White House Censors French President François Hollande For Saying "Islamist terrorism"

Obama is so paranoid about linking terrorists to the Muslim faith that when French President François Hollande used the phrase "Islamist terrorism" at a meeting in Washington, White House officials posted their official press video with audio of the words cut out completely.

The 8-minute clip was posted on the White House Web site and showed Hollande discussing the global terror threat at a Nuclear Security Summit meeting with Obama and advisers on Thursday.

The White House’s transcript of the event shows the French leader declared at the 4:49 minute mark that "the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq."

But rather than include Hollande’s remark in its entirety, the Obama administration posted footage in which his interpreter’s English translation of the words "Islamist terrorism" was missing.

The audio gap was first reported by the Media Research Center, a media watchdog. After initially posting the video without the edits, the White House took it down and uploaded it again with the interpreter’s voice muted, the MRC reported.

The nonprofit group reported that the White House’s official MP3 recording of the meeting was also censored, but that the transcript was not.

A user wrote in a comment on the White House’s YouTube page,"Thanks, of course, Ministry of Propaganda offices at WH for going ahead and simply posting the proof!" Another wrote: "Nice backtracking, White House. You tried to censor Hollande and you know it."

Obama, who has come under fire for refusing to say "radical Islam" or "Islamic terrorist", made three mentions of terrorism throughout Thursday’s meeting, uttering the phrases "hands of terrorism," "scourge of terrorism" and "counterterrorism."

A White House official said the audio gap was the result of a technical error that (just) happened to come as Hollande was uttering the controversial words (Nice try, no cigar).

The official told The Post, "Nothing was edited out. A technical issue with the audio during the recording of President Hollande’s remarks led to a brief drop in the audio recording of the English interpretation. As soon as this was brought to our attention, we posted an updated video online with the complete audio, which is consistent with the written transcript."

As of 6 p.m. Friday, the White House had posted footage with the words "Islamic terrorism" included.

That's it for now. More soon !

Why Is Rep. Mike Rogers Stepping Down From Office?

Suppose you were Chairman of The House Intelligence Committee and it was your job to investigate what happened in Benghazi. What if your wife were the CEO of the very company contracted to provide that security? Would that not be a rather glaring conflict of interest?

Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is charged with investigating the adequacy of security at the Benghazi compound prior to the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack. Rogers has announced recently, and rather abruptly, that he will be stepping down from representing Michigan in 2014 to host a national radio show syndicated by Cumulus Media.

His wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers was the president and the CEO of the company that was contracted by the State Department to provide that security. Mrs. Rogers, until recently, served as president and CEO of Aegis LLC, the contractor to the United States Department of State for intelligence-based and physical security services.

Aegis, a British private military company with overseas offices in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kenya, Nepal and the U.S., won a $10 billion, 5-year contract with the State Department to provide security for U.S. diplomatic posts around the world.

Congressman Rogers, has been criticized for dragging his feet in the Benghazi investigation. Only when pressure from backbenchers on his committee became intense did he agree to hold a hearing at which former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morrell testified.

Even then, observers noted how mild he was in his questioning, preferring to let Congressmen Peter King, R-N.Y., and Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., take the lead in asking the tough questions.

How on earth can the Rogers family justify having a husband who chairs a Congressional committee charged with reviewing the performance of his wife’s company in guarding the Benghazi compound?

Demands for a special select committee to investigate Benghazi have been heard ever since the attack took place, but now that the Rogers’ conflict of interest is exposed, they are likely to escalate.

The accusations of conflict of interest surface at the same time as the Inspector General for the State Department reported that $6 billion in department contracts, largely in Afghanistan and Iraq, couldn’t be accounted for. The contracts covering the work have disappeared.

Authors Note: Today's post is excerpted from Dick Morris http://www.dickmorris.com

That's our government, folks. Corrupt from the Presidency, the Senate and Congress. Some things never change.....

That's it for now. More soon.

Stay Tuned !

The Truth Is That A.A.R.P. Could Care Less About The Welfare Of Its Members !

This is a reprint of an article from Bloomberg.com. For those of you who are members of A.A.R.P., you might want to read the following excerpts. AARP doesn't have the best interest of seniors in mind. It's true goals are for it's own bottom line......

Jimmy

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Arthur Laupus joined AARP because he thought the nonprofit senior-citizen-advocacy group would make his retirement years easier. He signed up for an auto insurance policy endorsed by AARP, believing the advertising that said he would save money.

He didn’t. When Laupus, 71, compared his car insurance rate with a dozen other companies, he found he was paying twice the average. Why? One reason, he learned, was because AARP was taking a cut out of his premium before sending the money to Hartford Financial Services Group, the provider of the coverage.

Laupus stumbled onto something that many members of the world’s largest seniors’ organization don’t know: The group, formerly called American Association of Retired Persons, collects hundreds of millions of dollars annually from insurers who pay for AARP’s endorsement of their policies.

The insurance companies build the cost of these so-called royalties and fees, which amounted to $497.6 million in 2007, into the premiums they charge AARP members, according to AARP’s consolidated financial statement for that year.

AARP uses the royalties and fees to fund about half the expenses that pay for activities such as publishing brochures about health care and consumer fraud -- as well as for paying down the $200 million bond debt that funded the association’s marble and brass-studded Washington headquarters.

In addition, AARP holds clients’ insurance premiums for as long as a month and invests the money, which added $40.4 million to its revenue in 2007.

"There's an inherent conflict of interest....They're ending up becoming very dependent on sources of income." - Former AARP Executive Marilyn Moon, quoted in Bloomberg article.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it was investigating Humana for providing "misleading" information regarding the Administration's proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage policies-and prohibited other Medicare Advantage plans from providing similar information on how Democrat health "reform" could take away their current coverage.

Yet the Administration's edict prohibiting plans from communicating with their beneficiaries failed to include AARP, which sponsors a Medicare Advantage plan but has been a prime advocate of Democrats' government takeover of health care-quite possibly because AARP has been supporting a health care overhaul from which it stands to gain overall handsomely.

Even as AARP advocates for cutting Medicare Advantage plans by more than $150 billion, an analysis of the organization's operations reveals that it stands to receive tens of millions of dollars at the expense of seniors' medical care-with Democrats' full approval:

** The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans proposed in Democrats' government takeover of health care (H.R. 3200) would cause millions of seniors to lose their current plan and enroll in government-run Medicare.

** Because the government-run Medicare benefit is less generous than most private health plans, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found in June that more than nine in ten seniors not in nursing home settings utilize some form of Medicare supplemental insurance.

** While many of these individuals currently rely on Medicare Advantage plans for the extra benefits they provide to seniors, many would be forced to purchase supplemental Medigap policies should their existing Medicare Advantage plans be taken away from them due to Democrats' government takeover of health care.

** A review of its financial statements finds that in 2008, AARP received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from selling products like Medigap supplemental insurance policies-$652.7 million in direct "royalties and fees," and an increase of more than 31 percent from the $497.6 million in similar revenue AARP generated in 2007.

** Royalty revenues now comprise more than half-60.3 percent-of all AARP revenues; a Bloomberg news analysis published in December found that in 1999, royalties comprised only 11 percent of the organization's total revenues.

** The Bloomberg article-which highlighted what one observer called AARP's "dirty little secret"-profiled seniors who felt betrayed after paying hundreds of dollars above market price for AARP-branded coverage. One noted that "AARP has great buying power, and people should be able to get the best deal....This is unconscionable, what AARP has allowed to happen."

Another disillusioned senior wrote to the organization's leadership asking whether AARP had a "‘special relationship' with (insurance carriers) by which it receives commissions, incentives, rebates, or dare I say ‘kickbacks?'"-and when he arrived at AARP headquarters for a tour, was promptly escorted out of the marble-covered atrium.

** While H.R. 3200 would place strict price controls on Medicare Advantage plans-requiring them to pay out 85 percent of premium revenues in medical claims-Medigap policies face a far less strict 65 percent requirement. In other words, under the Democrat bill, seniors could pay as much as 20 cents more out of every premium dollar to fund "kickbacks" to AARP-sponsored Medigap plans than Medicare Advantage plans.

The higher prices charged by AARP plans and the organization's increasing dependence upon revenue from "royalties," provide tangible evidence why AARP would support cuts to Medicare Advantage that would likely increase their "kickbacks" from Medigap plans. However, it does not answer several key questions:

** Given the myriad new layers of insurance regulation included in Democrats' government takeover of health care, why does the legislation not include a single provision attempting to impose any new restrictions on Medigap policies?

** Did Democrats "forget" to protect seniors-or were they informed that AARP could not support legislation that would limit its lucrative revenue source?

** Similarly, did CMS "forget" to include AARP among the organizations whose First Amendment rights to inform seniors of harmful Medicare provisions were restricted-or did the Administration only wish to silence its critics, and not outside organizations using "kickbacks" to fund advertising in support of the Democrat agenda?

These questions hint at a more fundamental query: With seniors believing that AARP is "making money on the backs of old people," who should believe that the organization is looking out for seniors' interests and not its own?

That's it for now. More soon.

Stay Tuned !