Obama Purposefully Lies About Foxx by Mychal

In August of 2011 column, Nero In The White House, I wrote: “Mr. Nixon and Clinton lied to save their backsides. Although, I would argue there are no plausible explanations for doing what they did, I could entertain arguments pursuant to understanding their rationales for lying. But in the case of Obama, he lies because he is a liar. He doesn’t only lie to cover his misdeeds–he lies to get his way. he liesto belittle others and to make himself look presentable at their expense. He lies about his faith, his associations, his mother, his father, and his wife. He lies and bullies to keep his background secret. His lying is congenital and compounded by socio-psychological factors of his life.” (http://www.wnd.com/2011/08/331497/)

I wrote: “Never in my life, inside or outside of politics, have I witnessed such dishonesty in a political leader. He is the most mendacious political figure I have ever witnessed. Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, his narcissistic, contumacious arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Nero would have to be elevated to sainthood.”

Speaking in Chapel Hill at the Carmichael Arena on Tuesday, Obama displayed not just his commonality, he purposefully lied to what I would believe was a handpicked audience of students–and as he never misses a chance to do he was trying to belittle someone else to make himself look good. Said behavior is typical of someone who carries the scars of the type of parents he had, but such insecure, puerile, and dishonest behavior are not the character traits of an emotional stable leader.

In boasting about his plans to keep student interest rates on federal loans form doubling he said: “one Republican congresswoman said just recently–I am going to quote this because I know you guys will think I’m making this up. She said she had very little tolerance for people who tell [her] they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.” He mockingly continued: “I am just quoting here, she said students who rack up studnet loan debt are just sitting on their butts, having opportunity dumped in [their] lap.” He finished with: “Now can you imagine saying something like that?”

Actually Barry what we can’t imagine is that you are such a preening liar. The Congresswoman he was referencing was Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC, and her exact words were: “I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks that the Declaration of Independence says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.”

I pause to point out that Rep. Foxx, unlike Obama and his wife didn’t have her education handed to her because she was Kenyan, black, Muslim, or because they needed another black to make their quota. She worked as a janitor, and it took her seven years to get her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated in 1968 at age 25 without borrowing any money.

I have previously said, Obama needs blacks, Hispanics, and the youth/college age to win. His administration has been one lie after another and Tuesday was no different. The tragedy is that many of those students believed what he was saying and most of the others didn’t care one way or the other, as long as he was promising them something. One girl seated behind Obama, shook her head in disgust at what Obama falsely accused Foxx of saying.


But, that student wasn’t thinking about finishing school with $100,000-$200,000 in student loan debt alone. She wasn’t thinking about the credit card debt and car payments she was going to have on top of that student loandebt. She was happy to be a prop for someone who will say anything and tell any lie necessary to have his way.

As I conclude, let me remind me you of something else I’ve been saying. Extending the lowered student loan interest rate is setting up another financial bubble, because there is no way to pay for it. But, that doesn’t matter to Romney, he agrees with Obama, that the plan should be extended another year. And the Republicans who are fully aware there is no way to pay for it, are stuttering and stammering “we have to find a way to pay for it” as they line up behind him.

Which points out what I’ve been saying. Romney is no different than Obama and the Republicans will pass whatever legislation he wants, if he wins, ergo, it will be more of the same.

'Your' Car Won't Be After 2015

After a certain point, it's not paranoia.

The latest brick in the wall is the predictably named "Moving Ahead For Progress in the 21st Century Act," also known as Senate Bill 1813. (See here for the full text of the bill itself; the relevant section is 31406.) This legislation -- already passed by the Senate and likely to be passed by the House -- will impose a legal requirement that all new cars made beginning with the 2015 models be fitted with so-called Event Data Recorders (EDRs). These are the "black boxes" you may have read about that store data about how you drive -- including whether you wear a seat belt and how fast you drive -- ostensibly for purposes of post-accident investigation.

These EDRs are not new. GM and other automakers have been installing them in new cars for years -- in GM's case, since the late 1990s. What's new is the proposed federal mandate, which would make it illegal to not have one -- or (in all likelihood) to remove or disable one in a car required to have the device.

The question arises: why?

Several possibilities come to mind:

First, the EDRs could be -- and almost certainly will be -- tied into your vehicle's GPS. (Most new and late model cars, conveniently, already have this, too.) Then data about your driving can be transmitted -- as well as recorded. To whom? Your insurance company, of course. Progressive Insurance already has such a system in place -- voluntary, for the moment.

When EDRs are mandated, you will no longer have a choice.

We'll be told it's all for the sake of (groan) "safety" -- just like the old 55 MPH highway speed limit and every radar trap in the country. Of course, it's really for the sake of revenue -- the government's and the insurance company's. Your rates will be "adjusted" in real time, for every incident of "speeding" or not buckling up. It'll be so much moreefficient than using cops to issue tickets. After all, so many fishes escape! With an EDR in every car, no one will escape. Your "adjusted" premium will be waiting for you when you get home.

You've got mail!

