Trump Selects Former Indiana Senator Dan Coats for National Intelligence Director — Is Julian Assange A Russian Cuttout? — American People Rejected Clinton and Obama — Videos
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Director of National Intelligence
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Agency overview | |
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Formed | April 22, 2005 |
Preceding agency | |
Jurisdiction | Federal Government of the United States |
Headquarters | Liberty Crossing Tysons Corner, Virginia[1] |
Employees | 1,750[2] |
Agency executives |
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Child agencies | |
Website | www.dni.gov |
The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the United States government official – subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President – required by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to:
- Serve as principal advisor to the President and his executive offices of the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council about intelligence matters related to national security;
- Serve as head of the sixteen-member United States Intelligence Community; and
- Direct and oversee the National Intelligence Program.
On July 30, 2008, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13470,[3] amending Executive Order 12333 to strengthen the DNI’s role.[4] Further, by Presidential Policy Directive 19 signed by Barack Obama in October 2012, the DNI was given overall responsibility for Intelligence Community whistleblowing and source protection.
Under 50 U.S.C. § 403-3a, “under ordinary circumstances, it is desirable” that either the Director or the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence be an active-duty commissioned officer in the armed forces or have training or experience in military intelligence activities and requirements. Only one of the two positions can be held by a military officer at any given time. The statute does not specify what rank the commissioned officer will hold during his or her tenure in either position, but historically a four-star general or admiral has served. On July 20, 2010, President Obama nominated retired Lt. (three-star) Gen. James R. Clapper for the position. Clapper was confirmed by the Senate on August 5, 2010, and replaced acting Director David C. Gompert. The prior DNI was retired Navy four-star admiral Dennis C. Blair, whose resignation became effective May 28, 2010.[5]
History
Founding
Before the DNI was formally established, the head of the Intelligence Community was the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who concurrently served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The 9/11 Commission recommended establishing the DNI position in its 9/11 Commission Report, not released until July 22, 2004, as it had identified major intelligence failures that called into question how well the intelligence community was able to protect U.S. interests against foreign terrorist attacks.
Senators Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham introduced S. 2645 on June 19, 2002, to create the Director of National Intelligence position. Other similar legislation soon followed. After considerable debate on the scope of the DNI’s powers and authorities, the United States Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 by votes of 336–75 in the House of Representatives, and 89–2 in the Senate. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on December 17, 2004. Among other things, the law established the DNI position as the designated leader of the United States Intelligence Community and prohibited the DNI from serving as the CIA Director or the head of any other Intelligence Community element at the same time. In addition, the law required the CIA Director to “report” his agency’s activities to the DNI.
Critics say compromises during the bill’s crafting led to the establishment of a DNI whose powers are too weak to adequately lead, manage and improve the performance of the US Intelligence Community.[6] In particular, the law left the United States Department of Defense in charge of the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). (The limited DNI role in leading the US Intelligence Community is discussed on the Intelligence Community page.)
History (2005–2007)
On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush named US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte to the post, pending confirmation by the Senate. It was reported that President Bush’s first choice for Director of National Intelligence was former Director of Central Intelligence Robert M. Gates, who was serving as president of Texas A&M University; however, Gates declined the offer.[7] Negroponte was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98 to 2 in favor of his appointment on April 21, 2005, and he was sworn in by President Bush on that day.
On February 13, 2007, John Michael McConnell became the 2nd Director of National Intelligence, after Negroponte was appointed Deputy Secretary of State.
Donald M. Kerr was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence on October 4, 2007 and sworn in on October 9, 2007. Kerr, from Virginia, was most recently the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, and previously the Duty Director for Science and Technology at the US CIA and earlier in his career the Assistant Director of the Justice Department’s FBI.
Declan McCullagh at News.com wrote on August 24, 2007, that the DNI site was configured to repel all search engines to index any page at DNI.gov. This effectively made the DNI website invisible to all search engines and in turn, any search queries.[8] Ross Feinstein, Spokesman for the DNI, said that the cloaking was removed as of September 3, 2007. “We’re not even sure how (the robots.txt file) got there” – but it was again somehow hidden the next day. Another blog entry by McCullagh on September 7, states that the DNI site should now be open to search engines.[9] This explanation is plausible because some software used for web development has been known to cause servers to automatically generate and re-generate robots.txt, and this behavior can be difficult to turn off. Therefore, if the web developers working for the DNI had tried to solve the issue by simply removing robots.txt, it would have looked like it worked at first, but then fail once the server had undergone a self-check for the robots.txt file.[10] http://dni.gov/robots.txt has been configured to allow access to all directories for any agent.
In September 2007, the Office of the DNI released “Intelligence Community 100 Day & 500 Day Plans for Integration & Collaboration”. These plans include a series of initiatives designed to build the foundation for increased cooperation and reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community.[11]
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as an independent agency to assist the DNI. The ODNI’s goal is to effectively integrate foreign, military and domestic intelligence in defense of the homeland and of United States interests abroad.[12] The budget for the ODNI – and the Intelligence Community for fiscal year 2013 was $52.6 billion[13] and the base request for fiscal year 2014 was $48.2 billion.[14] The Military Intelligence Program (MIP) base budget request for fiscal year 2014, excluding overseas contingency funds, is $14.6 billion, which together with the NIP, comprise an Intelligence Community budget request of $62.8 billion for fiscal year 2014.[15] The ODNI has about 1,750 employees.[2]
On March 23, 2007, DNI Mike McConnell announced organizational changes, which include:
- Elevating acquisition to a new Deputy DNI position
- Creating a new Deputy DNI for Policy, Plans, and Requirements (replacing the Deputy DNI for Requirements position)
- Establishing an Executive Committee
- Designating the Chief of Staff position as the new Director of the Intelligence Staff
The ODNI continued to evolve under succeeding directors, culminating in a new organization focused on intelligence integration across the community. The ODNI has six centers and 15 Offices that, together with the centers, support the Director of National Intelligence as the head of the Intelligence Community (IC) in overseeing and directing implementation of the NIP and acting as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to national security. The six ODNI centers include:
- Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA)
- Information Sharing Environment (ISE)
- National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC)
- National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)
- National Intelligence Council (NIC)
- Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX).
ODNI organization
The ODNI is divided into core, enabling, and oversight offices. The Principal Duty Director (PDDNI) to the DNI, in a role similar to that of a Chief Operating Officer, oversees operation of ODNI offices, manages Intelligence Community (IC) coordination and information sharing, reinforces the DNI’s intelligence-integration initiatives, and focuses on IC resource challenges.
Core missio
The core mission functions of the ODNI are organized under the Deputy DNI for Intelligence Integration (DDNI/II). The DDNI/II facilitates information sharing and collaboration through the integration of analysis and collection, and leads execution of core mission functions. These include:
- Integration Management Council
- National Intelligence Council
- Mission Integration Division
- National Counterterrorism Center
- National Counterproliferation Center
- Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive
Mission enabler
Mission enablers include policy, engagement, acquisition, resource, human capital, financial, and information offices.
Oversight
Oversight offices include the General Counsel, civil liberties, public affairs, Inspector General, Equal Employment Opportunity, and legislative affairs functions.[12] 78
Directors
No. | Director | Term of Office | President(s) served under | |
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Position succeeded the Director of Central Intelligence | ||||
1. | ![]() |
John D. Negroponte | April 21, 2005 – February 13, 2007 | George W. Bush |
2. | ![]() |
VADM John M. McConnell, USN (Ret.) | February 13, 2007 – January 27, 2009 | |
Barack Obama | ||||
3. | ![]() |
ADM Dennis C. Blair, USN (Ret.) | January 29, 2009 – May 28, 2010 | |
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David C. Gompert* (Acting) | May 28, 2010 – August 5, 2010 | ||
4. | ![]() |
Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, USAF (Ret.) | August 5, 2010 – present |
Line of succession
The line of succession for the Director of National Intelligence is as follows:[16]
- Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
- Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration
- Director of the National Counterterrorism Center
- National Counterintelligence Executive
- Inspector General of the Intelligence Community
Subordinate
Principal Deputy Directors of National Intelligence
Name | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
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Gen Michael Hayden, USAF | April 21, 2005 – May 26, 2006 | George W. Bush |
LTG Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., USA (Acting) | June 2006 – January 2007 | George W. Bush |
Donald Kerr | October 2007 – January 2009 | George W. Bush |
LTG Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., USA (Acting) | January 2009 – February 2009 | Barack Obama |
David C. Gompert | November 10, 2009 – August 2010 | Barack Obama |
Stephanie O’Sullivan | February 18, 2011 – present | Barack Obama |
Director of the Intelligence Staff/Chief Management Officer
Name | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
---|---|---|
LTG Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., U.S. Army | May 2007 – February 2009 | George W. Bush, Barack Obama |
LTG John F. Kimmons, U.S. Army | February 2009 – October 2010 | Barack Obama |
Mark Ewing | November 2010–present | Barack Obama |
Intelligence Community Inspector General
Name | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
---|---|---|
I. Charles McCullough, III | November 2011–present | Barack Obama |
Deputy Directors of National Intelligence
Name | Office | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
---|---|---|---|
Robert Cardillo | Intelligence Integration (oversees collection and analysis) | September 2010–present | Barack Obama |
Peter Lavoy | Analysis | December 2008–? | George W. Bush |
Vacant | Collection | April 2010–? | Barack Obama |
David Shedd | Policy, Plans and Requirements | May 2007–? | George W. Bush |
Dawn Meyerriecks | Acquisition and Technology | September 2009–? | Barack Obama |
Assistant Directors of National Intelligence
Name | Office | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
---|---|---|---|
Deborah Kircher | ADNI for Human Capital | October 2011–present | Barack Obama |
Al Tarasiuk | IC Chief Information Officer | February 2011–present | Barack Obama |
Marilyn A. Vacca | Chief Financial Officer | April 2009–present | Barack Obama |
L. Roger Mason, Jr. | ADNI for Systems & Resource Analyses | May 2009–present | Barack Obama |
Dawn Meyerriecks | ADNI for Acquisition, Technology & Facilities | ?–present | Barack Obama |
Assistant Deputy Directors of National Intelligence
Name | Office | Term of Office | President(s) served under |
---|---|---|---|
Dan Butler | Assistant Deputy Director for Open Source | April 2008–? | George W. Bush, Barack Obama |
Andrew Hallman | Assistant Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration | September 2010–present | Barack Obama |
See also
References
- Jump up^ “Director James R. Clapper Interview With Andrea Mitchell”. DNI.gov.
- ^ Jump up to:a b Clark, Charles (September 2012). “Lifting the Lid”. Government Executive. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- Jump up^ “Executive Order 13470”. Federal Register. National Archives and Records Administration. July 30, 2008. Retrieved November 22, 2016.
- Jump up^ “Bush Orders Intelligence Overhaul”. The New York Times. Associated Press. July 31, 2008.
- Jump up^ Miller, Greg (May 21, 2010). “Dennis C. Blair to resign as Director of National Intelligence”. Washington Post. Retrieved June 3, 2010.
- Jump up^ Kaplan, Fred (7 December 2004). “You Call That a Reform Bill?”. Slate.
- Jump up^ “Robert M. Gates profile”. Washington Post. November 8, 2006. Retrieved November 22, 2016.
- Jump up^ McCullagh, Declan (2007-08-24). “Feds use robots.txt files to stay invisible online. Lame.”. CNET. Retrieved 2014-02-14.
- Jump up^ McCullagh, Declan (2007-09-07). “National Intelligence Web site no longer invisible to search engines”. CNET. Retrieved 2014-02-14.
- Jump up^ “Auto generated robots.txt file in WordPress”. Codegrad. February 10, 2013. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
- Jump up^ “Director of National Intelligence Moves Forward with Intelligence Reform” (PDF). ODNI News Release No. 20-07. DNI.gov. September 13, 2007.
- ^ Jump up to:a b “Public Affairs Office, ODNI”. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ODNI. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- Jump up^ “National Intelligence Program” (PDF). Budget for Fiscal Year 2013. US Government Publishing Office. p. 85. Retrieved 14 Apr 2013.
- Jump up^ “National Intelligence Program” (PDF). The Budget for Fiscal Year 2014. US Government Publishing Office. p. 75. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- Jump up^ “DoD Releases MIP Base Request for FY 2014”. Department of Defense. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- Jump up^ “Designation of Officers of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence To Act as Director of National Intelligence”. Federal Register. 78 FR 59159. 2013-09-25. Retrieved 2016-10-30.
External links
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence
- US Intelligence Community
- The National Counterproliferation Center at the Wayback Machine (archived April 28, 2015)
- The National Counterterrorism Center
- The National Counterintelligence Executive
- Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment
- Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
Articles
- U.S. News & World Report: First line of Defense: Inside the Efforts to Remake U.S. Intelligence
- Fact Sheet: Real Progress in Reforming Intelligence
- The Washington Post – December 29, 2006: DNI Awards $2 Million in Hush-Hush Money
- The National Security Archive: From Director of Central Intelligence to Director of National Intelligence
- U.S. National Intelligence: An Overview 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligence
Dan Coats
Dan Coats | |
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United States Senator from Indiana |
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In office January 3, 2011 – January 3, 2017 |
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Preceded by | Evan Bayh |
Succeeded by | Todd Young |
In office January 3, 1989 – January 3, 1999 |
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Appointed by | Robert Orr |
Preceded by | Dan Quayle |
Succeeded by | Evan Bayh |
United States Ambassador to Germany | |
In office August 15, 2001 – February 28, 2005 |
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President | George W. Bush |
Preceded by | John Kornblum |
Succeeded by | William Timken |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana‘s 4th district |
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In office January 3, 1981 – January 3, 1989 |
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Preceded by | Dan Quayle |
Succeeded by | Jill Long |
Personal details | |
Born | Daniel Ray Coats May 16, 1943 Jackson, Michigan, U.S. |
Political party | Republican |
Spouse(s) | Marsha Coats |
Children | 3 |
Education | Wheaton College, Illinois (BA) Indiana University, Indianapolis(JD) |
Website | Senate website |
Military service | |
Allegiance | ![]() |
Service/branch | ![]() |
Years of service | 1966–1968 |
Daniel Ray “Dan” Coats (born May 16, 1943) is an American politician who served as a United States Senator from Indiana from 1989 to 1999, and again from 2011 to 2017.
