Judge Andrew Napolitano Accuses Government / Treasury Department of Extortion

Absolutely must read & watch .. Just heard on Studio B: Judge Andrew Napolitano accuses the U.S. government under president Bush and the Treasury department under Henry Paulson of extortion.

According to Napolitano, banks that did not want or need TARP funds were threatened with a ‘multi-year and very public’ audit, which would almost certainly put them out of business as the result of an already-scared public making a run on the bank.

My mind immediately went back to the IndyMac failure, which, at the time was attributed directly to the actions of NY Senator Charles Schumer. Quoting from a July 7, 2008 LA Times article:

Here’s from the press release issued by IndyMac’s regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision: “The OTS has determined that the current institution, IndyMac Bank, is unlikely to be able to meet continued depositors’ demands in the normal course of business and is therefore in an unsafe and unsound condition. The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York.

The letter expressed concerns about IndyMac’s viability. In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.

“This institution failed today due to a liquidity crisis,” OTS Director John Reich said. “Although this institution was already in distress, I am troubled by any interference in the regulatory process.”

At the time, Schumer’s actions were considered ‘reckless and irresponsible’, but in the context of our nation’s current economic and political situation, the benefit of nine months of hindsight, and the horror of the last 72 days under the leadership of a decidedly anti-American administration, one can’t help but wonder if Schumer’s action was more calculated than reckless; designed to provide a crystal-clear example, in preparation for what was to come just two months up the road, of how quickly a financial institution could be taken down by a few simple words from government.

Conspiratorial? Perhaps, but not nearly as far-fetched as it may have seemed a few short months ago, because what we’re seeing now is the government trying to take control of these TARP-funded banks.

It needs to be said that there hasn’t been any confirmation of Napolitano’s claims yet. However, my personal opinion is that the judge’s credibility is good, and if he’s putting it out there it needs to be taken seriously.

Conservative Nation will be watching this story closely.

UPDATE: here is the video from Youtube:

-Cnation

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Shariah law in America?

from Investor's Business Daily .... must read

President Obama's nominee for State Department legal adviser could be a future Supreme Court pick. He believes U.S. law should be based on foreign precedent, and even Shariah law could find a home here.

We have commented many times on the opinion of a number of U.S. Supreme Court justices that American jurists should include foreign law and precedent in their decisions. In several prominent cases, this has already happened.

In a speech in South Africa, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the March 2005 Roper v. Simmons decision, in which a 5-4 majority ruled against executing murderers who were 17 or younger, "perhaps the fullest expressions to date on the propriety and utility of looking to the 'opinions of (human)kind.' "

Koh: Man of the world.

More recently, Justice Stephen Breyer said: "We see all the time . . . how the world really . . . is growing together. The challenge (will be) whether our Constitution . . . fits into the governing documents of other nations." Whether our Constitution fits?

Agreeing with Ginsburg and Breyer is one Harold Koh, a former dean of Yale Law School who's been nominated by President Obama to be the State Department's legal adviser. He's an advocate of what he calls "transnational legal process" and argues that the distinction between U.S. and international law should vanish.

Koh believes laws of places like Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka should carry equal weight with the laws of Virginia and South Dakota, and that it's "appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in the light of foreign and international law" in its decisions.

He also believes foreign law trumps U.S. law on issues such as the death penalty. Echoing Ginsburg, he has said: "The evidence strongly suggests that we do not currently pay decent respect to the opinions of humankind in our administration of the death penalty. For that reason (italics added), the death penalty should, in time, be declared in violation of the Eighth Amendment."

In Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy laws, Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion cited a 1967 British parliamentary vote repealing laws against homosexual acts and a 1981 European Court of Human Rights decision that such laws were in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Agreeing with Kennedy, Koh himself filed an amicus brief in the case that argued that international and foreign court decisions compelled the Supreme Court to strike down the Texas law. Koh has also submitted an amicus brief to the Connecticut Supreme Court arguing that foreign precedents require recognition of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

He also values the opinions of the world's imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says Koh in 2007 told the Yale Club of Greenwich that "in an appropriate case, he didn't see any reason why Shariah law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States."

Koh thinks America is the bad guy on the world stage. He blasted Operation Desert Storm as a violation of international law despite the U.N.'s blessing. He supported the Sandinista move to get the International Criminal Court to force Congress to cut off funding of the Contras in Nicaragua.

In 2004, after Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun, Koh lumped the U.S. in with North Korea as part of an "axis of disobedience" regarding international law.

Koh says the Supreme Court is now divided between "nationalist" judges who believe our Constitution is the only one that counts and "transnationalists" who believe "we the people" should be changed to "we are the world."

The next appointment will tip the balance one way or the other, Koh says. He just might be Obama's first pick to fill the next vacancy. Neil Lewis of the New York Times last year said Koh was widely regarded as a leading contender.

This is the man who'll be giving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton legal advice. This is the man who could quite possibly be the next Supreme Court justice. This is Harold Koh.

Hiding a Mountain Of Debt

(Compiler's note: Must read. And please remember that China buys most of our debt, and we then in turn fund their new weapon systems that they may yet use against us.)

