The ACLU’s Terror Lobby
by Andrew Walden, FrontPage:
Earlier this month, the Obama administration moved to transfer alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from the military justice system at Guantanamo Bay to the jurisdiction of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Behind this move away from the military tribunal system, which delivered justice so effectively at Nuremburg, is an $8.5 million lobbying effort by the so-called “John Adams Project” launched in April, 2008 by the American Civil Liberties Union.
[...]
Losing Nicaragua
by Jaime Daremblum, Weekly Standard:
With U.S. policymakers distracted by the situation in Honduras, Nicaragua continues to move toward authoritarianism. On October 19, a Nicaraguan Supreme Court panel overturned a constitutional provision limiting presidents to two non-consecutive terms in office. The ruling will allow incumbent Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega–the Sandinista party leader, former Soviet client, vociferous critic of the United States, and current Hugo Chávez acolyte–to run for another term in 2011.
[...]
ClimateGate: The Fix is In
By Robert Tracinski:
In early October, I covered a breaking story about evidence of corruption in the basic temperature records maintained by key scientific advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. Global warming “skeptics” had unearthed evidence that scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to manufacture a “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic-but illusory-runaway warming trend in the late 20th century.
But now newer and much broader evidence has emerged that looks like it will break that scandal wide open. Pundits have already named it “Climategate.”
A hacker-or possibly a disillusioned insider-has gathered thousands of e-mails and data from the CRU and made them available on the Web. Officials at the CRU have verified the breach of their system and acknowledged that the e-mails appear to be genuine.
[...]
ACORN OKLAHOMA Document Dump: The Oklahoma Power Plan
by Publius, Big Government:
ACORN’s San Diego office isn’t the only place its been careless with sensitive documents. Late last year, ACORN abandoned an office in Oklahoma. In its haste to vacate the office–and skip out on the landlord’s claim of back-rent–ACORN abandoned piles of documents, as well as a computer. Below is a copy of ACORN’s “Oklahoma Power Plan,” a long-term political plan to reshape politics in the Sooner State.
[...]
‘Fighting’ terror with wishful thinking
Ralph Peters, NY Post:
It’s not true that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist. Even dead terrorists aren’t good. But at least they’re dead.
And that helps.
But political correctness has possessed Washington. It’s so bad that even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who’s done a great job in many other respects, parrots the cliché that “we can’t kill our way out of this.”
Well, folks, there’s no other way out of this all-or-nothing struggle with fanatics. Three thousand years of history teach that there’s no alternative — none — to killing fanatics in large numbers when your enemies are ablaze with religious zeal.
What Gates and countless others really mean is that we’re unwilling to kill our way out of this assault on our civilization. So the terrorists keep on killing us.
[...]
Future living standards will take a hit as federal borrowing balloons and bank lending to business shrinks
By GEORGE MELLOAN, WSJ:
For anyone who wondered if last winter’s federal seizure of the financial services industry would have adverse economic consequences, an answer is now available. The credit market has been tilted to favor a single borrower with a huge appetite for money, Washington. Private borrowers, particularly small businesses, have been sent to the end of the queue.
The Federal Reserve, which supervises some 7,000 banks, has been telling bankers that they must cut risk. The most spectacular step in that effort was the Fed announcement last month that it will evaluate the salaries of bank officers on how carefully they manage risk.
By official definition, Treasury securities are risk-free, so how better to manage risk than to pad your bank’s portfolio with Treasury securities, which is what bankers are doing. Under the new management from Washington, bankers who take a flyer on a venture that might some day become an Apple, Microsoft or Google will risk not only their depositors’ money but a possible pay cut. Banking has been captured by the nanny state, which means that its potential for contributing to economic growth and job creation has been sharply curtailed, even as its potential contribution to government growth has been expanded.
[...]
Join the public service, where money still grows on trees
Raphael Alexander, NP:
According to the Hill Times, federal bureaucrats have spent $19.6 million in non-business related expenses over the past two years. Some of the expenses have come in the form of executive “meetings” taking place in exclusive retreats at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, coastal resorts, Mont Tremblant and Whistler ski resorts. Bureaucrats have also taken in “health” spas as well, along with country clubs, casinos, resorts, and luxury hotels:
The report also lists dozens of retreats for managers and employees at secluded inns, country clubs and tennis clubs along with meetings at top-flight hotels such as the Pan Pacific in Vancouver, the Fairmont Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, and the Fairmont Chateau Montebello on the Ottawa River near the capital.
