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In a stunning sequences of events that unfolded yesterday, it was revealed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to intimidate the media went beyond targeting reporters and editors at the Associated Press. Early in the day, the Washington Post reported that the DOJ not only seized the phone records of Fox News reporter James Rosen, but used his security badge to access records tracking his movements at the State Department, traced the timing of his calls with a Department security advisor suspected of giving him classified information, and obtained a search warrant to access his personal emails.

Later in the afternoon another bombshell was dropped: two more Fox staffers, reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine, were also targeted by the DOJ.

We begin with Rosen and his involvement with State Department advisor Steven Kim. Kim is a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for telling Rosen that the intelligence community believed North Korea’s response to additional UN sanctions would be another test of its nuclear capabilities. Rosen published a story to that effect on June 11, 2009, noting that the CIA had received the information from sources inside North Korea.

That story was posted the same day a top-secret report was made available to Kim, arms expert with security clearance, and 95 other members of the intelligence community. Using the surveillance techniques described above, the FBI built a case that the information Rosen received came directly from those documents. Yet Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to top-secret information, steal or sell documents or secrets, or collaborate with the enemy. He gave exclusive information to a reporter, a reality that occurs every day. Furthermore, according to the New York Times, four months prior to disseminating the information for which he was indicted, Kim was asked by a State Department press officer to speak to Rosen about North Korea, “and the two began to talk and exchange e-mails,” the paper reported.

Despite this reality, Kim is facing 15 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act.

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Last week, while everyone was enraptured by the trio of Obama administration scandals, Congress was hard at work fleecing American taxpayers.

This time, they’re doing it with a multi-billion dollar bill to subsidize farmers. The bill is a maze of agribusiness subsidies, welfare payments and “green” crony capitalism spending. Programs in the farm bill include: income support for farmers, price controls on select crops, government guaranteed loans and special subsidized crop insurance for farmers.

The problem is not agriculture per se. It’s that once the money flows, it becomes impossible to turn off the gushing payment spigot to demanding recipients.

You see, the current farm payment programs all got started in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, times were tough… but today’s farming is a whole other thing, mostly controlled by large, successful agribusiness. Present-day farms are bringing in record-high incomes. Technology has done away with numerous risks that used to bedevil agriculture.

Nowadays, the never-ending giveaway of billions of dollars to agribusiness is a needless expense that inevitably falls to taxpayers.

Big Agriculture is a Big Business

When you listen to congressmen talk about the farm bill, you might think the bill helps small, family farms. But in actuality, the victors are giant agribusiness.

About 75% of big farms collect subsidies compared to only 24% of the smaller, family farms. According to the government’s own data, farms with gross sales of $1 million or more received 23% of all commodity-related cash, significantly more than the 15% share received by smaller farms in the $100,000 to $249,999 sales range.

Subsidy payments given to large enterprises make it very difficult for small farms to compete and stay in business. The stream of tax dollars into big farms increases demand for farmland, which raises the price of property above the reach of smaller players. If the government wanted to enact effective change, Congress should cut payments to farms raking in over $250,000 per year.

And Now For Some Corruption

If saddling taxpayers with unwanted bills isn’t bad enough, there’s this: Members of Congress and their families are eligible for these farm subsidies.

You see, many of the members assigned to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are farmers themselves, and the public can’t see how much these same members and their families profit from crop insurance payments.

In essence, they get to reach into the farm bill honeypot and grab however much money they want.

And as for corruption, that’s only the start. The farm bill wouldn’t pass with the support of farmers alone. It needs the support of big city politicians, too, which is why Congress tied the Food Stamp program to the farm bill. Urban members of Congress exchange their support of the bill for millions in welfare benefits for their constituents.

And of course the idea of decoupling welfare from the farm bill faces stiff resistance. It makes good politics to mix the two. As Sen. Thad Cochran of the Senate Agriculture Committee candidly admitted to the North American Agricultural Journalists meeting that food stamps must be included in the farm bill “purely from a political perspective. It helps get the farm bill passed.”

I say America would be better off if we just cashiered the whole bill, but Capitol Hill doesn’t listen to common sense. Congressmen only listen to the special interests that pour money into their re-election campaigns.

Your eyes on the Hill,

Floyd Brown

“This article originally appeared at CapitolHillDaily.com and is reprinted here with permission.

Photo credit: iluvcocacola (Creative Commons)

How do you kill a country?  Answer: kill its language for starters.

The great philosopher Emanuel Kant said, “The two great dividers are: language and religion.”

