February 26th Author Trevor Loudon Speaks to The Las Vegas Valley TEA Party About His New Book, ‘The Enemies Within’

Trevor Loudon is traveling to Nevada to spread the word about his new book that exposes, “The Enemies Within.” Don’t miss this special evening event!

“The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress” is like no other book written on American politics. The book exposes, in layman’s terms, the comprehensive communist, socialist and extreme progressive infiltration of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

The book profiles fourteen Senators and more than fifty Representatives and their ties to the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers World Party and the Institute for Policy Studies, Council for a Livable World and other radical anti-American organizations. Trevor has done the hard work to connect the dots of why the U.S. Congress has moved further and further left over our lifetime and you won’t want to miss him. The Mid-Terms are coming. It’s time to clean House and Senate!

The Las Vegas TEA Party
Wednesday, February 26 | 6:30 – 8:00 pm

A Thyme for All Seasons
310 East Warm Springs
Las Vegas, NV 89119

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What “60 Minutes” Didn’t Say About Russia

The Sunday CBS “60 Minutes” program aired a dramatic story about murder and corruption in Russia and the criminals who run the regime in Moscow. But it did not mention the failure of the Obama administration to challenge the Putin regime over its blatant human rights abuses and official corruption.

Obama has officially been in favor of a “strong Russia” since a speech he made in Moscow in 2009. “America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia,” he said.

Businessman Bill Browder, who ran an investment fund in Russia called Hermitage Capital Management, told “60 Minutes” that “The Russian regime is a criminal regime. We’re dealing with a nuclear country run by a bunch of Mafia crooks. And we have to know that.”

It appears that Obama does not want to recognize this fact.

The story was narrated by correspondent Scott Pelley, who is also the anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News.” He began the story by saying, “Russia has been showing the world glistening scenes of the Winter Olympics. It’s a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption. One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft, and a lot of that by government officials.”

It may be worse than that. As AIM recently noted, Russian activists estimate that $30 billion of the $50 billion cost of the Olympics has been stolen by corrupt officials linked to Putin.

Exposing corruption in Russia is a valid journalistic project. But what about the “national image” of the Obama administration and its failure to challenge and expose what’s happening in Russia? This was a glaring omission in the CBS report.

Most of the “60 Minutes” story was a Pelley interview with Browder about the death of his Russian attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, in 2009 in Russia. Magnitsky was imprisoned and then killed by Russian authorities after he uncovered official corruption involving the theft of $230 million.

Browder has become an “Enemy of the State” in Russia, and has been threatened with death.

Pulling no punches when it came to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the story made it clear that he is part of the corruption and cover-up. He has explained away Magnitsky’s murder by Russian authorities as an accidental death and nothing to be concerned about.

Putin said, “Do you think no one dies in American jails. Of course they do. So what?”

Russian officials claimed that Magnitsky, who was beaten and tortured to death, had died from a heart attack. He was prosecuted after his death, along with Browder, for tax evasion.

However, Congress passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act at the end of 2012 over the objections of the Obama Administration. It placed visa and financial asset bans on Russian officials either involved in Magnitsky’s case or accused of human rights abuses.

It was in July 2009 that Obama told the New Economic School in Moscow that the U.S.-Russian relationship required a new tone recognizing a strong Russia. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift-wrapped red button that was supposed to signify a “reset” in relations.

With the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even various conservative groups, Obama also pushed Congress to grant Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status to Russia, giving them access to American capital.

After PNTR was granted, Putin showed his gratitude by giving asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, in a case writer Edward Lucas calls “the West’s greatest intelligence disaster,” benefiting America’s enemies.

While Obama threw a temper tantrum over an anti-gay propaganda law in Russia, his administration has failed to implement and enforce the Magnitsky Act. In fact, as noted by David Kramer of Freedom House during a recent press conference, the Obama administration has not updated the list, as required, and has been challenged on this by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Robert Corker (R-TN).

