Month: February 2020

Philip Haney, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official during the Obama administration who blew the whistle on shortcomings within his own agency, was found dead in California on Friday with a “gunshot wound” to the chest, several news outlets report, citing a statement from the law enforcement.

Although authorities have said the gunshot wound “appears” to be “self-inflicted,” stressing that the investigation is ongoing, 66-year-old Haney had been missing since February 19. and died from a gunshot wound to his chest two days later, Red State and Heavy reported.

Gunshot wounds to the chest are uncommon in the case of suicides, data reportedly show. Haney’s death has triggered a wave of claims suggesting he may have been a victim of foul play.

Echoing some of the whistleblower’s friends, a number of senior congressional officials have expressed alarm to Breitbart News about this, noting that they do no believe Haney was suicidal.

Law enforcement found Haney’s body 40 miles east of Sacramento, California.

While testifying as a whistleblower before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016, Haney asserted that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files of people with links to Islamist terrorist groups. He argued that authorities could have prevented several terrorist attacks in the U.S. if DHS had not scrubbed specific data.

The Washington Examiner learned from the Amador County Sheriff’s office that “deputies and detectives responded to reports Friday morning at 10:12 a.m. of a male subject on the ground with a gunshot wound in the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth, California.”

“Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time,” the sheriff’s office reportedly declared in a statement.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said Haney “didn’t kill himself” as claimed by law enforcement who ruled his death a suicide. Haney was in possession of an archive of information he considered an insurance policy in case he was ever found dead, King asserted.

“Phil Haney was a friend & patriot. He was a target because of all he knew of Islamic terrorist coverups,” King wrote Saturday on Twitter. “He insured his life by archiving data that incriminated the highest levels of the Obama administration. Phil Haney didn’t kill himself. RIP, Phil.”

Phil Haney was a friend & patriot. He was a target because of all he knew of Islamic terrorist coverups. He insured his life by archiving data that incriminated the highest levels of the Obama administration. Phil Haney didn’t kill himself. RIP, Phil. https://t.co/pvy7MflFwc

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) February 23, 2020

“If I am found dead, it wasn’t suicide,” Haney told multiple people, confirmed by two anonymous sources, the NOQ Report learned.

One America News Network (OANN) reporter and veteran intelligence officer of the U.S. Navy, Jack Posobiec, suggested on Twitter that Haney’s death could be a homicide.

“I can confirm at @OANN we are investigating the suspicious death of DHS whistleblower Phil Haney,” Posobiec tweeted on Saturday. “We have spoken with local sources that suggest this may have been a homicide”:

I can confirm at @OANN we are investigating the suspicious death of DHS whistleblower Phil Haney

We have spoken with local sources that suggest this may have been a homicide

Updates to follow as our investigation develops

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) February 22, 2020

Sheriff’s office quick to rule his death a "suicide"… yeah right. pic.twitter.com/th5p5rmFM5

— Machiavelli (@TheRISEofROD) February 23, 2020

Authorities found Haney dead ahead of his plans to publish another book exposing problems within the Obama administration, according to the Examiner.

Citing unnamed sources, however, the Examiner also revealed that Haney “was recently in contact with top officials about returning to work for the DHS. Additionally, Haney was engaged to be married.”

Over half of monetary transactions in Venezuela take place using dollars, and nearly two-thirds use any type of foreign currency, according to data obtained by the Caracas-based research firm Ecoanalitica.

The analysis, which studied around 16,000 transactions carried out from February 9th to 14th across ten cities in Venezuela, found that 55.7 percent of all transactions now took place in dollars, while over 64 percent of sales in foreign currency. The most popular currency after the dollar is the Colombian peso, as the neighboring country is experiencing relative economic prosperity compared to the shattered economy of Venezuela.

Credit card readers accepting Venezuela’s bolívar currency are regularly rendered useless by repeated power cuts, The most affected cities, such as San Cristobal and Maracaibo, reported usage of foreign currency as high as 94 and 92 percent, respectively.

The figures mean that despite the fierce opposition of Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime to all things American, the U.S. dollar has effectively become the country’s unofficial currency. As well as the total collapse in value of the bolivar, which has lost well over 99.99999 percent of its value in the past decade, a major reason for this change is because four million people have fled Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis over the past five years.

