Category Archives: Choke Point

Where Were You America on Net Neutrality?

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Going back as far as 2010, for the Federal government to take over the internet has been a building coup and while America did not care….the FCC assumed control.

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and “said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making.” Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

 

 

FCC Cites Soros-Funded, Neo-Marxist-Founded Group 46 TIMES In New Regs

New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist.

The FCC released the 400-page document on Thursday, two weeks after it passed new regulations, which many fear will turn the internet into a public commodity and thereby stifle innovation.

“Leveling the playing field” in that way has been a clear goal of Free Press, a group dedicated to net neutrality which was founded in 2003.

As Phil Kerpen, president of the free-market group American Commitment, first noted, Free Press is mentioned repeatedly in the FCC document. Most of the references are found in footnotes which cite comments by Free Press activists supporting more internet regulation.

The term “Free Press” is mentioned 62 times in the regulations. Some are redundant mentions referring to the same Free Press activists’ comments in favor of more oversight. In total, the FCC cited Free Press’ pro-net neutrality arguments 46 times.

The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

One argument made against the FCC’s regulatory push is that the general public is largely happy with its internet service. Support for net neutrality was seen as the domain of special interest groups like Free Press.

The activist group has big money behinds its effort. It has received $2.2 million in donations from progressive billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and $3.9 million from the Ford Foundation.

And one of Free Press’ co-founders, Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has not been shy about his desire to see the internet regulated heavily. (RELATED: A Leading Net Neutrality Activist’s Neo-Marxist Views)

But internet regulation appears to be only part of McChesney’s more radical agenda of completely revamping how the media operate in the U.S.

“In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles,” McChesney wrote in a 2009 essay.

“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism,” he said.

“The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society. Once we accept this, we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want,” McChesney once argued.

Sentiments such as these have raised questions about whether the FCC’s new regulations will eventually led to oversight of internet content.

“The unthinkable has become thinkable, and the free-market Internet – one of freedom’s greatest triumphs – is set to be reduced to a public utility, subject to pervasive economic regulation and, in turn, to content control,” American Commitment’s Kerpen wrote in an open letter to McChesney after the FCC voted 3-2 in favor of the regulations.

McChesney, who is currently on Free Press’ board of directors, made a series of progressive proposals in a 2010 book, “The Life and Death of American Journalism.” He suggested spending $35 billion on federal subsidies for public media outlets. He also proposed creating a journalism branch of AmeriCorps and said it would be a good idea to give each American a $200 news voucher which could be given only to publicly-owned media outlets.

“Advertising is the voice of capital,” McChesney said in a 2009 interview with the Socialist Project. “We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications.”

FCC commissioner Ajit Pai blew the whistle on the agency’s attempt to sneak the new regulations in under the radar. He pressed FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to release the proposed regulations so that the public could view them before the commission voted on the measure. Wheeler refused.

In his dissent, Pai, a Republican, slammed the commission’s secrecy and also mentioned Free Press as one of the activist groups which received special attention on the matter.

“What the press has called the “parallel FCC” at the White House opened its doors to a plethora of special-interest activists: Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, just to name a few,” Pai wrote.

Indeed, even before activists were blocking Chairman Wheeler’s driveway late last year, some of them had met with White House officials. But what about the rest of the American people? They certainly couldn’t get White House meetings. They were shut out of the process. They were being played for fools.”

 

Hillary was Hacked, Data Virgin Islands/Ukraine

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EmailGate courtesy of Hillary Clinton’s home server has taken on a life of its own.

From the Blaze:

Clinton Email Domain Hosted by a Company That Was Hacked in 2010 and Had Data Redirected to Ukraine — and IP Address Reveals Link to British Virgin Islands

As news of Hillary Clinton using a private email during her tenure as Secretary of State continues to emerge, TheBlaze has learned that the email domain was hosted by a “consumer grade” company whose data was hacked in 2010, with information being sent to Ukraine. Additionally, data reveals that the domain was hosted at one point in the British Virgin Islands. This, experts say, is a big security no-no.

