MentalSaftyNet

Integrity?

2008-10-24T18:10:00.002-04:00

The following is a wholly reproduced copy of the article written by Orson Scott Card in the Rhinoceros Times on October 20, 2008. The URL for the story there is:
http://www.linearpublishing.com/orsonscottcard.html ...

Truth is where you find it. Unfortunately, the media figures that this story targets really don't care about their images nor anything but a myopic goal of ushering in an era of socialism here in America. They don't even seem to care that socialism has never worked anywhere it was tried. To quote Albert Einstein, "Insanity is doing the same things over again and expecting different results." The mainstream media in this country, maybe in all of the Western World, are completely insane.
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Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
by Orson Scott Card

October 20, 2008

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Sen. Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" (http://snipurl.com/457to): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Fred Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naiveté time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards' own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe -- and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

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How worthless is the MSM?

2008-10-24T18:03:00.001-04:00

That title may be a non sequitur but I think it makes the point clear. Worthless is what they are, there are no values of worthless other than being without worth. “What am I talking about?” you may well be asking yourself. OK, read this and see if you understand:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,433314,00.html

The mainstream media has no worth as a news agency when it is simply acting as the propaganda arm of the Obama/Biden campaign. There used to be a time when the media would be all over these gaffs by Biden and also would have known that Gov. Palin was right in her answers to her questions, used as examples. Biden’s ignorance of basic Constitutional tenants would have been all over the networks and newspapers, not just a lone story on the one news agency that makes an attempt at integrity.

We are living in very dangerous times and the MSM is exacerbating the danger. How dangerous? Watch the stock market the day after the election… McCain’s victory will start its recovery; Obama’s victory will precipitate the long awaited, final crash that will excuse the switch to socialism and the destruction of America’s financial leadership role in the world. (Why do you think so many people are selling off their portfolios now, before the market completely makes them worthless, if not in preparation for an Obama ‘victory’? I put that in quotes because a victory for Obama is a severe defeat for America. It will certainly mark the end of the country as we grew up knowing it. The US of A will more closely resemble a South American country than anything else; it’s heading there as it is but Obama will usher in the final transition. He’s already set to Nationalize all your pension funds… have you heard that? Oh yes he is.

Biden mentioned that corporate big-wig pensions will be the first to go; but right now, in Washington, there is a hearing on a method of completely Nationalizing 401k’s and rolling them into the Social security System. Oh, for sure they’ll sweeten the deal and make some people think it’s a good idea, giving you the August (2008) value of your 401k; but it will just be a little value added to your SS benefits and only 50% of it will be transferable to your heirs. (A way to apply the death tax to your pension.) Right now you have, at least the illusion that your money is yours, that is, the part of what you make that the government allows you to keep; but before much longer, if the democrats put their plans into action, you won’t even have that illusion. Are you so enamored with the Social Security Administration that you can’t wait to retire on what they will provide you with?

If all the money that was put into your SS account by just you over the course of your life was in a 401k, even with the resent market losses, you would have quite a nice nest-egg that would pay you better than a living wage throughout your retirement years; but there is actually twice that amount in your account, isn’t there, what with your employers’ contribution; yet your SS benefits will hardly be enough to live comfortably on, will it? I know because I get just about the maximum payout from SS along with about half that by way of a VA pension and I’m just getting by in today’s economy. Without that VA pension I’d be living in a slum tenement on tuna fish. The democrats in congress want them to handle all your retirement. You aren’t capable of taking care of yourself, in their elitist opinion.

What do you think he means when Obama said that industry should start from the bottom up? Think about that… “from the bottom up.” Did your company, the one you work for or own now, or any one in the past start out by hiring a bunch of people then sit around and decide what you were going to do to make money? …or did it start with an idea, risked money on it, worked until help was needed, and then hired people to handle the work that the owner couldn’t do by themselves? The latter is a ‘top down’ enterprise – that’s how all companies started. Obama thinks it should be the other way around. How do you think that will work? Will it work? Can it work?

Ten days to find out.

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

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Can Obama be any More Dangerous?

2008-10-10T19:35:00.000-04:00

Now that ACORN is coming under fire for their voter fraud activities in several states (and a possible RICO investigation), Obama is denying any association with that organization. You might remember, however, that ACORN is where he did his ‘community organizing’! Like his associations with the Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Richard Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and others, he is trying to hide his radical background. In fact, insofar as CAIR goes, he had a campaign staffer last year that left his campaign over his association with that group but he was replaced with another person connected with it, who is now coming under fire for that connection. CAIR, in case you don’t know, is on the Homeland Security watch list because of its connection to Hamas and Hizballah.

Who is Obama, anyway? The person he says he is in his book(s) is a radical who learned to fool people by being friendly, articulate, and soft spoken. (‘Fooling People’ is the phrase he used in his book, by the way, not something I am attributing to him.) Something is very odd about this guy, at the very least. Like when he was twenty years old, why did he go for a visit to Pakistan (from Malaysia)?

Remember my report on the issue of his birth? He is using a CAIR lawyer for that, too, rather than simply show the record number on his ‘live birth certificate” that is redacted on the copy shown on his website. Then the plaintiff could go to Hawaii and ask to see that record at the hospital where it was issued. He chooses to fight the suit instead. How suspicious does that seem? He doesn’t seem to care, though, and as long as the MSM is carrying his water, he can obfuscate all he wants to and the MSM will make his excuses for him.

The old saw for the time of the Third Reich goes something like, “The bigger the lie, the easier it is for more people to believe it.” Obama would seem to be the personification of that saying; nobody wants to believe that he is the dangerous radical that more and more evidence seems to say he is. He says so in his books (his version of Mien Kampf); he says so with the people he learned from growing up (one of which was a charter member of the American Communist Party); he does have some Muslim background, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but why did he visit Pakistan when he was twenty and why would he deny it now? He uses CAIR lawyers (who would do that?), and has great mutual respect for Luis Farrakhan. Moammar Kaddafi talks highly of him, as does the Iranian President; and he seems to be drawing money (some of which was found out about and sent back) from Palestinian sources linked to Hamas. His friends and neighbors, with whom he also served on ‘charitable learning foundations’ (that seem to have lowered the standard of education in Chicago) were members of the Weather Underground who addmiitedly bombed Congress, the Pentagon, police stations and other government facilities; only to get away with it due to legal technicalities. Now, of course, Obama denies knowing them. He has denied so much of his background and the people in it that we must believe he lived for over thirty years in a vacuum, with no friends, no associates, did nothing with anyone, worked alone as a community organizer (how does that work?) – he’s just a blank piece of paper, just like his resume. In the difficult times ahead for the country, how can we even be thinking about letting someone who has done nothing, with nobody, and did it no where, get into the White House where experience and decision making is a major part of the job?