By David S. Broder

With a bit of bookkeeping legerdemain borrowed from the Bush administration, the Democratic Congress is about to perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future.

That threat is not the severe recession, tough as that is for the families and businesses struggling to make ends meet. In time, the recession will end, and last week's stock market performance hinted that we may not have to wait years for the recovery to begin.

The real threat is the monstrous debt resulting from the slump in revenue and the staggering sums being committed by Washington to rescuing embattled banks and homeowners -- and the absence of any serious strategy for paying it all back.

The Congressional Budget Office sketched the dimensions of the problem on March 20, and Congress reacted with shock. The CBO said that over the next 10 years, current policies would add a staggering $9.3 trillion to the national debt -- one-third more than President Obama had estimated by using much more optimistic assumptions about future economic growth.

As far as the eye could see, the CBO said, the debt would continue to grow by about $1 trillion a year because of a structural deficit between the spending rate, averaging 23 percent of gross domestic product, and federal revenue at 19 percent.

The ever-growing national debt will require ever-larger annual interest payments, with much of that money going overseas to China, Japan and other countries that have been buying our bonds.

Reacting to this scary prospect, the House and Senate budget committees took the paring knife to some of Obama's spending proposals and tax cuts last week. But many of the proposed savings look more like bookkeeping gimmicks than realistic cutbacks. The budget resolutions assume, for example, that no more money will be needed this year to bail out foundering businesses or pump up consumer demand, even though estimates of those needs start at $250 billion and go up by giant steps.

Republicans on the budget committees offered cuts that were larger and, in some but not all instances, more realistic.

But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, $5 trillion in debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families.

The Democrats did not invent this gimmick. They borrowed it from George W. Bush, who turned to it as soon as his inherited budget surpluses withered with the tax cuts and recession of 2001-02. But Obama had promised a more honest budget and said that this meant looking at the long-term consequences of today's tax and spending decisions.

There are plenty of people in Congress for whom the CBO report was no surprise, and some of them have proposed a solution that would confront this reality. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Judd Gregg, its ranking Republican, have offered a bill to create a bipartisan commission to examine every aspect of the budget -- taxes, defense and domestic spending, and, especially, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congress would be required to vote promptly, up or down, on its recommendations, or come up with an alternative that would achieve at least as much in savings.

In the House, Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Republican Frank Wolf of Virginia have been pressing a similar proposal but have been regularly thwarted.

The roadblock in chief is Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. She has made it clear that her main goal is to protect Social Security and Medicare from any significant reforms. Pelosi has not forgotten how Democrats benefited from the 2005-06 fight against Bush's effort to change Social Security. Her party, which had lost elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, found its voice and its rallying cry to "Save Social Security," and Pelosi is not about to allow any bipartisan commission to take that issue away from her control.

The price for her obduracy is being paid in the rigging of the budget process. The larger price will be paid by your children and grandchildren, who will inherit a future-blighting mountain of debt.

Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan pledge military cooperation against "Islamist extremists"

from Robert Spencer

Let's see. Afghanistan's Constitution already enshrines Islamic law as the highest law of the land. Pakistan has already allowed for Sharia in the Swat valley. And Gul's party in Turkey is a known foe of that country's secular government. So evidently these three are pledging to fight against Sharia supremacists on the one hand while giving them what they want peacefully on the other.

"Terrorism: Gul, Karzai, Zardari Pledge Military Cooperation," from ANSAmed, April 1 (thanks to Insubria):

(ANSAmed) - ANKARA, APRIL 1 - Army chiefs and intelligence officials from Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by their presidents, pledged military cooperation against Islamist extremists in Turkish-sponsored talks in Ankara on Wednesday. Afghan President Hamid Karzai met his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, in a trilateral meeting hosted by Turkish President Abdullah Gul at Cankaya Palace in the Turkish capital. Gul, who chaired the summit, told a joint press conference that the participation of the respective chiefs of staff, land forces commanders and senior intelligence officials was "the most important" element of the talks, the third of their kind since 2007. A joint declaration said the representatives of the three countries agreed to continue contacts "in functional and comprehensive formats on various levels." Military and intelligence officials will meet once a year as part of delegations led by foreign ministers, it added. (ANSAmed).

Citizen grand jury indicts Obama

Groups in 20 more states reviewing eligibility claims

By Bob Unruh

President Obama has been named in dozens of civil lawsuits alleging he is not eligible to be president, with one man even filing a criminal complaint alleging the commander-in-chief is a fraud, and now a citizen grand jury in Georgia has indicted the sitting president.

The indictment delivered to state and federal prosecutors yesterday is one of the developments in the dispute over Obama's eligibility to be president under the U.S. Constitution's requirement that presidents be "natural born" citizens.

Orly Taitz, a California attorney working on several of the civil actions, also announced she has filed another Quo Warranto case in the District of Columbia, where, she told WND, the statutes acknowledge that procedure.

.... "If the government does not amend the error within 40 days after being shown the error, then the four members shall refer the matter to the remainder of the grand jury," it says. "The grand jury may distrain and oppress the government in every way in their power, namely, by taking the homes, lands, possessions, and any way else they can until amends shall have been made according to the sole judgment of the grand jury."....