With Operation Fast and Furious headlining the news, there is no doubt civilian arms have been trafficked into Mexico. However, many of the arms used by Mexican cartels are NOT supplied by civilian gun outlets in the United States. Based upon the statistics I have compiled, our State and Defense Departments may be the premier suppliers of weaponry to Mexican drug cartels — not the US civilian.

From 2003-2009, over 150,000 Mexican soldiers deserted from their ranks. Drug cartels became so confident in their recruitment of military personnel that they posted help wanted ads for hit men, traffickers, and guards. When these soldiers desert, their US-supplied weapons (grenades, sniper rifles, assault weapons, etc.) often accompany them over to the cartels. In 2008 and 2009, 13,792 and 20,530 small arms were exported to Mexico from the US. Over 92% of these arms were civilian legal semi-automatic or non-automatic firearms, a number eerily similar to the debunked 90% number echoed by the ATF. A 2008 State Department memo to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi shows a $1,000,000 shipment of select fire M4A2 assault rifles to the Mexican Federal Police Force, (AKA Federales) one of the most corrupt Mexican government agencies.

The most recent numbers from 2010 show the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) — the State Department agency responsible for overseeing the exportation of military goods — authorized the transfer of 2.5 million units of small arms, weapon optics, silencers, and related components. In that same year, over 11 million units of ammunition and 127,000 units of explosive ordnance were cleared for exportation to Mexico. This amounted to $25 million worth of small arms, ammunition, and explosives shipped to Mexico authorized by our State Department.

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From the New York Post:

Anthony Weiner’s wife is taking time off from her senior job with the State Department – as well as time off from the randy former representative, The Post has learned.

While Weiner, 46, heads to an “intensive” rehab program to recover from the sexting scandal that cost him his congressional career, his 35-year-old spouse, Huma Abedin, will be relaxing at an undisclosed location.

“She is definitely taking time off away from her husband and chilling,” a source said. “And he’s going some place for at least a couple of weeks.”

Huma, who is in the early stages of pregnancy with the couple’s first child, has been seen infrequently since she returned from a trip to Africa with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She returned just before the Democrat announced his decision to quit his Brooklyn-Queens seat in the House after six terms. It was also reported that she had decided to try to make their marriage work. (more…)

Three weeks ago the BBC World Service Trust, a charity for the British network, was angling for a share of State Department funding to promote Internet freedom. But after Americans revolted at the idea, the organization has pulled out entirely, failing to even submit a grant proposal.

The BBC charity had developed a lucrative relationship with the U.S. government during the Obama administration. U.S. tax dollars are supporting at least two BBC World Service Trust projects: The State Department gave the organization $300,000 for work in Burma and USAID gave it $4.5 million for a project in Nigeria.

But outrage from American taxpayers, members of Congress and the Broadcasting Board of Governors was apparently enough to dissuade the British organization from making a formal proposal this time. At stake was up to $28 million in funding for work on Internet freedom issues.

Even with the BBC World Service Trust out of the running, there’s still hard feelings over a British organization seeking U.S. funding for work that the federal government’s own taxpayer-funded broadcaster does as well.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Josh Kraushaar to talk about the new electoral math Obama faces in 2012. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about PJ Crowley’s dismissal at the State Department.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

For Obama, Virginia Is the Next Ohio
Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval
Josh Kraushaar at National Journal’s Hotline
Pej: Hope and Change?
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Last evening on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow took a few moments on her show to jab at the Beltway press, suggesting that the press in DC is so annoyed at being “sidelined” by the Egypt story that it’s “clawing and scratching to find some partisan story to tell here.”  Maddow then proceeded to slam a list of conservative politicians and bloggers, including freshman Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, former UN Ambassador John Bolton, and blogger Pam Geller.

One other story that Maddow called out was from RedState.com, to which she mocked the suggestion that unions and the U.S. state department are involved in the Egypt protests and quipped, “What, no ACORN?”

