Visit the Tony Branco Political Cartoon Library

Antonio A.F. (Tony) Branco is a political cartoonist currently published weekly in the Conservative Chronicle a national magazine and frequently at Conservative Daily News.

Somewhere between the Far Side and the right side of every issue, sits Branco at his desk, crafting Comically Incorrect cartoons.

After years of listening to the squeaky wheel of the left (or the worst wheel of the cart, as Benjamin Franklin put it) advance the cause of radical Liberalism, he decided that he would use the power of his bully palette to advance the conservative movement.

Tony’s work has paid off and he has been featured on Fox New Watch and is a nominee for a 2013 Pulitzer Prize and his work is found on many popular political websites.

He can be contacted by e-mail at branco@reagan.com.

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Conservatives, Depressed, Angry and Otherwise by Alan Caruba Online

Visit Caruba Online at Warning Signs

File this under random musings.

From what I can determine as I visit various blogs, forums, and websites intended to be read by conservatives, as a group we are very depressed, very angry, or moderately gleeful over the travails of a certain Mr. B.H. Obama. Or all three.

Obama has been the most unifying force for conservatism since the days of Ronald Reagan; only Reagan did it in a positive, uplifting fashion whereas Obama is seen as evil incarnate; incompetent; arrogant; ignorant of history, science, and economics; a Leftist ideologue; a man whose birth certificate and Social Security number appear to be fraudulent, and who is a liar on a daily basis.

Obama has probably caused more guns and ammunition to be purchased by Americans since the British invaded again in 1812.

Warning Signs Website

The revelations about NSA surveillance have caused a number of liberal activists such as Michael Moore and actor John Cusack to revise their opinion of Obama. The revelations about the IRS reinforced everyone’s fears of about this very scary agency. The questions about Benghazi remain unanswered by as the event fades into the past, there is concern they will disappear entirely.

There is increasing push-back against ObamaCare which is turning out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity and one that will be administered by that most beloved agency, the Internal Revenue Service. This is already a Democratic Party nightmare and one that will impact the 2014 midterm elections. Everything Obama told us about it has turned out to be a lie.

• It is causing people to be laid off or just not hired
• It is driving up insurance rates
• It is filled with hidden taxes

And yet, it is precisely because of the pain it is inflicting that should be a cause of celebration among conservatives. This and future generations will refer back to the “the horror, the horror, the horror” of ObamaCare.

A lot of people are among the unemployed and those numbers have not improved since Obama took office in 2009. Despite the multi-billion dollar “stimulus” and various bailouts the economy is barely showing any improvement.

Obama suffered a political setback in 2010 when the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives. They have, in varying fits and spurts, managed to stall his ambition to “transform” America from the happy, prosperous nation it once was to a pit of despondency rivaled only by the former Soviet Union. He has withdrawn the nation from the leadership it exercised since the end of World War II and weakened our influence in the world.

After the 2012 elections, the Republican Party issued an “autopsy” of what went wrong. Only the GOP was not dead. Essentially it got mugged, but it is also true that lots of white people who might normally vote Republican stayed home. Data from the Center for Immigration Studies found that 4.7 million stayed home, of whom 4.2 million of them lacked a college education.

Conservatives do not want to hear Republicans in Congress talk about amnesty, but it is claimed that Hispanics could become Republicans by virtue of their conservative values. Meanwhile the immigration reform bill becomes more unpopular by the hour. Forty-four amendments were offered the day it was introduced in the Senate.

It is a legislative monstrosity with so many waivers and vague language that it will stop no one from coming here illegally and will deport the many who will head north. If the 1986 amnesty bill was so great, how come we have eleven million illegals? Or probably twice that many.

No conservative wants to let the President raise taxes on anything for any reason. This is, after all, a man who added three trillion dollars to the national debt in just his first term.

ObamaCare is a huge tax and hugely unpopular.

There is increasing alarm over a government that is accessing the phone records of millions of Verizon customers, whose Department of Home Security is stockpiling ammunition against civil unrest, whose IRS is targeting conservative groups, whose EPA favors environmental groups, and whose Department of Justice has targeted journalists for investigation.

In general there is a hard core of thirty percent of voters who have difficulty tying their shoe laces or grasping the meaning of a stop sign. Another twenty percent of liberals give no indication of thinking about the issues in a rational fashion. That leaves a disparate coalition of half the voters and disenchanted former Obama supporters to save us from further decline.

All this liberalism didn’t happen overnight. Starting in 1913, the income tax was introduced, the same year the Federal Reserve was created. This was followed, from the 1930s to the 1960s, by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In the 1960s we got the War on Poverty. If we adopted a Fair Tax, we would not need an IRS. Presumably, if the “entitlement” programs were administered as intended, they would be solvent. And if Santa Claus was real we would all get the presents we want on Christmas.

Rasmussen polling is showing that trends lines are all moving against Obama. On June 5 a poll demonstrated that 56% of likely voters “now consider the federal government a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.” That’s up 10 points since December. Other polling found that 57% want IRS offenders jailed or fired. 68% consider freedom of the press very important, and 42% think Eric Holder should resign.

If history is any guide the scandals afflicting Obama will gain sufficient momentum and mass to crush his messianic dreams and leave him looking a lot like Jimmy Carter. Or worse! The scandals all lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So, if conservatives can be patient while also keeping the pressure on the Democrats and their Dear Leader, we may well be just a year and a few months away from a turnaround in the 2014 midterm elections.

We have a full bench warming up for 2016; Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan and Alan West, to name a few. A number of Democrats in Congress may well decide not to run for office again.

Obama will not be impeached. He will not resign. And, oddly enough, that is good news for conservatives when it comes to the forthcoming elections.

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Employers are not immigration officers by Jeff Jacoby

Workers pick strawberries on a farm outside Burlington, Wash. Many such laborers on US farms are unauthorized immigrants.

IMMIGRATION REFORM is notoriously contentious. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t think employers should be barred from hiring illegal immigrants — and sharply penalized if they do so.

When President Obama last week endorsed what he called the “common-sense, bipartisan” immigration package now before the Senate, he praised it for getting tough on “shady employers” who “knowingly hire undocumented workers.”

The White House website devotes an entire page to workplace enforcement of immigration restrictions. It leads off with the president’s call for “cracking down more forcefully” on companies that employ undocumented aliens, and boasts that his administration has imposed more than $100 million in employer sanctions since January 2009.

Whatever else may polarize Republicans and Democrats, on this issue they march in lockstep.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich favored intensifying the penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Romney drew flak for praising “self-deportation” — inducing undocumented workers to leave by making it impossible for them to find employment. On the Senate floor last Tuesday, Democrat Charles Schumer said essentially the same thing:

“Even if someone is able to get here illegally or overstays their visa, their main goal for being here — working — will be impossible after the bill is passed.… If we eliminate the jobs magnet, we eliminate illegal immigration.”

Even leading pro-immigration advocacy groups, such as ImmigrationWorks USA and America’s Voice, trumpet their support for “crack[ing] down hard” on “bad employers” who hire immigrants without legal work papers. They may have concerns about the details of workplace enforcement — especially the expanded use of E-Verify, the federal government’s electronic database for vetting job applicants.

But like most Americans — 85 percent, according to a recent Gallup Poll — they seem to regard it as in the natural order of things that the government should forbid the hiring of the illegal migrants, and that employers should have to check the residency status of anyone who applies for a job.

I cannot fathom why.

I don’t dispute that Washington has the authority to establish rules for immigrating to the United States, and to proceed against anyone caught violating those rules. But by what logic does that entitle Congress to turn employers into involuntary immigration agents, and to compel them to enforce a federal policy that the government couldn’t enforce?

It would be one thing to call for “cracking down hard” on an employer who hires someone to do work that is in itself illegal, fraudulent, or a threat to public safety. But why should a job applicant’s green-card or visa status — which is a matter between him and US immigration officials — impose obligations on an employer willing to pay him honest wages for honest labor?

If the law can ban a company from hiring a competent and peaceable worker who happens to be in the country without appropriate documents, can it also ban a company from hiring a worker who happens to be bankrupt? Or who has unpaid speeding tickets? Or who was once arrested for smoking marijuana?

The government can levy penalties on Americans who cheat on their tax returns; it can discipline airline passengers who refuse to undergo a security screening at the airport.

Does it follow that every employer, as part of its hiring process, can be required to check with the Internal Revenue Service or the Transportation Security Administration to make sure it doesn’t hire someone with a tax-code infraction or an airport security breach in his past?

Should employers also be prohibited from hiring anyone who has ever been caught violating traffic laws?

Can any legal skeleton in your closet be used by Congress not just to strip you of the right to work, but to punish any employer who hires you?

That was as it should be. Immigration enforcement is the government’s job, not the private sector’s. No employer should be punished because of an employee’s immigration problems. “Workplace enforcement” wasn’t an effective answer to illegal immigration in 1986; there is no reason to think harsher sanctions will prove more effective now. But whether or not such harshness is effective, any free society should find it offensive.

Even if it is the one piece of immigration “reform” that everyone agrees on.There is nothing self-evident about a federal prohibition on hiring illegal immigrants. It is an innovation that dates back only to 1986 and the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Before then, as the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper notes, “employers were free to hire workers based on the skills and willingness they presented, and not their documents.”

Indeed, while federal law before then made “harboring” illegal aliens unlawful, it explicitly exempted employment from the definition of harboring.

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Full-Fledged Surveillance Society – You’re Living It! by Debbie Lewis

Visit the William Lewis Films Website

When journalist Glenn Greenwald broke the news about The National Security Agency’s on-going collection of “information on all telephone calls” in Verizon’s vast network, the United States population exploded with questions.

While Greenwald says he doesn’t know if Verizon is the only telecom under the NSA’s spell, a flip back in time will reveal there are, more than likely, others involved.

Flash back to a December 16, 2005 article in the New York Times in which James Risen and Eric Lichtblau disclosed that the Bush era spy order began the virtual dragnet of customer communications involving AT&T and Verizon, Sprint Nextel and others.  One company that didn’t participate, Qwest, says it was approached about turning over their customer information in February 2001.

Anyone interested can get an overview of our country’s surveillance background by watching a clip from the widely acclaimed documentary, Washington, You’re Fired.

The Bush Era wiretaps were more than illegal though; they were unconstitutional.  Judges Vaughn Walker and Anna Diggs Taylor explained that in different decision about similar cases.

Today’s NSA/Verizon relationship is much like the Bush NSA/Telecom fiasco.

The more interesting part about the Obama and Bush spy programs is it’s not the first time portions of the United States general population have found themselves being surveilled.  The Supreme Court cases Katz v United States and Berger v New York, both from 1967, dealt with invasion of privacy and eavesdropping on telephone conversations.

What should be clear by now is that that this country has become a surveillance society, and it has been as far back as at least the 1960’s.

Something else well established is that the United States government is willing to break the law that governs them, the Constitution, in order to spy on the United States population.

Is it any wonder that people refer to the present conditions of the United States as a 1984 Society?

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What If They Held a Primary and Nobody Came? by Michael Shannon

Read the Michael Shannon Column

The Washington Post finally got its primary and in typical leftist fashion, they approved of the candidate selection method that was both inefficient and cost taxpayers the most.

Earlier this year the Posties criticized Republicans for using the convention method to choose their nominees — even though Lincoln was chosen by a convention and the Constitution was written at one.

The Post complained the 8,000 delegates that attended the Richmond convention were less than one percent of registered Republicans in the Commonwealth. And in fact, the editorial page was in such a snit over the Republican’s choice of a convention the page “did not make endorsements.” (Which explains all the black armbands on the convention floor being worn by former Bolling supporters.)

But an expensive Democrat primary where less than 3 percent of the voters bothered to make it to the polls is considered a triumph of participatory democracy on the Post editorial page. So now Virginia voters face the daunting prospect of a campaign spent listening to a lily–white ticket, composed of three middle–aged males that are obsessed with women’s reproductive organs.

And that’s just the Democrats!

Republicans in their “closed convention” somehow managed to choose the only minority on either statewide ticket, while a majority of Democrat primary voters refused to select either the Indian running for lieutenant governor (the sub–continent kind, not the Lone Ranger kind) or the black running for attorney general.

And talk about your social issue fanatics! Ralph Northam, the Democrat pick for lieutenant governor, ran a commercial before the primary where all he talks about is abortion. Northam declares, “There is no reason that a group of legislators, mostly men, should be telling women what they should and shouldn’t be doing with their bodies.”

Well that’s pretty definitive. But I have to ask: Does Northam’s declaration cover prostitution? Underage sex? Incest? Female–teacher–on–underage–male sex abuse? Flashing? Where, exactly does Northam draw the line?

Northam supporters keep mentioning that “he is the only physician in the VA Senate” as if that gives him special standing. But Northam is one of those doctors who have a loose interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. In Northam’s office you have to be large enough to hand over the co–pay before you are accorded the rights of a human being.

While Republicans Ken Cuccinelli and E. W. Jackson are talking about creating jobs and growing the economy, Northam advocates de–regulating abortion clinics and fighting passage of a bill that would grant “personhood” status to an unborn baby.

