All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

Liz Cheney's organization Keep America Safe today released a mini-documentary featuring citizens of Standish, Michigan lashing out at the Obama administration's proposal to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the town's Standish Maximum Correctional Facility.

Standish is one of at least four sites being considered as potential transfer destinations for detainees, along with facilities in Montana, Colorado, and Illinois, according to the New York Times. The Detroit News reports that the Standish facility, which closed October 31st due to budget cuts, employed more than 250 people, making it the small town's largest employer. Nonetheless, some residents are reluctant to let their town play host to the 200 or so alleged terrorists facing transfer to the United States.

The video, which you can watch at left, includes interviews with citizens of Standish (which has a population just over 2,000 and is 97 percent white, according to last available census data) intercut with messages from Keep America Safe, all set to an ominous piano track.

"President Obama has ordered the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility closed," a message on the screen reads. "Hundreds of terrorists will be moved to prisons in the United States. Politicians want them placed in Standish, Michigan."

This message is followed by a woman speaking. "[Politicians] aren't listening to us little people in Standish," she says. "Because that's what we are. We're a small, small farm town. And we are not being listened to."

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Like her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Elizabeth Cheney doesn't think highly of President Obama's policies. And now she has a new organization, Keep America Safe, dedicated to pressing her argument.

"Like a lot of Americans, we have watched with concern and dismay as the Obama administration has cut defense spending, wavered on the war in Afghanistan, and launched investigations into Americans serving on the front lines of the war on terror, while at the same time expanding legal protections for the terrorists that plot to attack this country," Cheney writes in an opening statement, which is also signed by fellow board members Debra Burlingame and William Kristol. "These policies, along with President Obama's abandonment of America's allies and attempts to appease our adversaries are weakening the nation."

The group vows to "make the case for an unapologetic approach to fighting terrorism around the world, for victory in the wars this country fights, for democracy, freedom and human rights, and for a strong American military that is needed in the dangerous world in which we live."

Keep America Safe has also produced a video (at left) articulating a critique of Mr. Obama for failing to match his rhetoric with reality – and for playing golf and traveling to Copenhagen instead of dealing with various issues.

Politico reports that the group, incorporated as a 501 (c ) 4 non-profit, launches its fundraising push today. Said Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard: "The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror. The good guys need some help too."

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A group of retired generals say that former Vice President Dick Cheney and his "acolytes," including daughter Liz Cheney (left), are trying to scare Americans over the prospect of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility through "nonsense" arguments, Politico reports.

"It's up to all of us to say these arguments advanced by Cheney and his acolytes are nonsense and that really what they're doing is undermining our national security by delaying the date at which Guantanamo is closed," retired Brig. Gen. James Cullen told Politico.

Added retired Gen. David Maddox: "Some of the fear issues that are being raised in this are really unfortunate. It gets people excited about things they shouldn't be excited about and impedes doing what is critical to this country…We take a setback every time somebody, whether it's the vice president or his daughter comes out and says the things that they say."

In June, Liz Cheney said on CNN that "it's clear that al-Quaeda operatives and terrorists have spent a lot of time and have expended a lot of effort to get into the United States. So I think it's impossible to argue that when our government actually helps them get into the United States, as we would do in this case, that it doesn't make us less safe. Of course that makes us less safe."

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When it comes to needling Democrats in one of their most sensitive places, daughter Liz is proving that the apple doesn't fall far from the Cheney family tree.

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Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, joins the ranks of several Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who are criticizing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s quote on ethnicity and judgment. On today's “Washington Unplugged” with host Bob Schieffer, Cheney said she found the quote “troubling.”

In yet another, Schieffer – Cheney interview, the mother of five said, “if you switched around the designations in the quote, you know somebody's career would over.”

The Sotomayor quote in question came from a 2001 speech where the court nominee said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”



“I don't think there is place in this country for that kind of a perspective,” Cheney said, noting that President Obama himself advocates against racial preference. “I don't think we should be thinking about how judges reach determinations and reach decisions and making assertions like somebody from one ethnic group is going to be a better judge than someone from another ethnic group.”

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