Back to Basics

A Democrat member of Arizona’s House of Representatives who fights for illegal aliens’ rights, Paul Ben Arredondo, was charged on Wednesday by a federal grand jury with bribery, fraud, attempted extortion and false statements he made to the FBI in connection with receiving more than $6,000 in tickets to sporting and special events while he was a Tempe, Arizona, council member and a member-elect of the Arizona House, according to a federal law enforcement official.

According to the indictment, Arredondo was a council member in Tempe for 16 years, until July 2010. He was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in November 2010.

The indictment alleges that from February 2009 to November 2010, Arredondo accepted, agreed to accept and solicited things of value from representatives of a company whose purported business objective was to acquire city-owned property in Tempe for real estate development purposes. The representatives were, in fact, undercover agents with the FBI.

“While many Tempe residents were aware of allegations made against Arredondo, he was strongly supported because of his advocacy for illegal aliens and his opposition to fellow Arizona officials like Rep. Russell Pearce and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who believe in tough immigration enforcement,” a former prosecutor who requested anonymity told the Law Enforcement Examiner Wednesday evening.

In August 2011, there were many who wished Rep. Arredondo to be “recalled” for alleged misconduct in his attempt to bring the Fiesta Bowl from Phoenix to Tempe.

According to the indictment, Arredondo received more than $6,000 worth of tickets to sporting and other special events from FBI from the undercover agents. The tickets included 18 tickets for Arizona Diamondbacks baseball games valued at a total of approximately $2,400, and four tickets to an American League Championship Series baseball game valued at a total of approximately $1,225.

In return for those tickets, Arredondo took and agreed to take action in his capacity as a Tempe city council member and as a member of the Arizona House of Representatives to facilitate the undercover agents’ purchase of city-owned property and development project, the indictment alleges.

The indictment alleges that Arredondo brokered meetings between the undercover agents and other public officials, divulged information regarding the city of Tempe’s bidding process, and attempted to persuade other city officials to approve the purported development project.

The indictment further alleges that Arredondo lied to the FBI about his conduct during an interview in January 2012.

The federal programs bribery charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Each count of honest services mail fraud and attempted extortion carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The false statement charge carries a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Ronald Reagan once said that it was fairly easy to sum up government’s view of how to handle the economy. “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it,” Reagan said.

Well, some liberals want to give new meaning to the first part of that phrase. Yes, Senator Chuck Schumer (D), who is always looking for some new way to get his grubby hand in the pockets of the doer class, is pushing for the “Ex-PATRIOT” [1] act which says, essentially, “if it wants to move out of the United States, tax it.” Along with Senator Schumer was my Senator from Pennsylvania. Dear God I am so ashamed to say this, Bobby Casey Jr. (D) who only pops up every now and then and has apparently decided, after many years, to stop seeking higher office and not shirk his current one.

Ex-PATRIOT, which stands for Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy. You can bet that someone got paid good tax payer dollars to come up with that long winded title that was able to be condensed to such a cutesy acronym. Ex-PATRIOT is designed to tax people who no longer want to live in the United States because they are tired of being targeted by liberal Democrats like Schumer and Casey for higher and higher taxes and to pay for more and more unconstitutional, socialist spending. Consider this the left’s modern day version of the fence with machine gun mounts, barbed wire and landmines that their fellow travelers have often put up to convince people to not leave the “paradise” liberalism always constructs. Those fences were designed to keep people in. Those fences were meant as a signal. Do not cross this line. Do not even think about looking for a better life elsewhere. Sure, you might make it though, but we will take our pound of flesh as you leave.

Liberals like Schumer are so outraged that people like Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin are renouncing their citizenship and leaving because liberals like Schumer are constantly vilifying them. So isn’t the problem clear? Well, it is to anyone other than liberals like Schumer it is. The problem is the policies of the left that drive these people to a point where they feel that they can do better elsewhere. The problem is the left, not people like Saverin. But as usual the left cannot see the solution because they are the problem and instead double down on their own self-created problem.

Taxes are too high.

People choose to flee the high taxes.

Liberals raise taxes even higher by taxing those who leave.

In the mind of the liberal this solves the problem. Right? After all, they are getting oodles of money when they kick the doer who has decided to leave as he is headed out the door.