Many of these exiles send foreign currency back to their friends and relatives in Venezuela. Ecoanalitica estimated around $4 billion in annual remittances. That figure is highly likely to rise given the thousands of Venezuelans who continue to flee the country each day in search of economic refuge.

Currency inflation in Venezuela began to soar as early as 2007 under the rule of socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and in recent years has reached levels similar to Germany’s Weimar Republic or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where some people were seen using a wheelbarrow to buy products and the government introduced a 100-trillion-dollar banknote.

The study also found that 81 percent of sales now take place in cash, creating problems for local businesses unable to store their money in Venezuelan bank accounts.

“I do not believe that the economy will be completely dollarized but it is showing a growing trend that is difficult to reverse,” Asdrubal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalitica, said. “We will continue to have a dual economy in which the dollar has an increasing weight.”

Another popular trend in Venezuela is the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum. Increasing numbers of businesses are accepting payments based on various blockchain technologies, although these can be problematic due to their rapidly fluctuating value.

In a bid to interfere in this market – often touted by free marketeers as the key towards a stateless, libertarian future – the socialist regime has introduced its own scam cryptocurrency known as the “petro,” supposedly backed by the country’s extensive natural resources and oil reserves. Maduro has previously claimed that the currency has received over a billion dollars’ worth of investment, although this figure is highly disputed by cryptoanalysts, many of whom question whether it has any value whatsoever.

You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.

Actor Tim Allen used his hit sitcom, Last Man Standing to humorously school Democrat presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren about the dangers of socialism and how capitalism is the “recipe for economic success.”

In the episode, “Baked Sale,” Allen’s Mike Baxter teaches foreign exchange student Jen (Krista Marie Yu) about the wonders of capitalism as the teenager begins running a bake sale to benefit her school geology club. In the series, Baxter is the boss of Outdoor Man, an outdoor supplies store. Allen closes each episode of the Fox show with a video blog (vlog) for his store. In this week’s vlog, Baxter takes a swipe at Sanders and Warren by name, slamming them for their attacks on capitalism.

“Hey, Mike Baxter, for Outdoor Man to talk about one of my favorite passions. No, no, no, not gutting a deer while listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful. I’m talking about capitalism,” Baxter starts out on his vlog. “Now, old Bernie and young Elizabeth tell the folks capitalists are coldhearted, money-grubbing vultures. When you put it that way, you make it sound like a bad thing. But we’re also human beings with a conscience. Conscience. You remember those?”

Watch Below via MRC: 

Baxter winds up his lesson on capitalism with a few more amusing jabs but adds a serious message.

“I mean, sure, paying your workers with baseball cards and bubble gum would increase profits, but it’s wrong! Listen, a good boss should know how to make a buck and still be a human being,” Baxter said.

“You see, capitalism, it’s just a recipe for economic success, and it doesn’t taste quite right until you sprinkle in a little morality,” the star said. “That’s why, here at Outdoor Man, we provide benefits for our part-timers, paid medical leave and all-you-can-eat chili at the Annual Meat Summit. Which sadly leads to a lot of paid medical leave. Happy employees make good employees, and that’s good business. Baxter out.”

Last Man Standing continues to earn top ratings for Fox Television after being booted from ABC in 2017. Fox picked up the canceled series and continued it in a rare example of a series jumping from one network to another.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston.

Someone needs to tell Sen. Elizabeth Warren that unctuous moneybags Michael Bloomberg isn’t an existential threat to her campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, it was entertaining to see the Massachusetts Democrat essentially stop the former New York mayor’s path to the presidency before it even really began at the Nevada debate this week.

However, she should have been done at that point.

Do the “Waiting to Exhale” thing and walk away from misogynist idiot’s BMW after you’ve set it aflame. Don’t keep kicking the doors and then cursing because your feet are getting burned.

But no.

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Instead of going after, oh, I don’t know, that guy who shares the same beliefs you do who’s in the lead and who’s also hated by the party establishment — which gives you an opening, Sen. Warren — you’re going to try and resuscitate your near-moribund campaign by going after a) Michael Bloomberg and b) police officers. Good work.