[...]
Cloward-Piven on steroids
Diogenes Jones, M.D., AT:
Finally, someone who gets it.
Kudos from an old ex-lefty to James Simpson for Cloward-Piven Government (AT 11-23-09 ).
What most people don’t get is that the economic recovery and health care reform plans are not supposed to work. They are not really intended to reduce unemployment, stop the flu, save the planet, insure the uninsured, rescue the dollar, or lower the deficit.
The internal architecture of this administration’s political strategy is very different from the public pablum dutifully parroted in the media, but is far from hidden. Even so, most of its supporters are oblivious to the true underlying agenda, and are merely making the public confessions and professions of faith, expected of fundamentalists and loyalists to the progressivist cause.
What’s going on, as Simpson points out, is actually Cloward-Piven on steroids, propelled into lunar orbit, and magnified to continental size.
[...]
CRU emails spur lawsuit
Clarice Feldman, AT:
Chris Horner writing for The American Spectator reports that the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has filed a lawsuit against NASA and Goddard Space Center demanding information they’ve withheld for three years:
[..]
Dershowitz slams Goldstone for ‘spreading lies’
YNET:
Jewish-American legalist, Prof. Alan Dershowitz accused Judge Richard Goldstone, the author of the UN report investigating Operation Cast Lead, of dodging an intellectual confrontation with him and of choosing to speak with relatively less incisive interviewers in order to spread lies against the Israeli government.
In a conversation with Ynet, Dershowitz claimed that Goldstone preferred to give interviews to public television over debating him. Dershowitz said that it isn’t appropriate for Goldstone to filter whom he debates, saying that he chose to speak with Bill Moyers and People magazine, but refused to sit at the same table as him.
[...]
Lemming people
David Waren:
It is the same when people vote for demagogues, or “pied pipers.” Sometimes they survive, to go on reproducing, after the usual losses to predators along the way. Certainly there is no conscious intention to commit mass suicide.
Indeed, one of my favourite posters, from Despair.com, shows a grizzly interrupting the migration of a salmon, and reads: “The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.”
While I’ve taken two uncharacteristically subtle digs at the current U.S. president already, and would not hesitate to take more at the man Charles Krauthammer referred to this week as “baby Jesus,” after reviewing the president’s latest narcissist performances in Asia — surrendering U.S. interests in Taiwan, Japan and India that his Chinese hosts hadn’t even asked him to surrender — Barack Obama is only a foreground illustration.
And we can hardly sneer at the Americans, after we accepted 16 years of Pierre Trudeau. There will always be demagogues, as there will always be people eager to follow them, into new “promised lands.”
The advantage humans have over lemmings is in our knowledge, or potential knowledge, of history. I was delighted this past week to receive several kind compliments from present or former history teachers, who told me they thought a line from last week’s column belongs up in classrooms:
“One of the things that built our civilization, and has contributed to every other great civilization, is reverence for the past. With its extinction comes the extinction of the civilization itself: it loses all of its moorings.”
[...]
The rub
David Warren:
Politics may be more or less visible; better or worse. To use the current example in Canada, Stephen Harper has annoyed and even disappointed me (and it is hard for a politician to disappoint me). This is because to some extent he conned his “socially conservative” constituency, with cautious promises to address several of their “hot button” issues, including for instance same-sex marriage.
Now, that constituency is not small, even if mainstream media for the most part act as if it does not exist. English-speaking Canadians are not that much different from English-speaking Americans in their general outlook (again, media to the contrary), and I note that, Stateside, same-sex marriage was recently defeated in a referendum in the very liberal northern state of Maine. It was defeated decisively in liberal California, too, and has indeed been defeated 31 consecutive times, when put before 31 state electorates, with not one victory for the other side.
It would certainly have been defeated up here, too, had Canadians been entitled to vote on the matter, but as ever our “progressive” masters in government and the courts decided that we could not be trusted.
Moreover, they are basically right about us: Canadians will, in fact, readily agree to be pushed over, for the sake of peace in the family. Once same-sex marriage became a judicial fait accompli, only a tiny minority of the religious types continued to mention the subject; especially in light of powerful Criminal Code legislation (via Svend Robinson’s private member’s bill of 2003) that effectively equated “homophobia” with “genocide,” creating all kinds of scope for the prosecution of people who continued to articulate the received moral views of 20 centuries of Christian civilization.
[...]
