Tag: larry klayman
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio Sues To Halt Obama’s Action On Immigrants

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio Sues To Halt Obama’s Action On Immigrants

By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., sought on Monday to overturn President Barack Obama’s executive action protecting up to 5 million immigrants without documentation from being deported.

Arpaio and his attorney, Larry Klayman, argued in front of U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington. The suit was filed last month.

In their suit, Klayman and Arpaio contend the administration’s policy change to defer deportation added to the burden of law enforcement, especially in a border state like Arizona. They allege the changes will allow more people to enter the United States where they will commit crimes.

“President Obama and others recite that the immigration system of the United States is broken,” Klayman wrote in a court filing. “It is unmistakable that the only thing that is broken about the nation’s immigration laws is that the defendants are determined to break those laws.”

Klayman is a conservative who has previously alleged that Obama falsely claimed U.S. citizenship, a stand that was untrue. Arpaio has long called for more border enforcement to prevent illegal immigration.

Under the Obama plan, the pool of immigrants who will be protected from deportation would be expanded. The largest added group are parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who have been in the country since Jan. 1, 2010, and they can request employment authorization and deferred deportation.

Federal officials can still prioritize the removal of those who represent a threat to security.

The Justice Department has argued that Arpaio’s theory of added danger is misguided. “This theory is speculative and unsubstantiated,” the Justice Department argued in its court papers.

According to media reports from the courtroom, Howell questioned Arpaio’s claims. The jurist said that programs such as those Obama announced last month have been around since the 1970s, according to Bloomberg News.

The president’s action has also been challenged by a coalition of 17 states led by Texas. A court hearing on that suit is scheduled for Jan. 9 in Brownsville, Texas.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

This Week In Crazy: Affirmative Action For Terrorists, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Affirmative Action For Terrorists, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Steve King

As the situation in Ferguson, Missouri spiraled out of control, Newsmax TV decided to sort out the police shooting and subsequent protests by turning to an expert on race relations: Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

According to Congressman King, racial profiling didn’t play a role in the violence — because everyone in Ferguson is from the same “continental origin.”

“This idea of no racial profiling…I’ve seen the video,” King said. “It looks to me like you don’t need to bother with that particular factor because they all appear to be of a single, you know, of a single origin, I should say, a continental origin might be the way to phrase that.”

You guys, I don’t think he’s talking about North America.

But don’t worry, minorities: King added that he “reject[s] race-based politics, identity politics” (unless someone has cantaloupe calves, in which case all bets are off).

Meanwhile, Reince Priebus would like you to know that his outreach plan is going just fine, thanks for asking.

4. Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck checks in at number four, for predicting (again) that America is about to collapse once and for all — unless we heed his advice.

To underscore the seriousness of the situation, Beck busted out his chalkboard and covered it with a timeline of just about every global crisis since 1999. What caused 9/11, the housing bubble, and the “Nazi European uprising,” you might ask?

Not listening to Glenn Beck, obviously.

“All of these things were insane to say at the time,” Beck said, after scolding Americans for mocking his prophecies. He explained that people are always telling him, “I don’t want to hear any more from you on your predictions, because they tend to come true” [note: nobody has ever said this], but he just can’t stop dropping facts.

“Try being me,” he said. “You think I want to think these things?”

Unfortunately, according to the Prophet Beck, “we’re at the end of the highway. This is it.” Is there any hope for the future?

Yes. All we have to do is give in to the power of love, and “live like Jesus.”

I guess it beats living like Moloch and Baal.

3. Louie Gohmert

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Congress may have left Washington for the summer, but that isn’t stopping Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) from sharing his unique views on the news.

In a Wednesday interview with the Tea Party News Network, Gohmert warned that “undocumented Democrats” are flooding over the border to infect Americans with Ebola.

“This administration doesn’t have the desire, doesn’t have the will to actually stop it. Because they see people coming across as undocumented Democrats,” Gohmert explained. “So they want to keep that surge of people coming in illegally. Even though it includes a big spike in ‘other than Mexicans.’ OTMs, as we call them. It includes a spike in people from countries where terrorism abounds. We have people coming in from countries where Ebola is located.”

