By Philip Klein

When a given issue is causing trouble for a political candidate, that trouble tends to get compounded if: a) it turns out that the one problem is part of a broader pattern and/or b) if the candidate can’t get his or her story straight. Along these lines, U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell of California will continue to be dogged by his past relationships with Islamic radicals because those relationships are numerous, and because he’s now been caught in several lies while trying to explain those associations.

Most of the reporting on Campbell’s ties to radicals has focused on Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who donated to the Campbell campaign and later pled guilty to conspiring to help associates of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Campbell keeps tripping himself up when trying to explain himself.

In an interview with the New Ledger last month, Campbell said point blank, “I received no contribution from Sami Al-Arian.” After I (along with others) reported that this was demonstrably false based on Federal Election Commission filings, he reversed himself and told the Politico that he made an “honest mistake, with no attempt to mislead.”

Then, in last Friday’s candidate debate, Campbell claimed that when he sent a letter to the president of the University of South Florida protesting Al-Arian’s firing, it was before an “O’Reilly Factor” interview in which Al-Arian called for the “Death to Israel.” Yet subsequent disclosure of the letter revealed not only that it was dated after the O’Reilly segment, but also that Campbell specifically referred to the segment in the letter itself.

Campbell wrote in defense of Al-Arian: “I read a transcript of the ‘O’Reilly Factor’ interview last autumn, and I did not see anything whereby Professor Al-Arian attempted to claim he was representing the views of the University of South Florida.”

I now see (via Jennifer Rubin) this Los Angeles Times report:

On Monday, Campbell said in an interview that despite the language of his letter, he had never read the full transcript of the O’Reilly interview, specifically the “Death to Israel” language. If he had seen it, he said, he never would have written the letter….

Campbell spokesman James Fisfis said the candidate’s memory of his dealings with Al-Arian is foggy because he did not have an original copy of the letter and because the events occurred nearly a decade ago.

“It was a long time ago,” Fisfis said. “We’re trying to piece together everything about that time period.”

So in other words, Campbell’s explanation for having been caught in yet another lie is that he’s telling the truth now, but was actually lying in 2002, when as a Stanford law professor he wrote to the president of another university on behalf of a campaign donor. And now, nearly a decade later, his memory is too foggy to accurately recall the lies that he once put in writing.

Even if you were totally to set aside his problems with al-Arian, however, it still wouldn’t explain away Campbell’s other associations. Just to review some of what I’ve already reported:

– In 2000, Campbell publicly defended Abdurahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council and refused to return contributions from him, even though both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton rejected donations from Alamoudi, and even after the community leader was caught on video rallying support for Hamas and Hezbollah. In 2004, Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in prison on terrorism-related charges.

– On a trip to the West Bank and Gaza while Congressman, Campbell bumped his head on a taxi door and recalled receiving a phone call from Yasser Arafat in which he chummily told the terrorist leader, “This makes me the first American to have shed blood in your country.”

– In 2000, an invitation to a Campbell fundraiser touted his votes to cut aid to Israel (the same votes he’s now claiming are being misrepresented to portray him as anti-Israel). Clinton rejected donations from the group.

– One month after the September 11 attacks, Tom Campbell accepted a lifetime achievement award from Muslim leader Agha Saeed at a conference in which speakers cited poverty and U.S. policy toward Israel as the “root causes” of terrorism. Clinton was forced to return donations from the group in 2000, but Campbell stood by it.

Again, perhaps any one of these single cases could be explained away for those who want to be charitable. But when there’s such a consistent pattern over a number of years, it becomes much more difficult to reconcile the old Campbell with the current Campbell who is trying to portray himself as a pro-Israel national security hawk while seeking the Republican nomination. And it makes it even harder to give Campbell the benefit of the doubt when he continues to be dishonest and his explanations are constantly evolving.

Matt Welch–Reason Magazine

Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address, Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a “pre-emptive fact check” that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have “stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.” As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

In fact, more than 40 former lobbyists work in the administration, including such policy makers as Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn (who was lobbying for Raytheon as recently as 2008), Office of the First Lady Director of Policy and Projects Jocelyn Frye (National Partnership for Women and Families), White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz (National Council of La Raza), and Treasury Secretary Chief of Staff Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs). 

When Carney confronted a White House spokeswoman with the falsehood, she conceded nothing. “As the President said,” she wrote, “we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions.” Just not all of them. 

As such defiance suggests, this was no isolated slip of the tongue. The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a “new era” of Washington “responsibility,” routinely says things that aren’t true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises. When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies, Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to “explain” things “more clearly to the American people.”

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that “our approach” to health care reform “would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats’ “approach” to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the “doc fix.” The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually “would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to current law, an increment that would grow in subsequent years.” This is why House Democrats stripped out the doc fix from the health care bill, and passed it separately; it made the CBO scores look bad, making it harder for the president to present bogus claims about deficit neutrality.

