White House move to collect 'fishy' info may be illegal, critics say

(Fox News)

The White House strategy of turning supporters into snitches when they see "fishy" information about the health care debate may run afoul of the law, legal experts say.

"The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it," Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday.

"There's also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can't try to rewrite history by pretending it didn't receive anything," he said.

"If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute."

Napolitano was referring to the Privacy Act of 1974, which was passed after the Nixon administration used federal agencies to illegally investigate individuals for political purposes. Enacted after Richard Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, the statute generally prohibits any federal agency from maintaining records on individuals exercising their right to free speech.

The White House has been under fire since it posted a blog on Tuesday that asked supporters to e-mail any "fishy" information seen on the Web or received electronically to flag@whitehouse.gov.

...

The Dirty Little Immigration Secret Kept by Both Parties

by Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Next month, Congress is likely to reboot the immigration debate. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, has said that he plans to introduce an immigration reform bill by Labor Day.

In a speech in June at a conference sponsored by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, Schumer laid out seven principles that would form the basis for the legislation. They include: curtailing illegal immigration, achieving control of our borders, creating a biometric employee verification system to diminish the job magnet, forcing illegal immigrants to register and undergo a rigorous legalization process or face deportation, preserving family reunification as a cornerstone value, creating a system that makes it easier for immigrants to come legally, and encouraging the best and brightest to immigrate to the United States while also discouraging businesses from using temporary guest workers.

It’s that last item that Americans should be focused on. Everyone gets distracted by talk of legalization or — as the nativists and restrictionists on the far right like to call it — “amnesty.” Maybe Congress likes it that way. If we focused instead on the politics surrounding guest workers, it could prove embarrassing to both parties.

Democrats don’t want you to know that they’re in the hip pocket of organized labor to the point where they were willing, in both 2006 and 2007, to smother immigration reform legislation because it had language calling for the importing of hundreds of thousands of guest workers. Republicans don’t want to broadcast the fact that they’re pushing for guest workers when so many Americans are unemployed.

Meanwhile, organized labor is pushing the fairy tale that foreign workers — and in this case legal foreign workers — are taking jobs from Americans.

Nonsense. Many of these foreign workers would wind up in agriculture, and we don’t see union workers lining up to pick peaches or strawberries. Some insist that we might see that if the wages were higher. More nonsense. Just because Americans think they’re entitled to earn $50 per hour picking lettuce doesn’t mean the industry can accommodate such demands. And why do U.S. workers think they deserve those wages? It’s because they were lucky enough to be born in the United States. Big deal. What role did they play in that? ....

Soros Care

By: Ben Johnson

A rising chorus of discontent – more a citizens uprising – shows Middle America’s deep suspicion of President Obama’s health care reform proposal. Average citizens have voiced their disapproval at townhall meetings hosted by Sen. Arlen Specter and HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Rep. Tim Bishop, and staffers of Sen. Claire McCaskill. In a burst of passion-envy, Chris Matthews asked on Monday night’s Hardball, “Where the Hell are the people who want health care, the poor people out there…the union people? Where are they? I haven’t seen one placard, let alone one protest demonstration, for health care.”

In fact, tens of thousands of people have rallied in the nation’s capital supporting the president’s health care reform plan, including the controversial public option. However, national momentum is not with them, because they are, to use Nancy Pelosi’s phrase, “Astroturf.” These demonstrations were organized by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), a new “national grassroots campaign of more than 1,000 organizations in 46 states representing 30 million people dedicated to winning quality, affordable health care.” Most of its component organizations have two things in common: they have no experience or expertise in health care, and virtually all received large, tax-exempt grants from far-Left billionaires like George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry. Like the “grassroots” movement for campaign finance reform a decade ago, the public demonstrations for health care reform are largely a Soros-financed operation.

Former Governor Howard Dean announced HCAN’s mission on the first night of the annual “America’s Future Now!” conference (formerly the “Take Back America” conference), hosted by the Campaign for America's Future in June. Dean pledged to spend up to $82 million to advance socialized medicine. HCAN rallied 15,000 people in D.C. in April, 10,000 more in June, and with state affiliates like the Maine People’s Alliance, hundreds more in state capitals in July. A searchable database of upcoming spontaneous demonstrations can be found here.

However, a closer look at its members shows it is less a “grassroots” organization than a series of interconnected left-wing pressure groups united by a collectivist ideology and, for most, a common donor.

Among the 21 members of its steering committee are ACORN, MoveOn.org, and the Center for American Progress. CAP, headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, was created with Soros’ money as a counterweight to the Heritage Foundation. In 2007 alone, Soros’ charity, the Open Society Institute (OSI), gave CAP $1.75 million in 2007 and approved additional grants totaling $1.25 million. Soros personally gave millions to MoveOn.org before the 2004 elections, and he has funded ACORN, the most notorious practitioner of election fraud in the nation.