Domain history data reveals Clintonemail.com was registered in 2009 with Network Solutions, shortly after Clinton was appointed as the nation’s top diplomat. But the decision to host the domain for such a high-profile person on a consumer registrar like Network Solutions is questionable to security experts.

Bill Sweetman, a domain registration expert based in Canada who describes himself as part of the “left-leaning camp,” told TheBlaze Friday that the whole Clinton email controversy has struck him as “naive on the part of the players.”

Image source: DomainTools.com
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“If you’re someone that is concerned about security of your data, you don’t go and register your domain name with a consumer-oriented registrar like Network Solutions or GoDaddy,” Sweetman said.

Image source: DomainTools.com

“You would work either with a corporate domain registrar like MarkMonitor or CVSC, or you would talk to your employer – in this case the government – about their internal solutions that would protect the domain name and would protect the data associated with it.”

Sweetman isn’t alone in thinking this.

Rod Rasmussen, a leading expert on the abuse of domain name systems, wrote in a 2013 column for the trade publication Security Week, that any domain managers using a consumer-grade registrar for a “major enterprise” should lose their jobs. Rasmussen wrote the piece after Network Solutions was hacked in 2010, resulting in thousands of domains being transferred to Confluence Networks, a domain registrar traced to the British Virgin Islands.

“When it comes to Internet security, there is absolutely no way major corporations would use consumer grade anti-malware and anti-phishing solutions as a one-stop security solution. So why would major organizations – we’re talking major Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, financial services and critical infrastructure organizations – put their domains in the hands of consumer grade registrars?” Rasmussen wrote.

Among the companies whose domains were moved offshore at the time of Rasmussen’s column were organizations like LinkedIn, Fidelity, Craigslist, Yelp and the U.S. Postal Service

“We have received reports that Network Solutions customers are seeing malicious code added to their websites, and we are really sorry for this experience,” company spokesman Shashi Bellamkonda wrote in a company blog post at the time. Aside from that admission, Rasmussen wrote that Network Solutions has been “tight-lipped” about the details, only adding that the websites of a “small number” of customers were “inadvertently affected for up to several hours.”

Computer World reported in 2010 that throughout the course of the attack, users of up to 50 domains hosted by Network Solutions were redirected to a Ukrainian attack server.  Historical domain data associated with Clintonemail.com reveals the last recorded change to a Clintonemail.com IP address occurred Dec. 22, 2011. A simple lookup of that particular IP address shows it is hosted in Road Town, British Virgin Islands, although its unclear whether the offshore IP address is a direct result of the Network Solutions hack.

What’s also unclear is whether Clintonemail.com was one of the domains directly involved in the same attack that redirected to a Ukrainian attack server. What is evident, however, is that the security threat posed by Hillary Clinton using a “consumer-grade registrar” for her private email domain, potentially containing classified information, was greater than the threat that could have been posed had she decided to use the State.gov domain.

Since the New York Times broke the story, questions surrounding Clinton’s use of private email have circulated throughout the media and even some members of her own party. Republicans, especially those who are expected to be considering a 2016 presidential run, have also pounced on the issue. After days of silence, Clinton finally tweeted a response to the controversy Thursday.

Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, told the press during a visit to Saudi Arabia that the review would be conducted “as rapidly as possible,” Reuters reported.

But the review of the nearly 55,000 emails Clinton sent from her private email could take some time, as one State Department official acknowledged: ”The review is likely to take several months given the sheer volume of the document set.”   ***    SIX YEARS

Hillary Clinton was in violation of State Department rules governing the use of non-governmental email accounts during her entire tenure as secretary of state and for nearly two years after she left the job, ABC News has learned.

A senior State Department official tells ABC News that under rules in place while Clinton was secretary of state, employees could only use private email accounts for official business if they turned those emails over to be entered into government computers. They were also forbidden from including sensitive but unclassified information on private email, except under some very narrow exceptions.

