Sunday, August 9, 2020

HOMELESS IN SENS. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND REP. NANCY PELOSI'S STATE OF CALIFORNIA - It's only getting grimmer!

LOS ANGELES IS MEXICO'S SECOND LARGEST CITY.

JOE BIDEN WILL HAND 40 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVER AMNESTY SO THAT THEY MAY LEGALLY BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO.

NOW DO THE MATH ON AMERICA'S JOBS, HOMELESS AND HOUSING CRISIS!


'DACA Nancy' up in arms


Eight years ago, President Obama signed DACA by executive order, and then House minority leader Nancy Pelosi was thrilled.  Now Speaker Pelosi has a problem with a president issuing executive orders when Congress stalls on passing a solution.

It would have been better if Congress and the president had worked together.  Unfortunately, the Democrats were not really interested.

Overall, it was a brilliant political move by President Trump, as Stephen Moore wrote:

Trump's four executive actions do many of the things that the Democrats have been agitating for: it gets money to hard-working people via a suspension of the payroll tax. This means a 7.5% boost in take-home pay for every worker making $100,000 or less for the rest of the year. It is legal and popular with voters.

Most important, it puts the Democrats on defense — especially Joe Biden.

The Democrats, and I assume Biden, want billions to "help" (actually bail out) many blue states and cities.  They want billions for states poorly managed and weighed down by public-sector unions.

I'm sure all of this will end up in the courts.  In the meantime, people who need money will get some soon.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

California Using $100 Million of $550 Million Federal Coronavirus Funds to Put Homeless in Hotels

Rectangles are painted on the ground to encourage homeless people to keep social distancing at a city-sanctioned homeless encampment across from City Hall in San Francisco, California, on May 22, 2020, amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Josh Edelson / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
3:14

The California Department of Housing and Community Development is using $100 million of the $550 million it got from the federal Coronavirus Relief Fund to put homeless people in hotel rooms or other facilities in San Francisco as a way to allegedly curb the spread of the disease.

The state’s Homekey program announced the millions of taxpayer dollars available as grants to pay for the housing and that the deadline to apply is December 30.

The agency’s website states:

Administered by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), $600 million in grant funding will be made available to local public entities, including cities, counties, or other local public entities, including housing authorities or federally recognized tribal governments within California to purchase and rehabilitate housing, including hotels, motels, vacant apartment buildings, and other buildings and convert them into interim or permanent, long-term housing.

The additional $50 million is from State General Funds and must be used by June 30, 2022, according to the website.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the bay area participation in the government handout:

As the coronavirus crisis stretches on and many hotels remain shuttered, some antsy owners are becoming more open to the idea of selling rather than hanging on to see how long they can survive the crippled economy. In hyper-expensive San Francisco, where plummeting tourism has led to 40% of the hotels temporarily closing, some owners might feel more confident than those in other regions in recovering financially once the pandemic eases.

But it doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about selling, officials said. San Francisco homeless policy leaders have said since early summer they are hoping to buy two or more hotels for conversion, and some leading players in the city’s Homekey process say several properties are in play.

The challenge, they say, is finding buildings that don’t need prohibitively expensive updating — in-unit bathrooms, disabled access and the like — whose owners are willing to sell at a fair price. All of that is no small ask, considering that while rents have dipped significantly during the pandemic, real estate prices have not. Then there’s the follow-up cost. Overseeing a supportive housing operation costs about $30,000 a year — per person — so a modest, 50-unit complex alone would require $1.5 million a year. 

The Chronicle reported that the state has received about 100 initial applications so far, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) office.

San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen suggested a more militant approach if properties do not become available. 

“If we can’t find willing sellers, we should consider addressing this major problem by eminent domain,” Ronen said. “Homekey is a solution, but we need much more like it. We have to do everything we can.”

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter.



 

 

Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/another_line_they_cut_into_illegals_get_free_public_housing_as_impoverished_americans_wait.html

 

By Monica Showalter

Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?

Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.

Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.

The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.

According to a report in the Washington Times:

The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.

Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.

Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.

“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”

The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.

Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.

The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.

The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.

The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.

 

Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years

 

BY MASOOMA HAQ

In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.

The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.

Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.

The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.

The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.

Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.

Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”

“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.

In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.

In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.

According to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”

Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.

California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.

California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.

According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.

BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.

 

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.

 

 

 


JOE BIDEN - THE CON MAN WHO CONS US HE IS NOT UNDER DEMENTIA

 

Where Is Joe Biden's Brain?