Born in Jackson, Michigan, Coats graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois and Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He served in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1968. Before serving in the U.S. Senate, Coats was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Indiana’s 4th congressional district from 1981 to 1989. He was appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Dan Quayle following Quayle’s election as Vice President of the United States in 1988. Coats won the 1990 special election to serve the remainder of Quayle’s unexpired term, as well as the 1992 election for a full six-year term. He did not seek reelection in 1998, and was succeeded by Evan Bayh.
After retiring from the Senate, Coats served as U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 2001 to 2005, and then worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He was re-elected to the Senate by a large margin in 2010, succeeding Bayh, who announced his own retirement shortly after Coats declared his candidacy. Coats declined to run for re-election in 2016, and was succeeded by Todd Young.
On January 5, 2017, Coats was nominated by President Elect Donald Trump for Director of National Intelligence, succeeding James R. Clapper.[1]
Early life, education and career
Coats was born in Jackson, Michigan, the son of Vera (Nora) Elisabeth (née Swanlund) and Edward Raymond Coats. His father was of English and German descent, and his maternal grandparents emigrated from Sweden.[2] Coats attended local public schools, and graduated from Jackson High School in 1961. He then studied at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1965. At Wheaton, he was an active student athlete on the soccer team. He served in the United States Army from 1966 to 1968, and earned a Juris Doctor from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis in 1972, where he was also the associate editor of the Indiana Law Review.[3] He also served as assistant vice president of a Fort Wayne life insurance company.
U.S. House of Representatives
From 1976 to 1980, Coats worked for then-U.S. RepresentativeDan Quayle, a Republican from Indiana’s 4th congressional district, as Quayle’s district representative. When Quayle decided to challenge three-term Democratic incumbent Birch Bayh in the 1980 U.S. Senate election, Coats ran for and won Quayle’s seat in the U.S. House.
U.S. Senate
Senator Coats visits Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996
When Quayle resigned from the Senate after being elected Vice President of the United States in 1988, Coats was appointed to Quayle’s former seat. Coats was subsequently elected to the seat in 1990 and 1992 and served in the Senate until January 1999, when Evan Bayh became the new Senator. Coats announced on February 3, 2010, he would run [4] for his old Senate seat and on February 16, 2010, Bayh announced his intention to retire.[5] Coats went on to win that Senate seat. He announced in March 2015 that he would not run for re-election in 2016.
Political positions
Gun laws
On multiple occasions, Coats has supported gun control measures. In 1991, he voted in favor of the Biden-Thurmond Violent Crime Control Act of 1991. This act, which did not become law, would have created a waiting period for handgun purchases and placed a ban on semi-automatic firearms. Subsequently, he supported the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act that President Clinton signed into law in 1993.[6] The legislation imposed a waiting period before a handgun could be transferred to an individual by a licensed dealer, importer, or manufacturer. This waiting period ended when the computerized instant check system came online. Coats also supported Feinstein Amendment 1152 to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1993.[7] The purpose of the Feinstein Amendment was to “restrict the manufacture, transfer, and possession of certain semiautomatic assault weapons and large capacity ammunition feeding devices”.[8]
In April 2013, Coats was one of forty-six senators to vote against passage of a bill which would have expanded background checks for gun buyers. Coats voted with 40 Republicans and 5 Democrats to stop the passage of the bill.[9]
Taxes
In 1995 Senator Coats introduced S. 568: Family, Investment, Retirement, Savings, and Tax Fairness Act[10] which would provide “family tax credits, increase national savings through individual retirement plus accounts, indexing for inflation the income thresholds for taxing social security benefits, etc”.[11] The bill did not become law.
LGBT issues
In 1993, Coats emerged as an opponent of President Clinton’s effort to allow LGBT individuals to serve openly in the armed forces.[12] Coats was one of the authors of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and opposed its 2011 repeal. He does not support same-sex marriage but opposes interference with “alternative lifestyles“.[13]
Other
Coats cosponsored, with former Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and James Jeffords, S.2206: Coats Human Services Reauthorization Act of 1998. This bill, which was enacted into law, “amended the Head Start Act, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Act of 1981, and the Community Services Block Grant Act…in order to provide an opportunity for persons with limited means to accumulate assets.”[14]
In 1996, Coats cosponsored the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 which President Clinton signed into law. The bill allowed the President to “rewrit[e] legislation by vetoing single items of spending or specific tax breaks approved by Congress.”[15] The Supreme Court of the United States declared the law unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York in a 6-3 decision.
Coats made headlines in August 1998, when he publicly questioned the timing of President Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan, suggesting they might be linked to the Lewinsky scandal: “While there is clearly much more we need to learn about this attack and why it was ordered today, given the president’s personal difficulties this week, it is legitimate to question the timing of this action.”[16]
Between U.S. Senate tenures
Coats worked as Special Counsel member in the firm Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand in 2000 and 2001.
In 2001, Coats was reportedly one of George W. Bush’s top choices to be Secretary of Defense, a job eventually given to Donald Rumsfeld who had previously held it under President Gerald Ford.
From August 15, 2001, to February 28, 2005, Coats was the United States Ambassador to Germany.[17][18] As ambassador during the lead-up to the Iraq war, he pressured the German government not to oppose the war, threatening worsened US relations with Germany.[19] As Ambassador he also played a critical role in establishing robust relations with then opposition leader Angela Merkel and in the construction of a new United States Embassy in the heart of Berlin next to the Brandenburg Gate.[20]
In 2005, Coats drew attention when he was chosen by President George W. Bush to shepherd Harriet Miers‘s failed nomination to the Supreme Court through the Senate. Echoing Senator Roman Hruska‘s famous 1970 speech in defense of Harrold Carswell, Coats said to CNN regarding the nomination: “If [being a] great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole.”[21]
In 2007, Coats served as co-chairman of a team of lobbyists for Cooper Industries, a Texas corporation that moved its principal place of business to Bermuda, where it would not be liable for U.S. taxes. In that role, he worked to block Senate legislation that would have closed a tax loophole, worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Cooper Industries.[22]
The NYT also reported that Coats was co-chairman of the Washington government relations office of King & Spalding, with a salary of $603,609.[22]
Political campaigns
2010
On February 10, 2010, Coats confirmed that he would return to Indiana to run for the seat held by incumbent Evan Bayh in the 2010 United States Senate election.[23][24] Bayh had made no previous announcements and was fully expected to run for another term, but after Coats announced his candidacy, Bayh announced his retirement on February 15, 2010. On May 4, 2010, Coats won the Republican primary over state Sen. Marlin Stutzman and former Congressman John Hostettler.[25][26]
Coats received endorsements from National Right to Life Committee, Indiana Right to Life, and the Susan B. Anthony List.[27]
Coats defeated Democratic Rep. Brad Ellsworth by a fifteen-point margin to return to the Senate.[28]
Coats became the senior senator from Indiana after Richard Lugar lost a challenge in the 2012 Republican primary election and subsequently was not re-elected to the Senate in 2012. Coats is currently serving with Democrat Joe Donnelly.
Personal life
Coats is married to Marsha Coats, Indiana’s female representative to the Republican National Committee. During the 2016 presidential campaign she endorsed Donald Trump, saying, “I truly believe the office will change Donald Trump. I believe it will humble him. And, I think even Donald will be impelled to turn to God for guidance. . . I believe our party needs to give Donald Trump a chance.”[29]
Coats is affiliated with the Fellowship, an informal association of Christian lawmakers. Coats lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana.[30] Coats received Big Brothers Big Sisters of America’s Charles G. Berwind Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 for his decades of involvement with the organization. He also frequently donates to charity and has even helped underprivlaged Youth such as rising YouTuber Dhommay[31]
See also
Julian Assange
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The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (December 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
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This article’s introduction section may not adequately summarize its contents. (November 2016) |
Julian Assange | |
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![]() Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, London (August 2014)
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Born | 3 July 1971 Townsville, Queensland, Australia |
Residence | Embassy of Ecuador, London, England, UK |
Nationality | Australian |
Alma mater | |
Occupation | Editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks |
Home town | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɒnʒ/;[1] born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, publisher and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of the organisation WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006. He has won numerous accolades for journalism, including the Sam Adams Award and Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 but came to global prominence in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks, allegedly provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010),[2][3] the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and CableGate (November 2010). Assange became even more globally recognised after WikiLeaks published more leaks—the DNC leaks and the Podesta emails—during the United States presidential election, 2016.
Following the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance.[4] In November 2010, a request was made for Assange’s extradition to Sweden, where he had been questioned months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape.[5] Assange continued to deny the allegations, and expressed concern that he would be extradited from Sweden to the United States due to his perceived role in publishing secret American documents.[6][7] Assange surrendered himself to UK police on 7 December 2010 and was held for ten days in solitary confinement before being released on bail. Assange sought and was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012. Assange has since remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, and is unable to leave without being arrested for breaching his bail conditions.[8]
- 1Early life
- 2Hacking
- 3Programming
- 4WikiLeaks
- 5US criminal investigation
- 6Swedish sexual assault allegations
- 7Political asylum and life at the Ecuadorian embassy
- 8UNWGAD ruling
- 92016 US presidential election
- 10Allegations of anti-Semitism
- 11Writings
- 12Personal life
- 13Honours and awards
- 14Work
- 15See also
- 16References
- 17Further reading
- 18External links
Early life
Assange was born in the north Queensland city of Townsville,[9][10] to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951),[11] a visual artist,[12] and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder.[13] The couple had separated before Assange was born.[13]
When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange,[14][15][16] an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company.[17] They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982.[9][18][19] Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty[20][21] different Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria.[14][22]
He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983)[17] and Townsville State High School,[23] as well as being schooled at home.[15] He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994)[24] and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006),[14][25] but did not complete a degree.[26]
Hacking
In 1987 Assange began hacking under the name Mendax.[15][27] He and two others—known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect”—formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives.[15] During this time he hacked into the Pentagon and other US Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the US Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox; and the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University’s SRI International.[28] He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.[29][30]
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation.[15] The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange’s phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October,[31] and eventually charged him in 1994 with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes.[15] In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond,[29][32] avoiding a heavier penalty due to the perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.[32][33][34][35][36]
Programming
In 1993 Assange gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted with prosecutions.[37] In the same year he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network.[14][38] He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the Transmission Control Protocol port scanner strobe.c (1995);[39][40] patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996);[41][42] the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996);[43] the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997),[44][45] which reflected his growing interest in cryptography;[46] and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000).[47] During this period he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum;[46] ran Best of Security, a website “giving advice on computer security” that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996;[48] and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus’s Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives.[27][49] In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.[35]
In 1999 Assange registered the domain leaks.org, but, as he put it, “I didn’t do anything with it.”[35][unreliable source?] He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999 for voice-data harvesting technology: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.”[46] Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern — more than a decade later in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012) Assange summarised “the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”.[50]
WikiLeaks
After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organisation’s advisory board[51] and describes himself as the editor-in-chief.[52] From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.[15][21][53][54][55]
WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks,[56] and classified media from anonymous sources.[57] By 2015 WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”.[58] The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity,[59] but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning that Wikileaks became a household name.[60] The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010)[2] which showed US soldiers shooting dead 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq,[3] the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
Opinions of Assange at this time were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as “illegal,”[61] but the police said that he had broken no Australian law.[62] US Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a “terrorist”.[63][64][65][66][67] Some called for his assassination or execution.[68][69][70][71] Support came from people including the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva,[72][73] Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa,[74] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev,[75][76] Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn,[77] Spain’s Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias,[78] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay,[79] Argentina‘s ambassador to the UK Alicia Castro,[80] and activists and celebrities including Tariq Ali,[81] John Perry Barlow,[82] Daniel Ellsberg,[83][84] Mary Kostakidis,[85] John Pilger,[86][87] Ai Weiwei,[88] Michael Moore,[89] Noam Chomsky,[88] Vaughan Smith,[90][91] and Oliver Stone.[92]

Gun camera footage of the airstrike of 12 July 2007 in Baghdad, showing the slaying of Namir Noor-Eldeen and a dozen other civilians by a U.S. helicopter.
The year 2010 culminated with the Sam Adams Award, which Assange accepted in October,[93] and a string of distinctions in December—the Le Monde readers’ choice award for person of the year,[94][95] the Time readers’ choice award for person of the year (he was also a runner-up in Time’s overall person of the year award),[96][97] a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3 million,[98][99][100] and selection by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone as “rockstar of the year”.[101][102]
Assange announced that he would run for the Australian Senate in March 2012 under the newly created WikiLeaks Party,[103][104] had his own talk show on Russia Today in April–July and Cypherpunks[50] was published in November. In the same year, he analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.[105][106] On 15 September 2014, he appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom‘s Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland.[107]
The following February he won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda.[108] Two weeks later he filed for the trademark “Julian Assange” in Europe, which was to be used for “Public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services.”[109][110][111] For several years a member of the Australian journalists’ union and still an honorary member,[112][113][114] he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in June,[115][116] and the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism in November,[117][118] having earlier won the Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media) in 2009.[119]
US criminal investigation
Assange speaks on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, 16 October 2011
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, US authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917.[120] In November 2010 US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks.[4] It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.[121][122][123] An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor) leaked in 2012 said, “We have a sealed indictment on Assange.”[124] The US government denies the existence of such an indictment.[125][126]
In December 2011 prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange;[127][128] he denied this,[129][130] dismissing the alleged connection as “absolute nonsense”.[131] The logs were presented as evidence during Manning’s court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they show WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password.[132][133] The evidence that the interlocutor was Assange is circumstantial, however, and Manning insists she acted alone.[123][133]
Assange was being examined separately by “several government agencies” in addition to the grand jury, most notably the FBI.[134] Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under “active and ongoing” investigation at that time.[135]
Moreover, some Snowden documents published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the “2010 Manhunting Timeline”,[136] and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.[137] In the same documents there was a proposal by the NSA to designate WikiLeaks as a “malicious foreign actor”, thus increasing the surveillance against it.
