In Tennessee and On ABC News, the MSM Shills for Islam
Posted by Pamela Geller, BG:
Recently, I was one of the featured speakers at the inaugural statewide Tea Party Convention in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. This was despite efforts by the unindicted co-conspirator, terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to get me dropped from the speaker list. They issued a press release full of lies about me. That’s what I’d expect from CAIR, but the mainstream media quickly jumped in – and there followed some textbook examples of exactly how liberal media bias works.
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Much of ‘Going Green’ Is Pure Bunk
By: John Stossel:
I ride my bike to work. It seems so pure.
We’re constantly urged to “go green” — use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth. How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic, and buy things with the government’s Energy Star label.
But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al Gore’s group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10 years.
“It’s simply not possible,” says Robert Bryce on my Fox Business Network show Thursday night. “Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are produced by hydrocarbons — coal, oil, and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process . . . The world consumes 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias.”
Bryce is the author of “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy.” He used to be a left-liberal, but then: “I educated myself about math and physics. I’m a liberal who was mugged by the laws of thermodynamics.”
Bryce mocked the “green” value of my riding my bike to work:
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Look who’s behind the White House/Sestak stonewall
By Michelle Malkin:
My column today focuses on the White House lawyer behind the Sestak stonewall: Bob Bauer — a familiar figure if you’ve been reading this blog closely. He’s the hubby of former White House Fox-basher-in-chief Anita Dunn and a veteran Democrat legal fixer.
In related news, here’s a new video contrasting Sestak’s accusations with Team Obama’s blubbering denials:
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The nuclear smear option
Melanie Phillips:
Anyone who actually read Chris McGreal’s latest smear against Israel, which the Guardian ran as its front page splash yesterday, would have seen instantly that the detail of the story didn’t even stand up its own malevolent spin. Purporting to claim – on the basis of a book by American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky — that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid-rule South Africa, it actually provided no backup for this at all. In a risible farrago of suppositions, non-sequiturs, leaps of logic and even the throwaway but self-immolatory line that there was no evidence that Israel’s government would indeed have agreed to such a deal, all that it revealed was that the South African regime had come fishing for such weapons with Israel’s then foreign minister Shimon Peres. The story reversed this to state that Peres had offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa — for which there was no evidence other than an absurd and incoherent extrapolation of a phrase.
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Dhimmicrats on the March?
By Ken Blackwell:
What’s a dhimmicrat, you say? It’s not the same thing as a Democrat. A dhimmicrat is a person who, while not Muslim himself, nonetheless clears the path for shariah law to be adopted and incorporated into otherwise free nations.
One prime example of this would be the Right Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Normally, you would think this top Anglican cleric, who lives in a palace in London, would appreciate Britain’s history as the world’s leader in the Rule of Law. As a minister of the Gospel, Mr. Williams might see his country as a Christian country. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, an immigrant from Pakistan, has tried heroically to awaken Britons to their peril. Bishop Nazir-Ali says English law and the Christian religion are the two things that make Britain great. And every day, dhimmicrats like Rowan Williams are trading away their birthright for a mess of pottage. Rowan Williams said Britain must accommodate herself to shariah law in large swaths of her urban neighborhoods.
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Now Can We Put North Korea Back on the Terrorism List?
Claudia Rosett:
Fear not! It seems there is a secret plan to deal once and for all with the murderous totalitarians running the rogue regime of North Korea. The U.S. government, together with the United Nations, is going to bore them to death.
OK, just kidding. But as the sophisticates of the “international community” yak on about penalizing North Korea for the March 26th torpedoing and sinking of a South Korean war ship, the Cheonan, any sane person looking in on this scene might well wonder if this is all just some sort of tedious diplomatic spring ritual — long on diplo-talk, but short on any action that really matters. It’s now two months since North Korea with an unprovoked attack sank the Cheonan, drowning 46 members of the crew. Definitive evidence has been presented that a North Korean submarine committed this act of war. But if Kim Jong Il is tuning in to the remarks of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, what he heard her say on Monday, in response to a press question about whether the U.S. would support additional United Nations sanctions on North Korea, was: “We are obviously continuing to review and consult closely on these matters… .”