The third-season opener of the iconic sci-fi series Star Trek was an episode titled "Spock's Brain," in which an unidentified humanoid female from a seemingly advanced civilization transports aboard the starship Enterprise and, after rendering the entire crew unconscious, absconds with science officer's Spock's brain.  Capt. Kirk and the crew spend the episode tracking down the brain and figuring out a way to make Spock whole and functional again.

 It is unlikely that aliens have descended and absconded with Joe Biden's brain, but there is no clear explanation for Biden's incoherent outbursts; inability to complete sentences or thoughts; and failure to remember where he is, who people are, even what office he is running for.  We all get old and forgetful, and to some extent the prone to plagiarism, Biden has always had his tongue engaged before his brain was in gear.  The "that's just Joe" refrain became a cliché.  But there's more going on here than just getting old and forgetful even though that would be bad enough.  His "gaffes" are now, it seems, a frightening predictor.  We need to know before he gets his hand on the nuclear codes and determines policy or becomes a sock puppet for an administration full of Obama-era puppet masters all too willing to be his Rasputin.

The latest joke is that Biden should end his commercials with the tag, "I'm Joe Biden, and I forgot this message."  We drop our jaws or grit our teeth when he calls Arizona a great city, talks about Super Thursday, says black Americans ain't black if they don't support him and that blacks all think alike, and c'mon man, you know, the thing.  November 3 is approaching, and it ain't funny anymore.  We need to know what is wrong with Joe Biden's brain.

If it had happened to Trump, it would have been the yop story for months.  It was not that long ago that Joe Biden' eye filled with blood during a CNN town hall.  As the New York Post reported:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's left eye filled with blood during an appearance on a CNN town hall Wednesday.

As he answered a question about climate change, the former vice president's eye turned red, and the Washington Examiner suggested it might have been caused by a broken blood vessel, a condition known as a subconjuctival hemorrhage.

It can be caused by a number of things — including sneezing, coughing, straining, eye rubbing, trauma from injury, high blood pressure or a bleeding disorder — according to WebMD.

As a senator, Biden had emergency surgery twice for life-threatening brain aneurysms in 1988.

The eye bleed is likely not related to Biden's cognitive difficulties, but the possible lingering effects of those two brain surgeries may now be visible in Joe Biden's daily cognitive breakdown.  The signs are ignored by a lapdog media.  They would not be if this were happening to Trump.

Marc Siegel, M.D. is a professor of medicine and medical director at Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health and a Fox News medical correspondent.  Dr. Siegel last September penned a piece for The Hill in which he detailed the possible lingering effects of such surgery, which makes it a lifetime handicap:

I was not concerned when I saw blood appear in his left eye during the CNN climate-change town hall last week[.] ... What was more concerning to me, as a physician, was when Biden appeared to lose his train of thought mid-sentence.  

In recent weeks, the former vice president has at times made what appeared to be cognitive errors.  These include reportedly forgetting which state — Vermont or New Hampshire — he was in, when the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations occurred, and that he was not vice president when the Parkland, Fla., school shooting occurred

Last weekend, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Biden slipped and called the president "Donald Hump" before correcting himself and calling it a Freudian slip.

Biden had two brain aneurysms repaired surgically in 1988.  The first one was fairly large, a centimeter in size, and was leaking.  His neurosurgeon, Dr. Neal Kassell, has stated publicly that Biden is in excellent shape.

Still, the fact remains that studies have shown this type of aneurysm repair — especially when associated with a bleed — can sometimes lead to long-term cognitive difficulties, with problems in thinking, memory or orientation.   

As BizPacReview reports, Siegel elaborated some more on Biden's mental health last week on Sean Hannity's Fox News show:

The discussion came after a monologue during which host Sean Hannity dissected what appears to be presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden's declining cognitive state[.] ...

"VP Biden in 1988 had two aneurysms repaired surgically before the modern, most modern techniques came in. Studies have shown that there's up to 50 percent cognitive impairment long-term following those aneurysm repairs," he said.

"Also a matter of public record, former VP Biden has atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat. He's on blood thinners for that. A major study called the Swiss Atrial Fibrillation Study came out about a year ago. Over 1,200 people studied. They found three percent per year, even if people were on blood thinners, ended up having silent strokes. And guess how silent strokes present — they present usually with cognitive impairment with faltering, with inability to think clearly." ...

Atrial fibrillation also coincides with dementia, according to Hugh Calkins, MD, FHRS, FACC, FAHA, FESC, the Catherine Ellen Poindexter Professor of Cardiology and director of the electrophysiology laboratory and arrhythmia service at Johns Hopkins University.