On 26 January 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that three members of the organisation received notice that “Google had handed over all their emails and metadata to the United States government”.[138] In the notifications, there was the list of possible charges that originated the warrant to Google and that the secret grand jury intends to use against WikiLeaks and likely Assange too. They were espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. They carry up to a minimum of 45 years in prison, if they amount to one charge per these five types; otherwise, even more years could be added.
The United States investigation confirmed its ongoing proceedings against WikiLeaks in a 15 December 2015 court submission.[139]
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010, where he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women with whom he had sex. He was questioned, the case was closed, and he was told he could leave the country. In November 2010, however, the case was re-opened by a special prosecutor who said she wanted to question Assange over two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of “lesser-degree rape” (mindre grov våldtäkt). Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.[5][140]
In 2010, the prosecutor said Swedish law prevented her from questioning anyone by video link or in the London embassy. In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, she changed her mind and agreed to interrogate Mr Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with interviews finally beginning on 14 November 2016.[141]
On 18 August 2015, the statute of limitations expired on all three of the less serious allegations, as the Swedish prosecutor still had not interviewed Assange. However, he is still wanted for questioning over the allegation of “lesser degree rape”, and the statute of limitations for this will not expire until 2020.[142][143][144][145][146]
On 14 November 2016, Police, Swedish Prosecutors, and Ecuadorian officials met with Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London about the sexual assault allegations.[147]
Political asylum and life at the Ecuadorian embassy
On 19 June 2012, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that his government was considering the request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.[148][149][150][151]
Assange and his supporters state he is concerned not about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but that his deportation to Sweden could lead to politically motivated deportation to the United States, where he could face severe penalties, up to the death sentence, for his activities related to WikiLeaks.[3]
On 16 August 2012, Foreign Minister Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him and several calls for assassination from many American politicians.[152][153][154][155] In its formal statement, Ecuador reasoned that “as a consequence of [Assange’s] determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press… in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger”.[156] Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador.[157][158][159][160] Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely,[161][162][163] and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony.[164][165][166][167] Assange’s supporters forfeited £293,500 in bail[168] and sureties.[168][169] His home since then has been an office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette.[170][171][172]
Just before Assange was granted asylum, the UK Government wrote to Foreign Minister Patiño stating that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law.[173] Patiño criticised what he said was an implied threat, stating that “such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention“. Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the building from June 2012 to October 2015 in order to arrest Assange for extradition and for breach of bail, should he leave the embassy. The police guard was withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy “a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him”. The cost of the policing for the period was reported to have been £12.6 million.[174]
In April 2015, during a video conference to promote the documentary Terminal F about Edward Snowden, Bolivia‘s ambassador to Russia, María Luisa Ramos Urzagaste, accused Assange of putting the life of Bolivian president Evo Morales at risk by intentionally providing the United States with false rumours that Snowden was on the president’s plane when it was forced to land in Vienna in July 2013. “It is possible that in this wide-ranging game that you began my president did not play a crucial role, but what you did was not important to my president, but it was to me and the citizens of our country. And I have faith that when you planned this game you took into consideration the consequences,” the ambassador told Assange. Assange stated that the plan “was not completely honest, but we did consider that the final result would have justified our actions. We weren’t expecting this outcome. The result was caused by the United States’ intervention. We can only regret what happened.”[175] Later, in an interview[176] with Democracy Now!, Assange explained the story of the grounding of Morales’ plane, saying that after the United States cancelled Snowden’s passport, WikiLeaks thought about other strategies to take him to Latin America, and they considered private presidential jets of those countries which offered support. The appointed jet was that of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but Assange stated that “our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet […] and in some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that on open lines to lawyers in the United States. And we didn’t think much more of it. […] We didn’t think this was anything more than just distracting.” Eventually, the plan was not pursued and, under Assange’s advice, Snowden sought asylum in Russia.
Paris newspaper Le Monde in its edition of 3 July 2015 published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status.[177] Assange wrote that “only France now has the ability to offer me the necessary protection against, and exclusively against, the political persecution that I am currently the object of.”[178] In the letter Assange wrote, “By welcoming me, France would fulfill a humanitarian but also probably symbolic gesture, sending an encouragement to all journalists and whistleblowers … Only France is now able to offer me the necessary protection … France can, if it wishes, act.”[177][178]
In a statement issued by the Élysée Palace on 3 July 2015 in response to this letter, the French President said: “France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger.”[179]
On 4 July 2015, in response to the denial of asylum by France, a spokesman for Assange denied that Assange had actually “filed” a request for asylum in France. Speaking on behalf of Assange, Baltasar Garzón, head of his legal team, said that Assange had sent the open letter to French president Francois Hollande; but Assange had only expressed his willingness “to be hosted in France if and only if an initiative was taken by the competent authorities”.[178]
On 16 August 2016, Assange’s lawyer in the UK, John Jones, was found dead, according to the first reports after being hit by a train in an apparent suicide.[180] An inquest into his death found that the lawyer was accepted since March to a private psychiatric hospital with several issues of mental health, including bipolar disorder, and closed-circuit television cameras showed no-one was near him when he jumped before the train.[181] The death of both lawyers in such a short time span sparked conspiracy theories, and a tweet by WikiLeaks on 21 August said that an inquest rules it was not suicide, implying that he was assassinated.[182]
The next day, on 22 August, a man scaled the embassy’s walls, but was caught by the embassy’s security.[183]
On 17 October 2016 WikiLeaks announced that a “state party” had severed Assange’s internet connection at the Ecuadorian embassy.[184] The Ecuadorian government stated that it had “temporarily” severed Assange’s internet connection because of WikiLeaks’ release of documents “impacting on the U.S. election campaign”.[185] In an interview published Dec 29, Assange said,”“The internet has been returned”.[186]
UNWGAD ruling
On 5 February 2016, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention decided that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. According to the group, Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation.[187][188]
The UK and Swedish governments rejected the ruling,[189] as did the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Philip Hammond, and the UK and Swedish prosecutors.[190][191] The UK maintained it would arrest Assange should he leave the Ecuadorian embassy.[192] Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the ruling is “not binding on British law”.[193] United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein has said that the ruling is based on binding international law.[194]
2016 US presidential election
During the 2016 presidential election, Assange repeatedly criticised Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, promoted conspiracy theories about Clinton and the Democratic Party, released emails from Clinton campaign staff and the DNC on Wikileaks, expressed only muted criticism of Donald Trump and did not release any content on Wikileaks damaging to the Trump campaign or the Republican Party.
Criticism of Clinton and the Democratic Party
Assange wrote on WikiLeaks in February 2016: “I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgement and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. … she certainly should not become president of the United States.”[195] On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention (RNC), during an interview by Amy Goodman, Assange was quoted saying, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea? … Personally, I would prefer neither.”[196][197][198] WikiLeaks editor, Sarah Harrison, has stated that the site is not choosing which damaging publications to release, rather releasing information that is available to them.[199]
During the presidential election, Wikileaks popularised conspiracies about the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, such as tweeting an article which suggested Clinton campaign chairperson John Podesta engaged in satanic rituals, which was later revealed to be false[200][201][202] implying that the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed,[203] stating that Hillary Clinton wanted to drone strike Assange,[204] promoting conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health,[205][206][207] and promoting a conspiracy theory from a Donald Trump-related internet community tying the Clinton campaign to child kidnapper Laura Silsby.[208] According to Harvard political scientist Matthew Baum and College of the Canyons political scientist Phil Gussin, Wikileaks strategically released e-mails related to the Clinton campaign whenever Clinton’s lead expanded in the polls.[209]
On 26 August, Assange spoke to Fox News and said that Clinton was causing “hysteria about Russia”. This statement was repeated in the Russian media outlet RT.[210]
Leaks
On 4 July 2016, during the Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted information and content of emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of State[211] as originally released by the State Department in February 2016, based on a FOIA request.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chairwoman following WikiLeaks releases suggesting collusion against Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) seemingly presenting ways to undercut Bernie Sanders and showing apparent favouritism towards Clinton, leading to the resignation of party chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.[212][213] The New York Times reported that “Assange accused Mrs. Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him…” and that he had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention.[214] In an interview with Robert Peston of ITV News Assange suggested that he saw Hillary Clinton as a personal foe.[196][215]
On 4 October 2016, in a WikiLeaks anniversary meeting in Berlin with Assange teleconferencing from his refuge in the Ecuador embassy in London, reporters spoke of a supposed promise to reveal further information against Hillary Clinton which would bring her candidacy down, calling this information “The October Surprise”.[207]
On October 7, Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing over 2000 emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.[216] The emails, ranging from 2007-2016, revealed excerpts of Clinton’s paid Goldman Sachs speech in 2013.[217] In the emails, she explained her relationship to Wall Street and how she had previously represented the community: “even though I represented [people in finance] and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. So when I raised early warnings about subprime mortgages and called for regulating derivatives and over complex financial products, I didn’t get some big arguments, because people sort of said, no, that makes sense.”[218][219]
On 9 October 2016, during the second presidential debate, Clinton accused Russian hackers for the leak of information to WikiLeaks, presumably working under the orders of Vladimir Putin: “… But you know, let’s talk about what’s really going on. Because our intelligence community said the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking, on American accounts to influence our election … And believe me, they’re not doing it to get me elected. They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump”.[220] While the two candidates faced off during the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton criticised the Russian government for giving private information to WikiLeaks: “…this is such an unprecedented situation, we’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election.” [221]
On the topic of WikiLeaks, host Chris Wallace directly asked Donald Trump if he would denounce Russia’s actions if the country actually interfered with the American election. Although Trump did not condemn Putin, he did express that he would not condone hacking “By Russia or anybody else.”[222][221] On the eve of the general presidential election, Assange wrote a press release addressing the criticism around publishing Clinton material on WikiLeaks.”We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish.” He explains that the website received pertinent information related to the DNC Leaks and Clinton political campaign, but never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson’s campaign, and therefore could not publish what they did not have.[223]
Allegations of anti-Semitism
In 2011, the British magazine Private Eye reported that one of Assange’s associates in Russia was a Holocaust denier. The magazine further reported that the WikiLeaks founder said that Jewish journalists in Britain were trying to discredit his organisation.[224][225] Assange responded that the magazine’s allegations of anti-semitism are false and stem from “distortions” on the part of its editor, Ian Hislop. On 1 March 2011, Assange released a statement in which he said, “Hislop has distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase. In particular, ‘Jewish conspiracy’ is completely false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting. We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world.”[226][227]
In July 2016, Wikileaks suggested that the parentheses bracketing, or (((echoes))) — a tool used by neo-Nazis to identify Jews on Twitter, appropriated by Jews across the Twittersphere — had been used as a way for “establishment climbers” to identify one another.[228][229] Haaretz reported that this led to anti-Semitism allegations towards Assange.[224] Assange denied making claims of a Jewish conspiracy, stating, “‘Jewish conspiracy’ is completely false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting”.[224]
Writings
Assange is an advocate of information transparency and market libertarianism.[230] He has written a few short pieces, including “State and terrorist conspiracies” (2006),[231] “Conspiracy as governance” (2006),[232]“The hidden curse of Thomas Paine” (2008),[233] “What’s new about WikiLeaks?” (2011),[234] and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012).[50] He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus’s Underground (1997),[27]and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song “Multi_Viral” (2013).
Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of the World Tomorrow episode eight two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann.
Assange’s book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, was published by OR Books on 18 September 2014.[235] The book recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice-president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.[236][237][238]
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer.[14][26][239] The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child.[15]Assange was Daniel’s primary carer for much of his childhood.[240] In an open letter to French President François Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his/her mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment due to his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.[241]
Honours and awards
- 2008, Economist New Media Award[242]
- 2009, Amnesty International UK Media Awards[243]
- 2010, TIME Person of the Year, Reader’s Choice[244]
- 2010, Sam Adams Award[245]
- 2011, Free Dacia Award[246]
- 2011, Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal[247]
- 2011, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism[248]
- 2011, Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism[249]
- 2011, Voltaire Award for Free Speech[250]
- 2012, Big Brother Awards Hero of Privacy[251]
- 2013, Global Exchange Human Rights Award, People’s Choice[252]
- 2013, Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts[253]
- 2013, New York Festivals World’s Best TV & Films Silver World Medal[254]
- 2014, Union of Journalists in Kazakhstan Top Prize[255]
Work
Bibliography
- Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
- Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (2012) OR Books
- When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014) OR Books[256]
- The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire (2015) Verso Books[257]
Filmography
- Producer
- Collateral Murder (2010)
- The World Tomorrow (2012) (host)
- Mediastan (2013)
- The Engineer (2013)[258]
- As himself
- The War You Don’t See (2010)
- The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode “At Long Last Leave“)
- Citizenfour (2014)
- The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
- Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)[259]
- Asylum (2016)[260]
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Pronk Pops Show 472: May 27, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 471: May 26, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 470: May 22, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 469: May 21, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 468: May 20, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 467: May 19, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 466: May 18, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 465: May 15, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 464; May 14, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 463; May 13, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 462: May 8, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 461: May 7, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 460; May 6, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 459: May 4, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 458: May 1, 2015
Story 1: President Trump — The Political Elitist Establishment (PEEs) of The Democratic and Republican Parties and Mainstream Media Worst Nightmare — American People Want Immigration Law Enforcement and Ending Birthright Citizenship aka Anchor Babies — American People Including Trump Democrats, Trump Republicans and Trump Independents Will Elect Trump — PEES are Panicing — Videos
Amendment XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
…
Section 5.
