The Screaming Eagle Journal

Has Fox News gone over to the dark side ?

2012-02-13T17:50:00.001-05:00

Many of you have complained of late about a noticeable shift in Fox News, not only in its coverage of various political events, but also in its staffing. More and more, they are adding to their paid Fox News contributors with people who are in some way linked to the radical left. People have wondered aloud what could be driving this shift, and while we probably won’t ever know it with certainty, I’d like to call to your attention what could be the basis for a quid pro quo that would offer at least one explanation for it. In the months leading up to the revelations about the phone-hacking scandal at New of the World, another Murdoch news outlet in the UK, we saw the first signals of a change on Fox News, and of course, there have been rumblings of potential investigations and prosecutions here by our own Department of Justice. If Murdoch and Ailes have anything to fear from these scandals here in the US, then it wouldn’t be inconceivable that the corrupt Department of Justice under Eric Holder and Barack Obama could use it as the potential stick to lash Fox News into political compliance ... Read the rest !

RUBIO TO OBAMA: YOU'RE TURNING AMERICA INTO 'DEADBEAT NATION' !

2012-01-06T12:19:00.000-05:00

Brady Talking Point Broadsides: Opening Salvo !

2011-12-29T16:29:00.001-05:00

Today on the chopping block, inspired by This Post, I'd like to address the issue of need. As in the constant whine of "Why do you NEED x? What are you going to use X for?" in regards to personal weaponry. This is a common question among Gun Owner Butts (as in "I'm a gun owner, but...") who wail and gnash their teeth because you don't use night vision scopes to hunt Bambi. Put quite simply, this question is some bullshit, and I've always got an answer. So here goes.

Q: "Why do you NEED high capacity magazines?"

A: "Because sometimes you have to kill a whole bunch of motherfuckers."

Q: "Why do you NEED armor piercing rounds?"

A: "Because sometimes you have to kill some motherfucker hiding on the other side of a wall."

Q: "Why do you NEED a fifty caliber sniper rifle?"

A: "Because sometimes you have to kill some motherfucker from a kilometer away."

Q: "Why do you need a night vision scope?"

A: "Because sometimes you have to kill some motherfuckers in the dark."

Bitches I can go on all day like this. Why do I NEED this shit? Well I dunno, genius, why were these items developed? Almost all of them had a purpose when they were developed. They designed AP to penetrate barricades. They designed night vision for killing motherfuckers in the dark. They developed standard ("high") capacity magazines to lessen the need to reload.

I'm sick of pretending that there are sporting purposes to my shit. I'm a survivalist and my weapons are for killing motherfuckers in a theoretical Mad Max future, and perhaps most importantly of all I don't have to justify shit to you, god damnit.

Choke on that, you fascist vermin.

Capitalism and the Right to Rise !

2011-12-19T13:42:00.001-05:00

By JEB BUSH

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.

But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.

Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise.

Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. "Trust in the dynamism of the market" is not a phrase in today's political lexicon.

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

Mr. Bush, a Republican, was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007.

Could 2012 be America’s Last Presidential Election ?

2011-12-12T14:55:00.000-05:00

I’ve asked this question to a number of people and most them respond as if I were crazy for asking. They tell me that this is America, land of the free and that there will always be elections. I tell them that we are no longer the land of the free and that if Obama gets re-elected in 2012, that this just may be America’s last election.

In the past three years, the Obama administration has been very carefully crafting the nation for a political take over by his Marxist regime and this isn’t just my opinion.

Popular radio talk show host Michael Savage is the son of Russian immigrants and is very familiar with Soviet and European history. Savage warned his listeners this week saying,

“I have to tell you that if this man, God forbid, is the next president of the United States, we’re going to be living in something along the lines of – people say Europe. I don’t believe it’s going to be like Europe – I think it will be closer to Chavez’s South American dictatorship.

“This is the most corrupt, incompetent, dangerous tyrannical administration in American history. It’s not politics as usual. It’s not just Democrats versus Republicans. Obama has a long history of being at odds with American values and with America itself and the core principles of this country. They don’t want government-sponsored opinions. They only want government-sponsored ‘Pravda.’ That’s exactly what the government-media complex tells you on a daily basis – nothing but the government-media complex party line. Pay attention. Your freedom may be at stake.”

Over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a small group of people in an Iowa coffee house that,

“Barack Obama is not incompetent, ladies and gentleman. He knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. He sees America differently than you see America.

[Obama] has gone out of his way to divide this country in a way I haven’t seen since the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt went around to divide his country. That’s his hero. What makes America great [in Obama’s mind is that] the government takes money from somebody and gives it to somebody else. No, that’s what makes America, France.”

With his control over the Executive and Judicial branches of the government, the stage is set for a complete takeover of the government. Think about it.

Since taking office, instead of helping the economy, Obama has purposely escalated the economic crisis by plunging the country into unprecedented debt. He has a number of programs that are designed to go into effect in January 2013, just in time for his second term of office. The economic burden and increased taxes on everyone will be enough to cause the final economic collapse of the country. As soon as that happens, Obama declares Martial Law and assumes dictatorial control of the nation.

The Department of Justice has already been subverting federal laws to strip us of a number of freedoms. The Supreme Court and many of the other federal courts have been seeded with socialistic liberal judges that will rule in Obama’s favor on virtually anything, thus ending constitutional rule and law.

He’s already changing the face of America’s military. Allowing homosexuals to openly serve along with changing the retirement program is causing many conservative military leaders to resign commissions and leave the military. Some Pentagon officials are also noting that an increase in the enlistment of radical Muslims into the US military where they get all the training they need on weapons and defense systems. We have no idea how many of them there are in the armed forces or in what positions they may hold.

Obama has been wielding executive powers this past year as if he were already a dictator. When Congress is not doing his bidding, he simply bypasses them and used an executive order to accomplish it anyway. This has set the stage for his disbandment of Congress. He would not be the first world leader to take control of a nation and disband the legislative branch of government.

He has been effectively using the media to anesthetize the public to the dangers he poses. Like a patient being prepped for surgery, people are numb to the changes and won’t have a clue what took place until they wake up in recovery and realize that free America has been removed and replaced with a regime that may parallel those of Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Chavez and Castro.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I earnestly pray that we are spared from what seems a certain future and that Obama is overwhelmingly defeated in 2012. Otherwise, heaven help us.

Newt Tells Truth About Palestinians !

2011-12-11T12:10:00.000-05:00

Fourth “Great Escape” tunnel found under Stalag Luft III

2011-12-05T17:40:00.000-05:00

Archaeologists excavating Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe POW camp in Lower Silesia made famous by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, have found a fourth tunnel dug after the failure of the attempt immortalized/fictionalized on film. Although historians knew about the existence of this fourth tunnel, named George, and that it was dug underneath the camp theater, its exact location was a mystery.

Using ground-penetrating radar and information from POWs who survived internment, archaeologists spent three weeks looking for George. Now they’ve found it and it still contains a number of artifacts left behind when the Germans hastily evacuated the camp in the middle of the night on January 27, 1945, forcing the 11,000 remaining POWs to march 50 miles in below freezing temperatures deeper behind German lines.

[Artifacts] include yards of wire that inmates stole from the Nazi searchlight power-lines to make electric light in the shaft and tunnel. Also found were numerous “klim tins” – powdered-milk containers – which were hollowed out and used as fat lamps stuck into the side of the tunnel walls when the electricity failed.

Others were joined together to form tubes along which air was pumped for the men digging at the face. Numerous bedboards were used to shore up the workings, and many jagged hinges, bits of old metal pails, hammers and jemmies, used to scour away the sandy soil of the camp, were also excavated.

“It is hardly a treasure in the conventional sense,” said Marek Lazarz, director of the museum that has been built to honour the men of Stalag Luft III. “But it is priceless to us and a time capsule of what life was like back then.

The Day Hitler Blinked !

2011-12-04T22:07:00.001-05:00

Day and night for a week in early 1943, hundreds of unarmed German women did something that was unheard of in Nazi Germany.

They stood toe-to-toe with machine gun-wielding Gestapo agents and demanded the release of their Jewish husbands from Adolph Hitler’s murderous grip. The men were locked up in the Jewish community center in the heart of Berlin, victims of Hitler’s "final roundup" of German Jews.

The women's courage and passion prevailed: As thousands of other Berlin Jews were crammed into cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz, the Jews married to “Aryan” German women were set free.

But even today, more than 50 years after the Nazi reign of terror, few Germans acknowledge the significance of protest on Rosenstrasse, the street where the dramatic showdown took place. To admit that unarmed women saved 1,700 Jews from deportation would be to challenge postwar Germany's consensus that ordinary citizens were powerless to curb Hitler's anti-Semitic rampage. Read the rest !

ANARCHY !

2011-11-12T23:47:00.001-05:00

Everybody’s been too damn polite about this nonsense:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they’re spewing their garbage – both politically and physically – every which way they can find.

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently - must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh - out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft.

Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape.

They might not let you babies keep your iPhones, though. Try to soldier on.

Schmucks.

Dirty Little Secrets !

2011-10-30T13:17:00.002-04:00

Spineless Bureaucrats Kill A Soldier

by James Dunnigan

October 27, 2011

The U.S. Army brass are catching a lot of heat because of a recent screw-up in Afghanistan, where a medical evacuation (medevac) helicopter was delayed half an hour because of strict adherence to regulations. As a result, it took 65 minutes to get a badly wounded soldier to a hospital, and the soldier died when he got there. But if the medevac had taken off as soon as it was called, half an hour would have been saved, along with the badly wounded soldier.

The problem was that the wounded soldier was waiting in an area that was under fire. In these situations, a medevac helicopter can only come in if it has an armed escort (usually an AH-64 helicopter gunship), but none was immediately available. The armed escort is needed because the medevac helicopter is unarmed, as is required, by international law, for vehicles marked with the Red Cross.

But there was another medevac helicopter available, that was unmarked and armed. This was a U.S. Air Force medevac helicopter. It seems the air force generals noted that no one in Afghanistan or Iraq was respecting the Red Cross, so they didn't use it, and armed their medevac birds. The air force medevac helicopters were also equipped to fly in all sorts of weather, unlike most army medevacs. So the army and air force had an arrangement, where an air force medevac would be sent in if the weather was too difficult for an army medevac to handle. But that was not the case in this instance, and army medevac commander would not let the air force medevac helicopter go in, and refused to allow the army medevac helicopter to take off until an AH-64 showed up.

Army commanders have been complaining about these policies, which are post-Vietnam developments, for many years. But because there were so few instances where a wounded soldier died because of medevac delays, no senior army commanders were willing to do what the air force had done, or to simply arm medevac helicopters. During the Vietnam War, medevac helicopters were sometimes armed, and they always went in, no matter how "hot" (under heavy fire) the landing zone was. Army medvac crews want a return to the old days, so they can do their job by old school rules, and save lives. Army bureaucrats do not want to violate international treaties, risk the lives of medevac crews, or endanger their own careers by doing anything controversial.

Obama Gives Rise To A Beast !

2011-10-27T00:06:00.001-04:00

The Arab Spring blossoms into the Summer of Jihadist Islam heralding the Winter of Doom for the West as Obama empowers Radical Islam to global supremacy.

“A Tall black man will assume the reigns of government in the West. He will command the strongest army in the earth, and he will carry a clear sign from the Third Imam, whose name was “Hessei Ibn Ali“. – Shi’a End-Time Prophecy, Iman Ali Ibn Abi-Talib

As the Islamist prophecy goes, this ‘tall black man’ is a forerunner of the Mahdi/12th Imam, the Islamic Savior who will conquer the earth for Islam; a counterfeit of John The Baptist as the forerunner of Christ. The clear sign’ this man will deliver to the Umma, is that he presides over the destruction of the infidel nations from within, and then delivers the West into the hands of the Caliphate to crush and annihilate.

Islam sees Obama’s policies as another sign of the West’s decline and the triumph of Islam, and the events of the last few weeks no doubt has given confidence to Jihadist Islam that Obama is their sign as he gives rise to what will become a global beast.

The Washington Times is running two editorials that each address a frightening litany of actions and policies by the Obama regime that are shaping an Arab and Persian Middle East that will one day soon, become a bane to our very existence.

Jeffrey Kuhner addresses the domino fall of Arab nations to radical Islamists

President Obama is empowering radical Islam across the Arab world. He is presiding over both the American decline and the rapid advance of our mortal jihadist enemies….Muslim fundamentalists have used street protests against corrupt, autocratic regimes as a Trojan horse to expand Islamic militancy.

while the Arab Spring falls into an Islamist Winter .

There is no strategic upside in any of this change for the United States. The new post-authoritarian Islamist governments will have no particular affinity for America or its values. Regional partners, particularly Saudi Arabia, are alarmed that the Obama administration was so willing to throw longtime allies like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus.

Why? Simple, the Marxist Left will embrace every enemy of America in order to advance it’s own agenda: our destruction. As Kuhner concludes in this observation:

Like emperors in the final days of Rome, our leaders can pretend that the barbarians pose no imminent threat. Everyone knows, however, that Mr. Obama is simply managing America’s decline. His warm embrace of the Arab Spring as a pro-democracy movement simply camouflages the sad reality of our time: The Islamists are rising, threatening freedom wherever they tread.

It’s not incompetence that many assume Obama is demonstrating, rather is is cold, calculated and deliberate destruction of America and the West, presided over by a tall black man that Radical Islam sees as the sign, that their time to take over the world, is at hand.

There will be no Patton or Uncle Sam to save the world from the forces of darkness this time. A Beast rises on the world, and Obama is helping to pull it into our gates.

Is the New World Order unraveling ?

2011-10-13T19:45:00.001-04:00

By Patrick J. Buchanan

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With Greece on the precipice of default and Portugal and Italy approaching the ledge, the European monetary union appears in peril.

Should it collapse, the European Union itself could be in danger, for economic nationalism is rising in Europe. Which raises a larger question.

Is the New World Order, the great 20th century project of Western transnational elites, unraveling?

The NWO dates back as far as Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, which a Republican Senate refused to enter. FDR, seeking to succeed where his mentor had failed, oversaw the creation of a United Nations, an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank.

In 1951 came the European Coal and Steel Community, love child of Jean Monnet, which evolved into the European Economic Community, the European Community and the European Union. A European Central Bank and a new currency, the euro, followed.

The hidden ultimate goal of economic union was political union – a United States of Europe as model and core of the 21st-century world government.

Pat Buchanan's latest book -- the title says it all: "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the EU expanded to the east. And the New World Order, formally proclaimed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, was out in the open and seemingly the wave of the future.

Progress was swift.

A North American Free Trade Agreement, bringing the United States, Mexico and Canada into a common market that George W. Bush predicted would encompass the hemisphere from Patagonia to Prudhoe Bay, was signed in 1993.

A World Trade Organization was born in 1994. U.S. sovereignty was surrendered to a global body where America had the same single vote as Azerbaijan.

The Kyoto Protocol, brought home by Vice President Al Gore, set up a regime to control the worldwide emission of greenhouse gases.

An International Criminal Court, a permanent Nuremberg Tribunal to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, was created.

A doctrine of limited sovereignty had been asserted. Elites claimed a higher law than national sovereignty; "a responsibility to protect" enabled them to intervene in countries where human rights violations were egregious.

Serbia, bombed by Bill Clinton for 78 days for fighting to hold its ancient province of Kosovo, was the first victim.

Suddenly, however, the progression has stalled. Indeed, the New World Order seems to be unraveling.

Emerging powers like China, India and Brazil are demanding they be exempt from restrictions developed countries seek to impose. The follow-up summits to Kyoto – Copenhagen in 2009, Cancun in 2010 – ended in failure. The Doha round of world trade negotiations ended in failure.

China refuses to let her currency float lest she lose the trade surpluses that have enabled her to amass $3 trillion in cash reserves.

Protectionism is rising. Americans chafe at a new world economic order that has led to deindustrialization of their country. Congress is talking of defunding the U.N. as anti-Western and anti-Israel.

Why is the New World Order suddenly going in reverse?

A primary reason is the resurgence of nationalism. Nations are putting national interests ahead of any perceived global interests.

A second reason is the decline of a West whose project this was. We no longer dictate to the world, and the world no longer marches to our tune. The deficits and indebtedness of Western nations preclude more of the big wealth transfers in foreign aid that once bought us influence.

A third reason is demography. Not one European nation has a birth rate sufficient to replace its population. Europe's nations are aging, shrinking, dying. A depopulating Germany cannot carry forever the deficit-debtor nations of Club Med. The oldest nation, Japan, is on schedule to lose 25 million people by 2050, as is neighbor Russia.

Militarily, America remains the most powerful nation. But Iraq and Afghanistan have bled the country and left us without the certain attainment of our goals. Old allies like Turkey go their separate ways.

Ethno-nationalism also explains a disintegrating world order. Aspiring nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Padania, Flanders, Ingushetia, Dagestan, East Turkestan, Kurdistan and Baluchistan seek a place in the sun, free of the cloying embrace of the mother country.

The desire of peoples for nations all their own, where their own language, faith and culture predominate and their own kind rule to the exclusion of all others, is everywhere winning out over multiculturalism and transnationalism.

Through history there have been attempts to unite the world.

The Roman Empire. Catholicism. Islam. The West that ruled much of mankind from Columbus to the mid-20th century. Communism, which conquered half of Europe and Asia but arose and fell in a single century.

With the death of communism and the decline of the West – in relative population and power – Islam has become the largest religion, China the world's emerging superpower and Asia the continent of the future.

Could this still be the Second American Century?

Not the way we are going.

democrat food fight !

2011-07-23T00:09:00.001-04:00

Paul Krugman

July 22, 2011, 9:01 am

Conceder In Chief

Amanda Marcotte is right: of course the big problem is the craziness of the GOP. That said, I am among those in a state of suppressed rage and panic over the president’s negotiating strategy.

I’d like to believe that it’s all 11-dimensional political chess; but at this point — after the midterm debacle, after the big concession on taxes without even getting a raise in the debt limit — what evidence do we have that Obama knows what he’s doing?

It’s very hard to avoid the impression that three things are going on:

1. Obama really just isn’t that into Democratic priorities. He really doesn’t much care about preserving Medicare for all seniors, keeping Social Security intact, and so on.

2. What he is into is his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend the partisan divide. He imagines that he can be the one who brings about a big transformation that settles disputes for decades to come — and has been unwilling to drop that vision no matter how many times the GOP shows itself utterly uninterested in anything except gaining the upper hand.

3. As a result, he can’t or won’t see what’s obvious to everyone else: that any Grand Bargain will last precisely as long as Democrats control the Senate and the White House, and will be torn up in favor of privatization and big tax cuts for the wealthy as soon as the GOP has the chance.

I hope I’m wrong about all this. But when has Obama given progressives any reason to believe they can trust him?

Hussein really made it worse !

2011-07-06T16:28:00.000-04:00

The Republican charge is a body shot aimed right at the belly of President Barack Obama’s re-election effort: He made it worse.

No, not that White House efforts at boosting the American economy and creating jobs and “winning the future” were merely inefficient or wasteful, which they certainly were. Even Obama finally seems to understand that. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” he joked lamely at a meeting of his jobs council.

Rather, that the product of all the administration’s stimulating and regulating is an economy that’s in significantly worse competitive and productive shape than when Obama took the oath in January 2009. He was dealt a bad hand, to be sure – and then proceeded to play it badly. At least, that is what Republicans have been saying. “He didn’t cause the recession as we know,” presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in New Hampshire yesterday. “He didn’t make it better, he made things worse.”

