Turns Out John Kerry and Bashar Assad Are Bosom Buddies After All, Have Been Seen Chumming Around Damascus With Wives

Weekly Standard reported: John Kerry, who is expected to be nominated as secretary of state later this afternoon, has made frequent visits to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Assad is now under fire for mass murdering his own civilians, as he fights an internal war to keep his position of power. Even Obama has called for Assad to go.

In February 2009, Kerry led a delegation there to engage Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told visiting US members of Congress on Saturday that the United States should ‘move away from a policy based on dictating decisions.’ Assad’s guests on Saturday included US Senator John Kerry, who headed the third delegation this week to call on the Syrian president’s door as Washington reviews its policies toward countries the previous administration regarded as hostile. Assad told his visitors that future relations should be based on a ‘proper understanding’ by Washington of regional issues and on common interests, SANA news agency reported,” AFP reported at the time.

AFP followed up with this report after the visit stating that Kerry believes “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region”:

“President Barack Obama’s administration considers Syria a key player in Washington’s efforts to revive the stalled Middle East peace process, US Senator John Kerry said in Damascus on Thursday. ‘Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,’ Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a speech after meeting President Bashar al-Assad. ‘Both the United States and Syria have a very deep interest… in having a very frank exchange on any differences (and) agreements that we have about the possibilities of peace in this region,’ he said in the statement.”

Just a few years ago, Kerry and his wife wined and dined with the modern-day “Hitler” in Damascus:

Later, a couple months later, Kerry met again with Assad. “US Senator John Kerry met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a second time in as many months on Saturday for talks on ‘regional issues,’ the American embassy in Damascus said,” reported the AFP.

And in 2011, when Kerry again wanted to go to Syria, his visit was blocked–by the Obama administration. “The Obama administration and France reportedly nixed a visit by U.S. Sen. John Kerry to Syria. Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has cultivated a relationship with the Syrian regime otherwise treated as a pariah in the West in the hope of drawing it away from Iranian influence. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Kerry had planned a visit last month, but the governments of the United States and of French President Nicolas Sarkozy blocked the visit out of concern that it would signal ‘Western weakness’ as pro-Iranian and pro-Western forces jockeyed for influence in Syria’s neighbor, Lebanon,” reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in March 2011.

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John Kerry: Might Want to Dust Off His Copy of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, Or Just Borrow Obama’s

For those not familiar with the Alinky’s holy grail of turning a country upside down in order to achieve a desired result (Socialism), now’s the time to get acquainted with it because that’s one of the strategies Barack Hussein Obama is executing at the moment like a champ, more specifically the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Indeed, the vast majority are oblivious of what is happening around them (just as planned), but John Kerry’s visit by anti-war protestors marks a major milestone in their timeline.

PJ Media reported: They weren’t personally home yesterday, but if John and Teresa* were angry that anti-war protestors were pounding on the door of their Beacon Hill townhouse, they might want to dust off their copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, or borrow a copy from Kerry’s boss, who trained under Alinsky acolytes in Chicago.

Alinsky recommended that radical protestors descend upon the homes of what the Occupy crowd dubbed the “One Percent” in 2011; apparently, the goal in Saul’s fevered mind was to apply pressure by sufficiently angering the protestee’s neighbors, thus indirectly roping them as well into Alinksy’s patented formula of the protest as a form of organized public psychotherapy, to borrow from Mark Judge’s recent article.

Check out this violent rhetoric and racialism found in this passage from the version of Rules for Radicals at Google Books, and transcribed in 2010 by Founding Bloggers:

In its early history the organized black ghetto in the Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago engaged in conflict with the slum landlords. It never picketed the local slum tenements or the landlord’s office. It selected its blackest blacks and bussed them out to the lily-white suburb of the slum landlords residence. Their picket signs, which said, “Did you know that Jones, your neighbor, is a slum land-lord?” were completely irrelevant; the point was that the pickets knew Jones would be inundated with phone calls from his neighbors.

JONES: Before you say a word let me tell you that those signs are a bunch of lies!

NEIGHBOR: Look, Jones, I don’t give a damn what you do for a living. All we know is that you get those goddam niggers out of here or you get out!

Jones came and signed.

The pressure that gave us our positive power was the negative of racism in a white society.

In the immediate wake of the 2008 Democrat National Convention, Alinsky’s son wrote an open letter to the Boston Globe praising Mr. Obama’s mastery of his father’s techniques:

Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.

L. DAVID ALINSKY

I wonder if Alinksy’s heirs ever thought the old man’s techniques would boomerang against them? But then, the run-up to, well, whatever we’re going to do or not do in Syria has seen much of the left’s rhetoric of the past few years reflected through a funhouse mirror.

*Who were against war before they were for it, and for Assad before they were against him

Ben Shapiro: Andrew Breitbart ‘Understood the Tactics of the Left’

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Author and columnist Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, talks about the media’s role in popular culture, trends in higher education, and the political stand-off on Capitol Hill.

‘From ACORN to Weinergate, HATING BREITBART PG-13 tells the story of one man with a website who forever changed the media paradigm, upending the traditional press and changing the ground rules of political journalism.’

Courts Allow Obama to Keep White House Visitor Logs Secret

Breitbart reported: When Barack Obama came to office he promised that he would have the most ethical, most transparent presidency in American history. This month the Obama administration won a court judgment to allow Obama to keep the White House visitor log a secret from the American people.

On August 30, a federal appeals court decided that the White House visitor logs are not “public information” and therefore not subject to the disclosure requirements required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The vote was not close, either. It was a 3-0 decision allowing Obama to keep visitor log sheets secret for up to 12 years after he has left office–as is the case with many presidential records.

Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a native Chicagoan and 1997 Bill Clinton appointee who became chief judge on Obama’s watch, insisted that he took his cue from Congress itself.

In his decision, Garland said that with FOIA, “Congress made clear that it did not want documents like the appointment calendars of the president and his close advisors to be subject to disclosure.”

This is a blow to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that has been pursuingthe release of the visitor logs.

Upon release of the decision, Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, said, “Decisions like this turn the Freedom of Information Act from a transparency law to a secrecy law.”

Garland maintained that opening the logs to immediate public scrutiny would represent a “serious intrusion” into the president’s daily operations.

Garland’s opinion on the logs coincides with that of the George W. Bush administration, as well.

In 2008 when Obama first came to office, administration flack John Podesta said that Obama would implement the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to the White House.

But almost immediately upon taking office Obama began to break his own rules. Only weeks passed, for instance, before he broke his “rules” on hiring lobbyists, a proscription against which was one of his most insistent campaign claims.

Obama Backs GOP into Debt-Ceiling Corner with Syria Move

Breitbart reported: President Barack Obama’s decision to punt a possible strike against Syria to Congress has reshuffled the congressional calculus on Washington’s looming debt-ceiling debate and made Republican concessions more likely, say GOP congressional aides.

A House Republican aide told Reuters that Obama’s Syrian maneuver “would make it a lot harder to vote against a debt-ceiling increase given that we’re the party that tends to be more hard-line security and military supporters in the Reagan tradition.”

By forcing congress to debate and weigh in on a possible strike on Syria, Obama has increased the likelihood that congress will pass a short-term stop-gap funding measure, say analysts.

“Syria has really scrambled an incredibly crowded calendar,” says Guggenheim Securities political analyst Chris Krueger. “I think you have to say that the chance of a short-term extension has increased.”

Obama’s Syrian shuffle and the debt-ceiling showdown also have implications for Obamacare, just four weeks away from opening. Last week, 80 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) stating they would not grant a continuing resolution to extend government funding without denying Obamacare implementation funds. Obama’s decision to shift Syria to congress now complicates Republicans’ position during a time of possible war.

The United States is expected to hit the debt-ceiling in October.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Miley Cyrus + Obamacare = ??

 

TheBlaze reported: The public is equally grossed out by each of the above…

 

Liberal Small Business Owner, Once an Obamacare Supporter, Now Rips Program Costs: ‘It’s Gigantically Troublesome to Me’

TheBlaze reported: Link Christensen operates Tennessee Awning Co. in Chattanooga, a small business that creates awnings, canopies, tarps, and industrial fabrics.

Among his employees are needle workers, who don’t get big salaries — but at least Christensen doesn’t farm out their tasks overseas. Plus he offers health insurance to his employees.

In line with that, Christensen — a self-described “left-leaning social activist” — was looking forward to the implementation of Obamacare as it “sounded like a good idea to offer insurance to all the people in the country.”

That’s what Christensen told a Chattanooga chapter meeting of the National Federation of Independent Businesses this week. He said he figured Obamacare would lead to better health for people like his employees and end practices such as emergency room visits for minor ailments, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports.

Except Christensen didn’t realize how much Obamacare would cost him — now he’s terrified about how much it will cost his employees.

“Some of those regulations about what the costs of my employees are going to be are horrendous, and I can’t understand the math,” he said during the meeting. “Listening to the insurance providers and…webinars on how to figure out what our costs are going to be in this program, it’s gigantically troublesome to me.”

Not only that, but Christensen says he’s sure the people who work for him will totally lose all coverage. Why? Because his currently cost-effective CoverTN program doesn’t qualify under Obamacare’s rules and will disappear at the end of the year, the Times Free Press says.

CoverTN costs employees and Christensen about $60 each per month, but Obamacare would double that, the Times Free Press says, making it an impossible budget item for those who earn minimal pay.

“It’s not going to be any type of bargain for people who work for me,” he said. “I’m concerned that my employees and others in that socioeconomic background are going to be left without any coverage because of the requirements of that program.”

Also in attendance at the meeting was U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn.; as you might expect, the left-leaning Christensen didn’t vote for him.

But the two were on the same page Wednesday night.

“As Obamacare devolves and starts to fall apart, what do you get?” Fleischmann said. “This big-government largesse that is involved in Obamacare, my fear is that it’s going to devolve into a single-payer system, and we really can’t afford to let that happen.”

‘Treason’ Or ‘Free Speech?’ – Are These Anti-Syria Strike Statements From U.S. Military Members Okay?

The Blaze reported: Since the U.S. has started serious discussions about taking military action against Syria, many have publicly spoken out against a possible military strike. And now it appears that some of our uniformed service personnel have come forward to express their disagreement with an attack, any attack on Syria.

Is this kind of behavior allowed? Well, there are rules concerning what uniformed military personnel can and cannot do, especially when it comes to making a political statement. In reviewing the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 88 could come into play here. That section states:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

We see that commissioned officers could be called to question if they posted a photo like those seen above. What about enlisted or non-commissioned personnel? The UCMJ has rules for these folks as well. According to Article 92, failure to obey an order could result in being court-martialed.

Any person subject to this chapter who–

(1) violates or fails to obey any lawful general order or regulation;

(2) having knowledge of any other lawful order issued by any member of the armed forces, which it is his duty to obey, fails to obey the order; or

(3) is derelict in the performance of his duties;

shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Where do you stand on this issue? Should members of the military be allowed to publicly post their disagreement with a possible strike on Syria while they are in uniform? Take part in our Blaze Poll and feel free to comment below.