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| 5/23 |
| 2013/2/18-3/26 [Politics/Domestic/Election, Politics/Domestic/SIG] UID:54608 Activity:nil |
2/18 F U NRA:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/auazy6g (Sandy Hook Truthers)
\_ http://preview.tinyurl.com/bqreg8d
This shit makes me weep for America.
\_ I didn't see any mention of the NRA on that page. Did you mean "FU
Crazy Conspiracy Theorists?" Or do you have this really great
theory about how this set of nuts is really a front for the NRA?
\_ The NRA has been encouraging the lunatic fringe for a while now:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ac369ay
\_ And the only thing in *that* article that even attempts to
connect the NRA to conspiracy theorists is the speculation
that Operation Fast and Furious might have been an
*intentional* colossal fuckup on the government's part. Do
you have anything better? You realize that Fast and Furious
was all about government employees violating just about every
gun control law we've got on the books, right?
\_ Look the NRA has been trying to stoke insane conspiracy
amongst its members for years. I am amazed you would try
to defend crap like this:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/7udytxw
You are deluded about Fast and Furious as well.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/7k2gzq5
- Former NRA member, will never give them anther dime.
\_ Okay, so the official investigation into Fast and
Furious is a sham, but the *other side* are
encouraging conspiracy theorists? Here's a link to
what that investigation (by the House Committe on
Oversight & Government Reform) did the day after that
article came out:
http://issues.oversight.house.gov/fastandfurious/votes.html
They voted to hold your chief boy scout in contempt of
Congress for obstructing their investigation.
\_ There is a good reason that the House Republicans
have an approval rating of 15%.
\_ Oh, be fair. The approval ratings are piss poor
for *all* of Congress, not just one side of the
aisle.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/160625/congress-approval-holding-steady.aspx
Gallup suggests the republicans are a few points
lower, and the Democrats a few points higher,
averaging out to 15% for all of them. Here's a
few more polls:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/congressional_job_approval-903.html
Everyone hates Congress.
\_ Perhaps, but the POTUs doesn't have those kinds of
approval ratings. So maybe the chief boy scout is
doing the right thing. He is certainly more popular.
It takes a special kind of crazy to be a House
Republican these days.
\_ Perhaps, but the POTUs doesn't have those kind
of approval ratings. So maybe the chief boy
scout is doing the right thing. He is certainly
more popular. It takes a special kind of crazy
to be a House Republican these days.
\_ I was referring to Attorney General Eric
Holder, not Obama. Try to keep up.
\_ I believe that the AG is part of the
Executive Branch of government. If you
have AG opinion polls, please do share.
\_ The IRS is also part of the executive
branch. Do you believe that Obama's
approval ratings are also an analog
for public opinion of the IRS?
\_ Good point. There is this:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6rw5b49
Only 56% have even heard of F&F
and only 43% of them believe that
Congress is actually trying to do
anything other than play politics.