Hmm. Kim must be quaking in his elevator shoes.
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Left on the Cutting Room Floor: Climate Depot’s Marc Morano Takes on ABC News’ Dan Harris
By Jeff Poor, NewsBusters:
We’ve all sort of known the media have been in the tank for the global warming alarmist movement. For evidence, look no further than a March 2008 segment that aired on ABC “World News” attacking leading climate skeptic, University of Virginia environmental scientist Professor Emeritus Fred Singer.
And the same culprit behind that 2008 segment, “World News” weekend anchor Dan Harris, was at it again with a piece that aired on May 23 attempting to link climate change skeptics to white supremacists.
But for balance, Harris included a few brief remarks, all of 10 seconds, from Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, a news aggregator website Harris called “aggressive.” But the actual interview Harris conducted with Morano was much more extensive and in depth. Throughout the interview, Harris asked Morano questions, but with premises that weren’t necessarily true.
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What Real Threats Look Like
Abe Greenwald:
There is a set of realities identified by the American left as threats to national, if not global, security. These include things like the U.S.’s own nuclear arsenal, the stationing abroad of some 370,000 American troops, Israel’s capable defenses, and warm weather. To call these phenomena threats is no mere act of speculation. It is a bold inversion of the truth.
Few policies boast a perfect record of 50-plus years, but U.S. nuclear deterrence has the right to do so. The American arsenal kept Russia from invading Western Europe throughout the entirety of the Cold War. Similarly, U.S. military bases, whether established in postwar Germany and Japan or set up 50 years later in the Balkans, have underwritten long-term stability in every hemisphere.
The left has ignored entirely the debt owed to Israel’s military. In 1981, the Israeli Airforce’s Operation Babylon took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Osirak, robbing the world’s most dangerous leader of his own deterrence capabilities. This is to say nothing of Israel’s attack on other dangerous weapons programs and of the Jewish state’s perpetual battle to defeat Islamist terrorism the world over.
As for the deadly threat of high temperatures, a 2007 study reported: “From 1979 to 1997, extreme cold killed roughly twice as many Americans as heat waves, according to Indur Goklany of the U.S. Department of the Interior.”
It is remarkable how fast these boutique “threats” fall by the wayside when the genuine article appears.
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Marx, Keynes, Pelosi
BY William Kristol:
“It is all about a four-letter word: jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. We are all about jobs.” —Nancy Pelosi, May 4, 2010“We see [health care reform as] a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You won’t have to be job-locked.” —Nancy Pelosi, speaking to musicians and artists in Washington, D.C., May 15, 2010
The tension between these two statements runs through the left. Pelosi’s first statement recalls the Old Left, her second the New. The first is in the spirit of the mature Karl Marx (not to accuse Pelosi of being a Marxist!), while the second echoes the young Marx, who wrote in 1846: “As soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
So which is it? Is progressivism all about providing good jobs at good pay? Or is it all about transcending the world of being “job-locked” in the name of creativity?
It’s all about both—as we can learn from John Maynard Keynes, who, halfway between the age of Marx and the era of Pelosi, wrote this in 1930:
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Iran and North Korea March On
By JOHN BOLTON:
Last week, while meandering toward a fourth U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution against Iran, Washington was blindsided by the revival of a previously discarded plan to enrich some of Iran’s uranium to higher levels for use in the Tehran research reactor. This proposal—a good deal for Iran when it was proposed last year by the misguided Obama administration—is even better in its latest iteration and does nothing to stop Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
The Iranian enrichment deal was brokered by Brazil and Turkey, two of the 10 current nonpermanent Security Council members, and it could pose difficulties for getting the council to adopt another resolution on sanctions. To forestall the debilitating effects of the Brazil-Turkey deal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promptly circulated to other council members the draft of a sanctions resolution the five permanent members and Germany had spent months negotiating.
Unfortunately, the damage was done.
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UNDER PERSECUTION
Marzieh & Maryam
Location: Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Arrested: March 2009
On March 5, Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad and Maryam Rustampoor were arrested by Iranian security forces and labeled “anti-government activists,” according to Farsi Christian News Network (FCNN).