That bit of mendacity only scratches the surface of how Congress and the administration gamed the system to produce nice-looking numbers. The CBO, by its own rules, has to take Congress at its word when a piece of legislation promises unspecified future “cuts” in spending, even though an overwhelming majority of promised future cuts never come to pass (a fact that the CBO itself has repeatedly warned in supplementary comments). The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

Even when addressing black-and-white examples of broken promises —such as his vow to televise each and every bit of health care legislative negotiations on C-SPAN—Obama can’t quite resist the temptation to plead gray. When confronted directly on the broken C-SPAN pledge during a January meeting with GOP lawmakers, the president said: “Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process—just over the course of the year—overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating.”

Presidential defiance, dissembling, and disinformation are nothing new, even if such political perennials are more disappointing coming from someone who still boasts (as he did in the State of the Union address) of “telling hard truths” to the American people and “doing what’s best for the next generation.” Voters pretty much knew that Bill Clinton was a slime ball when they sent him to the White House; Barack Obama held out the promise of being more dignified.

The difference between these two most recent Democratic presidents, substantial to begin with (especially in the crucial area of economic policy), may come into sharper relief in 2010. Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

And yet it smacks of something worse still. When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough “explanations” from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism. And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology. With those two factors as backdrop, it’s hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn’t really believe what he said, or if he did.

By Richard A. Serrano–LA Times

Reporting from Washington – Nine top political appointees at the Justice Department previously worked as lawyers or advocates for “enemy combatants” confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompting new questions from Congress and conservative critics about the integrity of the administration’s handling of detainees.

The Justice Department insists that the officials have not involved themselves in matters dealing with enemy combatants. But the department has revealed the names of only two of the nine appointees, making it difficult to independently assess the claim. And one of the named officials — Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer in the national security division — sits on a task force weighing the future of Guantanamo prisoners. She is a former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, which worked on behalf of ensuring constitutional rights for detainees during the George W. Bush presidency.

The other named official is Neal Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and won a 2006 ruling that Bush’s military tribunal system violated the rules of military justice and the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, later was released and returned to Yemen.

According to congressional sources, one of the other seven appointees is Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the civil division. In 2002, he was part of the California-based legal team that represented John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

These kinds of backgrounds and connections “raise serious questions about who is providing advice on detainee matters,” a group of Republican senators told Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. last week.

One of the sharpest critics is a group called Keep America Safe, run in part by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. It has derided the unidentified appointees as the “Al Qaeda 7,” and in a video on its website Tuesday asked, “Whose values do they share?”

In a Feb. 18 letter to the senators, Ronald Welch, an assistant attorney general, said five Justice Department lawyers provided legal counsel to detainees and four filed friend-of-the-court legal papers on behalf of detainees or advocated on their behalf. He identified them only as working in Holder’s office, for the deputy attorney general and in other top positions at the department.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Welch wrote, “during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Others, he said, “came to the department from law firms where other lawyers represented detainees.”

In naming Katyal and Daskal, Welch said both appointees had been careful not to overstep rules governing professional conduct.

He said Katyal, after joining the Justice Department, had “participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He said Katyal also has participated in litigation involving Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois and accused of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell agent.

Welch said Daskal had “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” but that “her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations.”

In referring to all of the political appointees, Welch said that none “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

In addition, Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that “department attorneys are subject to ethics and disclosure rules as required under both department guidelines and the administration’s own ethics rules, which are the strongest in history.” She added that “it should be clear that fighting terrorism and keeping the American people safe is our No. 1 priority.”

Nevertheless, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the Justice Department had not given a full accounting of who and how many top appointees might have conflicts.

Sessions said the issue was whether “the attorney general believes that treating terrorists like civilians enhances or damages our ability to gather crucial intelligence.” He said that issue could not be answered until the other seven names were released.

“It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sessions said.

Newsmax

Former Vice President Al Gore admits that mistakes have been made by the scientific community regarding the issue of climate change.

In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Gore said: “It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.”

Gore states that it’s unrealistic to expect scientific research to be 100 percent error-free. And he says the errors have not changed the consensus opinion of the scientific community on climate change.

He also states in the Times that:

• January was the second-hottest January in 130 years, globally speaking.
• The last decade has been the hottest 10 years since records were first kept.
• Warmer temps have been increasing ocean evaporation.

Gore ends his article by urging the Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill that will be introduced later this week by Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.

——————————————————

Related:Stop Al Gore Before He Lies Again..and Again…and Again!

The New York Times once again is Al Gore’s “enabler”, publishing a February 28 opinion editorial, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change”, despite the mounting evidence that global warming was and is a complete fabrication.

In November 2009, the Telegraph, a British newspaper, carried a story, “Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire”, so let us disabuse ourselves of the notion that Gore just wants to save the world.

Heavily invested in the “carbon credits” scam and technologies whose success depend on people believing fairy tales about “clean energy” alternatives such as wind and solar energy, Gore has enriched himself by trumpeting the biggest hoax of the modern era.