So about 25% think it is a good
thing. Being held in contempt of
Congress probably made Holter
more popular, if anything, given
the extremelely low approval of
Congress. |
| 5/23 |
|
| preview.tinyurl.com/auazy6g -> sandyhookhoax.blogspot.com/2013/01/did-this-shooting-really-happen-or-this.html How many US Senators hold a foreign passport and have SWORN AN OATH OF ALLEGIANCE to a FOREIGN NATION? The Mayors of both New York and Chicago are also Foreign Nationals. Most of the elected officials who seek to disarm America are also either actual passport holding citizens of that foreign nation or are "eligible" for citizenship in that nation." Money is a means of exchanging the "value" of products and services. Money itself has no value - unless you use something valuable as money. For example, you could use useful objects such as automobiles as money. In such as case, you might say to someone, "Hey, if you build an addition onto my house - I will give you this automobile." J** money is not merely a means of exchanging the "value" of products and services. In the above example, an automobile is being used as money in a transaction involving building an addition onto a house. So how about if initially the homeowner who is offering the automobile as money shows the carpenter a brand new car and promises it in trade for the carpentry work. J**S CONTROL THE VALUE OF J** MONEY Your dollar is jew money. The j** can change the size of your cup of value at will by employing several different methods. But first, you need to understand what they are doing and how they are doing it. This group has infected most nations and operate within those nations ----all for the benefit of "their" nation. Their primary weapon is control of your monetary system. From there, they bribe control of your government and they "own" your mass media. The Mayors of both New York and Chicago are also Foreign Nationals. Most of the elected officials who seek to disarm America are also either actual passport holding citizens of that foreign nation or are "eligible" for citizenship in that nation." What connection does any of this have to the banking system and its role as your shadow government? Home Recent Comments x Disclaimer READ ME BEFORE WATCHING OR READING ARTICLES before you view this site and its content let me make one thing clear. I in no way claim this shooting never took place, or that people did not lose their lives. All this site is a collection of evidence that points to deception. I apologize to anyone offended by this site, and our best wishses to anyone affected by this disaster. This in no way is intended to disrespect families, victims or anyone involved. The purpose of the site is to raise questions that you, the viewer can research and try to solve. Still no school surveillance Every time a school shooting takes place, one of the very first things that gets released to the media is the school surveillance footage ... Sandy Hook Hoax - Adam Lanza's Death Record States He Died 1 Day Before Sandy Hook Event (Dec 13, 2012) Adam P Lanza: Social Security Death Index (SSDI) Death Record Name: Adam P Lanza State of Issue: New Hampshire Date of Birth: Wednesday ... Sandy Hook Hoax - SANDY HOOK HOAX BLOWN TO PIECES - THE ACTORS, PUPPETS AND MOTIVES - GUN CONTROL AGENDA SCAM Whether you agree or disagree with the video, please try to add constructive comments/criticism to the discussion before you sta... Sandy Hook Hoax - Fake Woman's Daughter's Photo used for Sandy Hook Shooting Victim Allison Wyatt Sandy Hook Shooting Victim Allison Wyatt does not exist. Her photo was stolen from her mother Cathy Gaubert's Flickr page. Sandy Hook Hoax - Sandy Hook Hoax Video Going Viral One in particular is a 30-minute film, which at this point has been watched more than 8 million times, claiming that the shooting was a h.. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/bqreg8d -> gawker.com/5976204/behind-the-sandy-hook-truther-conspiracy-video-that-five-million-people-have-watched-in-one-week Behind the 'Sandy Hook Truther' Conspiracy Video That Five Eight Million People Have Watched in One Week Behind the 'Sandy Hook Truther' Conspiracy Video That Five Eight Million People Have Watched in One Week "This is a simple, logical video," the text on the screen reads. "No aliens, holigrams, rituals or anything like that, just facts." "New information comes up every single days, so by the time you see this video there may be a lot more evidence that has come to light." You're watching "The Sandy Hook Shooting - Fully Exposed," the most comprehensive summary of the bizarre "Sandy Hook Truther" movement you can find on the internet. It's also the most popular: in the seven days since it was posted, it's racked up 55 million hits. honestly would have spent more time on it if I had known it would explode," the guy who created the video told me. It only took a few days after Adam Lanza opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School for conspiracy theories to pop up on the internet. We covered a bunch of them at the time, each less likely than the last: Lanza's father was due to testify in hearings about a banking scandal, and the shooting was a distraction; Obama orchestrated the shootings to enact gun control laws; The Dark Knight Returns and/or Hunger Games predicted the shooting. As it turns out, the one that stuck was maybe the most unlikely of all: the Sandy Hook elementary shooting never happened at all. Or, that it did, in