ISIS CARTOON

Mitch McConnell's campaign manager resigns

Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager resigned Friday in the wake of a scandal involving former Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, where he had been a top aide.
Jesse Benton said the decision to leave the staff of McConnell, R-Ky., “breaks my heart” but “inaccurate press accounts and unsubstantiated media rumors about me and my role in past campaigns” were becoming a distraction in McConnell’s efforts to win re-election in November.
His announcement stems from a political scandal in Iowa. Earlier this week, a former Iowa lawmaker pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from his switch of support from one Republican presidential candidate to another before the 2012 Iowa caucuses.
Former state Sen. Kent Sorenson received thousands of dollars in "under the table payments" before switching loyalties from Michele Bachmann, whose Iowa campaign he headed, to Paul, then lied to federal investigators about the money, the Justice Department said. Prosecutors refused to say which campaign paid Sorenson.
Benton, a Tea Party insider, worked as a top aide to Paul.
In a separate statement Friday, McConnell's campaign said the senator "obviously has nothing to do with the Iowa presidential caucus or this investigation, so it would be inappropriate for his campaign to comment on this situation."
Benton was mentioned in documents gathered during an Iowa state ethics probe of Sorenson, a complaint to the Federal Election Commission and e-mails purported to be from the Ron Paul campaign obtained by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors federal campaign finance issues, The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported.
McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is in a tight race for a sixth term against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state.
Charly Norton, a spokeswoman for the Grimes campaign, said in a statement, "Sen. McConnell owes the people of Kentucky a full account of what he knew and when he knew it."
In his resignation statement, Benton said, “recently, there have been inaccurate press accounts and unsubstantiated media rumors about me and my role in past campaigns that are politically motivated, unfair and, most importantly, untrue... the press accounts and rumors are particularly hurtful because they are false.
“However, what is most troubling to me is that they risk unfairly undermining and becoming a distraction to this reelection campaign.”
He said his resignation would take effect Saturday.

Online posts show ISIS eyeing Mexican border, says law enforcement bulletin

EXCLUSIVE: Social media chatter shows Islamic State militants are keenly aware of the porous U.S.-Mexico border, and are “expressing an increased interest” in crossing over to carry out a terrorist attack, according to a Texas law enforcement bulletin sent out this week.
“A review of ISIS social media messaging during the week ending August 26 shows that militants are expressing an increased interest in the notion that they could clandestinely infiltrate the southwest border of US, for terror attack,” warns the Texas Department of Public Safety "situational awareness" bulletin, obtained by FoxNews.com.
The three-page bulletin, entitled “ISIS Interest on the US Southwest Border” and dated Aug. 28 was released to law enforcement on Thursday.
“Social media account holders believed to be ISIS militants and propagandists have called for unspecified border operations, or they have sought to raise awareness that illegal entry through Mexico is a viable option,” states the law enforcement bulletin, which is not classified.
It notes no known credible homeland threats or specific homeland attack plot has been identified. That assertion was underscored by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who said Friday that DHS and the FBI are "unaware of any specific, credible threat to the U.S. homeland" from Islamic State.
Despite assurances that no threat to American soil is imminent, the watchdog group Judicial Watch said Friday that Islamic State operatives are in Juarez, just across the border from Texas, and are planning to attack the United States with car bombs.
"Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat," Judicial Watch stated on its website.
The Texas law enforcement bulletin cites suspected fighters from the terrorist group previously known as ISIS and based in Syria and Iraq as eyeing a border crossing.
“The identities of persons operating these accounts cannot be independently verified; however the accounts were selected for monitoring based on several indications that they have been used by actual ISIS militants for propaganda purposes and collectively reach tens of thousands of followers,” states the bulletin. “One account was verified as belonging to an individual located in Mosul, Iraq.”
Some 32 Twitter and Facebook posts monitored by law enforcement over one recent week reflected interest in the southern border, according to the bulletin. The messages, which were forwarded thousands of times, included calls for jihadists to cross over from Mexico to carry out attacks and even alluded to a recent video by U.S. activist James O’Keefe, who was recorded coming across the Rio Grande valley in an Usama bin Laden costume.
The bulletin details numerous “calls for border infiltration” on social media, including one from a militant confirmed to be in Mosul, Iraq who explicitly beckons the “Islamic State to send a special force to America across the border with Mexico.”
“This Twitter account holder, who is the administrator of an ISIS propaganda trading group, stated that the time was right for such an action because ‘the US-Mexican border is now open large numbers of people crossing,’” the bulletin said.
Another message sent out via Twitter suggested that Islamic State fighters have already entered the U.S. via the border, warning that, as a result, “Americans in for ruin (sic).”
The Texas DPS bulletin comes on the heels of a federal Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice Joint Intelligence bulletin dated August 22, a copy of which was also obtained by FoxNews.com.That bulletin, entitled “Online Reaction but No Known Credible Homeland Threats from ISIL and Its Supporters Following US Air Strikes,”addresses potential threats to the Homeland in response to recent US air strikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets in Iraq and the murder of journalist James Foley.
This bulletin notes that while the FBI and DHS are unaware of specific credible threats against the U.S. from homegrown violent extremists, ISIL or other violent extremist groups overseas “we continue to assess that violent extremists who support ISIL have demonstrated the capability to attempt attacks on US targets overseas with little-to-no warning.”
The report also says that “because of the individualized nature of the radicalization process—it is difficult to predict triggers that will contribute to [homegrown violent extremists] attempting acts of violence…lone offenders present law enforcement with limited opportunities to detect and disrupt plots, which frequently involve simple plotting against targets of opportunity.”
“FBI and DHS assess that civilian deaths reportedly associated with these US military air strikes will almost certainly be used as further examples of a perceived Western war against Islam in English-language violent extremist messaging that could contribute to [homegrown violent extremist] radicalization to violence,” the report notes.
The FBI and DHS bulletin includes a section titled "ISIL Supporters Increasingly Using Social Media to Encourage Violent Acts against US Interests."
"ISIL and its online supporters have employed—and will almost certainly continue—Twitter “hashtag” campaigns that have gained mainstream media attention and been able to quickly reach a global audience of potential violent extremists, highlighting ISIL’s supporter message and encouraging individuals to commit acts of violence, in Iraq or in the West," the bulletin states.
"Several of the Tweets in response to the air strikes featured original and creative use of graphics—including a photo of the ISIL flag in front of the White House—and graphically rendered images depicting desecration of US monuments and landmarks."

