge to rule on this issue, he won’t be the last. Indeed, we are prepared to take this case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary because it is imperative that our free speech rights not be subject to mob rule. This is the United States, not Benghazi.”

WND previously reported on the case several times.

The violence developed at the 2012 events when Christian evangelists walking on public sidewalks surrounding the event while carrying signs with biblical messages were assaulted with stones, bottles and debris by attendees of the festival.

The signs that brought on the attack included “Know the God of the Bible” and “Trust Jesus.”

Several of the Christian demonstrators walked away bruised and bloodied from the attack. Ruben Israel, the leader of the group, pleaded with law enforcement officials to intervene so that the demonstration could continue peacefully.

However, the officer refused and demanded the Christians leave the premises or face arrest for disorderly conduct.

Shortly after, Israel contacted AFLC, which filed a federal lawsuit against Wayne County and several officials from the Wayne County sheriff’s office. AFLC charged that the officers failed to uphold their constitutional duty to protect the Christians.

A video has been released of the 2012 confrontation that explains authorities not only failed to protect the Christians, they ordered them to leave the Arab festival under threat of arrest for “disorderly conduct.”

However, not one Muslim was arrested for the attack, which left several members of the Christian group injured, the video says.

The video, and a related complaint, showed the crowd – reminiscent of a rock-throwing “intifada” scene from the Middle East – hurling a dizzying barrage of objects at the Christians, who were standing passively with their signs.

WND later learned that the Christian crowd had been carrying a pole with a pig’s head attached to the top, further angering the Muslim crowd. At the beginning of the video, Christian street preachers shout, “God is good, and God is not Allah!”

A the 2:17 mark of the video, the mob can be heard screaming: “You want to jump ‘em? C’mon, let’s go!”

One boy yells, “Let’s beat the sh-t out of them!”

A girl shouts, “Go home! Do you understand English?!”

Despite the attacks the Christians endured, a man identified in the video as Deputy Chief Dennis Richardson of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office tells them, “You’re a danger to the safety right now.”

Officers claim they don’t have the manpower to protect the Christians at the festival.

“Your safety is in harm’s way. You need to protect everybody,” said Deputy Chief Mike Jaafar of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office. “You do have the option to leave. I just want to make that clear.”

Israel replied, “You have the option to stand with us” as Jaafar walked away, leaving the Christians to the mob.

When police leave, the crowd continues harassing the Christians and screaming profanities.

Then police begin escorting the Christians away from the crowd.

Richardson tells Israel: “We have the responsibility of policing the entire festival, and obviously your conduct is such that it’s causing a disturbance and is a direct threat to the safety of everyone here. Someone could get hurt. You already have blood on your face. One of the festival people, one of my officers, anybody can get hurt. Now we’re going to escort you out.”

Israel explains that the mob throws things and becomes more aggressive when police leave the scene.

“Part of the reason that they throw things on someone is because you tell them stuff that enrages them,” Richardson argues.

AFLC said the Christians were wearing shirts with Scripture quotes and Christian messages.

“For me, it’s about collaboration.” — National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley on the relationship between the anti-Tea Party IRS union and the Obama White House

 Is President Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal?

Is the White House Visitors Log the trail to the smoking gun?

The stunning questions are raised by the following set of new facts.

March 31, 2010.

According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.

The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:

Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30

In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”

-Snip-

…In interviews, allies of the White House privately suggested a few things Obama could do, including:

Appoint a bipartisan oversight board to oversee the implementation of Obamacare. There is no way around the fact that a vast majority of voters will not trust the IRS to implement the greatest piece of social legislation in decades. Before the tempests, Obamacare was unpopular and largely misunderstood by most Americans.  The law’s success hinges on the government recruiting young adults into insurance pools. And polls show young adults are the least likely to trust government.

Layer the White House communication team with experienced crisis managers.  As I wrote here last week, Obama needs to realize that the dedicated public servants in the West Wing are not getting the job done.

Apologize to the AP and announce a new policy for leaks investigations. The White House needs to punish people who leak classified information that endangers national security. But the scope of the snooping at AP combined with Obama’s unprecedented zeal for leaks investigations raises doubts about his commitment to transparency and to an unfettered media. He has pursued more such cases than all previous administration combined, according to the Washington Post. The paper also reported that the administration spied on a Fox News reporter at the State Department. Again, this is a matter of trust.

