French luxury firm gets sued for racism at its London store

Top fashion house Louis Vuitton is being sued over racism claims after a boss at a flagship store allegedly told an African employee: “Black people are slaves who eat dirt off the floor.”

Sales associate Oliver Koffi claims he was in a stock room packing a pair of shoes for a customer when his manager began the shocking race rant in front of stunned staff.

He alleged that the manager called Barack Obama a “muppet” and said America would be better off with “Miss Piggy” as its president because “Muslim people… don’t eat pork”.

Mr Koffi says he was left humiliated by the “black slaves” slur while working at the label’s store in Central London.

Details of the allegations emerged in papers which will be presented to a Central London Employment Tribunal on July 18.

Mr Koffi is suing Louis Vuitton for racist discrimination and harassment.

He claims his manager’s tone of voice was “cold and serious” as he made the comments during a discussion on the origins of the English language with him and three other members of staff in December last year.

Mr Koffi said: “During this discussion, my manager quite randomly stated that ‘black people are slaves and eat dirt off the floor’.

“This comment was grossly offensive and extremely humiliating.

“His ­reference to slavery in this day and age with regards to black people is quite frankly revolting.”

Mr Koffi was a contract worker at the Louis Vuitton Townhouse at London’s iconic Selfridges department store at the time of the incident.

He says he recorded the offensive comments on tape after concerns over the manager’s alleged “racist conduct”.

He added: “He went on a rant about black people and other races and religions. He jumped from subject to subject, making comments about other races and religions. He made comments about Barack Obama.

“All of his comments were derogatory and a clear illustration of his prejudices towards other races and religions.

“His comments were offensive and degrading. I confronted him about his statement that ‘black people are slaves and eat dirt off the floor’.

“I told him that I was offended by his comment. He did not deny making the comment. He apologised and claimed it was a ‘joke’. It was not a joke at all.”

Mr Koffi says the manager, who left his job following a disciplinary proceeding, had previously questioned him about his nationality, asking, “where are you originally from?” and often referred to customers by their skin colour.

He alleges that the manager’s frequent remarks about Asian people and his comments about some Louis Vuitton products being “s***” because they were “made in China” created a “hostile and intimidating” working environment.

His solicitor Lawrence Davies, of Equal Justice solicitors, said: “The case will set the 21st century bar as to what employers have to do to prevent racism in the workplace.”

Louis Vuitton accepts that the racist comment was made but defends the claim on the basis the company had taken all reasonably practicable steps to prevent the racist comment.

High-end fashion has recently faced a barrage of racism claims, with models Naomi Campbell and Imam supporting worldwide diversity campaigns.

Yesterday a spokeswoman for Louis Vuitton said: “Louis Vuitton has a zero-tolerance policy to harassment of any kind.

“This reported sentiment is in total violation of the Louis Vuitton Ethical charter.

“This issue was investigated, and the manager in question no longer works within the company.” – The Daily Mirror

Obama laughs about eating pies with ‘crack in them’

A President making a crack cocaine joke in the White House?

Some wondered if it would be possible for the US to sink any lower.

Monday at the White House while hosting a reception to observe LGBT Pride Month, President Barack Obama call his White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses “the crust master” because the president said, “I don’t know what he does—whether he puts crack in them.”

But the president continued he had to adopt a no weekday pie rule.

Laughing and applauding, the first lady Michelle Obama added, “There’s no crack in our pies.”

Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola

…where there was once oppression and order, there is now only chaos and carnage.