And naturally, they -- the government, insurance companies -- will be able to track your every move, noting (and recording) where you've been and when. This will create a surveillance net beyond anything that ever existed previously. Some will not sweat this: After all, if you've got nothing to hide, why worry? Except for the fact that, courtesy of almost everything we do being either "illegal" or at least "suspicious," we all have a great deal to hide. The naivety of the Don't Worry, it's No Big Deal crowd is breathtaking.

But the last possibility is probably the creepiest: EDRs tied into your car's GPS will give them -- the government and/or corporations -- literal physical control over (hack) "your" vehicle. This is not conspiracy theorizing. It is technological fact. Current GM vehicles equipped with the same technology about to be mandated for every vehicle can be disabled remotely. Just turned off. All the OnStar operator has to do is send the appropriate command over the GPS to your car's computer, which controls the engine. It is one of the features touted by OnStar -- of course, as a "safety" feature.

In the future, it will be used to limit your driving -- for the sake of "energy conservation" or, perhaps, "the environment." It will be the perfect, er, vehicle, for implementing U.N. Agenda 21 -- the plan to herd all of us formerly free-range tax cattle into urban feedlots. So much easier to control us this way. No more bailing out to the country or living off the grid - unless you get there (and to your work) by walking.

The pieces are all coming together.

First, computer-controlled cars. Next, widespread adoption of GPS in cars. Then, EDRs tied into them.

Viola. "Your" car is suddenly under the control of others. Just as "your" other (cough, hack) property -- "your" home, for example -- is under the control of others. It does not matter that you paid for it. Or even that you have the legal fiction of ownership. You do not control "your" property -- hence it is really the property of others. You are merely allowed to use said property -- under certain conditions -- by the leave of the true owners.

And once SB 1813 is passed and signed into law, there will no longer be an opt-out. In fact, sure as the rooster crows in the morning, you can bet the next step will a law requiring older cars not originally fitted with the technology be fitted with it -- or else decommissioned. It is inconceivable that they -- the government and its insurance company cronies -- will allow anyone to drive a vehicle not subject to this monitoring and control. They will insist it's not "safe" -- and of course, "unfair" that owners of older cars not equipped with EDRs are able to "get away" with "speeding" and not wearing their seat belts.

Our cars were once a tangible expression of the freedom ideal. They are fast becoming mobile cages. And the really devilish thing is they're making us pay the costs of our own imprisonment, too.

US bid to defuse Egyptian-Israeli tensions derailed by Egyptian Islamists

Monday night, April 24, the Obama administration stepped in to damp down the military frictions developing between Jerusalem and Cairo, which were fanned further this week by a dispute over the suspension of Egyptian gas to Israel. Earlier that day, the Chairman of Egypt’s Supreme Military Council, SCAF, Field Marshal Muhammad Tantawi said: “If anyone comes near Egypt’s border, we will break their leg.” Egypt’s Second Army chief, Gen. Muhammad Higazi added: “Aggressors should reconsider before thinking of attacking any part of Egyptian territory.”

Their remarks, delivered during a live fire exercise, Nasr 7, conducted by the Second Egyptian Army in Sinai, were clearly addressed to Israel and the IDF. In Washington, DEBKAfile’s sources report that President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were warned by their military and intelligence analysts that a military clash between Egypt and Israel was hovering on the brink. There were two potential triggers: The gas issue which suddenly surfaced this week and advance warnings that Sinai Bedouin, Palestinian extremists - some from Gaza, and al Qaeda gangs were plotting terrorist attacks and protest acts for Israel’s 64^th Independence Day this Thursday, April 26.
Their object: to whip up a storm to blow up the 1979 Egyptian-Israel peace accords.

Their plans entail sending terrorists across the Egyptian Sinai border for attacks on Israelis to generate Israeli military incursions into Egyptian territory in hot pursuit of the perpetrators.

This almost happened on April 5, after a Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees gang fired two Grad missiles at Eilat from Sinai. The IDF was about to sent a small special force across into Sinai for the first time since the peace pacts were signed 33 years ago to waylay the missile team as it headed back to the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu and Barak vetoed the incursion.

Wednesday, the US bid to temper tension was abruptly overturned.

Section 8 of the peace accords strictly bind Egypt to maintain and honor the war memorials for the Israelis who fell in battle in Sinai. On Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers on the eve of its 64^th independence day, Egyptian Islamists and Bedouin groups announced they would advance en masse on the Israeli memorials, erase the Israeli names of Israeli soldiers and fill in the names of Egyptian fallen men.

They are counting on Egyptian military and security forces, which have pretty much lost control of the situation there, failing to guard the Israeli sites and hope by their deep affront to Israel to plunge relations into deep crisis.
That said, Israel too must share some of the blame for the rising tensions this week, most particularly, remarks made by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
In an interview he gave Monday, April 23 during an official visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, Lieberman declined to repudiate his previous remark that the threat to Israel coming from Egypt was even graver than the threat from Iran.
Nor did the minister confirm or deny reports that the Foreign Ministry had handed Prime Minister Netanyahu a working paper recommending the reconstitution of the pre-peace pact’s Southern Army and deploy its seven divisions on the Egyptian border - as they were during the decades when the two countries were at war.
Only one IDF combat divisions currently guards the border. It too was only posted there after terrorists crossed in from Sinai on Aug. 26, 2011, attacked Eilat highway traffic and murdered eight Israelis.
Chief of Staff Lt. Benny Gantz commented at the time that the border with Egypt was no longer a frontier of peace but of menace.

