Tag Archives: citizen

Charts: How Foreign Firms Flood America With Guns—and Get Rich Doing It

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on April 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 1791, America’s founding fathers enacted a constitutional right to bear arms, in part to help citizen militias protect the homeland against foreign invaders. Some 300 years later, foreigners have become some of the Second Amendment’s biggest beneficiaries and shrillest advocates. The vast majority of the millions of guns we import each year—think Beretta, Glock, Taurus, and other name brands—come from countries with far stricter gun control laws than we have in the United States.

Every time another mass shooter unleashes a torrent of bullets in a school or theater, the world puzzles over America’s permissive approach to gun ownership. A story following up on the Sandy Hook massacre in Austria’s largest daily, Krone, noted the apparent link between “lax weapons laws” in the United States and our “high rate of gun killings, compared to other western nations.” But the newspaper didn’t mention how Austrian gun makers profit from and help perpetuate those lax weapons laws. In 2009, a whopping 67 percent of Austria’s gun exports went to the United States. Here’s the breakdown for our top 10 foreign suppliers.

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Charts: How Foreign Firms Flood America With Guns—and Get Rich Doing It

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Here Are the 7 Worst Things Antonin Scalia Has Said or Written About Homosexuality

by donkorleone842 Posted on March 26, 2013

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Justice Antonin Scalia has written that “it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings.” Judging by the things he has said in court or written in his legal opinions about gays and lesbians, he doesn’t really mean it.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over whether the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage are constitutional. Despite Scalia’s long public history of expressing revulsion and contempt for gays and lesbians, on the subject of whether people of the same sex should be allowed to marry, he is among the nine people whose opinions will really matter. Here are the lowlights of Scalia’s anti-gay comments:

“Flagpole Sitting”

What’s a little frat-boy humor between justices? In 2003, during oral arguments in Lawrence v. Texas, the case challenging a Texas law that criminalized homosexual sex, Scalia came up with a tasteless analogy to illustrate the issue. “Suppose all the States had laws against flagpole sitting at one time, you know, there was a time when it was a popular thing and probably annoyed a lot of communities, and then almost all of them repealed those laws,” Scalia asked the attorney fighting the Texas law. “Does that make flagpole sitting a fundamental right?”

Let’s throw gay people in jail because some people don’t like them

In his dissent in Lawrence, Scalia argued that moral objections to homosexuality were sufficient justification for criminalizing gay sex. “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home,” he wrote. “They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.” Some people think obesity is immoral and destructive—perhaps New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg should have imprisoned people who drink sugary sodas rather than trying to limit the size of their cups.

Laws banning homosexual sex are like laws banning murder

In his dissent in the 1996 case Romer v. Evans, which challenged Colorado’s ban on any local jurisdictions outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, Scalia brought out an analogy that he’s used to attack liberals and supporters of LGBT rights for years since. “Of course it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings,” Scalia wrote, in the classic prebuttal phrasing of someone about to say something ludicrous. “But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct.” It’s true that people generally disapprove of murder, but there’s more going on in laws banning murder than mere disfavor—the rights of the person being murdered, for example.

…And like laws banning child pornography, incest and bestiality

Scalia decided to take the “moral disapproval” argument up a notch in his dissent in Lawrence, writing that the Texas ban on homosexual sex “undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable,'” like laws against “fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.” Scalia later tees up “prostitution” and “child pornography” as other things he thinks are banned simply because people disapprove of them.

Homosexual couples are like roommates

Not content to analogize laws singling out people on the basis of sexual orientation to laws banning murder, Scalia suggested in his dissent in Romer that the relationships of same-sex partners were comparable to those of roommates. “Colorado’s ban prohibits special treatment of homosexuals, and nothing more,” Scalia wrote. “It would prevent the State or any municipality from making death benefit payments to the ‘life partner’ of a homosexual when it does not make such payments to the long time roommate of a nonhomosexual employee.” Like his “flagpole sitting” comment, this remark goes far beyond the law in expressing Scalia’s basic animus towards same-sex couples, implying that what they experience together cannot even properly be considered love.