Thirty year-old Marzieh and 27-year-old Maryam are being held at Evin Prison, which is notorious for treating women badly. “Both women are allowed just a one-minute telephone call everyday to their immediate families. Both are unwell and in need of urgent medical attention,” FCNN reported. During their last call on March 28, Mazieh said that she was suffering from an infection and high fever. She said, “I am dying.”
Marzieh and Maryam’s apartment was searched and their belongings were confiscated. “Their only crime is that they are committed Christians who follow the teachings of Jesus,” FCNN added. “They are being unfairly labeled as ‘anti government activists’ because of the hostility of the government towards practicing Christians.”
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Climate Change Agenda Exploits Incorrect Assumptions
By Dr. Tim Ball:
In 1963 while chasing Soviet submarines around the North Atlantic with the Canadian Air Force, I was privileged to see the new volcanic island of Surtsey emerge off the coast of Iceland. By the mid-1980s scientists knew how quickly life appeared. Despite this, they were surprised by how quickly life returned after Mount St Helens erupted. We can allow it takes time for a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumption, to occur. However, the idea that catastrophic human impacts on the environment, such as climate change, would take decades to recover or push them beyond recovery was exploited to exaggerate fear and push an agenda. The phrase “tipping point” became synonymous with this fear.
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Rep. Schakowsky and ShoreBank: New Evidence of Conflict of Interest
by Joel B. Pollak, BG:
I have found evidence that may explain the intense interest of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) in bailing out ShoreBank, the “community development” bank that has received extraordinary assistance from her and several other “friends in high places.”
The New York Times confirms that Rep. Schakowsky played a leading role in the ShoreBank bailout. Yet ShoreBank is not based in Rep. Schakowsky’s congressional district, and she did not help the Bank of Lincolnwood–which is in her district, and failed in 2009–or Park National Bank, which was also active in community development in Chicago until it was closed by federal regulators last year.
Now, court documents that I have obtained reveal that ShoreBank was one of several banks that Rep. Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, used in the check kiting scheme for which he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison in 2006.
[...]
Time to reconsider national bailouts
Calgary Herald:
It may be time for Canada and other countries at the G-20 summit in June to consider a different tack, such as ending the incentive for private lenders to continually loan money to risky countries, only to be bailed out later by taxpayers from around the world. It may be time to arrange a partial default, as orderly as is possible, and start with Greece.
One reason Greece has not yet been forced to face reality is that world leaders are worried about European banks taking a writedown on loans to Greece should it default on part of its sovereign debt. It makes sense to guarantee the banks rather than to guarantee nations which have ignored their corruption, overspending and debt for decades.
No one forced countries such as Greece to take loans and to live above their means. Taxpayer-financed bailouts cannot continue forever.
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World is dangerously exposed to European default, report says
by Tony Barber:
For anyone wondering why Europe’s leaders are so determined to avoid a restructuring of Greek sovereign debt, I recommend a remarkable piece of research published on Monday by Jacques Cailloux, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s chief European economist, and his colleagues. (Unfortunately, it seems not to be easily available on the internet, so I’m providing links to news stories that refer to the report.)
The RBS economists estimate that the total amount of debt issued by public and private sector institutions in Greece, Portugal and Spain that is held by financial institutions outside these three countries is roughly €2,000bn. This is a staggeringly large figure, equivalent to about 22 per cent of the eurozone’s gross domestic product. It is far higher than previous published estimates. It indicates that, if a Greek or Portuguese or Spanish debt default were allowed to take place, the global financial system could suffer terrible damage.
As the RBS analysts say, the problem isn’t – as some commentators have suggested – that Europe’s troubles would trigger an economic downturn or trade conflicts that would depress demand for US and other foreign goods. These are legitimate concerns but, relatively speaking, fairly trivial.
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Where Is The MSM’s Call For a Special Counsel In the Alleged Bribe Offered To Joe Sestak?
Posted by Archy Cary, BJ:
Democrat senatorial candidate and sitting Congressman Joe Sestak (D, Pa.) has repeatedly confirmed that he was offered a government position by the Obama Administration in exchange for withdrawing from his eventually successful race against incumbent Senator Arlen Specter for his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate.