The author of that post is a friend of mine and fellow BigGovernment contributor, who, in addition to blogging at RedState.com, also runs Labor Union Report.  I was surprised when I saw his post called out on Maddow’s show.  Not only is he not usually a typical target of MSNBC’s brand of snark, but it was obvious that Maddow – or whomever does her research – had not even read the post beyond paragraph two.  If they had, they would have noticed that the information came from a few familiar sources:  the Huffington Post and WikiLeaks. And those sources contained some potent information that’s directly related to the current uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

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Why is it that President Obama can travel to Cairo to promote the wearing of the hijab, but when presented with an opportunity to make a relevant statement on women’s rights issues in the Middle East, he and his Administration are silent?  It has been more than two weeks since Iran was handed a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women and still, not one word of condemnation from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, or UN Ambassador Rice.  Granted, we have become conditioned to expect world-sanctioned hypocrisy over at the United Nations, but this new appointment comes at a time which is especially dangerous to the women who actually live in Iran.

The women’s rights movement in the Islamic Republic has been building momentum for decades and in recent years has served as inspiration for human rights activists around the world.

Last summer in particular, women took to the streets of Iran in record numbers to peacefully protest what is widely considered to be a fraudulent Presidential election.  Activists in Iran have capitalized on this momentum and they continue to protest peacefully — now in an attempt to reform their government’s violent and oppressive laws against women.

This revitalized civil rights movement comes at a time when Iran is attempting to position itself as the leader of the Islamic world.  Emboldened women who seek to shift the Republic away from its stringent adherence to Islamic Shariah law pose a huge threat to the existing power structure of the ruling government and an even greater threat to Iran’s credibility in the entire region.  It is not the vague prospect of possible UN sanctions which is worrisome to the Iranian government, it is the empowerment of its own citizens — especially the ones in headscarves.

The result is a governmental crackdown on activists along with stricter, harsher laws and propaganda aimed against all women. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing more odd/troubling news coming from Iran — a cleric blames women for earthquakes and then days later a fatwa is issued against women with suntans.  News like this makes for catchy sound bites and headlines, but mainstream sources often overlook the harsher reality — women in the Islamic Republic lack even the most basic rights to personal freedom.  They have no right to choose their own husbands, have no right to divorce, cannot travel without the permission of their husbands, and are even barred from singing and dancing in public.  Activists in Iran face unimaginable odds, yet they are still rising up in peaceful protest — by doing so, they face the possibility of arrest, detention, torture, rape, and even death. (more…)

UPDATE: Jawa Report confirms Mullah Omar has been captured.

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately.  From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.

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As we reported a few weeks ago, White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin became ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy controversy when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Buzz profile, which included 28 senior Google lobbyists and lawyers.

The controversy has prompted a slew of letters and FOIA requests to the White House and Department of Justice from watchdog groups.  Last week, Congressman Darrell Issa sent a letter to McLaughlin asking whether the deputy CTO may have been using Gmail to communicate with his former employer, thus circumventing the laws associated with openness and transparency.  Issa gave McLaughlin a deadline of this week to answer a series of questions on what the Deputy CTO is doing to comply with official recordkeeping rules.

Now we’ve learned that another ex-Googler working in the Administration, Katie Jacobs Stanton, has been snagged by Google’s lax privacy settings as well. Like McLaughlin, Stanton — the New Media Director at the State Department — had 17 Google employees in her Gmail account exposed in the Buzz privacy flap, as the screenshots below indicate:

Katie Jacobs Stanton was President Obama’s appointee to the newly created position of Director of Citizen Participation in March of 2009 and recently moved to the State Department as the New Media Director.  Her previous responsibilities at Google included Google Moderator, Google Finance and Google’s Open Social initiative.

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Isn’t it finally time for the behind-closed-door racial slurs to die?  If our legislators truly do represent the people, then, how is it possible that in this nation, with so many people, of so many different ethnicities and races, an individual could  be castigated for accented speech or the texture of their hair or the color of their skin?

I was born in 1958, at the cusp of one of the biggest change in our country’s ideology– the civil rights movement.  But, six years later, desegregation had still not infiltrated all aspects of our national society and in Louisiana, it had had almost no effect at all.

As  a six year old, desegregation had little impact, until the day that Bobby Kennedy came to our house and, sitting at our kitchen table, convinced my dad to “try once more” and apply to have me attend an all-white, private school in New Orleans.  That day changed my life.

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The British government has banned Radio talk show host Michael Savage from traveling to the United Kingdom. The UK government placed Savage’s name on a list of prohibited individuals that is generally reserved for murderers, other serious criminals and terrorists. Today, Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her to press her counterparts in the UK to remove Mr. Savage’s name from list of banned individuals. Full test of the letter below:

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