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
14th Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment addresses many aspects of citizenship and the rights of citizens. The most commonly used — and frequently litigated — phrase in the amendment is “equal protection of the laws“, which figures prominently in a wide variety of landmark cases, including Brown v. Board of Education (racial discrimination), Roe v. Wade (reproductive rights), Bush v. Gore (election recounts), Reed v. Reed (gender discrimination), and University of California v. Bakke (racial quotas in education). See more…
Article I
Article I describes the design of the legislative branch of US Government — the Congress. Important ideas include the separation of powers between branches of government (checks and balances), the election of Senators and Representatives, the process by which laws are made, and the powers that Congress has. See more…
Section 8.
Clause 4
…To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
Bill O’Reilly Donald Trump Battle over Immigration Plan and 14th Amendment
Trump tackles problem of what he calls ‘anchor babies’
Donald Trump: I’ll keep saying “anchor baby” even if it’s not PC.
Trump’s Right: Anchor Babies Are Big Business
Trump on Immigration — the Good, the Bad & the Ugly
Should U.S. Citizenship Be Guaranteed at Birth?
Mark Levin Weighs In On 14th Amendment & Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan – Hannity
How the 14th Amendment Undermines Citizenship
Why Donald Trump rallies are becoming massive events
Donald Trump Still the Top Republican in New Poll –
Donald Trump Leads GOP Field By Wide Margin In New Fox Poll – Rove On Trump Immigration – Lou Dobbs
Donald Trump Leading In Latest GOP Poll As Candidates Descend On Iowa State Fair – Bulls & Bears
Donald Trump Still leading In Polls And GOP Not Happy
Donald Trump is trolling the Republican Party
Donald Trump: ‘Leaders of the party take me seriously…
Ann Coulter defends Donald Trump from “idiot” Rick Perry
Watch Ann Coulter Destroy an Anti-Trump Chump on Hannity
Rush Limbaugh: Donald Trump “is showing everybody how it’s done
FULL: Donald Trump Gives Rousing Speech in Hampton, NH (8-14-15)
Are Trump’s immigration views out of the mainstream?
Could Birthright Citizenship Be Undone?
Touting constitutional amendments on the campaign trail is more likely to rally voters than to produce changes in the law.
MATT FORD AUG 19, 2015
The Fourteenth Amendment, for its part, is clear on the scope of birthright citizenship: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Redefining the Citizenship Clause, either by legislation or by constitutional amendment, seems all but impossible today. “The only thing a politician could promise that would be harder would be, say, promising to build a giant, hundreds-of-miles-long wall and getting another country to pay for it,” The Washington Post’s Philip Bump drily notes. But like the proposed Great Wall of Mexico, feasibility may not be the point. It’s all about getting votes.
Donald Trump’s Immigration Principles Would’ve Barred His Own Grandfather
The last constitutional amendment used to resolve a political controversy was the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, which reversed prohibition. Constitutional amendments since then have reformed either presidential election and succession procedures (the Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fifth) or elections themselves (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty- sixth). The Twenty-seventh and most-recently ratified amendment, which addresses congressional pay, lay dormant for over 200 years before a college student revived interest in it.
Indeed, since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, no major social or political movement has seriously attempted to amend the Constitution to accomplish its goals. The anti-abortion movement, for example, generally focuses on limiting abortion’s scope through legislation and on supporting presidential candidates who will appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Opponents of capital punishment universally argue that the death penalty already violates the Eighth Amendment; advocating a separate constitutional amendment would undermine that argument. The gay-rights movement made the case that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause protects their rights, a position adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges in June.
But recent history shows the electoral value of proposing constitutional amendments. In 2003, the gay-rights movement scored two major legal victories: the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws nationwide in Lawrence v. Texas and Massachusetts’s highest court legalized same-sex marriage under that state’s constitution. For conservatives at the time, the Supreme Court’s trajectory seemed obvious—and so did the solution. As the 2004 election loomed, the conservative National Review forecasted that the spectacle of same-sex marriage would hurt Democratic candidate John Kerry. At the time, the American electorate was still broadly hostile to marriage equality.
To hammer home this connection, the National Review pointed to the Federal Marriage Amendment. First proposed in 2002, the FMA would constitutionally define marriage as existing only between a man and a woman. A path to ratification would be arduous, the magazine argued, but the struggle would bring its own benefits. “Constitutional amendments must be approved by a two-thirds vote of Congress and three quarters of the state legislatures,” it eagerly noted. “That means every political candidate, from the state level up, will be asked to take a stand.” In essence, the 2004 election would become “a national referendum on gay marriage.”
If John Kerry is elected, gay marriage will surely be nationalized by the end of his term. A Bush defeat would take the wind out of the sails of the campaign for the Federal Marriage Amendment, assure liberal judges that no serious consequences will arise from nationalization, and bring more Goodridge-style liberals onto the courts. A Bush victory, on the other hand, would keep the FMA alive, would help signal the courts that they’ve gone too far, and would stop the proliferation of activist judges on our courts.
Evangelicals took credit when Bush trounced Kerry that fall, although some dispute their impact. But their perceived role went unrewarded when Congress didn’t pass the FMA after Bush’s reelection; Democrats then retook both houses in 2006, forestalling future attempts. As public acceptance of same-sex couples grew in the Obama years, most GOP candidates abandoned the amendment. (Texas senator and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said last year that he still supports it, however.)
Republicans aren’t alone in using constitutional amendments to stir up their base, although they do it particularly effectively. After Al Gore was defeated in the 2000 presidential election despite winning the popular vote, some congressional Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Those efforts lost steam after Barack Obama trounced John McCain and Mitt Romney with significant margins of electoral votes. A similar movement emerged after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FECthat struck down limits on corporate and union election spending. Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposed one of several amendments in 2011; Hillary Clinton said she would only appoint justices who pledged to overturn the ruling.
Could birthright citizenship still be undone? There’s a strain of legal thought that argues that a constitutional amendment wouldn’t be necessary. In 1985, Yale law professors Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith proposed that congressional legislation could clarify that the right does not extend to the children of undocumented immigrants. It’s not a completely heretical idea—Richard Posner, a prominent federal judge in the Seventh Circuit, endorsed it in 2010—but it’s not a mainstream one, either. When Congress considered similar legislation in 1995, Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger told members that a bill “that would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to certain classes of alien parents is unconstitutional on its face.” Although a constitutional amendment to achieve the same goal could not itself be unconstitutional, Dellinger also argued it “would flatly contradict the Nation’s constitutional history and constitutional traditions.”
Anchor baby
Anchor baby is a pejorative[1][2] term for a child born in the United States to a foreign national mother who was not lawfully admitted for permanent residence.[3]There is a popular misconception that the child’s U.S. citizenship status (acquired by jus soli) legally helps the child’s parents and siblings to quickly reclassify their visa status (or lack thereof) and to place them on a fast pathway to acquire lawful permanent residence and eventually United States citizenship.[4][5] This is a myth.[6] Current U.S. federal law prevents anyone under the age of 21 from being able to petition for their non-citizen parent to be lawfully admitted into the United States for permanent residence. So at best, the child’s family would need to wait for 21 years before being able to use their child’s US citizenship to modify their immigration status.[7]
The term is generally used as a derogatory reference to the supposed role of the child, who automatically qualifies as an American citizen and can later act as a sponsor for other family members.[8][9] The term is also often used in the context of the debate over illegal immigration to the United States to refer to children of illegal immigrants, but may be used for the child of any immigrant.[10] A similar term, “passport baby”, has been used in Canada for children born through so-called “maternity” or “birth tourism“.[11][12]
History and usage
A related term, “anchor child”, referring in this case to “very young immigrants who will later sponsor immigration for family members who are still abroad”, was used in reference to Vietnameseboat people from about 1987.[10][13][14][15][16] “Anchor baby” appeared in print in 1996, but remained relatively obscure until 2006, when it found new prominence amid the increased focus on the immigration debate in the United States.[8][10][16][17] Lexicographer Grant Barrett nominated the term for theAmerican Dialect Society‘s 2006 Word of the Year.[16]
It is generally considered pejorative. In 2011 the American Heritage Dictionary added an entry for the term in the dictionary’s new edition, which did not indicate that the term was disparaging. Following a critical blog piece by Mary Giovagnoli, the director of the Immigration Policy Center, a pro-immigration research group in Washington, the dictionary updated its online definition to indicate that the term is “offensive”, similar to its entries on ethnic slurs.[17][18] As of 2012, the definition reads:
n. Offensive Used as a disparaging term for a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially when the child’s birthplace is thought to have been chosen in order to improve the mother’s or other relatives’ chances of securing eventual citizenship.
The decision to revise the definition led to some criticism from illegal immigration opponents.[19]Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates tighter restrictions on immigration,[20] argues that defining the term as offensive is inaccurate and is done for purposes of political rhetoric; according to Krikorian, “‘[An anchor baby] is a child born to an illegal immigrant,'” and the revision of the definition to state that the term is offensive was done to make a political statement.[19] According to Fox News:
Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based organization that seeks to end illegal immigration, said the revised definition panders to a small but vocal group of critics who are “manipulating the political, cultural and now linguistic landscape” of the United States. “Publishing word definitions to fit politically correct molds surrenders the language to drive an agenda,” Dane told FoxNews.com. “This dictionary becomes a textbook for the open borders lobby.”[19]
Professor of Law at the University of Florida, Pedro A. Malavet,[21] said that the dictionary’s reclassification of the term “anchor baby” to a term that is considered offensive was “right”.[22]
According to the Double-Tongued Dictionary, written by American lexicographerGrant Barrett, the term “anchor baby” means “a child born of an immigrant in the United States, said to be a device by which a family can find legal foothold in the US, since those children are automatically allowed to choose United States citizenship.” In response to a reader comment, Barrett claimed that the term is used to refer to a child of any immigrant, not just children of illegal immigrants.[23]
In 2012, UtahAttorney GeneralMark Shurtleff, in a meeting designed to promote the 2010 Utah Compact declaration as a model for a federal government approach to immigration, said that “The use of the word ‘anchor baby’ when we’re talking about a child of God is offensive.”[24]
Maternity tourism industry
As of 2015, Los Angeles is considered the center of the maternity tourism industry; authorities in the city there closed 14 maternity tourism “hotels” in 2013.[25] The industry is difficult to close down since it is perfectly legal for a pregnant woman to travel to the U.S.[25]
On March 3, 2015 Federal Agents in Los Angeles conducted a series of raids on 3 “multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses” expected to produce the “biggest federal criminal case ever against the booming ‘anchor baby’ industry”, according to the Wall Street Journal.[25][26]
Immigration status
The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution indicates that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship for nearly all individuals born in the country, regardless of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status.[27][28][29][30][31][32] However, some, like Edward Erler argue that since the Wong Kim Ark case dealt with someone whose parents were in the United States legally, there is no valid basis under the 14th Amendment for the practice of granting citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants: “Even if the logic is that Wong Kim Ark became a citizen by birth with the permission of the United States when it admitted his parents to the country, no such permission has been given to those who enter illegally.”[33]
Statistics show that a significant, and rising, number of illegal aliens are having children in the United States, but there is mixed evidence that acquiring citizenship for the parents is their goal.[28] According to PolitFact of the St. Petersburg Times, the immigration benefits of having a child born in the United States are limited. Citizen children cannot sponsor parents for entry into the country until they are 21 years of age, and if the parent had ever been in the country illegally, they would have to show they had left and not returned for at least ten years; however, pregnant and nursing mothers could receive free food vouchers through the federalWIC (Women, Infants and Children) program and enroll the children in Medicaid.[28]
Parents of citizen children who have been in the country for ten years or more can also apply for relief from deportation, though only 4,000 persons a year can receive relief status; as such, according to PolitFact, having a child in order to gain citizenship for the parents is “an extremely long-term, and uncertain, process.”[28]Approximately 88,000 legal-resident parents of US citizen children were deported in the 2000s, most for minor criminal convictions.[34]
Incidence
Some critics of illegal immigration claim the United States’ “birthright citizenship” is an incentive for illegal immigration, and that immigrants come to the country to give birth specifically so that their child will be an American citizen. The majority of children of illegal immigrants in the United States are citizens, and the number has risen. According to a Pew Hispanic Center report, an estimated 73% of children of illegal immigrants were citizens in 2008, up from 63% in 2003. A total of 3.8 million unauthorized immigrants had at least one child who is an American citizen. In investigating a claim by U.S. SenatorLindsey Graham, PolitiFact found mixed evidence to support the idea that citizenship was the motivating factor.[28] PolitiFact concludes that “[t]he data suggests that the motivator for illegal immigrants is the search for work and a better economic standing over the long term, not quickie citizenship for U.S.-born babies.”[28]
There has been a growing trend, especially amongst Chinese visitors to the United States, to make use of “Birth Hotels” to secure US citizenship for their child and leave open the possibility of future immigration by the parents to the United States.[35][36] The U.S. government estimates that there were 7,462 births to foreign residents in 2008[37] while the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 40,000 births are born to “birth tourists” annually.[37] Pregnant women typically spend around $20,000 to stay in the facilities during their final months of pregnancy and an additional month to recuperate and await their new baby’s U.S. passport.[38] In some cases, the birth of a Canadian[39] or American[40] child to mainland Chinese parents is a means to circumvent the one-child policy in China;[41]Hong Kong[42]and the Northern Mariana Islands[43] were also popular destinations before more restrictive local regulation impeded traffic. Some prospective mothers misrepresent their intentions of coming to the United States, a violation of U.S. immigration law; however, it is not illegal for a woman to come to the U.S. to give birth.[44]
Controversies
On August 17, 2006, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn used the term “anchor baby” in reference to Saul Arellano, in a column critical of his mother, who had been given sanctuary at a Chicago church after evading a deportation order.[45] After receiving two complaints, the next day Eric Zorn stated in his defense in his Chicago Tribune blog that the term had appeared in newspaper stories since 1997, “usually softened by quotations as in my column”, and stated that he regretted having used the term in his column and promised not to use it again in the future.