some way, but not as it was reported -- there was more than one shooter, or not as many children died, or the parents we saw on television were actors. Over the last month or so, the "Sandy Hook Truther" movement has taken hold in the usual channels of internet conspiracy -- sites like InfoWars and Natural News, message boards like Godlike Productions and Above Top Secret, and most importantly, on YouTube, where self-produced mini-documentaries like "The Sandy Hook Shooting - Fully Exposed" can make the leap from obscurity to viral success without any mainstream coverage at all. Once I learned about all the false flag attacks in history that have been proven to be true, I knew it was only a matter of time before another came a long." The "false flag attack," in which the true belligerents of an attack conceal their identities, is a common trope among conspiracy theorists, especially 9/11 Truthers, who believe the US government (or another actor) destroyed the Twin Towers and pinned the attacks on Al Qaeda. While there are plenty of documented false flag attacks in history -- all fervently cited by 9/11 true believers -- they tend to be regarded by conspiracists as the rule and not the exception. Spend enough time in the YouTube conspiracy dregs and you see them everywhere. "I just had this feeling deep down that these people and the whole town had this artificial vibe about them." com, the premiere Sandy Hook Truther site on the web, has an entire section called "All Actors," under an enormous header reading "NO TEARS," devoted to videos of families deemed insufficiently grief-stricken. TV's video accompanied by the caption: "FUN FACT: Gene is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, look it up!" There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the "emotional Jewish guy," and dozens of blog posts and videos "exposing" him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: "How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the shooting'. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov't sponsored hoax anyway?" The idea that the US government is somehow behind the shooting is widespread. thinks that the operation may have been a cover-up for the murder of Adam Lanza's mother, who "was costing his dad a lot of money": "Peter Lanza is reportedly an executive with GE, which is locally into genetic research and closely tied to the Obama regime." was killed, and that is an impossibility, that such a thing would be randomly falsely reported. So, there has to be an unseen hand (unnamed law enforcement officials) feeding disinformation and misinformation, maybe to form an incomprehensible web to dissuade or confuse investigations?" There's an odd but unsurprising overdetermination to this line of thought -- if early reports are conflicting, it's evidence of a conspiracy of misinformation; But mostly Johnson sticks to I'm-just-asking: the conspiracy is "offered as food for thought." "I really try to stress this video was about putting together a bunch of evidence and raising questions that others could research and answer," he wrote. "I never intended to expose who was behind it because I dont know, and I could be wrong. But history repeats itself and i'm really glad people are waking up to it. People seem to mistake my video for exploitation of victims and children and that is totally wrong. As I said in the beginning of the video, we in no way claim this shooting did not take place and our hearts go out to anyone affected by the tragedy, weather one person was responsible or another. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/ac369ay -> www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/01/sandy_hook_truthers_the_nra_has_actively_encouraged_the_paranoid_fears_of.html "I was watching some controversial stuff on YouTube about the sandy hooks thing today!" Advertisement Anybody paying attention to the dark corners of the Internet--ie, most of the Internet--knew what Span was watching. in my first piece for Slate, I profiled the "birther" activists who were petitioning to overturn Barack Obama's victory, because they thought he was born in Kenya. I naively expected the birthers to lose their cases and move on. watched the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party transform the state's Electoral College vote into a gripefest about Barack Obama's troubling birth certificate. But the Sandy Hook "truther" movement isn't quite like birtherism, or like vintage 9/11 trutherism. Birtherism mushroomed when conservatives got desperate about ousting Obama. Sandy Hook is moving public opinion like no massacre since Virginia Tech--and its truther movement, naturally, is growing faster. Every shooting that involves a mentally ill loner invites speculation that the loner was programmed by the government. a recent boost from CNN's Piers Morgan, asked readers to consider the shooter's "work as a graduate student in a government-funded neuroscience program that specifically researched altered perception of time and reality." led to a theory that "black ops" were behind the shooting. The viral Sandy Hook video is just an unusually good example. It begins with hasty interviews from the day of the massacre, men-on-the-street spreading rumors that led the news but were debunked and would have been forgotten without the magic of online video. Gene Rosen, a senior citizen who comforted kids fleeing the school, is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, faking