On Tuesday, April 24, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a radio interview ahead of Independence Day that the Sinai had degenerated into a Wild West land rife with Iranian-aided gangs who smuggled arms and attacked Israel. He expressed hope that the next Egyptian president, whomsoever is elected, will opt for upholding the peace pact with Israel because it is in the interests of both countries.
The strains between Cairo and Jerusalem were further exacerbated this week by the misreporting by Israel media of a dispute concerning the flow of Egyptian gas to Israel. It was falsely presented as affecting the peace accords, when in fact the flow was suspended over a court case airing in Egypt between conflicting business interests and repeated sabotaqe.

As the political rhetoric heated up in both Cairo and Jerusalem, a dose of balm was administered from Washington in both capitals. The Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv formally stated that the disagreement was commercial, certainly not political. And the defense ministry’s diplomatic coordinator Amos Gilad was dispatched to Cairo to persuade Egypt’s intelligence chief Murad Mowafi to join forces for calming the upset.

The next 48 hours will be critical.

Barackward

It's no secret that the Obama campaign and its surrogates will continue to portray Mitt Romney at too detached from the lives of ordinary Americans to be elected president.

"Governor Romney's a little out of touch," Vice President Joe Biden told Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer in early April.

Or as actress and Obama supporter Jane Lynch put it recently about the nominee-to-be, "the guy does not know how to relate to people."

But it's a theme the Obama campaign ought to think twice about before advancing. That's because President Obama himself exhibits a striking inability to connect with an electorate he seems uninterested in getting to know.

Obama rarely spends time with average Americans, and can seem smug and downright clueless about their lives when he talks about them.

We got a glimpse of this ignorance in the 2008 campaign, when Obama told a room full of San Francisco donors that Midwesterners cling to guns, religion and xenophobia. It surfaced again last year when he told a woman at a town hall event that he found it "interesting" that her unemployed engineer husband couldn't find work.

Obama's staff privately concede that their boss has a hard time understanding people. "Surprisingly for someone who led such an inspirational campaign," a longtime executive branch employee told the Atlantic's James Fallows, "[Obama] does not seem to have the ability to connect with people."

Obama's inability to connect shouldn't be all that surprising, however. Obama has spent most of his adult life living, working, and socializing in upper middle class suburbs, college towns, and seats of government. Hyde Park in Chicago, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. are fine cities. But they don't necessarily give residents a clear picture of the way most Americans live.

Granted, the bar for presidential connectedness was set high by Obama's immediate predecessors. Bill Clinton was in his element around other people, be they powerful D.C. insiders or average voters. Clinton had a natural ability to convince people he could feel their pain.

And it was often said that George W. Bush was the politician voters would most want to sit down and have a beer with. Though a child of privilege, Bush seemed to enjoy hobnobbing with average Americans.

Obama wasn't always the aloof politician he has become. As Jodi Kantor relates in her book, The Obamas,Obama went out of his way to spend time with people as he worked his way up the political ranks. "Earlier in his career, he had shown up to tiny events, shaken every hand," she writes.

But Obama's approachability changed quickly as his political trajectory spiked. "Now fame and demand drew him deeper within himself," Kantor writes about Obama during his time in the U.S. Senate. "His time and patience were shrinking, his desire for self-protection and privacy increasing. Some staffers had a word to describe the moments when he seemed unable or unwilling to connect: Barackward, a combination of 'Barack' and 'awkward.'"

It wasn't long before even spending time with American troops became a burden for him. In The Operators, Michael Hastings depicts candidate Obama as impatient when asked to pose for photos with American troops in Iraq. "He didn't want to take pictures with any more soldiers," a State Department official told Hastings. "He was complaining about it."

Any president is isolated by definition. And anyone can understand Obama's preference not to have to be "on" at every waking moment, as well as his desire to spend as much of his free time as possible with his young family.

And let's give Obama credit for continuing the presidential tradition of reading, and responding to, letters from the public. Obama reportedly reads 10 letters a day from his constituents, which Eli Saslow, author of the book Ten Letters, told Politico, offers Obama "a small window that he has to real people and real issues. He has such trouble creating authentic interaction with people. … These letters, what they really give him is the unfiltered chance to read people's diary entries."

But Obama could make a greater effort to get to know the people he serves. Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of time raising money for himself. Obama has held more than 100 re-election fundraisers in the less than a year since he officially filed his candidacy for a second term with the Federal Election Commission on April 4, 2011.

And his free time is often spent relaxing on luxurious vacations, hosting elaborate state dinners, appearing on comedy talk shows or mingling with A-list celebrities at posh White House events, such as the recent concert there for Black History Month featuring Mick Jagger and B.B. King.

Obama has a well-known affinity for golf, a game that would seem to offer ample opportunity for socializing. Obama has golfed more than 100 times during his first term. But, according to the New York Times, his foursomes usually consist of the same small group of mid- to low-level West Wing staffers. Otherwise, as theTimes reported in December, Obama is increasingly isolated, spending "his down time with a small-and shrinking-inner circle of aides and old friends."