Almost unanimous on the right is the mystifying notion that a reduced American footprint in the world, President Barack Obama’s doing, has brought about the “sudden” eruption across Iraq of a particularly savage faction of Sunni fundamentalists called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This small band of zealots has conquered a third of Iraq, including the metropolis of Mosul, from which 500,000 residents have fled. Tikrit too is under ISIS control. Fallujah fell in January.

mercer_ilanaOdd too is the idea that ISIS, currently barreling toward the capital, Baghdad, is somehow a new killer on the block. While the gang, led by newcomer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not as ancient as the Egyptian goddess by the same name—ISIS was previously known as Al Qaida in Iraq (A.Q.I.), reflecting its earlier, more modest mission. A.Q.I. was the brainchild of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, described aptly in the New Yorker as, “A Jordanian who had been a convicted thief and sex criminal before turning to radical Islam.” Commensurate with its morphing, expansive ambitions, A.Q.I. changed its name to ISIS. Whereas “Al Qaida was originally envisioned as a kind of Sunni foreign legion, which would defend Muslim lands from Western occupation,” writes New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright, “Zarqawi had a different goal in mind. He hoped to provoke an Islamic civil war.” George W. Bush’s invasion primed Iraq for Zarqawi’s purposes. “There was no better venue than the fractured state of Iraq, which sits astride the Sunni-Shiite fault line.”

So savage and extreme is ISIS, always has been, that it had been “booted out of the Al Qaida consortium,” attests Wright. Remember the “Dear Al (Zarqawi)” letter penned by Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2005? In it, Bin Laden’s Capo Bastone (Zawahiri) had asked the lieutenant (Zarqawi) to reconsider the wisdom of slaughtering so many Shia civilians in Iraq. Al-Z No. 1 broached the topic by counseling Al-Z No. 2 about the wisdom of bringing “the Muslim masses to the mujahed movement.” To that end, killing so many of them was probably unhelpful. Yes, the Shia are a handful—theologically problematic—conceded Zawahiri. Suspect too was the Shia’s history of “connivance with the Crusaders.” But while Zawahiri didn’t give a dried camel’s hump about his Shia brethren, he thought better of slaughtering them, preferring to forgive their “ignorance.” Besides, added Zawahiri as an afterthought, it’s impossible for the mujahedeen to kill all Iraq’s Shia.

While Zarqawi rejected Zawahiri’s soft approach, his personal odyssey has a happy ending. Zarqawi died, killed by Americans in 2006. But his legacy, like that of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, lives on in ISIS. Shia Iran, once a bitter enemy of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, now has pride-of-place in the Iraq that Bush built. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been galvanized to the aid of the Iraqi army. But it is not the 930,000 members of the Iraqi security forces that the Revolutionary Guard aims to rouse. Despite the princely sums ($25 billion) Americans spent to train and prepare it, in Mosul, this inorganic, artificial creation of the Bush brigades fled before 1,300 ISIS fighters. To fight the marauding Sunnis, the Revolutionary Guard will likely corral well-motivated, tribal Shia militias. (In Iraq, Shiites make up about sixty percent of the population. Sunnis comprise less than twenty percent.)

It is this cauldron of sectarian strife that Saddam Hussein kept from bubbling over.

Into the Cannibal's Pot

What’s unfolding in Iraq, with ISIS, is no more than a progression along a predictable continuum, the starting point of which was an American occupation that unseated an extremely effective law-and-order leader: Saddam Hussein. Consequently, where there was once oppression and order, there is now only chaos and carnage. The lawlessness we brought to Iraq with our messianic, faith-based initiative has allowed the manifestation of divisions that have riven the region for four millennia.

As this column predicted in 2007, “Once we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.”

There is little reason for me to hope to impart something new about the predictable progression of Iraq from (sectarian) rogue state to failed state to Islamic state, in the wake of the American occupation. There is no reason to expect me to best a column dated December 2006, titled “At Least Saddam Kept Order”:

“… If Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented, it is because they are busy … busy dying at rates many times higher than under Saddam. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” as The Lancet reported. Since Iraq became a Bush object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence. …
… Hussein’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it’s too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq.
Secretly, that’s what anyone with a head and a heart would want. We could promise solemnly never to mess with him again—just so long as he kept his mitts off nukes, continued to check Iran (which he did splendidly), and minimized massacres. To be fair, Saddam’s last major massacre was in 1991, during which only 3,000 Shiites were murdered. That’s less than Iraq’s monthly quota under “democracy.”
No one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. But even the Saddam-equals-Hitler crowd cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our faith-based intervention. Even the war’s enablers must finally admit that under our ministrations Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state.
Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order—or under a force made up of ideological terrorists, feuding warlords, and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?”