When asked about the alleged bribe, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has just as repeatedly claimed to have no knowledge of any such offer made to Sestak.
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Proselytizing for Palestine
by Mark D. Tooley, FrontPage:
[...]
According to a Pew poll, evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics in the U.S. all sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinian cause. But for the angry Evangelical Left, including Campolo, supposed Israeli oppression is due exclusively to Zionist evangelicals purportedly obsessed with biblical prophecies about the end-times.
Most American Christians sympathize with Israel because it is a pro-American democracy and not owing to 19th century Darbyite theology. But Campolo and the Evangelical Left prefer not to discuss the merits of democracy versus its Islamist alternatives. Instead, they demonize pro-Israel evangelicals and hope cries of “apartheid” will persuade when sound argument will not.
“There Is No Real Conflict Anywhere When One Side Gives Up”: Richard Weaver and the Darwin Debate
ENV:
In reading Richard M. Weaver, who effectively launched modern philosophical and political conservatism in the United States, I’m struck again and again by what a brilliant ally he would have made in the Darwin debate had he lived beyond 1963. (He would be one hundred years old this year if he were still alive.) Though a philosopher and a professor of English stationed at the University of Chicago, he anticipated not only the major outlines of contemporary thinking about why the evolution debate matters. He also foresaw the outlines of the scientific critique of Darwinian theory. I’ve been writing about him the past week in this series (whose Parts I through IV are here, here, here, and here.)
In Visions of Order, he noted three plausibility problems with Darwin’s theory. First, it is “a form of the question-begging fallacy.” Darwinism is the best explanation of how life got to be as it is only if you take a materialist world picture for granted:
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Rifqa Bary Suffering from Cancer, Her Lawyers Bring In Her Parents
By Pamela Geller:
There has been a terrible development in the case of Rifqa Bary, the teenage girl who fled from her home in fear for her life after her devout Muslim father found out she had become a Christian. According to Rifqa, who is now in foster care in Ohio, she has been diagnosed with advanced uterine cancer.
While this is a tragedy, how Rifqa is being victimized by her lawyers and her parents is nothing less than an atrocity. Her lawyers kept her in the dark about her condition — despite the seriousness of her cancer — for well over a week while they conferred with her parents and their CAIR-appointed lawyers about her treatment. While most cases like this result in a hysterectomy, Rifqa is only having the advanced malignancy removed. From what I understand, the survival rate in cases like these is only five percent.
Was she allowed to get a second opinion? No.
While she was lying ill, her lawyers brought her parents to her hospital bed. She was awaiting treatment and when she saw them, whereupon she became very agitated and upset. Her parents had to be removed.
[...]
I ask all my readers to please pray for Rifqa.
Canadians must demand that MPs submit to audit
National Post:
Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, shown on April 20, 2010 in Ottawa, has requested that MPs open their books Reuters/Chris Wattie Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, shown on April 20, 2010 in Ottawa, has requested that MPs open their books
Every year, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) audits thousands of taxpayers. They may grumble, they may panic, but for most Canadians, it would never occur to them to say: “Wait a minute Mr. Taxman, I don’t need to show you my receipts, just take my word for it. Why would I cheat you? There are laws against that sort of thing.”
The reason for this lack of resistance is not our mythic Canadian politeness, but the fact that failure to comply with an audit can have very nasty consequences. The CRA can seize your bank account, put a lien on your house and generally make your existence a living hell. Such is the power of the state.
But apparently when you are the state, different rules apply.
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A tragedy, and a travesty
Following the risible kangaroo court set up by the General Medical Council Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the MMR controversy, has now been struck off the medical register while his colleagues have yet to learn their own fate. This is a tragedy and a travesty.
As D.C. Cops Fine-Tune Their Story, Where’s the Washington Post On the SEIU Protest At the Bank Of America Exec’s Home?
Posted by Archy Cary, BJ:
Why is the Washington Post ignoring the SEIU protest at the homes of two bank executives, one being an employee of the Bank of America? Aside from a brief mention in a larger story on May 17 about SEIU protests, the paper of record in the nation’s capital has been strangely silent.