Over the past 237 years, America struggled with its most burdensome problem: race relations.  Black versus White.  Not a week goes by where “racism” rears its ugly head somewhere in America.  In 2013, we see tremendous disparity among whites, blacks and Latinas. Wherever one ethnic group dominates an area, racism invariably becomes a contentious factor.

While white racism dominated this country for the past 237 years since the birth of this Constitutional Republic, today European-Americans barely hold parity with Hispanics.  By 2042, Caucasian America will become the new minority while Latinos will become the new majority. Middle Easterners with Arabic languages, Asians with multiple dialects, Indians, Africans of many countries and a hundred other languages will compete for dominance in their own communities where they enclave.  In the 21^st century, immigrants no longer care to engage in the American culture or its language.

Once a particular ethnic group becomes dominate in numbers, it becomes dominate in language.  Once it becomes dominate in language, it presses for dominance in culture.

The current Senate Bill 744, giving complete amnesty to 12 to 20 million illegal aliens, assures that the United States of America will become a bilingual society if not trilingual with Arabic making greater and greater inroads into our society.  You can be assured that more and more Mexican immigrants will demand Spanish in educating their children. They will demand Spanish in books, movies, radio, TV and all aspects of social media. Same with Arabic speakers!

America faces becoming two or three different societies and cultures.  While it suffered and suffers from racism over the past two centuries, at least everyone spoke English.  Everyone communicated in one language that all understood no matter what their race.  The heralded “American Way of Life” faces deformation into “American Polyglot Chaos of Life.”

The one great falsity of S744 stems from the fact that Spanish speakers will gain such greater numbers that they will push for language equity with English speakers. Thus, we will see America fractured into two language groups.  Once contesting languages erupt, we will see cultural differences escalate.

Former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm, on October 3, 2003, said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America.  It is not that hard to do.  No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.  Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall, and that, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”

“Here is how they destroyed their countries,” Lamm said. “First, turn America into a bilingual or multi lingual and bicultural country.  History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures.  It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.  The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way, “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy.  Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon—all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

ProEnglish, the nation’s leading official English advocacy group, announced today it is launching a radio ad campaign in South Carolina to expose the fact that contrary to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s repeated claims, the comprehensive immigration bill he and the members of the “Gang of Eight” recently introduced in the Senate has no requirement that illegal immigrants learn English.

“The promise that Senator Graham made on repeated occasions to South Carolina voters to the effect ‘Don’t worry, they’ll have to learn English,’ is a lie,” said ProEnglish Executive Director, Bob Vandervoort.

“There is nothing in Sen. Graham’s immigration bill that requires illegal immigrants to demonstrate any knowledge of English to qualify for amnesty, or to retain their legal status throughout their entire lives,” said Vandervoort. “They only have to demonstrate knowledge of English if they decide to apply for an immigrant visa (“Green Card”) after living here ten years. And even then all they have to show is that they have enrolled in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) class,” he said.

“For at least ten years and perhaps for their entire lives, this huge new group of predominantly non-English speaking, former illegal immigrants will create a huge new demand for costly government services in their native language, further exacerbating the dangerous and growing division of the United States into separate cultural and linguistic communities,” Vandervoort added. “This would be an unprecedented calamity for our nation’s unity,” he said.

The fact remains that America cannot withstand nor will it survive two or more major languages competing for dominance.  When languages compete so do cultures.  When cultures compete, a country cannot withstand the tension, conflict of misunderstanding, friction of different natures, anxiety of being misunderstood, dread of trying to make oneself clear and apprehension of differing world views. What happens ultimately?  A country’s language dies. Its identity dies. Its future dies.  One look at Norway, Sweden, France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark and Holland should make that reality abundantly clear.

Senate Bill 744, if it passes, will become the death knell of the United States of America.

Upon the convergence of three evolving and daunting scandals, and in the teeth of repeated policy failures of unusually repetitive and desultory consistency, let’s make a humble request of Barack. If it must be an unending litany of failure, broken promises and unfulfilled visions—might we not try a different tack?

Why not use the theory of decision making detailed in the novel, The Dice Man, to mix up the experience? In this novel, the purported author and protagonist Luke Rhinehart—a psychologist, decides to upend his boring life by making all decisions by the cast of dice.

If failure is predetermined by choosing failed policy ideas, does this not take all of the drama and adventure out of government activity? Instead, why don’t we break up the sheer monotony of perpetual failure with an occasional lucky strike of success? If all of the current administration’s decisions are ill-fated and doomed upon arrival, the addition of decisions by lot or chance into the equation can only bring the occasional, or even spectacular result. And certainly this would do much to cheer up the dreary mood in America after 5 years of unmitigated mediocrity.

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