“Iraq has slipped back into chaos,” huffed one of Fox News’ interchangeable commentators, who, heretofore, had been oblivious to the pal of despair that has engulfed this Gulf state; to the Christian community’s near annihilation; to the millions of displaced Iraqis, refugees living in squalor within and without their country, all since Bush sicced the dogs of war on it.

“I wish the Americans had never come,” Baghdadi Mohammed Rejeb told veteran war correspondent Arwa Damon, a decade after the American Nakba (catastrophe). “They ruined our country. They planted divisions. They made us cry for the days of Saddam Hussein.” Wept another Iraqi woman, on that anniversary: “I lost hope six to seven months ago. You don’t feel it’s home anymore.” One after another, Iraqis all speak of the “corruption, suspicion and tribalism” that have seeped into civil society since the invasion.

No. Iraq hasn’t suddenly “slipped back into” this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn’t know Shiite from Shinola.

© 2014 by Ilana Mercer

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Obama announces sending US troops to Iraq

Tony Blair now tells the world that Western “inaction” in Syria has produced the Iraq crisis.

But since bombing Syria would have brought to power in Damascus the very Islamists who are now threatening Baghdad, it must therefore be only a mad person who considers his views.

President Obama certainly did not wince. He announced on Monday that US ground troops ‘equipped for combat’ are being sent to Iraq – just days after claiming that no American soldiers would be deployed to the war-ravaged country.

In a letter to Congress, the president said American troops will be returning to Iraq only three years after they left and their deployment began on Sunday.

The president told Congress that American military personnel in Baghdad will be ‘equipped for combat.’

It is instructive to contemplate what Blair’s rebel friends in Syria are up to.

Assad’s enemies are the same Nusra and al-Qaida fighters whom Blair’s bombing of Damascus would have helped and who now threaten Iraq’s existence.

Not to mention the recent attacks in Kenia.

Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday blasted former President George W. Bush for selling Americans the Iraq invasion, which led to the violence that is currently sweeping across the country.

During his Monday broadcast, a viewer asked Robertson if there was a solution to the ongoing violence caused by an al Qaeda splinter group, ISIS, threatening to take over Iraq.

“Right now, what we did — and it was a great mistake to go in there,” Robertson explained, pointing out that Saddam Hussein’s “bomb maker” had said that the then-dictator “doesn’t know how to make an atomic bomb.”

And so to sell the American people on weapons of mass destruction, he had WMD and was getting [concentrated uranium] yellowcake out of Africa and all of that, it was a lot of nonsense,” the TV preacher said. “We were sold a bill of goods, we should never have gone into that country!”

“As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he held those warring factions in check, and he contained those radical Islamists,” he continued. “Fix it, no? It’s too late to fix it. It’s unfixable. Those simmering animosities have been there for centuries.”

Most people outside the US knew this before the ill-fated invasion.

The sudden implosion of the vast Iraqi Army of the Baghdad Puppet Regime constructed by the US is a timely warning of the fates of the other puppet states in the Muslim World: Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE and lesser ones.

The whole Muslim World of one and a half billion people have turned overwhelmingly against the US and support guerrilla groups against the US.

Pakistan, a huge nuclear state with about 150 millon people quickly went from pro-US to fiercely anti-US over the annihilation of Afghanistan and the systematic drone attacks on Pakistani civilians.

Clearly American politicians understand money and funding, but have no grasp on geography or identity.