The current market crash is likely in response to the polls that say Obama is likely to be the next President, too. With the financial crisis facing us and the collapse of industry due to lack of money and credit, what will he do? That must be what Wall street is asking itself as investors are desperately trying to sell everything they have. Will he Nationalize the nation and bring Socialism to America for keeps to fill the void left by the collapse of Capitalism? If you think that’s good or even funny, think about whatever retirement portfolio you have and what it will be worth when/if that happens – zero! Some people want to turn to the government in times of financial uncertainty; but the government is what has caused this financial uncertainty to begin with, especially the liberal policies from the New Deal, to the Great Society, to the Community Reinvestment Act, we are coming closer and closer to Socialism and the collapse of industry here and around the world.

Global Warming has its role to play in all this too; we all heard Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives tell us that she would stand in the way of oil development in this country in order to “save the world.” Do you think these democrats in Congress will be disappointed if industry fails? Hell no! That would be the end of pollution; and that means more to them than your lives, your jobs and you futures! That’s who they are; that’s what they’ve said in hundreds of ways, culminating with MS Pelosi spelling it right out for us. She would sell us all out in order to Save the World… The world doesn’t need saving except from the likes of Nancy Pelosi and the rest of these liberals with their heads up their asses, thinking it’s in the sky!

I heard today where some financial experts are saying that if Obama gets into the White House, the Auto industry in this country, maybe around the world, will be the first of all the major industries to collapse and them by next year! Expect all coal-fired electrical generation plants to be shut down quickly, too. The House democrats, again lead by Nancy Pelosi, have already blocked the construction of new coal fired electrical power plants; it’s just one short step to close the ones that are already running. What then? How will industry run without electricity? Coal produces the vast majority of electricity now; but burning coal puts CO2 into the atmosphere! How long will we even be able to get gasoline, at any price, once industry is shut down? It won’t matter because you won’t need to commute anyway, there’ll be no jobs at all by then.

So what will the future hold? If Obama wins, there won’t be a future as we know it. If he loses we might have a chance. Nothing is yet too far gone that it can’t be rectified; but it’ll take a lot of changes to the way the government runs. All these cancerous programs and liberal policies will have to end or be restructured so they can work in a way so they will not be totally dependant on taxes, that’s for sure. They are all sagging under the weight of the Baby Boomer generation retiring anyway. Something has to give, folks; and only a determined and focused electorate can do it.

Things always look darkest before the storm. We have 24 days left to save the country. I will finish as much as I can with the blog I am getting ready that names culpable names and explains how this housing bubble came to be and came to burst, causing this financial crisis the country is in. I don’t know how it relates to the financial crisis happening in Europe and Asia, yet; but I will include that too, if I can. It is getting close but some things are harder to dig out than others. From what I’ve been able to uncover, so far, Obama and his associates are deep in the thick of it. Don’t let the democrats fool you into thinking they are fixing anything – they are who are culpable. As I’ve been saying, with all the digging I’ve done I have yet to find a republican name attached to any of it – the democrats wanted all the money and all the glory; but what they earned is all the blame in a multi-trillion dollar scandal/swindle that may well mark the end of the country.

We have to stop Obama’s run to the White House; he is the biggest disaster the democrats have ever perpetrated on us to date. Compared to Obama, Kerry would have been desirable (and he’s a full-fledged traitor); but I don’t think he was capable of destroying the country – Obama has us nearly there now!

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

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How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

2008-09-23T01:29:00.002-04:00

The emphasis in the story below are mine, including the disclaimer about the author’s relationship to John McCain. Not withstanding that, the fact speak for themselves and the money received by the democrat players is common knowledge now. What I have yet to see is a list of republicans who have received money from Freddie and Fannie during the same time frame as when Obama, Clinton, and Dodd got theirs.

The democrats are again starting to squawk about the plan put forth by the President. I’ll take a moment of your time here to explain a thing or two about that. First and foremost, only Congress can spend money. The President can ask for money and propose ways to spend money but he cannot, himself, appropriate a dime without Congress’s approval.

Secondly, having over seven years experience dealing with congress, the President surely knows that anything he proposes will get modifies during that proposal’s trip through both houses of Congress. It is better to ask for way more than he want, or realistically expects to get, so that in the end, when Congress is done modifying it, he has a good chance of getting what he reasonably hopes to get out of it. That is, if he started with a reasonable request, it would get trimmed and changed so much that, in the end, he’d wind up with nothing of what he wanted. The only way to get what is needed is to start by demanding a great deal more. (It would be different if the President were a democrat, of course.)

Another thing is that the democrats have done so much to create this mess (see below and other emails by yours truly) that he’d be truly incompetent to suggest that they, and by extension all of Congress, have any say over what happens with the bailout process. The courts, too, have been so complacent in dealing with democrat’s policies that they can be seen, easily be seen as just and extension of the DNC; and so to get them involved would be akin to involving the democrats. It is a terrible situation, however one looks at it and it would be better if a committee answerable to the President along would be better than just one person; but that would lead to the democrat’s majority in Congress finally controlling who sat on such a committee as well. What is he reasonably to do? At least the Secretary of the Treasury is answerable to the President and the President tried to restrict Fannie and Freddie back in 2003, the democrats made the mess and resisted all attempts to avoid it, so how can anyone seriously not understand why he’s trying to wrest any control over the bailout from the democrats? He may not be able to do it but he’s at least making the attempt.

That the democrats desire to profit from the bailout is axiomatic, too. That’s what they do and have done forever. It was the democrats that changed Washington time and again so that their would be huge amounts of money to plunder; and they their friends have never restrained themselves from plundering it, either. Note how the top one hundred, top level managers have taken over a billion dollars in ‘bonus money’ for the hard work they did plundering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… bonuses… can you imagine that? Can you imagine that they are getting away with it; and that it is still going on as the institutions crumble around us all, they are collecting over a billion dollars in bonuses (collectively).