First they came for the Cubs haters…

Scalia’s dissent in Romer is a long lament over the supposed “special rights” being granted to people on the basis of sexual orientation. In one section, he complains that banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in hiring amounts to granting gays and lesbians special treatment that Republicans, adulterers, and Cubs haters don’t get. He writes “A job interviewer may refuse to offer a job because the applicant is a Republican; because he is an adulterer; because he went to the wrong prep school or belongs to the wrong country club; because he eats snails; because he is a womanizer; because she wears real animal fur; or even because he hates the Chicago Cubs.”

Have gays and lesbians tried NOT having homosexual sex?

During oral arguments in Lawrence, the attorney challenging the Texas law argued that it was “fundamentally illogical” for straight people to be able to have non-procreative sex without being harassed by the state while same-sex couples did not have the right to be “free from a law that says you can’t have any sexual intimacy at all.” But Scalia pointed out that gays and lesbians could just have sex with people of the opposite sex instead. “It doesn’t say you can’t have—you can’t have any sexual intimacy. It says you cannot have sexual intimacy with a person of the same sex.” Later on in his dissent, Scalia argued that Americans’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law wasn’t violated by the Texas law for that reason. “Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are all subject to Texas’ prohibition of deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex.” That should sound familiar: It’s the same argument defenders of bans on interracial marriage used to make, arguing that the bans were constitutional because they affected whites and blacks equally.

Scalia has been on a tear lately, calling the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement” and ripping into the president in a dissent on Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law in the middle of an election season. But when it comes to LGBT rights, he’s been off the rails for a long time.

Mother Jones
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Here Are the 7 Worst Things Antonin Scalia Has Said or Written About Homosexuality

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Poll: Most Americans Oppose Drone Strikes on Americans

by Grover Nusom Posted on March 25, 2013

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A new survey from Gallup shows Americans oppose the use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists who are Americans whether those Americans are on American soil or abroad. But Americans still overwhelmingly back strikes against suspected terrorists abroad who are not American.

Here are the results, which suggest the public debate over targeted killing is affecting perceptions of the policy:

The most surprising result may be that 25 percent of those surveyed are okay with using drone strikes to target non-citizen terror suspects in the US. Maybe they just really don’t like their neighbors?

Nevertheless, the premise of Gallup’s question remains flawed. Although most of the debate over targeted killing has focused on drones, the survey is of limited usefulness because it focuses on the method of killing rather than the authority to kill. As far as Americans are concerned, the question is really whether and under what circumstances the government has the authority to use lethal force and what the limits are on that authority.

Although the use of drone airstrikes in the United States remains a far-fetched hypothetical, the use of targeted killing abroad is not. Between 3000 and 5000 people have been killed in US drone strikes abroad, including many civilians. Based on what we know publicly, only four Americans have ever been killed in drone strikes. Yet the kind of strikes the US is overwhelmingly engaged in are so popular that the number of people who oppose them is similar to the number who think the government should be firing missiles at terror suspects inside the United States.

Correction: This post originally stated that three Americans have been killed in drone strikes. The correct number is four.

Mother Jones
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Poll: Most Americans Oppose Drone Strikes on Americans

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Wage Rules for Foreign Workers — A Followup

by Guadalupe Williams Posted on March 24, 2013

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Yesterday I wrote about a dispute over wage rules for foreign workers that’s delaying the Gang of 8 from producing a draft immigration bill. I’ve now learned a bit more about this, thanks to Daniel Costa of EPI, and wanted to pass along a few further details.

This wasn’t clear to me from the original LA Times article I read, but apparently this dispute is over an expansion of the current H-2B visa program for seasonal guest workers. These workers are already required to be paid the local prevailing wage, and one option for calculating this is a four-tier wage structure tied to skill levels. For example, here are the rates for landscapers in Baltimore:

Level 1 Wage: $9.01 hour
Level 2 Wage: $10.60 hour
Level 3 Wage: $12.20 hour
Level 4 Wage: $13.79 hour

The AFL-CIO has long wanted to ditch the four-tier structure and move to a single wage based on the local average. Employers have opposed this for just as long. A couple of years ago, in response to a court order, the Department of Labor issued a new rule that eliminated the four-tier structure and instead relied on a single mean wage (usually equivalent to the Level 3 wage), but Congress has blocked it from being implemented.