"There are many studies showing an increased rate of all types of dementia in patients with [AF]," he said last year to Neurology Advisor.

Continuing his remarks, Siegel noted that the study tested the cognitive state of participants using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. That's the same test that the president reportedly aced earlier this year and that he's since argued Biden ought to take as well. The doctor agreed.

The Alzheimer's Association defines dementia as "[a]n overall term that describes a group of symptoms associated with a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person's ability to perform everyday activities."  In anybody, that is a scary and difficult reality to deal with.  But Joe Biden wants his everyday activities to include running the most powerful economic and military power on earth.  Now, let's see.  Just where did I put that nuclear football?

Not long ago, the media currently silent on Biden's mental state were entertaining fantasies about the deterioration of Donald Trump's mental state.  They prattled on endlessly about Trump's energetic personality coupled with his bluntness being a sign of mental disability as evidenced by a piece published in Psychology Today.

Trump is fine, thank you, demonstrating a coherence and competence as well as a schedule that is staggering, compared to an opponent who reads scripted material from his basement as his handlers prompt him through an earpiece and off-camera assistance.  Before the Chinese Wuhan virus and urban unrest in Democrat-run jurisdictions struck, Trump had the economy roaring with record job and wage growth — not bad for a crazy man.

Still, no less an authority than Dr. Joe Scarborough over at MSNBC said on cable network television he thought Trump had early-onset dementia.

Scarborough and his ilk ignore that Trump's accomplishments in business and in the White House are real and unparalleled, just as they ignore Biden's visible deterioration in a campaign that borders on elder abuse.  Biden is showing real signs of dementia, not imaginary ones conjured up out of hatred for and policy differences with Trump. We are witnessing the most epic breakdown since Captain Queeg lost it in the classic film The Caine Mutiny.  The story is now that Biden's V.P. selection is being delayed because party bosses are worried he might totally lose it soon and might not make it to November, much less the White House.

As Greg Gutfeld of Fox News notes, you can't have a "V.P." without a "P."  That pick will be the most consequential pick perhaps ever and  in fact become the president or the presidential nominee of the Democrats.  Should we be allowing Joe to pick up all the marbles when we can't be sure he hasn't lost all of his?

To quote Joe Biden, this is a BFD.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor's Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.



The GOP has a powerful new Biden v. Biden campaign video

Joe Biden has been in Washington, D.C., since 1972. It’s therefore easy to go through his past stances on issues and use those issues against him now. Doing so creates one kind of Biden v. Biden campaign video. The GOP, however, has come up with a stunning and disturbing new kind of Biden v. Biden campaign video, one that compares the Biden of eight years ago to the Biden of today.

Biden is an exceptionally weak presidential candidate. He’s been in American politics for 48 years and has always been a living example of the Peter principle. One doesn’t hear much about that principle nowadays, but it was a big deal in the 1970s.

The Peter Principle was a 1969 book that Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull wrote. It asserts that people who are competent at one thing invariably get promoted and often end up in a job that doesn’t match their area of competency. Peter and Hull, therefore, said that, in a hierarchical environment, employees rise to their “level of incompetence.” Joe functions perpetually at that level.

From the beginning, Biden’s primary skill was bringing home the bacon to Delaware, so he kept getting sent back to D.C. Merely by showing up every six years, he earned promotions.

In the Senate, Biden hung around with segregationists, showed a crude racial sensibility during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and backed a crime bill that sent almost two generations of black men to prison. His runs for the presidency were invariably stymied by his plagiarism and lying, as well as his basic stupidity. And of course, there was his weirdness around little girls and grown women.

It was because of his incompetence that Obama chose Biden as a running mate. There was no risk that Biden would get in Obama’s way. Additionally, Biden’s longevity, despite his stupidity and corruption, gave an air of experience and gravitas to a leftist community organizer.

By 2019, Joe stood for stability. He was no wild-eyed leftist like the rest of the top Democrat candidates. Instead, he was old Joe, the political moderate. Except, of course – and this is where the Biden v. Biden videos practically write themselves – he is no longer a moderate. Now that he’s the anointed one, Biden has chosen to turn his back on his entire political career and explicitly promises to be one of the most progressive presidents ever. To this end, Biden’s pretty much bought into the entire Bernie Sanders socialist playbook.

