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White House Wavers on Hagel, Considers Others for Defense By Michael Hirsh | National Journal – 5 hrs ago Besieged by criticism from right and left, and considerable skepticism from his former Senate colleagues, Chuck Hagel appears to be following the path of Susan Rice as a trial-balloon nominee who finds himself quickly losing altitude in Washington. And as happened with Rice, the White House is now signaling that it may soon puncture Hagel's hopes. Just as occurred with Rice, the U.N. ambassador whose prospective nomination as secretary of State—leaked to the media—flamed out in the face of widespread criticism...

Rosa Brooks serves as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy. In May 2010 she also became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy. She is running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues. She is on leave from her job as a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is known as a columnist (most recently with the LA Times) and at the Pentagon her portfolio has included both human rights issues and global engagement and strategic communication. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, is...

President Barack Obama’s love of secrecy has, by this point, become a favorite rhetorical cudgel for the President’s opponents. And perhaps no set of documents is more coveted due to its total unavailability than the President’s college records. These documents have sparked all sorts of conspiracy theories.To be fair, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, didn’t release his college records either. Those only became public after a leak from inside Yale University, not due to any consent on the part of the former President. All the same, Obama’s time at Columbia is filled with gaps, such as the question of...

At Take Back the American Dream, Van Jones, Paul Krugman, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ai-jen Poo, Sandra Fluke, Gov. Howard Dean, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes, Katrina vanden Heuvel and many more will share ideas and forge the strategy to make sure that the 99% is heard.

President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”

Barack Obama gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dolores Huerta, an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. During the ceremony today President Obama admitted he stole her slogan “Yes we can!” for his 2008 campaign. (Video at link) ---snip---...Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.” Huerta has claimed, “Republicans hate Latinos,” and has spoken fondly of Hugo...

It's a reminder that the President presented himself as much more progressive during his time in Chicago. In this little-seen advertisement that ran in the Hyde Park Herald in 1996, Obama was listed on a panel sponsored by the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), University of Chicago Democrats, and University of Chicago DSA. He also supported gay marriage back then.

The subversive network taking over America The time has long passed when we could afford to look the other way on the extent to which subversive influences — communist and jihad-oriented Islamists — have for years been worming their way into the high councils of our government.So let's say this again: When the Cold War ended, the enemies of America did not just go away. America is under attack from Communists (with both a large and small "c") and Jihadists.These two threats to America (by violent means if necessary) have philosophical differences, but they are bound together by an identical...

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has taken intense heat from the media and the left over his statement that there are “78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.” In the wake of the controversy that has resulted from his remarks, West, who was slated to be a speaker at an event hosted by the Martin County chapter of the NAACP this past Saturday, was disinvited from addressing the group. Mediaite has more about the reasons behind the decision to axe the congressman as the event’s keynote speaker: In Martin County chapter president Jerry...

A quarter-century after her debut as a regular on TV's "Saturday Night Live," Victoria Jackson is back entertaining audiences in South Florida. The crowds are minuscule compared with the millions who saw her, often portraying a ditsy blonde, during six seasons on SNL. But this is entertainment with a purpose. With a small American flag stuck in her pulled-back hair at one event, playing a ukulele and singing at the next, Jackson is out to spread her conservative worldview and alert the uninformed to the threats she sees facing America. "There's an urgency in the air," she said during a...

Pelosi: Amend the First Amendment By Terence P. Jeffrey April 19, 2012 (CNSNews.com) - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday endorsed a movement announced by other congressional Democrats on Wednesday to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow Congress to regulate political speech when it is engaged in by corporations as opposed to individuals. The First Amendment says in part: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Television networks, newspapers, publishing houses, movie studios and think tanks, as well as political action committees, are usually organized as, or...

Brown: Is Progressivism the new Communism? In politics, truth-telling can get you into trouble, even if you stumble upon it by accident. Just ask Rep. Allen West (R-FL). West is feeling the heat for a pregnant pause he took during a town hall meeting after he was asked "What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists?" "It's a good question," West responded, "I believe there's [sic] about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. (Long pause) "They don't actually hide. It's called the Congressional Progressive...

Abraham Lincoln rightly denounced the “mobocratic spirit.” James Madison considered it the sa- cred duty of government to protect property rights from the violent whims of the mob: “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” Lincoln and Madison would not have looked kindly upon the pro-redistributionist political street theater under way in urine- and garbage-saturated urban parks across the nation. In an insult to the...

Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party of the 1940s was nothing but a tool the Communist Party USA – and by extension, the Soviet Union. Today’s Democratic Party is also heavily infiltrated by the now pro Chinese Communist Party USA and their almost as equally extreme comrades from Democratic Socialists of America. Here’s an interesting picture from the 1940s. Henry Wallace chatting with Chicago journalist and Progressive Party supporter Vernon Jarrett. It turns out that around this time Vernon Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy – the youth wing of the Communist Party. Chicago communist...

“A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” ~ Mao We are currently in the midst of a battle for the heart and soul of America. This war is being waged at our schools, the workplace and in our communities. States struggling to moderate impossible debt and balance budgets are examining ways to free themselves from the fiscal and political shackles imposed by labor unions whose exorbitant pensions and benefits comprise the bulk of their debt. With the economy tanking and the fight over public union benefits and collective bargaining spreading across the...

According to Detroit Democratic Socialists of America leader David Green. Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production. Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace... We can accomplish this by promoting full employment policies, passing local living wage laws, but most of all by increasing the union movement’s power... Certainly in the last 15 years D.S.A. and their Communist Party USA and independent Marxist allies have effectively taken complete control the U.S. labor movement. Two of the U.S.'s largest unions AFCSME and SEIU are dominated by DSAers, but...

Last fall, leftist ideological groups of socialists and communists teamed up with American labor unions to march together for “One Nation.” Now, as labor leaders struggle to maintain a stranglehold on collective bargaining privileges in Wisconsin, the same groups are once again marching together under a banner claiming unions are the heart of the American dream.As we’ve reported, former White House green jobs czar Van Jones this week issued a rallying call for the progressive movement to “renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.” On Saturday, progressive groups and labor unions are reportedly planning...

President Barack Obama has appointed a far left labor unionist to a security sensitive U.S. trade post. Bob King On February 16, 2011,  Obama  announced the appointment of United Auto Workers president Bob King to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. As U.S. trade positions and data are always  key targets of foreign intelligence services, one would think that appointments to such a body would be subject to thorough scrutiny. Either this was not done in King's case, or affiliation with far left organizations, is no longer considered any sort of danger to national security in today's Washington....

Cornel West, an extremist race-relations instructor at Princeton, addressed the 10th annual Young Democratic Socialists conference earlier this month. The three-day event took place at Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, named after an American socialist activist. The meeting, entitled "Real change for a change," described itself as a "snap shot of the current socialist movement in the United States."

The Obama and Bush administrations have classified too much information unnecessarily and contributed to an overly secretive atmosphere surrounding U.S. policy, lawmakers at a House Judiciary Committee hearing said Thursday. At a hearing on the legal implications of potentially prosecuting WikiLeaks, panel Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said the group’s recent dissemination of classified diplomatic cables might have been embarrassing for the government but that the real-world consequences have been fairly modest. He labeled calls for criminal charges against site founder Julian Assange "extreme measures" and said the widespread outrage in Washington is a sign that caution is needed before proceeding....