So the current dispute is really nothing new. Employers are eager for the H2-B program to be expanded to include nonseasonal jobs. However, there’s little evidence of a labor shortage in the occupations likely to be most affected, which means an influx of new workers would probably drive down wages. As its price for going along with this, the AFL-CIO wants to set the prevailing wage at the mean level once and for all. The Chamber of Commerce is opposed because most guest workers are currently certified at the Level 1 wage, so the new rule would mean they’d have to start paying higher wages.

When I wrote about this yesterday, I suggested that the AFL-CIO proposal represented a “complicated new set of wage rules for the private sector,” and obviously that’s not the case. It would actually be simpler than the current rule.

I also suggested that the politics of this was difficult because it requires all guest workers be paid the average prevailing wage. Since some American workers are obviously paid less than average, this would, in effect, mean mandating higher wages for foreign workers than for (some) U.S. citizens. This is still arguably the case, though the political dynamics are obviously a little complicated.

So that’s that. This isn’t a topic I’m likely to spend a ton of time on, but since I wrote about it yesterday I wanted to follow up today now that I know more about it.

Mother Jones
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Wage Rules for Foreign Workers — A Followup

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Wage Rules Are Delaying Immigration Reform

by Michalak876 Posted on March 23, 2013

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The LA Times summarizes one of the disputes that’s delaying the Gang of 8 from producing a draft immigration bill:

One rough patch this week was a disagreement over how much immigrants should be paid under a proposed new visa category for entry-level jobs such as dishwashers, housekeepers and janitors. Negotiators for the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce … couldn’t agree whether foreign workers should be paid the same wages as Americans.

The chamber argued that foreign workers should be subject to federal minimum wage law and that they should not be paid more than Americans. The AFL-CIO wanted the minimum wage for different job categories to be indexed off the median wage, saying that would produce more competitive wages for American workers.

I get why the AFL-CIO is doing this. They’re afraid that higher immigration quotas will increase the supply of low-wage workers and therefore reduce overall pay in low-wage industries. So they want a complicated system designed to insure that immigrant workers will be paid as much as existing workers.

But I’m having a hard time taking the union’s side of this. First, simpler is better. If you want to create a complicated new set of wage rules for the private sector, you’d better have a really good reason. I’m not sure what it is in this case, since the bulk of the evidence suggests that immigrants don’t compete for the same jobs as native workers. Second, the politics of this is just impossible. The AFL-CIO wants members of Congress to vote for a bill that mandates higher wages for immigrants than for U.S. citizens? The attack ads practically write themselves.

If you think that higher immigration quotas will drive down wages in low-paid industries, that’s a good reason to oppose immigration reform. But if you’re basically in favor of immigration reform, trying to micromanage the wage effects seems (a) impractical and (b) politically toxic. It would encourage massive cheating and game playing, increase paperwork and enforcement, and be wildly unpopular. I just don’t see how this works.

But maybe I’m missing something. Comments?

Mother Jones
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Wage Rules Are Delaying Immigration Reform

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Rand Paul’s Long Road to Immigration Moderation

by muistenam Posted on March 19, 2013

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UPDATE 03/19/2013 3:26 PM PST: It appears Paul does support a path to citizenship, he just doesn’t want to call it that.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) endorsed a path to legalization—but not citizenship*—for unauthorized immigrants in the United States at a speech before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Tuesday, another step on Paul’s short, steep journey to moderation on immigration reform.

“If you wish to work, if you wish to live and work in America, then we will find a place for you,” Paul said Tuesday. “Somewhere along the line Republicans have failed to understand and articulate that immigrants are an asset to America, not a liability.”

Though early reports indicated Paul would endorse a path to citizenship, his speech mirrors a Washington Times column Paul made in February, when he endorsed legalization for undocumented immigrants but equivocated on the issue of citizenship.

