The Fix is in?

Such manipulation at high levels of government should not come as a surprise to anybody. What got me was this one was is so nakedly transparent.

I am confused as to what the desired outcome is. We all know we can't count on what this Obama guy might tell us.

Well then, didn't the current occupant of the White House promise transparency, openness?

Somehow, I don't think this is what he had in mind.  

Well-connected rookie judge to preside over Khattala Benghazi trial

Just three months into his tenure on the federal bench, and before his formal investiture ceremony later this week, newly minted U.S. District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper has been handed one of the most high-profile and politically sensitive American terrorism cases in recent years.

Cooper, who was confirmed by the Senate in March, has been randomly assigned by the court’s selection system to preside over the U.S. government’s case against Ahmed Abu Khattala, a suspected ringleader in the deadly attack on U.S. outposts in Benghazi, Libya.

“He can handle it. Casey didn’t come from academia or a corporate boardroom. He came from the trial bar and he will be quite capable,” said William Jeffress, a partner at Cooper’s former law firm who is also his father-in-law.

Cooper, 47, was part of the Obama administration’s transition team and is one of the more connected people in D.C. legal circles. His wife, Amy Jeffress, is a former national security adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder. She previously ran the national security section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office that has charged Khattala, and mentored the lead prosecutor on the case, Michael DiLorenzo.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Cooper’s roommate and close friend was John Rice, brother of President Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice’s controversial television appearances in the days after the Benghazi attacks helped fuel criticism that the Obama administration was trying to downplay suspicions of terrorist involvement in the assault that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Washington Post

Chicago style of patronage.

Obama % Redistribution

This commentary, Why the Fuss? Obama Has Long Been On Record In Favor Of Redistribution which is not new (9/23/2012).

Just ran across this and it reminded me of the warning signs which should have alerted a concerned citizenary of the predictible failure of the current occupant of the White House.

Why the Fuss? Obama Has Long Been On Record In Favor Of Redistribution

In 2001, then state senator and University of Chicago law lecturer, Barack Obama, sat down for a public radio interview. At the time, he did not anticipate a near-term run for the presidency. He spoke candidly and deliberately about how to “break free” of Constitutional constraints against redistribution to provide “economic justice.” In the course of his interview, Obama laid out the electoral strategy of cobbling together the  “power coalitions” that have been the hallmark of his 2012 re-election campaign.

Politicians are said to speak the truth only by mistake. As his political career took off unexpectedly, Obama subsequently hid his views on redistribution, except in unguarded moments, such as “you didn’t build that” or “spreading the wealth around is good.” But on that day in 2001 in a Chicago public radio station, Obama candidly expounded his political and social philosophy as shaped by his critical-legal studies professors at Harvard and his experience as a community organizer in Chicago.

The 2001 “Obama Raw” interview remains the one definitive Obama soliloquy on the Constitution,

First: “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” (Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy).

Second, Obama regrets that the Constitution places “essential constraints” on the government’s ability to provide positive economic rights and that “we have not broken free” of these Constitutional impediments.  Obama views the absence of positive economic liberties that the government must supply as a flaw in the Constitution that must be corrected as part of a liberal political agenda.

Third, Obama concludes that we cannot use the courts to break free of the limited-government constraints of the Founders. The courts are too tradition and precedent bound “to bring about significant redistributional change.” Even the liberal WarrenCourt “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”  Obama opines that the civil-rights movement’s court successes cannot be duplicated with respect to income redistribution: The “mistake of the civil rights movement was (that it) became so court focused” and “lost track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground…In some ways we still suffer from that (mistake).”

Fourth, Obama argues that economic rights that the state must supply are ultimately to be established at the ballot box. Those who favor redistribution must gain legislative control through an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” The electoral task of a redistributive President is therefore to craft coalitions of those who stand to benefit from government largess. The legislature, not the courts, must do this “reparative economic work.”

In a burst of what today might be regarded as political incorrectness, Madison wrote in 1787: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties (by what Obama calls “negative rights”) is the first object of government.” In modern English: It is government’s job and duty to protect the rights of those who succeed, even if the majority wishes to take these rights away. That is the test of character of a democratic government.

Maryland’s Bathroom Bill

There was a time I considered myself a liberal, but I had to stop. There was nothing wrong with my liberalism, but much of today's liberalism is unrecognizable to anything resembling common sense.

I mean really, to satisfy a small portion of the populace with mental problems the rest of us have to reject a shared respect of decency and modesty? 

 Maryland’s bathroom bill benefits few transgenders, puts all girls at risk from pedophiles

Maryland moms and dads will now have to be more vigilant when their children use public bathrooms. It will soon be legal for a man who simply says he identifies as a woman to use the ladies’ room.

This serious risk for sexual assaults of women and little girls is all in the name of political correctness. And this is just the latest in a string of successes by the transgender lobby.

On Friday, the Maryland House passed legislation that prohibits discrimination based on “gender identity” in employment, housing, credit and public accommodations — which, most disturbingly, includes restrooms.

The state Senate passed the same bill earlier in the month. Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley is expected to sign it, and it will go into effect on Oct. 1.

The most dangerous impact of this new law is that a man cannot be stopped from going into a women’s bathroom, locker room or pool changing room.

The state does not specify that a person must have undergone a sex-change operation to have their legal rights of “gender identity” protected.

A man doesn’t even have to dress like a woman.

To be considered transgender, you just have to give a “consistent and uniform assertion” of believing you are supposed to be the opposite sex. Or, a person has to provide evidence that the non-biological sex is “sincerely held as part of the person’s core identity.”

Those outraged by this bill are considering a plan to assess whether there is enough financial and grass-roots support for a referendum in November.

A total of 55,736 signatures would be needed by May 31, but the state’s board of election recommends getting 20 percent to 30 percent more to compensate for the ones that are ruled invalid.

FULL STORY - Emily Miller - Washington Times