It is no surprise that The New York Times published his latest collection of lies. The reportorial record of the Times has been decades of lies about global warming. Whatever patina of respectability it once had has been eroded by its participation in the fraud. Why should it stop now?

There is increasing discussion of whether testimony before Congress by Gore and other global warming advocates constitute criminal behavior that begins with lying under oath.

On February 24th The Washington Times reported on a hearing of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. “Republican James Inhofe told EPA head, Lisa Jackson, that man-made climate change was a ‘hoax’ concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who ‘cooked the science.’”

“More than that, Inhofe in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast criminal enterprise designed to bilk governments, taxpayers and investors while enriching those making the false claims.”

The global warming hoax has been sustained for decades by reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) an agency of the United Nations Environmental Program. It is responsible for the Kyoto Protocol that required signature nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases said to be trapping heat. In July 1997 a unanimous Senate resolution rejected the Protocol.

Key players, the scientists who controlled and provided the data to support global warming, Phil Jones, head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, are just two currently under investigation for alledgely deliberately providing and publishing falsified climate data.

Based on thousands of emails leaked last year, it is clear they and others engaged in an effort to suppress any dissenting data from being published in peer-reviewed science journals.

Does that deter Al Gore? The very first paragraph of his opinion editorial claimed that the planet faces “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale preventative measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

He wrote this knowing that data from weather satellites have shown little warming trend of the atmosphere since 1979!

He wrote that “January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.” Rubbish. He based that on the claim of a single Australian scientist that came from the same garbage can of equally absurd claims put forth for decades.

In a similar fashion, IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers were melting and the countless other claims attributed to global warming were based on inaccurate, often deliberately distorted computer models and from dubious sources.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a leader in the effort to reveal the vast global warming fraud, on February 27 wrote that “this apparent (global warming) consensus misled not only the media and the public, but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC.”

Dr. Singer summed up the entire global warming hoax as based on “temperature data (that) had been manipulated.”

When you use bad data you get bad results. When you use it to enrich yourself, you are engaged in an activity worthy of a criminal investigation.

It was unworthy of The New York Times to lend itself to the continuing lies of Al Gore, but neither it is surprising since the credibility of this once respected newspaper has been trashed by its appalling biases and a succession of reporters who have been found to be plagiarists and fantasists.

About the only thing left in which a reader can put any confidence is the date under the Times banner each day.

WASHINGTON – The Associated Press has learned that the House ethics committee has concluded that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel knowingly accepted Caribbean trips in violation of House rules that forbid hidden financing by corporations.

A congressional source familiar with the findings but not authorized to be quoted by name said at least four of members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the trips in 2007 and 2008 have been exonerated.

Rangel is one of the most influential members of Congress because the committee he chairs writes laws setting tax rates and oversees Medicare and Social Security benefits. The decision is certain to raise questions whether he can continue that role in an election year in which Congress must deal with several expiring tax laws.

Source

(CNSNews.com) - President Obama presented a new health care plan on Monday that calls for raising the Medicare payroll tax on some households earning less than $250,000, an apparent breach of his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on families earning less than that amount. The president’s plan also calls for increasing taxes on interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents.
 
In a Sept. 12, 2008 campaign speech in Dover, N.H, Obama said: “And I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase—not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your  taxes.”
 
But the new health care plan released in summary form yesterday by the White House specifically calls for increasing the Medicare payroll tax on “households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.”
 
Unless President Obama is prepared to say that the only type of “family” that qualifies as a “family” under his tax pledge is one that is formed around a ”married couple filing jointly,” then his new health care proposal violates his 2008 tax pledge on its face. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, makes clear that the “head of household” tax filing status is for “unmarried” taxpayers. A definition of the term “head of household” on the IRS Web site says: “Generally, you may claim head of household filing status on your tax return only if you are unmarried and pay more than 50% of the costs of keeping up a home for yourself and your dependent(s) or other qualifying individuals.”
 
The White House posted the president’s tax increase proposal as part of the summary of the new health-care reform bill he is proposing.
 
“Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary of Title IX of the president’s proposal. “The Act will include an additional 0.9 percentage point Hospital Insurance tax for households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. In addition, it would add a 2.9 percent tax for such high-income households to unearned income including interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents (excluding income from active participation in S corporations).”
 
Last August, after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers appeared on Sunday talk shows and seemed to float the possibility that Obama would violate his campaign promise by raising taxes on people earning less than $250,000, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs repeatedly and emphatically said that they president had made a commitment not to do so. At that time, Gibbs did not speak of the president’s tax pledge as if it applied only to “families,” but said the president had made a commitment not to raise taxes on “those making less than $250,000 a year.”
 
“Let me be precise: The president’s clear commitment is not to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000 a year,” Gibbs said at the Aug. 3 White House press briefing.
 
When reporters pressed him on the issue, Gibbs said: “I am reiterating the president’s clear commitment in the clearest terms possible, that he’s not raising taxes on those who make less than $250,000 a year.”