This policy is still in place, according to the Department. Until any private emails are entered into government computers, the official says, an employee is in violation of the rules.

Clinton used a private email account for her entire tenure as secretary — and did not even have a government-issued email. She only turned over some 55,000 pages of emails to be entered into government computer systems late last year, nearly two years after she stepped down from the State Department.

 

 

Hillary’s Emails, no Encryption and False Names

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There was also stolen White House furniture and then Wall Street. The makings of a Hollywood movie in the text below:

Is the Mysterious ‘Eric Hoteham’ Actually Longtime Clinton Aide Eric Hothem? 

The name of the mysterious individual who registered the servers for Hillary Clinton’s private email address used at the State Department bears a striking resemblance to a longtime Clinton aide.

Clinton and her top aides in the State Department were using email addresses on a private server registered to the Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by the Associated Press.

The customer listed in records registering the Internet address to the Chappaqua home was “Eric Hoteham.” The AP, however, was unable to identify an “Eric Hoteham,” stating that the “name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records, or Internet background searches.”

But the name is similar to that of Eric Hothem, who worked as a staff assistant for Clinton during her time as First Lady.

Hothem was involved in multiple personal matters during his service to Clinton and played a role in the controversy surrounding the pardon given to former President Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger Clinton.

A congressional investigation into Clinton’s clemency decisions found that as Roger Clinton refused to testify to the committee in March 2001, he received a $15,000 wire transfer from a Citibank account in the care of Hothem.

The name of the account was “E.C. 934(A) c/o Eric Hothem.” Lawyers told the committee that “the account is a personal Citibank account of former President and Senator Clinton” and that the money was a loan for Roger Clinton to obtain legal counsel for the investigation.

The congressional report points out that the “payment occurred at the height of public outcry and investigative activity regarding the pardons and at a time when Roger Clinton was deciding whether to provide testimony.”

According to accounts of the final days of the Clinton administration, Hothem told chief White House usher Gary Walters that multiple items of furniture were “the Clintons’ personal property” even though they were not.

The Clintons would later have to return or pay for more than $100,000 in furnishings stolen from the White House.

Hothem also received a special acknowledgement in Hillary Clinton’s book Living History.

Hothem went to work for Citigroup, then moved to JP Morgan Chase in 2013, according to public disclosure reports accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The documents indicate that Hothem began his financial career in 2002, just a year after his last documented work as an aide to Clinton.

Members of Hothem’s JP Morgan office in Washington, D.C., said on Wednesday that they had “no comment” to any questions regarding Hothem and directed the Washington Free Beacon to the company’s media relations department.

Inquiries made to media relations were not answered by press time. An email sent to an account believed to be Hothem’s was also not returned.

An analysis of Clinton’s personal financial disclosure forms shows she maintained accounts worth millions of dollars at Citibank throughout her years in the Senate. She moved her largest accounts to JP Morgan in 2009.

Her most recent available public financial disclosure in 2012 shows that she holds up to $25 million worth of assets in a JP Morgan account. Hothem did not make the switch to JP Morgan until Clinton was out of federal office in May 2013.

Hothem has maintained ties to Democratic campaigns. His wife, Sue Hothem, has “raised millions of dollars in political contributions,” and helped found a political action committee worth nearly $1 million. She was also the director of development Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

***    

Clinton’s E-Mail System Built For Privacy Though Not Security

No Encryption or protections and once the emails are gone…well they ARE gone?

A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

“You erase it and everything’s gone,” Matt Devost, a security expert who has had his own private e-mail for years. Commercial services like those from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. retain copies even after users erase them from their in-box.

Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking, said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.

The e-mail flap has political significance because Clinton is preparing to announce a bid for the Democratic nomination for president as soon as April. It also reminds voters of allegations of secrecy that surrounded Bill Clinton’s White House. In those years, First Lady Hillary Clinton fought efforts by some White House advisers to turn over information to Whitewater investigators and, later, sought to keep secret records of her task force on health-care reform.

Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads a special committee looking into the events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, said he will subpoena Clinton’s e-mails.

