Here’s one of the emails to Bob Woodward from Gene Sperling, via the Politico:
From Gene Sperling to Bob Woodward on Feb. 22, 2013
Bob:
I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.
But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios — but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial. (Indeed, the discretionary savings amount from the Boehner-Obama negotiations were locked in in BCA: the sequester was just designed to force all back to table on entitlements and revenues.)
I agree there are more than one side to our first disagreement, but again think this latter issue is diffferent. Not out to argue and argue on this latter point. Just my sincere advice. Your call obviously.
My apologies again for raising my voice on the call with you. Feel bad about that and truly apologize.
WASHINGTON — Bob Woodward isn’t the only person who’s received threats for airing the Obama administration’s dirty laundry. It seems anyone is a potential target of the White House these days – even former senior members of the Clinton administration.
A day after Woodward’s claim that a senior White House official had told him he would “regret” writing a column criticizing President Obama’s stance on the sequester, Lanny Davis, a longtime close advisor to President Bill Clinton, told WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall Thursday he had received similar threats for newspaper columns he had written about Obama in the Washington Times.
Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, “received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made.” Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, “that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials.”….
…but on social matters she has also been vehemently leftist and occasionally odd. “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries,” Judd told the Sunday Mail in 2006 (this from a woman who put up for sale her second home in Scotland earlier this year for about $5.9 million).
Comparing(Taken Down, can be found also at HotAirand here at Weasel Zippers) mountaintop removal to the Rwandan genocide:
President Clinton has repeatedly said doing nothing during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is the single greatest regret of the Presidency. Yet here at home, there is full blown environmental genocide and collapse happening, and we are doing nothing. Naturally, I accept that I set myself up for ridicule for using such strong terms, or perhaps outrage from human victims of slaughter.
Janette Jude, a 6th grade language arts teacher in Kentucky, furiously denounced Judd in 2010: “I recently listened to your luncheon speech on press.org and I must say I was appalled by your words.”
Lambasting fathers for giving away daughters at weddings:
To this day, a common vestige of male dominion over a woman’s reproductive status is her father ‘giving’ away her away to her husband at their wedding, and the ongoing practice of women giving up their last names in order to assume the name of their husband’s families, into which they have effectively been traded.
Tweeting that the coal industry should be eliminated: “The era of coal plant is over, unacceptable.”
Eviscerating Christianity for perpetuating “male power”:
Patriarchal religions, of which Christianity is one, gives us a God that is like a man, a God presented and discussed exclusively in male imagery, which legitimizes and seals male power. It is the intention to dominate, even if the intention to dominate is nowhere visible.
Comparing George W. Bush to a historic barbarian based on social issues:
Throughout history, men have tried to control the means of reproduction, which means trying to control woman. This president is a modern day Attila the Hun.
Blaming society’s problems throughout history on… men:
I’d like to propose that the society in which we live is, in fact, extremist and radical. It is so skewed, massively out of balance; the result of one sex ruling and objectifying another for at least the last millennia.
Former security guard Nkosi Thandiwe was found guilty of murdering a woman and wounding two others during a shooting spree in July of 2011 and has been sentenced to life without parole, CBS Atlanta reports.
He confessed to the crimes during his testimony last week, adding some chilling details about his motivation. And prosecutors argued that Thandiwe was fueled by racist hate against whites.
“My mind was blank at the time,” he said — but he still remembers what prompted the violence by his own twisted rationale. He cited anti-white ideas he learned at university.
During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.
“I was trying to prove a point that Europeans had colonized the world, and as a result of that, we see a lot of evil today,” he said. “In terms of slavery, it was something that needed to be answered for. I was trying to spread the message of making white people mend.”
He said the night before the shooting, he attended a so-called “Peace Party” intended to address his concerns about helping the black community find equal footing, but two white people were there.
“I was upset,” Thandiwe said. “I was still upset Friday. I took the gun to work because I was still upset from Thursday night.”
He even admitted to earlier that day getting angry enough on the job to shoot his supervisor.
“What my boss said to me …,” he told the jury, “that rage almost made me pull out my gun on him.” [Emphasis added]
…Thandiwe took the liberal propaganda the entire country has been marinating in for decades at face value. Like Colin Ferguson, he was sufficiently unstable to be set onto a maniacal killing spree by the vile poison of politically correct ideology.
Not too long ago this would have upset a majority of Americans…
Creeping Sharia points out that the youth have a favorable view of socialism:
…a Pew survey of America’s youth, or those aged 18-29, more have a positive view response toward Socialism than they do toward Capitalism. We will leave it at that.
“Groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent.” describes potential terrorists? WTH? DHS is using left wing hate groups and even Islamic groups with ties to terrorism as consultants to determine who are threats.