In addition to showing Biden running against his past stances, as he shifted from moderate leftist to a radical, there’s even more compelling Biden v. Biden material out there. Biden is a fragile, confused old man. One doesn’t have to be a specialist in geriatric diseases to recognize that he is suffering from severe cognitive decline. Saying that, though, is not the same as seeing it.

The GOP has therefore released a campaign advertisement that compares today’s Biden with a past Biden. The commercial doesn’t go back to Biden in 1972, when he was young, frisky, and assaulting female interns. All it needs to do is look at Biden in 2008. He was still a dim bulb then, but he was glib and in control of his material. That man is gone, and he’s not coming back:

In 1975, when Saturday Night Live was in its first season, the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, took an inordinately long time to die. Some news networks would periodically let viewers know that he wasn’t dead yet. After his death, when Chevy Chase read the parodied news on SNL’s “Weekend Update,” Chase would periodically announce, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”

A reader suggested to me that Biden’s dementia is so extreme that we could headline every story about him, “Joe Biden still has dementia.” As it is, nothing makes that point more clearly than the GOP’s newest ad.

Image: Joe Biden by Gage Skidmore; creative commons, some rights reserved.



“Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama.  Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.”


What do you get when you elect a corrupt, unethical man as President and join him with a career swamp creature as vice president (Joe Biden) who has spent his entire adult life enriching himself and his family while feasting from the public trough? You get the most corrupt, unethical, lawless administration in our lifetime. The corruption and lawlessness was compounded because Obama/Biden had co-conspirators in the media and with elected officials in the House and Senate such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer and other swamp creatures who covered up the lawless acts and act as if the Obama/Biden administration was pure as the driven snow.

Swirling corruption in Illinois, the state that brought us Obama

By Jack Hellner

In Illinois, the speaker of the house, Michael "King" Madigan is being investigated for a massive kickback scheme with Commonwealth Edison. It seems that in order for Commonwealth to get favorable legislation, that they had to pay the king with no-show jobs, board seats and hiring lobbyists. Commonwealth is now pretending that these kickbacks didn’t harm consumers.

Could ComEd Customers Get Reimbursed for ‘Wrongfully Inflated Rates’?

“From 2011 through the present day, millions of individuals and businesses owning or leasing property and operating businesses in the State of Illinois were unknowing victims of a vast and corrupt criminal scheme perpetrated by the State’s largest utility company,” the complaint reads

But in a statement, ComEd spokesman Paul Elsberg said: “The improper conduct described in the deferred prosecution agreement, however, does not mean that consumers were harmed by the legislation that was passed in Illinois

Now, 202 years after Illinois became a state and 50 years after King Madigan took office, Illinois, for the umpteenth time, after corrupt politicians are caught with their hand in the cookie jar, is going to focus on ethics legislation. Anyone who believes Madigan or Democrats care about ethics needs their head examined.

Every journalist and other Democrat in Illinois knows Madigan controls everything that passes and doesn’t pass. He rewards his supporters with taxpayer-funded raises and pension increases as well as with committee chairmanships that are worthless because Madigan controls everything. He also seems to have judges at his beck and call who keep independent redistricting and term limits off the ballot no matter how many signatures the public gets.

Madigan’s rules: How Illinois gives its House speaker power to manipulate and control the legislative process

But there’s another source of power the majority party of Illinois holds that allows its leaders a more underhanded influence over the legislative process and, ultimately, the daily lives of Illinoisans.

That power emanates from the little-known legislative rules that Illinois House of Representatives Speaker Mike Madigan – who’s held that position for more than 31 years since 1983 – uses on an everyday basis to orchestrate the legislative and political outcomes he wants.

Those rules allow Madigan to influence the makeup of legislative committees; how lawmakers vote; and when, if ever, the bills get voted on. But the most obstructive rule of all keeps bills – even those with popular support, such as term limits – from ever seeing the light of day. Madigan, and not the General Assembly, has the power to decide what has the chance to become law.

Virtually no state grants the types of powers to its legislative heads that Illinois grants to Madigan.

I haven’t seen any journalist ask Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin or Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth to demand Madigan resign as head of the Illinois Democrat Party or as speaker. They obviously don’t care.

If journalists and other Democrats truly cared about ethics, corruption and the rule of law they would not have elected a billionaire who committed fraud to save property taxes.

A billionaire who takes toilets out of one of his mansions to save $300,000 does not give a damn about ethics, corruption or paying his fair share, which he always talks about. In effect Pritzker stole money from teachers, the police, firemen, pensions and other taxing bodies to save peanuts for him. It doesn’t make a bit of difference that he paid it back after he was caught and was running for governor. A bank robber who pays the loot back still goes to jail. Why not someone who intentionally stole $300,000?