Obama's inability to connect may seem trivial. But it surely hampers his capacity to tap into the empathy he insists informs so much of his agenda. Obama's lack of connectedness may help explain his distant and then dysfunctional response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, and the deep unpopularity of some of his signature initiatives, such as Obamacare and the contraceptive mandate.

Obama once wrote that empathy "is at the heart of my moral code." But, by insulating himself from most Americans, Obama can't possibly develop or employ the empathy necessary to govern as a president for all Americans.

America's Alternate Economic Reality

Despite enormous federal spending, deficits, and debt, many Americans remain relatively unconcerned. With evidence of uncontrolled debt's consequences so clear in Europe, how can so many so easily ignore it at home? The answer is that competing economic realities divide America, obscuring our fast-approaching tipping point.

Under the President's own budget and estimates, the deficit this year will be $1.327 trillion. If correct, this will be the fourth consecutive budget deficit over $1 trillion and the highest deficit since 2009. Prior to this, America had never had one deficit over $1 trillion.

This year's $1 trillion-plus deficit will amount to 8.5 percent of GDP. Excluding those of the previous three years, it will be the largest since WWII. Under the President's own assumptions, the deficit will not fall below 2.7 percent of GDP -- and not reaching that until 2018 -- in any year of the next decade. As recently as 2007, the deficit measured just 1.2 percent of GDP.

Under the President's own budget and own estimates, the size of government never drops below 22 percent of GDP -- meaning government will consume almost a quarter of all America produces for the foreseeable future. Excluding the previous three years, the budget's lowest level would be the government's highest in 20 years.

Finally, under the President's own budget and estimates, debt held by the public will reach $11.6 trillion this year -- double 2008's $5.8 trillion level.

Prior to the recession, such levels of spending, deficits, and debt were unthinkable. During the recession, they were seen as unavoidable. Now, many seem to believe them acceptable. How can so many not see spending and debt's danger? It is not unseen, but rather seen through an alternate economic reality.

In the real world, the private sector is the producer and government is the consumer. In the alternate economic reality now pervading much of America, the reverse is believed true. This alternate reality is increasingly accepted by the increasing numbers who are decreasingly dependent on the private sector and increasingly dependent on the government for their economic means.

The engine of their economy is government. For them, government does not consume from them, it produces for them. According to Congress' official tax estimator, the Joint Committee on Taxation, in its 2/24 estimate of taxes paid for 2012, 52.9 percent of those filing taxes will pay just 6.8 percent of total taxes -- social insurance, excise, and income. Their share of income taxes -- due to refundable credits, which pay recipients in excess of their tax liability -- will be a negative 3.1 percent.

We marvel at Greek rioting over reduced government benefits, even when bankruptcy is the alternative. But seen from an alternate economic reality, it is perversely understandable. They simply are fighting for the only economic reality they know.

Assuredly, the cries of impending collapse have been made there -- as they have been made here -- for some time. Yet government's response -- both there and here -- has been to increase the size and scope of its extent and spending. As in the fairy tale, it is hard to believe the cries of "wolf," when the wolf neither appears nor is even regarded.

California offers a closer view of the same picture. Government's spending and extent creep inexorably until many no longer know anything else. What they then "know" -- their daily, lifetime experience -- is that the relevance in their lives is not economic theory, regardless of analytical soundness, but government.

Its fullest manifestation becomes that of the Greek rioters. They become worse than the Luddites, who merely sought to stop progress, and instead seek to refute reality itself.

While government can enable people to perceive a "reverse economics," it cannot in fact reverse economics -- any more than Canute could command the tide recede. Economic reality can only be put off temporarily by ever-widening circles of subsidy: the government's redistribution of wealth through taxes, then redistribution through borrowing at home, and finally redistribution by borrowing abroad.

With each widening circle, its cost escalates. Ultimately someone, if not everyone, balks -- producers' efficiency diminishes, creditors cease to lend. The nation goes from tipping point to tipping.

Until then though, the alternate economic reality creates an alternate perception. People see the same things, but interpret them entirely differently. So, here and now. Despite our horrific spending and the debt problems America faces, a large percentage of Americans do not fail to see, but their altered economic reality causes them to not see crisis, so long as government keeps spending.

The Perfect Storm of Liberalism

"How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?"-- Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm

The Perfect Storm of Liberalism has arrived.

A professional collapse inside the several departments and agencies of the United States government created by a decades-long erosion of standards. An erosion fed by all manner of deadly liberal obsessions from racial quotas to political correctness to an addiction to lawsuits, the tolerance for a culture of out of control spending, wildly improper personal behavior, and more.

This deadly combination is now surfacing repeatedly in scandals as seemingly different as those engulfing the Secret Service, the GSA, the U.S. military, the Department of Justice, and every other tentacle of the federal government imaginable.

Let's look at it liberal issue by liberal issue and examine how this perfect storm of liberalism is swamping the affected government department or agency in question.

Let's start with:

• Racial quotas and the Secret Service: An American Spectator source has fingered the hot-button issue of racial quotas as a serious problem for the Secret Service, an allegation now surfacing (hesitantly to be sure) in no less than the liberal Washington Post.

Did the Secret Service deliberately reduce its hiring standards to insure that minorities were hired and promoted in the name of racial quotas?

