Howard Dean: ‘Benghazi is a Laughable Joke’

By  Andrew Johnson

May 21, 2013 10:17 AM

Former Democratic National committee chairman Howard Dean considers the controversy over Benghazi a “joke” and “silly.”
“Benghazi is a laughable joke,” Dean proclaimed twice last week in a discussion with Republican National Committee communications chairman Sean Spicer.
“With all due respect, governor, when four Americans die serving this country, that’s not a joke, sir,” Spicer responded.
“Oh, stop it,” Dean said.
The former Democratic presidential candidate also said that there were “no serious questions being asked about Benghazi” and brushed off the controversy over the administration’s response to the terrorist attack as an effort by Republicans to score political points. ”It’s very clear what happened with Benghazi, this is ridiculous,” he said.

Wow: CBS News President and WH Official Tied to Benghazi Scandal Are Brothers

Guy Benson | May 11, 2013

One of the mainstream media journalists whose pursuit of the truth has been truly tenacious and nonpartisan is CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson.  Her tough reporting has made life difficult for everyone from Hillary Clinton to the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans.  She's also been relentless on the Obama administration's Fast & Furious gun-running scandal -- and, of course, Benghazi.  As we mentioned this week, Attkisson's tough investigative journalism is starting to bother unnamed CBS News executives.  Here's Politico's scoop, in case you missed it:

But from where Attkisson is sitting, there are actually two Goliaths, one of which is almost entirely absent from the Post profile. The second Goliath is CBS News, which has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson's Benghazi campaign. CBS News executives see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can't get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract, as POLITICO reported in April. Farhi mentions "internal conflicts" in the final paragraph, though he seems to dismiss them. The "internal conflicts" are indeed real -- Attkisson is still eyeing an exit, according to sources -- and provide important context for today's piece.

Nixama: What we can expect next.

May 21, 2015
John Sacs

What are the Similarities between Obama and Nixon?
Part 1 – The Enemies list then and Now

The multitude of scandals that is brewing around President Obama is increasing every day. The White House is in full deny and obfuscation mode. Obama has fallen back to his usual, “I didn’t know that. The first I heard of that was on the news.” Obama has used this many times in the past and the media had always given him a pass. Press Secretary Jay Carney is using the classic “No Comment” defense when asked about the Department of Justice (DOJ) seizing Associated Press (AP) reporters phone lines. Attorney General Eric Holder is claiming he recused himself from the AP investigation very early on. We know Richard Nixon had his enemies list. His list though was easily compiled by watching the major news networks, newspapers and anyone from singers or actors to average people who spoke at rallies who opposed him. Nixon’s list was manually compiled and was pretty simple and limited. Obama’s is much more dangerous. Obama, who is the first president to win the presidency in a large part due to Big Data and a mastery of Social Media. The office in Chicago set up by David Axelrod to use Big Data and Link Social Media to voters was simply brilliant. There are many articles looking into it from ARStecnica.com to MIT’s Technological review, but the most comprehensive is from Sasha Issenberg who wrote a book called the Victory Lab. http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Lab-Science-Winning-Campaigns/dp/030795479X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368646723&sr=1-1&keywords=sasha+issenberg We still don’t know the details of what data, algorithms, and pattern matching criteria they used. This is kept under lock and key and no one from the Chicago “Cave” as it was called is talking. This is not surprising as Obama and his team’s penchant for secrecy is Nixonian or worse. At least the media hated Nixon and were doing their job as a watchdog on power as the Founders intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights and made Freedom of Speech the very 1st Amendment. They did this on purpose; it wasn’t an accident that Freedom of Speech is the 1st Amendment. Obama’s hatred of truth tellers and whistle blowers is legendary. In Obamaland, no person, not even a journalist is safe as the Associated Press is finding out. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/in-america-journalists-are-considered-terrorists.html What is truly frightening is that Obama’s use of Big Data and Social Media can be used to find any small collection between two people. It may be able to link your reading of this article to your Google and Facebook accounts and the numbers you have called on your smartphone. From there it can determine everyone you have emailed, texted, called and read on the Web. If you hit enough parameters, then you may be determined to be an enemy of Obama. What I just wrote might not even be true, but from where I sit in Silicon Valley, I know people who are writing these sorts of type of correlation algorithms. It is truly Orwellian. The Soviet Union and the East German Stasi could only dream of control like this. Here is my favorite story about the East German Stasi and their ability to track enemies and remember they had one officer per every 2000 people. An opponent of the East German President, Erich Honecker would buy a newspaper and cut out a picture of Honecker and write, “pig” over Honecker’s face and mail it to the Communist headquarters. This went on for weeks and then months. This infuriated the Communist Party. The then put the Stasi in charge of catching this man. The Stasi was able to determine the man lived in East Berlin from the Post Office Stamping. That was all they knew. The Stasi then had the local newspaper print a different number on the back of each picture of Honecker in each newspaper and associate it with either an home address, business address or where each paper would be sold. Once, this was done, they caught the write of “pig” very quickly and I am sure he must have been tortured in a Stalag for at least a decade if he was lucky. This took an unbelievable amount of manpower and effort for the Stasi in a Police State. The power Obama has is something the Stasi could only dream of.