Team Obama offers a different narrative, of course. As the president said in his State of the Union address earlier this year, “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again. … These steps we’ve taken over the last two years may have broken the back of this recession.” He somehow failed to insert his usual boilerplate about the economy losing 700,000 jobs a month when he took office.

But Obama is correct, to a degree. The economy is growing (slowly) now and adding jobs (modestly) whereas neither was happening back in early 2009. Of course, economies in recession will eventually recover even without government action. So the question is whether Obamanomics helped, hurt or was inconsequential.

The centerpiece of Obama’s plan to “push the car out of the ditch” was the trillion-dollar (including interest expense on the borrowed money) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A recent article in The Weekly Standard determined that it may have cost as much as $278,000 for each job created. But that’s generous. Respected Stanford economist John Taylor, perhaps the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, has analyzed the actual results of the ARRA. Not what the White House’s garbage-in, garbage-out models say happened, but what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. Taylor, simply put, looked at whether consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs. His devastating conclusion:

Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.

Indeed, the results are horrifying. The two-year-old recovery’s terrible tale of the tape: A 9.1 percent unemployment rate that’s probably closer to 16 percent counting the discouraged and underemployed, the worst income growth and weakest GDP growth of any upturn since World War II, a still-weakening housing market. Oh, and a trillion bucks down the tube. Oh, and two-and-a-half years … and counting … wasted during which time the skills of unemployed workers continue to erode and the careers of younger Americans suffer long-term income damage. Losing the future.

Next, add in healthcare reform that Medicare’s chief actuary says will not slow the overall growth of healthcare spending. (Even its Obama administration godfather, Peter Orszag, warns that “more drastic measures may ultimately be needed.”) And toss in a financial reform plan that the outspoken and independent president of the Kansas City Fed says he “can’t imagine” working. “I don’t have faith in it all.” Indeed, markets continue to treat the biggest banks as if they are still too big to fail.

But wait there’s more. Obama created a debt commission that produced a reasonable though imperfect plan to deal with America’s long-term fiscal woes. But he stiffed it and then failed to supply a plan of his own, sowing the seeds for an impending debt ceiling crisis and making an eventual fiscal fix that much harder. One more step along the path not taken, along with pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that would have reduced policy and economic uncertainty and unleashed the private sector to invest, expand and create.

Elections have results. So do bad policies. Obama’s choices on taxing and spending and regulating, sorry to say, seem to have made things worse.

Hussein Has No Idea How Vulnerable He Is !

2011-06-14T20:17:00.000-04:00

I’m not prepared to predict a Carter-like defeat for President Obama, since it depends on several unknown factors, from who the GOP nominee will be to the state of the economy and the country. But I am prepared to say right now the elements for a 2012 upheaval are in place, much as they were prior to the Reagan landslide and as they were prior to the 2010 epic repudiation of Obama and Democrats. And unless the economy swings around soon and in a fairly substantial way, Mr. Obama will be terrifically vulnerable.

Read the rest !

The Art of Appreciating America from Abroad !

2011-06-13T14:06:00.000-04:00

Go to Europe and see the leftwing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or 3rd bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.

Read the rest !

The Goddess torches another liberal !

2011-06-09T16:27:00.001-04:00

The American Iliad: The Political Mythology of the Un-Civil War !

2011-06-09T02:31:00.003-04:00

Ludwell Johnson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the College of William and Mary, rightly referred to the “Civil War” as the American Iliad. First, the war was a defining influence on the American nation. Second, much of the war's political history has been shaped into a pious mythology. My hope is that the Sesquicentennial Commemoration of the war will result in a more accurate and realistic understanding of its issues. Truth is the only certain foundation for freedom.

I am hopeful but not overly optimistic. Political correctness, which is an enemy of both truth and reason, grips American educational and media institutions more tightly than at any time in our history since the Reconstruction era of 1865-1877.

A recent study showed that the average American college senior knows no more about a range of academic subjects than high school seniors of 50 years ago. On history, they know less.

Most Americans have accepted the government approved mythology that the “Civil War” was a morality play in which a noble Union Army marched south to crush the evil slave power and free the slaves. Other economic and constitutional issues are swept under the rug as irrelevant or rejected as racist distortions.

A famous axiom sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill is:

“History is written by the victors.”

Actually, no one has ever confirmed that Churchill ever said this. Judging from other similar quotes in history, however, it surely predates Churchill. It has the terse and penetrating style of an ancient Latin proverb, but no one can confirm that origin either. It is a cynical truism that is often true but can be proven wrong in many instances.

A more hopeful perspective came from the pen of New England poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878):

“Truth crushed to the earth shall rise again; the eternal years of God are hers.”

In 1882, Robert L. Dabney, Presbyterian theologian and former Chief of Staff for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, urged the graduating seniors of Hampden Sidney College in Virginia to retain all that was true and ennobling in their Southern Heritage. He continued with a rhetorical question:

“Take care that you do not bury…the inspiring memories of great patriots, whose actions, whether successful or not, are the eternal glory of your race and section; the influence of their virtues, the guiding precedents of their histories. Will you bury the names and memories of a Jackson and Lee, and their noble army of martyrs? Will you bury true history whose years are those of the God of Truth?”

In our modern era, these quotes could easily be paraphrased into something like: The political correctness of the times will not last forever. Truth will ultimately triumph.

The immediate consequences of Confederate defeat, however, were realistically anticipated by Irish-born Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne shortly before his death at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864:

“Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed Veterans as fit subjects for derision.”

The Reverend James Power Smith, the last surviving member of Stonewall Jackson's staff said this in 1907:

“No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the

slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government.”

Two days before Lincoln's election in November of 1860, an editorial in the Charleston Mercury summed up the feeling of South Carolina on the impending national crisis:

“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.”

Asked how the issue of slavery came to be so overblown as a cause of the “Civil War,”

President Woodrow Wilson said:

“It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery…”

This was also the opinion of English author Charles Dickens, published in December 1861:

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”

Five years after the end of the War, prominent Northern abolitionist, attorney and legal scholar, Lysander Spooner, said:

“All these cries of having 'abolished slavery,' of having 'saved the country,' of having 'preserved the Union,' of establishing a 'government of consent,' and of 'maintaining the national honor' are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats--so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.”

Unfortunately, this propaganda is now deeply entrenched in American mythology.

Ben Stein: The ‘Arab Spring’ Is a Fraud !

2011-05-16T21:28:00.000-04:00

Eric Holder is a liar !

2011-05-08T00:02:00.001-04:00

“This country cannot afford the luxury of having its top law enforcement officer confess ignorance of an operation that may have allowed thousands of guns to be illegally exported to Mexico. This operation happened on his watch, and apparently right under his nose, and apparently cost the life of at least one law enforcement officer.......

It is simply unbelievable that the attorney general can act as though he never heard of an operation that has been exposed on national television by CBS News. How could he not know, almost six months after the slaying of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, that guns recovered at the scene are linked directly to the Gunrunner sting?”

More Here !

George W. Bush was right !

2011-05-05T20:19:00.001-04:00

Ann Coulter

The CIA stepped up the search for Osama bin Laden last week after becoming as sick of royal wedding coverage as the rest of us.

American intelligence operations located Osama by following his trusted couriers, whose names were given up by al-Qaida members during harsh interrogations at CIA black sites under President Bush.

Yes, the same interrogations endlessly denounced by the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman), the mainstream media, and an especially indignant Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

The most-wanted terrorist in the world was living in a moldy, million-dollar mansion in a gated community just outside of Islamabad. It took the CIA five years to figure out the four-digit code to get in.

One important missed clue was that Osama was living at 72 Virgins Way. He might still be alive today if only he hadn't borrowed his neighbor's shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and never returned it.

Our mighty Navy SEALs not only put a bullet through Osama's head, but carried off his computers, disks and hard drives. So far, all they've revealed is that Osama had multiple Netflix rentals of "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Love Actually."

Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drives? I mean besides the goat pornography. Pants are wetting throughout Pakistan's military establishment.

The New York Times reports that the raid that killed Osama is being bitterly denounced on Pakistani TV as a breach of that country's sovereignty. Osama, our dear allies say, was not a terrorist, nor has al-Qaida ever been unfriendly to Pakistan -- unlike the United States, which they call "an enemy of Pakistan and Muslims."

(Also, bin Laden's entire video crew is in line at the Islamabad unemployment office today. Thanks, Barack.)

The one Islamic country that openly cheered our taking out bin Laden is Iraq. According to reports from inside the country, TV stations are treating the raid as a great victory for Iraq -- the final battle in a war that was mostly fought by Iraqis on Iraqi soil. They view bin Laden's killing as their own personal triumph in the war against Islamic terrorism.

Similarly, when there was an explosion of violence throughout the Muslim world in response to some Danish cartoons in 2006, guess which Islamic nation was nothing but placid contentment? Again: our plucky Iraq. (Having U.S. Marines in your midst apparently has some sort of calming influence.)

It's great that we got bin Laden, but if the last Democratic administration had been doing its job, there would have been no Osama bin Laden and no 9/11 attack to begin with.

Democratic presidents are always too busy feverishly redistributing wealth at home to devote serious attention to our national interests abroad.

Obama gets to reap the rewards of Bush-era terrorism policies -- policies that he, his fellow Democrats and Jane Mayer hysterically denounced at the time -- while Reagan and Bush had to deal with the consequences of Carter's Iranian policy and Clinton's bin Laden policy.

According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, President Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden's having publicly declared war on the United States and launched various terrorist attacks against us, murdering hundreds of Americans.

(If only one of those opportunities had presented itself on the day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, instead of Clinton's bombing Iraq, he might have postponed his problems at home by finally taking out bin Laden.)

Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, never once met with Clinton in a one-on-one meeting. This is in contrast to Monica Lewinsky, who got about a dozen face-to-face -- or face-to-something -- meetings with the president.

That's why Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, was caught stealing documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 commission hearings. That's also why Clinton blew a gasket and forced ABC to cancel the DVD release of the docudrama "The Path to 9/11" -- based on the commission's report.

Bush had to deal with the ticking time bomb of Osama bin Laden left by Bill Clinton.

All presidents have had to deal with the ticking time bomb set by Carter's passive acceptance of the Iranian revolution in 1979, giving Islamic lunacy its first nation-sponsor.

What ticking time bombs are being set around the globe by our current Democratic president?

Following the Democratic playbook, Obama's overall approach to national security is to pointlessly fling our influence and military around the globe -- in Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan -- with no evident national security purpose.

Thanks to our feckless president, most of the Middle East is rapidly degenerating into a terrorist fever-swamp.

The Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a power broker in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya. Meanwhile, the "democracy" movement in Syria seems likely to end with President Bashar al-Assad gaining a tighter grip on power, after he's killed enough of his own people to remind them why he's their president.

All of these countries are becoming worse than they were before. (On the plus side, Obama is set to announce the SEALs have just found Joe Biden.)

But George Bush's legacy -- Iraq – will be standing there, all on its own, the one point of light in a sea of Islamic darkness. And the media will coo about how reassuring it is that we now have a "thoughtful" president in the White House, instead of a cowboy.

Who's your favorite player ?....Mr. Derrick Brooks !

2011-05-02T21:17:00.000-04:00

Ex-Buc Brooks honored at retirement party !

TAMPA --

A retirement party honoring Derrick Brooks attracted several Hall of Fame players and many former teammates to Raymond James Stadium on Saturday in tribute to the 11-time Pro Bowl linebacker of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The organization honored Brooks in a four-hour event that featured video highlights of a 14-year career and speakers ranging from ex-Bucs safety John Lynch to former defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin.

Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders offered a heartfelt tribute to a fellow Florida State standout while Hall of Fame running backs Marcus Allen and Eric Dickerson looked on from the audience.

"We could argue about who was the best player,'' Sanders said of Brooks, "but I can honestly say I really feel like you were the best man and I love you. I met you coming out of Florida State and I walked away saying, 'That's a cocky, young man.' I loved that swagger Derrick Brooks brought. I don't know him intimately, but I love what he stands for.''

Among the former Bucs who turned out to honor Brooks were Mike Alstott, Brad Johnson, Brian Kelly, Anthony McFarland and Dexter Jackson. Coach Raheem Morris and general manager Mark Dominik also attended, along with co-chairmen Bryan and Joel Glazer.

"Prime Time'' was in top form as Sanders chided the quarterback that led the 2002 Bucs to an NFL championship.

"To the Glazer family, you're wonderful,'' said Sanders. "I played for five organizations and nobody did this for me. By the way, I heard Brad Johnson say that Derrick Brooks was the best player he ever played with. I want to remind Brad that he played with me on the 2000 Redskins. Brad, you know, I'm sitting right back there in the middle with a seersucker suit on, like you can't see me.''

Besides his football accomplishments, Brooks was lauded for his numerous charitable endeavors.

"There's so many consistent themes tonight,'' Lynch said. "People talk about Derrick Brooks the player, about the character, the family man, people talk about the leader. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to Derrick Brooks.''

Kiffin was accompanied by Joe Barry, who challenged Brooks daily as Tampa Bay's linebackers coach for seven seasons. Both are on Lane Kiffin's staff at Southern Cal and they talked about the unique skill set of Brooks, who will be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2014.

"That Derrick Brooks could go sideline to sideline,'' Kiffin said from the podium, becoming more animated with each syllable. "He has speed … and speed kills. He's fast and he's tough. He has instincts. And he was smart. We'd get the scouting report and Derrick Brooks would know everything for every single play.''

In his 25-minute closing remarks, Brooks thanked family members, coaches and former teammates for their support.

"I thank (former Buc executives) Rich McKay and Jerry Angelo for taking a chance on an undersized linebacker,'' Brooks said. "I can still remember my first meeting with Coach (Tony) Dungy. We sat for two hours and talked about changing the culture in Tampa. He wanted me to be a big part of that. He got us going and took us as far as he could.

"I'm big into challenges and Coach (Jon) Gruden challenged our football team to be great. We sat in that first meeting and the defense looked around at each other and said, 'Who is this guy trying to tell us who we are? We carry this team.' I can remember Coach Gruden saying, 'I can put that tape on and Michael Vick's still running down Dale Mabry.' As a defense, we needed that.''

"Shot in the head".... bin Laden dead !

2011-05-02T01:49:00.002-04:00

...And I hope that you die

And your death'll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand over your grave

'Til I'm sure that you're dead !

Masters of War...Bob Dylan

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.

But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”...Winston Churchill

Allen West Delivers Stern Lesson on DADT Repeal !

2011-04-21T13:07:00.000-04:00

Allen West was discriminated against while he was in the military. He was too short to join an elite infantry group. But, he says, he was okay with it because the military is rife with rules that serve a greater purpose, the insinuation being that there is a reason for the military‘s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy.

That’s the point West made during a Hill hearing yesterday on implementing the repeal of DADT. The hearing featured the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and during it West questioned almost every one of them about the certain standards each branch has that prima facia might seem discriminatory.

For example, he asked if the Army still has a minimum height requirement for an elite infantry group and if the Marines still require soldiers to pass physical fitness tests. The answer, “Yes.”

In the beginning of his comments, West summed up his position like this: “The military exists to win the nation’s wars and I think when we get to the point where we are starting to discuss about how the military conforms to accommodating individual behavior that’s what I get concerned with.”

The hypocrisy of the American left !

2011-03-29T20:30:00.002-04:00

By: Joe Scarborough

Self-righteousness is a dangerous vice. It breeds arrogance and moral blind spots for those who come to believe they are superior to those who share different worldviews.

Televangelists have fallen prey to this feeling of superiority, until the time they are caught crawling on the ground outside a hooker’s hotel room. Politicians have also wallowed in the grandiosity of their moralistic worldview, until they too fall prey to the hypocrisy that eventually snags all self-righteous moralizers.

For a decade now, we have been told of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s moral failings. They have been regularly compared to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and every other tyrant of the past century. Bush has been damned by the ministers of the far left as a war criminal, a fascist and a Nazi when labeling his policies as overly ideological and deeply flawed would have sufficed.

But that was never enough for the carnival barkers on cable news or the blogosphere. For the American left, Bush had to be condemned as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil.

That extremism required that the Bush years be filled with images of CODEPINK protesting on Capitol Hill, anti-war activists clogging the streets of New York City and left-wing commentators beating their chests with the self-righteous indignation of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

But in the morally murky afterglow of the Obama years, the certainty of these secular saints has melted away.

President Barack Obama bowed to his generals’ demands by tripling troops in an unending war. CODEPINK did nothing.

Obama backed down on Guantanamo Bay. Anti-war protesters stayed at home.

America invaded its third Muslim country in a decade. The American left meekly went along. Without the slightest hint of irony, liberals defended the president’s indefensible position by returning again to a pose of moral certainty.

Democrats streamed to the floors of the House and Senate to praise the president for invading Libya. It was, after all, a moral mission that would stop the slaughter of innocent civilians. Whether protesting for peace or calling for war, these liberals once again convinced themselves of the moral superiority of their positions.

While one can make the moral argument that countries can be attacked strictly on humanitarian grounds, that argument is laughable when it comes to Libya.

How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? During Saddam’s two decades in Iraq, he killed more Muslims than anyone in history and used chemical weapons against his own people and neighboring states.

With the help of his equally despicable sons, Uday and Qusay, Saddam devastated Iraq, terrorized his people and destroyed that country’s environment. By the time American troops deposed him in 2003, Saddam had killed at least 300,000 of his own people — and human rights groups say that tally does not even include the million-plus casualties his invasion of Iran caused.

If Obama and his liberal supporters believed Qadhafi’s actions morally justified the Libyan invasion, why did they sit silently by for 20 years while Saddam killed hundreds of thousands?

And how do they claim the moral high ground in Libya while not calling for the immediate invasion of Syria? The monstrous Bashar al-Assad regime is slaughtering his own people by the hundreds. More killings are sure to happen as that corrupt regime teeters on the brink of collapse.

In Yemen, the situation is no better. Government snipers shoot unarmed women and children from the rooftops of Sanaa. Should we follow Obama’s example in Libya and invade that country in the name of humanitarian relief? Or should we step into the breach in the Ivory Coast, where a terrifying civil war has led to a million refugees fleeing that country. And why do we not enter Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered over the past decade in a civil war of horrifying proportions?

Katrina vanden Heuvel, one of the few liberals to take a principled stand against what America is doing in Libya, has written in The Nation that the anti-war left has been silent since Obama took office because they don’t want to hurt the president’s reelection chances.

In defending Obama’s Libya offensive, they are compromising their own morals. The American left is also making it abundantly clear that it does not find all wars morally reprehensible — only those begun by Republicans.

This Week in American Military History !

2011-03-15T13:45:00.000-04:00

From the Birth of West Point to "a Bulldog of a Fighter" !

Mar. 14, 1951: United Nations forces under the command of U.S. Army Gen. Matthew B. Ridgeway recaptures Seoul, Korea.

Mar. 15, 1781: British Army forces under the command of Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis march toward a pyrrhic victory over Continental Army and militia forces commanded by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Greene at Guilford Courthouse (near present-day Greensboro), N.C.

Once engaged, the two armies fight for less than two hours. Tactically, it ends in a victory for Cornwallis, who drives Greene’s forces from the field. But British losses are heavy.