Where Has the Thrill Gone?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Who appointed over 40 ambassadors on the sole basis of campaign contributions, or has as many lobbyists in government as did any President in memory? And who releases touchy news—whether increased unemployment or trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civil courts—on Friday nights, or wants his Democratically-controlled Congress to debate unpopular legislation on Saturday nights?
You see where this is going. Prophets fall harder than normal politicians. When you claim that seas recede and planets cool before your presence, and that Latin mottos, new presidential candidate seals, neo-classical victory trophies, and faux-Greek temple sets are the appropriate backdrops for Your speeches, then you raise the bar a bit high. Obama is not necessarily any more partisan than a Nixon or Reagan or Bush, only just as partisan—but when he claimed something quite different.
Add in the hope/change mantra, and a cadre of lackeys talking about tingling legs, his majesty Caesar, and apotheosis into a “god”, and our young Icarus was simply soaring too near the sun for his own fragile wax-feather wings. The problem is not just that Obama is proving Clinton-like in his Chicago hardball partisanship (cf. the trash-talk of Rahm Emanuel, Mao-admirer Anita Dunn, or the Truther Van Jones), but that his entire persona was fabricated on a touchy-feely “there is no red state, no blue state America.”
[...]
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 1 of 6
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 2 of 6
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 3 of 6 – David Ramsey
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 4 of 6 – Climate Change Cover Up
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 5 of 6 – David Horowitz
Glenn Beck Show – November 23, 2009 – Pt 6 of 6 – David Horowitz
The End of Bolivian Democracy
By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY,
A dictatorship that fosters the production and distribution of cocaine is not apt to enjoy a positive international image. But when that same government cloaks itself in the language of social justice, with a special emphasis on the enfranchisement of indigenous people, it wins world-wide acclaim.
This is Bolivia, which in two weeks will hold elections for president and both houses of congress. The government of President Evo Morales will spin the event as a great moment in South American democracy. In fact, it will mark the official end of what’s left of Bolivian liberty after four years of Morales rule.
While the U.S. and the Organization of American States have been obsessing over Honduras’s legal removal of an undemocratic president, Mr. Morales has been fortifying his narco-dictatorship. He’s also made friends with Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will make another visit to La Paz tomorrow.
[...]
Obama WH scrambled for story to smear Walpin
Ed Morrissey:
When the White House fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin, the administration claimed that it acted on a number of complaints by the Corporation for National and Community Service’s board. Documents uncovered by Republicans in the investigation into Walpin’s firing have shown this to be a lie. The White House fired Walpin at the behest of the board’s chair, a big donor to Barack Obama’s campaign, but only contacted the board after the firing — and at first only to tell them to publicly support it:
[...]
The firing appears to have been motivated to protect an Obama ally (Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson) from having allegations of using federal funds to pay off employees and avoid sexual harassment charges exposed. The White House essentially smeared Walpin with completely unsubstantiated allegations of senility to undermine his credibility, once Walpin went public. One might think that the national media would take an interest in this, but as York also notes, their interest has never been very intense at all.
[...]
Former British policeman backs Barack Obama ‘birthers’ conspiracy theory
Telegraph [UK]:
Neil Sankey, who has almost 20 years experience serving in Special Branch and the Bomb Squad, is now devoting his energies to proving that Mr Obama is not a natural born US citizen.
He joined the Birthers after meeting Orly Taitz, one of the leaders of the group, which disputes Mr Obama’s claim that he was born in Hawaii.
Over the past year, Mr Sankey has been integral in some of the most aggressive efforts to remove him from office by claiming that his presidency is illegitimate.
[...]
Yemen On The Brink
by Stephen Brown, FrontPage:
While the fighting in Afghanistan continues to dominate news coverage, one Middle Eastern country has emerged as a leading flashpoint of Islamic terrorism. Yemen, most recently in the headlines as the home of Anwar al Awlaki, the exiled imam who fled to the country after inspiring Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, has become a haven for al-Qaeda even as its internal turmoil has drawn in regional rivals like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Yemen is the poorest and most unstable of all Middle Eastern countries. Located in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, it occupies a strategic position that makes the country difficult to ignore. At its south-western tip, Yemen straddles one side of the strategic, 20-mile wide Mandab Strait that connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, a vital international shipping lane leading to the Suez Canal. Equally important for world commerce, Saudi Arabia’s oil fields lie just across Yemen’s northern border.
[...]
Why Isn’t Anyone Really Investigating ACORN?
by Chris Berg, Big Government:
As we rapidly approach December 18th, the day when ACORN is again eligible to receive federal funds, we still have yet to see a meaningful investigation of ACORN.
Last week, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice released a “Review of Department of Justice Grants to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Inc. (ACORN) and its Affiliated Organizations.” Unsurprisingly this report “did not find any DOJ direct grants to ACORN.” The report did however reveal approximately $200,000 in sub-grants to ACORN affiliates. This number pales in comparison to the amount of federal money ACORN and its affiliates have received from other agencies.
ACORN and its affiliates have received over $54 million in federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). These are the grants that the government should be investigating. How did ACORN spend these federal tax dollars? Were they used for their designated purposes? Does ACORN owe the federal government a refund?
The Department of Justice should have answered calls to investigate ACORN’s criminal and fraudulent activity. The evidence continues to mount, and the Department of Justice continues to look the other way.
[...]
Andrew Revkin Spins ‘ClimateGate’ Story
By K. Daniel Glover, AIM:
Poor Andrew Revkin can’t help himself. The New York Times reporter and Dot Earth blogger is so intellectually invested in the environmental movement that he simply cannot report bad news about the movement’s extremists without spinning it.
That’s what he did over the weekend when confronted with a mountain of evidence that his heroes of global warming “science” actually are villains who have been manipulating data to achieve pre-determined beliefs, resisting efforts to make their research public, and maligning anyone who dares question their work.
[...]
Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
Nigel Lawson, Times [UK]:
[...]
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.
It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.
ACORN dumps documents; Breitbart has them and will release
Clarice Feldman, AT:
Following the release by Breitbart’s Big Government website of a video showing employees at ACORN’s San Diego County office offering to assist in the transportation and exploitation of underage prostitutes from abroad, the Attorney General of California announced an investigation into ACORN’s operations. Nights before the visit, ACORN dumped thousands of documents in a dumpster. Breitbart obtained them, says they are shocking evidence of ACORN’s illegality and promises to release them bit by bit over time:
[...]
Cloward-Piven Government
By James Simpson, AT:
It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then, the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O’Reilly, and now Mark Levin.
The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:
[...]
Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1230092/Patient-trapped-23-year-coma-conscious-along.html#ixzz0Xe7NhiOZ
Daily Mail:
A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night.
Student Rom Houben was misdiagnosed after a car crash left him totally paralysed.
He had no way of letting experts, family or friends know he could hear every word they said.
[...]
Think of poor, murdered Terri Schiavo.
Nidal Hasan and Fort Hood
by Raymond Ibrahim, Pajamas Media/VDH:
One of the difficulties in discussing Islam’s more troubling doctrines is that they have an anachronistic, even otherworldly, feel to them; that is, unless actively and openly upheld by Muslims, non-Muslims, particularly of the Western variety, tend to see them as abstract theory, not standard practice for today. In fact, some Westerners have difficulties acknowledging even those problematic doctrines that are openly upheld by Muslims — such as jihad. How much more when the doctrines in question are subtle, or stealthy, in nature?
Enter Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist, U.S. Army major, and “observant Muslim who prayed daily,” who recently went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, killing thirteen Americans (including a pregnant woman). While the media wonders in exasperation why he did it, offering the same old tired and trite reasons — he was “picked on,” he was “mentally unbalanced” — the fact is his behavior comports well with certain Islamic doctrines. As such, it behooves Americans to take a moment and familiarize themselves with the esotericisms of Islam.
[...]
Obama adminstration appoints Muslims to key Homeland Security posts — but… they’re “moderates,” aren’t they?
Jihad Watch:
The track record of the two appointees, taken together with the administration’s own ability to distinguish “moderates” from “extremists” inspires anything but confidence. After all, the Fort Hood jihadist was himself a member of a panel advising the incoming Obama administration.
At the heart of this issue are the politically correct articles of faith that few dare blaspheme, which insist that there is nothing problematic about Islam’s core texts and teachings regarding warfare and the rights of women and unbelievers, and that there exists a well-defined “moderate” Islam that the West can work with. The problem is, no one ever stops to define “moderate,” for fear that articulating actual standards may cause offense.
“Devout Muslims In Key Homeland Security Posts,” by Judicialwatch via Right Side News, November 22:
[...]
Political Islam is bent on world domination
By: Diana West, Examiner:
You might have missed it, but the Islamic Apology Police were on the case of the Republican governor-elect of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell this week. It seems that following the jihadist attack on Fort Hood, the Rev. Pat Robertson, a longtime ally of McDonnell’s, criticized Islam on his television show.