Qatar's role as US ally at odds with claims it sponsors terror

The man in the above photo on the right thinks man on left is a dumb ass.                                                                                                                                            

If the Middle East were one big room, Qatar would be the elephant, according to a growing number of regional experts who believe the oil rich emirate is propping up violent jihadists around the globe even as it poses as a U.S. ally and would-be broker of peace.
Israel has long complained of Qatar's alleged duplicity, accusing it of meddling, bankrolling Hamas in Gaza, exporting radical Islamic terrorism through its tight links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Nusra. And a German official recently suggested that Qatar may also play a role in funding Islamic State, the savage extremist group behind the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley.
"You have to ask who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops? The key word there is Qatar - and how do we deal with these people and states politically?" German Development Minister Gerd Muller said last week.
In response, Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah unequivocally denied funding the Islamic State group.
"Qatar does not support extremist groups, including ISIS, in any way," he said in an emailed statement. "We are repelled by their views, their violent methods and their ambitions. The vision of extremist groups for the region is one that we have not, nor will ever, support in any way."
Indeed, Qatar was one of the first Middle Eastern countries to condemn Foley's murder, saying it was "a heinous crime that goes against all Islamic and humanitarian principles, as well as international laws and conventions."
Qatar hosts a U.S. military base, helped broker U.S.-backed peace talks between Israel and Hamas, helped free U.S. journalist Peter Theo Curtis from Al Nusra earlier this week and even played a role in the U.S. swap of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Guantanamo Bay detainees earlier this year.
Yet previous statements from U.S. officials indicate that they know Qatar has a multi-faceted role in the region.
“Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally, has for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability,” Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen told the Center for New American Security on "Confronting New Threats in Terrorist Financing" in March. “Press reports indicate that the Qatari government is also supporting extremist groups operating in Syria. To say the least, this threatens to aggravate an already volatile situation in a particularly dangerous and unwelcome manner.”
Qatar is a U.S. “frenemy,” according to Jonathan Schanzer, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On one hand, it hosts the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East at Al Udeid; invests tens of billions of dollars in the U.S and across the globe in a bid to make itself indispensable and acts as the ‘white knight’ intermediary in hostage negotiations.
On the other hand, Qatar is arming and funding Hamas in Gaza, brazenly fueling violent Arab uprisings including the brief and bloody reign in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood and is long alleged to be arming vicious rebel groups in Libya, Mali, Syria, Iraq, and Tunisia.
“Qatar is trying to cozy up to everyone," Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, warned the U.S. in a 2010 cable revealed by Wikileaks. "I think that you should remove your bases from [Qatar]. [The Qataris] owe their security to the presence of the Americans.”
Noting that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have all recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, called for Qatar to be designated a state sponsor of terrorism.
"If we can get that done, then we can stop [the sale of U.S.] defense equipment and arms to Qatar.," Klein said. "There is an $11 billion deal to Qatar right now to sell them Apache helicopters, Patriot missiles, anti-tank rockets and such. This [designation] would enable both Israeli and Arab victims of Hamas attacks to sue Qatar in the United States.”
Klein is also working to try to suspend the FAA license for Qatar government-owned airline Qatar Airways to operate in the United States, but admits that getting enough U.S. politicians to speak out is a challenge.
Qatar’s policy of involving itself in so many different spheres on the world stage might finally be catching up with the tiny Gulf state that has a native population of just 250,000. The more Qatar seeks the limelight, the more scrutiny it attracts, and a growing number of informed observers around the world appear to increasingly believe that Qatar's two-faced foreign policy posture is being exposed.
“There are simply too many links, this network is too great, for us to pretend these are isolated instances of misguided individuals operating independently of government policy; or that this is merely part of talking to all sides in an argument,” Martin Samuel of Britain’s Daily Mail noted earlier this year. “Qatar has systematic and long-standing associations with some extremely dangerous people and information to support these allegations are established and in the public domain.”