On August 23, 2007, the San Diego, California-area North County Times came under criticism from one of its former columnists, Raoul Lowery Contreras, in a column titled “‘Anchor babies’ is hate speech”, for allowing the term “anchor baby” to be printed in letters and opinion pieces.[46]
On April 15, 2014, during a televised immigration debate between San Antonio, Texas Mayor Julian Castro and Texas Senator Dan Patrick, Dan Patrick came under criticism when he used the term “anchor babies” while describing his own view of some of the immigration issues the state of Texas faced.[47][48]
On November 14, 2014, CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo used the term on New Day: “Breaking overnight, President Obama has a plan to overhaul the immigration system on his own — an executive order on anchor babies entitling millions to stay in the U.S. Republicans say this would be war. Is the word “shutdown” actually being used already?” Chris Cuomo later apologized for the comment, ” OK, now, do they? Because let’s think through what this issue actually is on the other side of it. This issue is called the “anchor babies.” I used that term this morning. I shouldn’t have. It’s ugly and it’s offensive to what it is. What it really goes to is the root of the most destructive part of our current immigration policy, you’re splitting up families. They come here, here illegally, they have a baby, and the family gets split up. Maybe the kid stays. We don’t have a workable formation. This goes to the heart of the Latino vote because it shows a real lack of sympathy. You have to come up with some kind of fix. So why avoid this one? Don’t you have to take it on?”[49]
See also
Birthright citizenship in the United States
Birthright citizenship in the United States refers to a person’s acquisition of United States citizenship by virtue of the circumstances of his or her birth. It contrasts with citizenship acquired in other ways, for example by naturalization later in life. Birthright citizenship may be conferred by jus soli or jus sanguinis. UnderUnited States law, U.S. citizenship is automatically granted to any person born within and subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. This includes the territories of Puerto Rico, the Marianas (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands) and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and also applies to children born elsewhere in the world to U.S. citizens (with certain exceptions).[1][2]
The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Current U.S. law
Citizenship in the United States is a matter of federal law, governed by the United States constitution.
Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution on July 9, 1868, the citizenship of persons born in the United States has been controlled by itsCitizenship Clause, which states:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”[3]
Statute, by birth within U.S.
As of 2011, United States Federal law (8 U.S.C. § 1401) defines who is a United States citizen from birth. The following are among those listed there as persons who shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:
- “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” or
- “a person born in the United States to a member of an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian, or other aboriginal tribe” (see Indian Citizenship Act of 1924).
- “a person of unknown parentage found in the United States while under the age of five years, until shown, prior to his attaining the age of twenty-one years, not to have been born in the United States”
- “a person born in an outlying possession of the United States of parents one of whom is a citizen of the United States who has been physically present in the United States or one of its outlying possessions for a continuous period of one year at any time prior to the birth of such person”
U.S. territories
The 14th amendment applies to incorporated territories, so people born in incorporated territories of the U.S. (currently, only the Palmyra Atoll) are automatically U.S. citizens at birth.[4]
There are special provisions governing children born in some current and former U.S. territories or possessions, including Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, theVirgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. There are also special considerations for those born in Alaska and Hawaii before those territories acquired statehood. For example, 8 U.S.C. § 1402 states that “[a]ll persons born in Puerto Rico on or after January 13, 1941, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are citizens of the United States at birth”.[5]
Outlying possessions
According to 8 U.S.C. § 1408 persons born (or found, and of unknown parentage, under the age of 5) in an outlying possession of the U.S. (which is defined by 8 U.S.C. § 1101 as American Samoa and Swains Island) are U.S. nationals but not citizens, unless otherwise provided in section 1401. The U.S. State Department publication titled Acquisition of U.S. Nationality in U.S. Territories and Possessions explains the complexities of this topic.[6]
Statute, by parentage
Under certain circumstances, children may acquire U.S. citizenship from their parents. From 1940 until 1978, a child born abroad who acquired U.S. citizenship at birth but had only one U.S. citizen parent had to fulfill a “retention requirement” of residing, or being physically present, in the United States or its outlying possessions for a certain number of years before reaching a specified age. Otherwise the child would not retain the U.S. citizenship (hence the name “retention requirement”). The retention requirement was changed several times, eliminated in 1978, and subsequently eliminated with retroactive effect in 1994.[7]
Children born overseas to married parents
The following conditions affect children born outside the U.S. and its outlying possessions to married parents (special conditions affect children born out of wedlock: see below):[8]
- If both parents are U.S. citizens, the child is a citizen if either of the parents has ever had a residence in the U.S. prior to the child’s birth
- If one parent is a U.S. citizen and the other parent is a U.S. national, the child is a citizen if the U.S. citizen parent has lived in the U.S. for a continuous period of at least one year prior to the child’s birth
- If one parent is a U.S. citizen and the other parent is not, the child is a citizen if
Children born overseas out of wedlock
There is an asymmetry in the way citizenship status of children born overseas to unmarried parents, only one of whom is a U.S. citizen, is handled.
Title 8 U.S.C. § 1409 paragraph (c) provides that children born abroad after December 24, 1952 to unmarried American mothers are U.S. citizens, as long as the mother has lived in the U.S. for a continuous period of at least one year at any time prior to the birth.
8 U.S.C. § 1409 paragraph (a) provides that children born to American fathers unmarried to the children’s non-American mothers are considered U.S. citizens only if the father meets the “physical presence” conditions described above, and the father takes several actions:
- Unless deceased, has agreed to provide financial support to the child until he reaches 18,
- Establish paternity by clear and convincing evidence and, while the person is under the age of 18 years
- the person is legitimated under the law of the person’s residence or domicile,
- the father acknowledges paternity of the person in writing under oath, or
- the paternity of the person is established by adjudication of a competent court.
Because of this rule, unusual cases have arisen whereby children have been fathered by American men overseas from non-American women, brought back to the United States as babies without the mother, raised by the American father in the United States, and later held to be deportable as non-citizens in their 20s.[11][12]The final element has taken an especially significant importance in these circumstances, as once the child has reached 18, the father is forever unable to establish paternity to deem his child a citizen.[13]
This distinction between unwed American fathers and American mothers was constructed and reaffirmed by Congress out of concern that a flood of illegitimate Korean and Vietnamese children would later claim American citizenship as a result of their parentage by American servicemen overseas fighting wars in their countries.[14] In many cases, American servicemen passing through in wartime may not have even learned they had fathered a child.[14] In 2001, the Supreme Court, by 5–4 majority in Nguyen v. INS, first established the constitutionality of this gender distinction.[11][12]
Eligibility for office of President
According to the Constitution of the United States only natural born citizens are eligible to serve as President of the United States or as Vice President. The text of the Constitution does not define what is meant by natural born: in particular it does not specify whether there is any distinction to be made between persons whose citizenship is based on jus sanguinis (parentage) and those whose citizenship is based on jus soli (birthplace). As a result, controversies have arisen over the eligibility of a number of candidates for the office.
Legal history
Throughout much of the history of the United States, the fundamental legal principle governing citizenship has been that birth within the territorial limits of the United States confers United States citizenship, although slaves and the children of slave mothers, under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, were excluded.[15] The United States did not grant citizenship after the American Civil War to all former slaves until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was subsequently confirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment. American Indian tribal members are not covered specifically by the constitutional guarantee. Those living in tribes on reservations were generally not considered citizens until passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, although by that time nearly two-thirds of American Indians were already citizens.
English common law
Birthright citizenship, as with much United States law, has its roots in English common law.[16] Calvin’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 377 (1608),[18] was particularly important as it established that, under English common law, “a person’s status was vested at birth, and based upon place of birth—a person born within the king’s dominion owed allegiance to the sovereign, and in turn, was entitled to the king’s protection.”[19] This same principle was adopted by the newly formed United States, as stated by Supreme Court Justice Noah Haynes Swayne: “All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country as well as of England…since as before the Revolution.[20]” United States v. Rhodes, 27 Fed. Cas. 785 (1866). However, Calvin’s Case is distinguishable, as a Scotsman was granted title to English land as his King and England’s King (James) were one and the same.[21] Calvin was not born in England.[21] Moreover, inCalvin’s Case, Lord Coke cited examples in which the native-born children of parents, either invading the country or who were enemies of the country, were not natural-born subjects because the birth lacked allegiance and obedience to the sovereign.[22]
Federal law
The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. Since that time, laws concerning immigration and naturalization in the United States have undergone a number of revisions.[23]
Dred Scott v. Sanford
Justice Roger B. Taney in the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 U.S. (How. 19) 393 (1857) held that African Americans, whether slave or free, had never been and could never become citizens of the United States, as they were excluded by the Constitution. The political scientist Stuart Streichler writes that Taney’s decision was based on “a skewed reading of history.”.[24] Justice Benjamin R. Curtis in his dissent showed that under the Articles of Confederation, free blacks had already been considered citizens in five states and carried that citizenship forward when the Constitution was ratified.[25]
He wrote:
The first section of the second article of the Constitution uses the language “a natural-born citizen.” It thus assumes that citizenship may be acquired by birth. Undoubtedly, this language of the Constitution was used in reference to that principle of public law, well understood in the history of this country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, which referred Citizenship to the place of birth. At the Declaration of Independence, and ever since, the received general doctrine has been, in conformity with the common law, that free persons born within either of the colonies, were the subjects of the King; that by the Declaration of independence, and the consequent acquisition of sovereignty by the several States, all such persons ceased to be subjects, and became citizens of the several States … The Constitution has left to the States the determination what person, born within their respective limits, shall acquire by birth citizenship of the United States…[26]
1862 opinion of the Attorney General of the United States
In 1862, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase sent a question to Attorney General Edward Bates asking whether or not “colored men” can be citizens of the United States. Attorney General Bates responded on November 29, 1862, with a 27-page opinion concluding, “I conclude that the free man of color, mentioned in your letter, if born in the United States, is a citizen of the United States, …[27][italics in original]” In the course of that opinion, Bates commented at some length on the nature of citizenship, and wrote,
… our constitution, in speaking of natural born citizens, uses no affirmative language to make them such, but only recognizes and reaffirms the universal principle, common to all nations, and as old as political society, that the people born in a country do constitute the nation, and, as individuals, are natural members of the body politic.
If this be a true principle, and I do not doubt it, it follows that every person born in a country is, at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen; and who would deny it must take upon himself the burden of proving some great disfranchisement strong enough to override the natural born right as recognized by the Constitution in terms the most simple and comprehensive, and without any reference to race or color, or any other accidental circumstance.[28][italics in original]
Civil Rights Act of 1866
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared: “…all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”[29] (“Indians not taxed” referred to tribal members living on reservations.)
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution[edit]
Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution on July 9, 1868, citizenship of persons born in the United States has been controlled by itsCitizenship Clause, which states:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”[3]
Expatriation Act of 1868
This act, a companion piece to the Fourteenth Amendment, was approved on 27 July 1868.[30]
The Expatriation Act of 1868 led President Ulysses S. Grant to write in 1873, that the United States had “led the way in the overthrow of the feudal doctrine of perpetual allegiance”.[31]
Dr. Edward J. Erler of California State University, San Bernardino, and Dr. Brook Thomas of the University of California at Irvine, have argued that this Act was an explicit rejection of birth-right citizenship as the ground for American citizenship,[32] basing that argument on the debate that surrounded the passage of this act.[33][34]
1873 opinion of the Attorney General
In 1873, The Attorney General of the United States published the following legal opinion concerning the Fourteenth Amendment:
“The word ‘jurisdiction’ must be understood to mean absolute and complete jurisdiction, such as the United States had over its citizens before the adoption of this amendment. Aliens, among whom are persons born here and naturalized abroad, dwelling or being in this country, are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States only to a limited extent. Political and military rights and duties do not pertain to them.”[35]
Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924[36] provided “That all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States”. This same provision (slightly reworded) is contained in present-day law as section 301(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (8 USC 1401(b)).
U.S. Supreme Court case law
Sailor’s Snug Harbor
In the case of Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbor, 28 U.S. 99 (1830) the Supreme Court decided the question of the disposition of the estate of a man born in New York State in 1776. The Supreme Court resolved complicated questions of how citizenship had been derived during the Revolutionary War. The court found that the jus soli is so consistent in American Law as to automatically grant American citizenship to children born in New York City between the Declaration of Independence and the Landing at Kip’s Bay in 1776, but not to children born in New York during the British occupation that followed.[37]
“Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country while the parents are resident there under the protection of the government and owing a temporary allegiance thereto are subjects by birth..”
The Slaughter-House Cases
In the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) — a civil rights case not dealing specifically with birthright citizenship — a majority of the Supreme Courtmentioned in passing that “the phrase ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States”.[38]
Elk v. Wilkins
In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884), the Supreme Court denied the birthright citizenship claim of an American Indian. The court ruled that being born in the territory of the United States is not sufficient for citizenship; those who wish to claim citizenship by birth must be born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The court’s majority held that the children of Native Americans were
“no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.”[39]
Thus, Native Americans who voluntarily quit their tribes would not automatically become U.S. citizens.[40] Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship by Congress half a century later in the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which rendered the Elk decision obsolete.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
In the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a person who
- is born in the United States
- of parents who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of a foreign power
- whose parents have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States
- whose parents are there carrying on business and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity of the foreign power to which they are subject
becomes, at the time of his birth, a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Canadians transferred to U.S. hospitals
Since the majority of Canadians live in the relatively thin strip of land close to the long border with the United States, Canadians in need of urgent medical care are occasionally transferred to nearby American medical centers. In some circumstances, Canadian mothers facing high-risk births have given birth in Americanhospitals. Such children are American citizens by birthright.[41]
In these circumstances, Canadian laws are similar to those of the United States. Babies born in Canada of American parents are also Canadian citizens by birthright.[42]
In both of these situations, the birthright citizenship is passed on to their children, born decades later. In some cases, births in American hospital (sometimes called “border babies“) have resulted in persons who lived for much of their lives in Canada, but not knowing that they had never had official Canadian citizenship. This group of people is sometimes called Lost Canadians.[43]
Another problem arises where a Canadian child, born to Canadian parents in a US border hospital, is treated as a dual citizen and added to the United States tax base on this basis despite having never lived, worked nor studied in that nation. While Canadian income tax is only payable by those who reside or earn income in Canada, the US Internal Revenue Service taxes its citizens worldwide. Campobello Island is particularly problematic as, while legally part of New Brunswick, the only year-round fixed link off the island leads not to Canada but to Lubec, Maine — leading to many Canadians whose families have lived on Campobello for generations not being able to claim to be born in Canada.[44]
Current controversy
Original meaning
During the original debate over the 14th Amendment Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan—the sponsor of the Citizenship Clause—described the clause as having the same content, despite different wording, as the earlier Civil Rights Act of 1866, namely, that it excludes American Indians who maintain their tribal ties and “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”[45] Others also agreed that the children of ambassadors and foreign ministers were to be excluded.[46][47] However, concerning the children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens (and not foreign diplomats), three senators, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lyman Trumbull, the author of the Civil Rights Act, as well asPresident Andrew Johnson, asserted that both the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment would confer citizenship on them at birth, and no senator offered a contrary opinion.[48][49][50]
Most of the debate on this section of the Amendment centered on whether the wording in the Civil Rights Act or Howard’s proposal more effectively excluded Aboriginal Americans on reservations and in U.S. territories from citizenship. Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin asserted that all Native Americans are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, so that the phrase “Indians not taxed” would be preferable,[51] but Trumbull and Howard disputed this, arguing that the U.S. government did not have full jurisdiction over Native American tribes, which govern themselves and make treaties with the United States.[52][53]
Edward Erler argues that since the Wong Kim Ark case dealt with someone whose parents were in the United States legally, there is no valid basis under the 14th Amendment for the practice of granting citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants: “Even if the logic is that Wong Kim Ark became a citizen by birth with the permission of the United States when it admitted his parents to the country, no such permission has been given to those who enter illegally.”[54] Angelo Ancheta, by contrast, criticizes the “consent-based theory of citizenship”, saying that “The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure citizenship for ‘all persons’ born in the United States, particularly in response to ambiguities in legal status that attached to being the descendants of an outsider class, namely slaves.”[55]
Modern dispute
In the late 1990s opposition arose over the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship on a jus soli basis[56] as fears grew in some circles that the existing law encouraged parents-to-be to come to the United States to have children in order to improve the parents’ chances of attaining legal residency themselves.[57][58] Some media correspondents[59][60] and public leaders, including former congressman Virgil Goode, have controversially dubbed this the “anchor baby” situation,[61][62] and politicians have proposed legislation on this basis that might alter how birthright citizenship is awarded.[63]
The Pew Hispanic Center determined that according to an analysis of Census Bureau data about 8 percent of children born in the United States in 2008 — about 340,000 — were offspring of illegal immigrants. In total, about four million American-born children of illegal immigrant parents resided in this country in 2009, along with about 1.1 million foreign-born children of illegal immigrant parents.[64] The Center for Immigration Studies—a think tank which favors stricter controls on immigration—claims that between 300,000 and 400,000 children are born each year to illegal immigrants in the U.S.[65][66]
Bills have been introduced from time to time in Congress which have sought to declare American-born children of foreign nationals not to be “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”, and thus not entitled to citizenship via the 14th Amendment, unless at least one parent was an American citizen or a lawfulpermanent resident.
Both Democrats and Republicans have introduced legislation aimed at narrowing the application of the Citizenship Clause. In 1993, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation that would limit birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens and legally resident aliens, and similar bills have been introduced by other legislators in every Congress since.[66] For example, U.S. Representative Nathan Deal, a Republican from the State of Georgia, introduced the “Citizenship Reform Act of 2005” (H.R. 698) in the 109th Congress,[67] the “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2007” (H.R. 1940)[68] in the 110th Congress, and the “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009” (H.R. 1868)[69] in the 111th Congress. However, neither these nor any similar bill has ever been passed by Congress.
Some legislators, unsure whether such Acts of Congress would survive court challenges, have proposed that the Citizenship Clause be changed through aconstitutional amendment.[70] Senate Joint Resolution 6, introduced on January 16, 2009 in the 111th Congress, proposes such an amendment;[71] however, neither this, nor any other proposed amendment, has yet been approved by Congress for ratification by the states.
The most recent judge to weigh in on the issue as to whether a constitutional amendment would be necessary to change the policy is Judge Richard Posner who remarked in a 2003 case that “Congress would not be flouting the Constitution if it amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to put an end to the nonsense.” He explained, “A constitutional amendment may be required to change the rule whereby birth in this country automatically confers U.S. citizenship, but I doubt it.” Posner also wrote, that automatic birthright citizenship is a policy that “Congress should rethink” and that the United States “should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children.”[72]
Professor Edward J. Erler of the California State University has argued that “Congress began to pass legislation offering citizenship to Indians on a tribe by tribe basis. Finally, in 1923, there was a universal offer to all tribes. Any Indian who consented could become an American citizen. This citizenship was based on reciprocal consent: an offer on the part of the U.S. and acceptance on the part of an individual. Thus Congress used its legislative powers under the Fourteenth Amendment to determine who was within the jurisdiction of the U.S. It could make a similar determination today, based on this legislative precedent, that children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens are not subject to American jurisdiction. A constitutional amendment is no more required now than it was in 1923.”[73] Some others have disagreed with this interpretation, contending that while Congress can define territories (such as an Indian Reservation) as US jurisdiction, it has no power to define people as under US jurisdiction aside from where they were born.[74]
Republicans in the State of Arizona have indicated an intention to introduce state legislation which would seek to deny American citizenship to Arizona-born children of illegal immigrant parents by prohibiting the issuance of a birth certificate unless at least one parent has legal status.[75][76] However, critics argue that the child or parents could immediately sue the state for discrimination and that the federal courts would immediately force the state to issue the birth certificate.[74]
A report by an organization called the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in 2012 asserted that revoking birthright citizenship would be bureaucratic, expensive, would result in a national ID card, and would not slow illegal immigration.[74] Under current law, if a citizen parent gives birth in a foreign country, they must prove their own citizenship in order for their baby to have citizenship. The NFAP estimated this to cost $600 per baby, not including legal fees. The report alleged that if birthright citizenship were eliminated, every baby in the United States would be subject to this cost. For the four million babies born each year in the U.S., this would total $24 billion per year. In addition, currently the US government does not keep any record of births, instead using the records of individual states to issue passports. The report alleged that the end of birthright citizenship would leave the states unable to verify whether a new baby should be granted citizenship, requiring the federal government instead to issue birth certificates, and likely a national ID card. Finally, the report claimed that eliminating birthright citizenship would not reduce illegal immigration. The report said that immigrants come to the United States for economic reasons, and illegal immigrants cannot use a citizen child to be granted citizenship. The report also said that all proposals to end birthright citizenship, aside from a constitutional amendment, would be unconstitutional and quickly be overturned in court.[74] The Center for Immigration Studies disputed these conclusions, asserting in its own 2012 report that the NFAP’s claims were “unsupported”, that a bureaucratic overhaul would not be necessary, and that ending automatic birthright citizenship would not cost parents money, result in a caste system, or create stateless children.[77]
See also
- Birther
- Birthright citizenship in other jurisdictions
- Birth tourism
- Citizenship in the United States
- Natural-born citizen
- United States nationality law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_the_United_States
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Special Report Breit Baier On The Saudi National Deportation 212 3-b for Terrorist Activities — Videos
Bret Baier – TheBlazeTV – The Glenn Beck Radio Program – 2013.04.24
Bob Trent – TheBlazeTV – The Glenn Beck Program – 2013.04.24
The Glenn Beck Program Saudi Suspect/Boston Bombing Air Date: 4-24-13.
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Saudi National and Boston Student Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi Is Being Deported
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Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment
The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, (TIDE) is the U.S. Government’s central database on known or suspected international terrorists, and contains highly classified information provided by members of the Intelligence Community such as CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and many others.
There are about 745,000 names in TIDE.[1] In 2008, more than 27,000 names were removed from the list when it was determined they no longer met the criteria for inclusion. According to the FBI, international terrorists include those persons who carry out terrorist activities under foreign direction. For this purpose, they may include U.S. persons (U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents).[2] The Terrorist Identities Group (TIG), located in NCTC’s Information Sharing & Knowledge Development Directorate (ISKD), is responsible for building and maintaining TIDE.[3]
From the classified TIDE database, an unclassified, but sensitive, extract is provided to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which compiles the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
This database, in turn, is used to compile various watch lists such as the TSA’s No Fly List, State Department’s Consular Lookout and Support System, Homeland Security’s Interagency Border Inspection System, and FBI’s NCIC (National Crime Information Center) for state and local law enforcement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Identities_Datamart_Environment
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It’s starting to happen. Attorney General Eric Holder says lethal drone attacks without due process on Americans while on American soil, are hypothetically legal. A surprising Republican Senator is standing against it. Do Republicans and Democrats make exceptions for their own “teams?” Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
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Summary of Spending Outlays, Tax Receipts, Deficits (-) or Surpluses, 2005-2013(in millions of dollars) |
||||||
Fiscal Year |
Spending Outlays |
Tax Receipts |
-Deficit / Surplus |
President (Party) |
House Control |
Senate Control |
2005 |
2,471,957 |
2,153,611 |
-318,346 |
Bush (R) | Republicans | Democrats |
2006 |
2,655,050 |
2,406,859 |
-248,181 |
Bush (R) | Republicans | Democrats |
2007 |
2,728,686 |
2,567,985 |
-150,701 |
Bush (R) | Democrats | Democrats |
2008 |
2,982,544 |
2,523,991 |
-458,553 |
Bush (R) | Democrats | Democrats |
2009 |
3,517,677 |
2,104,989 |
-1,412,588 |
Obama (D) | Democrats | Democrats |
2010 |
3,456,213 |
2,162,724 |
-1,293,489 |
Obama (D) | Democrats | Democrats |
2011 |
3,603,061 |
2,303,466 |
-1,299,595 |
Obama (D) | Republicans | Democrats |
2012 est. |
3,795,547 |
2,468,599 |
-1,326,948 |
Obama (D) | Republicans | Democrats |
2013 est. |
3,803,364 |
2,901,956 |
-901,408 |
Obama (D) | Republicans |
Democrats |
Source: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2013, Historical Tables, Table 1.1http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf |
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Progressives have taken over the Republican Party as they did the Democratic Party.
Romney, Gingrich, Santorium and Perry are big government progressives that try to fool the American people into believing that they are conservatives that support limited government.
All four “talk” conservative while they “walk” progressive and expand the size and scope of Federal and state governments.
What is even worse is all four are also neoconservatives that want the United States to police the world and empire or nation build abroad–spread progressivism over the entire world–with an interventionist aggressive foreign policy!
The neoconservatives want war with Iran and Syria.
Progressives want government intervention at home and abroad.
Do not let the so-called “conservative” talk radio show hosts fool you that they favor one of the Republican progressive candidates as their “conservative” choice.
None of the Republican progressive candidates are either conservative libertarians or conservative traditionalists, they are big government Republican neoconservative progressives.
The Republican progressives want to make the American people dependent upon war.
The Democratic progressives want to make the American people dependent upon welfare.
Both political parties are running budget deficits exceeding $1 trillion and will never run balanced budgets or pay off the national debt.
The American people pay the bills in taxes, inflation, damaged bodies and their lives.
Only the American people can stop Republican and Democratic progressives.
Keep in mind that most of the media are either Democratic or Republican progressives including many of the so-called “conservative” talk radio show hosts.
Many of these talk radio show hosts are neoconservative progressives that support Romney, Gingrich, Santorium and Perry.
These talk radio show hosts fear that the American people are starting to wake up to the fact that all four Repubican presidential candidates that they support and praise are neoconservative progressives.
This includes Bennett, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Levin, Medved and Ingraham.
The American people are reading and discovering that Republican candidates are big government neoconservative progressives and not conservative libertarians or conservative traditionalist.
Do not be fooled by either the Republican neoconservative progressive candidates nor your favorite talk radio show hosts.
I have been in the conservative movement since Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964.
I am a classical liberal or what in America is called a libertarian.
I identify my political philosophy as classical liberal or traditional libertarian or simply conservative.
SA@TAC – The Great Neo-Con: Libertarianism Isn’t ‘Conservative’
I have read and reread the works of Smith, Burke, Bastiat, Say, Menger, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, Rand, Rothbard, Nock, Nash, Kirk and many others.
For many years I voted the lesser of two evil progressives by voting for Republican candidates that I knew were neither libertarians nor traditional conservatives.
Only one President, Ronald Reagan, was a conservative libertarian, but he was a disappointment for he failed to reduce the size and scope of the Federal government.
I am no longer a Republican, but an independent.
Life is too short and I have wised up.
I will no longer vote for the lesser of two evils for the simple reason it is still evil.