Wrong!

The doer is gone. And he or she has taken his or her ingenuity with them. They will create no new wealth for America and now America must replace that doer with another doer of equal ability just to keep the same level of tax revenue that was had before.

According to modern dogma, homosexuals are like sprinters: born and not made. Thus, even though psychology’s longstanding nature-nurture debate has concluded that many traits are the result of both factors, it isn’t politically correct to consider even this possibility with respect to homosexuality. But does this biology-is-destiny theory hold water with respect to same-sex attraction? And, if so, what does this say about the behavior’s moral status? Let’s examine the matter.

When discussing same-sex attraction’s cause, the first thing usually mentioned is the much touted “homosexual gene” theory. In fact, the idea has been repeated so often that many today accept it as fact. But the reality is this: Neither the groundbreaking Genome Project nor any other research endeavor has found any such gene. Moreover, it makes no sense from an evolutionary (or selective breeding, if you prefer) standpoint. After all, such a gene would greatly reduce the chances of its bearer procreating, would be unlikely to be passed on, and thus would be a dead-end mutation unable to survive many generations. And, I must say, it’s a testimonial to the emotion-oriented decision-making of secular modernists — who are generally staunch evolutionists — that they would glom on to a theory so contrary to Evolution 101.

Next we have the intrauterine development theory. It states that if a boy’s body fails to provide him with the necessary amount of testosterone in the womb, his brain won’t be fully masculinized. This, presumably, accounts for that rare boy we’ve all met who, from the word go, has very effeminate mannerisms. Anyway, the idea is that his more feminine brain will militate in favor of attraction to other males. It’s a logical theory, as far as it goes.

Yet it isn’t airtight. First, modern dogma would have us believe that all homosexuality is inborn when, as earlier indicated, those obviously effeminate boys are rarities. Second, ponder the phenomenon of feminine lesbians (not all are butch, and many appearing so have simply taken on a masculine look in response to their feelings). If a feminine woman can develop a psychological framework creating attraction to females, why can’t feminine men? Besides, the truth is that science does not claim hormones are destiny. As Dutch endocrinologist Dr. Louis Gooren stated in his 2006 paper “The biology of human psychosexual differentiation,” “A male gender identity can develop without a significant androgen [male hormone] stimulus.”

Now let’s continue. For argument’s sake, let us say that there can be inborn factors militating in favor of homosexuality. Nonetheless, we now know that many personality traits are a combination of both nature and nurture; why, a study even found that environment can influence gene expression, which, if correct, plainly means we aren’t prisoners of our genetics. Given this, is it reasonable to say that homosexuality is innate, inevitable, and unalterable in every case? Is it logical to insist that it cannot be purely psychological in even 1 out of 1,000 instances? Talk about jumping the behavioral shark.

Not just reason but also history — namely, that of the pre-Christian societies that institutionalized homosexuality — teaches that the reality seems quite the opposite. Consider the ancient Spartans.

There was another collective power outage in the heads of Occupiers this week.

From The Blaze:

A crowd of Occupy protesters in Chicago descended on Rush Limbaugh’s “office” Thursday to air their grievances about the conservative radio host.

The problem? Despite their references to”Rush’s office building“ and ”Rush Limbaugh’s studio,” they weren’t in the right place — not by more than 1,000 miles.

It seems the protesters — banded together by this weekend’s NATO summit — confused Limbaugh’s real “office building” with one of the hundreds of stations that merely air his show. Limbaugh lives in Palm Beach, Fla.

#OccupyWrongCity

Fail of the day:

Here’s another epic flush-Rush fail courtesy of a handful of NOW harpies.

The Obama campaign is complaining about the latest New York Times/CBS poll, because of its “methodology.” Their real complaint, however, is with the results. Whereas in April, the poll showed that in a general election match-up between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Obama was ahead among women voters by 49% – 43%, now, in the latest poll, Romney is ahead among women by 46% – 44%, which is within the three-point margin of error, but represents an eight-point swing in one month. After the Sandra Fluke/contraception issue, and the whole “GOP war on women” theme pushed by Obama and his media allies, these numbers seemed surprising. But, in fact, they indicate that a majority of women aren’t buying it.