They should be paying back every cent they have in the world, followed by about twenty years, each, in Federal Prisons. The real prisons, too, not the country clubs with restricted access; but in with the kidnapers, murderers, and other bank robbers. Just because they committed their crimes with a pen, rather that a gun, doesn’t make those crimes any less heinous… but they are collecting bonuses instead. I can’t speak for anybody else but that makes me mad enough to spit. (It makes me a lot madder than that but one needs to be discreet when putting words to paper (so to speak).) What can I actually do, though, besides just talking about it? What can any one person do?

Maybe it’s time to start a private militia? That is the purpose of the Second Amendment, after all is said and done. It’s for words alone are not enough but something has to be done and the government is the problem. That’s what the author of the Second Amendment said it was for. It has nothing at all to do with hunting; it is to ensure that the rest of the Constitution is adhered to by the government, is what it is all about, what it has always been about. That’s why the democrats are always trying to eliminate it, too.

They are so good at fooling people though, so damned good at that. The press is on their side, too, making the job of fooling people so damned easy. I used to wonder why, what was in it for the press but then it became clear enough. The press, print and broadcast, is owned by very few people and by and large they are democrats, too. The owners, the people you almost never hear the names of, get to wet their beaks in the public trough, too. Like so many democrat operatives, like Jamie Gorelick, who made over $26 million out of Fannie Mae. From Wikipedia on her:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gorelick ...

Federal National Mortgage Association
Even though she had no previous training nor experience in finance, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) from 1997 to 2003. She served alongside former Clinton Administration official Franklin Raines, and earned over $26,000,000 during her six years there. During that period, Fannie Mae developed a $10 billion accounting scandal.
On March 25, 2002, Business Week interviewed Gorelick about the health of Fannie Mae. Gorelick is quoted as saying, “We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody’s gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions.” One year later, Government Regulators “accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses”.
In an additional scandal concerning falsified financial transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a “manipulation” that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives. Gorelick received $779,625.

She served Clinton well, covering his (and her) ass as a member of the 9/11 Commission, whereas she should have been being investigated by said commission. They all get paid well out of public money; and so it goes with the owners of the MSM. The people get fooled and pay the tab, too; what a sweet deal for those in control of it. Which is why they now are screaming about Bush’s plan that excludes them from any control – it’s hard to know what they worry about the most, getting caught or losing their access to the feeding trough.

This isn’t the end – but I’m just to angry now to say any more. Ideas on what to do are welcome; we need a plan of action that will work.

Following is a tale by Kevin Hassett, written on Bloomberg.com, highlights and emphasis are my contribution – no words have been changed. Here, too, is the URL where you can find it for yourself:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_hassett&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0#

This is the end of my words and the bebining of Kevin Hassett's...
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How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

Commentary by Kevin Hassett

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn’t. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street’s efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn’t make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it’s hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie’s position on the relevant accounting issue was not even “on the page” of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a “world-class regulator” that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan’s Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn’t be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.”

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that’s worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@aei.org

Last Updated: September 22, 2008 00:04 EDT

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[End of blog]

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

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Again, another democrat plot exposed

2008-09-22T00:14:00.003-04:00

http://tinyurl.com/3j9nl6

I’m just tired of hearing that both sides do the same thing; if you think that’s how it is, send me examples- real ones, not some talking sock-puppet from Moveon.org, or some such. Real events with a real republican behind it. You might find a few; but I’ll find ten democrats for every republican you find!

One side is not as bad as the other. I started seeing the light when I started looking for when the republicans earned the title of bigot; and all I found was democrat bigotry at every turn, from before the Civil War, during it, and after it, right through the fifties. Then, when they had no choice, they voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1967 but with just 60% support – the republicans showed 80% support on that vote. Then, having been forced to ‘do the right thing’ they made up for it with the “Great society” that has systematically destroyed the Black family and the Black community with Affirmative Action and Political Correctness.

Both parties are not the same; the republicans aren’t even as ‘in-step’ with their party as the democrats are. Democrats define patriotism as being strong enough to commit treason by help America’s enemies to kill our troops; and they’d rewrite the Constitution as it suits them, and a plethora of actions like those. In case you are confused, that is not patriotism, it is treason in some cases but it is not patriotism. What we are sorely lacking for are leaders, from either party, that will start to investigate and prosecute these people. It would go a long way towards cleaning up our political system if we started holding our Representatives and Senators responsible and put those that have earned it, in jail. That is, put them in a real jail, with the other criminals, not some gated country club; and relieve them of their ill-gotten gains. They should be held to a higher standard since they took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Putting the bastards in prison and impoverishing them would make that oath mean something, too!

We need a new Political Party, that’s for certain. One that will hold all of these leaches accountable. The Civil Service needs a good looking into as well. Too many of them have grown too powerful and abuse their power. They may be the glue that holds government together but they are the ones that hold these scandals and scams together, as well.

The Primaries are over; so, come November 4th, we need to remove all of the democrats. Then, in the next primaries, change all the republicans, too. (Democrats should be kept as far from Washington as possible and for as long as possible, at least until the rotten ones die; and then any new ones will start fresh, without being taught how to cheat and steal.) We need to keep doing that until there are no politicians in Washington who have been there for more than a few years. Then we need to support a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on Congress, both houses. (If we could repeal the 17th Amendment, we wouldn’t have to worry about that with the Senate – they would change with new governors.

Even then there will be ‘mentors’ who will teach the young ones; so, investigations need to be kept going, so those ‘mentors’ can be rooted out and imprisoned (and impoverished) too. I’m afraid it’s going to take too long and we, as a Nation, don’t have the attention span for the long-haul. Hell, we can’t even keep our eyes on the ball in the war on terror; and we’re starting to say it’s taking too long!

With what’s happened the past few weeks and days, and what is coming as a result, I am truly afraid that nothing will be done, nobody will be held accountable, and the doors will be left wide open, like they were after the Savings & Loan debacle for a new batch of thieves to raid the Nation’s Treasury. The taxpayers will be robbed again and again because nobody is doing anything to stop it. What can we do about it? What will we do about it?

One thing that we all need to do is try and figure out short-term investing. (Not long term, that’ll all get eaten up as these bail-outs progress.) We need to find ways to accumulate a lot of money against the coming depression and the rampant inflation that will come with it. We are going to need wheel-barrows full of money just to buy groceries.