Canada Cartoon

Former US judge on 'one-sided' UN Gaza inquiry headed previous probe that criticized Israel

A former New York State Supreme Court judge who replaced George Clooney’s fiancé on the latest United Nations-sponsored inquiry into human rights violations in Gaza once chaired another U.N. committee that harshly criticized Israeli for a previous military operation into the Hamas-controlled territory.
The “committee of independent experts in international humanitarian and human rights law” chaired by Mary McGowan Davis in 2011 was intended to follow up on  the now discredited Goldstone Commission investigating human rights violations in the wake of the 2008 operations, known as Operation Cast Lead, against the forces of Hamas. 
The Goldstone Commission’s report, which placed responsibility on Israel’s political and military leadership for human rights violations during the conflict including the direct targeting of civilians, was subsequently recanted by its chairman, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, for its unfounded accusations of Israeli war crimes and tilt against Israel—though it lives on in U.N. archives and references.
Both the Davis committee of 2010 and the current inquiry—generated by the U.N.’s 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva—were opposed by the U.S., which cast the sole negative vote against each of them.
In the case of the current three-person probe—called the Schabas commission, after its chairman, Canadian law professor William Schabas— the U.S. declared it was “deeply troubled” by the enabling resolution and said that it created “yet another one-sided mechanism targeting Israel.”
The U.S. attitude now, however, is more wait-and-see.  While reaffirming that the Obama Administration was “strongly opposed” to creation of the Schabas Commission,  a State Department official told Fox News that “we will watch closely to see if the commission takes a constructive, unbiased, and balanced approach to the investigation.”
He warned that “It risks damaging the reputation of the Human Rights Council and its ability to objectively and constructively address human rights in the region.”
Whether the Geneva-based Human Rights Council has any reputation left to damage is perhaps a more pertinent question. Nonetheless, the appointment of Davis, by providing a thread of continuity tracing back to the other distorted U.N. investigations against Israel in the now- simmering Gaza conflict, doesn’t indicate that the Council itself is fretting much about the issue.
For its part, Israel has charged bias against all of the investigations and refused to allow them into the territory.
Davis, who served on the New York Supreme Court from 1986 to 1998, was named to the latest inquiry on Monday by the current President of the Council, Baudelaire Ndong Ella, after British human rights attorney  Amal Alamuddin—better known these days as the fiance of George Clooney—turned down the job.
Davis can at least claim to have impressive amounts of experience on the issue. Before she chaired the 2011 “independent experts” probe, she was a member of its three-person immediate predecessor, which reported in September 2010  along the same lines as her own probe six months later.
When it came to even-handedness, both reports were also about the same. In the report resulting from the  inquiry she chaired, eight pages were devoted to the criticism of the shortcomings of Israeli military investigations into alleged crimes and excessed by Israeli forces, while three pages were devoted to Palestinian investigations—which were, the report noted delicately, “limited.”
The report also heard from Gaza’s ruling Hamas authorities—referred to as the “de facto Gaza authorities,” meaning they had no legal status—that they “did not have access to persons involved in the launching of rockets and mortars into Israel” –an assertion that the probe said left it “concerned,” but not much else.
The committee also took with a straight face the assertion by “de facto authorities” that they had conducted seven investigations of alleged human rights violations by their forces—against fellow Palestinians” but that four of the cases had been “discontinued at the request of the victim.”
Overall, the Davis committee said mildly, “It considers that the de facto authorities should make genuine efforts to conduct criminal inquiries and to hold accountable those who have allegedly engaged in serious violations of international humanitarian law by firing these rockets.”