From a Jan, 2011 article “How Dept. of Homeland Security identifies ‘right wing extremists’:
The radical leftist group Southern Poverty Law Center has partnered with the Department of Homeland Security in a ‘Working Group’ called Countering violent Extremism to paint conservatives as hate groups and extremists.
[….]
Former Attorney General Edwin Meese says it is “despicable” for the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify the Family Research Council and a dozen other top conservative organizations as “hate groups” similar to the Ku Klux Klan.
The SPLC has a history of targeting conservatives and conservative groups as racist, homophobic, or extremist if they disagree with the radical left positions of the SPLC on any number of issues. An article at Discover the Networks.org says “What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there’s a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this “the broad-brush smear.””
[….]
The SPLC has joined the Department of Homeland Security in a ‘Working Group’ called Countering violent Extremism. John Cohen, President and CEO of SPLC is listed as a member and Laurie Wood, Analyst, Southern Poverty Law Center/Instructor, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is listed as an ‘expert in subject matter’. The members of the group also include three from Muslim organizations but we don’t see any conservatives. (see the list at the end of the report)
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which has been determined by the courts to be a terrorist support group proudly points out on their Facebook page that its Michigan members ‘participated a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group meeting with law enforcement officials and community advocates in Dearborn, Mich.'[ibid].
So we have the Southern Poverty Law Center, also known as The Church of Morris Dees, which calls groups and individuals like the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, the Heritage Foundation, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) ‘right wing extremists’ and the Council on American-Islamic Relations which the FBI has proven to be linked to a terrorist organization teaming up with the US Department of Homeland Security to determine what groups in America should be categorized as ‘extremist’ and potentially violent.
Now you can see why the DHS came out with its Rightwing Extremism report in April of 2009 that warned of potential violence by people against illegal immigration and gun control, and returning military veterans. Now that’s change.
Andrea Mitchell (MSNBC) turns to anti-christian “sex columnist” for input on Catholic issues:
NewsBusters has this GRAPHIC and UNNERVING post about who the public schools allow into our kids minds. Someone whom the Obama administration supports in their blind politically correct egalitarianism:
— AGAIN: GRAPHIC WARNING! —
….Savage’s book, “Savage Love,” collects his column of the same name. On page after page the author and gay rights advocate scoffed at monogamy and recommended and condoned a range of aberrant sexual activities. Savage enthused about bondage, shrugged at child molestation fantasies and incest, and even encouraged a reader to indulge in his fantasy to lie in an empty tub and have a woman defecate on him.Even the introduction to “Savage Love” was riddled with filth. “Mostly I give advice to breeders – eating pussy for boys, sucking dick for girls, buttfucking for everybody – which is an odd job considering I’m one of those boys who doesn’t sleep with girls,” Savage wrote.
The word breeder is an offensive term for heterosexuals, and Savage often tells his readers so. “Once upon a time, ‘breeder’ was an insult – our little derogatory term for you heterosexuals. We whispered ‘breeder’ behind your breeder-backs, and some people are going to call you breeder whether you like it or not,” Savage said. The word breeder is found 80 times throughout the book – a particular irony coming from the most high-profile anti-bullying advocate in the nation.
But to Savage, bullying gays is about the only thing that’s out of bounds. “In my opinion, child molestation fantasies do not make you an evil person,” Savage replied to a reader’s inquiry.
To another, he condoned incest between a mother and son, saying, “But hey, you’re consenting adults. If you wanna bone ma, and she wants to bone you, well, more power to you.”
Long before the “50 Shades of Grey” became a popular sensation, Savage hyped BDSM. An entire section in “Savage Love” was dedicated to “Kink.”
“People once thought bondage to be an unspeakable perversion, and anyone interested in bondage was sick. These days, outside my immediate family, it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t done bondage or doesn’t want to give it a try!” Savage wrote.
Savage’s perversion isn’t confined to sex acts. He regularly goaded readers to have affairs touting “If you’re going to cheat, then cheat honest,” and responded “Fuck the sanctity of marriage, what you’re really getting is a heap of social and financial benefits. Marriage is about rights, not monogamy.”
He continued that “Only fools would build marriages with monogamy as their foundation (and only a foolish society would demand such a behavior.)”
His answer to homosexuality was a clear mockery of traditional values. “Men are not straight because they think being gay is “morally wrong,” they’re gay cuz they wanna, gotta, fuck women. What your boyfriend, as a Catholic, was taught to believe about homosexuality (no! no!) is a conflict with what his dick is telling him (yes! yes!).
Drugs and prostitution aren’t off-limits topics for Savage either. “Drugs, alcohol and sex don’t mix? Really? Get out much? Not all substance abuse is abuse,” he wrote. Elsewhere Savage stated that “The human desire for psychoactive drugs is never going away – the war on drugs, however, can and should go away.”
Prostitution? “Every problem moralists and virtuecrats cite as an argument for keeping prostitution illegal – violence, disease, child prostitution – is a problem that is either created or made worse by keeping prostitution illegal,” he said.