Who knows, this could be a planned path to bring us around to a one-world government, first by consolidating all financial institutions. After that the rest becomes easy. Then, the Eugenicists fulfill their desires and remove 80% of the world’s population, with the other 19% working to keep the elite 1% in luxury. That might be far-fetched, of course; unless we see the other parts of that plan in play, like this Global Warming scam. One main thrust of that scam is the depopulation of Africa. Keeping DDT away from them as well as technology, insures plagues; converting choice agricultural land from food to bio-fuel production maintains the ongoing famines and wars, including those of genocide. Is it a crazy conspiracy theory when it’s actually working?

I call Global Warming a scam because that’s what the science says it is. The IPCC was a sham, with lass than a handful of scientists actually signing off on the greenhouse gas theories. The models don’t work and are so wrong that the entire theory based on them must be artificially maintained. The past few years have seen startling cooling; so much so that all the warming that happened in the twentieth century has gone away. The atmospheric layers that should be warming if there was a greenhouse effect taking place are not warming at all, nor have they ever (during the past hundred years, anyway).

Glaciers that are melting now have only been in place for a couple of hundred years, since the Maunder Minimum, anyway. As to wildlife being threatened, polar bears have survived the much warmer climate the Earth had a thousand years ago, when the Vikings had colonies on Greenland; and they should survive whatever change is happening now. The point is that Human Beings are not destroying the planet, nor could we if we set our minds to do so. The Earth has survived great extinction events in the past and will survive us, a species that came about quite naturally, according to those who think we’re destroying it, anyway. Whatever we do is natural to us, it is in our natures to manipulate the environment so to do differently would be unnatural. I certainly do not wish to behave unnaturally; so I’ll continue to manipulate my environment and encourage others to do so, too. Damn the democrats for wanting us to behave unnaturally!

This is going to be a long, cold winter with rising fuel prices, thanks to the democrats who want it that way. Learn to day trade well enough to pile up some large stash of cash; we are all going to need one (or two or more)!

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Global Warming, Part MMVIII

2008-07-19T16:24:00.004-04:00

Algore is getting desperate. Why else would he disperse hundreds of millions of dollars on a marketing campaign for a ‘scientific theory that was decided years ago’?

I have been perusing a website that is indisputably biased towards displaying AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) as a hoax; and those who cling to it, as charlatans. If anything, they are heralding the next Ice Age; but I think there’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek along with that declaration.

http://www.iceagenow.com/index.htm leading me to:

http://www.iceagenow.com/growing_glaciers.htm, specifically:

http://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm And a particularly interesting story from the BBC at:

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/bigchilltrans.shtml is worth the diversion, if I might call it that, about the (remote) possibility of an ice age descending on England.)

Feel free to start where you’d like and if you find something worth pointing to that I have not yet, send me the link where you found it and I’ll take a look.

I am still on the section about Greenland’s glaciers expanding; and it is apparent why they built the website. There seems to be as many (or more) glaciers in the world that are expanding as thee are those that are disappearing. They point out articles that grudgingly admit to that, then go on to say the expansion is due to Global Warming. No matter what the news, stories end saying it is due to Global Warming. Places warming – Global Warming; Places cooling – Global Warming; ice thickening – Global Warming; ice thinning, Global Warming; everything is Global Warming in many news articles. It’s just pathetic, really. Worse still are the articles that seem to have just disappeared. Oh, the links go to pages at the news site mentioned, but there is no story displayed, nor is there an error message and the page is marked (on the browser) as being what it was pointed at. Very strange…

Anyway, like I said, I’m still at the part about Greenland’s glacier(s) thickening and spreading. It would seem that all the excitement about the rise in sea levels is extremely exaggerated and premature at least. In fact, if the current trend continues, more of the Earth’s water is going to be trapped in Greenland causing the sea level to recede a tad. How disappointed Algore must be about that; no disasters to point to, so he has to rely on silly people becoming more alarmed.

Having no real events to alarm people with, news stories that I’ve seen (from this site or on my Google News page, where I built a section dedicated to Climate Change news) are suggestive, with phrases like ‘if such and such happens, then this’ll happen’ or ‘something could be caused by , leading to accelerating ’ but no facts at all. Like a story about a glacier growing in the caldera of Mt. St. Helen’s. The story goes on to say, “… which may be the only glacier in North America, or possibly the World, to be growing. …” Yet there are a dozen or so within five hundred miles that are, indeed, growing! The authors of these stories are dedicated to maintaining the myth of Global Warming, just as the same group were dedicated to the theme of us losing the war in Iraq but haven’t written a story in the past year about the war, just to maintain people’s opinion that it’s a lost cause.

Nevertheless, Congress, like a growing glacier, has picked up the cry (now, when the evidence is pilling up opposing it) about climate change and it is starting to cost you money. So far the rises have been somewhat subtle, like from using ethanol in gasoline. Actually ‘subtle’ may be the wrong word as it’s only subtle insofar as to the reason for it because there’s nothing subtle about the effects. Food prices are soaring and people around the world are starving. As mentioned (by me) before, croplands in Africa have been diverted from food to ethanol production, despite the surrounding famine. I only use the word ‘subtle’ because, so far, there has been no direct carbon tax, like what Algore is calling for. (See cartoon, below) The one thing we can count on with Congress, is to be a day late and spend lots of your dollars on the completely wrong things, creating the most possible negative consequences.

I took a peek at the section on Antarctica. Being the largest reservoir of ice in the world I thought it would make this note more complete and accurate. Depending on how you look at the expression “Most of the world’s glaciers” I may have been quite inaccurate above when I said, “There seems to be as many (or more) glaciers in the world that are expanding as thee are those that are disappearing.” It may have been more accurate to have said that 90-95% of the world’s glaciers are expanding, especially if we look at total volume, not just as a matter of named glaciers. Antarctica is about twice the area of the United States and all of its glaciers, except perhaps those on the Antarctic Peninsula, are building at an almost alarming rate, about 5’ of depth a year. Many of the scientific stations there have had to have been rebuilt a half dozen times over the past twenty years as the snow and ice have risen to engulf the previous ones.

From Canada’s Financial Post, datelined Sept, 2007: http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1edd8fbd-7084-4eb1-9f39-ecdee5378809 The story is about Antarctica and the scientist’s ten year quest to find evidence of climate change.

From the article: "The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica," he stated, adding that "We're looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment."

I would think it would be hard to find, as it doesn’t exist! The world is far too large for us puny humans to have any impact on its dynamic systems. Maybe, and that’s a big maybe, and if the Earth’s climate system was static we might be able to have an effect; but it’s not static, it’s dynamic, consisting of many feedback systems built-in to counteract intermittent effects, like volcanoes (which have far more impact, individually, than all the activities of mankind put together). The puny amounts of CO2 that we add to the atmosphere is simply god for plant life and nothing else. Even with what we add there is barely a few hundred parts per million molecules of the stuff in the air, far too little for it to influence a greenhouse effect. Far and away any greenhouse effect in the atmosphere comes from water vapor and perhaps to a much lesser extent, methane. That comes mostly comes from flatulence and that must surely be diminishing along with diminishing herds of huge animals. Now cows make most of that and we’re doing our part by eating them. CO2 is insignificant; all the talk about is has more effect than it has on the weather.

Not only are we not having an impact on the Earth’s climate, we couldn’t if we tried. It would be far easier to affect local weather than global weather and we cannot even do that. We can’t even predict what the weather is going to be next week and Algore, et al, would have us believe they can predict what it’s going to be like a hundred years from now. Their models are consistently wrong yet they cling to them and continue to sell them to gullible politicians who are afraid of their own shadows.

Enough for today. It’s too much to hope that it’s enough forever, though. As long as Algore and his minions are trying (and succeeding) to influence Congress (and the courts), we’ll all have to continue to fight back less they win and we all have to pay far more than we can afford to. Ultimately, if you see through all the hype, the goal of these people is to bring the world’s economy back to eighteenth century levels, where fossil fuels are left in the ground and transportation will be as far as horses will carry us.

The bright side of that lifestyle is that it’ll have less of a shock when women have to also start wearing burqas and need to follow alongside a man in public. That is, like life in Afghanistan eight years ago. Ready for that?

In closing let me mention a book that I’m reading on the subject called “Climate Confusion – How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor” by Roy W. Spencer, PhD. His PhD is in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1981 and is the Principle Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he directs a variety of climate research projects. (He knows what he’s talking about and writes in a self-depreciating sort of way, adding some humor into a grim subject matter – the Man-made Global Warming scam. For example, from the last paragraph of the Prologue: “Critics of this book will say that my treatment of global warming is obviously biased. And they are right. I have studied the issues enough to have developed some very strong biases on the subject. But it is not a question of whether or not bias exists – for we are all biased. It is a question of which bias is the best bias to be biased with.” After that there is a great deal of common sense, very little pandering, and a great deal of reason with facts enough to support what he says. I am just getting started today; but it is not a long read, under 200 pages in all. If you get a chance to get it, do; it’ll make for a good afternoon at the beach reading.

Cheers…

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Gary Varvel by Gary Varvel

(Click to see the comic, please. I wouldn't want to void his copyright.)

<http://www.mycomicspage.com/garyvarvel/>

Corruption

2008-05-07T14:47:00.001-04:00

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.” —Edmund Burke

You know, it isn’t their intentions so much as their corruption that makes me fear and suspect almost all liberal ideas from Congress. Although their intension's invariably lead to disastrous and unintended consequences, their corruption makes even their good intension's suspect! (Could it even be that those consequences are not unintended?)

Although there are many corrupt republicans, too, at least their platform is about individual rights and smaller government, not about identity groups’ privileges. The best government, as far as I understand the concept, is the smallest government possible needed to assure the common defense, monitor interstate commerce, and enforce equal rights for all individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, color, creed, or religion. It was when the government grew beyond those ideals that the corruption grew out of that excess. (As an aside here, I find the freedom of religion as a common theme throughout the founding documents but nowhere do I find the right of no religion; that has just been assumed.)

Beyond demanding that the States grant the freedoms inherent in the Constitution, the Federal government should have nothing to do with the people, per se – the people are within the domain of the state in which they live. The Sixteenth, and to a large extent the Seventeenth, amendments to the Constitution perverted that fundamental principle of Federalism; they involved the Federal government into the lives of the people of the country beyond insuring our liberties. In fact those amendments began the removal of our liberties, all in the name of good intentions.

If the Federal government were to distance themselves from the people (and their industry) the corruption would evaporate. It is as simple as that; at least for the most part. It is the money raised via the Sixteenth Amendment from which corruption springs forth. Money is power, power corrupts, absolute money corrupts absolutely. That follows like, if a=b and if b=c then c=a; I call it identity politics. The government has too much money to be uncorrupted, plain and simple.

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” —Augustine of Hippo

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, it needs it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Anthropomorphic Global Warming is Cooling!

2008-02-28T15:47:00.006-05:00

I have written much on the topic of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) to denounce it as a hoax, at best; as a swindle, more likely; and also as a cover for a nascent eugenics war based on the genocide of African and other Third-World populations, being waged by, or at least with the willing cooperation of, the UN.

Recently much of what I have said on the topic has been verified by current events and also by the scientific community. In particular, that the sun is the primary contributor to our climate, in many ways, not simply by providing all the energy the Earth receives. (Arguably, nuclear energy does not come from the sun but that has never been viewed as a contributor to climate or weather; so for all intents and purposes, I will leave nuclear energy out of the discussion for the sake of clarity and simplification.) To me the fact that Mars and other places in the Solar System are also warming left no doubt as to the sun being the dominant factor in climate and climate changes.

Since the AGW proponents have come forward, none of their predictions have born fruit; that is a sure sign that a theory is in error. It would seem, in fact, that they continually forecast the opposite of what has been happening. (This is above and beyond ice storms following Algore wherever he went to speak about the dangers of Global warming. That was just an amusing side note.) There are some examples of this in the following stories gathered from the internet this February, 2008. Please follow the links to the stories them selves to follow their references…

The following story is pasted (text only) in its entirety from: http://tinyurl.com/3b6zje
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Blog: Science
Temperature Monitors Report Wide-scale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM

World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year. Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.

There was an outrage, albeit a quiet one, from within the scientific community over the UN’s report on Climate Change. Names were used over the objections of the people who’s names were attached to the report; the UN refused to remove other names from the report after those people requested they be removed from it; other names on the report were not the scientists the report intimated they were, but rather just names of UN workers including janitors and maintenance workers. (Honorable enough professions but not experts on climate nevertheless.) Angry scientists focused on the issue.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has turned into hard data out of that scientific community. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad saw its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
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The story (behind that story) about solar activity driving our climate: http://tinyurl.com/239mgn (It starts out a bit chilling - pun intended):
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Blog: Science
Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 9, 2008 11:53 AM
A typical sunspot compared to the size of the earth. Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years.

Henrik Svensmark explains the SKY experiment (Source: Dr. Nir Shaviv)Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.

But will it happen again?

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

Observational data seems to support the claims -- or doesn't contradict it, at least. According to data from Britain's Met Office, the earth has cooled very slightly since 1998. The Met Office says global warming "will pick up again shortly." Others aren't so sure.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes. According to Patterson. we shouldn't be surprised by a solar link. "The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet," he says.

Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

However, researchers at DMI continued to work, eventually discovering what they believe to be the link. The key factor isn't changes in solar output, but rather changes in the sun's magnetosphere A stronger field shields the earth more from cosmic rays, which act as "seeds" for cloud formation. The result is less cloud cover, and a warming planet. When the field weakens, clouds increases, reflecting more light back to space, and the earth cools off.

Recently, lead researcher Henrik Svensmark was able to experimentally verify the link between cosmic rays and cloud formation, in a cloud chamber experiment called "SKY" at the Danish National Space Center. CERN plans a similar experiment this year.

Even NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies -- long the nation's most ardent champion of anthropogenic global warming -- is getting in on the act. Drew Shindell, a researcher at GISS, says there are some "interesting relationships we don't fully understand" between solar activity and climate.

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And: http://tinyurl.com/28kkfa
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The Sun Also Sets
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 2/7/2008
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.

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Copyright 2000-2008 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
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[We might want to build a few more coal fired electrical plants, perhaps in Africa?]
The temperature chart used in all the above quoted articles by itself is at:
http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/7390_large_hadcrut.jpg and here:

Note that the past year shows the single sharpest downward spike ever! Never has a .6°C annual temperature change been seen; and this one is negative (cooling), not warming! Note that they are stating that the sun is responsible for it. What has your humble author been telling you all these years about that? You doubt my humility, perhaps; but I doubt the need for humility here so it balances out. Read the last three paragraphs in the above story a couple of times and you might start agreeing with me about that, too.

Here’s how the sun’s influence impacts our climate and an experiment that verifies it: http://tinyurl.com/ywlhkb The entire galaxy seems to be involved – talk about influences not intuitively included in much research!

The first question always was, “Is the Earth’s climate going through a long-term change?” Followed by the second question (if the answer to the first one was yes), “Is it caused by the industry of mankind?”

Well, as of this year at least, the answer to the first question seems to be no, there is no long-term global weather/climate change; so there is no second question. That is, there is a new second question, “Should Algore, et al, be tarred and feathered along with the Nobel Committee and ridden off the planet on a rail?” That answer to that one is an unequivocal, “YES! They should be shot into the sun to get them some real warming.”

On a sobering note, monitoring world-wide temperature is very tricky. Having monitoring stations in cities artificially shows warmer temperatures, for example, so if the majority of them are in population centers we’d get false readings – and many are so situated. Therefore this negative spike might actually be worse (or lower) that it shows, just as the warmth recorded in the past couple of decades might be overstated.

What I think should be done is to install a world-wide network of simple weather stations positioned at the intersection of parallels and meridians set 10° latitude/longitude apart, making for 1296 stations linked to a central (or a couple of central) data centers to maintain a continuous global temperature record. Half would be in winter, half in summer, half in day, and half in night, making for a pure global average.

Wind, cloud cover, barometric pressure, and rainfall would complete the averages and provide a great deal of global averages and might be extremely helpful in understanding what drives climate, at least insofar as surface conditions effect it. Still it would be far less than perfect. What would be needed for a complete picture would be if those stations could have a weather balloon tethered, reaching to 100,000 ft with weather stations every thousand feet on the way up. (That’s not at all plausible but would be idyllic.)

The sad facts are that we, as a collective intelligence, have no idea what global averages are, ever, and short of such a system we most likely never will.

Maybe we should send all this to our Congressmen? It might do some good… Who knows? One benefit I’d personally like to see is Algore going back into obscurity, where he belongs. Perhaps he could invent something else new, like rainbows or automobiles…

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, it needs it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Liberal V Liberal - For the Future

2008-02-08T07:13:00.000-05:00

In the nightmare scenario of a choice between McCain or Clinton come next November what should the choice be?

I have always said “ABC” (Anybody But Clinton) but I have been listening to a logical argument from Ann Coulter that has me pausing. It goes like this:

If we get McCain he will be the (so-called) republican Jimmy Carter and lock the White House for decades for the Democrats. Republicans will be blamed for him and scare people from voting for any republican for at least a generation.

On the other hand, if Clinton gets in it will surely be for one term and the country will be screaming for the republicans to undo all the damage she did.

In both cases there will be so much damage done to the republic that, along with all the damage that’s been done over the past seventy years, we may never recover. If the democrats lock up the White House for decades there will certainly never be a chance to undo it. We will have a socialist hell-hole with unbridled numbers of illegal immigrants pouring over the borders to reap the harvest of everybody else’s hard work. There will no longer be a reason for people to aspire to ‘get ahead’ because there will be no place to go. Every raise, every dime over the poverty level will be ripped out of our paychecks before we ever see it, to feed the unquenchable thirst of people who would rather collect a handout than contribute to the bankrupt system; and who can really blame them?

If the damage was done by Hillary, however, the country might be so incensed, finally, that the Constitution might be modified by the republicans to undo all the socialist damage done by her and seventy years of abuses by liberals who think they are saviors because they redistributed our hard-earned industry to those who will not help themselves or others.

I will not spend a lot of time qualifying that, just to say that, yes, people should help their neighbors in genuine need; but that is not the business of the Federal Government. One change that needs to be made before any others is that the Constitution should be taught at every grade in school along with the Declaration of Independence so that people will understand what our republic is. That’s something that has long been lost; that’s the first thing that was removed from the curriculum so that all the abuses could be fostered on an ignorant electorate.

I wonder how many of us could pass a comprehensive test on those two documents as well as the Bill of Rights that came with them? Just a guess here but I think less than 5% of the general public would get over a ‘C’ on such a test. (Quick, what is the eighth amendment about?) Feeling queasy?

This may be a case when you see two evils and rather than which would be worse now we have to ask ourselves, which would have the most long reaching effects?

Reference: http://www.usconstitution.net/ & http://www.usconstitution.net/declar.html for the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (respectively).