The part of the poll that upset the Obama campaign even more was the percentage of those polled who believe that Obama made his decision to announce his support for gay marriage for political reasons. That number was 67% versus only 24% who said they believe he did it “mostly because he thinks it is right.” That is hugely significant, and it is a gap, a credibility gap, that reverberates throughout the Obama administration.

The White House’s reliable mouthpiece, Chuck Todd, of MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown,” said that the poll was “a callback survey, not a traditional poll.” This point was also made by Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, in an interview with Todd. She questioned the methodology. Yet this same poll matched its highest approval rating for Obama in more than two years, 50%, except for a bump he got after the death of Osama bin Laden in May of last year.

The irony is that this poll, like so many others, is skewed to favor Obama. Of those interviewed, 27% generally considered themselves Republican, 35% considered themselves Democrats, and 34% considered themselves independent. And most do not agree with Obama that the economy is getting better. In fact, 63% believe it’s getting worse or is not getting better, and only 36% believe it’s getting better, which is actually an improvement for Obama. By a 46% to 43% margin, they would vote for Romney over Obama if the election were held now. And this is a group in which 45% have a favorable opinion of Obama, while only 31% have the same feeling about Romney. It goes without saying that polls are a snapshot in time, and will certainly move in both directions in the months leading up to the election. And there are other polls showing Obama with a double-digit lead in the gender gap. But this is significant because it comes at a time when the Obama campaign has ramped up, and made a strong push to win over women voters. The media have clearly carried their message for them.

Obama’s Evolution Toward Gay Marriage

It has been obvious for a long time that Obama, despite his public statements to the contrary, did not oppose gay marriage. But now John Heilemann, the liberal columnist writing in New York magazine, has confirmed the extent of the duplicity. According to Heilemann, “Barack Obama knew the ludicrous pretense that his views on the issue were ‘evolving’ was living on borrowed time.

I’m not sure how thrilled Obama will be when he finds out his Veep is going around saying he doesn’t blame so many people for voting for a convicted felon over the President, but Plugs is at least toeing the company line by blaming Bush for it:

Here’s a clip from Vice President Joe Biden’s interview with WTOV-TV in West Virginia yesterday, the latest stop he’s made this week, where he was asked about what he made of out-of-state incarcerated felon Keith Judd getting roughly 40 percent of the vote against President Obama in the recent Democratic primary:

“Look, I come from a household where whenever there’s a recession, somebody around my grand-pop or my dad’s table lost a job.

“A brother, a sister a friend, a neighbor. When you’re out of work, man, it’s a depression. And a lot of people are still hurting because of this god-awful recession we inherited that cost 8.4 million jobs before we could really get going. And so I don’t blame people, they’re frustrated, they’re angry.”

I hear ya, Joe. If I had a dime for every time I was experiencing a financial hardship and said to myself “If only there was an incarcerated felon I could vote for to fix all this,” I’d be… still in financial hardship.

Maybe so many people in the West Virginia primary voted for someone in jail because they figured he’d be able to find a running-mate in the yard who is more hinged than this guy:

Did you detect a hint of Fredo in that Biden rant?

Compare/contrast:

While not widely known by Americans, there are millions of Arabs and Muslims living in Latin America, the majority of them Sunnis — with a Lebanese Shi’ite minority – who are the principle objective of Iran’s propaganda activities, according to a report by an Israeli terrorism think-tank.

According to the Israeli-based Meir Amit Information Center, there are two main communities in Latin American countries: one group’s roots are in India, Indonesia and Pakistan, while the other is mainly Arabs from Syria and Lebanon, descendents of immigrants who moved to Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s these groups that are “targeted” for recruitment by Iranian intelligence officers and their partners in the terrorist organization Hezbollah.

The spread of Muslims throughout Latin America, especially Shi’ite Muslims originating in Lebanon, are a convenient environment for Iran and Hezbollah to establish subversive, terrorist and occasionally criminal networks. Iran also conducts extensive ideological, religious, cultural and social activities within the Muslim communities to disseminate Khomeini’s radical Shi’ite Islam.