 

Obama’s top 10 greatest achievements

putinbama10. He strengthened international friendship and cooperation between patriots who cling to their guns, religion and integrity.

9. The increased international awareness of government spying results from violation of human rights and privacy laws committed by the Obama administration.

8. By constantly insulting our values and stealing our liberties he made us realise how much we care for our faith and tradition. The threats to our lifestyle are forcing us to become more determined and forceful.

7. He helped humanity become aware of devaluation of Nobel Peace Prize.

6. Thanks to the overdose of gay propaganda he established a solid base on which to build gay bashing.

Side effect 1: Gushing over the openly gay couples, yet refusing comments on his own ambiguous past associations he facilitated the spread of rumours about his own sexuality.

Side effect 2: He makes Vladimir Putin look even more macho.

5. His perpetual boasting and phantasms of omnipotence shifted into a very efficient public awareness campaign against malignant narcissism. Obama helped to persuade not only mental health professionals but ordinary citizens that Narcissistic Personality Disorder should not disappear from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

4. Bowing to foreign leaders, making confusing and exceedingly arrogant statements he managed to convince millions of people around the world that we need to put the genie back into the bottle. Obama caused that entire nations have a more suspicious and hostile attitude to Islam and we will think twice before electing officials who act like servants of a foreign supremacy.

3. He proved that wussy bureaucrats make bad military leaders and are harmful to our security interests. The Commander in Chief should both earn and deserve this honourable title. By neglecting veterans and persecuting soldiers he made us aware how much we respect them and how much we owe them.

2. He excavated dangerous ideologies; reminding us they proved harmful to humanity and made us want to eradicate them. He brought to light the grotesque features of political correctness and we are less likely to fall into the trap of laxity and permissiveness.

1. As a result of his disastrous leadership we came to the realisation that an incompetent and socially irresponsible president should be dismissed like any bad manager. He reminded us that we have the right to demand accountability from our leaders, and an obligation to limit their power if the prime duty to serve and protect turns into a licence to harm.

Side effect 1: Association with Obama brought his European allies record unpopularity and riots.

Side effect 2: We love Donald Trump’s: “You are fired!”

Source: Pravda

Russian intel ship docks in Havana

Vishnya-class
Vishnya-class

A Russian warship was docked in Havana Wednesday, without explanation from Communist Cuba or its state media.

The Viktor Leonov CCB-175 boat, measuring 91.5 meters (300 feet) long and 14.5 meters wide, was docked at the port of Havana’s cruise ship area, near the Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

The Vishnya, or Meridian-class intelligence ship, which has a crew of around 200, went into service in the Black Sea in 1988 before it was transferred seven years later to the northern fleet, Russian media sources said.

Neither Cuban authorities nor state media have mentioned the ship’s visit, unlike on previous tours by Russian warships.

The former Soviet Union was Cuba’s sponsor state through three decades of Cold War. After a period of some distancing under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, the countries renewed their political, economic and military cooperation.

The ship is reportedly armed with 30mm guns and anti-aircraft missiles.

Its visit comes as isolated Havana’s current economic and political patron, Venezuela, is facing unprecedented violent protests against President Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Cuban President Raul Castro’s Communist government, Americas’ only one-party regime, got a handshake from president Obama recently at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.

The Dec. 10 handshake signalled a warming of ties between the two nations after decades of animosity.

Fidel Castro congratulated his brother after he greeted the head of the U.S. government in English, saying ‘Mr. President, I’m Castro.’”

American president kicking a door is ‘racist’

okicksdoorA student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada was forced to issue a formal apology for emailing a picture of President Obama kicking open a door–all because some students thought the image was somehow racist.

The image was actually an edited .gif, and was shown by Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” last fall. It humorously suggests that the president may be fed up with press conferences. McGill student Brian Farnan, vice president of the university’s student government, sent out an email with the .gif and the harmless caption, “Honestly midterms get out of here,” according to Legal Insurrection.