“Would I hope that when they become citizens, these new immigrants will remember Republicans who made this happen? Yes,” wrote Paul in February, while later referred to “normalizing” or “legalizing” undocumented immigrants rather than granting them citizenship. “But my support for immigration reform comes not from political expediency but because it’s the right thing to do.” Paul also wrote that undocumented immigrants eligible for the DREAM Act—those brought to the US as children who are poised to go to college or join the military—should be legalized first. “I would start with Dream Act kids, children brought here illegally as minors.”

Paul has come a long way on immigration. In 2008, he was a believer in the “Amero” conspiracy—the secret plan to merge Canada, the United States, and Mexico and create a “borderless mass continent” under a single currency called the “Amero.” During his 2010 Senate run, when he campaigned as a tea party insurgent, he struck a hard line on immigration. “We shouldn’t provide an easy route to citizenship,” Paul said in 2010 during an interview with Russia Today. In the same interview, Paul rejected the guarantee of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment: “We’re the only country that I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. And I think that should stop also.” Another reason Paul opposed immigration reform and birthright citizenship? “A lot of this is about demographics,” Paul said during the RT interview. “If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register 3-to-1 Democrat, so the Democrat Party is for easy citizenship and for allowing them to vote.”

Here’s the video:

In 2011, Paul followed up on his opposition to birthright citizenship by cosponsoring a bill with Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) to end it.

On his campaign website in 2010, Paul endorsed making English “the official language of all documents and contracts.” He wanted “an underground electric fence, with helicopter stations to respond quickly to breaches of the border.” He supported Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law, part of which was struck down by the Supreme Court. Paul insisted in his speech Tuesday that security must be a component of comprehensive immigration reform, abandoning the electrified fence idea but insisting on “drones, satellite, and physical barriers, vigilant deportation of criminals, and increased patrols” to help secure the border. (Prior security benchmarks have largely been met, and border crossings are way down, but on the right it’s an article of faith that nothing has been done.)

The significance of Paul’s shift shouldn’t be understated. While fiscal issues were the catalyst for the tea party, according to a study by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, its adherents are also united by hostility towards undocumented immigrants. Liberals might have dismissed Paul’s 13-hour filibuster of Obama’s nominee for CIA director over drones as grandstanding, but Paul’s shift on immigration is, at least in part, an act of defiance towards the movement that put him in office.

Still, legalization without citizenship is a nonstarter for comprehensive immigration reform supporters, who say it would create a large permanent group of second-class citizens.

Paul has yet to join the GOP’s big stars in supporting path to citizenship a group that includes Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Jeb Bush (R-Fla.). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who joined Paul during his drone filibuster, still opposes a path to citizenship.

Passage of an immigration reform bill that guarantees a path to citizenship for the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States depends on how many GOPers in the House and Senate decide to follow the path of Marco Rubio, rather than that of Cruz. Although he’s come along way from his original hardline positions, Paul remains somewhere between the two.

Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously stated that Paul now supports a path to citizenship; he does not.

Mother Jones
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Rand Paul’s Long Road to Immigration Moderation

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NRA Targets UN Arms Trade Treaty, Again

by pwdt8w4 Posted on March 18, 2013

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The United Nations kicked off the first of nine days of final debate today in New York on the Arms Trade Treaty, an international pact seeking to regulate the $70 billion market in conventional weapons. Due to the unsupported belief that its largely unenforceable regulations would violate Americans’ Second Amendment rights, the treaty has once again found itself in the sights of gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association.

In reality, the Arms Trade Treaty, first discussed in 2006 and rejected by the Bush administration, is aimed at halting the cross-border flow of weapons into the hands of terrorists and soldiers in war-torn nations. That market is mostly unregulated now, and weapons advertised at international arms bazaars like the one in Abu Dhabi in February commonly find their way to conflict zones abroad. The treaty would take aim at weapons including tanks and missile launchers but also “small arms,” which the NRA claims could lead to a domestic crackdown on civilian-model AK-47s and other assault weapons.

The notion that the treaty would attack gun-owners’ constitutional rights ties into a popular right-wing conspiracy theory, embraced by the likes of Rand Paul, that it would lead to “full-scale gun CONFISCATION” and place lawful gun owners in an Orwellian international database. However, as the Washington Post reported, the treaty “lacks real enforcement mechanisms, but activists said it could be used to name and shame arms exporters who violate its terms.”