Cook County watchdog says 'scheme to defraud' saved Pritzker $330,000 in property taxes

Billionaire Democratic governor candidate J.B. Pritzker improperly received $330,000 in property tax breaks on one of his Gold Coast mansions as part of a “scheme to defraud” taxpayers, Cook County’s top watchdog concluded.

If journalists and other Democrats cared about electing an honest man as U.S. senator and president twice they would have never supported the corrupt Barack Obama. The stories of corruption are endless. He was clearly part of the corrupt Chicago political machine.

Anyone who dared point out Obama’s actions, policies or acquaintances were subject to being called racists by all the campaign workers posing as journalists. The media also didn’t care about anything Biden had done.

See the link?

Former Obama fundraiser Rezko gets 10-year sentence

...and these, too:

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Machine

Obama Kick-Back Cronyism - Part 2: Illinois Health And Human Disservices

The President’s Utility: Crony capitalism in Chicago turns “green” into greenbacks

 

What do you get when you elect a corrupt, unethical man as President and join him with a career swamp creature as vice president (Joe Biden) who has spent his entire adult life enriching himself and his family while feasting from the public trough? You get the most corrupt, unethical, lawless administration in our lifetime. The corruption and lawlessness was compounded because Obama/Biden had co-conspirators in the media and with elected officials in the House and Senate such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer and other swamp creatures who covered up the lawless acts and act as if the Obama/Biden administration was pure as the driven snow.

It is no surprise that the corruption and lawlessness started as soon as they took office.

Image credit: Ari Levinson, via Wikipedia // CC BY-SA 3.0Enhanced with Graphite.


Why the Media Chose Not to Hear When Trump Called Obama a Literary Fraud

 

By Jack Cashill

Barack Obama, the writer, is stumbling again.  Even the New York Times acknowledges that the former president is "anguishing over the publication date of his long-awaited memoir." Others are anguishing even more than he.

"The delay is wreaking havoc with print scheduling and of course budget planning," an insider told me.  "The enormous advance is starting to raise concerns within the publisher.  While Michelle's book performed well, Obama needs to deliver the book and sales to make the overall deal worthwhile."

This is not the first time Obama failed to deliver on a book deadline.  In the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster lost patience with Obama, canceled the contract it had awarded him two years earlier, and demanded the advance back.  To get out of debt and save his future, Obama had to do something.

Donald Trump knows just what that something was, and he has said so in public.  At the time, I was paying close attention.  In the spring of 2011, I received a call from a fellow named Michael Cohen.  I did not recognize the name, nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number.  He explained that he was Trump's attorney, and I had heard of Trump.  Cohen wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama's origins.

I told Cohen I had followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance and knew no more than anyone else.  I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship issue.  Obama claimed to have written his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, by himself.  He was lying.  He definitely had help, much of it from Bill Ayers.  This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.  In fact, my first serious article on the same was published in the American Thinker.

Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers's involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.  Andersen's sources in Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked."  At "Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

What attracted the Obamas, according to Andersen's sources, were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer" as evident in his 1993 book To Teach.  Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.

My conversation with Cohen reaffirmed that Trump was the un-Obama, a creature of his own creation: bold, bombastic, and as subtle as a truck bomb.  Unlike most on the right, Trump refused to be intimidated.  He was eager and ready to vet the nation's first unvetted president.  On April 15, 2011, Sean Hannity of Fox News gave him the opportunity.

"I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard," said Trump in his inimitably artless style.  "He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person."

"You suspect Bill Ayers?" said Hannity.

"I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book," Trump replied.

Trump had made the claim earlier in a public forum.  He doubled down on Hannity's show.  For all the outrage about Trump's questioning of Obama's birth certificate, the mainstream media were noticeably silent about Trump's much more tangible challenge to Obama's literary skills.  To this day, there has been negligible pushback to Trump's remarks about Dreams.

In the New York Times article cited above, for instance, Glenn Thrush and Elaina Plott had the opportunity to tie Trump's presumed "fixation" with Obama to the authorship issue, given their reporting on Obama's literary anguish.  Instead, they tied the fixation to "a bizarre personal animus and the politics of racial backlash exemplified by the birther lie."