Census figures show more than one-third of Americans receiving welfare benefits

Fifty years after the “war on poverty” was first waged, there are signs a new offensive is needed.
Newly released Census data reveals nearly 110 million Americans – more than one-third of the country – are receiving government assistance of some kind.
The number counts people receiving what are known as “means-tested” federal benefits, or subsidies based on income. This includes welfare programs ranging from food stamps to subsidized housing to the program most commonly referred to as “welfare,” Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
At the end of 2012, according to the stats, 51.5 million were on food stamps, while 83 million were collecting Medicaid – with some benefitting from multiple programs.
Though the programs were created to help those in need, some analysts worry that the way they’re designed is, increasingly, incentivizing people not to work. They note that when recipients combine several government assistance programs, in many cases they pay better than going to work.
The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner said that in the eight most generous states, the benefits can be tantamount to a $20 minimum wage – which would exceed the $7.25 minimum wage in most states.
“So in many cases people could actually do better on welfare than they could in an entry level job," Tanner said.   
Supporters say the safety net is necessary to keep Americans from living in dire conditions. As for concerns that these benefits pay better than working, they argue the solution is to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
"I think a lot of people would do the jobs when they pay a living wage,” said Melissa Boteach, from the Center for American Progress. “In addition, there's growing jobs in health care and information technology and energy. There's a lot of places where, if able to make investments, we can really grow our economy in those sectors.”
As millions still rely on government assistance programs, technology and automation have eliminated jobs many Americans used to do with a high school diploma. The challenge for policymakers is helping the economy adjust.  
"We have to figure out a way around this. Put innovation in play and really figure out how we're going to create a new economy where we can both raise wages and create more jobs for people," Boteach said.
Tanner said there must be a serious effort to put people back to work because the continued growth of these entitlement programs is unsustainable. The number of people on such benefits is up slightly from 2011.
The government still runs a half-trillion dollar deficit, according to the most recent estimates, and the national debt is nearing $18 trillion.
"You can't in the long run have a society in which you have to rely on a smaller and smaller group of wealth producers who have to support more and more people who are not contributing to that wealth," Tanner said.

Fort Hood shooter says he wants to become 'citizen' of Islamic State caliphate

 Bailey Comment: "This just shows you how politically correct our officials in the government are. He should have been put up against a wall and shot for the mad dog he is !"


The convicted shooter in the Fort Hood massacre has written a letter to the leader of the Islamic State saying he wants to become a "citizen" of the caliphate, in the latest example of the terror group's reach inside the U.S.
The letter from Nidal Hasan, obtained by Fox News, comes after two Americans reportedly died fighting for ISIS in Syria. Sources late Wednesday identified the second as Abdirahmaan Muhumed, of Minneapolis. Fox affiliate KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reported that Muhumed was killed in the same battle as Douglas McArthur McCain, who grew up outside Minneapolis in the town of New Hope and most recently lived in San Diego.
The State Department said Thursday it could not confirm Muhumed’s death and efforts to reach his family were unsuccessful.
In the undated letter, Hasan -- who fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 at Fort Hood in 2009 in what the Defense Department called “workplace violence”-- tells ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that he wants to join the caliphate.
"I formally and humbly request to be made a citizen of the Islamic State,”Hasan says in the handwritten document addressed to “Ameer, Mujahid Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”
"It would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier to a people and its leader who don't compromise the religion of All-Mighty Allah to get along with the disbelievers."
The two-page letter includes Hasan’s signature and the abbreviation SoA for Soldier of Allah.
Hasan's attorney, John Galligan, said the letter “underscores how much of his life, actions and mental thought process are driven by religious zeal. And it also reinforces my belief that the military judge committed reversible error by prohibiting Major Hasan from both testifying and arguing…how his religious beliefs” motivated his actions during the shooting.
In the last year, the Department of Justice has brought at least five prosecutions against Americans -- in Florida, California, Virginia and North Carolina - for trying to help terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
Omar Jamal, who is well known in Minneapolis’ Somali community, said at least 10 young men from there have been recruited to travel to Syria for ISIS.
"Douglas McCain wasn't the first one and unfortunately he won't be the last,"Jamal told KMSP-TV.
The former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee that investigated radicalization in a series of congressional hearings said there is a pattern.
“It was clear and convincing evidence then, that there was a pipeline from Minneapolis to Islamic jihad overseas,” said Peter King, R-N.Y. “And that people in the community knew about it and that people in the community were covering it up.”