Obama admits he made a mistakeMay 16, 2013
John Sacs


You know President Obama is in trouble when 2 things happen.

The first is that Obama actually fires someone.  He fired the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday and announced it at 6:30 pm EST in a televised White House statement.

Cleverly enough, the evening news broadcasts had just finished on the East Coast. The only thing better would have been if he could have done it on a Friday night at 11:00 pm. Sadly, time does not care that he is Barack Obama, aka “the Chosen One” by Oprah and himself.

President Obama despises firing anybody. I am not sure he had actually fired anyone. He believes every decision and appointment he has ever made is beyond questioning by any person. It is part of the administration’s bunker mentality.

The fact he fired someone and the timing of it shows he knows that the three scandals, Benghazi, IRS, and AP spying on reporters, are getting hotter. The fastest way to try to cool things down is to fire someone and hope that appeases the media and Congress.

The second reason you know the President is in trouble is that the New York Times and NBC have joined the Wall Street Journal in their coverage opinions of Obama.

Today’s NYT front page seems the same as yesterday’s WSJ front page.  Here is a quote “But the controversies of recent days have reinforced fears of an overreaching government while calling into questions Mr. Obama’s ability to master his own presidency.”

Later in the article, the NYT mentions that Obama portrayed himself as an onlooker to the IRS scandal and he is angry about it.

Left unsaid is why he is angry. Is he angry because what the IRS did is wrong? Is he angry because the IRS was caught? Or is he angry because he had to fire someone?

Later in the article Obama is mentioned as saying he had nothing to do with Justice Department seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

On Benghazi, Obama is reported, as saying is a dispute that is “brazen politics”. They then realized a document of emails to give the press and Congress something to look at.

The Obama administration is in pure damage control mode as they are desperately trying to get their arms around the three scandals.

Besides, the document dump on Benghazi, the administration has suddenly announced that they have decided to work with Congress on a Journalist Shield Law.

Despite this, the media and Congress don’t seem to be impressed with Obama’s speeches and actions.

The story that Obama is most concerned of appears to be the IRS story. This is a story that resonates with the American people. The people understand the power and fear that the IRS has. This is simple and terrifying government overreach.

Benghazi does not appear yet to have the ability to connect with the American people.

The AP story is believed to be least threatening, as they believe the popularity of the media is very low and the people don’t care what happens to the media.

Hannity guest claims IRS scandal means Obama stole 2012 election

Hannity guest claims IRS scandal means Obama stole 2012 election (via Raw Story )

A panel discussion on Wednesday night’s episode of the Republican talk show “Hannity” ended with everyone agreeing that President Barack Obama must have used the Internal Revenue Service to steal the 2012 election, keeping tea partiers so busy with filling out documents to obtain tax exempt status…

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BETWEEN THE LINES The Benghazi lies just keep coming Exclusive: Joseph Farah on key officials: 'The rats are beginning to abandon the ship'
It was just on May 8 that former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, criticized those who accused the Obama administration of a cover-up in the Benghazi scandal.

“I think the notion of a quote, cover-up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” Pickering said on MSNBC.
He rebutted claims his review board tried to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the way it conducted its investigation.

“I saw no evidence of it,” he said. “She did publicly take responsibility for what happened below her and indeed one of the things the Congress did in preparing the legislation that established the Accountability Review Board was to say we don’t want a situation where heads of agencies take responsibility and then nobody who made the decision in the chain has to suffer any consequences for failure for performance. I believe in fact the Accountability Review Board did its work well.”

But wait just a minute.
Only a few days later, on Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” even Pickering was scampering for the tall grass, saying his review only looked at what led up to the Benghazi attack with an eye toward security concerns. He said the review board did not examine the spin that followed the attack. In other words, all the changing talking points, after the fact, were not part of his review.

So how could he have said a few days ago there was no cover-up, which, by definition, is what occurs after an attack, if his investigation didn’t look at that?
What’s particularly distressing about Pickering’s role in the Benghazi scandal is his own personal history.

Lt. Col. Oliver North recalls a time when he served as with the National Security Council in the Reagan administration that Pickering was in a pickle very similar to Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Pickering was the target of assassination threats while serving as ambassador to El Salvador. He was, in all likelihood, saved from such an attack because of decisive action taken on his behalf.

Benghazi Emails Released Messages Show State Department, CIA Had Often-Tense Debate Over What to Disclose About Attacks

By COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON and ADAM ENTOUS

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Marines at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland last September carry caskets of the remains of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya.

WASHINGTON—More than 100 pages of emails released by the White House on Wednesday depict a protracted, frustrating and often tense debate about what should be contained in public "talking points" about last year's deadly assault in Benghazi, Libya.
The emails reveal a tussle within the administration about what it could confidently say about the attacks while an investigation into the assault was ongoing.
Senior administration officials said the emails—which the White House released to try to quell a partisan controversy—encompassed a two-day discussion among several agencies as officials wrote and rewrote the talking points on the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks.
Republicans have charged that the White House had political motives—less than two months before the presidential election—for changing the talking points to remove references to terrorist involvement in the assault.