A Saturday story by Susan Crabtree in the Washington Times highlights questions by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, of the U.S. Secret Service about possible involvement of White House staff in the Colombian prostitution scandal.

Given the close working relationship among members of the Secret Service
and other White House advance teams, Mr. Grassley wants to know whether
Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan and Acting Inspector General
Charles Edwards is investigating the possibility that staff from the
White House Communications Agency and White House Office of Advance also
may be involved in the scandal.

Mr. Grassley’s questions come following a Friday Senate Judiciary staff briefing the Secret Service provided.

Specifically, Mr. Grassley wants to know if the Secret Service reserved rooms or shared them with the WHCA or the White House Office of Advance for operational or support matters.

“Did the Secret Service reserve rooms at the Hotel Caribe or other hotels in Cartagena, Colombia for representatives of the WHCA or the White House Advance Team?” Mr. Grassley asked in a letter to Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Edwards. “If so, have records for overnight guests for those entities been pulled as part of the investigation conducted by [the Office of Professional Responsibility] or [the Office of the Inspector General]? If not, why not?”

If the Secret Service did share rooms with White House communications or advance teams, Mr. Grassley also asked whether logs for those rooms were checked to see if the hotel had overnight guests registered to them.

Click here to read more from the Washington Times.

The Blaze is reporting that the Communist Party USA opened its national conference in New York this weekend, and the speakers weren’t shy about their plans for the United States of America. 

In what constituted a clear step-by-step stratagem, Sam Webb, the
party’s chair, opened his remarks by saying that the upcoming elections
are only be part of “a grander design [that] will connect the dots
between our immediate and longer-range political task.”

(Related: Are We Headed Toward the Constitution or The Communist Manifesto? This Breakdown Tells You)
 
“To put it differently,” he elaborated, “we hope to connect the struggle at the ballot box today with the struggle for socialism tomorrow.”
 
Webb continued to discuss the “catastrophe” that would befall humanity if we did not begin living in a more environmentally friendly manner, before declaring socialism to be “imperative…to preserve peace and our planet, expand democracy, eliminate gross racial, gender, and other forms of inequality, and to provide a secure life for the billions living on this earth.”
 
But how, exactly, does the party propose to transform America’s system of governing?
 
The first step, according to People’s World – where the official Communist Party USA Twitter page directs readers– is to defeat right-wing “extremism” (presumably at the aforementioned ballot box).

Click here to read more from The Blaze.

OpEd:  From the very beginning of Obama-Soetoro’s illegal occupancy of the once-revered and respected office of President of the United States of America, he and his unindicted co-conspirators have been feverishly working to “fundamentally change” America. As expected by those who paid attention and actually read Mein Kamph…er…Dreams From My Father (written by Bill Ayers) and the facts known about Obama-Soetoro’s philosophical background, the changes have all been aimed at turning America into a Soviet-style dictatorship. And as we get closer to the 2012 elections, the pace of selling out America is increasing significantly.

Americans, I sincerely hope, will remember Obama-Soetoro’s disgraceful performances on what became known as his Apologize for America Tour. Who can forget the picture of his scrawny backside, as he bowed before the King of Saudi Arabia? Or his groveling before Muslims in Egypt, claiming that America is not a Christian nation? Karl Rove summed much of it up nicely in a Wall Street Journal article:

“Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America ‘has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has ‘a moral responsibility to act’ on arms control because only the U.S. had ‘used a nuclear weapon.’ In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by ‘just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy’ — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not ‘pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors’ because we ‘failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.’” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044156269345357.html)

He had Hilary Clinton apologize to the Russians, with her “reset” button nonsense, a high school gesture that she managed to botch. However, Obama-Soetoro, die-hard (though knee-jerk) Marxist that he is, has never given up pandering to Vladimir Putin, whom many suspect is still the hard-line Communist he was when he was a Lt. Colonel in the KGB, the Soviet secret police. The scrapping of the plan to install missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic was clearly a kowtowing move, aimed at impressing Moscow. This was followed by the START treaty, which many experts say was a big step in Obama-Soetoro’s unilateral denuclearization scheme that gave Russia a significant advantage over the U.S., especially in tactical nuclear weapons.

And as the traitorous cherry on top of the sell-out sundae, like a teen-age boy trying to act like a big shot, B. Hussein recently let slip to the Russians that after “my next election,” he will have more “flexibility” regarding America’s unilateral disarmament.

Also recently, Barry the Red has secretly arranged to give seven Alaskan islands, one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and rights to billions of barrels of oil, to his Russian comrades (http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/obamas-giveaway-oil-rich-islands-to-russia/). The U.S., over the objections of the State of Alaska, drew the line giving Russia the islands as part of a supposed maritime boundary agreement. This goes nicely with Obama-Soetoro’s and Leon Panetta’s support for the UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) and the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), both of which cede control of the oceans, including America’s territorial waters, to the UN. Rhetorical question: Do you think the UN will allow us to drill for any oil or gas in these waters?

While the current Marxist administration in Washington is not responsible for coming up with the idea, it has been moving right along on the furtherance of a North American Union, too. Surrender Secretary, Leon Panetta, was just up in Canada to discuss over-border military co-operation with Mexico and Canada. And the Fraud in the White House, himself, just met with the leaders of Mexico and Canada at the White House.

This one, however, didn’t go so well for The Smartest Man in the Room. Seems the Mexicans are not pleased with Obama-Soetoro’s and Eric holder’s gun-running scheme – Fast and Furious – that led to the smuggling by violent drug cartels of thousands of guns into Mexico, nor are the Canadians pleased or impressed by Obama-Soetoro’s killing of the Keystone Pipeline.