Cornwallis will purportedly say, “I never saw such fighting since God made me. The Americans fought like demons.” When word of Guilford Courthouse reaches London, Parliamentarian Charles James Fox will declare: “Another such victory would ruin the British army!”

Cornwallis’ entire army will surrender to the combined American-French forces of Generals George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, Virginia, Oct. 19, almost seven months to the day after Guilford Courthouse.

Mar. 15, 1916: As World War I rages in Europe, a U.S. Army expeditionary force under the command of Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing crosses into Mexico in pursuit of the bandit, Pancho Villa.

Though Villa will not be captured (he will be assassinated in 1923), the expedition will serve as both a proving ground for new American weapons systems and a combat-campaign prep school for many of the officers and men destined for European fighting in 1918.

Pershing – nicknamed “Black Jack” because of his command of black soldiers in the late 19th century – will ultimately command the American Expeditionary Force in World War I.

Mar. 16, 1802: Pres. Thomas Jefferson signs into law the establishment of a corps of engineers, which “shall be stationed at West Point in the State of New York and shall constitute a Military Academy.” The United States Military Academy is born.

George Washington, Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and others “desiring to eliminate America's wartime reliance on foreign engineers and artillerists, [had] urged the creation of an institution devoted to the arts and sciences of warfare,” according to the official West Point website.

Mar. 16, 1945: Though Japanese resistance will continue for several more days, Iwo Jima is declared secure.

The following day, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, will issue his now-famous communiqué:

“The battle of Iwo [Jima] Island has been won. The United States Marines by their individual and collective courage have conquered a base which is as necessary to us in our continuing forward movement toward final victory as it was vital to the enemy in staving off ultimate defeat. … Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Mar. 17, 1776: British forces under the command of Gen. Sir William Howe begin evacuating Boston after Howe reluctantly concludes that the American artillery positions atop Boston’s commanding Dorchester Heights are “impregnable.”

Mar. 18, 1945: Some 1,250 American bombers and their fighter escorts roar toward Berlin in one of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ “heaviest” bombing raids on the German capitol.

The Nazis are finished. In six weeks, Adolf Hitler will commit suicide.

Mar. 18, 1945: Adm. Marc A. Mitscher’s Fast Carrier “Task Force 58” begins a several-day series of attacks on Japanese bases at Kyushu, Honshu, and Shikoku in preparation for the forthcoming Okinawa campaign. The enemy will mount a counterattack, but with only moderate effect. Japanese losses of shore facilities, aircraft, and men will be heavy.

In less than two years, Mitscher will die of a heart attack. Adm. Arleigh Burke will remember him as “the preeminent carrier force commander in the world. A bulldog of a fighter, a strategist blessed with an uncanny ability to foresee his enemy's next move, and a lifelong searcher after truth and trout streams, he was above all else – perhaps above all other – a Naval aviator.”

Mar. 19, 1916: Four days after “Black Jack” Pershing crosses into Mexico, the U.S. Army’s 1st Aero Squadron under Capt. (future major general) Benjamin D. Foulois joins the hunt for Pancho Villa. Though Foulois’ aircraft will be used primarily for observation and delivery of dispatches, the squadron will be the first to test tactical air support of ground forces.

Today, the U.S. Air Force’s 1st Reconnaissance Squadron traces its lineage back to the 1st Aero Squadron.

Mar. 19, 2003: U.S. and coalition air and sea forces fire the opening shots in the invasion of Iraq.

Plans to invade Israel prepared !

2011-03-07T21:50:00.001-05:00

Terrorists looking to occupy

Jesus' home region of Galilee !

Sources close to the Hezbollah – which Israel and the United States regard as a terrorist group – have told G2Bulletin that the organization has devised military plans to occupy "Galilee," or northern Israel, should the Jewish state attack Lebanon, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

A few weeks back, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a public speech commemorating Hezbollah "martyrs," particularly Hezbollah operations chief Imad Muganiyeh whom Hezbollah believes Israel assassinated in Syria two years ago, that Hezbollah was prepared to occupy the region.

"If Israel tries to invade Lebanon again, then be ready to occupy Galilee," Nasrallah declared.

Now, a source close to Hezbollah said that plans have been devised to allow faction members to occupy Galilee within a matter of hours, based on knowledge of the area by residents who left and now reside in Lebanon.

"Hezbollah's resistance has detailed knowledge of the nature of the landscape and can thereby move easily," the source said. "Tactically, it is very much possible and even in a very short period of time.

"Hezbollah is well trained for this and they know every square meter in all of Galilee. They don't even need tunnels. They have areas like Maroun Al Ras that can allow them to study the territory," he added.

He said that Hezbollah needs only to hold seven or 10 of the districts there.

"And with small groups of about 40 to 50 well-trained and well-equipped fighters, they can take control, and force a siege on the entire area making close combat impossible for Israel."

Attorney General Mark Levin: Won't Enforce Roe v. Wade !

2011-03-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON

January 21, 2013

Barely twenty-four hours after her inauguration as America's first woman chief executive, President Sarah Palin announced today that Attorney General Mark Levin has been instructed to stop defending Roe v. Wade and abortion in a wave of fresh lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country.

Said the Attorney General:

"Roe v. Wade contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of unborn children and their potential intimate and family relationships -- precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the (Constitution's) Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against."

"Much of the legal landscape has changed in the 40 years since the Supreme Court created a so-called 'right to privacy,' which has no constitutional basis and no tangible form," Levin said in a statement. He noted that various Supreme Court justices have previously ruled that laws authorizing the taking of the life of an unborn child are unconstitutional and that Congress has forbidden the federal government from paying for abortions.

At the White House, a spokesman said Palin herself was never one to be "grappling" with her personal view of abortion, and has always personally opposed Roe v. Wade as "unnecessary and unfair."

Levin wrote to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that Palin has concluded Roe v. Wade fails to meet a rigorous standard under which courts view with suspicion any laws targeting minority groups who have suffered a history of discrimination. "The unborn, perhaps the most vulnerable minority group in history, have a severe history of discrimination," added the new attorney general.

The attorney general also said the Justice Department had defended the law in court until now because the government was able to advance reasonable arguments for the law based on a less strict standard.

On Wednesday, Levin said the president has concluded that, given a documented history of discrimination against the unborn, classifications that include genetic detection of sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny than the department had been applying in legal challenges to the act up to now.

The attorney general said the department will immediately bring the policy change to the attention of two federal courts now hearing separate lawsuits targeting Roe v. Wade.

The decision brought an angry response from Planned Parenthood. In what sources say was a heated phone conversation with the head of the pro-abortion group, one shocked Justice Department career attorney said the Attorney General was heard to say:

"Get off the phone you big dope."

Rush To Dems: The Worst Thing You Ever Did Was Pass ObamaCare !

2011-02-23T02:25:00.000-05:00

You Overreached By A Factor Of A Gazillion !

Blame Righty: A condensed history !

2011-01-28T21:23:00.001-05:00

By Michelle Malkin

I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been “far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than” they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It’s time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.

For the past two years, Democrat officials, liberal activists, and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Alas, the Obama administration’s political and media foot soldiers have proven themselves incapable of such restraint.

In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill instructor and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprits of the spree were the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).

That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others, and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the Left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent of undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the “huge anti–immigrant backlash in this country” – never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism, and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.

In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration’s report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the Tea Party, talk radio, and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. The state party chair, Pat Waak, singled out Tea Party activists and blamed “people opposed to health care” for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far Left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democrat candidate.

In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in an online magazine post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.” Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed “anti-government” bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, “conservative media personalities, websites, and even members of Congress.” So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.

In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to Tea Party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church, and airlines.

In May 2010, liberal New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.

In August 2010, Democrat supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a “firebombing” at the congressman’s St. Louis office on Tea Party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, enraged over a paycheck dispute.

President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that “Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.” But as the progressive Left’s smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.

Hussein's Choice !

2011-01-18T20:36:00.001-05:00

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

President Obama has made all the symbolic moves he needs to move to the center. But the essence of successful triangulation has to be rooted in policy not in image. As key policy issues come up in Congress, the president will have to move to the center or continue to hang out on the left. His choice will set the stage for the elections of 2012.

The symbolism of his response to the Tucson shootings reminded us of President Clinton at Oklahoma City. His initiative to reduce federal regulation is, at least, a cosmetic improvement. (Although it comes as he prepares, by executive action, to impose a carbon tax on American business, a ban on secret ballots in union elections, and FCC efforts to cripple talk radio). His appointment of Daily as his Chief of Staff sent a signal of coming moderation.

But the rubber will meet the road when the feds run out of money next month and need an increase in the federal debt limit to continue to operate. Republicans in the House will pass the increase, but only if the legislation also enacts big spending cuts at the same time. These cuts - running in excess of $100 billion a year - will roll back the increases in spending triggered by the stimulus package and reverse the trend of the Obama years, shrinking rather than expanding the federal government.

How will Obama respond?

If he stands his ground and refuses to sign the bill with the spending cut attached, he will trigger a governmental crisis par excellence. Social Security checks may not go out. Soldiers may not get paid. The government may close. And the fight will be simple: Should we borrow more or spend less? With public opinion solidly behind the Republicans on the issue, Obama may well see the wisdom in beating a retreat.,

But at what price? If Obama folds and agrees to big cuts in education, transportation, environmental and other spending, he will anger the left catalyzing a possible primary fight. He will, in the view of his 2008 supporters, have "sold out" and demands will increase for a liberal alternative in 2012.

And Obama will look weak as he folds in the face of the Republican Congress. He will appear to lack conviction and the power to make his views stick. Weakness is a disease that destroys presidencies.

Republicans need to make his dilemma more acute by extending the debt limit for only three months (about $500 billion) to force Obama to come back to the well for more water before the summer. And then, once again, Republicans can use the legislation as a way of forcing a rollback in Obama's agenda - like the defunding of health care?

Either way, Obama has a tough choice - fight on the wrong side of public opinion or look weak caving in!

Is Nancy Pelosi Really Insane ?

2011-01-11T16:57:00.000-05:00

Nancy Pelosi gave her farewell press conference as Speaker yesterday. I’ll pause while the wave of relief and euphoria passes over you, grateful American. In fact, I’ll start over, just so we can enjoy that sentence again

Nancy Pelosi gave her farewell press conference as Speaker yesterday. It was full of the expected boasting about achievements – it’s not as if she was going to admit she was the most catastrophic failure of a Speaker in recent American history, or that her successor faces the incredibly difficult task of repairing the damage she’s done. There wasn’t even much chance she would apologize for her dereliction of duty in failing to prepare a budget for 2011, leading us into the lame-duck roller derby in December. A thank-you to America for paying vast sums of money to transport her royal family in regal splendor aboard Air Force planes would have been nice.

In the middle of shaking her own hand, however, Pelosi said this: “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”

That’s just jaw-dropping. Pelosi presided over the greatest expansion of the national debt in history, and when I say “history,” I mean the history of the planet. Our debt soared from $9 trillion to $14 trillion on her watch. It swelled by a trillion dollars in just the past seven months.

As for Pay-Go, that ridiculous lie has been debunked so many times that even the press must have been stifling gasps of astonishment. Does the name “Jim Bunning” ring a bell? He’s the senator from Kentucky who was tarred and feathered for suggesting the Democrats stick to their Pay-Go commitments, when they were bleating that extending unemployment benefits was a super-duper emergency that could not be paid for by cutting a single nickel from our titanic federal budget. They said the same thing anyone had the temerity to remind them about Pay-Go.

This is disturbingly different from the usual spin and rally-the-troops flapdoodle a political leader is expected to shovel out. Not even the skewed perspective of a Representative-For-Life from a far-left district can explain it. As John Boehner gently takes the gavel from her hands and backs away slowly, the Democrat minority in the House must face the possibility that their new Minority Leader is insane.

John Hayward

How Jared Loughner has pushed the West closer to Armageddon !

2011-01-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

“Even if the government could censor the Internet, they’re not going to make all the alienated people who read and are influenced by these blogs magically disappear or become un-alienated. They – and you – will find a way to make their lives miserable. No amount of censorship or coercion can stop a critical mass of intellectuals who are committed to taking down the society in which they live. And of course, the government-media complex is not going to suddenly see the light and start addressing the underlying problems. They’re just going to double-down on their shaming, intimidation and totalitarianism until their empire crumbles to pieces. Those tactics didn’t save the Soviet Union or East Germany, and they won’t save Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs.” More here !

America, Land of the Free, Home of the Homophobe !

2010-12-29T02:24:00.001-05:00

I stood up before the crowd of people in the smoke-filled room. They were all sitting in chairs forming a circle around me. My fellow 12-steppers looked on in anticipation as I opened my mouth and confessed for the very first time. “Hello, my name is Skip Coryell, and I’m a homophobe.”

It felt good to get it off my chest and finally give my silent sickness a voice. I breathed a sigh of relief and thought to myself, “Finally, I’ve said it! I’m out of the closet!”

I’ve been watching this whole gay thing play out for years now, knowing that eventually the government would accept open homosexuality in the military. In the end, it really had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with morality.

A few years ago an openly “gay” man called me at my home to comment on something I’d written in one of my books. He scolded me because I had cast homosexuality in a negative light. He called me self-righteous, holier than thou, and judgmental. And then he insulted me! He called me a homophobe! My first response was to be offended. I got defensive and I argued with him. But looking back, he was right. I was, and still am, a full-blown, flaming, heterosexual male homophobe. I’m afraid of homosexuals. Not as individuals, mind you, because I’ve had some gay friends, and they were reasonable, polite, rational, and kind.

No, I’m not afraid of individual gays. I’m terrified of the group as a whole.

Their political agenda, their goals to reshape America, their political aggression and tenacity; they all scare me to death. And this isn’t an easy thing for me to admit. After all, look at who I am: I’m a Marine Corps veteran, a personal defense instructor, and I consider myself very masculine and capable. But still… the gay movement in America scares me.

On the one hand, I’m a devout Christian who believes the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong. On the other hand, I’ve always been pretty tolerant of other people’s lifestyles. I prefer to “live and let live”. So long as you don’t hurt me or mine, then I’ll leave you alone.

But here’s the rub with homosexual activists. They aren’t content to “live and let live”. They

want to teach my kids that homosexuality is a good thing, that it’s a life choice as noble and pure as Christianity itself. They want to teach my kids that John and Jim should get married and adopt a little boy and raise him according to their sick, twisted view of family. John and Jim are not a family; they are just two men having sex. I say again: Don’t hurt me or mine.

So why do they scare me so? Because they are the most successful group of sinners the world has ever known. They are a very small minority, but yet they have managed to change the views of a nation. They have convinced a vast number of Americans their actions are “normal, natural and good”. They have become so successful at terrifying, badgering and vilifying heterosexual Americans, that we are afraid to speak out against them. We are afraid to look them in the eye and say: “I don’t agree with what you’re doing.” You would immediately be labeled as a homophobe. And we all know that homophobes are judgmental, self righteous and intolerant. God forbid we should be like that.

But wait! Did I just say “God forbid”?

Hmmm, God said that men shouldn’t have sex with other men. That seems pretty cut and dried. But is it possible that God made a mistake? After all, Congress says it’s okay. The President says it’s a civil right. Is Congress right and God wrong? Is God a homophobe? Think about it. What good reason could God possibly have for telling men not to have sex with each other? I wonder who has a higher approval rating right now: God or Congress?

Is it possible that God knows what he’s doing? Is it possible that God knew that sex among men would result in a higher rate of promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases? Is it possible that God knew that sex among men would result in a breakdown in the family unit? Is it possible that God foresaw that if men had sex with men they couldn’t possibly have children and perpetuate the human race?

Yes, I’m a homophobe. I see where the gay community is taking our country and it scares the hell out of me. America is now at zero population growth, and it’s an historic fact that no culture ever survived without people. Between homosexuality and abortion, we are killing our country.

Just think about it for a minute. What happens to America if God is right and Obama is wrong?

Obama - Men having sex with each other is a basic human right.

God – Kids, don’t be doing that stuff! Don’t touch that fire! It’ll burn you!

Just thinking about Obama’s statement reminds me of Chevy Chase in the movie “Fletch Lives”. Fletch has just been thrown in jail with a Neanderthal named Ben Dover who is about to rape him. Fletch asks his cell mate.

Fletch - “What are you in here for, Ben?”

Ben Dover - “Molesting a dead horse.”

Fletch - “ Well, there’s no crime in that. It’s your right as an American. I’m trying to cut down myself.”

I know a lot of people are going to hate me for writing this. They’ll call me self righteous, intolerant, hateful, and some will even call me, you guessed it – a homophobe. But right now I’m beyond the point of caring. Before you insult me, first ask yourself some soul-searching questions:

Are you intimidated by the gay community and their plans for America?

Would you rather live in a country where you didn’t have to explain homosexuality to your kids?

Do you think homosexuality is bad for America?

Worse yet, do you think it’s a sin?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then according to the left, you’re nothing more than a self-righteous, intolerant, gay-bashing homophobe. You are a bad person.

I stand before you now, out of the closet, in the full light of day, openly admitting that I am afraid of the gay community. They are a powerful force to be reckoned with, and they are winning the war here in America and around the world. They, not God, are now defining morality.

My final question to you is this: “What are you going to do about it?”

Are you going to get politically involved and fight back for what you believe in?

Or are you going to Ben Dover and passively accept what they give you in the name of political correctness? I don’t know about you, but I Ben Dover for no man. Think about it. Decide what kind of America you want and then stand up for it.

In Praise of Mitch McConnell !

2010-12-22T18:03:00.001-05:00

This is not the post you probably were expecting from me given my harsh -- and as always prescient -- criticism of Republicans in the lame duck session. I was screaming "capitulation!" before screaming "capitulation!" was fashionable.

Notwithstanding the lame duck session, give Mitch McConnell some credit for the war which has been fought the past two years.

When Obama took office, Republicans had been routed in two consecutive elections. With Democrats having an overwhelming majority in the House, and a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, there was not much the Republican leadership could do.

As I noted before, in my post Some of Our Finest Hours, a variety of players and people fought valiant political battles to slow down the Obama onslaught. Those battles, particularly over Obamacare, created the landscape which led to victories in 2010.

But there was only so much McConnell could do.

All Obama had to do was flip one or two Republicans on an issue, and the filibuster was meaningless. Yet, McConnell managed to keep Republicans on the same page as to Obamacare (as did John Boehner and Eric Cantor in the House), so that Democrats owned Obamacare completely.

In light of the November elections, the lame duck session has been something of a disaster. The "tax deal" has been spun -- as I predicted -- as an Obama victory and move to the center. In reality, it was neither, but perception is everything in politics.

But the defeat of the Omnibus bill was an enormous victory which will give the incoming Republican House a chance to kill Obamacare in its infancy, and to impose fiscal discipline. Again, McConnell managed to keep Republicans sufficiently together to kill the bill and force Harry Reid into his one humiliating defeat in the lame duck session.

Most of the damage in the lame duck session came, once again, from a handful of Republicans -- some of whom are leaving office -- not holding to their pledge to stall votes on any legislation until taxes and the budget resolution were passed. And as National Journal found, Lisa Murkowski was Obama's best friend in the lame duck session; I'm not sure what McConnell could do about that.

But the lame duck session, as dismal as it has been, cannot define the past two years.

Against overwhelming odds in which the defeat of the Obama agenda was not possible, the best that could be hoped for was to get Obama and the Democrats stuck in the mud, to have them advance to places they did not want to be, and to set up the stage for the electoral counterattack.