Ironically setting up the possibility that the personal security of America's first black president -- himself a decided liberal -- could have been breached with disastrous consequences?

Did this alleged lowering of the agency's standards wind up slowly infecting the agency across-the-board? Thus setting the stage for the explosive sex scandal that has led to the investigation of 12 Secret Service agents.

Was the Cartagena scandal actually "fixed" -- "settled" -- until the Miami SAC got wind of what was happening on her turf -- when she blew the scandal wide open?

This is exactly the allegation from a source with considerable Washington and Secret Service connections. Precisely because of these close connections, the source requested anonymity. But this source tells a story that paints a grim portrait of an agency led by a "weak leader" -- Director Mark Sullivan -- in thrall with the liberal idea of racial quotas. A political correctness that led to the appointment of an African-American woman -- Paula Reid -- as the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the 150 member Miami Field Office. The Miami office, responsible for Secret Service agents operating in South America -- as they were for President Obama's now infamous trip to Cartagena, Colombia -- is said to rival only New York and Los Angeles for prestige.

What is really going on here? Was the Cartagena story "fixed" -- until Agent Reid blew the whistle? If so, who did the fixing? The White House? The State Department? Who?

Let me stipulate. As has been reported, Agent Reid blew the whistle on the Cartagena shenanigans the moment she heard about them. To her credit. Say again, to her credit.

The question here is not that she "blew the whistle," as they say in government vernacular. The real question, unasked much less unanswered, is why these particular agents were sent to Colombia in the first place. Did she not, as the Miami boss, understand these agents well enough to know that the possibility of these particular selections had the distinct possibility of going wildly off track in a country where prostitution was legal? Did she not understand these choices well enough to know that trouble… big trouble… was highly probable? Therefore unnecessarily embarrassing President Obama on the world stage while he was in a foreign country. And if she didn't make the selections, who did? With exact same questions applying to whoever selected these agents.

Or was there another, infinitely more serious problem that resulted in these agents being in the Secret Service in the first place?

Here are two much earlier instances of trouble on high profile trips that were handled quite differently.

First. When Vice President George H.W. Bush traveled to the Philippines for the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos in 1981 -- Bush's first official trip as vice president -- several members of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) were along to support the communications end of the trip. They were, as all White House staffers know, members of the Army Signal Corps. What happened? A handful vanished prior to the then-Vice President's arrival. MIA. Found eventually to have been drunk, in the company of prostitutes, their U.S. government IDs lost. What happened? Out. On the spot. returned to Washington and never, professionally speaking, heard from again.

Second. On another vice presidential trip in the Reagan-Bush era, this one to Moscow at the height of the Cold War, a naval aide managed to get himself in a compromising position with a Russian woman. This was incredibly taboo. The Philippines, at least, was an ally. As tensions were incredibly high with the Soviet Union, this was a country where the stakes were infinitely higher. The Vice President was already on the ground. What to do? Check first that the codes in the naval officer's position were secure (they were)… then he too was gone. Outta there on the spot. Again, professional toast.

In other words, to clean up the vernacular, bad things happen. Humans are imperfect no matter the generation or the qualification.

Here's the problem., however. When you have, as our source says, "entire complements of personnel working in high positions who should never have been hired in the first place as they were not qualified, and add to that the viperous mix of the generational issues and you have a disaster waiting in the wings."

This source cites the presence of Reid as one of the original plaintiffs in a discrimination lawsuit filed in 2000 by Agent Reginald Moore, an African American. The suit, charging the Secret Service with racial discrimination and discussed here, is still ongoing over a decade later, although Reid finally withdrew as a plaintiff. While the lawsuit surfaced disagreement even among black agents (the story cited above in the Chicago Tribune reports a black agent in charge of the Oklahoma Field Office as saying that "the agency portrayed in the lawsuit does not resemble the place he's worked for 19 years"), there is a decided belief, according to the Spectator source, that the net effect of the suit was that "the bar was lowered significantly" across the board when it came to standards of admission. Americans are by now well familiar in the Age of Political Correctness with lawsuits brought that wind up benefitting the person or persons suing. There may or may not be direct financial gain in terms of an award. But there can be professional gain, promotions achieved that might not otherwise be achieved simply because the government agency (or private company) feels it is easiest to "settle" and end the matter.

In fact, earlier in this campaign season, when the issue of alleged sexual harassment against then-GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain was raised, an issue that came about because of a suit filed against him when he ran the National Restaurant Association, there were numerous media reports (like this one) saying some version of this:

"Lawsuits are so expensive to defend that it makes good business sense to settle even the most frivolous cases. And businesses do."

The U.S. government, alas, has a bottomless pit of cash (or thinks it does). So it can fight on forever if it chooses. Still and all, as those who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment well know, they received their fifteen minutes of fame and more so, doubtless burnishing their names in some quarters.

In government circles it is entirely conceivable that suits are brought to insist on professional advancement that might otherwise might not be achieved. Even if the suit drags on forever, if there is one thing that members of the governing class are decidedly sensitive to in any administration it is the impression that they are somehow involved in racial or gender discrimination. They may not give a whit about the money… the money, after all, isn't theirs. But be pegged as racists or sexists? When their administration has to get votes from minorities and women? Not good. So, they can bend.

