Hans A. von Spakovsky

Why does President Obama persistently misrepresent a particular Supreme Court decision and make misstatements about the law?

Does he do it intentionally for political gain, or are his legal advisors such poor lawyers that they misinform him? Whatever the reason, if he were Pinocchio, the statements he made about campaign finance “reform” in his latest weekly address would give him a nose longer than a Nationals’ baseball bat.

The President essentially repeated some of the same false claims that he made during his last State of the Union address. Back then, he asserted that the Citizens United decision had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Alito seemed to shake his head and mouth the words “not true.”

In fact, the President’s claims weren’t true. The Citizens United decision left the ban on direct campaign contributions to candidates by corporations and unions in place; the Supreme Court overturned only the federal ban on independent political expenditures, which is the equivalent of independent political speech. The 1st Amendment requires no less.

This past weekend, Obama was attacking corporations for supposedly trying to “take over” our elections. He also criticized Republican leaders for stopping the “reform” sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the so-called DISCLOSE Act. The Democrats were unable to get a single Republican to vote with them to end cloture just before the recess.

Eight former commissioners of the Federal Election Commission (including myself) have called the DISCLOSE Act “unnecessary, partially duplicative of existing law, and severely burdensome to the right to engage in political speech and advocacy.” But none of these reasons (or the 1st Amendment) was sufficient to convince this president.

In his address, the President claimed that if this new law were in place, foreign corporations “would be restricted from spending money to influence American elections—just as they were in the past.”

The problem with this claim is that current law already prohibits foreign nationals, including foreign corporations, from participating in American elections directly or indirectly—the Citizens United decision didn’t change that at all. Foreign corporations can’t contribute to candidates, nor can they engage in independent political expenditures as American corporations and unions now can.

What Obama and the sponsors of the DISCLOSE Act want to do is expand the current prohibition on foreigners to as many American companies as possible that may have a small percentage of foreign shareholders, even if those shareholders have no control whatsoever over the decisions made by the Americans who run the corporation.

This is just an end-run around the Citizens United decision. Otherwise, why would he make no mention of unions with foreign members or foreign nationals as directors such as the Service Employees International Union? The DISCLOSE Act has nothing to say about such unions.

But that is the theme throughout the DISCLOSE Act, whose merits the President was praising on Saturday—most of its provisions apply to corporations but not unions. This completely abandons the history of past campaign finance reform that has always treated unions and corporations on an equal basis. It gives support to claims that the DISCLOSE Act is just a partisan bill intended to help one particular political party, not reform the election process.

Obama said on Saturday that he was concerned about “the corporate takeover of our democracy.” But the PACs of unions like the International Brotherhood of Electricians, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the SEIU are some of the biggest contributors to federal candidates. The SEIU made the largest amount of independent expenditures so far in the 2010 election cycle of any other organization. But do we hear Obama expressing concern about the “union takeover of our democracy”? Is he perhaps unaware that while corporate PACs generally split their contributions evenly between Democrats and Republicans, union PACs give almost 100% of their contributions to Democrats?

The President even cited Republican Teddy Roosevelt for his supposed opposition to “corporate influence” in our elections. President Roosevelt signed the Tillman Act into law in 1907, which banned direct contributions to federal candidates by corporations. That law is still in place today and was not changed by the Citizens United decision. Contrary to the President’s claim, Roosevelt was concerned with direct contributions to candidates, not with restricting the 1st Amendment rights of corporations, associations or unions to engage in independent political speech.

Obama mistakenly claims that “we don’t know who’s behind these [political] ads, and we don’t know who’s paying for them.” According to him, Republicans oppose the DISCLOSE Act because they want “to keep the public in the dark.” But current law and FEC regulations have extensive and detailed disclosure and reporting requirements for electioneering ads.

Obama seemingly overlooks the fact that the Supreme Court upheld those requirements in Citizens United. Once again, the lawyer and former law professor is wrong on the law.

Obama concluded his address by saying that “this is an issue that goes to whether or not we will have a democracy that works for ordinary Americans—a government of, by and for the people.” He is certainly correct about that—but his solution is to restrict political speech and political advocacy of those he fears will criticize his policies.

It is Obama’s push for an all-powerful central government, running our economy and the lives of everyday Americans, that represents the biggest danger to “a democracy that works for ordinary Americans.”