I'm not a military historian or tactician, but I do understand the concept of prepping the battlefield. That is as true in politics as in war.

For his role in prepping the 2010 political battlefield, for getting Obama and Democrats stuck in the mud of their own creating, and for giving us the possibility of significant gains in the coming years, Mitch McConnell deserves our praise.

Condoleeza Rice Corrects Katie Couric on Iraq War History !

2010-12-14T00:15:00.000-05:00

Hussein: The greatest president ever !

2010-12-06T21:46:00.003-05:00

Two years ago, we elected Barack Obama president.

Here is what we got:

1. He balanced the budget as he promised.

2. He repealed all of the Bush tax cuts, which he said had created the deficits.

3. He brought all the troops home from Iraq by May 20, 2010, as he promised.

4. He committed as many extra troops to Afghanistan to win what he called the real war.

5. He restored the world’s faith in America.

6. He worked with Republicans to achieve health insurance reforms and his other bills.

7. He had the most ethical White House ever.

8. He read every bill before signing them into law.

9. He banned lobbyists from his administration.

10. He had the most transparent government in history.

11. He closed Gitmo.

12. He gave terrorists civilian trials.

1. The deficit tripled. 2. He kept the Bush tax cuts for 2 years saying repealing them would ruin the economy. 3. We still have 50,000 or more troops in Iraq. 4. He added about half as many extra troops as promised to Afghanistan and seems bored with the war. 5. The Wikileak documents undermined relations with the world, already strained by his disdain of our allies. 6. He shunned Republicans. 7. While relatively clean, Van Jones did try to pressure advertisers to boycott Glenn Beck’s TV show while Van Jones was on the White House payroll. Also, Tax Cheat Tim Geithner remains as Treasury secretary. 8. He doesn’t read. 9. He would have hired lobbyist Tom Daschle as his HHS secretary if not for Daschle’s tax problems. 10. The Supreme Court just rapped the administration’s knuckles over noncompliance with the FOIA statue. 11. Gitmo remains open. 12. Civilian trials? Ha ha ha.

Mind you, I disagreed with the president on most of these policies and I am glad he failed on at least 6 of them.

But he is 0h Fer 12. A failure, especially once the Supreme Court guts Obamacare.

Had he done as promised, well, let’s just say he cudda been a contendah.

Right now, just why is he president?

What To Do If A Tea Party Family Moves Next Door To You !

2010-11-28T01:17:00.001-05:00

Coffee Party in Northern California

First, don’t panic. This is important as these people have guns. Lots of guns.

You are probably worried about property values, neighborhood safety, and a general deterioration of area living conditions. While adjustments to your daily life are certainly important for your general state of quiet and peace, there are things that you can do to lessen the impact.

Step one is to begin keeping a detailed journal. I prefer to write in the morning while my mind is fresh and having had time to quietly mull over the previous day. Writing in the evening will most always lead to a level of frustration and anger from what you have recently seen that will cloud your reflections.

In addition to relating your personal feelings, use the journal to take note of more mundane happenings. Times of vehicle coming and goings, license plate numbers, descriptions of visitors.

Frequency of deliveries such as UPS are also collectable information as most deliveries to such homes will be weapon related. Ammunition, guns, militia equipment…etc. This information will be invaluable to local law enforcement agencies when something happens in your general community. It is only a matter of time.

SECURE YOUR PROPERTY

I can’t recommend a good solid fence enough. These Tea Party People always have dogs. Usually large and dangerous. They are bred for security and often join them in the woods for their militia training. Small neighborhood children are particularly at risk and they must be taught to avoid them.

A good high fence will also help you avoid having to look at the blight your neighborhood will take on during election cycles. Tea Party homes are always covered with obscene racist yard signs. NOTE: it will do no good to place up a competing collection of Progressive candidate signs, as they will only encourage them to place even more.

Start a collection of local phone numbers to Government agencies. Keep them handy.

In addition to the important Fire, Police, and Medical, have names and contact information for such agencies as Public Health, and Code Enforcement.

Tea Party people tend to collect junk cars, trucks, or anything with wheels. Most often in a non working condition. They are quite anti-government and will most probably avoid weekly garbage pickup. Instead waiting until they have accumulated a pile large enough to put into one of the many pick up trucks that will be parked at odd angles up and down the street. They then tend to dump the garbage into secluded natural forests, wetlands etc. If possible, follow them and photograph their dumping. They care not for the environment.

A security system that feeds video directly onto the internet is your best bet to record activities.

Cameras mounted on top of your house that show not only the house, but the street as well. Print out individual photos and create a wall to gather information and place specific information on the individuals.

Talk with others at local Progressive meetings and share information. You will be surprised to find others like yourself that you can compare information with. In this way you will be able to generate a greater base of information and actual Tea Party Cell information. They never act alone.

PROTECTING YOUR CHILDREN

The Tea Party and Religion go hand in hand. Where you find one…the other is close to follow.

Protecting your children from not only the physical danger of being in close constant contact with Tea Party people, is but one of the many new challenges you will face.

Sundays deserve a particular note of caution. You will begin to notice and have to explain to children about their behavior of dress on Sundays and a general spate of activity at the residence. Tea Party people are fairly “worked up” after attending one of their racist religious meetings. It is a time for them to spread their magic and meet in small groups to plan.

They return to the neighborhood all hoped up and sooner or later will knock on your door and try to hand you or your children their literature. Even going so far as to try and enlist your children into their groups. Often sending their children directly to yours. Be on guard.

By creating a secure area for yourself, and your family you lessen the direct impact a Tea Party family will have on your neighborhood and lives. Talking with your children will alive some of the anxiety you are feeling. Becoming a part of your local Progressive groups, ACLU, local Democratic Party, and others, will provide you with a support group.

You are not alone.

In the end, your journal and constant contact with local government agencies will make living conditions so unbearable in your neighborhood for the Tea Party family that they will move. I am not saying it will be easy, or happen overnight.

President Obama has given us the tools, and the inspiration, to stand up and make change. It is your responsibility as a Progressive to point out injustice and correct it. No matter the cost.

My thoughts are with you.

Army Sending New Airburst Gun to 101st !

2010-10-15T17:36:00.000-04:00

The Army is set to field the first prototype of a new weapon that could deny the protection of buildings and canals to an enemy in Afghanistan that frequently uses the cover of local villages to fire on American troops.

The XM-25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System is a new shoulder-fired gun that shoots a fist-sized round packed with an explosive warhead that detonates over the heads of enemy forces at pre-determined ranges.

Call it a cross between an M203 grenade launcher and a 60mm mortar.

Though the weapon was originally set to go to an Army Special Forces detachment in Afghanistan this summer, senior Army officials received an urgent request from a battalion with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan for a more effective weapon to beat back their wily Taliban foe. As a result, the Army's top gear buyer, Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, orchestrated the moves to get the Screaming Eagles the XM-25 first.

Army officials would not disclose which specific 101st battalion would receive the XM-25, citing security concerns.

"The field wanted that capability and the leadership supports us providing that capability," Fuller said during an Oct. 14 media roundtable at the Pentagon. "They actually wanted a large number [of XM-25s] and we just can't build them that fast."

The Army agreed to set aside $10 million to purchase 36 of the airburst weapons. PEO Soldier Weapons has five XM-25s on hand and will send those, along with two civilians who will help maintain the weapons and teach Soldiers how to operate the gun.

Though the XM-25 emerged from the ashes of the ill-fated Objective Individual Combat Weapon, which was canceled early this decade, the technology has quietly progressed while Army engineers refined the fire control system and ammo and reduced the gun's weight.

Made by Heckler and Koch and firing Alliant Techsystems-made high explosive air bursting 25mm rounds, the XM-25 is a semi-auto bullpup design weighing about 12 pounds. It uses an L3 Communications-made laser targeting optic to determine a target's range and compensate for altitude and other environmental conditions to dial in precisely where the round is going to impact or explode.

Officials say the new weapon will address the range and firepower problems Soldiers face with an Afghan enemy that often fires from long distances behind tough cover.

"A squad's pinned down and they're getting fire from 600 meters away," explained the Army's top weapons buyer, Col. Doug Tamilio. "That [XM-25] gunner's going to come out and go 'boom, boom, boom,' fire five rounds, and there isn't going to be anybody shooting back at them."

"They're going to go 'oh my God, I want more!' "

Tamilio said that the deployment to a line infantry unit as opposed to a special ops team will help developers refine the weapon design and its use.

"The accuracy and the range of this thing are going to open up whole new ideas on how to use it," he said. "As we find lessons learned here, we'll make a better weapon system so when we finally produce this weapon on the production line, we'll have a lot of good Soldier feedback."

The Army plans to buy thousands of the XM-25 in the future, placing one airburst weapon in each infantry squad.

WW1 officially ends !

2010-09-28T13:48:00.000-04:00

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.

The bill would have been settled much earlier had Adolf Hitler not reneged on reparations during his reign.

Hatred of the settlement agreed at Versailles, which crippled Germany as it tried to shape itself into a democracy following armistice, was of significant importance in propelling the Nazis to power.

"On Sunday the last bill is due and the First World War finally, financially at least, terminates for Germany," said Bild, the country's biggest selling newspaper.

Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles, where Germany was made to sign the 'war guilt' clause, accepting blame for the war.

France, which had been ravaged by the war, pushed hardest for the steepest possible fiscal punishment for Germany.

The principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in June 1919 in protest at the scale of the demands.

"Germany will not be able to formulate correct policy if it cannot finance itself,' he warned.

When the Wall Street Crash came in 1929, the Weimar Republic spiralled into debt. Four years later, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.

Platoon commander: Pirate ‘sh– his pants’ after Marines captured him !

2010-09-15T01:53:00.003-04:00

“As soon as the first stack of [Marines] made our way into the bridge, their hands were up, their weapons were down, they moved to their knees and they were compliant,” Martin said. “At that point, they were pretty scared. One guy actually defecated himself. … He sh– his pants. I don’t know if that can go on the news or not, but that actually happened.”

The rest of the story !

Has a new legend been born ?

BONFIRE OF THE INSANITIES !

2010-09-13T19:00:00.002-04:00

Ann Coulter

In response to Gen David Petraeus' denunciation of Florida pastor Terry Jones' right to engage in a symbolic protest of the 9/11 attacks by burning copies of the Quran this Sept. 11, President Obama said: "Let me be clear: As a citizen, and as president, I believe that members of the Dove World Outreach Center have the same right to freedom of speech and religion as anyone else in this country."

Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida lauded Obama's remarks, saying America is "a place where you're supposed to be able to practice your religion without the government telling you you can't."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called Obama's words a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion" -- and also claimed that he had recently run into a filthy jihadist who actually supported the Quran-burning!

Keith Olbermann read the poem "First they came ..." on air in defense of the Quran-burners, nearly bringing himself to tears at his own profundity.

No wait, my mistake. This is what liberals said about the ground zero mosque only five minutes ago when they were posing as First Amendment absolutists. Suddenly, they've developed amnesia when it comes to the free-speech right to burn a Quran.

Weirdly, conservatives who opposed building the mosque at ground zero are also against the Quran burning. (Except in my case. It turns out I'm for it, but mostly because burning Qurans will contribute to global warming.)

Liberals couldn't care less about the First Amendment. To the contrary, censoring speech and religion is the left's specialty! (Any religion other than Islam.)

They promote speech codes, hate crimes, free speech zones (known as "America" off college campuses), and go around the country yanking every reference to God from the public square via endless lawsuits by the ACLU.

Whenever you see a liberal choking up over our precious constitutional rights, you can be sure we're talking about the rights of Muslims at ground zero, "God Hates Fags" funeral protesters, strippers, The New York Times publishing classified documents, pornographers, child molesters, murderers, traitors, saboteurs, terrorists, flag-burners (but not Quran-burners!) or women living on National Endowment of the Arts grants by stuffing yams into their orifices on stage.

Speaking of lying dwarfs, last week on "The Daily Show" Bloomberg claimed he was having a hamburger with his "girlfriend" when a man came up to him and said of the ground zero mosque: "I just got back from two tours fighting overseas for America. This is what we were all fighting for. You go and keep at it."

We're fighting for the right of Muslims to build mosques at ground zero? I thought we were trying to keep Muslims AWAY from our skyscrapers. (What an embarrassing misunderstanding.) PLEASE PULL THE TROOPS OUT IMMEDIATELY.

But back to the main issue: Was Bloomberg having a $150 Burger Double Truffle at DB Bistro Moderne or a more sensible $30 burger at the 21 Club when he bumped into his imaginary veteran? With the pint-sized mayor shrieking at the sight of a saltshaker, I assume he wasn't having a Hardee's No. 4 Combo Meal.

Adding an element of realism to his little vignette, Bloomberg said: "I got a hamburger and a pickle and a potato chip or something."

A potato chip? Translation: "I don't know what I was eating, because I'm making this whole story up -- I wouldn't be caught dead eating 'a potato chip' or any other picaresque garnish favored by the peasants." At least Bloomberg didn't claim the man who walked up to him took credit for setting the Times Square bomb because he was a tea partier upset about ObamaCare -- as Sherlock Bloomberg had so presciently speculated at the time.

Gen. Petraeus objected to the Quran-burning protest on the grounds that it could be used by radical jihadists to recruit Muslims to attack Americans.

This is what liberals say whenever we do anything displeasing to the enemy -- invade Iraq, hold captured terrorists in Guantanamo, interrogate captured jihadists or publish Muhammad cartoons. Is there a website somewhere listing everything that encourages terrorist recruiting?

If the general's main objective is to hamper jihadist recruiting, may I respectfully suggest unconditional surrender? Because on his theory, you know what would really kill the terrorists' recruiting ability? If we adopted Sharia law!

But wait -- weren't we assured by Fire Island's head of national security, Andrew Sullivan, that if America elected a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy," the terrorists would look like a bunch of lunkheads and be unable to recruit?

It didn't work out that way. There have been more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by these allegedly calmed Muslims in Obama's first 18 months in office than in the six years under Bush after he invaded Iraq.

Also, as I recall, there was no Guantanamo, no Afghanistan war and no Iraq war on Sept. 10, 2001. And yet, somehow, Osama bin Ladin had no trouble recruiting back then. Can we retire the "it will help them recruit" argument yet?

The reason not to burn Qurans is that it's unkind -- not to jihadists, but to Muslims who mean us no harm. The same goes for building a mosque at ground zero -- in both cases, it's not a question of anyone's "rights," it's just a nasty thing to do.

The Declaration of Independence is Unconstitutional !

2010-07-06T10:21:00.003-04:00

Jim Pontillo

While there is plenty of talk and rhetoric proclaiming all that is "Constitutional" or "Unconstitutional", when we examine and recognize that document which more than any other represents the soul of America, we find that document is: The Declaration of Independence.

With the simple preface, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", the novel idea of constructing government solely as best servant to the People and their God given privileges was born.

Because of the Declaration, and specifically this prefatory clause, the United States has developed a whole philosophy of thought called "American Exceptionalism".

This philosophy is what makes us special, different from any other nation on earth, and dare I say...

Better!

To the chagrin, of our current Commander in Chief, better is not better at all. In fact, better, a.k.a. American Exceptionalism, in the mind of our exalted leader, is arrogance.

To think, that we individuals might strive for excellence, driven by nothing other than our own will and the Providential opportunity with which we are presented is obscene to those like Obama who embrace a Statist ideology.

At his core, the Statist is a parasite who requires a subjugated public to advance himself. Unlike the rugged individualist who advances by grit and determination, the Statist assembles his power through propaganda that pits those rugged individualists in society who have achieved, against the sloth groups who have been convinced that achievement is an accidental occurrence falling upon those who have been "lucky".

Out of this thinking is bred a whole line of thought that has undermined our Founders vision for America and has convinced our populace that the Constitution is a "living, breathing" document which must be tempered by the populist mood of the age.

And of what character is this mood which is now arbiter and driver of public policy in America?

Schizophrenic, ignorant, sanctimonious, and dishonest are adjectives which come to mind.

It would seem, if we could apply contemporary American views and compare them to the theme of the foundational clause upon which our whole government has been built we ought to be able to find a congruence of understanding.

Let's try:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

These truths are unarguable, anyone from any walk of life, regardless of background, social or economic class, educated or uneducated would agree on undeniable fundamental truths. What are fundamental truths? Do all our inhabitants agree about them?

that all men are created equal,

declaring us all subject to the same unarguable truths, the same rule, and the same law. No individual or group would be afforded any more or any less in the eyes of our law; ergo, it is not by accident that Lady Justice adorns a blindfold when ascertaining weights on a balance scale.

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

That separation of Church and State thing kind of falls apart right here. Unalienable meaning that they cannot be taken away, and that we are endowed by our Creator—God, specifying exactly who endowed us with our Rights. It is not a stretch to infer government's only role here is to protect what God has provided. Do all American's believe this? Is this the contemporary understanding of "Constitutional"?

that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

While the Founders were content to allow us to use our imagination in interpreting what unalienable rights we were endowed with, they wrote down a couple to make sure we got onto the right track. Our most important rights were listed, and it is not by accident that Life was put first.

The order of rights was listed in a prioritized manner exalting Life the supreme right, and should any Right conflict with another, the latter would yield to the former.

If a mother felt pregnancy was in some way threatening to her Liberty, her baby's right to Life was, in the scheme of things, of such priority that mom's Liberty could be impinged for the duration of the child's term. Using the word "was" instead of "is" might seem offensive, however, in today's culture, do we respect this distinction? Is abortion today viewed as greater right than is Life?

Has Roe vs. Wade established a women's right to end her pregnancy at any point before a child's birth, for any reason? Have we not heard Senators and Representatives state that the "right to choose" is a Constitutional right?

Politicians love to invoke all that is "Constitutional" or "Unconstitutional" in support of their views or positions, but if we cannot even agree on the most fundamental right from our most fundamental document, how on earth can we intellectually interpret whether or not Arizona can or cannot ask someone who has broken a law if he/she is in this country legally or not?

Today the United States recognizes Constitutionality of the Constitution, based not at all upon the words of the document, but upon the urges and inclinations of those who have seized power by appealing to the largest voting bloc.

There is no such thing as a Constitutional right which cannot be readily overturned, and in the contemporary interpretation, our Declaration of Independence is...

Unconstitutional.

I’ve Never Seen Israel Like This !

2010-06-29T17:32:00.001-04:00

Jerusalem—I visit Israel at least once a year, so I have an opportunity to observe changes in the country's concerns. Never before have I sensed such a mood of foreboding, which has been triggered by two issues above all—the looming impasse in relations with the United States and a possible military confrontation with Iran.

In response to American pressure that began shortly after President Obama took office, the Netanyahu government agree last November to a temporary and partial freeze on construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which averted an immediate crisis. The freeze expires in September, however, and it will not be renewed. As I write, the central committee of the Likud Party is meeting to consider a resolution supporting renewed construction in all parts of the country. Netanyahu has signaled that he will not oppose the resolution, which its proponents describe as a way of pinning him down and removing all ambiguity about Israel's future course. The Prime Minister is scheduled to visit the United States in early July and to meet with President Obama. In the face of an Israeli stance that will torpedo the current proximity talks in the fall, what will the president say to him? If Netanyahu leaves Washington without a clear sense of the U.S. stance, he and everyone else will interpret it as a signal that he can stay the course at minimal price.

There are persistent rumors here that the Obama administration hopes to bring down the current Israeli government and replace it with a more tractable coalition. Don't hold your breath. The potential new coalition member--the Kadima Party headed by Tsipi Livni—will not join unless Netanyahu fundamentally alters his stance in the negotiations with the Palestinian. Headed by Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline forces in the current coalition will not accept Kadima unless it accepts a tough government platform including the transfer of Israeli Arab villages to a new Palestinian state in return for the incorporation of major West Bank settlements into Israel. Netanyahu's stated position is that he will accept Kadima as an addition to the coalition but not as a replacement for Lieberman and Company. To bring about a new coalition without the hardliners, the Obama administration would have to threaten Israel with measures at least as tough as the ones George H. W. Bush and James Baker implemented two decades ago against the Shamir government, risking a huge domestic political backlash.

Looking farther east, most Israelis—including many who are very dovish vis-a-vis the Palestinians—believe that only military force can prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in the near future, and they cannot understand why the United States resists this conclusion. According to Ha'aretz, eyewitnesses on the ground support a recent report from the Times of London that Saudi Arabia has agreed to open its airspace to Israeli aircraft "as part of preparations for a possible attack on Iran." (Israel refused to comment on this report, which the Saudis of course have denied.)

A few months ago I participated in a day-long exercise, organized by the Brookings Institution, simulating the aftermath of a surprise Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The outcome wasn't pretty—a forceful Iranian attack on American allies throughout the region and a serious rift in relations between Israel and the United States. The Israeli team hoped that the United States would back them with military measures against Iran that the American team refused to initiate.

In both these areas, the Obama administration has been playing for time. But the sand in the hourglass is running down quickly. Some time this fall, an administration headed toward a midterm election with a faltering economy and negative developments in two war zones may confront a genuine Middle East crisis. We can only hope that its contingency plans are in place and that they're better than BP's.

The Goddess hit's it out of the park again !

2010-06-18T00:09:00.005-04:00

ALVIN GREENE: THE MOST QUALIFIED DEMOCRAT I'VE EVER SEEN

Democrats have decided that Alvin Greene's surprise victory in the South Carolina Democratic senatorial primary must be the result of a Republican dirty trick.

Greene beat Vic Rawl, a former state representative and judge, with a whopping 60 percent of the vote in last Tuesday's primary, despite Greene's having no job, no house, no campaign website, no campaign headquarters -- indeed, no campaign. Other than paying the $10,000 filing fee, Greene seems to have put no effort into the race whatsoever.

But he does have one thing Rawl doesn't have: In the grand tradition of legendary Democrats such as Teddy Kennedy, Greene has a felony arrest. (Greene's inexperience really shows here: Democrats usually wait until after they're elected to show pornography to college girls.)

So this is not good for the Democrats. Naturally, therefore, they're blaming Republicans.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., has demanded that the U.S. attorney investigate, ominously suggesting that Greene may be a Republican plant. Clyburn is the third-ranking Democrat in the House.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann interviewed Greene as if he had Lee Harvey Oswald in the dock. Chris Matthews asked guests: "Do you think this has the look of a dirty trick -- sort of a Watergate number?" Watergate, you'll recall, involved the Nixon White House trying to persuade a mildly retarded black man to run for the Senate.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Greene was not a "legitimate" candidate and called his victory "a mysterious deal." (Yes, how could a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history come out of nowhere and win an election?)

They're hopping mad, these liberals, but it's not clear what their theory of the crime is. Before accusing Republicans of committing a dirty trick, apparently no one asked the question: "OK, but what was the trick?"

The key to Greene's victory, you see, is that he got more votes. How do liberals imagine Republicans pulled that off? Mesmerize the Democrats into voting for an idiot? If Republicans could do that, John McCain would be president.

There is zero possibility that Republicans skipped their own primary to vote for Greene in the Democratic primary. The marquee South Carolina election in last Tuesday's primary was the four-candidate, mudslinging Republican gubernatorial primary. That one was so heated, it's still to be decided in a runoff next week.

Even Sarah Palin got involved in the race, endorsing Nikki Haley (though not endorsing anyone in the Nevada primary, as I incorrectly gave her credit for in last week's column).

Not surprisingly, more than twice as many South Carolinians voted in the Republican primary (424,893) as voted in the Democratic primary (197,380). Not only that, but a higher percentage of Republican primary voters chose a candidate for Senate (97.12 percent) than did the Democratic primary voters (86.24 percent).

Perhaps realizing this, liberal loons (Keith Olbermann) are now pushing the theory that Republicans somehow ... rigged the voting machines! (This is what happens when you know absolutely nothing about politics but are given a TV show.)

I promise you, if Republicans could have rigged any voting machines, they would have made sure Nikki Haley won by 51 percent, instead of 49 percent, to avoid next week's runoff.

The only thing a Republican could possibly have done is pay Greene's filing fee. It's likely that someone paid his filing fee, inasmuch as Greene doesn't appear to have enough money to buy a sandwich.

But anyone could have paid it -- ACORN, a community organizer, a stimulus grantor, Betty White. If a Republican paid the $10,000 filing fee, why not give Greene another hundred bucks for a campaign website? Or how about making it $150, so Greene could buy a new suit?

But, for the sake of argument, let's say a Republican paid Greene's filing fee. Even the worst-case scenario is still not half as bad as what liberals did to Sen. Patrick Leahy's Republican opponent in 1998. To the delight of the media, liberals ran a simpleton dairy farmer, Fred Tuttle, in the Republican primary that year against a millionaire lawyer, Jack McMullen.

As in the South Carolina race, the serious candidate, McMullen, spent far more than the prank candidate -- by about $300,000 to $200.

And as with Greene, Tuttle was a feeble-minded everyman. He had starred in a movie, "Man With a Plan," made by his Harvard-graduate neighbor, about a cornball farmer who runs for Congress. Having "Fred" actually run for the Senate was openly described as a publicity stunt.

Fred won the primary and promptly endorsed Leahy.

The media lavished praise on the "gentlemanly" Senate race, with The Associated Press calling it a "calm, folksy Senate campaign." Reporters think there's too much "mudslinging" when the Republican candidate doesn't immediately endorse the Democrat.

The movie starring Fred was run on PBS, sponsored by Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and Fred -- the winsome simpleton -- was fawned over throughout the media. (CBS' Bill Geist to Tuttle: "Are you a sex symbol?")

That's a far cry from how reporters are treating poor Alvin Greene:

CNN anchor Don Lemon: You're mentally sound, physically sound? You're not impaired by anything at this moment?

Greene: No. Just -- I'm OK.

Lemon: No, just what?

Greene: I'm OK.

Lemon: Quite honestly, you don't sound OK. Are you impaired by anything right now?

Greene: No.

I suppose you could say the Republican primary in Vermont was irrelevant anyway since Sen. Leahy was a shoo-in for re-election.

But so is Jim DeMint, Alvin Greene's current opponent. Leahy won his prior election, in 1992, 54.2 percent to 43.3 percent. Jim DeMint won his last election, 53.7 percent to 44.1 percent.

And Alvin Greene is clearly more qualified to be a senator than Patrick Leahy.

Ann Coulter

Happy Flag Day !

2010-06-14T01:04:00.002-04:00

The Birth of Defiance

The American flag is 233 years old today. The President has proclaimed the entire week to be Flag Week, which sounds like a good idea to me. She deserves a good long birthday celebration.

The American flag is the symbol of our nation, and it is recognized around the world as a symbol of liberty. It is also a symbol of defiance. Much of the human race perpetually teeters on the edge of a brutal abyss, thousands of years deep, its bottom thick with the blood and bone of slaves. The twentieth century is littered with the work of educated people who provided elegant justifications for crawling back into the pit. The century before it was full of poetry written in praise of empire. Our forefathers stood beneath Old Glory as an act of defiance against the abyss and its servants. Every one of you who raises that flag today is equally defiant, in the face of savage enemies.

Our national anthem was written in awe of the American flag, soaring triumphantly on the morning breeze after a night of cannon fire. Liberty has spent many mornings walking above forts, trenches, and foxholes, clad in her tattered gown of red, white, and blue. She is kept warm by the love of those who died for her. She rises with them in the hours after battle, but she only climbs halfway to heaven. The stars that welcome their souls are mirrored on her breast, while the blood and bone of their sacrifice stream behind her as she walks the long road to the last battlefield… a destination she will not reach during our lives, or those of our grandchildren. The American Revolution is not over. Its final victory will come in an hour when all men and women share the spirit of those who raised our colors, and swore they would never fly above an empire.

This flag was not meant to be kept within the borders of our fifty states. It is a gift of genius and courage, presented to all mankind by patriots who refused to turn away from the divine truth of equality and inalienable rights. The American flag carried that truth through a forest of muskets and bayonets, into all the shackled corners of the world, past the frozen forests of Europe and the graveyard islands of the Pacific, and to the grey dust of the Moon. It passes nightly over the communist squalor of Cuba and North Korea, the butchers of Tiananmen Square, and the high priests of the Middle Eastern death cult. Let none of them ever look upon the Moon without remembering that free men walked there first. No slave or suicide bomber will ever leave a footprint beside the one Neil Armstrong made. No servant of darkness will ever touch the flag he planted there.

The American flag is not a symbol of conquest. It has passed above countless captive lands, and returned home when those lands were freed. Spoiled children love to whine about wars of conquest, fought for money and oil. What a sad little fantasy! The flag of the United States has never been carried by thieves. It rises over the sites of disasters around the world, glowing on the uniform of soldiers who shoulder their rifles to carry food and medicine. It stood watch upon the ramparts we built to save Europe from communism, after we saved them from fascism. We have made a gift of the future to broken nations across the globe, and often receive nothing but sneering contempt in return. We’d do it again in a heartbeat.

There is a reason the enemies of civilization are quick to burn the American flag. Their twisted ideals cannot long survive in her shadow. May the sick and starving people of the Earth always look upon that flag as a symbol of hope and deliverance. May tyrants and theocrats always recoil from it in terror. We almost tore that flag in half once, in a Civil War that left over half a million dead beneath her. She survived that ordeal, as she has endured every other. The children of a distant future will remember her as an eternal symbol of defiance against domination and murder. It’s a challenge we should all be proud to issue, until the joyous day when it is repeated in each of humanity’s beautiful languages, beneath every one of our flags.

Hussein's Would-Be Peace Partners Hang 7-Year-old Boy for Spying !

2010-06-10T23:27:00.006-04:00

Muslim Bastards !

Twisted Taliban militants took terror to a new low by accusing a 7-year-old boy of spying - and hanging him high.

That outrage drew immediate condemnation from the Afghan president, who called the execution a "crime against humanity."

"I don't think there's a crime bigger than that, that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit," Hamid Karzai said Thursday. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy. A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a 7-year-old boy

The execution happened Tuesday in the embattled Helmand province, said Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

"The innocent boy was not a spy, but he may have informed the police or soldiers about planted explosives," Ahmadi told Central Asia Today.

"If this is true, it is an absolutely horrific crime," added British Prime Minister David Cameron, while on a stop in Kabul. "I think it says more about the Taliban than any book, than any article, than any speech could ever say."

The victim was reportedly the grandson of a tribal elder.

The Taliban has targeted tribal leaders who have supported the Karzai government or took part in U.S. directed reconstruction programs.

Hanging is a favorite Taliban terror method for getting rid of enemies - and sending a message to other would-be opponents.

Read more:

No Country For Old Hens !

2010-06-09T01:22:00.002-04:00

Dr. Zero

It’s easy to see the contemptible end of Helen Thomas’ career as a metaphor for the twilight of the entire dinosaur media. Her departure is the latest tremor in a rapidly shifting print and television landscape. This is no country for old hens.
Fellow Green Room contributor Karl’s fine roundup of media reaction to the Thomas retirement includes a quote from Jonah Goldberg of National Review, making the point that Helen Thomas has been “a nasty piece of work” for a long time. Why did the White House press corps spend decades reserving an honorary seat for an ancient lunatic? Press briefings are a structural chokepoint that new media can’t bypass – there are only so many seats available, and only so much time the President and his spokespeople can devote to answering questions. What purpose was served by allowing Helen Thomas to squat in one of those precious seats like Jabba the Hutt’s nasty little imp, hooting and screaming incomprehensible insults at everyone who got tossed into the monster pit?
A portion of the blame lies with every Administration – Democrat, Republican, and Whig – which tolerated her presence, when they could have asked for her removal, or simply shoved her into the back of the room and ignored her. The White House refrained from doing this as a courtesy to the media… or, perhaps, as a concession to self-important journalists who loveopportunities to hail their colleagues as First Amendment martyrs.
This is the kind of cozy, elitist collegiality that transforms the mainstream media into an arm of the epic super-government they worship. The media might be only the Fourth Estate, but it’s the estate us common folks have to cross, in order to learn anything important about our ruling class… and the grounds of that estate are dotted with exclusive lawn parties we are pointedly not invited to attend.
The fall of Helen Thomas is a sign the New Media have crashed those genteel lawn parties, clad in combat pajamas and digital beer hats, asking rude questions about the hosts and laughing at their sputtering indignation. The New Media doesn’t stand on ceremony. Its elder statesmen, talk radio pioneers like Rush Limbaugh, have spent their entire careers being insulted and disrespected by the mainstream press. The same political and opinion elite that indulged decades of insane prattle from Helen Thomas, politely ignoring some of her worst outbursts, was quick to trumpet fraudulent accusations of racism against Limbaugh for things he never said, to paint him as unfit for association with a professional football team. Such relentless assaults build thick skin, and sharp wits. The New Media breeds gladiators, and has little patience for deans and doyennes.
The dinosaur media love to rewrite history. Anything that doesn’t fit a preferred media narrative is quickly flushed down the memory hole. They don’t quite realize how completely the New Media has foreclosed this option. Bloggers find everything, and forget nothing. Pathetic attempts to edit the Helen Thomas narrative are already popping up… and shriveling away in the withering heat of Internet search engines. For example, take Tommy Christopher’s pathetic attempt to claim Thomas’ colleagues were filled with righteous indignation over a story conservative blogs dragged them into covering, and the controversial remarks were a shocking aberration that nobody in the press pool was “prepared to hear.” Here’s Helen Thomas on terrorism, from January of this year:
I was trying to find out why, why, what’s, look, we’ve been in this war, eight, nine years, against this so-called terrorism. And I do say “so-called” because in the newspapers, if you read, you read about the militants, you don’t read about us bombing everybody, and never really explaining why, and going into three, four different countries, Middle East, Africa, and so forth. Who are we? And why are we doing this?
Here she is from January 2009, holding forth on the way those dastardly Zionists hold President Obama’s puppet strings, just like they controlled each of his predecessors:
I think that Obama, during the campaign, made many promises, as every president, potential president does to Israel, that they seem somehow bounded by their promises, promises to uphold all Israeli goals. I don’t see how the U.S. can provide F-16s, gunships, Apache gunships, phosphorus, possibly phosphorus, and cluster bombs and so forth to kill helpless people, children who are starving to death.
This is the creature Tommy Christopher professes to have “admired for years,” and respects for “setting an example for the Bush-era press corps,” which Christopher hilariously thinks “gave W. a years-long pass after 9/11.” Sorry, Tommy. Anyone more observant than the average member of the Washington press corps heard nothing surprising out of Helen Thomas this past week.
The old media hands waving farewell with copies of their dying newspapers, as they watch Helen Thomas shuffle off the national stage, must adjust to the new reality of an online America that no longer trusts them. We’re not interested in gatekeepers and packaged narratives any more. We believe in the importance of an honest media that simply reports the news and allows us to make up our own minds. We’re out of patience with blackouts anddoctored photographs.
The press never tires of telling us how important their job is. They should spend more time doing it, and less time bending their knees at ceremonial seats reserved for their mythic heroes. The free press of a vibrant republic, at risk in a complex and dangerous world, is no place for doddering royalty.

The man lives "rent free" in liberal heads !

2010-05-20T21:32:00.001-04:00

THERE are many theories for why very conservative Republicans seem to be doing so well lately, taking their party’s Senate nominations in Florida, Kentucky and Utah, and beating Democrats head-to-head in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia. Some attribute this to a generalized anti-incumbent mood. Others say it reflects the tendency of parties in power to falter in midterm elections. Recently it has been fashionable to ascribe right-wing success to the Tea Party movement.

But the most obvious explanation is the one that’s been conspicuously absent from the gusher of analysis. Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to two words: Rush Limbaugh.

Mr. Limbaugh has played an important role in elections going back to 1994, when he commanded the air war in the Republican Congressional victory. This time, however, he is more than simply the mouthpiece of the party. He is the brains and the spirit behind its resurgence.

How did this happen? The Obama victory in 2008 left Republicans dazed, demoralized and leaderless. Less than six weeks after the inauguration, in a nationally televised keynote address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Limbaugh stepped into the void with a raucous denunciation of the new president’s agenda and a strategic plan based on his belief that real conservatism wins every time. He reiterated his famous call for Mr. Obama to fail and urged the party faithful to ignore the siren song of bipartisanship and moderation and stay true to the principles of Ronald Reagan.

Democrats responded by branding Mr. Limbaugh — whom they considered self-evidently unattractive — as the leader of the opposition. The day after the conservative conference, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went on “Face the Nation” and described Mr. Limbaugh as the “voice and the intellectual force and energy” of the G.O.P.

Mr. Limbaugh loved being tossed into this briar patch. He mocked the notion that he was the titular leader of the Republicans even as he was becoming the party’s top strategist and de facto boss.

His strategy was simple. With Democrats controlling Congress, Mr. Limbaugh saw that there was no way to stop the president’s agenda. He dismissed the moderates’ notion that compromising with the president would make Republicans look good to independents. Instead he decreed that the Republicans must become the party of no, and force Democratic candidates — especially centrists — to go into 2010 with sole responsibility for the Obama program and the state of the economy. And that is what has happened.

Mr. Limbaugh was not just the architect of this plan, he was (and continues to be) its enforcer. Dissenters like Arlen Specter, whom Mr. Limbaugh disparaged as a “Republican in Name Only,” found themselves unelectable in the party primaries. Moderates like Michael Steele, the party chairman, were slapped down for suggesting cooperation with the administration. When Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia had the temerity to suggest that Mr. Limbaugh was too uncompromising, he was met with public outrage and forced into an humiliating apology.

When the Tea Party movement emerged, Mr. Limbaugh welcomed it. The movement’s causes — fighting against health care reform, reducing the size and cost of government, opposing the Democrats’ putative desire to remake America in the image of European social democracies — were straight Limbaughism. A very high proportion of the Tea Partiers listen to Mr. Limbaugh. Sarah Palin’s biggest current applause line — Republicans are not just the party of no, but the party of hell no — came courtesy of Mr. Limbaugh. (Ms. Palin gave the keynote address at the first national Tea Party convention.) Glenn Beck, who is especially popular among Tea Partiers, calls Mr. Limbaugh his hero.

So why the lack of attention? Mr. Limbaugh has studiously refrained from claiming credit for the movement. His only intervention thus far has been to quash talk about the Tea Party becoming a third party. He wants a unified, right-wing G.O.P. in 2010, and by all appearances he is going to get it.

Rush Limbaugh came along after the age of Ronald Reagan. He has never really had a Republican presidential candidate to his ideological satisfaction. But if the party sweeps this November under the banner of Real Conservatism, Mr. Obama will find himself facing two years of “no” in Washington and, very likely, a Limbaugh-approved opponent in 2012.

Zev Chafets is the author of the forthcoming “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”

Could a coup really happen here ?

2010-05-20T16:54:00.002-04:00

TPM News
Full Text Of Newsmax Column Suggesting Military Coup Against Obama

Here is the full text of John L. Perry's column on Newsmax which suggests that a military coup to "resolve the Obama problem" is becoming more possible and is not "unrealistic." Perry also writes that a coup, while not "ideal," may be preferable to "Obama's radical ideal" -- and would "restore and defend the Constitution." Newsmax has since removed the column from its website.

Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?

Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

How Iran played Hussein !

2010-05-18T23:50:00.004-04:00

Ahmadinejad and Lula expose Obama's hapless diplomacy.

What a fiasco. That's the first word that comes to mind watching Mahmoud Ahmadinejad raise his arms yesterday with the leaders of Turkey and Brazil to celebrate a new atomic pact that instantly made irrelevant 16 months of President Obama's "diplomacy." The deal is a political coup for Tehran and possibly delivers the coup de grace to the West's half-hearted efforts to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Full credit for this debacle goes to the Obama Administration and its hapless diplomatic strategy. Last October, nine months into its engagement with Tehran, the White House concocted a plan to transfer some of Iran's uranium stock abroad for enrichment. If the West couldn't stop Iran's program, the thinking was that maybe this scheme would delay it. The Iranians played coy, then refused to accept the offer.

But Mr. Obama doesn't take no for an answer from rogue regimes, and so he kept the offer on the table. As the U.S. finally seemed ready to go to the U.N. Security Council for more sanctions, the Iranians chose yesterday to accept the deal on their own limited terms while enlisting the Brazilians and Turks as enablers and political shields. "Diplomacy emerged victorious today," declared Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, turning Mr. Obama's own most important foreign-policy principle against him.

Iran agrees to ship its low-enriched uranium to Turkey for reprocessing. WSJ's Jerry Seib joins the News Hub to discuss. Plus, worries about Europe's debt crunch eases; and new research on red meat shows that eating steak is okay.
.
The double embarrassment is that the U.S. had encouraged Lula's diplomacy as a step toward winning his support for U.N. sanctions. Brazil is currently one of the nonpermanent, rotating members of the Security Council, and the U.S. has wanted a unanimous U.N. vote. Instead, Lula used the opening to triangulate his own diplomatic solution. In her first game of high-stakes diplomatic poker, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leaving the table dressed only in a barrel.

So instead of the U.S. and Europe backing Iran into a corner this spring, Mr. Ahmadinejad has backed Mr. Obama into one. America's discomfort is obvious. In its statement yesterday, the White House strained to "acknowledge the efforts" by Turkey and Brazil while noting "Iran's repeated failure to live up to its own commitments." The White House also sought to point out differences between yesterday's pact and the original October agreements on uranium transfers.

Good luck drawing those distinctions with the Chinese or Russians, who will now be less likely to agree even to weak sanctions. Having played so prominent a role in last October's talks with Iran, the U.S. can't easily disassociate itself from something broadly in line with that framework.

Under the terms unveiled yesterday, Iran said it would send 1,200 kilograms (2,646 lbs.) of low-enriched uranium to Turkey within a month, and no more than a year later get back 120 kilograms enriched from somewhere else abroad. This makes even less sense than the flawed October deal. In the intervening seven months, Iran has kicked its enrichment activities into higher gear. Its estimated total stock has gone to 2,300 kilograms from 1,500 kilograms last autumn, and its stated enrichment goal has gone to 20% from 3.5%.

If the West accepts this deal, Iran would be allowed to keep enriching uranium in contravention of previous U.N. resolutions. Removing 1,200 kilograms will leave Iran with still enough low-enriched stock to make a bomb, and once uranium is enriched up to 20% it is technically easier to get to bomb-capable enrichment levels.

Only last week, diplomats at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has increased the number of centrifuges it is using to enrich uranium. According to Western intelligence estimates, Iran continues to acquire key nuclear components, such as trigger mechanisms for bombs. Tehran says it wants to build additional uranium enrichment plants. The CIA recently reported that Iran tripled its stockpile of uranium last year and moved "toward self-sufficiency in the production of nuclear missiles." Yesterday's deal will have no impact on these illicit activities.

The deal will, however, make it nearly impossible to disrupt Iran's nuclear program short of military action. The U.N. is certainly a dead end. After 16 months of his extended hand and after downplaying support for Iran's democratic opposition, Mr. Obama now faces an Iran much closer to a bomb and less diplomatically isolated than when President Bush left office.

Israel will have to seriously consider its military options. Such a confrontation is far more likely thanks to the diplomatic double-cross of Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's Lula, and especially to a U.S. President whose diplomacy has succeeded mainly in persuading the world's rogues that he lacks the determination to stop their destructive ambitions.

How Liberal Jews Are Enabling the Second Holocaust !

2010-05-18T00:52:00.003-04:00

Philip Klein

In the past, I've remarked to friends that the difference between a Jewish liberal and a Jewish conservative is that when a Jewish liberal walks out of the Holocaust Museum, he feels, "This shows why we need to have more tolerance and multiculturalism." The Jewish conservative feels, "We should have killed a lot more Nazis, and sooner."

I thought of this as I read Peter Beinart's new essay, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," which argues that "liberal Zionism" is in danger unless groups such as AIPAC start to take a more critical view of Israel's actions. Beinart, using a Frank Luntz survey of young American Jews as a jumping off point, writes:

Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster -- indeed, have actively opposed -- a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

The problem, however, isn't with leading Jewish organizations that defend Israel, but with liberalism. As sickening as it sounds, Jewish liberals see their fellow Jews as noble when they are victims being led helplessly into the gas chambers, but recoil at the thought of Jews who refuse to be victims, and actually take actions to defend themselves. It isn't too different from American liberal attitudes toward criminal justice or terrorism, where morality is turned upside down and the lines between criminals and victims become blurred, and in certain cases, even reversed.

In the case of Israel, what changed over time was that Israel went from a state that exemplified Jewish victimhood (a role that Jewish liberals are comfortable with) to one in which Jews were actually in a position of power, which liberals are not comfortable with. Meanwhile, Palestinians, aided by the media, effectively exploited Jewish liberals by portraying themselves as the real victims, and Israel as the oppressors. I experienced this first hand once when I went on a Birthright Israel trip (which is a paid trip for American Jews to travel to Israel). At one point, we went to the cemetery at Mount Herzl, which is sort of Israel's equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, and is located by Yad Vashem, Israel's main Holocaust Museum. While stopping at the cemetery, we were asked to offer our feelings standing in a cemetery honoring fallen Israeli soldiers, and the first American Jew who commented was this liberal girl who reflected, "All I can think about is how many Palestinian graves there are."

Israel, right now, is surrounded by terorrist groups dedicated to the nation's destruction. Palestinian society teaches its children to aspire to slaughter Jews much in the same fashion as the Nazis indoctrinated their young. Suicide bombers who die in the act of killing Jewish civilians are celebrated as heroes. It's a culture that glorifies death and uses women and children as human shields to gain sympathy from the international community -- and especially liberal Jews. And the terrorists are receiving aid from Iran, a radical nation that vows to wipe Israel off the map within the context of seeking a nuclear weapon.

Yet against this backdrop, all liberal Jews want to do is to pin the blame on Israel's efforts to defend itself, and engage in the magical thinking that more Jewish concessions will create peace and security. By doing so, they are helping the enemies of the Jews who are intent on finishing the job that Hitler started. While Israel has no shortage of critics, when Jewish liberals attack Israel, it's that much more damaging, because Israel's enemies can say, "See, even Jews admit that Israel is the oppressor."

While I would never suggest that Jews who happen to be politically liberal would want a second Holocaust to happen, I do think that by participating in a campaign to defang Israel and prevent it from taking the actions necessary to defend itself, that Jewish liberals are making things significantly easier for those who do want to carry out a second Holocaust.

Luckily, though, there are a lot of Jews in Israel who are determined not to let that happen.

Can't you smell that smell ?

2010-05-15T01:45:00.002-04:00

By Oliver North

The two presidents -- Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama -- were onstage together in the East Room of the White House for 40 minutes May 12. They each talked about how they had differed in the past and how committed they are to going forward together. Both leaders expressed great hope in their mutual "quest for peace" and the forthcoming "peace jirga," or "reconciliation talks," to be held in Kabul at the end of this month. Neither the leaders nor any of the journalists present mentioned a cease-fire or the unseen skunk at their picnic, Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Mullah Omar, secretive head of Afghanistan's Taliban movement, is one of the most wanted men on earth. His sanguinary regime sheltered Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida as it prepared for the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government's Rewards for Justice program has a standing offer of "up to $10 million" for information resulting in his capture or confirmed death because he "represents a continuing threat to America and her allies." Now, thanks to Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Mullah Omar may be a key factor in the upcoming "peace talks" trumpeted by Obama and Karzai at their joint White House news conference.

Both heads of state avoided reference to the ISI or Mullah Omar as they gushed about the "consultative peace jirga," which starts in Kabul on May 29. And each president spoke glowingly about "commitment" to an "Afghan-led peace process" that allegedly will produce a negotiated settlement among Afghanistan's warring parties -- and the country's neighbors, meaning Pakistan and Iran. Karzai announced he wanted to consult with "thousands of Taliban who are not ideologically oriented, who are not part of al-Qaida or other terrorist networks or controlled from outside in any manner troublesome to us."

Obama observed that the "peace talks" will include those who have "a respect for the Afghan Constitution, rule of law (and) human rights, so long as they are willing to renounce violence and ties to al-Qaida and other extremist networks." An awkwardly worded joint communiqu<é>e vaguely noted U.S. "support for an inclusive process that includes broad representation from across all of Afghan society -- both men and women -- and takes into account their concerns and priorities."

All of this sounds very promising to the so-called "international community" and the self-declared mainstream media. It makes the striped-pants set all warm and fuzzy to see two leaders who last month appeared to be very much at odds now standing side by side to pledge their troth. And of course, the forthcoming "peace talks" mean diplomats, not warriors, are about to have their day. Unfortunately, none of this takes into account ISI plotting about the role it intends to play in Afghanistan's future, the part being played by longtime ISI ally Mullah Omar or the nearly total lack of intelligence on what's really happening on the ground on each side of the Af-Pak border.

This lack of intelligence was evident last week -- in the aftermath of the failed Times Square bombing -- when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proffered a blunt indictment of Pakistani cooperation with the U.S. Her stunning comment, "I believe that somewhere in this government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida is (sic), where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is (sic)," created a diplomatic firestorm.

Let's hope Clinton was dissembling, because intelligence sources here in the U.S. and Afghanistan inform me that Pakistani officials indeed do know exactly where Mullah Omar is: in the hands of the ISI. This should not be news to the U.S. secretary of state.

Last month, while I was still in Afghanistan, rumors were circulating that the ISI had detained Mullah Omar in Karachi, Pakistan, March 27 and placed him under house arrest in what they call "community care." American operatives say he has since been transferred to a secret ISI lockup under the Pakistani euphemism "institutional care." According to several reports, all of this information was confirmed to U.S. officials by a senior Pakistani military officer "several weeks ago."

"Why would the ISI take down 'one of their own'?" I asked. The answer came in a mixed metaphor, but the meaning was clear: "The ISI intends to be in the driver's seat when the 'peace talks' get under way in Afghanistan later this month. And the ISI officers calling the shots know Mullah Omar is the best bargaining chip they have."

None of this bodes well for the "consultative peace jirga," on which Obama has placed his imprimatur. Some of those watching preparations for the "peace talks" predict a call for an immediate Vietnam-style cease-fire as a precondition for the conference -- and a demand to grant Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden's closest ally, safe haven in Saudi Arabia. If the Obama administration agrees to any of this, it will be akin to putting perfume on a skunk.

All hail Mighty Caesar !

2010-05-10T14:24:00.002-04:00

Click on pic to enlarge !

The Wall Street Journal !

A federal appeals court ruled last month that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to regulate the Internet. No worries, mate. This week the Obama Administration chose to "reclassify" the Internet so it can regulate the Web anyway. This crowd is nothing if not legally creative.

For the past decade, broadband has been classified as an "information service" and thus more lightly regulated than traditional telephone services. This has led to an explosion of new investment and Web innovation, but it hasn't sat well with Democrats who want more control over the telecom business, as well as with some Web companies (Google) that want more leverage over Internet service providers like Time Warner or Verizon.

Associated Press FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski did their dirty work this week by announcing that he plans to reclassify broadband lines so his agency can regulate them under rules that were written for Ma Bell in the 1930s. This means subjecting the Internet to new political supervision—from the federal government and 50 state public utility commissions. The goal is to put one more industry under Washington's political thumb.

Even Bill Clinton's FCC, under Chairman Bill Kennard, had refused to go this far. "Classifying Internet access as telecommunication services could have significant consequences for the global development of the Internet," said Mr. Kennard in a 1998 speech. "We recognized the unique qualities of the Internet, and do not presume that legacy regulatory frameworks are appropriately applied to it."

Mr. Genachowski says he's merely hewing to the political middle, pursuing a "third way" on regulation that will "allow the agency to move forward with broadband initiatives that empower consumers and enhance economic growth, while also avoiding regulatory overreach."

But Mr. Genachowski's promise to put in place safeguards so broadband companies are subjected to "only a handful" of phone regulations is hardly reassuring. Even if he keeps his word, what prevents future FCC Chairmen from reversing course? If Google or some other big political donor doesn't get its way, its lobbyists will descend on the White House or Congress, which will lobby the FCC, which may well do their bidding.

Our reporting suggests that something like that may have happened in this case. All indications early this week were that the FCC wouldn't take such a drastic step. But when a Washington Post story reported that news, the liberal "consumer" lobbies went to the barricades, and Mr. Genachowski's team sequestered itself from other FCC commissioners for most of Tuesday. Late Wednesday, he broke the "reclassify" news. Perhaps they all had overnight epiphanies.

In any case, Mr. Genachowski has provided no evidence that the current regulatory approach is failing. The Supreme Court's 2005 Brand X decision reconfirmed cable broadband's current classification as an information service, and that regulatory certainty has led to a burst of capital investment and competition.

In the past five years, U.S. companies have invested $576 billion in communications equipment and structures, according to Bret Swanson of Entropy Economics. Add computers and software, and U.S. capital expenditures on information technology since 2005 have totaled $2.2 trillion. Telecom accounts for nearly half (47%) of all non-structure capital investment in the U.S.

The FCC decision adds a new element of political risk to these investments, which can only make companies more cautious. At a minimum, the FCC action will be challenged in court and introduce years of uncertainty at a time when the economy needs all the risk-taking and investment it can get.

At worst, it will lead to a new era of political meddling in Internet investment, bandwidth allocation, and no doubt much more. Google and others who are cheering now may not like where this ends up when, say, religious right groups start demanding FCC content regulations during the next GOP Administration.

Autos, health care, energy, Wall Street and now telecom. Is there any American industry this Administration doesn't want to run?

Gone in 28 seconds: Job well done Mate !

2010-05-07T18:04:00.003-04:00

A British sniper shot dead five Taliban gunmen in just 28 seconds to save the lives of comrades walking into an ambush.

The marksman felled the rebels from more than a mile away as they prepared to attack troops on foot patrol in Afghanistan.
The corporal - whose identity cannot be revealed for security reasons - has killed a record 37 enemy fighters during a four-month tour of duty.
But his most remarkable feat of arms came when he and the spotter who accompanies him saw the group of armed Taliban.

They were taking up positions to fire on a patrol that included the platoon commander in Helmand Province.
Hiding in an old fort, the sniper prepared his British-built L115A3 Long Range Rifle.

The firearm, which fires 8.59mm bullets at three times the speed of sound and uses a state-of-the-art telescopic sight, is so effective that it has been nicknamed The Silent Assassin.
Requesting permission to shoot - needed because the British had not yet been attacked - the corporal made sure the rebel leader was in the crosshairs of his sights.
He would have had to make precise calculations in a split-second on wind speed and other weather conditions to compensate for the drift of the rounds in flight.
Moments later his commander gave him the go-ahead to fire and in less than half a minute the five Taliban gunmen lay dead.
He said: 'They gave me the "weapons free". I engaged with the first insurgent. It took me nine rounds but I took him down with the ninth.
'Then the other four had moved closer, so I took them down as well.'

Read more:

Jackasses !

2010-04-29T03:14:00.002-04:00

MILITARY PROSECUTORS WITHHOLD EVIDENCE; ARMY RANGER GOES TO PRISON FOR 25 YEARS (recently reduced to 15 years) FOR SHOOTING AL QAEDA OPERATIVE
The Story

Michael Behenna
On March 20th, 2009, Army Ranger 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Ali Mansur, a known Al Qaeda operative while serving in Iraq. Mansur was known to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell operating in the lieutenant’s area of operation and was suspected to have organized an attack on Lt. Behenna’s platoon in April 2008 which killed two U.S. soldiers and injured two more. Army intelligence ordered the release of Mansur and Lt. Behenna was ordered to return the terrorist to his home.

During the return of Mansur, Lt. Behenna again questioned the Al Qaeda member for information about other members of the terrorist cell, and financial supporters. During this interrogation, Mansur attacked Lt. Behenna, who killed the terrorist in self-defense. The government subsequently prosecuted Lt. Behenna for premeditated murder.

Not only is this a miscarriage of justice on the behalf of Lt. Behenna, who was acting to prevent further loss of life in his platoon, it is demoralizing to the U.S. troops who continue to fight on behalf of the freedom and security of our nation. Whether it is U.S. border patrol agents, members of the armed forces, or FBI agents, no individual who is serving on the frontlines in the War on Terror should be so blatantly mistreated.

We urgently need your help to correct this terrible wrong against a loyal and faithful soldier. Please contact your congressman and ask them to intervene on behalf of 1LT Behenna. Below is a brief recap of the relevant aspects of Lt. Behenna’s case.