“We’re going to use every bit of legal recourse at our disposal,” Gowdy said Wednesday during an interview on CNN.

Private Service

The committee also said Wednesday that it has discovered two e-mail addresses used by Clinton while secretary of state.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though he said in a statement Tuesday that her practices followed “both the letter and spirit of the rules.”

Setting up a private e-mail service was once onerous and rare. Now, it’s relatively easy, said Devost, president of FusionX LLC, based in Arlington, Virginia.

“There are tons of disadvantages of not having teams of government people to make sure that mail server isn’t compromised,” McGeorge said. “It’s just inherently less secure.”

Former Florida Governor and likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and used a personal e-mail while he was governor and has done so since, according to his spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell. He kept a server he owned in his state office and didn’t have a private server at home, Campbell said in a phone interview.

Bush E-Mails

Bush differed from Clinton in that it was known he was using a personal e-mail, his aides had regular access to the server and “his office consistently throughout his term complied with Florida’s public records laws,” Campbell said.

In order to ensure her e-mails were private, Clinton’s system appeared to use a commercial encryption product from Fortinet — a good step, McGeorge said.

However, when McGeorge examined the set-up this week he found it used a default encryption “certificate,” instead of one purchased specifically for Clinton’s service. Encryption certificates are like digital security badges, which websites use to signal to incoming browsers that they are legitimate.

“It’s bewildering to me,” he said. “We should have a much better standard of security for the secretary of state.”

Confirmation Hearing

Clinton’s private e-mail — [email protected] — was on a domain set up Jan. 13, 2009, the same day a Senate committee held her confirmation hearing. She was confirmed and sworn in on Jan. 21 as President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State.

It’s entirely possible that Clinton had a private e-mail system set up at her home as a way to maintain administrative and legal control over her communications, said Tim “T.K.” Keanini, chief technology officer for network security company Lancope Inc. based in Atlanta.

“What we know is that she cared about that communication channel so much that she went out of her way,” and likely hired an expert to configure it for her, Keanini said in a phone interview.

Even so, there’s no guarantee she had complete control over what happened to the e-mails, Keanini said.

Keanini searched Internet records to determine that the computer server supporting Clinton’s e-mail was located in her hometown of Chappaqua, New York. An exact physical address could not be determined. The Internet Protocol address for the server was registered to a person by the name of Eric Hoteham, according to the records.

Kerry’s E-Mail

Supporters note that e-mails sent to State Department employees would have been retained on the government’s system.

However, the e-mail system was also used by at least some close staff, including Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department.

Clinton has yet to speak publicly about her motivation for setting up the system or what discussions she had with her advisers at the time.

Secretary of State John Kerry is the first in his position to rely primarily on a state.gov e-mail account, Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf said. Harf said that the State Department has “no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal e-mail account for anything but unclassified purposes.”

While Clinton didn’t have a classified e-mail system, she had multiple ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls and secure video conferences.

Top Aide

Clinton’s top aide during that period, Cheryl Mills, is a respected scandal-defense lawyer. As a member of the White House counsel’s office, Mills helped guide President Bill Clinton through a series of investigations in the 1990s and won praise for her performance in successfully defending him when the Senate voted not to remove him from office in 1999.

Mills would go on to combine two of the most powerful posts at the State Department — chief of staff and counselor — under Hillary Clinton. In that job, she spoke for Clinton on management matters within the department.

Mills didn’t reply to an e-mail seeking comment.

Not long after resigning as secretary of state, Clinton’s private e-mail service was transferred to a commercial provider, MX Logic, Devost said.

“The timing makes sense,” Devost said. “When she left office and was no longer worried as much about control over her e-mails, she moved to a system that was easier to administer.”

Encrypted Connection

It took less than a day for researchers to find potential problems with the Clinton’s system.