Bryan Denson– The Oregonian

More than 100 people crowded Friday into a Portland courtroom that comfortably holds half that many to see whether a lie by their friend, Milenko Krstic, would put him behind bars.

Krstic faced up to six months in prison for lying 12 years ago on U.S. immigration papers about his wartime service in the Bosnian Serb army.

Canada Free Press

By Move America Forward  

Move America Forward, the nation’s largest pro-military grassroots organization issued this statement today, in response to the announcement that Senator Barbara Boxer is leading the formation of a Senate Military Family Caucus:

Move America Forward condemns Senator Boxer for claiming to support military families when she has been anything but a friend to our troops throughout her career. Few members of congress have been as insulting and demeaning to high ranking military officers as Senator Boxer.  Still fewer members of congress have the audacity to say a life of dedicated military service is comparable to that of a career in congress.

By associating herself with the Military Family Caucus, Senator Boxer is attempting to confuse and deceive the American public into believing that she supports the troops. We know from her ridiculous ‘Don’t call me ma’am’ statement earlier this year that she thinks highly of herself and her position, but this is the absolute height of hypocrisy as she has consistently failed to support our troops and their missions.

Looking back over this Senator’s career, you’ll see a pattern of trampling and demeaning the brave men and women who serve in our military.  She is quick to criticize them whenever they are being attacked, and she is conspicuously absent when they need her support.  Her supposed leadership of this caucus is no more than a political gimmick to distance herself from her most recent comments about the military that were both shameful and insulting.

The Military Family Caucus is a noble effort, but Senator Boxer is no friend to the troops or their families and her title as part of the caucus does not make up for her lack of support or leadership for military families in the past.

We doubt very seriously that this maneuver will fool anyone.  Rather, it will be seen for exactly what it is – a transparent and insincere attempt to curry favor from a group for which she has never shown interest or respect.

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — A three-year-old federal law that makes it a crime to falsely claim to have received a medal from the U.S. military is unconstitutional, an appeals court panel in California ruled Tuesday.

The decision involves the case of Xavier Alvarez of Pomona, Calif., a water district board member who said at a public meeting in 2007 that he was a retired Marine who received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration.

Alvarez was indicted in 2007. He pleaded guilty on condition that he be allowed to appeal on First Amendment grounds. He was sentenced under the Stolen Valor Act to more than 400 hours of community service at a veterans hospital and fined $5,000.

A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him in a 2-1 decision Tuesday, agreeing that the law was a violation of his free-speech rights. The majority said there’s no evidence that such lies harm anybody, and there’s no compelling reason for the government to ban such lies.

The dissenting justice insisted that the majority refused to follow clear Supreme Court precedent that false statements of fact are not entitled to First Amendment protection.

The act revised and toughened a law that forbids anyone to wear a military medal that wasn’t earned. The measure sailed through Congress in late 2006, receiving unanimous approval in the Senate.

Dozens of people have been arrested under the law at a time when veterans coming home from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being embraced as heroes. Many of the cases involve men who simply got caught living a lie without profiting from it. Almost all the impostors have been ordered to perform community service.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said it was deciding whether to appeal Tuesday’s ruling.

Enlarge

In order to appear tough on immigration enforcement, the Obama Administration’s bureaucrats have been inundating the media with misinformation. And—surprise, surprise—their MSM cronies oblige with credulous fluff. Read More

POSER Command Sgt. Maj. Stoney Crump

By Jeff Schogol

The former command sergeant major at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is facing up to 16 years in prison on charges he falsified his official record and wore a litany of decorations and qualification badges he was not awarded.

Charges filed July 8 accused Command Sgt. Maj. Stoney N. Crump of wearing 11 awards that he didn’t earn, including the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal with Arrowhead Device, the Presidential Unit Citation Award, and the Senior Parachutist Badge.

He allegedly wore the decorations and qualification badges at Walter Reed in Washington, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Fort Bliss, Texas, and Heidelberg, Germany, according to the charge sheets.

He is also charged with falsely claiming to have attended several elite schools, including U.S. Army Ranger School, Special Forces Airborne School and Sniper School.
Crump had been relieved of duty in May for “unauthorized wear/claim of military awards, badges, and decorations,” Army officials said.

At Walter Reed and Heidelberg, Crump also allegedly falsified his command sergeant major biography by claiming he had been awarded a Marine Corps Combat Action Ribbon and that he was a registered nurse, according to the charge sheets.