Appoint a special prosecutor on the IRS. The last thing the country needs is another subpoena-powered fishing expedition like the Whitewater inquiries.  But we might need a special prosecutor with a narrowly defined mission to investigate the actions and motives of IRS agents and their superiors. Is there a better way to restore the agency’s integrity? The administration investigating itself will not lift the cloud from Obama’s White House.

Reset the narrative and public expectations with a major speech on trust. Obama has spoken eloquently and convincingly about this issue. If his next address included painful solutions such as the ones above, he might restore the public’s audacity to hope.

]]> http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2013/05/20/national-journal-5-ways-obama-can-restore-the-publics-trust-and-rescue-his-presidency/feed/ 5 http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2013/05/20/bankrupting-america-launches-new-debt-ceiling-resource-center/ http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2013/05/20/bankrupting-america-launches-new-debt-ceiling-resource-center/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 16:15:52 +0000 Steve Foley http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/?p=61010 “Literal Debt Ceiling” Web Series To Highlight Key Issues

Arlington, Va. – Bankrupting America, a project of Public Notice, today launched a Debt Ceiling Resource Center to provide facts and the latest news and developments as Congress debates increasing the nation’s debt ceiling this summer.  The resource center will educate Americans about the key drivers of the debt, provide a 10-year projection of future increases and explain why any deal in Congress must include equal to or greater spending cuts in return.

Bankrupting America

To help put the issue into perspective, Bankrupting America will also launch a new video series, “The Literal Debt Ceiling,” consisting of short web videos that will help break down the key issues, provide a commonsense perspective and highlight the dangers of failing to fix the problem.  “The Literal Debt Ceiling” will offer a new and creative way to think about spending issues and cut through the political rhetoric clouding the debate.

Gretchen Hamel, executive director of Public Notice, issued the following statement:

“The debate this summer about increasing the debt ceiling is an important reminder that Washington has failed repeatedly to live up to its promises to get spending under control.  Increasing the debt ceiling without equal or greater spending cuts or reforms does nothing to address our long-term fiscal crisis. Debt and spending remain top concerns for Americans, and this resource center will help hold members of Congress accountable.”

The official borrowing limit for the United States expired on Sunday, May 19, 2013, but the U.S. will not hit the actual debt limit until later in September or October, according to the Treasury Department.

Bankrupting America, a project of Public Notice, today launched a Debt Ceiling Resource Center to provide facts and the latest news and developments as Congress debates increasing the nation’s debt ceiling this summer.  The resource center will educate Americans about the key drivers of the debt, provide a 10-year projection of future increases and explain why any deal in Congress must include equal to or greater spending cuts in return. To help put the issue into perspective, Bankrupting America will also launch a new video series, “The Literal Debt Ceiling,” consisting of short web videos that will help break down the key issues, provide a commonsense perspective and highlight the dangers of failing to fix the problem.

White House Senior Advisor on IRS Scandal: “The law is irrelevant”

According to The New York Times, “The chief White House lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, learned last month that a Treasury inspector general had concluded an audit of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, weeks before the matter became public, according to a senior White House official. The White House counsel’s briefing came about the same time that Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew met with the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, to learn his draft audit of the controversial I.R.S. effort was complete, the official said. The acknowledgment that Ms. Ruemmler knew about the I.R.S. inquiry weeks before it became known publicly came as a senior adviser to President Obama, Dan Pfeiffer, mounted a combative defense of the administration on Sunday. … On ABC’s news program ‘This Week,’ Mr. Pfeiffer said that he did not know whether laws had been broken at the I.R.S., but that regardless, the agency’s actions were seriously wrong. ‘I can’t speak to the law here,’ he said. ‘The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped, and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again.’”

Paul Ryan: IRS Scandal Is “Big Government Cronyism”

The Hill reports, “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday called the Internal Revenue Service scandal a defining example of ‘big-government cronyism.’ ‘This is rotten to the core. This is arrogance. This is big-government cronyism,’ said Ryan on “Fox News Sunday.” The 2012 GOP vice-presidential nominee and House Budget committee chairman said the mismanagement which allowed IRS to target and delay applications for tax exempt status from conservative groups highlighted the failures of the Obama administration. … ‘This is what’s disturbing about this,’ he said. ‘We had a challenge in the campaign against empty rhetoric. Now the country is seeing what this kind of big unlimited government does in practice. And that is not a pretty picture.’”