the whole thing. He's awfully compelling, and someone named "Gene Rosen" is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Other Sandy Hook truthers have "proved" that Emilie Parker, a 6-year old victim at the school, is still alive. They spread in part because of the confirmation bias of worried gun owners. And that's actually been egged on, multiple times, by the National Rifle Association. The gun lobby might be the only credible group, with real clout, with the ability to bring presidential candidates to its conferences, to endorse the idea that the government would engage in a "false flag" operation. In 2011, as the Republican House of Representatives dug in on the "Fast and Furious" investigation, the NRA's professional flak magnet Wayne LaPierre speculated that the Feds planned the debacle, to build momentum for gun control. The idea that the government is one short step away from a gun ban is actually integral to the lobby's pitch. It's implicit when the lobby brags about ammo sales at gun shows or AR-15s disappearing from the shelves. And give the NRA this: It's not entirely wrong about the momentum of politics. At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre warned that the first-term Obama administration's "lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." "We see the president's strategy crystal clear," said LaPierre. "Get re-elected and, with no more elections to worry about, get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms' freedom, erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the US Constitution." There is no posse of New Black Panthers burning copies of the Constitution. But the fact that Obama responded to Sandy Hook at all validates LaPierre's fears, and he's said so. Why would anyone be surprised when that paranoia grows into a full-on conspiracy theory? MySlate is a new tool that lets you track your favorite parts of Slate. You can follow authors and sections, track comment threads you're interested in, and more. Discover Slate With Your Friends See what your friends are reading and automatically share how you're browsing Slate. You control what gets published to your Facebook News Feed. Feedback < newer | older > To temporarily turn off Social Reading, toggle the social reading button to OFF at the top of this box or in the toolbar areas of this page. This will allow you to see what your friends have read but won't show your reading activity on Slate. By Emily Yoffe | February 19, 2013 * 3 The Vicious, Senseless Abomination of Reclining Seats on Airlines By Dan Kois | February 19, 2013 * 4 I Was a Mean Girl By Carly Pifer | February 19, 2013 * 5 Help! By Emily Yoffe | February 18, 2013 * 1 The Vicious, Senseless Abomination of Reclining Seats on Airlines By Dan Kois | February 19, 2013 * 2 Burger King Gets 30% More Followers After Twitter Hack By Daniel Politi | February 18, 2013 * 3 Help! By Emily Yoffe | February 19, 2013 * 4 What Do Grown Children Owe Their Terrible, Abusive Parents? What Mitt Romney Can Teach Marco Rubio If the young senator from Florida is going to lead the GOP, he could actually learn a few things from the failed presidential candidate. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/7udytxw -> tinyurl.com/7udytxw Obama's Secret Plan To Destroy The Second Amendment By 2016 cover story visual by Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President If you want a glimpse of a genuine nightmare for America, just look at what's headed our way. It's a very real, very dangerous conspiracy of public deception intended to destroy your Right to Keep and Bear Arms. And it'll succeed unless you recognize it, understand it, and take action now to stop it. The best way you could do so is by carrying your new 2012 membership card (see sidebar story on page 29) in your wallet as a symbol of your commitment--and by renewing or upgrading your NRA membership or making a contribution to defending freedom today. But first, let me give you the facts, evidence, congressional testimony and documented words and deeds that reveal the frightening but irrefutable truth about this sinister plot. Over the past three years, the Obama administration and its anti-gun allies have been engaged in a silent but sophisticated long-term conspiracy to: 1 Neutralize gun owners and NRA voters as a political force in national elections, and thereby: 2 Win re-election to a second term in the White House, where they then will be immune to the will of voters and free to continue consolidating and misusing their ever-increasing power to: 3 Prosecute a full-scale, sustained, all-out campaign to excise the Second Amendment from our Bill of Rights through legislation, litigation, regulation, executive orders, judicial fiat, international treaties--in short, all the levers of power of all three branches of government. And the key to their success lies in keeping gun owners like you in the dark. Obama White House Pushes Gun Control "Under the Radar" Now, President Obama, his administration and his anti-gun allies in the media have tried to shrug off, laugh off, shout down or shut down anyone who dares to investigate their clandestine, back-channel anti-gun activities. They'll spout platitudes about protecting sportsmen and hunters. They'll insist they've done nothing to attack your right to own a gun. They'll even claim to have strengthened your rights, by restoring your right to transport firearms in luggage aboard Amtrak trains, or