WASHINGTON DC – Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to President Barack Obama, says she and the rest of the White House remain “very upbeat” despite the series of scandals that have engulfed the Obama administration in recent weeks.

“In any given day, our administration has about 2 million employees, and things happen,” Jarrett tells the Boston Globe. “We put in process procedures to make sure if there has been any wrongdoing, there will be appropriate consequences, and we will move on.”

Jarrett just wants to move on from the scandals. And, she says, the American people want these scandals not to serve as a distraction. (more…)

Hey, ya gotta give em’ props for honesty.  The Syrian “rebels” admit they are al-Qaeda, and the folks that met John McCain were only pitchmen – not commanders, and not representative of the real ideology behind uprising. 

(Via Time) . . . The reason for this night’s meeting, and indeed for the Libyans’ 10-day trip to southern Turkey and across the border into northern Syria, was to help the Libyans figure out how to get some of Libya’s vast and loose stockpiles of machine guns, artillery, ammunition and antiaircraft systems — leftovers amassed largely by snatching government stockpiles during their own successful military uprising against their late dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and from supplies donated to the Libyan rebels by the oil-rich Gulf nation of Qatar — to Assad’s opponents. […]

The Syrian men who sat radially around the beige couch in the Turkish hotel were keen to get their hands on some of that batch of weapons. But first, the Libyans wanted to know who the Syrians were exactly and which rebel group each represented. (more…)

Well it appears we now have TWO people in the media asking the “right” question.  Last week Chris Wallace, now Charles Krauthammer:

“I think there is a bigger story here that will in time come out. The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is what was the president doing in those eight hours. He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he never called the CIA Director, Who does he call? But five hours in he calls the Secretary of State. And after the phone call she releases a statement essentially about the video and how we denounce any intolerance. It looks as if the only phone call is to construct a cover story at a time when the last two Americans who died were still alive and fighting for their lives. There’s the scandal and that has to be uncovered.” (more…)

Not only is Oleg Atbashian an exceptional writer, as evidenced by this award winning essay on modern progs, but he’s also the artist behind the custom Brietbart Banner that tops our website.   He has a great blog “The Peoples Cube” – and his brilliant way of reflecting humor within the serious discussion posts is, well, just brilliant.

To preach tolerance and be so intolerant? To grieve for terror victims and justify terrorism? To stand up for workers and destroy their jobs? To march for peace and defend the militants? To denounce corruption and vote for the corrupt? To espouse non-violence and commit violent acts? To speak of liberties and promote government dictate? To bolster feminism and deride successful women? To cheer gays and aid the gay-bashers in the Middle East? To champion minorities as a group and hold them down as individuals? To care about the children and condemn them to intellectual mutilation? To denounce guns and hire armed bodyguards? To support the troops and side with their murderers? To demand love and be full of hate?

The Book of Progressive Chauvinism – There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins – equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds.

Elitists share the presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their souls for individual ambitions and achievements outside of what the government is giving them. Short of stating it explicitly, elitism implies that “the masses” are mindless, spiritless creatures without free will, always in need of the largesse of the state, and for their own good the state ought to nationalize the country’s resources in order to feed its subjects. (more…)

I was wondering when someone was going to pick up on this aspect of President Obama’s speech at National Defense University last Thursday.    POTUS was calling for “increased oversight” over drone use.   HIS drone use.

Glad to see the words and intent of the President did not escape at least one reporter, Brit Hume:

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume thinks it is very peculiar for President Barack Obama to call for executive power to be scaled back.

Hume noted on Fox News Sunday that Obama had “made generous use of” drone strikes.

“There’s an odd quality to this whole thing, and it is almost like he’s saying, with regard to the drone policy, ‘We need something to stop me before I kill again,’” he explained. “We can see that in his support on an unrelated matter on the shield law for journalists. He’s carried out these oversteps in pursuing journalists who are doing their job, and now he says ‘we need a shield law,’ as if to say we need a law to protect them from us.”

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Fox News reporter James Rosen’s personal email, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff reported Thursday.

The report places Holder at the center of one of the most controversial clashes between the press and the government in recent memory. The warrant he approved named Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in a leak investigation, causing many to warn that the Justice Department was potentially criminalizing journalism. The warrant also approved the tracking of Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, as well as his communications with his source, Stephen Kim. (more…)

First they came for Andrew Breitbart, and the legacy media did not care because they did not like Breitbart….  Then they came for Fox News, and the legacy media did not care because they do not like Fox;  Then they came for the Associated Press, and some inside the legacy media began to twitch……  Then they came for James Rosen…. and again, more twitching.  Now they come for CBS and Sharyl Attkisson…..  Soon the regime will have no-one left to expose their corruption.

WASHINGTON DC – CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson said on Tuesday that her personal and work computers have been “compromised” for over two years.

Attkisson told a local Philadelphia radio station that she has been working with investigators to discover the source of the activity.

“There has been an issue in my house and there has been an issue with my computers that’s gone on for quite a long time that we’re looking into,” she said. (more…)

WASHINGTON DC – House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights and will be hauled back to appear before his panel again.

The California Republican said Lerner’s Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination was voided when she gave an opening statement this morning denying any wrongdoing and professing pride in her government service. (more…)

WASHINGTON – A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was [is] scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday. (more…)

Seven months we’ve been waiting for someone, anyone, to ask the White House staff what was President Obama doing on the night the Benghazi attacks took place.    We have researched this on our own and have him tracked from 4pm to around 7:30pm (EST).  But after 7:30pm it is a total BLACKOUT – an unknown void of information.

Finally after seven MONTHS.  Chris Wallace asks White House Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, what was President Obama doing.  [Please watch this video clip in its entirety before continuing]

Of course Dan Pfeiffer pulls the familiar “what difference does it make” angle, with his claim that it is an “irrelevant fact“. (more…)