UPDATED: Breaking News: Tectonic Shift At CNN

Barack Obama, Ethics, Journalism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Rights

Did CNN just break a pattern by reporting on Barack Obama’s law-breaking?

Today, Jeffry Toobin, a senior legal analyst and one among an army of Obama sycophants at CNN, was briefly seen admitting that Obama did indeed break the law when he arranged the Bergdahl prisoner swap without giving Congress 30-day notice, required when releasing detainees.

Then, when I went in search of this historical event—a CNN pundit calling a spade a spade vis-a-vis Barack Obama—I was unable to trace the snippet.

Was The Event a figment of my imagination, or did this BHO shill tell it like it is, for once?

It happened! Via National Review:

The Obama administration’s failure to notify Congress of the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees ahead of his exchanging them for American soldier Bowe Bergdahl is a direct violation of the law, according to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
“I think he clearly broke the law,” Toobin said on Monday, adding that the president’s signing statement in which he called the law unconstitutional does not automatically make it so. “Certainly this is an example of a signing statement where the president is taking power for himself that the law didn’t give him — he’s explicitly contradicting it.”

As the articulate Nathan Bradley Bethea seconded today, also on CNN, unaltered is the ethical obligation to retrieve this man (whose parents are pretty off-putting).

The 30-day, notice-to-Congress law is procedural in nature. In exchanging Taliban terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl, Obama, who most certainly tramples rights daily, was, this once, flouting protocol, not rights.

UPDATE: WHAT DOES ROBERT REDFORD THINK? Yeah, that’s CNN’s headline with respect to “Obama’s big green move”:
What Robert Redford thinks about it.

Is Israel Weak For Negotiating To Free Prisoners Of War?

Family, Israel, Military, Pop-Culture, Terrorism, War

While the specter of the parents of returning POW Bowe Bergdahl babbling, sobbing and conveying encoded, incoherent messages to their son on national TV was inappropriate and undignified (although not atypical of the pornography of public grief in this country)—the fact that the soldier’s government has worked to get him released from Taliban captivity is entirely appropriate. It’s a good thing that, as Reuters reports, “Army Sergeant Bergdahl, held for nearly five years in Afghanistan, was freed in a deal with the Taliban brokered by the Qatari government. Five Taliban militants, described by Senator John McCain as the ‘hardest of the hard core,’ were released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and flown to Qatar.”

But not if you ask the usual suspects.

Nothing much has changed since, in 2004, the neoconservatives at National Review had “grumbled about Israel’s ‘lopsided prisoner exchanges’ over the years. One ‘sofa samurai,’ … noted the startling disparity of exchanging 5,500 Egyptian soldiers, following the Sinai campaign of 1956, ‘for the lives of the four Israeli soldiers captured in the fighting,’ and over 8,000 Egyptians, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in exchange for 240 Israeli soldiers.”

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released 430 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in exchange for three dead Israelis and one live one, people worried, and for good reason. Many of the prisoners were said to be very dangerous men. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would probably have supported the Sharon swap. According to Dr. Ganor, Rabin said categorically that when military action to free hostages is not possible, ‘real negotiations should be held.’…

… President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen beheaded … Abandoning hostages as the Bush administration did as a matter of ‘principle’ is … not an option, at least not an ethical one. President Bush bears the mark of Cain for looking on as Americans continue to be butchered. …” (“AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS”)

“Bergdahl was flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for medical treatment,” reports Reuters. “After receiving care he would be transferred to another facility in San Antonio, Texas, U.S. defense officials said, without giving a date for his return to the United States.”

MORE.

SWAT That Drug-Using Baby

Drug War, Fascism, Private Property

Georgia police—in the service of the police state and the war on the individual’s natural right to ingest, inhale, inject and trade in substances—incinerate a sleeping baby, during one of their 3:00 AM no-knock, drug-enforcement raids on private property. Oops, wrong house. This too happens all too frequently in the course of doing the Lord’s work. What are ya gonna do?

At least that’s how the culprits have written-off the baby at whom they lobbed a flash grenade.

The thrust of the AP report is not the tragedy, futility and violative nature of police action and mission, but on the age of the victim: Police did not know children were inside. So if adults alone were similarly incinerated would that have been OK?

British Libertarian Vows To Unite Behind UKIP

Britain, Classical Liberalism, Elections, EU, Europe, libertarianism, Nationalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness

In an interview with the German weekly Junge Freiheit, I ventured that,”Step one in reclaiming [European] national and individual sovereignty (the ultimate goal) is secession from the European union. Judging from their voting patterns, Europeans seem to grasp that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their national governments has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”

Of course, there is something fundamentally perverse about the idea of the British partaking in “European elections.” Come to think of it, the notion that each ostensibly sovereign European country belongs to this overarching suprastate and must obey it is equally abhorrent.

My comment about “voting patterns” has, nevertheless, been borne out.

“The overall result,” writes Sean Gabb of The Libertarian Alliance, “is a big increase in numbers for parties which are hostile to the EU goal of ‘ever closer union,’ and even to the existence of the EU in its present form or in any form at all. In Holland, the Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, came second. In France, the National Front, led by Marine le Pen, came first. The Danish People’s Party also came first, as did the Flemish separatist party in Belgium. In Hungary, the conservative party, Fidesz, came first, followed by Jobbik, which is describes as a national socialist party. In Greece, the leftists party Syriza (Euro-sceptic) came first, and the nationalist party Golden Dawn came third. In Finland and in Austria, Euro-sceptic parties did well, as they also did in Germany.”

Commentators and politicians are suspended between a rock and a hard-place, to use that cliche of in-betweeness. Do they diss the voter or do they revise their rejected positions? Some have just settled for the well-worn battle cry of “racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry.”

Back to Gabb: “The big winner of the [British] elections was the UK Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage.”

UKIP topped the poll, winning 27.5 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives, who are currently in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, came third—though this is largely because of a strong Labour performance in London, where native British are now a minority.[ Labour doubles its MEPs in London, BBC, May 28, 2014]. Significantly, the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-European of the main parties, were almost wiped out, losing all but one of their seats in the European Parliament.

UKIP must now be regarded as one of Britain’s major parties. This a huge achievement—and a useful reminder to depressed American patriots that new parties can succeed.

UKIP’s key policies: to leave the European Union, to end mass immigration, and to strip Political Correctness out of law and administration. … Whatever some people may think of UKIP, it is our best hope for pulling down the current order of things. I with enthusiasm, others with reluctance, have a duty to unite behind it. …

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