The senators said, “On December 20, 2013, we received the Department of State’s first annual report. Disappointingly and contrary to repeated assurances and expectations, this report indicates that no persons have been added to the Magnitsky list since April 2013, and it does not provide adequate details on the administration’s efforts to encourage other governments to impose similar targeted sanctions.”

In addition to the prestige of hosting the Sochi Olympics, Russia holds the presidency of the G8 group of nations, and is also hosting the G8 summit in June in Sochi.

The “60 Minutes” show featured this exchange with Browder:

Scott Pelley: What’s happened to these people [Russian officials involved in Magnitsky’s death and cover-up] now that you’ve exposed them?

Bill Browder: A number of them received state honors. They’re still valued people no matter what anyone says about them abroad.

Scott Pelley: What does that tell you?

Bill Browder: That tells me that this goes right up to the president of Russia.

Scott Pelley: Why do you say so?

Bill Browder: Because the president of Russia has basically gone on record and he’s denied that there was any crime that was committed by any official. He’s on the record saying Sergei Magnitsky was a crook and he’s gone on the record saying that I’m a crook. He’s clearly involved in the cover-up.

Browder continues to press for justice for Magnitsky and has launched a website and videos to expose “the untouchables” in the Russian regime involved in the murder and cover-up.

The website exposes one group, the Klyuev Organized Crime Group, which has “the full cooperation and protection of high ranking Russian government officials in law enforcement, the Tax Ministry, and the FSB, the successor to the KGB.” It adds, “Because the Klyuev Organized Crime Group contains members of the Russian government and because the highest authorities in Russia are protecting it, it is no longer possible to consider the group independent of the Russian government. Its crimes are state sanctioned.”

At the end of his “60 Minutes” report, Pelley noted that the U.S. Department of Justice had filed suit against 11 companies “alleging that they used Manhattan real estate transactions to launder some of the money stolen from the Russian treasury” in the case.

But he didn’t utter a word about the administration refusing to fulfill its legal responsibilities under the Magnitsky act. And there was no indication that a comment was sought from Hillary Clinton about whether she believes her “reset” in relations with Russia has been successful.

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Forget Obamacare. Get Worried About ObamaLoans.

The U.S. government is simultaneously trying to shut down a legitimate industry and replace it with a taxpayer backed version. Pretty much everyone has heard of Obamacare by now, but what about ObamaLoans? No, this is not a joke.
Section 1205 of Dodd-Frank included a provision that turned a local San Francisco program (Bank On USA) into a national program by making Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) eligible to compete with payday lenders.  This competition will come at the expense of taxpayers because CDFIs receive nearly $300 million in taxpayer subsidies each year, all in the name of promoting economic growth in low-income areas.
CDFI’s and their affiliates, such as the Center for Responsible Lending, have been arguing that payday lenders are predatory because they charge exorbitant rates of interest nearly 400%, they claim to people who simply don’t know any better and have no other options.  This sort of argument is wrong on many levels.
First, value is subjective so there’s no way to objectively state that consumers are harmed when they pay, for example, $15 to voluntarily borrow $100 for two weeks.  Second, it’s illegitimate to claim payday lenders are charging a 400% annual percentage rate (APR) on a two week loan the APR represents the yearly interest cost over the term of the loan.  The interest cost really is 15 percent.
Naturally, payday lenders’ competitors don’t argue that these loans shouldn’t be made at all. Instead, they want to make the loans and use taxpayer funds to help them do it. To help speed the transition to a fully government-funded financial industry, the Obama administration instituted Operation Chokepoint, a program which aggressively investigates banks and payment processors that deal with payday lenders. These actions amount to an abuse of power, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is investigating the matter.
The Justice Department surely knows it’s much less costly for banks to stop dealing with these companies than to submit to special audits, so the hope is that banks will stop dealing with payday lenders. All the while, the taxpayer-funded companies that will take the place of payday lenders are being supported financially as well as through legislation.  Aside from the CDFI grants, the President has asked for more than $100 million just to fund the ObamaLoan program.
Now, the US Postal service an agency that has lost almost $50 billion since 2007 wants in on the act. The only recent experience the Postal Service has with money is losing it, but now it insists it can step in and provide payday lending services for 90 percent of the cost that it currently takes private businesses to deliver.
In the span of five years, the Federal government has identified large financial institutions as too-big-to-fail, small financial companies as illegitimate businesses, and payment processing companies as public utilities.  Members of Congress have to dismantle ObmaLoans and Dodd-Frank before the entire financial industry is transformed into one large public utility.
Payday lenders should be applauded for filling a market niche that others don’t want to touch, not vilified for providing a service that others are happy to provide if they can use taxpayers’ money to do it.