Iran’s intensive efforts to export the Islamic Revolution to Latin America take many forms: financing the construction of mosques and cultural and religious centers; translating books and ideological and religious material into Spanish and distributing them throughout Latin America; providing local residents with religious-political training in Iran, who then return to their own countries imbued with radical Islam and anti-American, anti-Israeli ideology; sending Iranian clerics to preach and spread Khomeini’s ideology in Latin America; and establishing a Spanish TV station, HispanTV, that broadcasts 24/7. The sophisticated TV station began broadcasting on February 1, 2012.

In addition, the Iranian activists provide assistance in establishing Spanish-language Internet sites similar to those utilized by Middle Eastern terrorists.

In the overall Iranian view, Latin America is a secondary arena. Its principle venues for widespread subversion and terrorism remain Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Central and Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf and Sudan.

Nevertheless, Iran and Hezbollah find Latin America attractive for purposes of terrorism, subversion and crime. As elsewhere, in Latin America their activities are led by the Quds Force in collaboration with various other bodies and entities within the Iranian regime.

Iranian activity in Latin America, as in other arenas, combines exporting the Islamic Revolution with terrorism and crime, worries Washington and is often represented as a threat – or at least a potential threat – to American interests.

On Tuesday we (and the rest of the free world) mocked the Obama administration for including pitiful addendums at the bottom the biographies of almost every president from the last century.

The Obama administration, true to narcissistic form, don’t really understand why people are making a big deal out of it. Besides, technically, they didn’t change any of the bios:

The Obama White House is drawing ridicule for appending the official online biographies of nearly every president over the last century, in order to link President Barack Obama’s accomplishments to the former commanders-in-chief.

The Obama team went into the pages of US presidents dating back to Calvin Coolidge to add “Did you know?” fact boxes to the end of their bios. Those additions were used to plug a host of Obama administration initiatives.

For instance, the following line was added to the official bio of Ronald Reagan, “In a June 28, 1985, speech, Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multimillionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.”

The White House defended itself, saying, “No biographies have been altered. We simply added links at the bottom of each page to related whitehouse.gov content, which is a commonly used best practice to encourage people to browse more pages on a site.”

The additions do include links, but each one touts an Obama administration policy or practice in the process.

So it’s kind of like Obama building a monument of himself next to the Lincoln Memorial with the inscription “Yeah, what he said,” and then saying, “What’s the big deal? We didn’t make any changes to the Lincoln thing.” But I’ll stop talking about that because I don’t want to give them any ideas.

(h/t JWF)

Here’s a bio of Barack Obama put out by his former literary agents, Acton & Dystel, in 1991. Anything seem out of sorts?

Whew! For a minute there I thought Obama’s bio was going to claim he was part Cherokee. But still, The One must be furious that the people at his agency were birthers before the world even knew what birthers were. And to think he paid them a healthy commission for circulating this tripe!

Maybe as a joke some former presidents went back in time and messed with Obama’s bio just to see how he likes it.

All the background on that bio is here. Speculate away!

Update: A person who was an assistant at the agency at the time has said it was a “fact checking error.” (Job offer from the Associated Press incoming!) It would be interesting to find out if this same “fact checking error” was made on, say, Obama’s admissions application to Harvard. We’ll probably never know.

Actor Will Smith supports President Obama’s call for America’s top earners to pay more taxes. But where would he draw the line? Let’s just say Smith won’t be moving to France any time soon.

Here’s a brief transcript from an interview with Smith that ran on French television. Video via Real Clear Politics:

Will Smith: I have no issue with paying taxes and whatever needs to be done for my country to grow. I believe very firmly that my ability to sit here—I’m a black man who didn’t go to college, yet I get to travel around the world and sell my movies, and I believe very firmly that America is the only place on Earth that I could exist. So I will pay anything that I need to pay to keep my country growing. . . .

Interviewer: Do you know how much in France you would have to pay on earnings above one million euros [under new French President Francois Hollande's proposal]? Not 30%. 75%.

Smith: 75?! Yeah, that’s different, that’s different. Yeah, 75. Well, you know, God bless America.

Why is that “different”? Doesn’t he want his country to be able to continue to grow?

It’s great that Smith appreciates the opportunities America has provided him, but a shame he believes the reason for it has anything to do with a patriotic willingness to fund Washington’s out-of-control spending addictions.

Video to be filed under “This week’s lesson in ‘be careful what you ask for’”: