Monthly Notes

Briefly Noted: February 2016


A blast email sent by Jesse Moore, Associate Director of Public Engagement at the White House, urged prominent entertainers to use Twitter to promote gun control, which highlights once again the incestuous relationship between Hollywood and the Obama administration. The anti-gun propaganda email was addressed to “Family” and its subject line was, “Artists & Entertainers Unite to #StopGunViolence.” It read, FoxNews.com reports, “Below you have: short and long-term action steps, more info on POTUS’s actions, highlights from YOUR Tweets thus far (thank you!), and draft Tweets for you to build from if helpful.” Actors Ashton Kutcher and Mark Ruffalo tweeted “@POTUS is taking steps to keep guns out of the wrong hands through background checks.” Singer Andrea Bocelli tweeted to his 207,000 followers, “FACT: Each year, more than 30,000 American lives are cut short by guns. It’s time to #StopGunViolence.” Dan Gainor of the Media Research Institute commented, “This seems an unprecedented abuse of White House influence to manipulate the public into believing celebrities genuinely supported the president.” Gainor added, “Hollywood is just an extension of Obama’s press office.”

Iran booster and former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering has been involved in a project using Palestinian protesters to vilify Israeli soldiers, journalist Caroline Glick reports. In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Pickering “recommended using leftist NGOs—including Peace Now, which he mentioned by name—to destabilize the political situation on the ground in Israel … and set out a plan, which in his view would force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ask the Americans to initiate a new diplomatic process with the Palestinians.” Pickering urged that Saul Alinsky-style tactics be used against the Israeli government and be captured on film. Provocations aimed at the Israeli military “could create the kind of action which no army can easily use force to deal with.” He urged that Palestinian women demonstrate “peacefully under the eyes of the world, [because] the chances are much less force will be used against them, since that action has its own consequences.” He wrote that “there might be peaceful demonstrations against all aspects of the occupation on the Palestinian sides—roadblocks, land confiscations, new settlement activity, around military government installations and perhaps in Area C, which they do not control.” Soldiers would look mean as they stopped female demonstrators from interfering with military operations or disrupting the local economy. Pickering has ties to the pro-Iran Islamist front group known as the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which a federal court ruled is a tool of the brutal, totalitarian Islamic Republic of Iran.

Disgraced activist Shaun King has been excommunicated and anathematized from the Black Lives Matter movement because he lied when he claimed he was half black and also may have embezzled charitable donations, reports say. King raised funds for Justice That’s All and said in 2013 that his company, Upfront Media Group, would donate some of its profits to an affiliated nonprofit, the Upfront Foundation. No government registration for the two nonprofits could be found by the Daily Caller. King claims a racist conspiracy is in play to persecute him.

After several high-profile outbreaks of food poisoning, the burrito restaurant chain Chipotle plans to shut down all its stores for up to a day this month to teach its employees about food safety. “Health officials investigated six outbreaks tied to Chipotle last year involving norovirus, E. coli and salmonella,” the Chicago Tribune reports. “They included one that started in October in Oregon and Washington and spread to seven other states, sickening more than 50 people by mid-November. In December, about 200 were sickened by norovirus after eating at a Chipotle in Boston. Also in December, federal health officials investigated five cases of E. coli poisoning in Kansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma.” The delicious irony is that Chipotle is a crusader against modern agricultural practices, especially the use of antibiotics on livestock, even though such practices have an excellent record at preventing contamination of meat. The Center for Consumer Freedom is highly critical of Chipotle’s nonsensical “Food with Integrity” principles.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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