possess firearms in national parks. But that's just a diversion to distract you from their true beliefs and objectives. Think about it: Before moving into the White House, Barack Obama spent his entire career proudly, publicly advancing the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. He endorsed a total ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. He voted to ban nearly all common hunting-rifle ammunition. In short, Obama never met a gun he liked, and never met a gun ban he didn't like. The same was true of his running mate, then US Senator Joe Biden, D-Del. In fact, during presidential primary debates, Obama and Biden competed to be the most anti-gun candidate in the race. Obama vowed to re-impose the discredited Clinton gun ban, and Biden bragged that, "I'm the guy that originally wrote the assault weapons ban." Did Obama, Biden and the anti-gun extremists who soon filled the West Wing suddenly completely reverse their positions? In an act of pure political calculation, they plotted to keep their gun-ban objectives concealed. After all, Obama knew what happened in 1994, when the politicians who voted for Bill Clinton's gun ban were swept out of Congress. Even Clinton admitted the nra was the reason Democrats lost their 40-year lock on control of the House of Representatives. Obama saw what happened in 2000, when Al Gore built his campaign on the platform of gun control, and watched as the nra derailed Gore in the battleground states of Arkansas, West Virginia and even his home state of Tennessee--costing him the White House. Obama saw how gun control was a loser--and NRA the winner--in election after election. So his administration concocted a scheme to avoid the gun issue, lull gun owners into a false sense of security, and play us for fools in the 2012 election. For the past three years, that's exactly what they've tried to do. But while they've rarely revealed their true agenda in public, in private they've remained true to their unchanged, if unspoken, ultimate objectives. Ask Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, D-NY Before Obama's inauguration, she pressured Obama's transition team to back her ban on ammunition magazines. But, as she later confided to Newsweek, "They told me that's not for now, that's for later." Since then, the White House has maintained almost military discipline in its "don't talk about gun control" directive. Whenever anyone breaks rank on that issue, they're quickly brought back to toe the line. gov--that listed several anti-gun objectives as priorities, including: Permanently re-imposing the Clinton gun bans Opening up sensitive BATFE gun "trace" data for manipulation by anti-gun politicians Imposing restrictions that would severely restrict gun shows You can bet some webmaster lost his job over that mis-step, because within days the web page, and its anti-gun agenda items, disappeared into cyberspace. Even Attorney General Eric Holder departed from the company line. In his first month on the job, at a news conference in Mexico City, Holder said, "As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons." The phone lines must have been on fire between Washington and Mexico City that day, because Holder didn't mention that plan again. But that doesn't mean that Holder and the White House aren't planning and plotting, behind closed doors, to launch a massive anti-gun onslaught when the time is right. Just this spring, gun-ban zealot US Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, told The Washington Post that Attorney General Holder had visited him on March 29 "and tried to give us his assurance to help us with legislation" that Lautenberg and McCarthy were pushing to ban ammunition magazines. According to Brady, as reported by the Post, President Obama told her, "I just want you to know that we are working on it," and "We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar." The Obama conspiracy might be trying to run this operation "under the radar." But even the steps they've taken so far clearly indicate--and concretely support--the all-out war on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms that they positively plan for their second term. Prelude to War on Second Amendment Freedom For proof, just look at the Justice Department's clandestine and deadly conspiracy in the "Fast and Furious" scandal. The only plausible explanation for "Fast and Furious" is that they wanted to somehow "prove" the administration's false and fraudulent claims that--to quote President Obama--"more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States." So the Justice Department and BATFE appear to have secretly conspired to allow, encourage and assist an illegal gun smuggling operation--even spending your tax dollars to buy guns for the drug cartels--knowing full well that thousands of guns were heading straight to the most violent criminals on both sides of the border. The "Fast and Furious" operation might have remained a secret if it hadn't led to the murder of one federal officer--US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, where "Fast and Furious" guns were found at the scene of that murder--and possibly many violent crimes both in the US and Mexico. As I'm sure you know, two congressional investigations into this criminal conspiracy have been under way for most of the year. Yet so far, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have done nothing but shrug their shoulders, shirk responsibility and stonewall the investigations at every turn, as if Americans shouldn't care that a massive criminal enterprise seems to have been run right out of our own Justice Department, just to set the stage for a future Obama gun ban. Its mission is to deliver professional, compelling, accurate, timely and hard-hitting journalism that tells the truth about the threats to our Second Amendment rights. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/7k2gzq5 -> features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/ comments The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal June 27, 2012: 5:00 AM ET A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust. dave voth Dave Voth, Fast and Furious supervisor for the ATF FORTUNE -- In the annals of impossible assignments, Dave Voth's ranked high. In 2009 the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives promoted Voth to lead Phoenix Group VII, one of seven new ATF groups along the Southwest border tasked with stopping guns from being trafficked into Mexico's vicious drug war. The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the US into Mexico. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking within the US, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one. Strapping and sandy-haired, the former Marine is cool-headed and punctilious to a fault. In 2009 the ATF named him outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis. He was the "hardest working federal agent I've come across," says John Biederman, a sergeant with the Minneapolis Police Department. But as Voth left to become the group supervisor of Phoenix Group VII, a friend warned him: "You're destined to fail." Voth's mandate was to stop gun traffickers in Arizona, the state ranked by the gun-control advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence as having the nation's "weakest gun violence prevention laws." Just 200 miles from Mexico, which prohibits gun sales, the Phoenix area is home to 853 federally licensed firearms dealers. Billboards advertise volume discounts for multiple purchases. Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. "In Arizona," says Voth, "someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich." By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others. By June 2010 the agents had sent the US Attorney's office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect. The attackers fled, leaving behind two semiautomatic rifles. A trace of the guns' serial numbers revealed that the weapons had been purchased 11 months earlier at a Phoenix-area gun store by a Fast and Furious suspect. Ten weeks later, an ATF agent named John Dodson, whom Voth had supervised, made startling allegations on the CBS Evening News. He charged that his supervisors had intentionally allowed American firearms to be trafficked--a tactic known as "walking guns"--to Mexican drug cartels. Dodson claimed that supervisors repeatedly ordered him not to seize weapons because they wanted to track the guns into the hands of criminal ringleaders. The program showed internal e-mails from Voth, which purportedly revealed agents locked in a dispute over the deadly strategy. The guns permitted to flow to criminals, the program charged, played a role in Terry's death. After the CBS broadcast, Fast and Furious erupted as a major scandal for the Obama administration. The story has become a fixture on Fox News and the subject of numerous reports in media outlets from CNN to the New York Times. The furor has prompted repeated congressional hearings--with US Attorney General Eric Holder testifying multiple times--dueling reports from congressional committees, and an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general. It has led to the resignations of the acting ATF chief, the US Attorney in Arizona, and his chief criminal prosecutor. "Who authorized this program that was so felony stupid that it got people killed?" He has charged the Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, with having "blood on their hands." Issa and more than 100 other Republican members of Congress have demanded Holder's resignation. The conflict has escalated dramatically in the past ten days. On June 20, in a day of political brinkmanship, Issa's committee voted along party lines, 23 to 17, to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for allegedly failing to turn over certain subpoenaed documents, which the Justice Department contended could not be released because they related to ongoing criminal investigations. The vote came hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege to block the release of the documents. Holder now faces a vote by the full House of Representatives this week on the contempt motion (though negotiations over the documents continue). Assuming a vote occurs, it will be the first against an attorney general in US history. As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that "the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again." Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn. Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time. How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. How data could save cities from outgrowing themselves "Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee. The ATF's accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn't actually exist. "Terry w... |
