Over the July Fourth weekend, there was a major development in the Fast and Furious investigation when BATF head Ken Melson made a surprise July 4th appearance before Darrel Issa and Chuck Grassley’s congressional committee put together to investigate Fast and Furious.

That operation involved BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) agents allowing straw purchasers to buy over two thousand automatic weapons and then smuggle them illegally across the border to Mexican Drug cartels. The operation led to a spike in violence in Mexico, the killing in Arizona of a U.S. Border Patrol agent last December and a possible attempted cover up by the BATF and the US Department of Justice.

BATF head Melson was placed in a particularly bad light by the earlier testimony of agents, some of whom depicted him watching the illegal gun deals go down on closed circuit TV and literally rubbing his hands with glee. Melson, a temporary appointee, was set up to fall on his sword for Fast and Furious and was apparently under a great deal of pressure from the Obama Administration to ‘resign’. Instead, he resisted and said he wanted to testify before the investigative committee, but in order to do that, he needed clearance from the Department of Justice.

In a particularly revolting display of partisan horse trading and disregard for justice, the ranking Senate Democrat on the committee, Patrick Leahy made a deal with Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to allow access to certain documents and allow Melson and other witnesses to testify – in exchange for releasing holds on three Obama Administration DOJ nominees.

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The latest dinosaur media meme involves a comparison of two speeches given within hours of one another on the Tucson shootings- Sarah Palin’s video and President Barack Obama’s in a Tucson Basketball stadium.

Obama’s speech is lauded as showing him to be ‘a formidable figure’,'unifying a nation in its grief’, ‘conciliatory’ and ‘calling for anew era of civility in American politics’.

Sarah Palin’s is branded as ‘a missed opportunity’, ‘defiant’, symptomatic of ‘grievance-based’ and ‘urgent and defensive’.

I can appreciate why Sarah Palin’s political enemies would want to compare these two speeches..but it’s an exercise in absurdity.

No one accused President Barack Obama of being directly complicit in mass murder, and no one in Sarah Palin’s camp orchestrated a campaign to do so. If they had, we might have heard a very different speech from one of the most thin-skinned presidents in modern times.

It was not President Obama who was receiving death threats from the right calling for ‘payback’ for the Tucson murders, and no one suggested that the killings were ‘Obama’s fault’.

President Obama was in Tucson to conduct a memorial service for the victims, and he did so.

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No, I’m not kidding..I wish I were.

Hillary Clinton was speaking in front of an Arab audience in Abu Dhabi and was asked `why the 9/11 terror attacks, the work of a handful of men, had been allowed to color American views of a whole people.’

Her reply? After the usual fawning over America’s Muslims, she didn’t,of course say anything about the 9/11 attacks being done in the name of Islam, about the numerous attacks on America and Americans before or since 9/11, or the millions of Muslims America has spent blood and treasure to liberate.

No…her response was to compare the Arizona shooting to 9/11 and to blame both incidents on ‘extremism’!

“We have extremists in our country,” she said. “A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman congress member was just shot by extremists (RM: Note her use of the plural, extremists) in our country.

“We have the same kinds of problems, so rather than standing off of each other we should work to try and prevent the extremists wherever they are from being able to commit violence.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your Secretary of State….eagerly comparing a lone nut case to the very sane gentlemen who planned and carried out 9/11, as well as a number of other operations.

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In a vote of 333-79, the House voted yesterday to censure Charlie Rangel. It’s the most serious penalty they could give him short of expulsion.

Let’s reiterate what Rangel actually did, and then we’ll discuss the horrendous penalty.

To summarize briefly, we have blatant and recurring Federal and State tax fraud, illegal use of four rent-controlled apartments in New York City, using his Congressional letterhead to illegally solicit funds for his private foundation from lobbyists for companies he was writing tax regs on, outrageous conflict of interest, failure to declare over $600,000 in income..the sort of stuff that would get you or I locked up for a long time.

Charlie Rangel’s penalty? He’ll be required to stand in the well before his colleagues in the House while a censure resolution is read, which will then become part of the Congressional Record. That’s it. Boo-freaking hoo.And he will stay in Congress.

Rangel lobbied to the end for a ‘reprimand’, a lesser punishment based on the idea that he did not commit the violations for personal gains.

According to Rangel there was “no evidence of corruption, no evidence of self-enrichment found, no evidence there was an intention on my part to evade my responsibility, whether in taxes or whether in financial disclosures.”

As I revealed earlier, that’s exactly what the Rangel Center he solicited corporate and lobbyist donations for was all about.

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The retrial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been delayed until April, which will put it after the February 22 mayoral election in which a certain White House former Chief of Staff will be running.

It’s almost certain that Blagojevich’s lawyers will seek to subpoena Rahm Emanuel or at the very least depose him over certain conversations involving the ”negotiations’ over the appointment to Barack Obama’s old senate seat, which the president was reportedly seeking for presidential adviser and long time Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett. Rahm was subpoenaed as a defense witnesses by the defense at Blago’s first trial, which ended in a hung jury, but he was never called.

Of course, by April both the midterms and the mayoral election will both be over, which ought to give a little relief to another prominent Democrat, Alexi Gianoullias whose family owned Broadway Bank was just closed by the Feds amid what can only be called massive ‘irregularities’. And who’s now running for the same senate seat in a hotly contested election.

The feds have Blagojevich’s ex-chief of staff John Harris on tape telling Blagojevich in November, 2008 right after the presidential election that “Alexi called me.” Harris told Blago that Giannoulias “wants to meet with me a few minutes this afternoon. He says it’s . . . I said what’s it about? He says the (Senate) seat, ‘but not for me, for someone else’.”

While Harris claims he never met with Giannoulias, who is a long time friend, fundraiser and supporter of Obama (and along with Obama, a mutual pal of convicted financier Tony Rezco) right after the phone call a meeting was set up between between Valerie Jarrett and Illinois labor leader and Blagojevich supporter and confidant Tom Balanoff, to discuss the vacant senate spot.

That could mean that Jarrett went to the White House afterwards – which would have meant getting Rahm Emanuel involved – and asked them to ‘bid’ for her if this is the way things went down.That could make for some interesting testimony if Emanuel is grilled by Blago’s lawyers this time around.Especially since the feds have Emanuel on tape in various conversations with Blagojevitch and Harris.

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