Source: Heritage
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Obama: We’re all about freedom of religion

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, President Obama said that “freedom of religion is under threat … around the world.” That’s true, and we have spent considerable time in writing about the persecution of Christians here at Hot Air while most of the media and the Obama administration do their best to avoid the topic. But the freedom of religious expression as defined by Barack Obama in this clip is under attack here too … by Barack Obama (via Deacon Greg):
Today, we profess the principles we know to be true. We believe that each of us is
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The Stealth Campaign To Destroy Abortion Rights That You Haven Heard Anything About

A little-known lawmaker in Iowa, State Rep. Matt Windschitl (R), recently declared that he’d like to end abortion altogether. “If I could stop all abortion in this state, I would,” Windschitl said earlier this week. Although he likely won’t be able to accomplish that goal immediately, he’s inching closer to it — with potential implications that will stretch far beyond Iowa’s borders.
If you’ve never heard of Windschitl, and had no idea that Iowa is become a battleground for reproductive rights, you’re not alone. With national attention recently focused on high-profile battles in Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina, the unfolding fight in the Hawkeye State hasn’t captured as many headlines.
But Iowa’s current conflict over what’s called “telemedicine abortion” has actually stretched on for months, and the push to restrict this practice could end up having big consequences for abortion access across the country. If conservatives in the state are successful, they’ll further narrow the health care options for economically disadvantaged women in a society that’s already chiseled away at their right to choose. And Windschitl just filed a bill to take another step in that direction.
What’s telemedicine abortion, and why does it matter?
To understand what’s happening in Iowa, it’s important to backtrack to 2008, when Planned Parenthood of the Heartland began using telemedicine — essentially, video technology that allows doctors to interact with patients without physically being in the same place — to administer abortion care. As new technology continues to impact the way the health industry operates, telemedicine is becoming increasingly common, and is now used by about 10 million to 12 million Americans every year. And since telemedicine is especially advantageous for low-income and rural Americans who struggle to travel to a doctor’s office, it’s a natural fit for abortion patients — who are disproportionately poor and increasingly losing access to nearby clinics.
The program has provided first-trimester abortion services to more than 3,000 women in the state since it began in 2008.
So the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Iowa piloted the new service, which allows doctors to prescribe the abortion pill (pictured above) to their patients over a video chat. The program has provided first-trimester abortion services to more than 3,000 women in the state since it began in 2008. It became a model for a few other states to start offering telemedicine abortions, too. Evidence mounted that this tactic was effectively expanding low-income women’s access to abortion care, and patients reported feeling satisfied with their virtual doctors’ consultations.
Particularly as abortion clinics are being forced to close at a record pace, there’s a huge opportunity for telemedicine programs to help maintain women’s access to safe, legal, early abortion. So it’s perhaps no wonder that conservatives like Windschitl want to put an end to them.
‘Robot skype abortion’
Iowa Rep. Steve King (R) has been one of the biggest crusaders against telemedicine abortion care, decrying it as “robot skype abortion” and attempting to ban it on a national level. Incidentally, although King typically stokes fears about the practice by suggesting that robots are performing invasive surgeries on women, that’s not actually how telemedicine works. It’s only offered for first-trimester, non-surgical, medicine-induced abortion. No robots are involved.
Interestingly enough, there’s no outcry about other advances in reproductive health that actually do rely on robot technology. According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly ten percent of all hysterectomies — the surgery that removes a woman’s uterus — are now performed with robot-assisted technology here in the United States. Since surgical robots can help make the procedure slightly less invasive, an increasing number of women are opting to use them.
Republican lawmakers are happy to sign onto measures promoting telemedicine services among veterans.
There’s no controversy over over types of telemedicine programs, either, which are now used to treat America’s ailing veterans who live in rural areas. Republican lawmakers are happy to sign onto measures promoting telemedicine services among this population. “We must encourage the Department of Defense to continue to work on implementing telehealth throughout our military health system,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said this past December to introduce a new piece of legislation on the subject.
When advances in health care technology are used to expand women’s abortion access, however, that’s another story.
Cloaked in the language of “preserving women’s safety,” conservative abortion opponents have seized on the opportunity to prevent telemedicine abortion programs from getting off the ground. Over the past several years, multiple state legislatures have rushed to ban the practice even before any local clinics even attempted to start implementing telemedicine abortion care — essentially, banning it where it doesn’t even exist yet. Fourteen states now require physicians to be in the physical presence of patients while administering the abortion pill, a medically unnecessary policy that essentially strikes at the heart of this new telemedicine technology.
Stacking the medical board