In 2011 and 2012, the NRA joined Larry Pratt’s conspiratorial Gun Owners of America in lobbying for a House resolution that would “express the sense of the Congress that the United States should not adopt any treaty that poses a threat to national sovereignty or abridges any rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution, such as the right to keep and bear arms.” The bill died in committee. But pressure from the gun lobby led the Obama administration to abandon talks last July on a draft of Arms Trade Treaty. Major players in the global arms trade including China and Russia also objected to the draft’s language.

In February, the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights concluded that the Arms Trade Treaty “would not require new domestic regulations of firearms” nor compromise the Second Amendment (PDF). In a statement last Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the administration “will not support any treaty that would be inconsistent with U.S. law and the rights of American citizens under our Constitution.”

But such reassurances are unlikely to convince the NRA and its allies.

Mother Jones
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NRA Targets UN Arms Trade Treaty, Again

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Marketing Campaigns and Immigration Reform

by 1LymSlagter473 Posted on March 18, 2013

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Republicans have released a report explaining why they lost in 2012 and what they need to do about it. Are you ready?

Among the report’s 219 prescriptions: a $10 million marketing campaign, aimed in particular at women, minorities and gays; a shorter primary season and earlier national convention; and creation of an open data platform and analytics institute to provide research for Republican candidates.

Hmmm. I guess a $10 million marketing campaign might work, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Everything else aside, that’s a pretty puny budget for a national campaign aimed at boosting sales of consumer packaged goods—and what are political parties if not packaged goods?

So how about some actual changes in policy to go along with that? Slapping “New Formula!” on the box only gets you just so far, after all. But according to the Washington Post, the report included only one “major foray into policy”: immigration reform. And sure enough, Senate Republicans are making progress on a bipartisan plan:

The nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants would have to wait a full decade for a green card but could earn citizenship just three years after that, under a provision being finalized by a bipartisan group of eight senators working to devise an overhaul of immigration law, several people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Taken together, the two waiting periods would provide the nation’s illegal immigrants with a path to United States citizenship in 13 years, matching the draft of a plan by President Obama to offer full participation in American democracy to millions who are living in fear of deportation.

The arrangement would shrink the amount of time it takes to become a naturalized citizen, to three years from five years. But in an appeal to Republicans, it would also extend to 10 years, from 8, the amount of time that illegal immigrants must wait before receiving permission to work in the United States permanently.

That’s some compromise. The only question now is whether they can sell it to their CPAC-ified colleagues in the House. The packaged bads, you might call them. Wait and see.

Mother Jones
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Marketing Campaigns and Immigration Reform

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At CPAC 2013, FreedomWorks Is Nowhere to Be Found

by charlenedean Posted on March 15, 2013

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As it does every year, the conservative movement has turned out en masse for the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, an annual Washington confab. Everyone’s here: activists, operatives, Rand Paulites, politicians, Mitt Romney, think tank wonks, big-wig donors, fundraisers courting the big-wig donors, and so on. But there’s one big name glaringly absent from the CPAC schedule: FreedomWorks.

FreedomWorks, in case you slept through the summer of 2010, is the liberty-loving, ostensibly grassroots outfit that fueled the tea party movement and helped elect a class of uncompromising, hard-line conservative politicians such as Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). FreedomWorks has been a fixture at past CPACs: the group sponsored panel discussions and happy hours and film screenings, its staffers weighed in on “new media activism” and a constitutional amendment curbing government spending. In 2012, Kibbe spoke at CPAC’s main stage.

Yet FreedomWorks is nowhere to be found at CPAC 2013, housed this year at the spacious Gaylord Convention Center at Maryland’s National Harbor. No staffers are scheduled to speak. No events bear FreedomWorks’ name as sponsor. FreedomWorks doesn’t even have a booth in the vast exhibition hall here (nearly everyone else does, from the NRA and Citizens United to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and the author of the book WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again). FreedomWorks’ lively Twitter account is silent on the matter of the conservative movement’s biggest event.