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

(Could it be that the only reason McCain running now is to get Hillary into the White House? (He has been helping a variety of liberal causes since he begrudged Bush the nomination in 2000; and he’s really too old and infirm to serve a whole term.) Is he getting help behind the scenes from the Clintons? The MSM have been on his side for quite some time. What I don’t understand about that is why some people allow the liberal press/media to help them choose a republican candidate – they sure as hell don’t want a conservative running the country; but they sure are enamored with Team Clinton!)

It may be worth looking at whom he chooses as his running mate because there is a real chance that’s who will be President shortly after McCain is inaugurated. (Just a thought…)

It’s looking like we are going to have two liberals running for President this year, one on the democrat ticket and the other on the republican ticket. The real big problem is that people will blame all republicans for a generation for whatever McCain does and we’ll have liberal Presidents there after… The other way, if Clinton (or Obama) wins, the liberals will get their justly deserved blame and maybe, just maybe we’ll have a generation of republican Presidents and Congress to right the wrongs of the past – if we can get one or two with some real testicles (or ovaries, don’t get riled girls) to get some real changes to the Constitution like repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments for starters!

A National Sales Tax (with rebates for the poorest) will go a long way to repairing our very sick economy; and having Senators represent their States instead of being a second House of Representatives will get States’ Rights back where they belong, too!

Then (mostly) privatize the public pensions (Social Security) and get the government completely out of the health-care industry and regulate the insurance companies, which should be highly regulated anyway as well as protected from unscrupulous lawyers. All the country needs to guarantee everybody is covered is to pool the insurance carriers and we’d all be part of a 600,000,000 member (what’s out population, minus illegals?) coalition of insured people. Insurance is covered under interstate commerce and as such the feds do have authority to do that; but what they do not have authority to do is be the insurers!

Get the Federal Government completely out of the education industry, period! That’s State business, period.

The FCC has control over the broadcast media; we don’t need any campaign finance legislation to protect incumbents and it never should have been signed into law in the first place. Cleaning it up just takes spending caps and equal access to free broadcast time, which should also be capped. The broadcast companies could still sell commercial time and with all of them broadcasting the political ads, etc. at the same time, (coordinated by the FCC) all the sponsors would get equal time, too. Nobody losses and more people would be able to afford to run for office, not just the wealthy ones. or with rich friends, and high-paid media & marketing companies to raise untold capital, not to mention the corruption involved with campaign finance (Charlie Tre, Normand Shu, and countless others both known and unknown.

Term limits has always been a good idea; we never needed long-term windbags who become expert at pork-barrel spending and pandering to lobbyists to keep their jobs. I do think, though, that after sitting out a term or two that all elected offices should be open to everybody, even people who had served previously. After a hiatus, if a person could get re-elected that just might mean they are who the people want, not just who use their office to hold on to that office. With the 17th Amendment repealed, the Senate wouldn’t have that problem very much anyway; they’d change with the states’ governors.

The only way to even have a chance at any of that, though, just might mean getting the democrats to rightfully take the blame for the liberal administration that we’re going to have anyway. That’s a bitter pill for sure; but these are bitter times with no choice about having a liberal in the White House anyway. One way gets rid of them for the long-term; the other insures a liberal government for many, many years, perhaps for decades to come. Really, what’s worse, four years of liberals or twenty? That’s what this may well have come to.

This is not good however I look at it. Does anyone have a better future in view? Please? I need to hear about it. What choices do we have?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, it needs it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Anthropomorphic Global Warming, Eugenics, and Genocide

2008-01-23T19:45:00.000-05:00

This topic is springing up in many venues, some are nicely concealed, too.

I have been watching a National Geographic special entitled “The Universe” every Wednesday evening (at 9PM) and one of them was about the composite history of the Earth. It was pretty good and seemed quite comprehensive but there were a lot of areas where conjecture was presented as fact; that was very disappointing for me. I used to think that the NG was truthfully factual; but I have been disabused of that notion, not only from this one episode, but by many of their shows now.

One particular item of interest was the period of the early history of the Earth that has been dubbed “Snowball Earth”. At this period the entire Earth was supposedly encased in miles of ice from pole to pole. They said it was due to ocean currents (like the Atlantic conveyor) being blocked by continental drift, inhibiting the circulation of warm water causing the ice caps to spread leading to reflecting too much sunlight back into space, leading to further encroachment of ice until the entire planet was covered. Bullshit, absolute bullshit.

First of all there isn’t enough water to cover the entire Earth with miles of ice! If there was, then where did it go? Even melted the Earth would then be completely covered in ocean. Even then, how did it melt? The albedo of all that ice would have perpetuated the condition indefinitely. They said it was the dynamics of the heat at the Earth’s core but if that was the case then it should never have completely frozen to start with.

The Earth may have gone through a period of extreme cold and ice but it couldn’t have cycled through that on its own; surely the sun would have had a major role in what happened? The sun, however, was never mentioned at all during the program, like it has no effect on our climate. That’s when I knew that the entire show was a cover for AGW, just another silly theory that denies the effect of the sun on the Earth’s climate.

We’re being bombarded with subliminal messages like the above to get us all to believe in Algore’s scam. More and more historical programs are being produced that have this message embedded in them that are inexorably pressuring people to ‘get with the program’ and go back to the middle ages’ technologically. The pressure to reduce fossil fuel usage is going to make life hard here but its main thrust is to make life impossible in Africa and other Third-World areas. The thrust of the program (the AGW program) is to reduce the Earth population by at least 50%! It is a Eugenics War hidden in a liberal agenda, getting otherwise good people to do things that will ultimately lead to the single largest Genocide in Earth’s history.

I for one do not wish to be associated with genocide; and I certainly do not wish to be any part of this Global Genocide, hidden behind a propaganda war called Anthropomorphic Global Warming. The Earth has a fever right enough, it’s the fever of a holocaust! This isn’t something that we can just stay out of, either. Like the German people during WWII, those who stood by and let it happen were just as accountable as those who committed it, so too will those now who fail the peoples of today’s world! This is a time where everybody is either helping the extermination of more than three billion people or fighting against it; there is no middle ground with something this big. Ignorance is no excuse either, not in the information age it isn’t.