What happened next is almost unbelievable: Another student issued a formal complaint against Farnan for committing a “micro-aggression.”For those not up-to-date on the PC lexicon, “micro-aggression” is the latest phrase of choice for leftist radicals seeking to blame racism for common annoyances suffered by people of all races. Minority activists at the University of Michigan, for example, have insisted that trivial slights, such as “Having your opinion second-guessed in a group assignment,” are micro-aggressions that betray the campus as a hostile place for students of color.

Source: The Daily Caller

Debt up $6.666 trillion under Obama

Obama
Obama 

The debt of the U.S. government has increased $6.666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.

When President Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt of the U.S. government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. As of Jan. 31, 2014, the latest day reported, the debt was $17,293,019,654,983.61—an increase of $6,666,142,606,070.53 since Obama’s first inauguration.

The total debt of the United States did not exceed $6.666 trillion until July 2003. In the little more than five years of the Obama presidency, the U.S. has accumulated as much new debt as it did in it’s first 227 years.

Source: cnsnews.com

Secession, not convention, offers salvation

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The healthiest and most intuitive response to deep-seated, irreconcilable unhappiness—political or personal—is not to hold a constitutional convention, Mark Levin, but to leave; to exit the abusive relationship.

It is indeed inexplicable how the famous broadcaster trashes secession but, at the same time, looks to the states for salvation.

To reclaim the republic, Levin and his listeners hold out hope for the atrophied states and their unexercised role in the amendment process, as stipulated in Article V of the Constitution.

Never mind that the states, contrary to the mistaken predictions and hopes of the Constitution makers, have never initiated a constitutional amendment; and never mind that even in the event that the states demand a constitutional convention, there is no mechanism to compel Congress to act.

The great constitutional scholar James McClellan was no “neo-confederate.” Yet even an ardent defender of the Constitution as was McClellan conceded that, sadly, “the Framers relied on the good faith of Congress for the observance of the requirement” and that, when it came to a constitutional convention, “there was no way to force Congress to act.” (“Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” p. 310.)

Into the Cannibal's Pot

Ultimately, the legislatures of two-thirds of the states have to unite to call on Congress to hold a national constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the dead-letter Constitution. Levin and his listeners are deluded if they think that the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, will unite for this purpose; salvation is more likely to come from dissolving dysfunctional political bonds.

Still, what a force for liberty Levin would be were he a libertarian.

Alas, in one of his magnificent rants against the regime the radio mouth wanted to know why no Democrat had protested Obama’s overweening ways.

This is not quite true. As this column has pointed out, the late, great, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was driven to distraction by Big Man Obama and said as much. Byrd, RIP, was “a stern constitutional scholar who always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House.”

This old Southern gentleman, whom Republicans continually berated for his past indiscretions, warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab and the extra-constitutional creation of a number of new White-House fiefdoms: on health reform, urban affairs policy, energy and climate change, on and on.

In 2009, “Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill”:

“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”

The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:

“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”

Magnificent too has been liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who has protested the emergence of the Über-Presidency in the person of Barack Obama.

Then there is WND columnist Nat Hentoff. I know not whether he is a Democrat, but Hentoff has long been considered liberal and now labels himself a libertarian. He has accused Obama of “an unprecedented abuse of powers,” calling him the “most un-American president in the nation’s history.”

… The journalist said he doesn’t think any other president has acted so lawlessly as a matter of habit.

“So, if this isn’t a reason for at least the start of an independent investigation that would lead to impeachment, what is?”

Hentoff is baffled that Obama should escape such scrutiny when former President Bill Clinton faced impeachment just for being “a lousy liar.”

A big part of the problem, the journalist believes, is what he calls the utter ignorance of a huge portion of the population, which is not outraged at losing its basic right to be self-governing.

Obama “doesn’t give a damn, because he can get away with whatever he wants.”

And that’s why Hentoff surmised—and Levin would indubitably agree—that this was the worst state the country has ever been in: “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.”

