It is time to move 'Dreams From My Father' to the Fiction Section

Like most of Obama's narrative, Dreams from My Father contains a lot of fiction.

Via The Daily Mail:

A new biography of Barack Obama has established that his grandfather was not, as is related in the President’s own memoir, detained by the British in Kenya and found that claims that he was tortured were a fabrication.

'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life.[...]

The book also notes that Obama removed two white roommates in Los Angeles and New York from his story. Obama himself told Maraniss in a 90-minute interview that a racial incident involving a New York girlfriend had in fact happened in Chicago.

A tale of the father of Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Soewarno Martodihardjo being killed by Dutch soldiers as he fought for Indonesian independence turns out to be ‘a concocted myth in almost all respects’, Maraniss finds.

According to the book, both Obama’s father and his paternal grandfather were abusive towards women and Maraniss finds that Obama’s story that he was abandoned by his father when he was two was false – in fact, Obama’s mother fled to Washington state a year earlier, possibly because she was being beaten. Read more here...

Flashback 2007: Obama claims Executive Privilege was not a good reason to withhold information from Congress (Video)

Obama values his buddy Eric Holder more than the Constitution.

House Oversight Committee Holds Eric Holder In Contempt of Congress, Full House Vote Scheduled For Next Week

After the House contempt vote passes, we can move on to a grand jury indictment...

WASHINGTON, DC — House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) issued the following statement after the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee approved a resolution holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for his refusal to turn over subpoenaed documents related to the Fast & Furious operation:

“Despite being given multiple opportunities to provide the documents necessary for Congress’ investigation into Fast and Furious, Attorney General Holder continues to stonewall. Today, the Administration took the extraordinary step of exerting executive privilege over documents that the Attorney General had already agreed to provide to Congress. Fast and Furious was a reckless operation that led to the death of an American border agent, and the American people deserve to know the facts to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. While we had hoped it would not come to this, unless the Attorney General reevaluates his choice and supplies the promised documents, the House will vote to hold him in contempt next week. If, however, Attorney General Holder produces these documents prior to the scheduled vote, we will give the Oversight Committee an opportunity to review in hopes of resolving this issue.”

The most open administration in history exerts executive privilege to prevent release of "Fast and Furious" documents

Above the law...

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege for the first time Wednesday, escalating a fight with congressional Republicans over documents about a gun-trafficking probe.

The move threw into uncertainty a possible vote to sanction Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was meeting Wednesday morning to discuss the contempt fight. The panel's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), said the committee was evaluating the White House's assertion.

Holder stalls, Republicans plan to hold contempt vote today

Rep. Darrell Issa and AG Eric Holder meet yesterday afternoon. Holder failed to turn over anymore documents. Instead, he wanted Issa and House Republicans to settle for some lame briefings. That is a no pass. Unless Holder turns over documents this morning, it looks like the contempt vote will go forward. It doesn't appear Holder was seriously trying to resolve the issue. Republicans have claimed they will get as many as 30+ Democrats to vote with them to hold Holder in contempt. This whole charade by Eric Holder is an attempt to provide cover for Democrats to vote against the contempt charge.

Via Politico:

House Republicans are charging head first into their most direct conflict with President Barack Obama’s administration over the extent of executive branch power, as they prepare to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress on Wednesday.

Holder and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) failed to reach an agreement on what documents the administration would fork over to help Republicans investigate the Fast and Furious program, a joint Justice Department-Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives operation that put guns into the hands of Mexican cartels.

The two sides remained at loggerheads Tuesday evening, after a 20-minute huddle in Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s third-floor Capitol suite. Holder later called Issa’s position “political gamesmanship” and not a true attempt to resolve the dispute.

After the session, Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said no deal was in hand and Wednesday’s vote would move forward, barring a last-minute reversal.

Religion of Peace Alert: Saudis chop off man's head because he is a witch

Islam is stuck several centuries in the past...

(USA Today) — A Saudi man was beheaded today on charges of sorcery, witchcraft and owning talismans, Arab News reports, quoting the Saudi Interior Ministry.

Muree bin Ali Al-Asiri also admitted to “committing adultery with two women,” the ministry says, according to the Saudi Press Agency. He was executed in the southern Najran province.

The BBC reports that a Saudi woman was executed for committing sorcery and witchcraft in December, and a Sudanese man was executed in September, despite calls by Amnesty International for his release.

The BBC’s Arab affairs editor, Sebastian Usher, notes that Saudi Arabia’s powerful conservative religious leaders strongly back the harshest punishment for anyone suspected of acts of sorcery, including fortune-telling and faith-healing.

Fauxcahontas Elizabeth Warren still won't meet Cherokee women

Elizabeth Warren blames the controversy over her using an apparently false clam to be 1/32 Cherokee as a vehicle to seek minority status on right wing extremists. The truth is she is a petty and despicable woman.

(Boston Herald) — On their first day in the Hub, a group of Cherokees hoping to confront Elizabeth Warren over her Native American heritage claims blasted the Democrat for trying to dismiss the ancestry controversy as a non-issue in the Bay State U.S. Senate race.[...]

Ali Sacks, a Cherokee from Warren’s home state of Oklahoma, had harsher words: “It’s cowardly to ride the coattails of people who have lost so much for your own benefit and not accomplish what you can accomplish on your own benefits. I think it’s shameful and extremely disrespectful not just to Cherokees but to all tribes who have given so much to this country historically and lost so much.”

Four Cherokee women are in Boston for four days hoping to arrange a meeting with Warren. A spokeswoman for the Warren campaign told the Herald Sunday a staff member would greet the group, but the women told the Herald this morning they’ve still heard nothing from the campaign. [...]

Warren’s camp responded late today with this statement: “The people of Massachusetts are concerned about their jobs, the future for their kids, and the security of their retirement. Scott Brown would rather talk about anything else. The out-of-state group in question is being promoted and supported by a right wing extremist who is on the record supporting and contributing money to Scott Brown. It is past time we moved on to the important issues facing middle class families in Massachusetts – even if Scott Brown won’t.”

Hypocrisy: NSA refuses to say if it spied on you because it would violate your privacy

Is it just me or has the government gotten a lot more asinine since Obama took office?

Via Wired:

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.