Although the left won't let the birther business die, if anyone told a "birther lie," it was Obama.  In 1991, likely to position himself as more exotic than a garden-variety African-American, Obama claimed in a promotional brochure put out by literary agency Acton & Dystel that he "was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

Despite media assertions otherwise, Trump, like most serious people labeled "birther," never claimed that Obama was born in Kenya.  In September 2016, CNN ran an article headlined "14 of Trump's most outrageous birther claims."  On that same September day, ABC News headlined a story "67 Times Donald Trump Tweeted About the 'Birther' Movement."  Despite their best efforts, neither of these news services found a quote from Trump claiming that Obama was born in Kenya.  To be sure, Trump questioned the legitimacy of the birth certificate and speculated on why Obama had taken such pains to keep it under wraps, but he never went beyond speculation.

As Christopher Andersen discovered, the media wanted nothing to do with the idea that Ayers was Obama's muse, no matter who made the claim.  At least fifty publications reviewed his book, and not a one mentioned the six pages he spent on the book's most newsworthy revelation.

Relentless Obama-defender Chris Matthews interviewed Andersen on MSNBC's Hardball and did not address the authorship issue.  Said Matthews at the end of the interview, "You're amazing, successful guy.  You have a winning streak here."  If Matthews did not read the book, which is likely, someone on his staff surely must have but chose not to notice the damning Ayers revelation.

To accuse Obama of being a literary fraud opens one up to the charge of racism.  This I can verify from experience.  There is only one reason, then, that the mainstream media passed on the opportunity to call out Trump: the deep-seated fear that he was right.

Jack Cashill's newest book, Unmasking Obama, is available for pre-order at Amazon.


Obama's General Flynn Problem

When the real message of 'Dreams from My Father' becomes clear.

May 11, 2020 

Lloyd Billingsley

And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.

That was former president Barack Obama last week after the DOJ dropped the case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had not been “charged with perjury,” or anything else. The FBI set up Flynn in a perjury trap, with threats against his family, and that violated both institutional norms and the rule of law. The 44th president set up the whole thing in a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting with FBI boss James Comey, vice president Joe Biden, CIA boss John Brennan, and other administration officials. This revelation created a stir, but it’s really old news.

POTUS wants to know everything we are doing,” Lisa Page texted to Peter Strzok, the FBI factotum in the campaign against candidate and President Trump. To keep that operation going once Trump took office, POTUS needed to take down Flynn. The January 5 meeting was key but in May of 2017 a bigger bombshell would explode.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

This was the judgement of POTUS 44’s official biographer David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author of Bearing the CrossThe FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and other books. Garrow let his subject preview the manuscript of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama and it’s easy to see why the president maintained strong disagreements with the account.

Dreams from My Father was a novel, and Garrow was on to the composite authorship.  On page 1049 of Rising Star, an unidentified reporter explains, “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true.” The president’s official biographer also explained why the former Barry Soetoro needed a new narrative.

Dreams from My Father devotes more than 2,000 words to “Frank,” a happy-drunk poet and counselor. In Rising Star, Garrow correctly identified “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, an African American Communist who spent most of his life defending all-white Stalinist dictatorships. As Garrow explained, “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive,” so if Barry was to become a political player, Frank had to go.  

In the best Stalinist tradition, Frank disappeared from the audio version of Dreams, and did not appear in the 2006 The Audacity of Hope.  In similar style, Frank does not appear in The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, released in 2018 by Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes, or in Michelle Obama’s 2018 Becoming. Also missing in both books is David Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The author, doubtless under pressure from the former president, is now changing his tune.

In “Obama’s Airbrushed Dreams,” in the March 2020 edition of The Critic, Garrow transforms Dreams from My Father back into a legitimate memoir and autobiography. For further research, see Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation, and Yes I Con: United Fakes of America. And adapt what the former president said last week.

There is “no precedent” for a composite character with a bogus autobiography becoming president of the United States, yet it happened in 2008, and again in 2012. There was no precedent for an outgoing president to deploy deep state operators to support his chosen successor and attack her opponent, yet in 2016 the composite character did just that.

In similar style, there was no precedent for an outgoing president tasking the FBI to target a National Security Advisor with a perjury trap to destroy his life and reputation. In 2017, the composite character sprung that trap, and in 2020 he tricks it out with the lie that Flynn was charged with perjury. And if you like your plan, you can keep it.

What the FBI did to Flynn was a violation of institutional norms and the rule of law, but as Sebastian Gorka noted on Saturday, “as of this writing, not one person has been charged with any crime connected to the FBI’s use of its enormous power for political purposes. Not one. Not Comey, not Strzok, not McCabe, not Lynch. No one.” So maybe the composite character’s transformation of America is the new normal going forward.

Back in 2016, his chosen successor was former First Lady Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he endorses his former vice president Joe Biden, so one might say the composite character is still on the ballot.

As November 3 approaches, look for more lies and obfuscation from the former president whose own biographer proclaimed him a composite character in the historical fiction of Dreams from My Father. As President Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.

There is Nothing ‘Loony’ About Bill Ayers as 

Obama’s Muse

By Jack Cashill

This past week several people called my attention to a post by Scott Johnson on his influential PowerLine blog that addressed the literary relationship between Barack Obama and his radical friend, Bill Ayers.      

In the post Johnson spoke of his high regard for David Garrow’s “staggeringly researched” 2017 Obama biography, Rising Star. “Without resolving all mysteries,” Johnson writes, “[Garrow’s] scholarship belies the notion that [Dreams from My Father] was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers or other such collaborator.”

Johnson emailed Garrow to follow up on the authorship question, and Garrow responded, “I don’t recall exactly where the Bill Ayers [stuff] got started, but it, like the Frank-Davis-as-father notion, is just beyond loony, ’cause Dreams is already *in galleys* when Barack and Bill first get to know each other.”

do know where the Ayers stuff got started because I started it with a major assist from American Thinker on these pages on October 9, 2008. I never said Ayers wrote Dreams, but I presented overwhelming literary forensic evidence that Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, helped Obama shape Dreams.

I did not advance this theory casually. I understood then what Obama biographer David Remnick would later affirm, namely that my theory, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of [Obama’s] candidacy.” 

My research on this topic, aided by several helpful literary detectives, culminated in my 2011 book, published by Simon & Schuster, Deconstructing Obama. I think I can safely assume Garrow has never read it. I would invite those curious about the evidence to read the book or even to read the preliminary article cited above.

That Garrow does not know the source of a theory he dismisses offhand as “beyond loony” is, unfortunately, altogether typical of establishment political writers. His airy dismissal, in fact, reinforces the theme of my forthcoming book Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency.

In the book, I use the phrase “samizdat” -- Russian for underground press -- to describe the loose coalition of conservative blogs, online publications, talk radio shows, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch that challenged the Left -- and, occasionally, the “responsible” right -- for control of the Obama narrative.

For eight-plus years, the samizdat broke virtually every major unflattering story about Obama and his presidency, some of which the major media grudgingly confirmed, some of which they continue to suppress. In the book I tell how the individuals in question managed to break these stories out. In every case, as you might imagine, the samizdat journalists were met with condescension, if not outright contempt, from the major media.

Obama’s biographers were among the more contemptuous. Curiously, the four major biographers are all named David -- Mendell, Remnick, Maraniss, and Garrow. The last three are Pulitzer Prize winners. To his credit, Garrow was the only one of the four who refused to prop up what Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.”

The story Obama told about his happy multicultural family at the conventions was pure fiction. According to Garrow, Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and Barack Obama Sr. “never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s pregnancy.” Garrow quotes approvingly one unnamed scholar to the effect that Obama Sr. was no more than “a sperm donor in his son’s life.” All of this was common knowledge in the samizdat as early as 2008, but it came as news to many of Garrow’s readers in 2017.

Like his fellow Davids, however, Garrow has no use for information gleaned from the samizdat, especially information I introduced. On the subject of the Obama poem “Pop,” for instance, Garrow notes, “Most commentators presumed that Obama had written about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis.”

This much was true, but “hostile critics,” Garrow continues, insisted the poem was about Obama’s bi-sexual Communist mentor, Davis. The “hostile critics” Garrow cites in the footnotes are historian Paul Kengor and me.

Instead of giving me credit for being the first to decode “Pop,” Garrow describes me in the footnote as “someone who is cited with the greatest reluctance.” What I did to deserve this slight is left unsaid, especially since Garrow knows I nailed the identity of “Pop” two years before anyone in the mainstream media did, including the other Davids.

As to Bill Ayers’s involvement in the writing of Dreams, Garrow does not even deign to dismiss the possibility. He has a discovery of his own, namely that outside literary help came from a law school buddy of Obama’s named Rob Fisher.  This is an important find if for no other reason than it undercuts Obama’s 2008 boast to a crowd of schoolteachers, "I've written two books. I actually wrote them myself."

An established economist before starting law school, Fisher became good friends with Obama at Harvard. There, they co-authored a manuscript that perhaps prophetically was never finished. One completed chapter dealt with the always sexy topic of plant closings.

“The quest is to develop guidelines,” they wrote, “on how politically progressive movements can use the market mechanism to promote social goals.” Garrow quotes the unfinished manuscript extensively. Its style is wonkish and ungainly throughout.

Sentences like the following suggest that one author wrote as awkwardly as the other: “While Yuppies can afford the expensive frivolities provided by The Sharper Image, others receive insufficient nutrition to allow their minds to develop properly.”

I do not question Fisher’s involvement. Obama needed all the help he could get. What I do question is Fisher’s ability to provide the poetry, the rage, the postmodern rhetoric, and the Homeric structure that inspired Oona King of the London Times to overpraise Dreams as “a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty.”

Garrow seems to dismiss my thesis for no more substantial reason than his belief that Dreams was already in galley form when “Barack and Bill first get to know each other.” Garrow traces the first meeting of these two gentlemen to a breakfast some time in early 1995. He bases this timing on the suspiciously well-remembered account of a common friend who claims to have introduced them.

Garrow, however, has a problem with chronology. He writes that Obama took six weeks off from his law firm job “in late spring 1994” to finish Dreams. He needed time to complete the book’s third section, the one on Africa. Garrow claims Obama worked largely from letters he sent in 1988 while in Kenya and retrieved from his girlfriend at the time, Sheila Jager.

David Maraniss told a different story in his 2012 bio. According to Maraniss’s source, Crown editor Henry Ferris, Obama made an additional trip to Kenya for further research. Obama confirmed this trip when interviewed by Marannis. Garrow makes no mention of this mysterious trip, which would have taken place in 1994. No one else does either. Like much in his life, Obama appears to have made it up.

A more likely possibility is that Obama lied to Ferris about the trip. Instead of going to Kenya, Obama may have contented himself with going to the local library and pillaging the memoirs of longtime Kenya resident Kuki Gallmann

This is the theory proposed by tireless researcher Shawn Glasco. He was intrigued by the many words and phrases in Dreams that also appeared in Gallmann’s book, African Nights, which was published in 1994. These include Baobab [a tree], bhang [cannabis], boma [an enclosure], samosa [a fried snack], shamba [a farm field], liana [a vine], tilapia [a fish], kanga [a sheet of fabric], shuka [decorative sashes], and many, many more. 

Based on Garrow’s imprecise timeline, Obama flew to New York to hand the completed book off to Ferris no later than early June 1994. In other words, he spent six weeks to finish the last third of the 400-page book between “late spring” 1994 and early June 1994, which is, in fact, late spring.

In his 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen offers a much more credible account of how Obama managed to finish a project that hung over his head ever since he finished law school.

According to Andersen’s two sources in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborated, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.” Andersen’s six-page account makes sense, logically and chronologically, but Garrow fully ignores it.

Andersen is a best-selling, mainstream author. He even appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball to discuss the book. Said Chris Matthews at the end of the interview, “You‘re amazing, successful guy. You have a winning streak here.” Matthews likely did not read the book. Garrow did read it and cites the book in the footnotes but, oddly, not on the subject of authorship.

Garrow nonetheless offers some valuable insights into the Ayers-Obama relationship, insights that I believe strengthen my thesis. Once Ayers helped launch Obama’s political career in 1995, Garrow writes, “Barack and Michelle began to see a great deal more of not only Bill and Bernardine [Dohrn] but also their three closest friends, Rashid and Mona Khalidi and Carole Travis."

According to Garrow, the three couples attended "almost nightly dinners” together up until the time Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. This information, of course, makes complete hash out of Obama’s infamous claim during a 2008 debate that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”

Khalidi, a radical Palestinian, begins his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, with a tribute to his own literary muse. “First, chronologically and in other ways,” writes Khalidi, “comes Bill Ayers.” Unlike the calculating Obama, Khalidi had no reason to be coy about this relationship.  He elaborates, “Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some writing for the project.”  Khalidi did not need the table.  He had one of his own. He needed help from the skilled neighborhood editor and writer who obviously could and would provide it.

There is nothing “loony” about Bill Ayers helping a good friend finish his book. That is what Ayers did. He was grooming Obama for higher office and was savvy enough to keep his writing relationship with Obama under wraps. Being a friend of a terrorist, Ayers knew, would not exactly help Obama’s career.

Jack Cashill’s most recent book, a political thriller called “The Hunt” co-authored with Mike McMullen, is available wherever you buy books. For a signed collector’s edition, see www.TheHuntBook.com.