© by Ilana Mercer

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Obama’s gay pot dealer killed for flatulence

The distinguished choom gangster
The distinguished choom gangster

The leader of the free World, Barack Obama’s high school pot dealer who he thanked in his yearbook for the ‘good times’ was beaten to death by his lover after a series of fights over flatulence and drugs, MailOnline can reveal today.

Raymond Boyer, known as ‘Gay Ray’ to Obama and his marijuana smoking ‘Choom Gang’, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer seven years after he sold the future president and his friends drugs.

His lover Andrew Devere, a male prostitute, gave police a laundry list of reasons for the killing, including that Boyer, a surfer and unemployed chef, constantly put him down, made him beg for drugs and had a habit of breaking wind in his face.

Source: Daily Mail

Obama blames his failing popularity on race

racecardPresident Barack Obama said that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorker magazine’s website today.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said in the article by David Remnick.

Obama said this in his most direct comment on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office. His wife Michelle has spoken openly about race before.

Obama’s second term has been marked by controversies including a partial government shutdown in October, revelations that the National Security Agency has gathered personal mobile phone data and the troubled rollout of health-insurance expansion.

Obama’s approval rating among all voters is 39 percent and his disapproval rating is 53 percent, according to a Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 14-16. In the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, compared with Obama’s 39 percent, according to exit polling by a consortium of major news outlets. Obama won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008 against 55 percent for opponent John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona.

Source: Bloomberg

Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go POOF

mercer_ilanaby Ilana Mercer

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While the nation fretted over the ouster of one Duckster from the parallel reality of a TV reality show, more of the protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution evaporated.

Just after Christmas, district-court Judge William Pauley ruled that the privacy protections afforded by the Constitution were relative freedoms, not absolute ones. As such, Fourth-Amendment rights had to be calibrated against a government’s need to maintain a database of records that would (putatively) prevent future terrorist attacks.

Paraphrased by The Guardian, “Pauley argued that al-Qaida’s ‘bold jujitsu’ strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.”

You’d think that the purview of the justice elite is to “marry” American law with Islamist ideology, rather than uphold a timeless principle that states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

“The judgment,” continued The Guardian, “directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court [a week earlier] which ruled the NSA’s bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was ‘almost Orwellian’ in scale.”

Friday’s ruling, surmised the vigilant British paper, “makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.”

Indeed, in August, media-enabled megalomaniac Obama told a rapt press corps that, in his magnanimity, he’d be prepared to “jiggle” his surveillance apparatus here and there to better allay unnecessary fears (“provide greater assurances,” as the president put it).

In his remarks, Big Daddy said—in defiance of the evidence—that he was comfortable “the NSA program [was] not being abused,” going on to promise that he’d outsource the matter to a new hire: A civil liberties officer. (CNN’s Jessica Yellin was in estrus.)

This is the inglorious history of American freedom and federalism. In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along (as nicely as plaything Justice John G. Roberts did for ObamaCare)—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, “independent” regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

A “civil liberties officer,” for example.

The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another. The idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government was worse than naive.

Ditto the Duck detritus: they are the new wholesome in America.

Into the Cannibal's Pot

As “luck” would have it, legislation that flouts the Fourth Amendment was previously in place to provide Pauley with all the positive-law backing the judge needed to justify an anti-constitutional ruling. To wit, the grounds upon which the New York jurist dismissed this ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) case against the NSA were, primarily, “that bulk collection was [already] authorized under existing laws allowing ‘relevant’ data collection to be authorized by secret US courts.”

Here you have the essence of modern-day, Managerial-State America. Natural law, common-law and Constitution have been nullified; buried under the rubble of legislation, statute, precedent, ad infinitum, rights having long-since been outsourced to the “better” judgment of bureaucrats and hired “experts.”