•September 2007: 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna deployed to Iraq for his first combat experience
•April 21, 2008: Lt. Behenna’s platoon was attacked by Al Qaeda operatives. The attack resulted in death of two of Lt. Behenna’s platoon members, two Iraqi citizens, and wounded two additional soldiers under Lt. Behenna’s command.
•May 5, 2008: Known terrorist Ali Mansur was detained at his home for suspected involvement in the attack on Lt. Behenna’s platoon
•May 16, 2008: Army Intelligence orders the release of Mansur
•Lt. Behenna, who lost two members of his platoon just weeks earlier, was ordered to transport Mansur back to his home
•Lt. Behenna attempts a final interrogation of Mansur prior to his release
•During the interrogation, Behenna is attacked by Mansur and is forced to defend himself. During the altercation, the terrorist is killed.
•Lt. Behenna failed to properly report the incident
•July 2008: The U.S. Army charges Lt. Behenna with premeditated murder for the death of Al Qaeda operative and terrorist Ali Mansur.
•February 23, 2009: Lt. Behenna’s trial begins
•Government and defense experts agree on the trajectory of the bullets killing Mansur
•Prosecution expert Dr. Herbert MacDonnell initiated contact with defense attorneys explaining his agreement with the testimony of Lt. Behenna and his presentation to prosecutors supporting Lt. Behenna’s version of events.
•Dr. MacDonnell is not called to testify in the case and instead is sent home. Just before leaving the courthouse he picks up his coat from the prosecution room and says to the three prosecutors (Megan Poirier, Jason Elbert, and Erwin Roberts), ‘The explanation that Lt Behenna just testified to was the exact same scenario I told you yesterday. Lt Behenna is telling the truth.’
•Jack Zimmermann, defense counsel, asks prosecutors if they have any exculpatory evidence that should be provided to the defense (referring to Dr. MacDonnell’s demonstration). Prosecutors deny having any such evidence despite having been told by their own expert witness that Lt Behenna’s explanation was the only logical explanation.
•Prosecutors withholding of this evidence allowed them to argue that Lt. Behenna executed Ali Mansur while seated when the forensic experts, including Dr. MacDonnell, agree that Ali was standing with his arms outstretched when shot
•Lt. Behenna is convicted of unpremeditated murder and assault by a military panel of seven officers, none of whom had combat experience.
•Dr. MacDonnell contacts prosecution requesting that the information provided in his demonstration be given to the defense.
•Prosecutors provide such information after a verdict was rendered, but prior to sentencing.
•At the request of the presiding judge, Dr. MacDonnell provides his information to the court via telephone
•The judge orders both sides in the case to file briefs relating to a possible mistrial
•After reading the briefs the judge set an additional hearing and ordered additional briefs, including one from the defense requesting a new trial.
•On March 20, the judge denied defense motions to declare a mistrial and to order a new trial
•Lt. Behenna was paraded in handcuffs through the Nashville airport, the Milwaukee airport, and the Kansas City airport enroute to Fort Leavenworth Prison
•Lt. Behenna’s attorneys are appealing the verdict
•Lt. Behenna is currently serving a 15-year sentence (the 25 year sentence was reduced five years by the commanding general of 101st Airborne and reduced another five years by the Army Clemency Board. The earliest he would be eligible for parole is after serving a third of his sentence. Without parole or a new trial Lt. Behenna will get out of prison for the shooting an Al Qaeda terrorist in self defense when he is 40 years old.
1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna was an excellent officer. He received his call to serve his country while attending the University of Central Oklahoma. He is from a family of public servants, his mother being an Assistant United States Attorney and his father a retired Special Agent with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. He has served the Army and the United States with honor and dignity. To sacrifice the life of this Oklahoma soldier over the death of a known terrorist, is a breech of faith with all who are serving our country.

No Experience Necessary !

2010-04-23T01:58:00.002-04:00

Our State Department has an unquenchable thirst for wasting our money. I recently wrote about the $300,000 that the bureaucrats spent for alcoholic beverages -- about twice as much as last year,

You expected them to drink the free booze out of paper cups?

A no-bid contract for custom crystal stemware for Hillary Rodham Clinton's State Department left taxpayers on the hook for $800,000 -- yet the feds didn't get a single glass...

The glass contract -- obtained by The (NY) Post -- and other internal government billing documents are filled with overhead costs, including $117,000 for a "project manager," $63,000 for a "software engineer" and $44,000 for "warehouse housing."

Perhaps the diplomatic corps was drunk when they cooked up this deal.

(T)he documents show no purchase or delivery of a single sherry glass, whiskey tumbler, martini glass or brandy snifter, all of which are listed among fancy stemware to be procured for US embassies and ambassadors' residences overseas.

Systems Design Inc., the politically connected interior-design firm that got the contract totaling $5.4 million without competition, had no experience making glassware.

Actually, if you don't deliver the glassware, experience isn’t necessary.

Read more: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/04/21/no-experience-necessary/

It's Armageddon for democRATS !

2010-04-22T17:38:00.003-04:00

Democrats are spending trillions at the worst possible moment, with a new poll showing public trust in government at a historic low of 22%.
By DANIEL HENNINGER..
There was always something eerie about the way the Democrats said their health-care legislation was what the American people had waited "70 years" for. Invoking the ghosts of 1939 was kind of creepy. Then when the moment in history finally arrived, history got no votes from the other party. Whatever the politics, there was something ominous about all this. One felt something else was going on.

A Pew Research Center report just out, the one that says trust in government is at an "historic low" of only 22%, looks like the something else.

Dig past the headline of the Pew study and one discovers why Bill Clinton is insinuating that "demonizing" government could cause another Oklahoma City bombing. If these numbers are at all close to reality, something one can hardly doubt just now, the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government, at both the national and state level. To the extent one believes in the "consent of the governed," consent is being eroded.

Daniel Henninger says that the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government.
.
Podcast: Listen to the audio of Wonder Land. .
This report isn't bad news for the Democrats. It's Armageddon.

The survey compares views sampled in 1997 with now. The "now" is the Democrats' problem. The survey took place this mid-March. After one year of the charismatic, ever-present Barack Obama, after passage of the party's totemic health-care bill, after spending zillions on Keynesian pump-priming, the American people—well beyond the tea partiers—have the lowest opinion ever of national government.

A year ago, 54% said government should exert more control over the economy; a year later it's 40%.

Some 58% say Uncle Sam is interfering too much in state and local affairs; 53% want "very major reform" of the federal government. After health care passed in March, Pew re-sampled in early April: Trust in government rose—to 25% from 22%. Inspector Clouseau would call that a "bmp."

Pew concludes: "A desire for smaller government is particularly evident since Barack Obama took office." That's pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey without blindfolds.

Democrats could cite one passage in Pew to mitigate this dire portrait. Historically, the report notes, whichever incumbent party is standing next to a big disaster gets pulled down in the undertow. Thus Bush and the Iraq war and Katrina. They can argue that Mr. Obama and the Democrats are getting hit with the legacy of the Bush downdraft and the after-shocks of the financial meltdown of September 2008. Once that passes, and after the inevitable November losses, the economy will stabilize and by 2012 the playing field will reset to normal.

.I don't buy this. Something unique happened in the first Obama year, about the last thing the Democratic Party needed: The veil was ripped from the true cost of government. This is the ghastly nightmare Democrats have always needed to keep locked in a crypt.

Before the Internet, that was easy. Washington, California, New York, New Jersey—who knew what the pols were spending? The Democrats (and their Republican pilot fish) could get away with this. Not now. Email lists, 24/7 newspapers, blogs, TV and talk radio—the spending beast is running naked.

When the financial crisis piled in atop a recession, the Democrats' academic/pundit economists blandly convinced the party to wave a $787 billion stimulus at the problem in early 2009. Then, on April 30, the Democrats passed an FY 2010 budget of $3.5 trillion. This year the FY 2011 budget hit $3.8 trillion, reaching a post-World War II high of 25% of GDP. In March, they passed the trillion-dollar health-care bill. Total headline spending commitments in one year: about $9 trillion. That's a lot of "trust" to ask for during a recession with 9% unemployment. And now a sense is building of some broad middle-class tax grab. After soaking the rich, comes the deluge.

Demonization? No need. They did it to themselves.

Barack Obama's speeches are filled with the Democrats' core claim to legitimacy: Government must and will do good. It must "act." But in a crucial period when voters across the political spectrum were losing faith in that core claim, the Democrats lost any self-protective sense of what they were doing with public budgets. Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party (62% said they liked the Democrats in January 2009), and emptied it. Since he took office, the percentage of people who want smaller government and fewer services has risen, to 50% from 42%.

View Full Image
Associated Press .
A Quinnipiac poll released yesterday has the Obama presidential approval rating down to 44%—after health care, after the arms treaty with Russia, after the 47-nation, anti-proliferation convocation in Washington.

He insists on more government. People want less, and don't trust what they've got. They want reform. Here's the Pew blowout data:

In 1994 when the Democrats lost over 50 House seats at mid-term, the party's favorable rating was 62%, and for the Congress they controlled it was 53%. They still got killed. Now the party's favorable is 38% and Congress's approval is 25%. The Republicans' numbers are low, too, but they're not in charge.

The Democratic Party is on the edge of an electoral cliff with a long fall to the bottom. No wonder they're seeing a demon under every bed.

More democrat Hypocrisy !

2010-04-15T00:55:00.002-04:00

By Monica Crowley

During President George W. Bush's two terms, you couldn't drive far without seeing a particular bumper sticker: "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, the left treats dissent as the lowest form of treason. When the left agitates over government policies, it's considered righteous anger. When the right - and much of the center - agitate, it's painted as the rantings of the criminally and violently insane.

With Obamacare signed into law, Democrats have stopped congratulating themselves long enough to notice that the American people aren't cheering on the sidelines. According to a CNN poll released last week, 58 percent oppose President Obama's handling of Obamacare, while Gallup shows him this week with a 46 percent job approval, his lowest yet. A CBS poll released after the House of Representatives passed Obamacare showed Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorable rating at 11 percent and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's at 8 percent, higher only than Beelzebub's.

Aware that their "reform" is rejected by most of the American people and that they will face serious consequences in November, the Democrats have decided that the best defense is a good offense: Attack those who oppose Obamacare. It doesn't seem to bother most Democrats that that pernicious strategy puts them in the weird and politically untenable position of attacking most of the American people.

Over the past week, a parade of Democrats have accused members of the Tea Party movement and other opponents of Obamacare of threatening them. There may be an infinitesimal number of looney tunes who have engaged in that kind of unacceptable behavior out of hundreds of millions of Americans. But the Democrats have dishonestly extrapolated from a few claimed incidents to taint all those who reject Obamacare as wild-eyed wackos.

If this sounds familiar, it's because the Democrats have shown a disturbing pattern of demonizing those who disagree with them. A year ago, Mr. Obama's Department of Homeland Security issued a report for law enforcement called "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." It suggested that anyone who opposed abortion, illegal immigration and oppressive taxes, supported gun rights or served in Iraq and Afghanistan should be singled out for special attention. Why? Because such people might burst into a spasm of violence at any time. There was no mention of being on the lookout for potential violence committed by Islamic jihadists, even after actual acts of violence committed by an Islamic jihadist in Little Rock. (The Fort Hood shooting happened later.)

In other words, if you go to church, believe in protecting innocent life, own a gun or defend your country, the Democrats consider you a potential enemy of the state. It was no coincidence that the Homeland Security report was issued just as the Tea Party movement was gaining real national traction.

Not surprisingly, then, once they had passed their widely unpopular health care bill, the Democrats moved quickly to delegitimize opposition to it. Their defiant move in the face of overwhelming popular resistance gave them another excuse to equate big-government progressives with good patriots and small government advocates with potentially violent nutcases who must be watched.

As if on cue, this week, Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice's Joint Terrorism Task Force carried out raids against a purported "Christian militia group" in the Midwest. According to reports, nine people have been charged with plotting to kill police officers with "weapons of mass destruction." The indictment describes the group as an "anti-government extremist organization" and the FBI special agent in charge, Andrew Arena, cast it as "radical and fringe." That may be, but the description has a conveniently familiar ring to it.

Interestingly, the head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Dawud Walid, rushed to announce the raids at a CAIR banquet at about the same time the story became public. "We salute the FBI for breaking up a militia that was seeking to harm American Muslims," he said. It's curious that he would know that at a time when the FBI still had the investigation under seal. (We're still waiting to hear why Homeland Security and the FBI chose to use the descriptive word "Christian" when they seem unable to use the word "Muslim" in connection with Islamic extremism.)

It's mind-blowingly coincidental that these raids on a supposedly "Christian" militia group would come at the exact moment that Democrats were trying to change public opinion on Obamacare by claiming persecution by their opponents. They have cast Tea Partiers, conservatives, independents, Christians and militia members as all cut from the same unstable, volatile cloth. How can anyone take their opposition to the Democrats' agenda seriously when they're toting guns and being raided by Homeland Security and the FBI? They're all nuts, don't you know?

The Democrats handle dissent by isolating it, smearing it and delegitimizing it in order to crush it. The warning should be clear: If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state

The painful truth !

2010-04-13T17:43:00.002-04:00

Shortly after the Six Day war in June 1967, this Letter written by Eliezer Whartman was published in the Wall Street Journal. It seems appropriate to share it with you, in view of the current conflict and the reaction by so many of our world leaders, religious leaders, left wing press and Yefei Nefesh.

A letter to the World from Jerusalem
By
Eliezer ben Israel

I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe.
I am a Jerusalemite- like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood.
I am a citizen f my city and integral part of my people.

I have a few things to get of my chest. Because I am not a diplomat, I do not have to mince words. I do not have to please you, or even persuade you.
I owe you nothing. You did not build this city; You do not live in it; you did not defend it when they came to destroy it. And we will be dammed if we will let you take it away.

There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin , Moscow , London and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves – a human moral code.

Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightening. Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would – be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled themselves into the flames of their burning temple rather then surrender; and when finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they forgot Jerusalem they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their right arm wither.

Foe two pain filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the almighty: “ gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to our land; return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city and dwell in it as Thou promised.”

On every Yom Kippur and Passover we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in Jerusalem. Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos in to which you jammed us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism, and the final unspeakable horror, the holocaust ( and worse, your terrifying disinterest in it ) all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what little moral strength you still possessed but they forged us into steel. Do you think that you can break us now, after all we have been through? Do you really believe that after Dachau
and Auschwitz we are frightened by you threats of blockades and sanctions?
We have been to hell and back – a hell of your making. What more could you possibly have in you arsenal that could scare us?

I have watched the city bombarded twice. By nations calling themselves civilized. In 1948 , while you looked on apathetically, I saw women and children blown to smithereens, this after we had agreed to request to internationalize the city. It was a deadly combination that did the job:
British officers, Arab gunners and American made cannons.

And then the savage sacking of the old city: The willful slaughter, the wonton destruction of every synagogue and religious school; the desecration of Jewish cemeteries; the sale by a ghoulish government of tomb stones for building materials, for poultry runs, army camps – even latrines.

And you never said a word.

You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians shut off the holiest of our holy places, the western wall in violation of the pledges they had made after the war – a war they waged, incidentally against the decision of the UN. Not a murmur came from you whenever the legionnaires, in their spiked helmets casually opened fire upon our citizens from behind the walls.

Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your airlift “ to save the gallant Berliners. “ But you did not send one ounce of food when Jews starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered against the wall which the east Germans ran through the middle of the German capital - but not one peep out of you about the other wall, the one that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.

And when the same thing happened twenty years later, and the Arabs unleashed a savage unprovoked bombardment of the holy city again, did any of you do anything? The only time you came to life was when the city was at last reunited. Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of “ justice” and the need for the “Christian” quality of turning the other cheek.

The truth is – and you know it deep inside your gut – you would prefer the city to be destroyed rather than have it governed by Jews. No matter how diplomatically you phrase it, the age old prejudices seep out of every word.

If our return to the city has tied you theology in knots, perhaps you would better reexamine your catechisms. After what we have been through, we are not passively going to accommodate ourselves to the twisted idea that we are to suffer eternal homelessness until we accept your Savior.

For the first time since the year seventy there is now complete religious freedom for all in Jerusalem. For the first time since the Romans put the torch to the temple every one has equal rights. (you preferred to have some more equal then others) We loath the sword – but it was you who forced us to take it up. We crave peace – but we are not going back to the peace of 1948 as you would like us to.

We are home. It has a lovely sound for a nation you have willed to wander
over the face of the globe. We are not leaving. We have redeemed the pledge
made by our forefathers – Jerusalem is being rebuilt. “ Next year “ – and the year after, and after, and after, until the end of time “ in Jerusalem!”

Rights and Wrongs !

2010-04-10T14:34:00.001-04:00

The current health-care debate may produce some of the best civics lessons given in the United States for several decades – if we can get the media to challenge one of the underlying assumptions of government-run health-care advocates. It’s a sound bite we hear repeatedly from supporters of Obama’s health-care reform proposal, and one we sometimes hear from its opponents when they try to sound reasonable. The UN even got into the act with a declaration not long ago, insisting that health care was a basic human right.
It may sound harsh, and it may sound “unreasonable,” but health care is not a right, at least in the terms understood in the American experience. In fact, the insistence that health care is a right contradicts the basic fabric of liberty: property rights.
To start, let’s take another look at the founding documents of the US to get a sense of what “rights” meant to those who formed the nation. From the first moments of independence, the founders focused on the “unalienable rights” of free men: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The only other right mentioned specifically in the Declaration of Independence is the right to overthrow any government that does not respect those unalienable rights.
In the Constitution, the founders returned to clarify what specific rights the Creator had endowed for men and women. It is not an accident that the very first mention of a “right” in that document comes not in the Bill of Rights concerning the relationship of government to its citizens, but in acknowledging the crucial role of property rights in liberty. In Article I, Section 8, the founders provided Congress the power to create an environment for creativity and industrial impulse by “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
This gave Americans the right to control and profit from their own intellect, treating their works as individual property that the nascent nation would protect to help build a prosperous America. Instead of being a subject who had a sovereign lord who would demand tribute or even receive in some cases a royal monopoly restricting trade and goods, Americans would own their own property and prosper from its use.
The Bill of Rights also followed a pattern, which was to lift the innate, natural rights of citizens above the power of government. The rights in those first ten amendments again flowed from the concept of natural law, which flow from the individual and not from the society in which the individual lives. The rights to speech, assembly, privacy, petition for redress of grievances, to keep and bear arms, and so on come from the individual himself as a consequence of his humanity – and require no gift or confiscation from government.
Note that the founders did not add a right to health care, or to food, or shelter, or even water in this bill. Why? Each of those items existed in those days, obviously, and were just as critical to life and happiness as they are today. However, to grant a right to food, as an example, would directly contradict the idea that the farmer who grows the food has a right to ownership of the fruits of his labors – literally speaking, in this instance. It sets in motion a confiscatory requirement to satisfy that right. Someone has to seize that food and distribute it to others in order to bring that “right” to fruition.
Rights cannot be confiscatory in a society that respects the individual right to property. That’s why none of the enumerated rights in the Constitution involve confiscation. Americans have the right to free speech, but they do not have the right to demand publication in a newspaper, nor do they have the right to demand that other people listen when they speak. The right to free expression of religion does not involve occupying someone else’s church and using it to your own ends. You have the right to keep and bear arms, but you do not have the right to demand free or publicly financed weaponry. All of those examples involve confiscating someone else’s property or services, whether done through the government or by force individually.
That brings us to the notion of the “right” to health care. As human beings, we want to see people succeed to the point where they can feed, clothe, and care for themselves independently, as that establishes true personal freedom. However, none of us have the right to confiscate the services of a doctor or nurse without their consent, and without their ability to set a price for their time and expertise. We don’t have the right to walk into a grocery story to demand apples when we’re hungry, either, although we should have access to the market without bias when we can properly compensate its owner for the goods.
Arguing that we have a right to health-care goods and services disconnected from our individual ability to provide that compensation takes us down a much different path than that envisioned by the founders. It owes much more to schools of thought where private property rights have little or no meaning, where the individual gets subsumed by the society in which he lives, and where all property belongs to the people as a whole. We have seen massive experimentation with those systems in the 20th century, and they had several points in common: they resulted in a sharp decline in individual liberty, in production, and in standards of living.
The founders understood that property rights would secure liberty and the greatest good for the nation as a whole. That’s why they declared the “pursuit of happiness” as an unalienable right, and not the end result of happiness itself. They knew that creating a government that respects private property and the innate rights of individuals over their government would create the best opportunities to achieve happiness for the largest amount of people. The 20th century proved them correct, for those who paid attention.

Enemies of the state !

2010-03-31T16:29:00.002-04:00

Going Home: A Third World Presidency !

2010-03-25T00:08:00.004-04:00

Yet again, Americans must look overseas for any real analysis and perspective on our un-American president.
Here is a searing, stunning, spot-on piece on Hussein and his foreign policy in the Daily Mail. America ignores what's happening at her own peril.