And in this case, the case of the Secret Service, the question is: Did the Secret Service, as our source suggests, bend because of racial considerations? In fact bend so far that standards not simply for minorities or women but for everybody were lowered. Resulting in a crew of Secret Service agents screwing up (so to speak) in Colombia when in fact the closest they should have ever been to a Secret Service agent is watching Clint Eastwood play one in the movies.

Lending credence to this scenario, says our source, is that Director Sullivan, described as a "weak" leader surrounding himself with equally weak subordinates, "was overheard at a cocktail party at the end of last year bragging about [how] the academy class of new agents in progress at the time was overwhelmingly filled with minorities. An event he seemed to be very pleased about as opposed to having been heard to say that this class of new agents is the most qualified, best scored group we have had in a generation!"

Indeed, our source says Miami SAC Reid has a reputation as a "true radical black woman." According to one interesting nugget in the Washington Post, Reid came to the Secret Service through "an NAACP job fair that sought to encourage minority applicants for law enforcement jobs." The NAACP, once a beacon of equal opportunity, has now earned a considerable reputation in the eyes of some as nothing more than a home for far left-wing politics and its camp followers. Was Agent Reid one of those followers? The Post does not say.

Notably, in a classic of liberal journalism, the Washington Post story hails Reid as a "rising supervisor"… while burying crucial information about her performance well into the story. Wrote the Post sympathetically of Reid's rise to be the head of the Miami Field Office:

Her move prompted grumbling among some longer-serving white supervisors that she was unqualified, according to people with knowledge of the situation, including a former agent who left recently. A lot of the "good old boys" were not happy, said the former agent, who, because of the sensitive nature of personnel decisions, asked not to be identified.

The result of the push for meeting racial quotas in the Secret Service at the expense of lowering standards, says our source, is that "…the bar was lowered significantly. Now that affects ALL hires of the Service regardless of race." In consequence, when combined with "the societal attitudes of the latest generations and their general lack of education, commitment and reality," the inevitable outcome is a "dumbed down" Secret Service. Where conduct like that in Cartagena "is only the tip of the iceberg."

Agents at the end of their careers, the Spectator was told, relate "horror stories while on presidential protective detail. They would assign agents posts to stand, observing certain perimeters within which was the POTUS (President of the United States). Supervisors would pass to check on the postings and there were no agents! 'Where were you?' they were asked." The response: "Oh, I had to go to the bathroom." There is, says this source, a "basic lack of understanding of the importance of the job and commitment to it (that) goes across all lines."

Agent David Chaney, a senior supervisor who is white, was cited as an example of the dumbed down standards not simply because the standards for hiring have dropped over time but also the standards "for retention have been lowered to the point that there is no accountability." It was Chaney, now abruptly retired after his involvement in the Cartagena scandal, who posted on Facebook (in 2009) a photo of himself guarding protectee Sarah Palin in 2008. With the comment that "I was really checking her out, if you know what I mean." Whether Chaney was ever reprimanded for this 2009 posting at the time is unclear.

All of this has brought fresh attention to a 2002 investigation of the Secret Service by U.S. News and World Report. The magazine provided a detailed examination that further illustrates the allegations and concerns of our own source with regard to an agency lost in a swamp of liberal political correctness. The story is replete with tales of violations of one-time Service standards. Such as:

-- A female agent detailed to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton violating Service standards by drinking while carrying her gun, then losing her purse to a thief -- and the .357 Sig Sauer service weapon inside. It was the second time the agent had lost her gun -- yet she had been promoted between the first and second incidents.

-- An alleged affair between an agent guarding the Clinton White House with President Clinton's cousin Catherine Cornelius.

-- Alleged affairs with female White House staffers involving not one but two successive Secret Service Directors.

-- An agent guarding then-former President Reagan having an affair with an underage teen-age girl.

-- A fight in a D.C. bar that resulted in a shooting and the dismissal of the agent involved.

There's much more. But the overall portrait from the Spectator's source and elsewhere is of an agency in crisis. Or, as was said in the U.S. News story, an agency that is "like a giant ship teetering on toothpicks, waiting to collapse." The allegation is now raised that racial quotas is one of those toothpicks. And the ultimate irony, as mentioned, is that this addiction to the liberal obsession with racial quotas may be putting the personal safety of the nation's first black president in jeopardy.

Next on this dismal list?

• Political Correctness and Ft. Hood: Remember this one? In November of 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, suddenly pulled out a gun and started firing? Shouting "Allahu Akbar!" -- God is Great-- Hasan killed thirteen and wounded 29 other servicemen and women. Right in the heart of the U.S. Army's Fort Hood.

What was the bottom line of this horror? It turned out that Major Hasan, now scheduled for trial this summer, was an American Muslim of Palestinian descent who had already been investigated prior to the shooting by the FBI. Why? It had discovered e-mail correspondence between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini cleric who was well on the list of al Qaeda terrorists. After the shooting al-Awlaki issued a statement praising Hasan as a "hero" and saying that "fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty." Al-Awlaki was killed by a US drone in 2011.