CPAC 2013 comes at a rough moment for FreedomWorks. As Mother Jones has reported, FreedomWorks’ board of directors is divided over the direction of the organization, a conflict that burst into public view after ex-chairman Dick Armey resigned from the group last year. Several board members support Kibbe and vice president Adam Brandon, while others were Armey loyalists who believe that Kibbe used FreedomWorks resources for his own personal gain. For months, private investigators have been interviewing FreedomWorks employees and digging through the group’s financial records at the behest of board members C. Boyden Gray and James Burnley. That investigation is ongoing, creating a tense atmosphere in the FreedomWorks offices. And the group’s headaches got worse when my colleague David Corn revealed that FreedomWorks staffers had made a video depicting an intern wearing a fake panda suit pretending to give oral sex to someone posing as Hillary Clinton.

That turmoil may explain the group’s absence at CPAC. I sent an email to Jackie Bodnar, FreedomWorks’ spokeswoman, asking why FreedomWorks was MIA. She has yet to write back.

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At CPAC 2013, FreedomWorks Is Nowhere to Be Found

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9 CPAC Events We Initially Thought Were Parodies

by publik23 Posted on March 14, 2013

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Once a year, conservatives from across the country gather in some manner of subterranean hotel ballroom or windowless conference center to talk about what matters most to them and why. It’s called the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and it’s usually a complete and utter zoo; Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz will be there, along with Rep. Paul Ryan and his former running-mate, Mitt Romney.

But CPAC isn’t just a showcase for the party’s brightest stars and biggest ideas; it also offers a close-up view of the underbelly of the conservative movement—the hacks and hucksters that helped lead Republicans astray in November in the first place. (Last year I found a booth dedicated to exposing the secret alliance between George Soros and Fox News.) Here are some of the panels and speeches at this year’s conference that promise to entertain:

“Dick Morris, author and political commentator“: Morris lost his gig as a Fox News commentator, with cause, after predicting that Mitt Romney would win the presidential election in a landslide. He also projected that Republicans would pick up as many as 13 seats in the Senate, including races in New York and Oregon. (Quick, name last year’s Republican Senate candidate in Oregon!) Dave Weigel wasn’t the only person to dismiss Morris as a “con artist.” Naturally, he was slated to speak on Thursday morning.

“Benghazi and its aftermath: US Middle East and Southwest Asia policy,” moderated by John Solomon: It’s not entirely surprising that CPAC would devote an on-stage panel to what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called “the worst tragedy since 9/11.” But Solomon is most famous—or infamous—for his work as a journalist, ably chronicled here by Mariah Blake.

Wayne Allyn Root as a featured speaker: Here, I’ll just quote from a 2012 article by the former Libertarian Party presidential nominee:

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia—and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia…

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him…

I can only think of one answer that would explain this mystery.

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

“Should we shoot all the consultants now?,” featuring Pat Caddell: Finally, a Democrat! Except it’s Caddell, a former Jimmy Carter pollster who now plays the part of the Good Democrat on Fox News. In the run-up to the 2012 election, he repeatedly argued that President Obama should remove himself from the presidential race and be replaced by Hillary Clinton. We don’t think Pat Caddell should be shot, but it’d be tough to find a consultant who offers worse advice.

“Stop THIS: Threats, Harassment, Intimidation, Slander, and Bullying from the Obama Administration,” with Ben Shapiro: In which the Breitbart.com reporter behind the “Friends of Hamas” smear accuses someone else of slander.

Screening of Hillary the Movie: This 2008 film is something of a historic artifact, given its central role in the 2009 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. It’s also totally nuts. Among other things, the movie alleges that the former First Lady murdered a cat.

“The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution,” featuring Bill Norton of the National Center for Constitutional Studies: Come find out how the Founding Fathers were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel!

Donald Trump, chairman and president of the Trump Organization: Trump, whose birther crusade made him a (short-lived) front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2011, was last seen all-but-endorsing liberal activist Ashley Judd for Senate in Kentucky. His entire political existence appears aimed at trolling us all:

Mitt Romney: Congratulations!

Mother Jones
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9 CPAC Events We Initially Thought Were Parodies

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