Obama Administration Knowingly Funded a Designated al-Qaeda Affiliate

The group had been on a list of terrorist funders for a decade when a government agency specifically approved funding for it.

“The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him.” It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings.

The 2004 designation included all of ISRA’s branches, including a U.S. office called the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA-USA). Eventually it became known that this American branch had illegally transferred over $1.2 million to Iraqi insurgents and other terror groups, including, reportedly, the Afghan terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 2010, the executive director of IARA-USA and a board member pled guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and several other charges.

ISRA’s influence also spread to Washington. Former U.S. congressman Mark Siljander (R., Mich.) pled guilty in 2010 to obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent after prosecutors found that IARA-USA had paid him $75,000 — using misappropriated USAID grant money — to lobby the government, in an attempt to remove the charity from the government’s terror list.

Despite this well-documented history, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2014 awarded $723,405 to World Vision Inc. (Yeah,…

…thatWorld Vision), an international evangelical charity, to “improve water, sanitation and hygiene and to increase food security in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.” Of these funds, $200,000 was to be directed to a sub-grantee: ISRA…”

We’re shocked…

…to find the Administration which signed the Iran deal and literally delivered the planet’s leading sponsor of Islamic terrorism $1.7B in cold, hard cash…

…while releasing untold tens of billions more in frozen assets would forward $200,000 to an Muslim group with known ties to Al Queda.

In a related item of highly questionable government cooperation with organizations which support terrorism, Tucker Carlson broke this story of the FBI‘s…unseemly…relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center:

As we’ve noted numerous times before, sorta kinda makes you wonder whose side these guys are on?!?

Since we’re on the subject of those Tucker termed the “utterly reckless and totally dishonest”, next up, also courtesy of NRO, Alexandra Desanctis relates…

“…The most common statistic that Democratic politicians and abortion groups have employed thus far is a poll showing that seven out of ten Americans say they support the decision in Roe. According to pro-choice logic — or lack thereof — this fact(That’s “fact”…in parenthesis!) requires that the Senate refuse to confirm Kavanaugh, because he supposedly will vote to overturn Roe in contradiction of public opinion.

Cataloguing the problems with this argument presents a formidable challenge. Most fundamentally, public-opinion polls have no bearing whatsoever on the Supreme Court’s decision-making process. As the Court is not a legislature, it is not required to be — and in fact affirmatively should not be — responsive to public opinion on any issue, no matter how controversial.The job of the Court is to uphold the Constitution as written, a matter wholly separate from public sentiment on any given case.Even if Americans do agree with the outcome of Roe, this does not in any way necessitate that the Court let the decision stand.

Interestingly, the 70 percent talking point is also self-contradictory. If there is such a groundswell of public support for the abortion regime put in place by the majority decision in Roe, the legislative system would surely respond to that public pressure by ensuring that a similar regime was established by law rather than by judicial fiat — or even a constitutional amendment.If those wielding this data are so concerned about proper representation and respect for public opinion, they ought to prefer the democratic process to the highly undemocratic method of unelected justices’ imposing their reading of the Constitution on the entire country.

But even on its own terms, this statistic is largely useless as a barometer of public opinion on abortion. Crucially, it ignores the fact that most Americans don’t understand the specifics of Roe. A 2013 Pew Research Center poll, for example, found that only 62 percent of Americans even knew Roe had to do with abortion; among respondents under 30, that percentage fell to just 44 percent.

As a result, surveys that fail to explain Roe and the effects of its being overturned are highly suspect. If so many Americans are unaware that Roe dealt with abortion,imagine how many more must not know that, for example, a decision to overturn the precedent wouldn’t automatically make abortion illegal at the federal level.

Fewer still likely know the precise types of abortion regulations that the current framework prohibits. States are in theory allowed to restrict abortion after the point of “viability” — which can be as early as 22 weeks with current medical technology — but even then physicians are given broad latitude to perform abortions on the grounds that a woman’s physical or mental health is at stake.