A spokesman for Europe Regional Medical Command in Heidelberg declined to comment because the investigation is ongoing.

Crump is represented by an attorney at Fort Belvoir Trial Defense Service, according to Army Times. A woman who answered the phone at trial defense services said the office would have no comment on Crump.

Crump did not return an e-mail seeking comment by deadline on Monday.

Walter Reed spokesman Chuck Dasey declined to say how Crump’s alleged deceptions were discovered. Crump’s Article 32 hearing similar to a civilian grand jury, is slated for August.

He faces charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not the Stolen Valor Act, a federal law that was recently ruled unconstitutional. That act was intended to apply to veterans or people who were never in the military, said James Klimaski, a civilian attorney who practices military law.

And the very same FEDS are suing Arizona for SB1070, which states that when local law enforcement has “reasonable suspicion” that a person is not a legal resident, the officer is to ask questions and can take into custody those who cannot show they are legal residents.

Victor Davis Hanson

Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself.

Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center — as Obama had serially promised to do within a year of his inauguration.

But this accusation is disingenuous for a variety of reasons.

Obama campaigned on calls to reverse the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism protocols, charging that they were either unnecessary or counterproductive. Then, when invested with the responsibility of governance, Obama suddenly reversed himself on almost all of them — tribunals, renditions, Iraq, the Patriot Act, targeted airborne assassinations, and Guantanamo Bay. Holder himself — in the quite different political climate of 2002 — once supported the detention of terrorists without regard for the Geneva Conventions. What made him so radically change his views?

In fact, any time Obama wishes to close Guantanamo Bay, he can simply carry out his earlier executive order, in the same manner in which President Bush opened it without congressional approval. In blaming Congress, Holder does not mention the real reason why the president broke his promise: The American public now wants unrepentant terrorists to stay in Guantanamo rather than be incarcerated and tried in civilian courts here at home.

Holder got himself into trouble last year when he played politics by announcing that the administration would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in a civilian courtroom. The boast was supposed to contrast an enlightened Obama team with the demonized Bush administration’s supposed lawlessness in confining KSM at Guantanamo.

But after New Yorkers protested against holding the trial practically next door to the scene of the 9/11 attack, Holder backed off. Meanwhile, the president rushed to assure the nation that KSM would be “convicted” and have “the death penalty . . . applied to him.” At that point, Bush’s planned military tribunals seemed a lot less prejudicial than Holder’s planned civilian show trial.

Holder’s continual refusal to link radical Islam with the epidemic of global terrorism is likewise entirely political. When asked at a congressional hearing whether radical Islamic terrorists were behind the Fort Hood killings, the attempted Christmas Day bombing, and the foiled Times Square attack, Holder refused to identify that obvious common catalyst. He cited instead a “variety of reasons.” The nation’s chief prosecutor was not looking at the evidence, but adhering to a politically correct, predetermined dogma.

On matters of race, the attorney general castigated America as “a nation of cowards” for not engaging in a national conversation on his own terms. This was an odd accusation, since at present we have a black president, attorney general, EPA head, and NASA chief; Hispanic secretaries of labor and the interior; and a recently appointed Hispanic Supreme Court justice; not to mention that the previous administration’s two secretaries of state were black.

The president himself accused police of stereotyping minorities and acting “stupidly” in arresting his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Some conversation.

Nor would Holder’s envisioned dialogue include attitudes such as Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor’s self-identification as a “wise Latina” who supposedly exercises superior judgment over the usual white male jurist. In truth, the nation suffers from too much racial self-identification and politicking, not too little.

Yet Holder himself has used race for political purposes. He criticized the Arizona government for its anti-illegal-alien law — after admitting that he hadn’t read it. Then he chose to sue the state for trying to enforce unenforced federal immigration laws. Now he has promised that if that tactic fails, he will play the race card on Arizona, alleging in yet another suit that its new legislation would entail racial profiling. Remember, the law has not gone into effect yet, so Holder has no evidence of how it will play out.

At the same time, Holder just dropped the case against the New Black Panther Party, which was caught on tape intimidating voters at a polling place. Thus he is leveling charges of racism against those who deliberately excluded racial profiling in their legislation, while giving a free pass to those who blatantly used race to bother voters at the polls.