Using a scanning tool called Fierce that he developed, Robert Hansen, a web-application security specialist, found what he said were the addresses for Microsoft Outlook Web access server used by Clinton’s e-mail service, and the virtual private network used to download e-mail over an encrypted connection. If hackers located those links, they could search for weaknesses and intercept traffic, according to security experts.

Using those addresses, McGeorge discovered that the certificate appearing on the site Tuesday appeared to be the factory default for the security appliance, made by Fortinet Inc., running the service.

Those defaults would normally be replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars. By not taking that step, the system was vulnerable to hacking.

Fortinet Statement

It’s unclear whether the site’s settings were the same before news of the private e-mail account emerged this week.

Fortinet issued a statement saying it wasn’t aware the company’s technologies were used by Clinton.

“If they were, our recommendation is to replace provided self-signed certificates with valid digital certificates for the protected domains,” said Andrea Cousens, a Fortinet spokeswoman.

“It may have fallen in the realm of acceptable risk,” Devost said. “They wanted to make sure that when she was in Egypt all of the traffic from her phone to the mail server was encrypted and that was their priority.”

SCOTUS on Obamacare, Facts

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court was sharply divided Wednesday in the latest challenge to President Barack Obama’s health overhaul, this time over the tax subsidies that make insurance affordable for millions of Americans.

The justices aggressively questioned lawyers on both sides of what Justice Elena Kagan called “this never-ending saga,” the latest politically charged fight over the Affordable Care Act.

Chief Justice John Roberts said almost nothing in nearly 90 minutes of back-and-forth, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s questions did not make clear how he will come out. Roberts was the decisive vote to uphold the law in 2012.

Otherwise, the same liberal-conservative divide that characterized the earlier case was evident.

Opponents of the law say that only residents of states that set up their own insurance markets can get federal subsidies to help pay their premiums. The administration says the law provides for subsidies in all 50 states.

The liberal justices peppered lawyer Michael Carvin almost from the outset of his argument to limit the subsidies.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the law set up flexibility for states to either set up their own markets or rely on the federal healthcare.gov. Giving subsidies only to people in some states would be “disastrous,” Ginsburg said.

When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. stepped to the lectern, the liberal justices fell silent, and Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia took over.

“It may not be the statute Congress intended, but it may be the statute Congress wrote,” Scalia said of the provision in question. The case focuses on four words in the law, “established by the state.” The challengers say those words are clear and conclusive evidence that Congress wanted to limit subsidies to those consumers who get their insurance through a marketplace, or exchange, that was established by a state.

(AP) Members of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association rally…
Full Image

Verrilli argued that the law can only be read more broadly and noted that millions of people would lose health insurance if the court rules against the administration.

Alito wondered if the justices could delay the effect of such a ruling to allow states and perhaps the federal government to act. Scalia said he believes Congress would act.

“This Congress, Your Honor?” Verrilli said to widespread laughter in a packed courtroom that included leading congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Kennedy voted to strike down the health law in 2012, but on Wednesday he asked questions of both sides that made it hard to tell where he might come out this time.

He suggested that challenger Carvin’s argument raised a “serious” constitutional problem affecting the relationship between states and the federal government. On the other hand, he seemed less than convinced by Verrilli’s reading of the law to allow the subsidies nationwide.

Millions of people could be affected by the court’s decision. The justices are trying to determine whether the law makes people in all 50 states eligible for federal tax subsidies to cut the cost of insurance premiums. Or, does it limit tax credits to people who live in states that created their own health insurance marketplaces?

A ruling that limits where subsidies are available would have dramatic consequences because roughly three dozen states opted against their own marketplace, or exchange, and instead rely on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s healthcare.gov. Independent studies estimate that 8 million people could lose insurance coverage.

Activists on both sides were in place outside the marble courthouse by 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. Some held placards showing how many people in each state would lose insurance if the court ruled that the law does not allow subsidies everywhere.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act failed to kill the law in an epic, election-year Supreme Court case in 2012. Chief Justice Roberts joined with the court’s liberal justices and provided the crucial vote to uphold the law in the midst of Obama’s re-election campaign.