The only Republican presidential candidate that is clearly not a progressive but a classical liberal or traditional libertarian is Ron Paul.
The only Republican presidential candidate that wants to decrease the size and scope of the Federal government, balance the Federal budget, bring the troops home and eliminate the progressive income tax, IRS, Federal Reserve System, and many government departments, agencies and programs is Ron Paul.
The only way to stop the progressives of both political parties is to vote for candidates that truly believe in the Constitution and limited government.
This will take decades to accomplish and another political party with the financial backing of the American people.
Progressives control both political parties, media, professions, colleges, unions, and most large businesses.
It will not be easy, but it can be done over time.
Do not be fooled by the neoconservatives who are actually right-wing progressives who left the Democratic Party.
Now and in the future I will not support or vote for any Republican or Democratic candidate for any public office that is a progressive or neoconservative.
As they say in Texas, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Republican Neoconservative Progressive Candidates
Party Establishment Choice: Mitt Romney
Rush Limbaugh Admits Mitt Romney is a GOP Disaster if nominated
John McCain endorses Mitt Romney for President
Mitt Romney gets Endorsement from George H.W. Bush (12-22-11)
The story of two men trapped in one body
Mitt Romney: I’m Progressive
Mitt Romney: “R” Does Not Stand for Republican
The Real Romney?
Mitt Romney on the Contract with America
See Mitt Romney Promote an Individual Mandate
Romney anti-Gingrich ad “Baggage”
Smiling (Restore Our Future)
Newt Gingrich Vs Mitt Romney 2012 Ad
SA@TAC – No Excuse: Mitt Romney’s Case for American Empire
Party Base Choice: Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich on abortion in 1991: “Relax and accept it”
Newt Gingrich: We should respect pro-abortion Republicans
Newt Gingrich: There’s plenty of room for pro-abortion Republicans
Newt Gingrich Admits He’s a Progressive in the Theodore Roosevelt Tradition
Newt Gingrich is a Progressive Rockefeller Republican
Newt Gingrich: I’m a Wilsonian
Newt Gingrich: I supported Rockefeller over Goldwater
Newt Gingrich FDR was Greatest President of the 20th Century
Newt Gingrich: Progressives took over both parties
Sean Hannity endorses Newt Gingrich
The REAL Newt Gingrich
SA@TAC – Newt Gingrich is Not a Conservative
Newt Gingrich is Toast
Neoconservative Religious Right Choice: Rick Santorium
SA@TAC – Who’s a Republican?
SA@TAC – Compassionate Conservative Rick Santorum
Santorum: pursuit of happiness harms America
Rick Santorum says he’s “proud” of his earmarks
Rick Santorum – Unelectable
Senator Rick Santoum A Big Washington Insider & Spender
Senator Rick Santorum Admits Voting for Ear Marks and The Bridge To Nowhere
Rick Santorum On Earmarks “Congress Appropriates Money! That’s What Congress Is Supposed To Do”
Rick Santorum hearts turncoat Arlen Specter
Rick Santorum on gay marriage
Rick Santorum Opposes Gay Marriage and Adoption
Santorum: pursuit of happiness harms America
Ron Paul Destroys Rick Santorum On Iran! – Iowa Republian Presidential Debate
cnn – rick santorum: barack obama’s foreign policy is appeasement
Dennis Kucinich on Santorum’s attacks on Ron Paul
Rand Paul Exposes Rick Santorum: He’s a Reckless & Trigger-Happy Big Spender
SA@TheDC – Conservatism for What?
SA@TAC – Constitutional Conservatives?
Republican Party Conservative Libertarian Choice: Ron Paul
Ron Paul – The Founders gave Government one Role: Protecting Liberty
Ron Paul Ad – Life
Thanksgiving Family Forum – Ron Paul Highlights
SA@TheDC – Conservatism for What?
Ron Paul on Iowa Caucus, Spending Cuts, Opponents
Ron Paul Ad – Plan
Ron Paul: The Economy
Ron Paul: Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney Are “Consistently Inconsistent”
Veteran Ron Paul Calls Newt Gingrich A Chicken Hawk Draft Dodger!
“Blessed are the Peacemakers:” Ron Paul’s Christian Foreign Policy
Congressman Ron Paul, MD – We’ve Been NeoConned
Ron Paul on Just War, War Breaking Families
SA@TAC – Ronald Reagan: Isolationist
SA@TheDC – “I Like Ron Paul Except on Foreign Policy”
Ron Paul – “The one who can beat Obama”
Breaking Bob Grant Dead At 84 –Talk Radio Path Maker — Rest In Peace — Videos
Posted on January 2, 2014. Filed under: American History, Blogroll, Business, College, Communications, Computers, Culture, Economics, Education, Employment, Entertainment, Fiscal Policy, Heroes, history, Language, Law, liberty, Life, Links, Literacy, media, People, Philosophy, Photos, Politics, Press, Psychology, Radio, Radio, Rants, Raves, Regulations, Reviews, Security, Talk Radio, Unemployment, Video, Wealth, Wisdom | Tags: Addiction, Bob Grant, Breaking News, Commentary, Communicator, Conservative, Conservative Talk Radio, Culture, Entertainment, Influence, Mark Levin, Mass Communicator, Opinions, Radio, Rest In Peace, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Talk Radio |
‘Bob Grant has died. Born March 14, 1929 he was an American radio host whose real name was Robert Ciro Gigante. Grant, who lived in Tom’s River, N.J., died on New Year’s Eve.He was a veteran of radio broadcasting in New York City, and Grant is considered to be a pioneer of the “conservative” and “confrontational” talk radio format who influenced many people after him.He began working in radio in the 1940s at WBBM in Chicago as a radio personality and television talk show host at KNX in Los Angeles, and as an actor. During the Korean War he served in the Naval Reserve. He became sports director at KABC in Los Angeles, where after some substitute appearances he inherited the talk show of Joe Pyne in 1964 and began to build a huge following. Grant hosted three shows on KABC in 1964 titled, “Open Line,” “Night Line,” and “Sunday Line.” Many people were avid listeners of his show and it helped the popularity of the format.He was the father of conservative talkradio.He was known to say: “Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to another hour of the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions in the belief that as American citizens you have the right to hear, and to be heard.”
Bob Grant on “Hannity & Colmes” discusses retiring 1.16.2006 (Sean Hannity)
Bob Grant Celebrates 40 Years on New York Radio
Bob Grant Interview: Media Coverage of Obama “Absolutely Sca
Bob Grant’s Emotional Monologue 9.23.2012
Bob Grant 40th Anniversary in New York City Show on WABC 9.20.2010
Howard Stern calls into Bob Grant’s last WOR show 1.13.2006
Bob Grant in “the History of Talk Radio” documentary 1996
Rush Limbaugh Roasts Bob Grant – September 15, 1991
Bob Grant makes fun of Michael Savage hyping his books
Bob Grant on filling in for Michael Savage
The Best of Bob Grant-2000’s Pt 1
The Best of Bob Grant 2007-2012 Pt 2
Bob Grant on CBS News discussing Rush Limbaugh’s prescription drug addiction 10.11.2003
Bob Grant Show-Day after September 11, 2001 (9.12.2001)
Bob Grant attacks ‘the Tea Party’ 1.6.2013
Bob Grant on taking over Joe Pyne’s Show the night of the Kennedy Assassination
WABC 77 New York – Bob Grant GAG (Get At Grant) Hour- Dec 1988
Bob Grant, Father of Conservative Talk Radio, Dead at 84
Veteran New York radio personality Bob Grant — widely credited with inventing the conservative talk-radio format — has died at the age of 84.
Grant, who lived in Tom’s River, N.J., passed away on New Year’s Eve, according to the Branchburg Funeral Home, which is handling the arrangements.
Grant began his career as a controversial talk show host in 1970, when he joined WMCA in New York and quickly bucked the liberal slant of many of the other hosts.
The gravel-voiced talker’s in-your-face opinions and regular telling off of callers often got him in hot water.
He opened his show stating: “Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to another hour of the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions in the belief that as American citizens you have the right to hear, and to be heard.”
He slammed uncouth politicians as “craven bootlickers.” He once said of the Second Coming of Jesus: “He’s not coming back. Look, I don’t believe he’s coming back. I think that’s a myth and I say it.”
Grant routinely signed off with the chant “Get Gaddafi,” in a taunt at Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi.
In 1973, he called Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal of New York a coward for cancelling an appearance on his show, leading Rosenthal to complain to the Federal Communications Commission.
The case went to the U.S. Court of Appeals and was ultimately thrown out after a judge decided Grant had offered Rosenthal equal time.
Grant left WMCA in 1977 to work for WOR, but was fired for controversial remarks he made in 1979.
“A caller phoned in to the show saying he was upset with a woman who was blaming the police for what happened to her sons. [This woman] was the public relations director or community relations director of WCBS newsradio,” he said.
“I stupidly asked the caller if he knew how she got that job. The caller said he didn’t know and I promptly and arrogantly said, “I will tell you how. She passed the gynecological and pigmentation test — that’s how! … WOR was forced to fire me even though I had given the radio giant the biggest overnight ratings they ever had.”
Grant returned to WMCA in 1980, where his producer was Steve Malzberg, now host of “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
“I had grown up listening to Bob Grant so this was a dream come true,” Malzberg said.
“He was an extremely nice guy, a wonderful and funny pioneer who overcame many attempts to turn him into a villain. He persevered and did what he love until the very end.”
In 1984, Grant was hired by WABC, which had switched formats from Top 40 music to all-talk. With its strong signal, Grant was heard by millions of listener in the Northeastern United States.
The station began billing him as “America’s most listened to talk radio personality.”
But Grant got in trouble with WABC in 1996 when he made a mean-spirited crack about Commerce Secretary Ron Brown whose plane had crashed in Croatia.
“My hunch is that [Brown] is the one survivor. I just have that hunch. Maybe it’s because, at heart, I’m a pessimist,” Grant said. Brown, along with 34 others on board, had been killed.
Grant then moved back to WOR and his show became nationally syndicated. His WOR run ended in 2006.
In 2007, he returned to WABC where he stayed for a year and a half, before leaving to host an Internet radio show titled “Straight Ahead!” He again returned to WABC in Sept. 2009, to host a Sunday talk show, retiring last summer because of poor health.
Grant’s family asks that memorial contributions may be made in his memory can be made to the Young America’s Foundation, 110 Elden Street, Herndon, VA 20170 or the New York Police and Fire Widows’ & Childrens’ Benefit Fund, Inc., 767 Fifth Ave., 2614C, New York, NY 10153.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Grant-radio-obituary-conservative/2014/01/02/id/544851
Bob Grant
Bob Grant (March 14, 1929 – December 31, 2013) was an American radio host whose real name was Robert Ciro Gigante. A veteran of broadcasting in New York City, Grant is considered a pioneer of the “conservative” and “confrontational” talk radio format.[2][3][4]
Career[edit]
Early work[edit]
Grant graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in journalism. He began working in radio in the 1940s at the news department at WBBM (AM) in Chicago, as a radio personality and television talk show host at KNX (AM) in Los Angeles, and as an actor. During the Korean War, he served in the Naval Reserve. [5] He later became sports director at KABC (AM) in Los Angeles, where after some substitute appearances he inherited the talk show of early controversialist Joe Pyne in 1964 and began to build a following. Grant hosted three shows on KABC (AM) in 1964 titled, “Open Line,” “Night Line,” and “Sunday Line.”[6]
Move to New York City (WMCA: 1970–1977)[edit]
Grant came to New York in 1970, where he hosted a talk show on WMCA as the “house conservative”, distinctively out of fashion with both the times and with some countercultural WMCA personalities, including Alex Bennett. His offbeat but combative style (along with Fairness Doctrine requirements of the era) won him seven years on WMCA, with a growing and loyal audience. His sign-off for many years was “Get Gaddafi”, which meant remove Muammar al-Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya, whose anti-Israeli stance was in opposition to Grant’s pro-Israeli feelings.
On March 8, 1973, Grant had scheduled New York Rep. Benjamin S. Rosenthal, who was leading a boycott of meat. Grant later learned that Rosenthal would not appear on his show, and in a discussion with a caller, Grant referred to Rosenthal as a “coward.” Rosenthal then filed a complaint with the F.C.C., and the issue went all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Straus Communications v. Federal Communications Commission, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, January 16, 1976, Wright, J.[7][8][9] The appeals court ultimately ruled in favor of WMCA and Grant, due to the fact that Grant offered the congressman an invitation to appear on his show, granting Rosenthal equal time.[9]
One of Grant’s most memorable regular callers was Ms. Trivia, who aired her “Beef of the Week”, a series of seemingly trivial complaints. Ms. Trivia was Grant’s guest at a Halloween Festival dinner held at Lauritano’s Restaurant in theBronx, where a young Ms. Trivia, not long out of her teens, revealed herself for the first time to a startled radio audience, many who had expected and assumed, based upon her articulation and intonation, that she would be an elderly, prudish woman. Instead, a statuesque and fashionable Ms. Trivia, wearing an elaborate Victorian costume, was the surprise guest seated next to Grant at the dais table along with several political figures from New York. The following day the majority of calls to the show were for the purpose of obtaining information about the mysterious Mm. Trivia, with Grant in his typical manner finally in exasperation hanging up on the callers, shouting, “THIS IS NOT Mm. TRIVIA’S SHOW!”[10]
A linguistic “hoax” trivia question originated on Grant’s WMCA show in 1975, “There are three words in the English language that end in -gry. Two of them are angry and hungry. What is the third?”[11] While at WMCA, Grant attracted attention in 1975 from a commentary he recorded titled, “How Long Will You Stand Aside.”[12] Grant also released an LP record in 1977 titled, “Let’s Be Heard,” which was a recording of a speech Grant gave before a synagogue in New York. Grant left WMCA in 1977.