The Wall Street Journal reported that not only were U.S. intelligence agencies like the FBI aware of Hasan's activities and connections, his "former colleagues have said he performed substandard work and occasionally unnerved them by expressing fervent Islamic views and deep opposition to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." No wonder, since he passed out business cards calling himself a "Soldier of Allah."

So why was not Hasan flagged and removed from duty, pronto? How did he get to be a major in the United States Army in the first place? How did he stay a major when U.S. intelligence knew he was communicating with an al Qaeda leader?

Then-Army Chief of Staff General George Casey provided a disturbing glimpse into just how far the liberal mindset of "diversity" has penetrated the military. ("Diversity" being increasingly seen as a code word for judging others by the politically correct skin color or religion: in the latter case, Muslim.) Said the General in a CNN interview:

"As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well," the Army Chief of Staff also said Sunday. Casey was quick to add that he does not think there is currently discrimination against the roughly 3,000 Muslims who serve in the Army as active duty soldiers or in the reserves."

Retired General Jack Keane had another view, which he gave to the U.S. Senate in testifying about the incident, which he said showed "just how unacceptable the military's failure to deal properly with Major Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism was." Keane added the obvious: "….that Hasan's open displays of violent Islamist extremism was [sic] a violation of military rules calling for good order and discipline."

All of this, of course, was after the fact. So too was Attorney General Eric Holder's hotly controversial decision not to try Hasan as a terrorist but rather for the simple act of murder.

But the hard fact was obvious.

Yet another liberal standard -- political correctness -- had been brought to bear in the U.S. Army in order to find excuses not to deal with Major Hasan. And as a result, 13 servicemen and women are dead.

• Lawsuits and the federal government. What would liberals do without their obsession with trial lawyers? Or Big Government?

The apparent answer? Starve to death.

If you would really like a glimpse of liberal values at work in the government, take a look at this site, a small (?!!) compilation of lawsuits that have been filed against the federal government. Who, specifically, is being sued?

Here's a partial…a tiny… list:

The Air Force
The Department of Commerce
The Department of Homeland Security
The Social Security Administration
The Bureau of the Census
The Security and Exchange Commission
The Federal Aviation Administration
The U.S. Marshal Service
The Environmental Protection Administration
The Bureau of Engraving
The Department of Health and Human Services

This being Washington, these things can not only cost you -- the taxpayer -- money in terms of the actual legal costs and monetary awards if applicable. No, there's always the required congressional investigation to go along with it. And lest you think this is just a partisan Republican versus Democrat thing -- think again.

This clip revolves around a complaint of being racially victimized, with a black woman leading the complaint against none other than Bill Clinton's EPA administrator Carol Browner. Browner, of course, is a longtime liberal ally of then-Vice President Al Gore and returned to government in the Obama White House as the head of the Office of Energy and Climate Change. It was announced in January of this year that Browner was leaving government after her second stint as a senior presidential adviser.

A racist with a penchant for discriminating against minorities and women? Carol Browner? Well, yes went the cry from various black and female EPA employees. So there was a law suit and a decision and a bill to the taxpayers in the form of an award for the alleged "victim'" (depending on the source) either $600,000 or $300,000.

This kind of legal bickering generated by liberal silliness goes on all day every day all across the government. Fueled by your tax dollars. Here's another example of the bickering that is always on-going, this time from a lefty site called "Occupy EPA." The target here? That's right, Obama's EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a black woman, is in the sights of an angry lefty at EPA.

And you wonder why so many Americans instinctively rebel at the size of the federal government?

We haven't even gotten to:

Wasting Tax Dollars and the GSA: Surely you haven't missed the saga of the GSA's Jeffrey Neeley and his zany crew at the General Services Administration? The GSA usually dubbed as the government's landlord. This guy (pictured here in his now immortal bathtub scene in Las Vegas) has, with daunting effectiveness, become the very epitome of Big Government's ingrained DNA for wasting your hard-earned tax dollars by the champagne and caviar buckets full.

Then there are the execs at Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac demanding bonuses for failure. The soldiers urinating on dead enemies for the cameras or posing with the body parts of a suicide bomber on camera. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department turns a blind eye to the New Black Panthers caught on camera menacingly standing outside a Philadelphia polling place -- with nightsticks. Not to mention going blind again when the Panthers were recently well out in public offering a million dollar bounty for George Zimmerman, the accused killer in the Trayvon Martin case.

In a few weeks, The Death of Liberalism by The American Spectator's Founder and Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell will hit the bookshelves. Tyrrell examines exactly the wild, wacky, and truly disturbing obsessions of the modern left that have reduced the liberalism of FDR, Truman, and JFK to a perpetually unfunny 20 percent in onepoll after another. Written before this latest rash of scandals, Tyrrell's book is nonetheless prescient about what's happening here -- and why this kind of unfunny business is killing liberalism when it isn't killing real people like those at Fort Hood..

The other day, The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan wrote a perceptive column about all of this, calling it "America's Crisis of Character." She closes by saying:

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they?… Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

That "something" that is going wrong we would suggest is the rewriting of high standards to remake them as liberal obsessions disguised as "standards." Which is to say, all too frequently, no standards.

All of this becomes a real opportunity for -- Mitt Romney.

The economy is at the head of the list of the issues in this campaign. But Romney has a chance here to finally connect the dots that have been discussed throughout the primaries by his opponents.