“They could be coming in with disease that we simply do not need,” he added. “And that’s not fear mongering, it’s just saying ‘let’s be careful.'”

Because if there’s one person who’s always careful about what he says and does, it’s Louie Gohmert.

Presumably, once the Ebola-ridden terrorists reach America, they’ll take the first available opportunity to have terror babies (who will eventually grow up to be freeloading todders). By Gohmert’s own logic, though, they won’t be Democrats; after all, he already won Hispanics’ hearts and minds by killing immigration reform.

Audio of Gohmert’s comments is available atBuzzfeed.

2. Erik Rush

Screenshot: Youtube

Screenshot: YouTube

The ever-paranoid Erik Rush checks in at number two, for a column suggesting that gay Americans are aligning themselves with ISIS to kill Christians.

Writing in WorldNetDaily, Rush laments the fact that ISIS is targeting Christians in Iraq, and then warns that “in America, we are seeing a different methodology being used to disenfranchise Christians, but rest assured, many of the principals and operatives are the same people.”

The operatives, of course, are the president and his gay buddies.

“It isn’t necessary at this time to belabor the fact Obama has more than a nodding acquaintance with all things gay,” Rush writes — linking to another WorldNetDaily article about the president’s secret gay life — before transitioning to his central argument: “Those on the political left hate Christians.”

“[T]hose true-believing useful idiots on the left – some of them homosexual themselves – share the same big tent with another political special interest and beneficiary of progressives’ largesse: Muslims, those who would just as readily and just as severely persecute homosexuals, women, children and, of course, non-Muslims in America as they are doing in Iraq,” he writes.

“It says a lot that so many liberal Americans have decided to stand with abject animals, men who are capable of the most heinous, disgusting, depraved war crimes imaginable, and against their own countrymen and women who happen to be Christians, and against our ally Israel,” Rush continues.

Personally, I haven’t seen many liberals standing in solidarity with ISIS, but as Rush frequently reminds us, evidence is for liberals.

Rush concluded his column with what he surely considers to be a kill shot: “Finally, addressing the Islamist horde that has promised to raise its flag over the White House: In a sense, it has already been done.”

I guess that’s what we get for electing Malcolm X’s gay, radical Islamist-loving son (probably).

1. Larry Klayman

Screenshot: YouTube

Screenshot: YouTube

This week’s “winner” is the only man with a crazier WorldNetDaily column than Rush: Right-wing legal activist and failed coup leader Larry Klayman.

“Under the Obama administration run by our so-called commander in chief,” Klayman begins, “affirmative action has been expanded to include Muslim terrorists such as Hamas and yet another Afghan terrorist, amidst its security forces, who just killed the American general, Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be murdered since 1970 in the Vietnam War.”

You have my attention.

Klayman goes on to give a long “refresher course” on how President Obama — “the first Muslim president” — actually sympathizes with terrorists over the U.S. military. (Key points include the fact that Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, and has suggested that the U.S. “avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion.”) He then gets to the meat of his argument:

“The situation has reached an intolerable point, and it is time to either impeach Obama or find some other legal means to rid the nation of his treasonous and harmful ways,” Klayman writes.

“Thus, in the world of war against radical Islam, Obama and his comrades, like Kerry and the U.N.’s Ban, have created a new type of affirmative action where Muslim terrorists have more rights than our own military and our country as a whole,” he continues.

Just think of all of the well-qualified Christian terrorists who didn’t get a spot at Guantánamo!

“Obama must now be held legally accountable for his treason, either through impeachment or some other legal means,” Klayman concludes. “The nation finally must be rid of this tyrant, who allows our own best and brightest to be sacrificed at the altar of his Muslim roots and sympathies.”

It’s nice that Klayman has decided to stick to “legal means” to remove Obama from office this time. But if he wants to go outside the law, I can think of dozens of Americans who are ready for action.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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This Week In Crazy: Malaysia Airlines Crash Just A Liberal Media Distraction, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Malaysia Airlines Crash Just A Liberal Media Distraction, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Larry Klayman

larry klayman

Most Republicans were excited by the news that the GOP would be holding its 2016 convention in Cleveland, Ohio, as they hope that it could help their party win the state’s 18 critical electoral votes. But right-wing activist Larry Klayman knows better.