It goes without saying that the Ministry of Propaganda, aka the “mainstream” media, has done its best to cover up or spin all this. For instance, how many know that back in February, several U.S. “professors” from universities in New York attended a conference in Tehran, Iran, to discuss, of all things, the Occupy Wall Street Movement? Seems this “movement,” which Obama-Soetoro, the Democrat Party, and Academia support, is of great interest to the Muslims who see America as the Enemy, the Great Satan (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/american-professors-gather-tehran-occupy-wall-street-conference_640543.html).

Space limits this to a partial list, but there is a clear, undeniable pattern here, of selling out America and We, the People, to our enemies. Please, keep this in mind when you vote in November.

While physician-turned-Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma admittedly describes President Barack Obama as a “good personal friend,” he doesn’t pull any punches in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV when asked if the president deserves a second term.

“No, he does not,” Coburn declared flatly on Tuesday. “I think his leadership is sorely lacking on the major problems facing our country. He was handed a tough economy. I think many of the programs he put forward and passed when they had absolute control of the Congress have been exactly the opposite prescription that we should have for our country.”

Dr. Coburn, who has delivered more than 4,000 babies since graduating from the University of Oklahoma Medical School in 1983, insists that it’s possible to oppose someone’s political positions but still be the person’s friend.

“So even though I’m a good personal friend of him, I absolutely disagree with him on 98 or 99 percent of the issues,” said Coburn, who is married to a former Miss Oklahoma. “You actually can oppose people and still be friends with them. It doesn’t have to be rancor and harshness. You can actually have a disagreement. I yearn for the date when we have real debates in the Senate again.”

In his new book, “The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America,” Coburn unabashedly prescribes firing 90 percent of Congress to address the burgeoning national debt and other issues that threaten to plunge the U.S. into what he fears could be an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression though he admits that the percentage is somewhat of an exaggeration.

“I said that tongue in cheek in terms of relating to Jack Welch’s program at GE where they drop the bottom 10 percent of their employees every year and replace them,” Coburn says of his book, adding that the point was an important one: “We owe almost 16 trillion in debt. Everybody knows that’s not sustainable. But we’re going to add $1.3 to the debt this year and you’ve not seen one thing come out of Congress that addresses that. Why is that?”

He blames career politicians.

“Congress is not addressing the problems in front of the country and the reason is careerism,” he stressed, adding that most people are not aware that the government is twice the size it was in 2001. “People are not going to do what is necessary because they think it might affect their re-election. And when we’re thinking about the next election — always ahead of the problems of the country — the country is ill-served and my prescription for that is you have to change who’s here.”

Click here to read more and view the video on Newsmax.com: Sen. Coburn: Obama ‘Good Personal Friend’ but I Won’t Vote for Him

Tina Brown, whose massive losses at Newsweek and the Daily Beast are a matter of public ridicule, stepped up to the NPR microphone in an attack on the late Andrew Breitbart that revealed why her media enterprise are such failures.

Brown recommended David Carr’s profile of Andrew Breitbart, which ran in
this week’s New York Times. The profile, while generally positive,
included a bizarre ad hominem swipe at Breitbart, and also mangled the
facts of the Shirley Sherrod controversy. 

Drawing a parallel between Breitbart and the behavior of journalists who aided the rise of Adolf Hitler, Brown told an amenable Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep:

• Breitbart didn’t report anything, really. What Breitbart did was, he was a provocateur, he was a ‘death by a thousand tweets’; he was quite happy to take the flying soundbite, any soundbite, and misapply it in its context and create an absolute mayhem for the person concerned–like he did for poor Shirley Sherrod, who was the obscure official in the Agriculture Department. He gave the impression by the cutting of her words in a tape that he released that she was giving racially motivated financing decisions–when actually she was doing the very opposite. So this was really using a kind of bastardization of journalism through the format of Web and tweeting and, you know, just simply using the Internet as a tool for activism.

Brown’s claim that "Breitbart didn’t report anything, really" is a laughable accusation that Anthony Weiner could easily refute. And Brown’s pathetic resort to comparisons with Hitler and Nazi Germany affirms Godwin’s Law while discrediting anything she has to say.
 
What is particularly interesting, however, is Brown’s description of the Sherrod controversy, during which she uses Carr’s exact words–verbatim, barely paraphrasing, and without indicating that she is lifting directly from Carr and the Times, not offering her own analysis.

Click here to read more on Breitbart.com. 

Also on Breitbart.com a glimmer of hope that Republicans can find a spine…

Republicans Sue Obama Over Recess Appointments

Today, Senate Republicans hired Miguel Estrada, the 2002 judicial nominee for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals filibustered by Senate Democrats, to press a lawsuit against the Obama administration. The lawsuit itself is based on President Obama’s non-recess “recess appointment” of political allies to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees management-union relations; it was originally filed by Noel Canning, a soft-drink business owner who sued the NLRB over its ruling that the company had to work with a labor union.
 
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came out firing today:

“The president’s decision to circumvent the American people by installing his appointees at a powerful federal agency, when the Senate was not in recess, and without obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate, is an unprecedented power grab. We will demonstrate to the court how the president’s unconstitutional actions fundamentally endanger the Congress’s role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”
 
The Senate was technically in session when President Obama made his recess appointments; he unilaterally determined that there was indeed a recess. “The Senate should decide when the Senate is in session,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) stated.

Click here to read more from Breitbart.com on Obama’s recess appointment lawsuit.