“Obama’s budget is another instance of lost credibility”

Jennifer Rubin editorializes in The Washington Post, “It turns out that President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget is no more trustworthy than the rest of his administration. His budget, unsurprisingly to conservatives, is not ‘balanced’ and does not deliver on its promise to cut $1.8 trillion in spending over a decade. The Post reports: President Obama’s most recent budget request would reduce borrowing by $1.1 trillion over the next decade compared with current law — almost entirely through higher taxes on the rich, large estates and smokers, congressional budget analysts said Friday. … The same accounting gimmicks remain (‘those savings include money the government never intended to spend anyway, such as a contingency fund for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nearly $300 billion in unneeded disaster relief’). In fact, without these tricks, ‘Obama’s budget blueprint would actually increase spending over the next decade by roughly $700 billion, according to CBO figures.’ Oh, and his budget never balances. Once again, what he told us is very different from reality. The difficulty the president now faces is not merely the multiple scandals and the perception that his administration has crossed the line from partisanship to illegality, but the growing recognition that almost nothing he says can be taken at face value. The presumption of integrity and assumption of good faith has vanished in a cloud of unkept promises, wrongdoing and ineptitude.”

Lawmakers Have Been “Doing Nothing” to Bridge the Gap on a Budget Deal

Reuters reports, “A sudden improvement in the outlook for the government deficit over the next decade has alleviated some of the pressure on lawmakers to act. … The news about the shrinking deficit came Tuesday, when the Congressional Budget Office slashed its deficit forecast for 2013, projecting it will be equivalent to 4 percent of America’s economic output, less than half its 2009 level, and will drop to 2.1 percent, based on current projections, by 2015. But the report said the deficit would start widening again in 2016 and continue on an upward path with ‘serious negative consequences’ on the economy, increasing ‘the risk of a fiscal crisis.’… They [Lawmakers] have been doing little, for example, to bridge the gap between budgets passed in March by the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. No conference committee has been formed to reconcile deep spending cuts in the Republican plan with nearly $1 trillion in tax hikes in the Democratic version.”

Small Businesses Fearing Obamacare Aren’t Getting Help from Congress

The Hill reports, “Small businesses looking for a break from President Obama’s healthcare law aren’t getting any help from Congress.  The law’s critics spend a lot of time talking about its potential effects on employers, and small businesses in particular. But there hasn’t been a real effort on the Hill to address the provisions that will have the most immediate impact on small businesses. In part, the lack of action stems from Republican divisions over whether it’s OK to ‘fix’ parts of the healthcare law. Some conservatives say the party should focus solely on repealing the law and shouldn’t help Democrats solve potential problems.”

“Employers Eye Bare-Bones Health Plans Under New Law”

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage. Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit. Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing.”

Tough Days Ahead for Obamacare Implementation

The Washington Post editorializes, “Thought you had seen the last of the fighting over the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare? Since its passage in 2010, after all, it has survived Supreme Court review, innumerable challenges from House Republicans and Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful campaign to evict its author from the White House. Nonetheless, with the heart of the reform set to take effect next year, its most contentious days may lie ahead. The law will affect Americans’ health and pocketbooks, and its implementation entails many challenges and quite a few unknowns. … President Obama last month said nothing will change for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who have insurance. That’s not quite right. Even some people who are currently insured may see premium increases — or, depending on their health, gender and age, reductions. For example, the 10 percent or so who are in the individual insurance market will shop at ‘exchanges’ — new health-care marketplaces for individual purchasers — where the currently uninsured also will go. The law protects the old and the sick, but that also means that some of the young and the healthy might have to pay more than they do now, particularly if price-control mechanisms don’t work as well as hoped.”

S&P Analyst: ‘Political Brinkmanship’ Remains Major Threat on U.S. Credit Rating

The National Journal reports, “The debt-ceiling deal expired over the weekend, but the credit-rating agency that sent shock waves through financial markets when it downgraded the U.S. credit rating in 2011 is again warning Congress that a credible five-year plan to stabilize the federal deficit is as necessary—and elusive—as ever, National Journal’s Stacy Kaper reports. In an exclusive interview, Nikola Swann, Standard & Poor’s top analyst for the U.S. government’s rating, said that making big fiscal decisions in a crisis setting hurts the U.S. rating outlook and that continued ‘political brinkmanship’ remains a major threat. … S&P’s current AA-plus rating with a negative outlook means there is at least a 1 in 3 chance that the agency will lower America’s rating by 2014.”