In addition to King’s national crusade against the practice, local lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to pass legislation to ban telemedicine abortion in Iowa — a move that would prevent the nation’s largest program of its kind from continuing to collect compelling data about how well it’s working. Since that’s been unsuccessful so far, abortion opponents in Iowa recently took a different tactic: going through the state’s medical board instead of the legislature.
In 2010, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland’s telemedicine program got approval to continue operating from the state’s Board of Medicine. But since then, the state’s anti-choice governor has worked to change the makeup of the board so that won’t happen again. Gov. Terry Branstad (R) replaced all ten members of the supposedly nonpartisan medical board with his own conservative appointees.
This past June, the new board approved new rules to require doctors from prescribe the abortion pill in person, taking a huge step toward abolishing to telemedicine abortion in the state. At the end of August, the Board of Medicine held a public hearing on the matter that stretched on for over three hours — and the medical professionals who attended said they were “embarrassed” by the board members’ actions. The vice president for the Iowa Medical Society pointed out that even though the proposed rule was written by anti-choice activists who have been collecting signatures for a petition to ban telemedicine abortion, the board simply accepted that wording “hook, line and sinker.”
“I’m going to ask you to please make your decision not on your personal prejudice and not on your religious beliefs, and not on political pressure.”
“I’m going to ask you to please make your decision not on your personal prejudice and not on your religious beliefs, and not on political pressure, whether it’s subtle or not so subtle. But make it based on the evidence,” one retired obstetrician, Dr. William Burke, told the board members.
They didn’t listen. On the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, Iowa’s Board of Medicine quietly voted to eliminate abortion access for low-income women in the state.
All eyes on a big court battle
After the medical board voted to ban telemedicine abortion, Planned Parenthood quickly filed a legal challenge. “There was no medical evidence or information presented to the Board that questions the safety of our telemedicine delivery system,” Jill June, the president of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, said in a statement announcing the group’s lawsuit against the state. “It’s apparent that the goal of this rule is to eliminate abortion in Iowa, and it has nothing to do with the safety of telemedicine.”
A district judge agreed, ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood in November and temporarily blocking the board’s new regulations from taking effect while the legal challenge proceeds. District Judge Karen Romano’s scathing 16-page opinion essentially chastises the Board of Medicine for blocking access to reproductive health care without any good reason.
“The court strains to understand how decreasing the number of apparently effective and safe abortion services offered to Iowa women pending the resolution of this case supports the public’s interest in receiving ‘adequate’ health care,” Romano wrote, noting she’s “not entirely persuaded” that banning telemedicine abortion services would achieve the board’s stated goal of protecting women.
Nonetheless, she won’t have the final word. Planned Parenthood is still awaiting a final decision on the matter — a ruling that will impact the future of telemedicine abortion programs across the country. If Iowa’s program is halted, that will carry even more weight than the recent rash of state laws designed to target telemedicine abortion. There will be legal precedent for squashing this type of clinic program for good.
Part of a larger strategy
That brings us back to Rep. Matt Windschitl, who doesn’t want to wait for the court to hand down its decision about telemedicine. Backed by 18 other Republican lawmakers in Iowa, Windschitl just filed a bill to outlaw telemedicine abortion the old-fashioned way — through the legislature.
This is merely a strategy to carry out his bigger goal of putting an end to abortion.
Considering the long battle over abortion access in Iowa, it’s not hard to see what Windschitl’s motives are. Jill June of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland points out that “this is merely a strategy to carry out his bigger goal” of putting an end to abortion. “Do we want the government and people like Matt Windschitl, who never have to be pregnant, who never have to take birth control, to control our health care?” June told the Quad-City Times.
Windschitl’s new bill could easily pass the GOP-controlled House. It faces more of an uphill battle in the Senate, where Democrats could resist bringing it up for a floor vote. But at least one key Democratic senator, an anti-abortion Catholic who often breaks from his party on reproductive rights issues, has indicated that he supports the measure and would like the full Senate to consider it.
There are some important takeaways from Iowa’s ongoing fight that speak to a larger anti-choice strategy to eliminate abortion access. First of all, the whole point is to keep these efforts too complicated to understand, weighed down with legal jargon that prevents the average American from realizing what exactly poses a threat to reproductive rights. That’s why abortion opponents are increasingly going after abortion providers, enacting yards of red tape around clinics and doctors that often don’t seem to be problematic on the surface. Particularly when the new restrictions are framed in terms of “women’s safety,” it’s hard to figure out what’s really at stake.
It seems logical to keep women safe by requiring doctors to be present during an abortion. It seems logical to require abortion clinics to adhere to strict building codes. It seems logical to require abortion providers to get the proper licenses, including from local hospitals. Those laws aren’t supposed to spark headlines or inspire protests. But in fact, these type of policies represent some of the most insidious threats to abortion access in states across the country. And they’re succeeding because Americans don’t realize they should be paying attention.
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What J.K. Rowling Ron And Hermione Bombshell Tells Us About True Love And Harry Potter