WOR AND WWDB[edit]
In 1979, radio host Barry Farber, fought with WMCA station manager Ellen Straus to rehire Grant. Farber broadcast during the 4-7 P.M. weekday timeslot on WMCA. When asked by Straus at a meeting if Farber was willing to give up his airtime for Grant, Farber replied, “Yes he can have my time. I’d rather he have my time than no time at all.”[13] While away from WMCA, Grant went up the dial to New York’s WOR (AM) for a time, where he was fired for controversial remarks. Grant describes the remarks that got him fired from WOR:
After being fired from WOR, Grant worked at WWDB in Philadelphia. Grant had gone back to WMCA after working at WWDB in Philadelphia. It was reported upon Grant’s departure that his ratings had slipped to number 23 out of 39 shows during the 4-7 P.M. weekday timeslot.[15]
WABC (1984–1996)[edit]
In 1984, WABC (AM) in New York City hired Grant to join their new talk station. He first hosted a show from 9-11pm, before moving to the 3-6pm afternoon time slot. The Bob Grant Show consistently dominated the ratings in the highly competitive afternoon drive time slot in New York City and at one point the radio station aired recorded promos announcing him as “America’s most listened to talk radio personality.” The gravel-voiced Grant reminded listeners during the daily introduction that the “program was unscripted and unrehearsed”.
Grant’s long stay at WABC ended when he was fired for a remark about the April 3, 1996 airplane crash involving Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Grant remarked to caller named, Carl of Oyster Bay (Carl Limbacher, later of NewsMaxfame), “My hunch is that [Brown] is the one survivor. I just have that hunch. Maybe it’s because, at heart, I’m a pessimist.” When Brown was found dead, Grant’s comments were widely criticized, and several weeks later, after a media campaign, his contract was terminated.[16]
Return to WOR (1996–2006)[edit]
After being fired, Grant moved down the dial to WOR to host his show in the same afternoon drive-time slot. Grant’s age began to show while broadcasting at WOR. He was less engaging with the callers, and not as energetic during his broadcasts. For a time, the Bob Grant show went into national syndication, but has been a local only show since 2001. Grant and his WABC replacement Sean Hannity would sometimes throw jabs at each other. Hannity defeated Grant in the ratings from 2001–2006.[17][18]
Grant’s WOR run ended on January 13, 2006. Grant’s ratings were not to blame for his departure, according to the New York Post, which mentioned that the decision was reached because the station’s other shows had niche audiences to garner more advertising dollars.[19] On January 16, 2006, shortly after Grant’s last WOR show, Grant appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show and TV program Hannity & Colmes, where his former competitor paid tribute to him. Having left his options open for “an offer he cannot refuse,” Grant returned to WOR in February 2006, doing one minute “Straight Ahead” commentaries which aired twice daily after news broadcasts until September 2006. On September 8, 2006 Grant again appeared on Hannity’s show to provide a post-retirement update, which led to premature rumors that Grant was returning to WABC.[20][21] Grant then made various isolated radio appearances. He appeared as a guest host on WFNY (now WXRK) on December 7, 2006, and was interviewed by attorney Anthony Macri for Macri’s WOR show on February 24, 2007.
Post-Retirement: Return to WABC and Internet broadcasting[edit]
His guest appearances became more frequent beginning in July 2007. On July 7, 2007, he guest hosted for John R. Gambling, and appeared on Mark Levin’s show (which is networked from WABC) on July 10. Grant, guest hosted for Jerry Agar on July 9, 10, 11 and re-appeared as a fill-in host again for John Gambling on August 20 and 21. Then, on August 22, while appearing on Hannity’s show, he announced that he was returning as a regular host to WABC, in the 8–10 PM slot that at the time was filled by Agar. It would later be revealed, on what was Agar’s final show a few hours later, that he would be starting effective immediately, as Grant took over the final segments of the show. His first full show on ABC since 1996 was on August 23. The story of Grant’s return, as reported by the New York Daily News, had been discovered only a couple of hours before Grant’s official announcement.
Grant’s stint lasted less than a year and a half, until his regular nightly show was pulled by WABC in late November 2008 as part of a programming shuffle stemming from the debut of Curtis Sliwa’s national show, and later Mark Levin’s show expanding to three hours, leaving no room for Grant.[22] Grant did his most recent AM radio work as guest host filling in for Michael Savage on January 21, 2009, Mark Levin on March 23, 2009, and Sean Hannity on July 31, 2009.[22]
During the week of July 6, 2009 Grant began hosting an Internet radio show titled Straight Ahead! which originally ran Monday through Friday from 8 to 9 a.m. Eastern time on UBATV.com.[23] As a webcast, the show differed from Grant’s radio shows, in that the viewer watched Grant as he did his broadcast. The first two months of Straight Ahead! were from inside Grant’s home, and were run with technical assistance from independent filmmaker Ryan O’Leary.[24]New York radio personalities Richard Bey and Jay Diamond were also brought on board to broadcast their own one hour shows. Grant mentioned that he did not get paid to do the UBATV show, but believes that Internet broadcasting is the future.[25][26]
Beginning in September 2009, Grant reduced Straight Ahead! from five days a week down to two (Mondays and Wednesdays from 10 to 11 a.m Eastern time). Grant also moved the show from his home to a professional studio. Due to a low number of callers to the show, Grant usually interviewed only guests for the hour. On January 13, 2010, Grant did his last UBATV show. Grant’s last UBATV show and his last WOR show both fell on the date of January 13.
On September 13, 2009, Grant returned to WABC for a third stint at the station, doing a weekly Sunday talk show from 12pm to 2pm. Grant’s return to AM broadcasting has allowed him to continue interacting with his fan base through greater listenership and participation than his previous internet radio show provided. At the close of his first show, he expressly thanked the management of the station for “inviting him back” and said he looked forward to continuing this joint venture every week for the foreseeable future. Grant issued a statement in October 2012 that his October 7 broadcast would be his last, but then rescinded that message after the show, labeling it a “mistake” and an attempt to grab attention. He then took off a short time for medical work, and when he returned to the air, it was for a shortened 1pm to 2pm Sunday show (current as of November 2012). Bob Grant’s last show on WABC was July 28, 2013 when he retired due to ill health.
Grant also prepares weekly columns for his website, www.BobGrantOnline.com. The site was originally sponsored by NewsMax. As of February 19, 2013, Grant has discontinued his editorials.
Characteristics of Grant’s radio shows[edit]
Grant’s political philosophy generally followed American conservatism, but with some lurches into populism, libertarianism, conspiracy theory, and unorthodoxy (such as being pro-choice and anti-Flag Desecration Amendment). Grant was known for using a number of catchphrases on his show, such as “You’re a fake, a phony, and a fraud!”,[27] “Straight ahead”, “Get off my phone!”, “Anything and everything is grist for our ever-grinding mill”, and his closing line, “Your influence counts. Use it.” His opening line was used as the title of his 1996 book, Let’s Be Heard, a title representing an abbreviated version of his original opener, “And let’s be heard! Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to another hour of the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions in the belief that as American citizens you have the right to hear, and to be heard.” Before his daily monologue, Grant would ask the rhetorical question, “And what’s on your mind today, hmmm?”, and would sometimes call women “chickie-poos”. He occasionally referred to women as “broads” and when certain undesirable, lacklustre or contentious women were combative he referenced them as “several miles of bad road”. One of his favorite put-downs was to refer to someone as a “cacazote”. During the 1988 presidential bid of Michael Dukakis, this term took on a natural segue as Grant often referred to him as “Dukacazote”. He also referred to feckless politicians as “craven bootlickers,” especially when elected officials would cave in to political pressures, and Grant accused them of “folding like a cheap camera”. Due to his Italian heritage, Grant frequently used Italian slang words to describe callers or other individuals calling them gavones (crude or uncultured persons), stunads (stupid, thick, dense) or chiacchorones (persons who talk excessively). During his second stint at WOR, Grant often closed his show with the phrase, “Somebody’s got to say these things, it has to be me!” As a resident of Manalapan, New Jersey in the late-1990s, he considered running for statewide office, but eventually decided against it.
Grant occasionally made on-air reference to an always unheard, ethereal Beatrice-like presence à la Dante’s Paradiso section in The Divine Comedy, “The Lady Josephine”, to whom he constantly paid obeisance. His son, Jeff Grant, a traffic reporter with a different station, would call in occasionally. Grant made frequent references to the REO Diner in Woodbridge, New Jersey, his regular haunt.
For many years Grant closed each show with the exclamation, “Get Khadafy!” This was apparently an allusion to the practice of Roman statesman Cato the Elder ending his speeches with a call for the destruction of Carthage even if he had not been discussing Carthage in the speech. When Khadafy was finally killed in the 2012 Libyan civil war, Grant praised the decision.
When once asked by the caller George the Atheist whether he believed in God, Grant replied, “What if I tell you, George, that sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t?” On his July 21, 2005 broadcast, Grant, a baptized and raised Roman Catholic, unequivocally stated to the same caller his opinion on the Second Coming of Jesus: “He’s not coming back. Look, I don’t believe he’s coming back. I think that’s a myth and I say it. I don’t trumpet it but if a person asks — and you know one thing for sure, I’ve been deadly honest, dead-on honest all the time I’ve been on the air talking to people and they ask me questions or they make a comment that elicits a response, they are going to get an honest response. It may always not be ‘correct’ but it’s honest.” Grant has since stated that he is not an atheist.
Like many hosts in the talk radio format, Grant had his battery of usual callers that added interest to the show. John from Staten Island, Jimmy from Brooklyn, Al from Chappaqua, Greg from Chatham, David from Irvington, Dorothy from Montclair, Hal from North Bergen (at the time an undercover FBI agent provocateur posing as a white supremacist, he later went rogue), patients rights activist Eddie Carbone, and the popular Frank from Queens were some of the frequent callers. A few quasi-fictitious characters (played by Grant) were also employed during the show such as, ‘Julian P. Farquar, Dexter Pogue, Rantz Greeb, Paul “needlenose” Monage, and Lucy Shagnasty.
Over the years, Grant has made a number of statements on his shows that critics have described as racist. For example, he was quoted in the Newsday of June 2, 1992, as saying “Minorities are the Big Apple’s majority, you don’t need the papers to tell you that, walk around and you know it. To me, that’s a bad thing. I’m a white person.” In his book, Grant defended this statement by writing that he did not intend to put down other races, but only intended to express that “no one likes to be in the minority,” and that America can only survive by retaining its “humane, west European culture.” Thus, he supports ending bilingualism and multiculturalism, two policies of which he has been highly critical.
On October 15, 2008, Grant said “Did you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. […] He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now,…these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” The “O” flag to which Grant referred was, in fact, the state flag of Ohio.
Grant distinguished himself from other conservative talk show hosts by calling for Obama to release his long form birth certificate, prior to Obama releasing it.[28]
Although Grant is generally known as being a conservative, he has been a critic of hard-lined conservative advocates in primary races, including the Tea Party movement’s candidates. This has been a frequent debate topic between Grant and his callers over the past few years. During the fall election of 2010, Grant criticized candidates, such as Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle. Grant endorsed Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio on a July 10, 2010 broadcast for the Florida senate primary. On a May 8, 2011 broadcast, Grant informed his audience that he supported the moderate Jon Huntsman, Jr. for the Republican nomination for president, although he would later go on to supportMitt Romney.[29]
Influences and legacy[edit]
Being largely the innovator of his own particular talk radio style, Grant previously worked with the likes of Barry Gray and Joe Pyne. Pyne would often end each broadcast with “Straight Ahead” which is something Grant picked up, leading many to believe that Grant was the first host to frequently use that line.
Over the years, national radio talk personality Howard Stern has made differing remarks on his admiration for Grant as an early influence. Upon Stern’s arrival in New York, he cited Grant as an influence,[30] but as Stern’s stardom rose, Grant became the subject of ridicule on Stern’s show. During Stern’s prime, he denied being influenced by Grant or having respect for him.[31] Stern has also frequently criticized Grant for changing his act to appease management.[31]Grant told Paul D. Colford, author of the 1996 Stern bio, Howard Stern: King of All Media, about being approached at a public appearance by Ben Stern, Howard’s father, with a teenage Howard in tow. Father introduced son to Grant and told him of Howard’s desire to go into radio. “I looked at this big, gawky kid and I said to him, ‘Just be yourself,'” Grant recalled. Stern has denied Grant’s version of the story.[31] Soon after Grant’s firing from WABC, and before his first WOR show, Grant appeared as a call-in guest on Stern’s radio show. In more recent years, Stern began to praise Grant’s legacy,[32] and called in on his last WOR show in 2006.[33]
Glenn Beck now uses the catchphrase “Get off my phone!” as a spinoff of Grant’s earlier call-in talk show style, as do Tom Scharpling and Mark Levin; similarly, Sean Hannity often uses Grant’s phrase “Straight ahead.”
In 2002, industry magazine Talkers ranked Grant as the 16th greatest radio talk show host of all time.[34]
On March 28, 2007 Bob Grant was nominated for induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame.[35]
Radio & Records had planned to issue a Lifetime Achievement Award to Grant during its annual convention in March 2008; however, the award was revoked in January 2008 for “past comments by him that contradict our values and the respect we have for all members of our community.”[36] Several talk radio hosts have spoken out against the decision; Neal Boortz has stated:
Sean Hannity, Opie and Anthony, Comedian Jim Norton, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Lionel and Howard Stern opposed the move as well, with Levin stating “I am disgusted with the mistreatment of Bob Grant. I am fed up with the censors, intimidators, and cowards in this business.”[this quote needs a citation] Don Imus deemed the award unimportant, offered to return awards he had received after treating them to his sledgehammer and block of wood, and called Grant’s comments “stupid”, although he also referred to Grant as a “legendary broadcaster.”[38]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grant_(radio)
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