| issues.oversight.house.gov/fastandfurious/votes.html Passed 254-173, Reported as Amended to Full US House of Representatives Rep. Yarmuth TOTAL = 173 NEAS WHAT Oversight Committee Vote on Holder Contempt Report WHEN June 20, 2012 OUTCOME Passed 23-17, Reported as Amended to Full US House of Representatives Chairman Darrell Issa Rep. Mike Kelly TOTAL = 23 YEAS Ranking Member Elijah Cummings Rep. Jackie Speier TOTAL = 17 NAYS WHAT Oversight Committee Vote on Gowdy Executive Privilege Amendment WHEN June 20, 2012 OUTCOME Passed 23-17 Chairman Darrell Issa Rep. Mike Kelly TOTAL = 23 YEAS Ranking Member Elijah Cummings Rep. |
| www.gallup.com/poll/160625/congress-approval-holding-steady.aspx E-mail * * SHARE February 19, 2013 Congress Approval Holding Steady at 15% Up one point from January, but at the low end of the historical spectrum by Frank Newport PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans' approval of Congress is at 15% in February, one percentage point higher than in January and exactly matching the 15% average for all of 2012. More than eight in 10 Americans (81%) disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job. gif Congress' current 15% approval rating is up slightly from the all-time low of 10% recorded in February and August 2012. Just before the presidential election last year, approval increased to 21% in October, but then fell to 18% in November and December and has been lower still, at 14% and 15%, over the first two months of this year. Congressional job approval continues to be at the low end of the historical spectrum. The February reading of 15% matches last year's average, which was the lowest yearly average in Gallup's history extending back to 1974. More broadly, Americans' approval of Congress has been low for several years now, averaging 17% in 2011 and 19% in 2010. Approval spiked to 30% in 2009, reflecting a rally that accompanied President Barack Obama's first year in office, but was at 19% in 2008. Prior to that, yearly congressional job approval averages were more positive, averaging 25% or higher for each year extending back to 1994. The record-high yearly averages for congressional job approval were 56% in 2001 and 54% in 2002, reflecting a rally effect that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Democrats Remain Slightly More Positive Republicans' approval ratings of Congress edged up to 12% from 6% in January, while Democrats' ratings also were up slightly, from 15% to 19%. Independents' ratings, on the other hand, were slightly down, from 17% to 14%. Republicans have generally been at least slightly less approving of Congress than the other two groups since last summer, but the partisan groups have generally rated Congress similarly since it came under divided control in 2011. Prior to 2011, when Democrats held control of both houses, Democrats across the country were significantly more positive about Congress than either independents or Republicans. gif Implications The overall average for congressional job approval since Gallup began measuring it almost 40 years ago is 33%, meaning that Congress' image is in significantly worse shape now than it has been throughout most of the last four decades. This may in part reflect the difference between rating an institution versus rating a particular person; no doubt many Americans would rate their individual representative in Congress higher than they would rate Congress overall. Still, the disparity may give Obama the upper hand when it comes to generating public support on various policy issues and laws where congressional leaders and the president disagree. Congress currently faces many difficult issues, including the looming sequestration of federal spending funds, the need for a new federal budget and spending bill, pressures to pass new gun control and immigration legislation, and continuing efforts to reconcile vastly different perspectives on government spending more broadly. How Congress handles these issues will help determine if it can climb out of its very negative positioning in Americans' eyes anytime soon. Survey Methods Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Feb. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points. Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cellphones numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday. Samples are weighted to correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse, and double coverage of landline and cell users in the two sampling frames. They are also weighted to match the national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, population density, and phone status (cellphone only/landline only/both, cellphone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2012 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older US population. Phone status targets are based on the July-December 2011 National Health Interview Survey. Population density targets are based on the 2010 census. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls. maintains several registered and unregistered trademarks that include but may not be limited to: A8, Accountability Index, Business Impact Analysis, BE10, CE11, CE11 Accelerator, Clifton StrengthsExplorer, Clifton StrengthsFinder, Customer Engagement Index, Customer Engagement Management, Dr. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. These materials are provided for noncommercial, personal use only. Reproduction prohibited without the express permission of Gallup, Inc. |
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