And no one in these not-just-politically-but-also-Islamically-correct times is permitted to do that — not even, as we have learned to our horror, senior Army personnel when presented with incontrovertible evidence that a jihadist is in their ranks.
Speaking on “The 700 Club,” Robertson called Islam “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination.”
[...]
But in bizarro world as we know it, Robertson’s statement — particularly the notion that Islam is “a violent political system” — showed up as political smoke around McDonnell, carefully tended for days by The Washington Post and a rogue’s gallery of Muslim Brotherhood associates.
[...]
Barack Obama: the politics of hypocrisy and cynicism
Toby Harnden, Telegraph [UK]:
[...]
One of this White House’s flaws is that it is packed with campaign operatives like Axelrod at senior levels or other refugees from the Windy City like Emanuel, who delight in the dark arts of Washington and Chicago-style hardball.
What Mr Obama lacks is wise, detached counsel from outside his inner circle. Mr Craig might have fulfilled such a role. His replacement? Mr Obama’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer, another campaign loyalist. It was an eerie echo of President George W Bush’s installation of his crony Alberto Gonzales in the same position.
The supposedly post-partisan Obama is operating a one-party system in Washington in which Republicans are frozen out. His big campaign donors are now housed in sumptuous ambassadorial residences across the world.
Where he promised transparency, everything is opaque.
Far from changing Washington, Obama has slipped effortlessly into its ways. Could it be that the hallowed figure who preached hope and “yes we can” is really a hypocrite whose legacy will be greater cynicism?
Obama inspires; Palin connects
Rex Murphy, Globe and Mail:
It will make Obama fans perspire to hear this, but Ms. Palin has a more forceful bond with her supporters than he with his. Mr. Obama offers a kind of self-flattery to his worshippers. They feel exalted that they have the intelligence or sensibility to see how remarkable their man is. But he remains remote. Ms. Palin works close up. She offers those much invoked, but actually neglected figures, “the ordinary Joe or Josephine,” a real sense that she does represent them.
Ms. Palin is in the hurricane’s eye again with the publication of Going Rogue. The Associated Press assigned no fewer than 11 reporters to “fact check” Ms. Palin’s memoir, a concentration of scrutiny AP would never presume to exert over the man who’s actually in the White House. Elements of the press mock and scorn her with a fury that is near inexplicable. Rather fewer extol her gifts. But pro or con, the media cannot get enough of her.
[...]
Ms. Palin is a real and evolving element in the great story of American politics. She is the “other half” of the Obama moment, and she may be in the ascendant. Mr. Obama is losing his lustre, his appeal is dimming, at the very moment the Alaskan outsider is staking her claim. Those who call her a joke are expressing an anxious hope not offering a rational description.
[...]
Brilliant evaluation.
Death for being a Christian
CFP
A 15-year-old Egyptian girl, Dina el-Gohary, has written an emotional appeal to President Obama asking him to use his influence to save her father, Maher el-Gohary, who is being persecuted for his beliefs. “Mr. President Obama, we are a minority in Egypt,” Dina writes, according to a report from the Assyrian International News Agency. “We are treated very badly. … We are imprisoned in our own home because Muslim clerics called for the murder of my father, and now the Government has set for us a new prison, we are imprisoned in our own country.”
Dina and her father are Christian converts in a part of the world where conversion can mean death.
[...]
Marriage Hating ‘Psychologist’ Calls Palin a ‘Special Liar’
Warner Todd Huston, Right Wing News:
An anti-Palin screed somehow ended up on Psychology Today’s website. I know, I know, it’s shocking that Psychology Today could sponsor something that is less science than it is PC, hatespeak against conservatives, what with psychology being so scientific and all — but, there you have it. Penned by one Bella DePaulo, the piece really has little worth as a work of science and is little but a political rant filled with name calling and hate for Governor Sarah Palin and anyone that might support her. In the piece Palin is termed a “special liar” by the writer and conservatives are painted as willfully ignorant, knuckle dragging troglodytes.
As I mentioned, DePaulo originally posted her political hit piece at the website of Psychology Today but has since moved the piece to the Huffington Post apparently because the PT website was getting slammed by complaints — and rightfully so.
[...]
VIDEO: Street Preacher Arrested for Preaching Christ to the Bar Crowd
Posted by Suzanne at The Big Blue Wave:
Charges have been dismissed. But clearly, this is a form of intimidation.
Would the hero cops have arrested muslims doing the same thing? The cops should be prosecuted.
WATCH HERE
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