Warren spent Thursday and Friday hitting Bloomberg on pretty much everything, including the stop-and-frisk policy the New York City Police Department had in place during Bloomberg’s time as mayor.

Stop-and-frisk, described in a desultory manner, involves police temporarily detaining a person if they deem their behavior suspicious, questioning them and then searching them if they have reasonable suspicion the suspect may be armed.

A 2013 court ruling found the city’s application of the policy to be unconstitutional, in part because it said the stops were racially discriminatory.

Bloomberg now disavows the policy, because he’s a Democrat running for president so of course he does.

This is a pretty easy target which Warren managed to bomb with such frightening intensity during a campaign stop in Nevada — where, by the way, Bloomberg isn’t even on the ballot — that she managed to inflict a whole lot of collateral damage that I don’t think she even noticed.

She began by noting Bloomberg’s shift on the issue: “So to suddenly, years later, days before he announces that he wants to be president of the whole United States, he suddenly comes up with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry that I had a plan that inadvertently hurt people,’” Warren said Thursday on “The View,” according to Politico. “No, that is just simply not good enough.”

And then she decided it was time to go after police officers — although, again, I’m not sure she noticed

“It reveals his character. It reveals his understanding of race in America,” she said,

“Look, I am not a person of color. I have not lived with that. I have not been thrown across the hood of a car in my own neighborhood, but I try to learn from the people who have, and it is clear that what Mayor Bloomberg has learned so far is that he can hire enough ads, have enough money that he can insulate himself from any recognition of what his actions did to other human beings. And it was wrong and he has not accounted for it.”

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She said virtually the same thing while campaigning in Las Vegas that day: “I am not a woman of color. I never got thrown across a hood. I have the privilege of never having been slammed into the wall by a police officer. But I tell you this, I listen to people who have.”

Sen. @ewarren in Las Vegas: “I am not a woman of color” so I’ve never been “slammed into the wall by a police officer” pic.twitter.com/ua6FHrqMas

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 20, 2020

So the NYPD’s policy was to stop black women and just throw them across the hood of a car for no good reason?

This is a new one.

And she’s “try[ing] to learn from the people who have” had that happen to them, because apparently this is just what police do. If you’re a black woman, apparently you’ve been thrown across the hood of a car.

That’s the takeaway from this ill-constructed thought which she just decided to throw out there.

Again, I’ve given a short description of stop-and-frisk. If you want a longer, more detailed version of of what this entails, Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute has a more thorough writeup on the legal niceties of the practice.

In New York City’s case, the court ruled that the way stop-and-frisk was being applied violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The court did not rule that cops were just taking random people and throwing them across the hood of their cruiser for possession of melanin.

This is such a reflexive liberal talking point that nobody seems to grab the subtext: The men and women of law enforcement are mindless attack animals with an eye for people of color who are kept on the leash of local, state and federal politicians.

If police do something illiberal, it’s because calculating politicians let the hyenas off the chain to feast upon innocent prey.

There’s never, it seems, a Democrat who describes how police act in quotidian terms.

Warren didn’t say, for example, “I have not been stopped and temporarily detained for questioning in my own neighborhood” because she’s white. (It is, by the way, endlessly refreshing to see her have to admit she isn’t a person of color.) Rather, she would just be thrown over a hood, no questions asked.

And then there’s the amazing part: You get the feeling the offensive part didn’t even register with Warren.

She didn’t even bother prefacing this with the boilerplate “I know most police officers are good people who do their jobs without prejudice, but…” to cover herself.

Warren went straight for the progressive cliché that police are racist automatons looking to harm people of color at any opportunity, physically if possible.

Feeding into anti-cop prejudice isn’t going to help in the general election if, by some incredible chance, Warren’s campaign is able to throw a Hail Mary pass and get the nomination by beating up on Michael Bloomberg and law enforcement.

It’s not going to help the Democratic Party even if she doesn’t.

Beyond that, it doesn’t help our society.

Police put their lives on the line to help keep communities safe.