In just 18 months, Holder has proven to be the most political attorney general since Richard Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell. And like the hyperpartisan Mitchell, Holder will continue to embarrass the nation until he steps down. Given his partisan temperament and his checkered record in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, his departure is not a matter of if — only when.

By Bill Roggio and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

When CIA director Leon Panetta declared on a Sunday talk show in late June that “we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100” al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, “maybe less,” some commentators took this as a political turning point. British journalist and author Stephen Grey commented via his Twitter account, for example, that the statement “could change the whole war debate.”

No doubt the 50 to 100 figure will be repeated by officials and pundits for some time to come; given the paucity of available information, it will factor heavily in debates over America’s strategic interests in Afghanistan. This is unfortunate, as every available indicator suggests that Panetta’s figure is unreliable. Worse, it may be evidence of a lack of rigor within the U.S. intelligence community.

Data points gleaned from coalition operations seem to undercut Panetta’s claim. Consider the case of Kunar Province.

The same day that Panetta said there were only 50 to 100 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, the U.S. military announced an operation in Kunar targeting “al Qaeda and Taliban leadership in the area.” While the names of targeted al Qaeda leaders were not disclosed, two major known al Qaeda leaders in Kunar are Abu Ikhlas al Masri, al Qaeda’s operations chief for Kunar, and Qari Zia Rahman, who is considered the top regional commander in Kunar and Nuristan.

A report published last year by the Institute for the Study of War provides more detailed information about the insurgency in Kunar. It notes a 2008 estimate by provincial officials, which coincides with information provided to us by an American intelligence source, that there were “at least 2,000 insurgents in the mountains of Kunar.” Though the number fluctuates as insurgents crisscross the border with Pakistan, it is significant that about half of these fighters were “believed to be foreigners, including Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks.” Most foreign fighters are assessed to be loyal to al Qaeda.

The number of insurgents in Kunar has probably risen since 2008. More fighters are reported to have moved there since the United States began abandoning its Kunar outposts last fall. Even if 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Kunar belong to the Pakistani Taliban and only the remaining 10 percent are Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, and so on, that would suggest that Kunar alone has a significant al Qaeda problem—with about as many al Qaeda-affiliated fighters as Panetta estimated for the entire country.

But the number of al Qaeda fighters is almost certainly higher still. One American intelligence officer who recently returned from Afghanistan told us: “About half of the insurgents in Kunar are foreign fighters, and given that most of the foreign fighters are loyal to al Qaeda, that would easily put the group’s numbers at approximately 1,000 in Kunar alone.” The military’s intelligence agencies do not concur with the figures Panetta cited.

Another difficulty in measuring al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is defining “al Qaeda.” The distinctions between many militant leaders or groups and al Qaeda have broken down over time. Qari Zia Rahman, for example, straddles al Qaeda and the Taliban. Hakimullah Mehsud’s Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is closely allied with al Qaeda; it sponsored the failed Times Square bombing and aided an al Qaeda operative in the suicide attack that killed seven CIA officials in Khost province. And Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a powerful network in Pakistan, is believed by some intelligence officials to be a member of al Qaeda’s shura majlis, or leadership council.

It is possible that the unreliable estimates of al Qaeda numbers are politically motivated—designed either to demonstrate progress or to hasten U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan. Another possibility, and perhaps cause for greater concern, is that they reflect poor analytical methods.

It is unclear what methodology CIA analysts used to arrive at the 50-100 figure. (This opacity can work to the advantage of anyone trumpeting the figure, as those without the proper security clearances cannot get a sense of how the sausage is made.) One strong possibility, however, is that the analysts ran through recent intelligence and embraced the fixed numbers they came across without subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny.

The analyst we spoke with about Kunar noted that forming an estimate for even a single province requires specific, in-depth knowledge of that place. It would take detailed data for “every province in Afghanistan to derive a real approximation of the enemy” in the country as a whole. That would require a great deal of research, effort, and analysis—which Panetta’s estimate seems to lack.

Of course, unreliable estimates do not start and stop with Leon Panetta. Rahm Emanuel claimed in late June that about “a half of al Qaeda has been eliminated in this last 18 months.” Similarly, George W. Bush claimed in 2004 that three-quarters of al Qaeda had been killed or captured. Such declarations can only confuse the public debate—or produce confused policy that ultimately costs lives.