Do Republicans still have a majority in the House of Representatives, or did I miss something?
I know that to date they haven't used that majority power very frequently or effectively.
They haven't gotten to the bottom of Benghazi.
They haven't arrested Lois Lerner.
They haven't even considered freezing the debt limit, thus rendering Obamacare and lots of other unconstitutional, irresponsible and unsustainable government spending moot.
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Maybe those ideas are just too big for John Boehner.
Here's something deliciously small for him to consider: How about censuring Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., for her prodigiously intemperate and slanderous characterizations of colleagues as "racist."
Recently, she hurled the mindless, reactionary epithet ay Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for making a point that was lost on race hustlers like Barbara Lee when it was first articulated so thoughtfully and courageously by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 – a Democrat, by the way. When Bill O'Reilly called Lee on her slur, she called him a racist, too.
She has famously labeled as racist all those in favor of requiring proper identification to vote.
Last year, following the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict in the killing of Trayvon Martin, she declared it was evidence that "institutional racism is alive and well in America."
In 2013 she called Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a racist.
In 2011 she called a group trying to save black babies from abortion racist.
In 2005, she called Bill Bennett a racist.
Suffice it to say, "racist" is her mantra.
What is she hiding with all this racist talk? An extremist background and political career that is so shocking she should never have been seated in the House of Representatives in the first place.
That's why it's long past time for the House to censure her for conduct unbecoming a member of Congress.
This is what Congress gets when it seats members who have no business being there – people with a history of supporting murderous, totalitarian regimes, ideologies and personalities.
I've been following and reporting on Barbara Lee since she first became a member of the California Assembly. Let me share with you just a little of what I have discovered over the years.
Lee's radicalism dates back to at least the early 1970s when she was a confidential aide to Black Panther Party Minister of Defense Huey Newton. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, Calif., by a member of the rival Black Guerrilla Family.
Barbara Lee is a pal of longtime Communist Party militant Angela Davis. She paid her political dues – first as an aide to Rep. Ron "Red" Dellums and later as a California assemblywoman and state senator.
As I first reported in 1993, Lee served on the national coordinating committee of the "Committees of Correspondence," an organization that splintered from the Communist Party USA in 1991. Davis, the three-time Communist Party candidate for vice president of the United States, served by her side.
But that isn't where her active involvement with Communist organizations begins. Both Lee and Dellums were encouraged to enter politics by Carlton Goodlett, a long-time Communist Party activist, and Maudelle Shirek, a Berkeley councilwoman and Communist Party supporter. Another big supporter of Lee was Yvonne Scarlett-Golden, who, along with Shirek, David and Lee, went on to join the Committees of Correspondence.
Earlier, while working with Dellums, she joined the U.S.-Grenada Friendship Society, a front group supporting the Communist dictatorship of Maurice Bishop, a close ally of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Just months before the U.S. invasion that toppled Bishop in 1983, Lee and Dellums visited the island on official business of the House Armed Services Committee to gauge the military threat posed to the United States by an international airport being built there by Cubans. According to documents captured by U.S. military forces in Grenada, Lee personally presented Bishop's Politburo with a draft of Dellums' report before it was presented to his congressional committee.
What would you call that? In a "less-enlightened" time, we might refer to such an action as treason. But it didn't do anything to slow the political careers of either Lee or her mentor. But there's even more to this horror story. The minutes of a Politburo meeting held in 1982 say Lee personally encouraged the Communist government to make a revision in the report to minimize the military significance of the airport.
Less than a year later, the captured documents reveal, Lee helped coordinate a tour of the West Coast for Ian Jacobs, Grenada's deputy U.N. ambassador, as part of a propaganda offensive "to counterattack President Reagan's verbal attack on Grenada." Once again, Angela Davis was by her side.
President Reagan later ordered an invasion of the island when U.S. medical students were taken hostage by the little police state. When U.S. Marines landed, they were met with armed resistance not from local forces but from Cuban infantry regulars.
Lee's friendly relations with Cuba date back even further. In 1979, while on Dellums' staff, she traveled to Havana to attend a conference of "non-aligned nations," a Cold War euphemism for countries aligned with the Soviet Union. She attended the conference not as an employee of the federal government, which she was, but rather claiming to be a journalist for the left-wing alternative San Francisco paper, the Sun-Reporter – owned by Communist Carlton Goodlett.
Throughout the 1980s, Lee was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, an active front group of the Communist Party USA, directed at the time by the Soviet KGB. She served with Alice Palmer, who would go on to become a mentor to Barack Obama, until he betrayed her to run for her Illinois Senate seat.
In 1997 she attended the Communist Party's Bay Area People's Weekly World Banquet. In 1999 she co-sponsored a fundraiser for the Communist Party newspaper. In 2001 honorees at the Communist Party newspaper's banquet received certificates of congressional recognition from the office of Rep. Lee. Ditto in 2002 and 2004 and 2006.
Lee declined to answer my questions about her Communist connections, but after my original story about her shady activities broke, she threatened to sue me for libel. When her attorney was reminded that truth is still an absolute defense against libel under the First Amendment, the threats ceased.
Paul Ryan: The next time Barbara Lee calls you a racist, don't grovel for an apology. Explain to the world what she is – a totalitarian extremist.
Bill O'Reilly: Next time Barbara Lee calls you a racist, don't call her a pinhead. Explain her history to the world.
People like Barbara Lee are not only a disgrace to the U.S. Congress, they represent a genuine threat to our national security.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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