In this case, to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

Not only has Obama “the sinner” trusted Holder his “sin eater” with the expansion of surveillance-state USA; he has, it would appear, charged him with dealing a one-two Knockout punch to white America.

Eric Holder’s first arrest in the string of Knockout attacks across the country is a first in more than one way.

The arrest is unique in that it is of a white offender. Knockout attacks have been, almost exclusively, black-on-white hate crimes.

Were it not so disquieting for what it portends, this single arrest would be as comical as the specter of global-warming scientists marooned in Antarctic ice so densely packed that no man-made machinery can affect it.

Heeding Holder, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas has remanded Conrad Alvin Barrett (27 years old) to prison for breaking the jaw of a man (79 years old), while “laughing and saying; ‘Knockout’” as he beat it.

The question is not whether this is a good arrest. If he’s guilty, let Barrett rot. The question is, why have there been no arrests for the multiple killings and maiming of innocents by feral black thugs across the country?

Befitting a banana republic, Holder, who carries water for President Camacho, is likely attempting to deploy the law to frame the Knock-Out phenomenon as an equal-opportunity crime. This is the administration’s ultimate racial reprisal against white victims of hate crimes: “know thy place, Honky!”

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry will no doubt deem the “banana” usage here to be racist, “conceived by a group of wealthy white men who needed to . . . render [a black man] inferior and unequal and diminish his accomplishments.” This is what our unsharpened pencil thinks of the word “Obamacare.”

But Obama and his fans “can’t have their banana and eat it.” It is an incontrovertible fact that under Strong Man Obama, America’s banana-republic- and surveillance-state credentials are that much stronger.

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The strange transformation of Mandela’s prison cell

Nelson Mandela’s old prison cell on Robben island has undergone a strange transformation.

Photos from the Johannesburg archives show a cosy cell with furniture and books and above all, a bed and mattress.

On many later visits by Mandela to his old cell in the company of foreign journalists and film crews, not much had changed. His books were no longer there, but the furniture looked the same.

Even recent visits by the likes of Beyoncé showed the cell as it had been while the famous South African was imprisoned there for inciting violence and terrorism.

With president Barack Obama’s most recent visit however, the cell suddenly strangely took on the appearance of a bare, 19th century gaol, stripped of all furniture.

Mandela in his cell after his release
Mandela in his cell after his release

 

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Mandela on a later visist to the same cell
Beyonce at Mandela's cell with the furniture visible
Beyonce at Mandela’s cell with the furniture visible
From the Joburg Artchives, his desk, books and shelf with a photo of his wife Winnie
From the Joburg Artchives, his desk, books and shelf with a photo of his wife Winnie
Obama visiting the now bare cell
Obama visiting the now bare cell
The new 19th century look bears no resemblance to the original cell
The new 19th century look bears no resemblance to the original cell

America’s world leadership has tumbled to 40-year low

obama-printing-moneyFor the first time in nearly 40 years, a majority of Americans believe the United States is less important around the world and that it should mind its own business, a stunning rejection of President Obama’s foreign policy just four years after he received the Nobel Prize.

A new Pew Research Center poll found that 53 percent of people believe that the U.S. is playing a less important role as a world leader than a decade ago, the highest figure since 1984.

Worse: 70 percent said that the U.S. is respected less than in the past, almost matching the high reached under former President George W. Bush, whose foreign policy Obama pledged to reverse.

Other key highlights from Pew’s release:

— By a 56 percent to 34 percent margin, more disapprove than approve of Obama’s handling of foreign policy. The public also disapproves of his handling of Syria, Iran, China and Afghanistan by wide margins.

— For the first time, 52 percent believe the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally.”

— Some 51 percent said the U.S. does too much in helping solve world problems.

— Most say the U.S. should engage internationally on economic issues. Fully 77 percent say that growing trade and business ties between the U.S. and other countries is good.

— Just 31 percent of the public say the war in Afghanistan has made the country safer from terrorism.