Even after the story broke here that the buses that carried an estimated 500 protesters to the Greenville Rd, Chevy Chase residence of a B of A executive were escorted by at least two units of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the incuriosity of the WaPo continues.
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Media Matters’ assault against ‘Manchurian President’
By Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily:
Media Matters for America today launched a campaign of disprovable lies clearly aimed at minimizing my new book, “The Manchurian President,” while attempting to deter news media from featuring the crucial work.
The George Soros-funded activist organization’s attacks came in response to a segment today on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends” morning program.
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Ignoring Calls for Holocaust
by David Swindle, FrontPage:
Remember in our most recent video from UCSD when David Horowitz said to the cleverer-than-thou college communist, “Enough. Enough. It’s boring. You’re boring”? That sentiment keeps repeating in my head these days.
Socialist journalist Chris Hedges writing at New Left Marxist Robert Scheer’s online magazine Truth Dig:
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Obama’s Professor and America’s Cultural Crisis
by David Horowitz, FrontPage:
No man more exemplifies the Left’s half-century assault on America’s intellectual and academic traditions than celebrity professor and intellectual con artist Cornell West. Thrust into cultural prominence most recently thanks to his ties to President Obama, to whom he has acted, together with the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright, as a spiritual mentor, the radical West also typifies the decline and degradation of standards in the American university. As David Horowitz illustrates in his devastating new pamphlet, “Obama’s Professor and America’s Cultural Crisis,” West is an improbable intellectual icon – an apologist for racists and anti-Semites; a cheerleader for Marxism; and a perpetrator of books of pseudo-cerebral nonsense that are celebrated by his legions of fans in inverse correlation to their literary merit. For anyone wishing to understand America’s current cultural predicament, the destructive career of Cornel West shows with alarming clarity the grave damage that the progressive onslaught has wrought.
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Obama seeks veto power he blocked Bush from getting
By Stephen Dinan:
When President George W. Bush called for a kind of line-item veto four years ago, the top Senate Democrat said it was like getting a “bad sore throat,” and the No. 2 House Democrat called it “a sham.” On Monday, President Obama asked them to reconsider and pass something very like it, for his sake.
With fears of a Greece-style debt collapse roiling a Congress already balking at new spending this week, the White House on Monday proposed a modified line-item veto that would give the administration another crack at forcing Congress to vote on spending cuts.
But the proposal will have to pass a Congress wary of giving up power over the purse, and would require a reversal by many Democrats who voted against a similar proposal from Mr. Bush.
One who’s already reversed himself is Mr. Obama, who as a senator in 2007 voted along with then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and almost all of the rest of Senate Democrats to filibuster Mr. Bush’s proposal.
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Mob Rule From SEIU
IBD:
Labor: Does belonging to the service workers’ union give you the right to invade private homes, terrorize children and smear anyone questioning such tactics? Apparently so, based on recent events in Maryland.
On May 16, Washington, D.C., police escorted 14 busloads full of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members at least part of the way to storm the Chevy Chase, Md., home of Bank of America’s deputy legal counsel, Greg Baer.
Some 500 protestors affiliated with SEIU and their allies in the community organizing group National Political Action (NPA) trampled his lawn, blocked his doorway to his home and screamed “greed.” Legally, it was burglary, trespassing and, possibly, assault.
But Maryland cops didn’t enforce the law. And Baer had to brave the insult-hurling mob alone to rescue his 14-year old son who, home alone, had locked himself in the bathroom in fear.
But there was one thing these thugs didn’t count on — a credible journalist next door who reported what happened.
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The Istanbul-Moscow Axis of Evil
By Joel J. Sprayregen
I logged over 15,000 air miles in the past three weeks, my ports of call including Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, and London. I enjoyed opportunities to exchange views with informed leaders of government, business, and think-tanks. Changes — many repugnant to believe — are proceeding rapidly in each country I visited. I choose to focus on changes in Turkey and Russia which are harmful to the national interests of the United States.
Turkey presents the more immediate concern.
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