Over the weekend, Klayman took a break from trying to overthrow the federal government to brand both the city and the GOP as “losers.”

Writing in — where else? — WorldNetDaily, Klayman gave five reasons:

  • Cleveland is “perhaps the most leftist major city in the United States,” so it won’t help Republicans win Ohio.
  • “[D]owntown Cleveland, where the convention will be held, has at most three decent eateries,” and even the best neighborhood is so dangerous that “the number of street people and beggars approximates the number of white- or blue-collar workers who frequent and live in the area.”
  • Cleveland is the third-fattest city in the United States, so naturally “the mood of the populace is depressing.”
  • During the summer, “Gnat-like disgusting creatures swarm the area” (he’s talking about flies, not the political operatives who will flock to the convention).
  • The city is so corrupt that the GOP will lose its moral high ground to attack “Obama and his comrades.”

“[F]or a political party that has lost the last two presidential elections to an incompetent and dishonest ‘Mullah in Chief,’ the future under any scenario does not bode well given its choice for the national convention, unless its new constituency is liberal fat people who have given up on life and enjoy seeing themselves as victims,” Klayman concludes. “Perhaps it is appropriate, as the GOP has metaphorically become fat, having fed at the trough of a dis-served American people that have few electoral choices to try to restore our beloved nation to the greatness of our Founding Fathers.”

It seems that GOP attempts to court to Ohio will go just about as well as the rest of the party’s outreach efforts.

4. Mark Levin

During Tuesday night’s edition of The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart criticized Israel’s use of airstrikes against Gaza in a satirical segment titled “(500) Crazies Of Summer.”

It may not shock you to learn that right-wing radio host Mark Levin wasn’t laughing. According to Levin, Stewart’s jokes at Israel’s expense make him a self-hating Jew.

“The people in the Gaza Strip serve as human shields and somehow this basic human fact, this simple logic is lost on Jon Leibowitz, I mean Stewart,” Levin said.

“I don’t trust Jews who change their names!” he then shouted.

“Have you f’ing seen Israel, you little twerp? Have you f’ing seen what surrounds Israel, you little twerp?” Levin raged at Stewart. He went on to suggest that Stewart probably has some “very funny” jokes about the Holocaust, before repeating his point about Stewart’s name change (he was born Jonathan Stuart Liebowitz).

“I despise the self-haters, I really do,” he added.

Of course, if Levin really can’t stand Jewish people who have changed their names, then one would think that he would be a bit more tolerant towards criticism of Avigdor Lieberman (who was born Evet Liberman), Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski), Benjamin Netanyahu (whose father changed the family name from Mileikowsky), and all of the other Israeli leaders who adopted new names upon immigrating.

Then again, I do believe that Levin probably isn’t a big fan of Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman).

3. Larry Pratt

During an interview with “The Liberty Brothers Radio Show,” Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt explained why Barack Obama, our “socialist in chief,” really hates America.

“Look at the way this guy was formed,” Pratt said. “His father was either a Kenyan socialist or the Communist Party member who lived across the street, Frank Marshall Davis, and there’s a lot more physical resemblance between the latter and Obama than Obama Sr. and Obama.”

As Right Wing Watch’s Miranda Blue helpfully explains:

The Frank Marshall Davis birther theory was invented and popularized by right-wing filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who thinks that Obama got plastic surgery in an attempt to hide his resemblance to Davis and who also believes that the president wears a secret Muslim wedding ring and could have been behind the Aurora movie theater shooting.

So there’s that.

Pratt added that it doesn’t really matter who Obama’s real father is — “whoever was the dad, they were all Marxists” — but still, he insisted that “I really think that more likely was that the Communist that lived across the street in Hawaii could have been the father.”

Amazingly, Pratt is endorsing a conspiracy theory that even most birthers won’t touch; after all, if President Obama is the son of the Commie next door, then he can’t be removed from office for being a Kenyan usurper.

2. Rush Limbaugh

On Thursday, a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in Ukraine, after reportedly being shot down by a missile. All 295 people aboard were killed.

According to Rush Limbaugh, however, there’s only one reason the media would cover this tragic loss of life, and its massive ramifications on international security: To distract Americans from “the bad Obama news at the border.”