Where there are abuses, they should be dealt with, but that doesn’t obviate the overwhelming majority of police officers who conduct themselves with nothing but the purest intentions.

I understand that admitting this on the left is political suicide, but feeding into an anti-cop narrative that’s been festering on the left for the better part of a decade is only going to divide us further.

It’s not going to heal communities that feel stop-and-frisk targeted them. On the contrary, it merely deepens the wound in the hope that the wounded cling to the left for political succor.

From the past few days, it’s clear Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is going to remembered for everyone she’s torn down.

In fact, judging by this week’s debate and the aftermath, that includes everyone but Bernie Sanders. (Apparently, she’s forgotten all about that whole Bernie allegedly telling her a woman can’t win the presidency angle, much to the detriment of whatever possible chance she has left.)

If she wants to tear down Michael Bloomberg over stop-and-frisk, fine. I have no love for the man or his shifting positions. Taking cops down with him is a step too far and one that Elizabeth Warren ought to be called out on.

Don’t count on her fellow Democrats to do that, however.

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There’s severe flooding in Mississippi.

There are people quarantined on cruise ships at this very moment, some of them with coronavirus and the others desperately wishing they were home.

There are probably even still people who, in this day and age, had their bank accounts denuded by Nigerian 419 scammers within the past few days.

In short, there are people who have had worse weeks than former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But there aren’t a whole lot of them.

After having spent almost half a billion dollars on ads in order to buy his way into being a presidential front-runner, Bloomberg arrived on stage in Las Vegas on Wednesday night looking very much a man who had never even watched one of the Democratic debates, much less prepped for one.

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At the end of the night, he came away looking like Montgomery Burns without the charm.

Never before have I seen a major candidate simultaneously so unready for and so savaged by his competitors.

They hit him over his history with stop-and-frisk.

They hit him over his campaign spending.

They hit him over the fact he used to be a Republican.

And they hit him especially hard over his treatment of women.

Bloomberg never offered any effective response to this other than to say that his company was a great place for women to work and had been recognized with accolades to that effect — which isn’t exactly what’s going to endear anyone to the Democratic electorate when their competition is saying they call women “horse-faced lesbians” and they somehow manage to make things worse by saying the women who they’ve signed nondisclosure agreements with all just kind of took a joke the wrong way.

“But let me tell you what I do at my company and my foundation and in city government when I was there. In my foundation, a person that runs it [is] a woman. Seventy percent of the people there are women,” Bloomberg said in his response.

However, he did flex on his current record regarding sexual harassment or other gender-based indiscretions: “Anybody that does anything wrong in our company, we investigate it, and if it’s appropriate, they’re gone that day,” he said.

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Unfortunately, even that one is going to fly in the way a penguin doesn’t. Exhibit A: Martin Sorrell.

Sorrell, for those of you who don’t know him, is a British advertising executive who was kicked out at WPP, a firm he turned from a shopping-cart manufacturer into a global marketing leader.

He’s also on the Bloomberg Family Foundation’s board — something that its namesake might indeed begin to regret after this week.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Sorrell’s removal from WPP came after allegations from female assistants who described a “toxic environment” at the company.

How toxic? One described it as “being in an abusive relationship.” Another said that there was “routine verbal abuse.”

Women at the company were subjected to “brutal and inhuman” treatment, according to the allegations.

The claims were serious enough that he was removed from his position as CEO in 2018.

When The Financial Times did a story on the matter, they found 20 to 25 employees to talk about Sorrell’s alleged verbal abuse.

According to the New York Post, he wasn’t terribly apologetic when asked about it during a Q&A with journalist Ken Auletta in Cannes, France, June of 2018.

“Am I an easy person to deal with? The answer is no. Am I demanding? Yes,” Sorrell said, in what the newspaper described as a “glib” manner.

“I don’t know who the FT talked to. They claimed to be talking to 20 to 25 people … maybe they spoke to the wrong 20 to 25 people.”

Oh, and there was the matter of allegedly using £300 of company cash to hire a prostitute, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. Sorrell denied that one in Cannes, as well.

“We’ve dealt with each and everything that’s been said and we’ve responded formally to everything that’s been said,” he said. “We dealt with that by strenuously denying. It’s not true.”