Barack Hussein Obama and Indonesia: there's no place like home Daily Mail

Now that President Obama has done enough back-room deals to get the Democrats' health care legislation through the House of Representatives, he can resume making plans for a visit to his childhood home, Indonesia. The trip was on for this week, but the White House cancelled it so Obama could stay in Washington to push through the Bill.

Once he lands at Jakarta, capital of the world's largest Muslim state, he probably won't make the same mistake he made a few years ago in Kenya, when he let himself be photographed wearing a turban. Still, he may find it hard to resist the urge to go native.

One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.

What's this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first black president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is: America's first Third World president.

If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner's call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we've heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn't mean anything.

Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.

I've just been in touch with Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director, about all this. He tells me: 'Culturally, Obama detests Great Britain. He sent the bust of Churchill back without a fig leaf of an excuse. He insulted the Queen and the Prime Minister, giving them ridiculous gifts.' At one point, 'he refused to meet the prime minister.'

Here is what is happening, though the British Government seems oblivious of it. The Obama administration is ready to dump the Old World in pursuit of the One World.

Britain is being dumped. The special relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. Britain losing control of the Falklands to Argentina would just be collateral damage.

But France is being dumped, too. Obama's ostentatious refusal to have dinner with President Sarkozy during his visit to France last year was no accident. Rather than meet the French president, Obama went off to a restaurant with his wife Michelle.

Germany is being dumped. Obama has been little more than dismissive of Chancellor Merkel. Russia in turn will be waved aside.

Most spectacularly of all, the European Union has now been comprehensively dumped. The American president has refused to attend what is supposed to be a US-EU Madrid summit in May.

What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn't yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America's relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.

He believes that the US -- yes, his own country -- and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.

And Obama is America's first Third World president.

Forget Obama's Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image.

What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president's personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.

Chicago is not Obama's homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president's world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.

You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president's manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier.

What's going on? According to Dr Lucier, Obama's policy is to disestablish the United States, Great Britain and Europe from the hegemony of world power, and elevate in their place the hegemony of the Third World under international governance.

Remember, Obama is a deracinated individual. He has no roots. He is a man from an Asian-Pacific background bred to no admiration for the ancient constitutional history which, until now, has reached across the Atlantic to bind America and Britain.

The president actually feels that the US Constitution, which grew out of Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, is 'inadequate.'

You. Must. Read. It. All.

Israel tells Hussein...'Kiss our Asses' !

2010-03-24T18:18:00.003-04:00

Story here !

Cross posted at A Herd of Turtles !

The Real History of the Vietnam War !

2010-03-23T17:32:00.001-04:00

by Phillip Jennings

03/23/2010

1954—South Vietnam becomes independent state, “granted” by Geneva Convention, which they did not attend; Diem appointed Prime Minister by Emperor Bao Dai. Ho Chi Minh grabs North Viet Nam for himself, a gift from the Japanese who ‘owned’ it briefly in WW II.

Communist forces in South Vietnam begin terrorist attacks on civilians in South Vietnam, escalating to skirmishes and platoon/company-size battles. South Vietnamese forces keep Communists from any significant military victories.

1956—South Vietnam doesn’t vote to turn itself into a communist-ruled slave state irritating Europeans and the American left.

1957—The UN Security Council votes 8 to 1 (the Soviet Union vetoing) and the General Assembly votes 49 to 9 to admit South Vietnam. It becomes a member of every UN agency from which it could not be barred by Soviet veto. Becomes first UN “Almost” Nation.

1959—Communists in Hanoi pledge to conquer South Vietnam and begin sending troops to invade Laos and Cambodia to secure highway right-of-way (Ho Chi Minh Trail) having been given ‘free pass’ by Kennedy administration’s settlement with Communists in Laos.

1962—JFK backs up ‘bear any burden’ speech and approves small U.S. advisory force in Vietnam.

1963—Weasels in U.S. government, uncertain and with weak leadership, acquiesce to coup against South Vietnamese leader, Diem, who is assassinated after JFK administration forgot to arrange transportation out of the country following coup.

1965—U.S. Marines arrive in Danang. Followed by U.S. troop build-up to over 500,000 with 20% actual combat troops. Kill ratio (U.S. to Communist) remains above 10 to 1 for duration of war. ARVN fight valiantly, independently and alongside U.S. forces, losing over a million dead and wounded (over course of war) in defense of their homeland.

1968—TET ’68 Offensive. Communists lose 50,000 to 75,000 soldiers in ten days. No South Vietnamese join offensive on side of Communists. No South Vietnam cities are held by Communist invaders with exception of Hue where Communists held long enough to slaughter 3,000 to 4,000 civilians before being defeated by U.S. and ARVN forces.

US media declares resounding US defeat, primarily based on reports that Viet Cong sappers had completely destroyed flowerbeds in US embassy grounds during their final few hours before being shot. Media claims U.S. government didn’t tell them the war was still going on and begins five year pout.

Siege of Khe Sanh lifted, fewer than 300 Americans dead, between 5,000 and 15,000 Communists dead. Media decides it was ‘almost Dien Bien Phu’ except that US won, killed thousands of enemy, was never in danger of being overrun, had overwhelming airpower available as well as tens of thousands of troops in reserve.

North Viet Nam claims they never meant to overrun Khe Sanh anyway. Just a brilliant ploy to lose a few thousand men so as to divert attention from chance to lose 50,000 men in TET offensive.

1968-1975—Hoards of leftist journalists, academics, peace-activists, politicians, movie stars, folk singers, radical war-protesters, and various charlatans, fools and frauds descend on North Vietnam, reporting breathlessly that U.S. bombing is causing damage and that the North Vietnamese people don’t like it. After photo-ops and notes for books complete, all return to lives of relative luxury and safety in U.S.

Richard Nixon elected president of U.S., proving populace and media not 100% in synch.

1969---America begins to withdraw troops. Europe and NATO throw fit that Nixon won’t reveal his withdrawal plan completely. Administration suggests they subscribe to New York Times if they want U.S. military secrets.

1972—North Vietnam joins in the debate over effectiveness of American air power and launches Communist “Easter Offensive” on South Vietnamese towns. Lose 100,000 soldiers before scrambling back into North Vietnam and Cambodia/Laotian sanctuaries.

Communists walk out of Paris Peace talks. Nixon bombs be-Jesus out of Hanoi. Communists scurry back into Paris Peace talks.

1973—Paris Peace Accord signed in January. All U.S. combat troops out. Democratically elected SVN government is non-Communist. Internationally sanctioned cease fire in place. U.S. POWs released. Viet Cong army no longer exists. North Vietnamese army decimated. North Vietnam economy in ruins. US starts chats with new best friends China and Russia. American War in Vietnam Over!

U.S. Democrat Congress, not realizing U.S. had won, seizes opportunity to surrender. Votes Case-Church Amendment barring US naval forces from sailing on seas surrounding, US ground forces from operation on the land of, and US air forces from flying in the air over, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Nullifies Paris Peace agreement (which pledges support to enforce the treaty) before North Vietnam has a chance to do it for itself. (*)

1973-1974—North Vietnam rebuilds army. Receives massive aid from Communist godfathers. Begins military probe of South Vietnam, testing waters with attacks in Phouc Binh province.

US Congress debates break-in of Democratic office in Watergate complex in Washington DC and its implications for humanity, God, and future elections.

North Vietnam leaders begin planning full scale attack on South Vietnam. Discuss their fear and hatred of Nixon. (Ditto U.S. Congress) The Vietnam propaganda machine prevails after 1973, convincing the world that North Vietnam is entitled to overrun South Vietnam. Legality and morality is not challenged by attorneys or U.S. Congress.

1974—Richard Nixon resigns as President. Giving Congress scores sole victory of their Vietnam War policy.

1975—North Vietnam captures Phouc Long, provincial capital of Phouc Binh, north of Saigon on Cambodian border. Democrat Congress musters courage to sit quietly and study fingernails. Foul mouth anti-war activists, Rubin and Rudd, debate opportunity to work Phouc Binh and Phouc Long into their anti-American tirades.

1975 later—North Vietnam mounts full scale invasion of South Vietnam with 17+ divisions, spearheaded by 700 Russian tanks. US Democrat Congress expresses ‘grave concern.’

Without air power, replacement parts, ammunition, and funds (cut off by US Congress in numerous bills, amendments, rants and resolutions) the South Vietnamese army defeated and North Vietnam and its leftist allies conquer South Vietnam. (**)

Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese citizens are suddenly struck by a desire to see Disneyland and depart, primarily in boats, through heart-breaking horror of piracy, rape, murder, and starvation to come to America. (Where they become one of the most successful immigrant groups in US history).

Although now supplied with a flotilla of boats, none of the anti-American leftists and radicals, escape ‘immoral’ America back to now ‘free’ Vietnam.

1975-Until Sun Burns Out—Draft dodgers, leftist journalists, peaceniks, academics, fools and charlatans (See 1968-1975 above) begin self-justification of cowardly acts and empirically wrong opinions, with attacks on American Veterans, and the South Vietnamese Government and its army under guise of morality and ‘evil’ motives of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

1975-present—Communist Vietnam plans and manages its way to one of the poorest and most repressive nations on the face of the earth. (***)

(*) At the time, America had several treaty agreements to provide support and protection for its allies and favored nations. 50,000 troops in Korea. 300,000 troops in Europe. The US Navy protecting Taiwan. All had various guarantees that the US would intervene if Communist forces crossed international borders. These precedents were ignored by the US Congress in regard to the Vietnamese peace arrangements.

(**) Contrary to the chatter of Communist propaganda aptly spread by their allies in the US, the South Vietnamese army did NOT just roll up in front of the invading North Vietnamese. In one of the last major battles of the war, (March 1975) the NVA 6th and 7th Divisions attacked Xuan Loc, forty miles northeast of Saigon. They were joined, after being repulsed by the South Vietnamese defenders (the Army Republic of South Vietnam 18th Division), by the NVA 341st Division, who unleashed a four thousand round artillery bombardment on the town. Spearheaded by Russian tanks the three Communist divisions assaulted the ARVN positions and were again repulsed. Finally with a force of 40,000 Communist troops assaulting them, the 5,000 ARVN soldiers were overwhelmed.

(***) In final irony, Vietnam begins to adopt capitalistic model in late 20th Century, just as U.S. decides it hasn’t worked very well for us and moves (in 2008) toward old Viet Nam model of socialism and lying to people. Two hundred thirty plus years of American success was just ‘good luck’ new administration declares.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip Jennings served in Vietnam with the United States Marine Corps, flying helicopters, and in Laos as a pilot for Air America. He is the author of the critically acclaimed comic novels Nam-A-Rama and Goodbye Mexico, and won the Pirate�s Alley Faulkner Society first prize for fiction with his short story, �Train Wreck in a Small Town.� A successful entrepreneur, he is currently CEO of Molecular Resonance Corporation, which is developing technology to detect and disarm Improvised Explosive Devices. He lives with his family near Seattle, Washington.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will Charlie Crist ditch the GOP for the U.S.Senate ?

2010-02-25T19:08:00.001-05:00

By Jack Funari

Two highly placed and independent sources, speaking strictly on background, tell me that Gov. Charlie Crist is preparing to leave the Republican Party and run as an independent in the race for the U.S. Senate.

With Crist trailing Marco Rubio by 18 points in the latest polls, the Crist campaign has been in panic mode, launching attack after attack on the conservative Rubio.

Yesterday, the attacks reached a crescendo with the Crist campaign, and/or his disgraced Republican Party of Florida thug bootlickers, leaking Rubio's credit card expenses from his time as speaker of the Florida House.

According to published reports, the former RPOF chair, the bovine bully-boy buffoon Jim Greer, spent more in a month than Rubio did in his entire two years as state House speaker. If all the Crist campaign has on Rubio is $53.49 at Winn-Dixie in Miami for ``food” and a couple of plane tickets for his wife, then it's game, set and match, as far as the Republican primary for Senate is concerned.

From what's been made public, Rubio's credit card expenses make him the most frugal of the Republican leaders with RPOF credit cards.

The attacks are not having the desired effect on the conservative Republican base because Crist, and the people who enable and support him, have lost all credibility with the majority of activists and Republican primary voters throughout the state.

Another well-placed source tells me the reason several Crist campaign staffers left recently is because, being committed Republicans, they refused to take part in an independent Senate run by Crist. That’s not confirmed by an independent second source, but it does ring true.

Now, reports from anonymous sources are sometimes wrong, so I have stopped short of reporting a Crist independent run as a verifiable fact, even though I believe my sources are accurate.

Here, in a minimalist nutshell, is why Crist will lose to Rubio in a Republican primary:
If someone told you that Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County, was going to leave the Republican Party to become an independent, would you believe them? Would you believe it about Marco Rubio? No. If you knew anything at all about politics, or anything about Rubio and Dinerstein, you would dismiss out of hand such a ridiculous report as not being credible and just another silly political rumor.

So tell me, do you believe it is possible that Crist will leave the Republican Party to run as an independent?

You do, don't you?

And that is why Crist will lose to Rubio.

Lt Colonel Allen West: "They're Running" !

2010-02-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

Washingtoons 18 February 2010
Lieutenant Colonel Allen B West (US Army, Retired)
“They’re Running”

Greetings Wheels on the Road (WOTR) readers, fellow South Floridians, and all Americans, time for another monthly political assessment….with a bit of satire. Speaking of satire, I am writing this missive to you all from beautiful, sunny, cold, and snow packed Washington DC. I am here for the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where I will have the distinct honor to speak.

Being here, I would almost postulate that DC has seen more snowfall recently that the Winter Olympics venue in Vancouver. If we could just get President Obama and former Vice-President Al Gore to apologize to God reference “man-made global warming/climate change” perhaps we would not all be freezing, even in South Florida! Coming to DC is always an experience because I always seek to find out what the politicians up here are drinking, so as to avoid.

Yesterday, Wednesday 17 was the anniversary of the “American Economic Recovery Act” legislation, better known as the Stimulus bill. I listened to the President and the pundits and just wondered, if we stimulated the economy, why is unemployment in Florida close to 12%?

Now today, I understand that the President is signing an Executive Order….how many is that now in first year….that establishes a panel to discuss how to reduce the deficit. LOL LOL LOL

Earth to President Obama, I can answer that, STOP SPENDING! Of course the President is lauded as being insightful, deliberative, and pragmatic. Heck, wish he had been those things a year ago before he tripled our national deficit and allowed the Nancy Pelosi Congress, and my good buddy Congressman Ron Klein, to vote for a $1.9T increase of our national debt, to $13T.

What is in the water up here?

That brings me to the topic of this month’s piece, “They’re Running”. In these last few weeks we have seen several members of the US Senate and House call it quits. Most recently Senator Evan Bayh and Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Kennedy, have said they have had enough. We have seen in Florida Senator Mel Martinez, Representative Robert Wexler, and Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart all quit on their promise to serve the people. Why is it that all of a sudden these individuals are stepping down? Simple answer, the American people are FINALLY starting to hold elected officials accountable and that is such an amazing paradigm change. The reelection rate for Congressional incumbents has always remained rather high in America, now they feel challenged, actually scared.

What angers me the most is that these individuals have brought us to the edge of the abyss and now walk away? They are completely complicit but yet find these inexcusable reasons for stepping down. I would prefer they all just said, “I have failed the American people”. However, that would require the very intangible ingredients missing in Washington DC; Honor, Integrity, and Character. As Plato warned, we are truly being governed by our inferiors, and in some cases criminals.

What should unhinge everyone who shall read this is that the American taxpayer will be providing a retirement salary to all these individuals, full 100%. It took me 22 years and a few trips into combat zones to earn a 55% retirement off my base pay. It takes a member in the Senate and House just 6 years to earn their full salary retirement for THE REST OF THEIR LIVES!

Therefore, realize that the inept, incompetent, and oft time corrupt individuals who granted themselves automatic pay raises, caused the economic morass in which we find ourselves, and quit to leave the American taxpayer holding the bill. This bill falls not only upon us but our children and grandchildren for this debt and deficit, and also to fund their retirement.

Why not quit, they have made for themselves the most excellent of schemes. But there is another side of “They’re Running” and that is the solution, an awesome shift which we have not seen since post-World War II. That is the resurgence of former Military who are running for Federal level political office. It has truly become en vogue to mention that you have prior military service, as opposed to touting that you are a career politician and lawyer.

Groups like Combat Veterans for Congress and Iraq Veterans for Congress are thriving with close to 20 candidates out there, Senate and House. And of course, yours truly is counted in those ranks.

America is once again looking for those Men and Women who clearly understand the ideals and principles which made this Country great. Moreover, the American people are seeking those who have taken that special oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and bear true faith and allegiance to the same”…and have put their lives on the line to honor that oath. America is turning to those who have a lineage of service, sacrifice, and commitment to that which is greater than them. Americans are rejecting the self-serving politician whose interests are no longer in alignment with that of the people.

However, let me issue a word of caution, test us and make sure we are indeed American Warriors and Patriots, not just former uniform wearers. This past Sunday I was appalled at the interview of National Security Advisor General James Jones, former Commandant of the US Marine Corps (and it is not pronounced corpse Mr President) by Chris Wallace of Fox News. I find individuals such as Representatives Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak repulsive. Former Army Generals Colin Powell and Wesley Clark have lost all my respect and regard…therefore, never believe that having served in the Military gives a carte blanche, because even we have self-serving persons whose commitment may have been well intentioned at one time……but have lost their way.

This 2010 election cycle represents an impeccable awakening of the American people, regardless of what the mainstream media and liberal progressive pundits assert. It is an awakening causing the ruling class presumed intellectual elite politicians to run away. However, based upon yesterday’s New York Times front page article, the left is already preparing for their assault on grassroots movements, Tea Party, in order to marginalize their influence. I offer them a word of caution; Americans are on to your game, hence why your viewing and reader subscriptions are faltering. It is funny to me that far left groups such as ACORN, Code Pink, SEIU, and anarchist groups can roam about freely spewing their venomous version of protest being applauded, while concerned Americans are attacked.

Finally, I know the liberal progressive political mantra is personal attacks aimed at character assassination, since they are unable to articulate principled solutions. When dealing with former Military combat Veterans running for office, stick to the issues….Congressman Ron Klein……because we are unlike your typical politician. We welcome an attack and we will fight back, as we always have done, to protect the Constitution of the United States and the American people.

It might be best for ole Ron Klein to run away as well.

Steadfast and Loyal!
LTC A B West (USA, Ret)

Hussein's Damage Control in 5 Easy Steps !

2009-12-29T13:53:00.002-05:00

Politico's Carol E. Lee has an interesting story today on President Obama's "by-now familiar pattern...for dealing with unexpected problems." As best we can figure, the Obama damage control strategy consists of these 5 easy steps:

Step 1: Deny seriousness of issue.
Step 2: Deny any admin responibility/failure.
Step 3: Have spokespeople convey O’s feelings to public.
Step 4: Blame Bush admin.
Step 5: Concede the issue days later.

Of course, it's very important that you understand the signals to know which step we're at. For example, "Obama heading to the golf course, [Cato Institute fellow Benjamin] Friedman said, 'signals that it’s not a crisis, and he’s the president and he has a lot of things to do and this is just one of them.'" Maybe it's when the president goes bowling that you're supposed to find immediate shelter and duck tape the windows !