Northam’s ‘an abortion in every pot’ platform is particularly relevant when one remembers that the Posties have declared war on Jackson — who happens to be of the black persuasion — for his accurate, completely true remark that Planned Parenthood has been “far more lethal to black lives” than the Ku Klux Klan.

The WaPost responds by analogizing that, “Abortion rates in the United States are higher for African Americans and Hispanics than for other groups. That reflects the fact that those groups tend to have higher rates of unwanted pregnancies. To blame the incidence of abortion on the clinics that provide abortion services is like blaming stores that sell cigarettes for the fact that too many Americans smoke.”

This analogy is only accurate if the government is buying smokes for the underage and poor, while simultaneously discouraging abstinence.

At the victory celebration, Northam came this close to talking about an issue that would attract independents and soft Republicans, before he lapsed into pube–speak, “This state, in order to have business, in order to welcome people, we need to be inclusive. That starts with stopping the attack on women, the assault on the (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) community.”

Northam’s obsession with divisive social issues, instead of pocketbook issues, means that if you’re looking for a job in an abortion mill, Northam’s your man, otherwise it’s time to start listening to the Republicans.

Mark my words, during this election the Republican ticket will be talking about jobs, taxes and transportation, while the Democrats travel the state brandishing the bloody coat hanger and accusing the GOP of concentrating on “divisive social issues.” Psychiatrists call it projection.

Meanwhile the WaPost will be doing it’s best to drive E.W. Jackson out of the race. Right now the focus is on financial problems. Jackson was behind on his taxes and has filed for bankruptcy in the past. He is now current on all his tax bills, which puts him ahead of the 1,289 Treasury Department employees who collectively owe $9.3 million in back taxes.

Jackson also regrets his bankruptcy, “It was painful. It was difficult. It was embarrassing. I don’t like the idea of not paying off debts.” Compare Jackson’s situation to that of Democrat nominee for governor, Terry McAuliffe. He convinced the taxpayers of Mississippi to give his GreenTech company $7 million in “growth and prosperity” tax exemptions and another $8 million in grants, loans and land in return for building a factory, creating jobs and manufacturing “green” cars.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “…GreenTech looks to be a lemon…there is no evidence the company is manufacturing any cars…(it) has yet to begin building its flagship factory in Tunica. GreenTech is the latest proof…the political class is adept at hooking up cronies and investors with taxpayer dollars. But creating jobs? No can do.”

Rather than be tied down by bad publicity and previous commitments, McAuliffe resigned from GreenTech and walked away from all obligations, while Jackson stayed to face his.

But Jackson’s real sin, as far as the Posties are concerned, is that he’s a Tea Party conservative.

Jackson has escaped the Democrat Leftist plantation, once again pointing out the need for the Fugitive Minority Act (co–sponsored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) that would return ideological escapees to the Democrats for re–education and relieve the media of dealing with off–message minorities that do not support amnesty, abortion and alternate lifestyles.

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IRS exempts terror front group over tea party from Barry Sommer

Visit Islam Today in Oregon

At the same time the Internal Revenue Service delayed or denied requests for tax-exempt status from hundreds of conservative non-profit groups, it was quietly restoring the tax-exempt status of an Islamist front group accused of collaborating with terrorists.

Last year, the politicized agency reinstated the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations’ tax-exempt status despite years of delinquent tax filings. CAIR officials had met with officials inside the White House before the decision was made.

Though Democrat-connected CAIR did not officially endorse Obama, many of its staffers helped turn out the Muslim vote for his re-election. CAIR boasted that its own polling showed more than 85 percent of Muslim-Americans voted for Obama.

In 2011, the IRS stripped the group’s national office of its nonprofit status for failure to file annual tax reports as required by federal law.

The move followed requests by then-Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., and other congressional leaders asking the IRS to investigate after the 2009 bestseller “Muslim Mafia” called attention to CAIR’s missing IRS filings and foreign donations.

During the years CAIR failed to disclose its donors to the government, it solicited funds from Libya, Sudan and other terror-sponsoring foreign governments, according to “Muslim Mafia.” CAIR is not registered as a foreign agent.

Read More >>>>>

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The Continuing Collapse of the Global Warming Hoax by Alan Caruba Online

Visit Caruba Online at Warning Signs

While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.

Directed from within the bowels of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.

As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris.

Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.

The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty.

There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur.

In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!

Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences—50,000 members strong—recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.

In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.