Here was his takeaway after the Q&A: “The first thing I’ve learned is never do an interview with Ken Auletta,” he said. “The second thing is never give a press conference.”

Your board member on the Bloomberg Family Foundation, ladies and gentlemen!

At least he hasn’t hired a prostitute with Mini Mike’s money — not that we know of, anyway.

Sorrell is one of those people whose name seems to attract the adjective “disgraced” before it as if by some kind of magnetic force.

I’m fairly certain there’s nobody who believes his story that doesn’t have the surname Sorrell, and even they probably have their doubts about it.

Remember what Mike Bloomberg said: “Anybody that does anything wrong in our company, we investigate it, and if it’s appropriate, they’re gone that day.”

WPP investigated Martin Sorrell and he was gone. Ken Auletta queried him and Sorrell said he was merely difficult to deal with and that maybe journalists spoke to the wrong people.

Mind you, this alleged abuse was concentrated on women, too.

If it was enough for him to be banished from the company he founded, why wasn’t it enough for Mike Bloomberg to banish him from the board of his charity?

Elizabeth Warren is right about 1/1,024th of the time, and one of those times was at the debate on Wednesday: “We are not gonna beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many non-disclosure agreements and the ‘drip, drip, drip’ of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against,” she said.

Martin Sorrell is part of the drip, drip, drip that’s hiding in plain sight.

There’s probably more behind the scenes.

This is enough of a leaky faucet to turn a really bad week into a really bad campaign for Michael Bloomberg, no matter how much he wants to brag about his empowerment of women or his zero-tolerance policy on this sort of thing.

I hope he kept the receipts for those half-billion worth of television ads.

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Instead of defending the Catholic faith like the heroic martyrs of the last two millennia, a Minnesota priest offered his pinch of incense to the gods of Tolerance in yet another instance of clerical cowardice.

In his Jan. 5 homily, the Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke rightly identified Islam as the “greatest threat” to both the world and the United States, according to the New York Post.

The homily was originally available on the website for the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Lonsdale, where VanDenBroeke serves as pastor, but the recording has since been removed.

The verifiably accurate but somehow controversial statement was part of his sermon on a day dubbed “Immigration Sunday” by the Catholic bishops of Minnesota.

With the exception of some pockets of resistance, the church has been heavily advocating for more immigration in an effort to stem the tide of dwindling church attendance.

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Despite all of the pearl-clutching and fake outrage, VanDenBroeke made it clear in his homily that he doesn’t hate Muslims.

“They are people created out of love by God just as each one of us is. But while we certainly do not hate them as people, we must oppose their religion and worldview,” he said, according to City Pages, which had access to the recording.

While his statement might not be politically correct, VanDenBroeke wasn’t wrong. Violence against Christians worldwide has been on the rise in recent years.

Just last Easter, Christians were murdered by a jihadist group on their holiest day of the year in Sri Lanka.

The BBC reported last year that worldwide “attacks on Christians are at near genocidal levels” and they are being wiped out in the Middle East.

Although he had truth on his side, VanDenBroeke issued an apology because his homily “contained words that were hurtful to Muslims,” he said. “I’m sorry for this. I realize now that my comments were not fully reflective of the Catholic Church’s teaching on Islam.”

Archbishop of Minnesota Bernard A. Hebda also released his own groveling mea culpa after receiving heat from the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Post reported.

While the Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that all religions hold some part of the truth of divine revelation, the main underpinning of Catholicism is “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” — meaning that outside the church, there is no salvation.

Islam, therefore, should not hold such a privileged place that a priest cannot speak freely about it. After all, VanDenBroeke is a Roman Catholic priest who made remarks to his congregation in the course of a sermon at a Catholic Mass.

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Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of modern Catholic leadership is its cowardice in the face of social justice warriors.

Pope Francis is vocal in his pandering to the migrant community while remaining virtually silent on the scourge of radical Islam as Christians are slaughtered around the world.

The church that was literally built on the bones of the martyrs should not shy away from the truth. If early Christians were willing to go before the jaws of hungry lions, VanDenBroeke and his bishop should have the courage to withstand a tongue lashing from their PC enemies.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.