This is the man who is able to reach millions of children via his “It Gets Better” bullying campaign. Although Savage is a zealous bully himself, he is endorsed by President Obama and the White House, and has said, chillingly, that he will spread his message to children whether their parents want him to or not. Instead of hailing Dan Savage as an anti-bullying hero, the world need only read a sentence from any of his five books to see how foul the real Dan Savage is.
(Drudge Report h/t) Democratic strategist and DNC adviser Hilary Rosen lobbed an insult at Ann Romney, suggesting that the 64-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 16 had never held a job.
“Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” said Rosen, who was being interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the “war on women.”
Choosing to mentor and raise 5 boys is a yeoman’s task. Funny though, because in 2003, Hilary Rosen took time off to be with her boys:
On January 22, 2003, Rosen announced that she would resign as head of the RIAA at the end of 2003, in order to spend more time with her partner, Elizabeth Birch, and the couple’s twins (a boy and a girl).
She didn’t stay home long and I am sure she really lives out these motto’s:
“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.” ~ Audre Lorde
“…in theJanuary 1988 National NOW Times, the newsletter for the organization, said: “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist” ~ Gnostic Feminism
If one does not adhere to the left’s gender/orientation beliefs, and are a stay at home mom… yur assed out!
UPDATED: While saying the Democrats are not using the word “war on women,” Hilary Rosen commits the act of “waring on women”:
Talk about a “War on Women”: this past week, the White House welcomed members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist organization whose Freedom and Justice Party won the largest number of seats in that country’s parliamentary elections and which may take the Egyptian presidency as well.
The Brotherhood remains staunchly anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Christian, anti-Jew — and anti-woman [and may I add anti-gay, the dead kind of anti]. In an interview posted today by Kerry Picket of the Washington Times, a member of the Brotherhood’s delegation confirmed that sharia, or Islamic law, would guide all lawmaking in Egypt under his party’s rule.
Since its origins in Egypt in the 1950, the Muslim Brotherhood has established branches throughout the Middle East, and contacts in the West as well. It has carried out and supported countless acts of terror and murder, and spread the radical Islamist ideology that sustains public support for terrorism.
Al Qaeda itself was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and its leaders. The current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, began his terrorist career in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. There are alarming connections between the party taking over in Egypt and the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Yet President Barack Obama has decided that the United States should “engage” the Brotherhood, apparently believing that doing so will deter the Brotherhood from its radical course, and grant the United States a voice in the new Egyptian government–as it once had in the dictatorial regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, the man Obama abandoned during the so-called Arab Spring. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision; Obama was always pro-Muslim Brotherhood, going out of his way in February 2009 to finagle invitations for them to his Cairo speech.
Melanie Phillips in her most excellent book explains well why the Left in our country continuously supports such horrible regimes:
These curious coalitions are frequently explained as merely opportunistic alliances, where certain groups make common cause with ideological opponents in pursuit of the shared aim of bringing down Western society. This explanation surely is only partly correct. What these various movements have in common goes much deeper: they are all utopian. Each in its own way wants to bring about the perfect society, to create a new man and a new world.
Each therefore thinks of itself as progressive; the supporters of each believe themselves to be warriors in the most noble of causes. The greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The fascists believe they will purge mankind of corruption. And the Islamists believe they will create the Kingdom of God on earth.
What they all have in common, therefore, is a totalitarian mindset in pursuit of the creation of their alternative reality. These are all worldviews that can accommodate no deviation and must therefore be imposed by coercion. Because their end product is a state of perfection, nothing can be allowed to stand in its way. This is itself a projected pathology. As Eric Hoffer suggested in The True Believer, the individual involved in a mass movement is in some way acutely alienated from his own society, an alienation to which he is completely blind. Projecting his own unacknowledged deficiencies onto his surroundings, he thinks instead there is something wrong with society and fantasizes about building a new world where he will finally fit.” This belief that humanity can be shaped into a perfect form has been the cause of the most vicious tyrannies on the planet from the French Revolution onwards.
As Jamie Glazov notes in his book United in Hate, the totalitarian believer publicly denies the violent pathologies within the system that he worships. Privately, however, these are what drew him towards that system in the first place because he is aware that violence is necessary to destroy the old order so that utopia can arise from its ashes. Pretending he is attracted to “peace,” “justice” and “equality,” he actually stands for their opposite. He needs to empathize with the”martyrs” and the downtrodden in order to validate himself vicariously. The Third World, intrinsically noble since it is uncorrupted by the developed world, provides an apparently inexhaustible supply of such validation. That’s why the image of the Palestinian youth armed with only a slingshot touches the radical soul so deeply, and why the radical does not want to hear—why he even denies—the guns that are ranged just behind that youth as he throws his stones.”