Caruba Online at Warning Signs

“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”

“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.” Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.

In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic…

“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.

The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.

The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.

It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.

Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.

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Visit the Tony Branco Political Cartoon Library

Visit the Branco Political Cartoon at Legal Insurrection.com

Visit any of the Popular Websites Listed Below and Enjoy the Political Cartoon Work of Pulitzer Prize Nominee, A.F. (Tony) Branco

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The Washington Post’s new survey tainted by Progressive bias? by Ken LaRive

Read the LaRive Column at the Examiner

A new poll from the Washington Post is said to be showing an amazing trend: Americans value safety over liberty. They state that 56 percent of those polled said that government should monitor everyone’s phone records, and should go to any length to uncover terrorist activity. They also said that the people they polled stated that an investigation into possible terrorist threats should be done, even if personal liberty is abolished.

Only a slight margin, 41 percent, said that broad-based monitoring should not be acceptable, including the telephone call records of millions of Americans.

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Iran’s Meaningless Elections by Alan Caruba Online

Visit Caruba Online at Warning Signs

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, no doubt knows the outcome of Friday’s, June 14 elections. My money is on Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator whose job it has been to talk the other negotiators into a stupor while work toward the creation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program continues.

Meanwhile, Gulf States are rather nervous about word that Iran’s nuclear reactor is said to have cracks in its structure due to a recent earthquake. Chernobyl anyone?

This will be the eleventh presidential election in the history of Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized control of the nation in 1979, forcing the Shah to flee. When he died, Khomeini’s coffin was treated like a piñata by the adoring crowd who jostled to touch it.

It doesn’t matter who wins the predictably rigged elections. Recall that in 2009 the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to eleven days of protests in Tehran that were brutally suppressed. They were shouting “Death to the dictator.” Asked to comment at the time, President Obama said ”It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling—the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

The U.S. would like it known that we are not “meddling” in the Syrian civil war in which an estimated 93,000 have died at this point and 1.5 million have fled. Or that sending a billion dollars to Egypt—whose leaders hate us—plus fighter jets is not meddling, and with the exception of the occasional drone attack, we are to believe that the U.S. is not meddling anywhere in the Middle East…but I digress.

Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security, said it best when he called the elections “meaningless” and reminded us that “The Supreme Leader will still reign supreme.

Like his predecessor, he believes Muslims have a religious duty to wage war against infidels, in particular America, the ‘Great Satan’, and Israel, the closer to home ‘Little Satan.’ Iran’s constitution is quite clear; it calls for jihad ‘against the arrogant in every corner of the globe.’ That would be us.”

May points out that the ability of U.S. diplomats to grasp the simple truth that Iranian elections are a farce is pockmarked with statements by men like Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush, who called Iran a democracy. More recently, both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel have said that Iran has an “elected” government and Hagel added that it was “legitimate.”

The elected representatives to Iran’s parliament have no real power. That remains in the hands of the Supreme Leader.

Kerry is apparently enough of a realist to know that the election’s outcome will have no effect on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “I do not have high expectations that the election is going to change the fundamental calculus of Iran,” said Kerry.

As for the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, the elections are just a charade. A May 3rd report in the International Business Times by Palash Ghosh noted that Khamenei “apparently has a number of surprising side ventures apart from running the Islamic Republic.” An investment firm that he controls reportedly took over the nation’s biggest dealer of German automobiles with tactics reminiscent of the Mafia.

“Khamenei,” wrote Ghosh, “who seeks to propagate an image of austerity and self-denial, reportedly receives substantial payments from Iran’s arms and petroleum industries, while claiming he receives a small salary from the government. Khamenei’s true wealth is estimated to be immense, perhaps in the territory of tens of billions of dollars.”

For the ordinary Iranian citizen and voter, the story is very different. Writing in EuroNews in early June, Shaheen Fatemi asked if the Iranian economy holds any prospect of improvement after eight years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency.

“Falling economic indicators, more poverty and unemployment and the fall in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial—these are just part of the negative economic record…”  Oops, for a moment there I thought he was writing about the U.S.

No doubt a phalanx of analysts, columnists, and others will be commenting on Friday’s elections in Iran, but the only thing you need to keep in mind is that they will change nothing.

Real change will only happen when Iranians once again seize control of their government, but that is not going to be easy given the loyalty of Khamenei’s Republican Guard Corps and the bully-boys in his militia known as the Basij.

Like a cop at the scene of an accident, I am inclined to say, “Move along. Nothing to be seen here.”

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