What’s more, nearly all major public-opinion polls have found majority support for restrictions that are currently impermissible.According to Gallup’s latest round of abortion surveys, released in June, a slight majority of Americans (53 percent) say abortion should be legal in only a few cases or under no circumstances. Marist polling from this January, meanwhile, found that only 12 percent of Americans believe abortion should be available at any time during pregnancy and for any reason.

Marist also reports that 76 percent of Americans support significant abortion restrictions, including limiting abortion to the first three months of pregnancy, cases involving rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. Six in ten Americans who call themselves pro-choice reported supporting these types of restrictions, as do 60 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of independents. More than 60 percent of respondents said they support a 20-week abortion ban, a restriction that was shot down in the Senate in January by Democratic politicians currently insisting that Roe should be upheld out of respect for public opinion.

The seven-in-ten figure, then, far from being proof that a vast majority of the public supports the abortion-rights regime put in place by Roe — and far from being a de facto condemnation of Kavanaugh on the assumption that he will oppose that regime — is in fact a smokescreen thrown up by pro-abortion zealots who would prefer not to delve into the real data on Americans’ abortion views. The limitations that most Americans favor are nearly impossible to implement under Roe and subsequent jurisprudence.

And that is precisely why Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and a whole host of Democratic politicians…

…continue to pound on the statistic that 70 percent of Americans think they support Roe: The rest of the data suggest they really don’t.“

In what The Left has forced us to make a habit, we once again respond we’re shocked…

…to find Liberals would misrepresent the truth in the pursuit of Progressive political policies.

As Rich Lowry notes, the primary problem with Roe remains the simplefact it’s BAD LAW:

“…Over the years, the decision’s laughable constitutional inadequacy has been widely recognized. Shortly after it came down, Harvard Law School professor John Hart Ely, a supporter of legalized abortion, wrote that “Roe is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

“Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding,” a former Blackmun clerk, Edward Lazarus, has written. “And in the almost 30 years sinceRoe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.”

That’s because none is possible. The Court in Roe purported to find the constitutional right to abortion in the 14th Amendment, which says that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

This passage has no obvious or even subtle connection to legalized abortion (in fact, abortion laws were being tightened in the 19th century when the amendment passed). No matter.According to Blackmun, abortion is so central to liberty that no restriction on it can stand constitutional scrutiny.

He is at pains to deny that unborn children are “persons in the whole sense.” As evidence, he points to clauses in the Constitution about persons that don’t have “pre-natal application,” e.g., the requirement that persons must be 35 or older to run for president. This is too stupid for words.Just because clauses like this refer to adults doesn’t mean that minors, or unborn children, don’t have rights.

The best case that can be made for Roe is that it is a mistaken decision on the books for nearly 50 years now, so it has to be honored as a precedent.But the Court is not, and shouldn’t be, in the practice of standing by fundamentally flawed decisions. Brown v. Board of EducationoverturnedPlessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregated education, almost 60 years later. Just last week, the Court overturned a labor decision from 1977.

Roe is bad law and bad democracy. It has no sound constitutional basis, and deserves to go the way of the Court’s other embarrassments and misfires.“

As we’ve asked repeatedly in the past, can anyone PLEASE explain The Left’s love affair with murdering the unborn?!?

And in the Holy Hillary, Batman segment…

Julie Chen stands by Les Moonves after sexual misconduct allegations: ‘I fully support my husband’

Wow, talk about déjà vu.  We seem to remember another woman defending her gravy train under similar circumstances:

Julie Chen’s version of…

…is about as believable as Hillary’s.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with a sincerely sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Child, 2, starves to death while mom works overnight as club dancer

“A Georgia mother was accused of neglecting her two-year-old daughter who starved to death while she worked overnight shifts at a club, police said. Devin Moon, 29, called authorities on Tuesday after discovering her daughter Reygan Moon was “was unresponsive and cold to touch,” the Gwinnett County Police Department said.

…She told detectives her daughter was born with “medical issues” that prevented the child from gaining weight. An autopsy was conducted on Wednesday and determined the child’s cause of death to be neglect from malnutrition. Investigators noted the child was 14 pounds at the time of her death, around half the normal weight of a girl that age, according to the CDC’s growth chart…”

This is one Georgia peach who’s rotten to the core.

Magoo