Later, after following through with the history of the coining and idea behind the term “Westoxification,” she has a fabulouse paragraph that puts in a pretty bow why the Progressive Left so often finds solice in these radical views you would think it would reject:
The Islamists committing mass murder in New York’s Twin Towers or a Jerusalem cafe really do believe they are fighting for justice and to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The communists and the fascists really did think they were ending, respectively, the oppression and the corruption of man. The environmentalists really do think they are saving the planet from extinction. The radical left really do think they will erase prejudice from the human heart and suffering from the world. And those who want Israel no longer to exist as a Jewish state really do believe that as a result they will turn suicide bomb belts into cucumber frames, and that they are moving in the way that history intended.
CAIRO, March 28 (UPI) — A fisherman saved the life of a young Egyptian woman after her parents threw her into the Nile River for divorcing an abusive, elderly husband, police said.
Women’s rights groups in Egypt said they are working with authorities to gather more information about the attempted honor killing, Bikyamasr.com reported Wednesday.
“If this is really what happened, then it shows there is a lot of work to counter honor violence in this country, where women and girls are killed because, simply, they are women,” said Nora Tarek, a women’s rights researcher in Cairo.
The young woman initially refused to marry the elderly man but later bowed to family pressure, Bikyamasr.com reported.
Her parents tossed her into the river when she returned home after divorcing him.
Last year, a 22-year-old Egyptian woman was found dead on a coastal road with a noose around her neck. A family member said the woman was killed by her brother for leaving home with a stranger. Read the rest.
Take note also this imperative in Islamic Scripture/tradition from The Religion of Peace:
Question: Why are rape victims often punished by Islamic courts as adulterers?
Summary Answer: Under Islamic law, rape can only be proven if the rapist confesses or if there are four male witnesses. Women who allege rape, without the benefit of the act having been witnessed by four men who subsequently develop a conscience, are actually confessing to having sex. If they or the accused happens to be married, then it is considered to be adultery.
The Qur’an:
Qur’an (2:282) – Establishes that a woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man’s in court (there is no “he said/she said” gridlock in Islam).
Qur’an (24:4) – “And those who accuse free women then do not bring four witnesses (to adultery), flog them…” Strictly speaking, this verse addresses adultery (revealed at the very time that Muhammad’s favorite wife was being accused of adultery on the basis of only three witnesses, coincidentally enough) however it is a part of the theological underpinning of the Sharia rule.
Qur’an (24:13) – “Why did they not bring four witnesses of it? But as they have not brought witnesses they are liars before Allah.”
Qur’an (2:223) – “Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will…” There is no such thing as rape in marriage, as a man is permitted unrestricted sexual access to his wives.
From the Hadith:
Bukhari (5:59:462) – The background for the Qur’anic requirement of four witnesses to adultery. Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of cheating [on her polygamous husband]. Three witnesses corroborated the event, but Muhammad apparently did not want to believe it, and so established the arbitrary rule that four witnesses are required.
Additional Notes:
Rape is virtually impossible to prove under strict Islamic law (Sharia). If the man claims that the act was consensual sex, there is very little that the woman can do to refute this. Islam places the burden of avoiding sexual encounters of any sort on the woman.
A recent fatwa from a mainstream Islamic site echoes this rule and even chides a victim of incest for complaining when she has no “evidence”:
However, it is not permissible to accuse the father of rape without evidence. Indeed, the Sharee’ah put some special conditions for proving Zina (fornication or adultery) that are not required in case of other crimes. The crime of Zina is not confirmed except if the fornicator admits it, or with the testimony of four trustworthy men, while the testimony of women is not accepted.
Hence, the statement of this girl or the statement of her mother in itself does not Islamically prove anything against the father, especially that the latter denies it.
Therefore, if this daughter has no evidence to prove that her accusations are true, she should not have claimed that she was raped by her father and she should not have taken him to the court. (IslamWeb.net, Image)
Since it is incredibly unlikely that a child molester will violate his victim in front of “four trustworthy men”, Islamic law amounts to a free pass for sexual predators.
Islamic law rejects forensic evidence (such as DNA) in favor of testimony. An interesting situation thus sometimes develops in cases where a victim alleges rape and the man denies that sex even took place. In the absence of four male witnesses, rape cannot be proven. The woman’s testimony then becomes a “confession” of adultery. She can be stoned, even though the male is unpunished, since he never “confessed” to a sexual act!
Also, there can be no such thing as rape in marriage, even if the husband has to hit the wife in order to bring about her submission. Another recent fatwa reminds a woman, she “does not have the right to refuse her husband, rather she must respond to his request every time he calls her.” (Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 33597).
Keep in mind that most Muslim countries do not operate under strict Islamic law, but rather under legal codes imported from the West. Therefore rape victims in these countries can and often do receive justice under more reasonable standards of proof.