Dean announced HCAN’s mobilization before the Campaign for America's Future, another institution that has received funding from George Soros and the Rockefeller Family Fund. CAF, an HCAN steering committee member, pushes for national health care as one means to transform the United States into a European social welfare state. Co-founder Robert Borosage previously served as director of the overtly Marxist Institute for Policy Studies, while co-founder Roger Hickey also co-founded the Economic Policy Institute. Other CAF co-founders include socialist columnist Harold Meyerson, Sixties radical Tom Hayden, socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, Service Employees International Union president Andrew Stern, AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney, Jesse Jackson, and Julian Bond. CAF is best known for hosting its annual “Take Back America” conferences, a gathering of D.C. “progressives” and far-Left community organizers. Code Pink activists famously booed Hillary Clinton after a tour-de-force leftist speech in 2006. An up-and-comer named Barack Obama also spoke at the ’06 event.

Advancing the welfare state by ruse is old hat to the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). The CDF Action Council is a member of the HCAN steering committee. CDF founder Marian Wright Edelman once admitted she got nowhere pushing a left-wing message until “I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.” Hiding behind “the children,” her undisguised Sixties radicalism still shines through. In her 1987 book Families in Peril, she wrote, “We must curb the fanatical military weasel.” At the time, the CDF was chaired by one Hillary Rodham Clinton. In addition to Hillary’s patronage, the CDF received a grant of more than $700,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York while Teresa Heinz Kerry sat on its board of trustees, and Edelman received the Heinz Award for the “Human Condition” in 1995.

Labor unions are heavily represented on the HCAN steering committee. Members include the SEIU, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Change to Win (James Hoffa’s breakaway group of seven powerful unions, which includes the SEIU’s Andrew Stern), UAW, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Even with the power of compulsory union dues, SEIU received $75,000 from the Open Society Institute in 2007, and AFT was approved for a $150,000 OSI grant.

Other members, such as USAction, are more overtly radical. Its profile on DiscoverTheNetworks.org notes, “The President of USAction is longtime radical activist William McNary, who has written for and supported the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the People's Weekly World.” McNary spoke at the June 25^th HCAN rally. USAction receives also funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The radicalism and overlapping nature of the “coalition” is perhaps best illustrated by the Center for Community Change (CCC), an organization founded in 1968 to advance Saul Alinsky-style confrontational politics. The CCC board includes a founder of Students for a Democratic Society; former Congressman and current mayor of Oakland, California, Ron Dellums, an admirer of Fidel Castro; Marian Wright Edelman’s husband, Peter Edelman; La Raza Vice President Cecelia Munoz; and Heather Booth, who founded the Midwest Academy, where the SEIU’s Andrew Stern learned about union organizing. The CCC is financed in part by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, with OSI awarding the group $2.9 million in grants in 2007 alone. Other funding sources include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Other members of the HCAN “grassroots” include: ....

National Guard asked to explain 'internment' jobs Campaign recruiting for workers at 'civilian resettlement facility'

By Bob Unruh

An ad campaign

featured on a U.S. Army website seeking those who would be interested in being an "Internment/Resettlement" specialist is raising alarms across the country, generating concerns that there is some truth in those theories about domestic detention camps, a roundup of dissidents and a crackdown on "threatening" conservatives.

The ads, at the GoArmy.com website as well as others including Monster.com, cite the need for:

"Internment/Resettlement (I/R) Specialists in the Army are primarily responsible for day-to-day operations in a military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility. I/R Specialists provide rehabilitative, health

, welfare, and security to U.S. military prisoners within a confinement or correctional facility; conduct inspections; prepare written reports; and coordinate activities of prisoners/internees and staff personnel.

The campaign follows by only weeks a report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warning about "right-wing extremists" who could pose a danger to the country – including those who support third-party political candidates, oppose abortion and would prefer to have the U.S. immigration laws already on the books enforced. ....

THIS AIN'T NO TEA PARTY Home front getting ugly for recessed Congress Protests, arrests, shouts, tempers … is there a doctor in the house?

By Drew Zahn

At town halls around the country, many flooded by more protesters than event organizers anticipated, lawmakers returning from Washington are finding constituents don't want to listen; they want to be heard.

"Why won't you let the people speak?" shouted one protester in Tampa, Fla., at a public forum where Rep. Cathy Castor, D-Fla., attempted to pitch Obama's health care reform plan to her constituency.

The Tampa protest made national headlines afterward, as dozens of protesters were pushed out the door in a scuffle, some claiming to have received injuries, and the doors were locked to bar their chanting protest: "You work for us!"

Sign the WND petition challenging the Obama administration to stop its attacks on free speech and the nation's health care system.

But even inside the locked doors, many in the crowd didn't want to listen to their legislator's reasons for advocating a federal health care plan.

When Castor tried to tell the crowd that those who currently pay for their own health insurance, either privately or through their employer, would benefit the most from legislation being considered in Washington, she was drowned out by disbelieving citizens.

"Bull----!" shouted protesters inside the room. "No we're not!"

Video of the eruption can be seen below, though the clip does contain flagrant and repeated profanity:

Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Wis., got a raucous earful as well, when hundreds of people inside and outside the Green Bay town hall demanded their representative read thoroughly the health care reform bill, which many people believe is being pushed too quickly through Congress.

On the Fox News Channel, a Wisconsin man who attended the town hall meeting explained he wanted to express the message, "We don't feel that Washington is listening to us."

He told host Bill Hemmer, "The way the Congress has been acting in general lately is in my mind totally unconstitutional. They want to take one of the most important issues in my life, which is health care, they want to say that they are going to reform it but they haven't even read the bill."

"I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights until this government exhibits some form of willingness to communicate with the people," the guest explained. ....