“I haven’t had CNN on all day, what do you bet they have broomed everything and are covering wall-to-wall the Malaysian [sic] Airlines flight shot down by a missile?” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “This is, I mean, you talk about — I don’t want to appear to be callous here, folks, but you talk about an opportunity to abandon the bad Obama news at the border!”

“And no, I’m not suggesting anything other than how the media operates,” he added.

He’s just asking questions.

If you think that’s bad, just wait until someone tells Allen West that CNN is covering the horrific incident instead of #Benghazi.

1. Larry Smith

Photo via votelarrysmith.com

Photo: votelarrysmith.com

The crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border has inspired some genuinely awful reactions from politicians, but perhaps none has been as strange as that of Texas congressional candidate Larry Smith.

Smith, the Republican challenging Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela in Texas’ 34th congressional district, recently toldThe Daily Beast that the relatives of the migrant children who have crossed the border in recent weeks should sue President Obama.

“I believe really, internationally, these families need to get together in international court and sue the Obama administration in a class-action lawsuit for unilateral child abuse,” Smith said, in a surprising bit of advice for a Texas Republican (they’re not known for their love of international institutions).

“Whether it was incidental or accidental, they were the cause of it. They knew it was coming and they allowed it to happen,” he added.

Why would President Obama allow such a tragedy to take place? According to Smith, it’s a result of his mental illness.

“People who intentionally hurt children for attention can be accused of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” a press release on Smith’s website explains. “The facts surrounding the surge of unaccompanied, non-citizen children across the border support this charge.”

“American society is riddled with mandatory reporters, such as teachers and doctors, who have the obligation to alert the authorities to prevent children from being harmed. Any adult who clearly sees danger for a child would step in to prevent it,” Smith said in a statement. “President Obama, when requesting transport services for 65,000 unaccompanied children earlier this year, saw the coming harm and did nothing to stop it. These unfortunate children have become pawns to benefit Obama’s push for his unpopular and destructive immigration policies.”

In fairness, while Smith may not be a doctor, it does seem plausible that he knows a bit about attention-seeking behavior.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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This Week In Crazy: Clinton Conspiracies, Coups, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Clinton Conspiracies, Coups, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Louie Gohmert

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who infamously once warned Americans of the grave threat posed by foreign “terror babies,” graduated to a new target this week: toddlers.

Speaking on the House floor on Monday, Congressman Gohmert argued that young children shouldn’t get legal status in the United States — because they don’t pay taxes.

After recounting the story of “a three-year-old [who] had someone convince them that they needed to try to get here,” Gohmert explained that this undermines the case for comprehensive immigration reform.

“We have people saying, oh, if we just legalize everybody that is here, all of this new tax money will come flooding in,” Gohmert said. “There can be no debate that young children who are not working, even if they are legalized, for those who make the argument, gee, look at all the tax money that the federal coffers will be getting if we just legalize everybody here, that is a bogus argument. It is a strained argument by people who want more people coming in illegally.”

Indigent toddlers weren’t the only target of Gohmert’s speech; he also accused President Obama of being “complicit” in sex trafficking, by “luring” vulnerable children into the U.S. with promises of amnesty.

His speech can be seen below, in all its illogical glory, via The Raw Story:

In related news, Gohmert and the GOP are still waiting for their poll numbers among Hispanic voters to skyrocket.
4. Ted Yoho

Earlier this month, Kentucky senator Rand Paul warned his fellow Republicans that they should ease up on their efforts to make it harder to vote, saying, “It’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.”

On Tuesday, Right Wing Watch provided a handy example of what Paul was talking about. The website posted a newly discovered video of U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) suggesting that instead of a voter ID, citizens should have to present a deed to cast a ballot.

“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote,” Yoho told a cheering crowd at Berean Baptist Church in Ocala, Florida, during his 2012 campaign.

Yoho added that early voting through absentee ballots is “a travesty,” and lamented that Florida governor Rick Scott’s decision to reduce early voting — which he later reversed under significant political pressure — didn’t go far enough.

Yoho is right about one thing: It’s never a good time to tell voters that you are running on Bryan Fischer’s “poor people shouldn’t vote” platform.

Despite this latest revelation, Yoho remains the most normal Republican candidate in Florida’s 3rd congressional district.

3. Bryan Fischer

Speaking of Fischer, the hate group leader checks in at number three for offering a Clinton conspiracy double play on the Wednesday edition of his show.

While discussing the right-wing meme that Hillary Clinton’s 2012 concussion rendered her brain damaged, Fischer took a moment to launch a new conspiracy theory: Bill Clinton is secretly sabotaging his wife’s still-nonexistent campaign.

“The fact that Bill Clinton dropped that little nugget, to me that was inexplicable,” Fischer said of the former president’s recent comments on Hillary Clinton’s recovery. “Unless maybe some part of Bill Clinton does not want Hillary to be president in 2016.”

Fischer’s evidence? Well, he doesn’t have any. But he has a feeling that Bill Clinton “doesn’t want to share the limelight. Doesn’t want to share the glory. And maybe he doesn’t want the media tracking his every move, for reasons I think are obvious to you and me.”

If The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander ever writes an update to his piece on the Clinton Crazies, Fischer is sure to be his first call.

2. Allen West

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced the five Democrats who will serve on the Benghazi select committee.

It may not shock you to learn that former congressman Allen West disapproves of Pelosi’s picks. But even by West’s standards, the content of his complaint is startling.

During an appearance on The Janet Mefford Show, West questioned the patriotism of Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), saying, “I just don’t know where her loyalties lie.”

“You know, for her to have been a veteran, a wounded warrior for the United States Army, she should know that this is not the right thing,” West elaborated. “And hopefully, you know, she will remember the oath of office that she took as an Army officer and not the allegiance I guess she believes she has to the liberal progressives of the Democrat Party.”

This seems like a good time to mention that Duckworth lost her legs and partial use of her right arm during her service in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was awarded a Purple Heart for her service.

West’s military career ended when he was forced into retirement rather than face a court martial for assaulting an Iraqi detainee during an interrogation.

The former congressman didn’t limit his criticism to Duckworth; he also told Mefford that Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) is “one of those geeky little debaters that is going to try to micromanage every single detail” — because who wants a stickler for the facts in a federal investigation? — and that Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) has a “very whiny way.” It almost makes one wonder what West would have said if Pelosi had bowed to left-wing pressure and named Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) to the committee.

Ultimately, it’s not surprising that West is angry with Pelosi’s choices for the committee. After all, letting Democrats participate in the process is clearly just another distraction from #Benghazi.

1. Larry Klayman

larry klayman

This week’s “winner” is right-wing activist Larry Klayman, who is calling for a “Second American Revolution” to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming the next president of the United States.

Writing in WorldNetDaily — which recently featured an article under the charming headline, “‘Worst’ fire season still better than Obama” — Klayman warns that “the possible election of the female partner of the Bonnie and Clyde duo of Bill and Hillary Clinton would usher in the death knell of the United States of America.”

Explaining that he “fought the Clintons tooth and nail during the 1990s…having pursued them for their commission of a host of crimes, ranging from Whitewater, to China-gate, to Travel-gate, and Monica Lewinsky-gate to name just a few of the 40 or so of their misdeeds,” Klayman writes that Bill and Hillary Clinton “would resume their practice of selling off anything of value for their political expediency…In effect, the entire country would be put up for sale at a Bonnie and Clyde auction to further subjugate the American people to political slavery under their rule.”

In fairness to his nemeses, Klayman does acknowledge that at least “they are not black Muslim-sympathizers like Obama and his racist comrades.” But still, Clinton is too popular for Republicans to stop — so the right wing must take matters into their own hands.

“All of this is why We the People must wage our Second American Revolution now, before it is too late, to free the nation and ourselves of the scourge of the likes of the Obamas and Clintons,” Klayman writes. “If we do not do it now, then all is likely to be lost.”

If Klayman’s plan to overthrow the government sounds familiar, it’s because he tried to do so less than a year ago. It didn’t work out. But if Klayman is serious about trying again, I know where he can find literally dozens of supporters.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of the list, when Klayman claims that his stupid column was actually written by the DNC.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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