Presidents are not accountants. They are leaders. American leaders who must understand the importance of the distinctively American character and the need for that American character to shine through every open portal of the United States government.

Without high standards, without character, without a colorblind approach that measures every government agency from the more glamorous precincts of the United States Secret Service to the mundane General Services Administration to the far afield operations of the U.S. military or the critical functions of the Department of Justice -- the future holds nothing but one government scandal after another.

Is it time for the next president to throw out a huge chunk of these parasitic bureaucracies wholesale?

Yes. Unequivocally yes. It's not just time -- it's past time.

But whatever remains as the constitutional government of the United States cannot operate if high standards are not returned. If left-wing obsessions are not finally and fully replaced with a devotion to the highest of high standards.

Otherwise, perpetual scandal looms. The ship of state will indeed sink.

And in the case of below-excellent Secret Service agents? As the U.S. Army has already learned the hard way, the Perfect Storm of Liberalism that swept up Fort Hood has every capability of producing:

Tragedy.

Obama's Latest Plan to Snooker Seniors

For years, the President and his congressional accomplices have been telling us that the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is too costly. As Obama claimed during a 2009 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage.… And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion…" This canard was the pretext for the massive slashes in MA(Medicare Advantage) funding he authorized when he signed Obamacare into law. As the election year approached, however, the President's reelection team evidently noticed a potential problem -- the seniors most likely to be affected by these MA cuts were due to find out about them just a few weeks before the November election.

As Benjamin E. Sasse and Charles Hurt report, open enrollment for MA begins three weeks before voters go to the polls: "It's hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he's taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election." And it is no exaggeration to say that MA is "beloved." Nearly 25 percent of all Medicare enrollees are on MA, and the vast majority of these seniors chose the program because of its low co-pays and comprehensive benefits. It is no coincidence that well over three-fifths of MA beneficiaries have annual incomes of less than $30,000 and that the percentage of minorities enrolled in the program is much higher than is the case for traditional Medicare.

The electoral significance of these facts would hardly have been lost on the President's political advisors when they learned that Obamacare's MA cuts would be unveiled to the nation's most reliable voters just before the November election. The resultant vision of surly seniors lining up in their millions at the polls to pull the lever for Mitt Romney presumably produced urgent emails and frantic phone calls, followed by a terse directive from the White House to Obama's creatures at CMS to come up with plan to put off the cuts until after the election. In due course, an $8.3 billion "demonstration project" materialized that would "temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don't lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama's re-election bid."

It would appear, however, that the auditors of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) smell a rat. "In a rebuke to the Obama administration, government auditors are calling for the cancellation of an $8 billion Medicare program that congressional Republicans have criticized as a political ploy." Naturally, the number crunchers at the GAO didn't employ the kind of partisan verbiage that the GOP used when word of this scam got out. They couched their criticism in the bland vernacular of the Beltway bureaucrat. Nonetheless, they pointed out that this particular demonstration project "dwarfs all other Medicare demonstrations -- both mandatory and discretionary -- conducted since 1995" and "precludes a credible evaluation of its effectiveness in achieving CMS's stated research goal."

In other words, the amount of money being spent on this faux demonstration project is gigantic compared to legitimate projects and CMS didn't bother to outline any real plan for evaluating its success. The GAO folks are mistaken on the latter assumption, however. The Obama reelection team, which includes the apparatchiks at CMS, does indeed have a plan for measuring the success of the project -- they will count the votes cast for the President on election day. If he receives more votes than Mitt Romney, the program will be judged a success. Presumably, the transparency of their motives in this regard is why the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has also raised concerns: "The panel denounced Medicare's 'overly broad use of demonstration authority.'"

This concern echoes those which have long been voiced by a variety of Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Senator Orrin Hatch and Rep. Dave Camp, who released this statement: "The Obama Administration launched this demonstration program to divert attention away from cuts to the popular Medicare Advantage program … Furthermore, it's unclear whether the Obama Administration even had the legal authority to undertake it in the first place." The response of the White House to the protests of Republicans and the concerns of nonpartisan agencies was predictable: "Asked about the report, White House press secretary Jay Carney immediately changed the subject to the $200 billion in projected savings from eliminating improper payments under the health care law."

At this late date, it's difficult to restrain a chuckle when Republicans like Orrin Hatch, the appointees at MedPAC, and the GAO number crunchers raise concerns about "overly broad" use of power and lack of "legal authority" by this administration. These people should know by now that such behavior defines the Obama White House. For Obama and his accomplices, this $8 billion "demonstration project" is no different than the Obamacare waivers or the gag order issued by Kathleen Sebelius in September of 2009 forbidding insurance companies to communicate with their own customers about the "reform" law while it was being debated in Congress. These people simply don't care if their actions are legal. They will do whatever it takes to win.

And to win this November, they know they must keep as many seniors as possible in the dark about what has been done to Medicare Advantage. It isn't enough to simply lie. They must maintain the false illusion that the program's cost and benefits have not been altered. Thus, $8 billion of our money must be used to shore up the program until the President has weathered the election. That this is unethical and probably illegal is utterly irrelevant to Obama and his mendacious minions.