It’s frustrating, but probably inevitable in this age of voracious fandom, to see authors attempts to tweak, or litigate, or modify their work via interview long after the pages have gone to the printers and the work has wandered out into the world to be read and loved. I, too, have been guilty of enjoying these revelations, though they often raise as many questions as they answer. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s declaration that of course Albus Dumbledore is gay is very nice in retrospect, but I wish she’d had the courage to make her subtext text in the darn novels, given that no one would have said her nay, and it would have made Dumbledore one of the most high-profile gay heroes in the whole canon of fantasy literature. And now Rowling’s done it again: in a leaked interview with Wonderland, she apparently declares that she got one of the central romantic relationships of her series wrong.
“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment,” she reportedly says. “That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”
Cue the tsuris.
I don’t particularly have an OTP in this fight, though it is interesting to me that Rowling apparently regrets what I see as some of the most sensitively written and emotionally well-realized passages in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as an error of judgement. Rather, I’m struck by the whole debate in relationship to an idea that occurred to me as I was rereading Rowling’s series the weekend before Christmas.
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Megyn Kelly Clashes with Carville over Obama's Shots at Fox: Bush Never Did This About MSNBC!

Megyn Kelly squared off with James Carville on Tuesday about President Obama taking multiple snipes at Fox News during his big Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly, with Kelly telling Carville that George W. Bush never complained this much about MSNBC when he was in office.
The segment kicked off with Carville brushing off Hillary Clinton‘s Super Bowl Sunday tweet about seeing someone else “getting blitzed and sacked,” dismissing it as a joke that people really shouldn’t be reading int.
But things got more heated when Kelly brought up Obama’s comments, finding it a little silly for the president to be taking such broad shots at a cable network.
“Is it embarrassing enough for the President of the United States to be complaining about a cable channel? I mean, President Bush never did this about MSNBC!”
Carville shot back that the Bush team was always complaining about the liberal media, and told Kelly that Fox News needs to stop being so defensive every time he says Fox is a right-wing network and just embrace their identity. Kelly just thought it was silly for Obama to be “complaining about his coverage when he’s got most of the mainstream media in his pocket.”

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