The new case, part of a long-running political and legal fight to get rid of the law also known as Obamacare, focuses on the four words “established by the state” in a law that runs more than 900 pages.

The administration counters that the law was written to dramatically reduce the ranks of uninsured, and that it would make no sense to condition subsidies on where people live. The phrase “established by the state,” is what the administration calls a “term of art” that takes in both state- and federally run exchanges. The administration also says the term cannot be read in isolation, and that other parts of the law show that subsidies should be widely available.

Each side in the case argues that the law unambiguously supports only its position. One other option for the court is to declare the law is ambiguous when it comes to subsidies and defer to the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations making tax credits available nationwide.

Partisan and ideological divisions remain stark for a law that passed Congress in 2010 with no Republican votes. Of the judges who have ruled on lawsuits over the subsidies, Democratic appointees have sided with the administration and Republican appointees have been with the challengers.

Roberts was the only justice to essentially cross party lines with his vote in 2012. His fellow conservatives on the court voted to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

A decision in King v. Burwell, 14-114, is expected by late June.

To understand the case that House has against the Department of Health and Human Services on Obamacare (ACA), in part this is from the lead lawyer, Jonathan Turley representing the House of Representatives:

The case could again put Chief Justice Roberts in the position of saving or dooming the ACA with a court that has been deeply divided over the Act. Roberts appeared to have switched sides soon before the issuance in the individual mandate case — a decision that saved the ACA but also produced a rather convoluted opinion. Now the Administration seems to be trying to influence Roberts with dire predictions about what would occur if he or his colleagues vote against the President. Obviously, the ramifications of a legal interpretation should not influence the Court but clearly some believe it may factor into the analysis.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the Health and Human Services secretary, told lawmakers in a letter on Tuesday that millions of Americans would lose their health insurance if the court rules against President Barack Obama’s administration in the case, which is expected to be decided by June. The timing of the letter is rather obvious and the question is whether such heavy-handed moves could backfire. It seems pretty obvious who the letter is really directed toward and Roberts may feel like he is being played as a chump.

Ironically, there is no need for the letter. As I have noted in the past, King and Halbig represent serious threats to the ACA, even though there could be legislative remedies. The problem is that the President has burned every bridge with Congress in continuing to take unilateral actions in violation of the the Separation of Powers (at least in the view of some of us).

In the end, this type of public campaign can irritate and alienate justices before an argument. Whether the President acted constitutionally (and I believe that he did not) should not be a question that turns on how you feel about health care or the ramification of enforcing what you believe is the constitutional mandate.

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Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, ISNA/CAIR

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Check EVERY lawmaker in Washington DC, no one is exempt when it comes to the funds they receive much less the events they attend. But let us take a deeper look at one, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson-Lee. Jackson-Lee is in the court of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror organization listed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Back as recently as in August of 2012, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee was a willing speaker at an ISNA event on the topic of ‘Forming a More Perfect Union’. ISNA has a motto: ‘One Nation Under God: Striving for the Common Good’. The Congresswoman was at this large event with 2 other significant Islamists, Nihad Awad, a Palestinian and has proven ties to Hamas, a terror organization listed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Awad is the Executive Director and Founder of Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The second Islamist joined by Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was Suhail Khan. Khan blocked the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and he facilitated the meeting of the Bush White House and Sami al Arian, now deported for terrorism. Khan also delivered a speech in 1999 full of hostility toward Federal law enforcement and demonstrated sympathy to terror suspects. Khan is also the first born son of Mahboob Khan, a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

Then in 2011, Sheila Jackson Lee went on a full blown rant at a hearing held by Congressman Pete King’s committee hearing on terrorism. Moving towards 2013, Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was campaigning to replace Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Jackson-Lee gained the full support of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Jackson-Lee’s outrageous remarks over the years — including her comment that welfare entitlements are “earned,” and famously asking where she could find photos of our flag planted on Mars — have made her a laughingstock.

Still, the letter asserts, “Rep. Jackson-Lee would serve as an effective DHS secretary because she understands the importance of increasing border security and maintaining homeland security.”

Yes, Jackson-Lee currently serves on a homeland security subcommittee. But she’s never run any organization, certainly not one as big and critical as DHS.

And Jackson-Lee actually voted against the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the DHS.

More concerning is Jackson-Lee’s free association with people DHS is supposed to protect us from. She’s in the pocket of Islamist groups who support terrorism.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she is among the top 10 recipients of Arab-Muslim cash and has helped unindicted terrorist co-conspirators raise cash.

At one annual fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, she presented the terror-tied group with a congressional recognition award — even though the FBI has banned the group from outreach meetings.

“How proud I am to have been associated with CAIR’s legislative work,” she said at a 2007 CAIR event. “We need CAIR and we need all of you supporting CAIR.”

That same year, she placed at least one CAIR worker in her office, according to “Muslim Mafia.”

It does not end here, there is more. A Turkish cleric named Fethullah Gulen has been a force when it comes to schools in America, when several have actually been raided by the FBI. Sheila Jackson-Lee has bee up to her chin in the schools too as have many others including some Republicans.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, Gülen’s allies have been stepping up their involvement in U.S. politics, emerging as a force in districts from South Texas to South Brooklyn. Liberal Democrats like Yvette Clarke, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Al Green, and conservative Republicans like Ted Poe and Pete Olson have all benefitted from donors affiliated with Gülen in one way or another.
Leaders in the movement deny that there is any top-down organization of the donations (or, indeed, that the Gülen movement has any organization at all), but the patterns of giving suggest some level of coordination in a community beginning to flex its political muscle. Gülen himself reportedly told followers in 2010 that they could only visit him in the Poconos if they donated to their local congressman, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Gülen has denied the comment.
The donations, taken together, comprise significant totals for some U.S. House members in relatively safe seats. For instance, people connected to the Gülen-inspired charter schools donated $23,000 to Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in October 2013 — a large sum considering Jackson Lee has raised just more than $130,000 this cycle in individual contributions, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The state of Texas is home to Harmony Public Schools, the Gülen-inspired network of charter schools that have inspired some controversy; the Harmony schools, and other Gülen-related educational institutions around the country, have been accused of abusing foreign worker visas and of using taxpayer money to favor Turkish businesses over others. And Houston and its southwest suburbs are a hub for the movement in the U.S. Many Turkish immigrants who live there work for Harmony or for other organizations with ties to the Gülen movement, such as the Texas Gulf Foundation, the Raindrop Foundation, or North American University, a relatively new STEM-focused school that sits on the side of a desolate highway in north Houston. Other Houstonites affiliated with Gülen groups gave to Rep. Henry Cuellar, Rep. Pete Olson, Rep. Ted Poe, Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine, and others.

Though bundling political donations is common, Gülen-affiliated Houstonites said there was no top-down coordination of the donations.

For instance, Metin Ekren, a Harmony educator who gave $2,000 to Sheila Jackson Lee in 2012 and $1,500 to her in 2013, said that Harmony did not tell its employees to donate. Ekren said he and “friends in the office” discuss such things, but that “usually Sheila Jackson Lee has a kind of donation meeting” and that’s how he had donated. He said he gives to other Democrats as well, though records show he has mostly given to Republicans, including Poe, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.

Erdal Caglar, Harmony’s chief financial officer, gave $1,500 to Jackson Lee in October 2013 at a fundraiser, he said.

“She has been always a supporter of our schools,” Caglar said. “She has attended all major events that Harmony organized. And she expressed — you know, Harmony’s STEM, and she’s supporting STEM education.”

Don’t go away yet, there is still more.

You see when it comes to events even in Washington DC….lil miss Sheila is there too, along with Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Amy Goodman, who runs the operation titled Democracy Now. Democracy Now protested the 2008 Republican National Convention and were detained by police. Not to be omitted, Democracy Now was the recipient of $100 million from George Soros, the Ford Foundation and the Tides Foundation.