Perhaps I’m overstating things? Have you seen the news out of Africa lately? Even though, or perhaps because, the UN has Peacekeeping Forces are there, thousands of people a month are being slaughtered. Genocidal wars are rampant; Islamofascists are having a field day, poverty is deplorable; but simple power plants are denied to those people (so medical supplies are not only in pathetically short supply but due to the lack of electricity, and by extension refrigeration, they can’t be kept long enough to be dispensed with), and their arable land is being used to grow bio-fuel rather than food for consumption in the midst of famine. Their natural resources are exploited without compensation to the people who should own them, while these deplorable conditions are promoted to distract the world from the thievery. Instead of doing anything about it we’re all wringing our collective hands about carbon emissions! What about all these blood emissions?

Try pricing solar-electric panels to make your home energy independent and you’ll quickly find that paying the Utility company their monthly tribute is cheaper than doing that; but that’s the ‘solution’ the Africans are told to pursue for their energy needs. Nice, isn’t it, telling the poorest people on the face of the planet that their only hope is the most expensive route! That’s telling them that they have absolutely no hope at all. Now we have to use florescent lights by 2012 to save energy!

I saw a better program on the History Channel last night, though. It seems that several prophecies made thousands of years ago and from all parts of the globe: from Central America (Myan), to China (I-Ching) to the Pueblo’s of N. America and others have all agreed that the world, as we know it at least, will end on December 21, 2012. The scary part is that they were that specific, too, right down to the day; so I don’t think florescent lights will be our biggest problem. When the world ends and we have to answer for our lives to our Maker, what will we tell Him that we did about this Global Genocide? I don’t know for sure but I have a feeling that saying ‘I didn’t know about it’ will not work. It isn’t like it’s a big secret, the headlines are there, the perpetrators are known, the people are dying. How can we deny it?

I’m spreading the word and looking for other things to do. Elections are another way; it isn’t so much about democrat vs republican as it is about liberal vs the people. It’s the liberals in government, elected and appointed, that are perpetuating this crisis and they need to be replaced. We need to forget selfish causes and petty hatreds and get people who are realistic about dealing with real problems and stop these people who want to be seen as Pollyanna’s selling us sugar water as a cure for all ills while the world bleeds real blood!

I'm mad as hell and I'll do whatever I can to stop this hell on Earth now!

Comments welcome; pro-active ones are solicited!

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, it needs it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A Tyranny of Clintons

2008-01-05T20:01:00.000-05:00

Yes, a tyranny of Clintons, like a gaggle of geese, of a bunch of grapes, a bevy of beauties, the collective form for team Clinton is a tyranny of them.

I just finished watching "Waco - Rules of engagement" which also reminded us of Ruby Ridge, which lead this thinker to remember Elian Gonzales, the little boy that the Clinton administration refused to wait for a court ordered hearing before shipping him off to Cuba. The rule of law has no meaning for the Clintons other than other people should adhere to their words as law.

It is bad enough here with bloated, bureaucratic police agencies running rampant on Americans without having unrestrained egomaniacal leadership wielding them like a whip on our backsides.

The Branch Davidians were not a cult, as such, but just this group that had been around since the thirties, an offshoot of the Mormons. It was more a bible study group that was about the Seven Seals spoken of in the Book of Revelations of St John. People there lived a communal life, maintained a farm and made money for their other needs by selling produce and dealing in firearms. That, in fact, is what many or most of their guns were, collectables that were bought and sold for a profit at gun shows.

As to the BATF serving them a warrant to investigate their guns there was two problems: First, why didn't they just walk up to the front door and serve the warrant? The Davidians had been served warrants several times over the years, mostly to investigate how the children were being treated and educated. The sheriff was in the documentary and said they were good people and there were no problems with the kids as far as Social Services could ascertain nor from questioning the children either.

The second problem relates to what feel was the real reason that BATF was harassing them in the first place, and that was because BATF had already lost a court case against the Davidians concerning their guns and BATF had to return those guns to the Davidians. BATF doesn't like loosing and decided to get even and get some publicity at the same time. It all backfired on them, at least the publicity did, anyway. Those Davidians who made it out alive were exonerated in court for the murder of the BATF agents, too; so it seems BATF nearly lost all around, except of course that over 90% of the Davidians were dead, including the children.

Speaking of the children, the FBI and BATF only started talking about 'saving the children from the cultists” after several weeks had already gone by and none of their warrants stated anything about the children either.

Jack Booted Thugs is exactly what they, the BATF, were down near Waco, TX, motivated by a tyrannical White House.

So, after running roughshod over America for eight years, raping anyone who came near the President, and molested again by his wife if they dared to complain, and pillaging whatever they could, including the White House on their way out; the Clintons want back in and a lot of people think that's a good idea.

Think what you will about the current President, he has not attacked the American People; all he's actually done is protect us from World-Wide Terrorism; the Clintons, on the other hand, attacked Americans individually, personally and in groups using all the weapons available to a President (as well as one given to him at birth).

What this country does not need is another Tyranny of Clintons!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; The latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe. Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, it needs it!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Future Shock

2007-11-07T11:23:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic should the democrats take the White House, especially if they continue to hold Congress. Hold on to your wallets because it is going to be expensive, very damned expensive!

First, gasoline, natural gas, coal, (all fuels), electricity, will all go up be at least, at the very least 30%, maybe as much as double in 8 years! (The MIT paper said by 2015, oh, so actually seven years) due largely to implementation of taxes and other restrictions to try and cool the sun. (By that of course I mean the climate but we all know that’s driven by the sun, so…)

We’ll have 20 million or more new citizens, many or most of which will be on Welfare and/or Social Security (for which they have not contributed a dime). That should see FICA payments double as well, especially as the Baby-Boomer generation have started to retire).

The Nanny-State will grow at an alarming rate with Health Care and the government dictating how you can live your lives to get it. More and more horror stories are pouring out of England and Canada on how well single payer Health Care doesn’t work. People are dying waiting for services and many services are not even available as fewer and fewer students are opting for medical degrees (and going into law instead). Even those students who do go for medical degrees leave England or Canada to practice their craft where they can do so without the over-burdening government regulations that hamper them in their countries. A significant number of Dr.s in those countries are being imported from the Middle-East (and lots of them turned out to be terrorists and/or supporters of terrorists). How will you deal with a surgeon who is trying to convert you to Islam when you need a heart bypass from him? Have you thought about that angle? Isn’t that type of extortion also terrorism? With the new middle-man of government bureaucracy between you and health care, that should double in price while halving in service too.

Meanwhile, developing countries, especially in Africa, are being deprived of every civilized advancement to improve their lives. Power plants of any type are being withheld from these wretched people so our rich-cats can keep their beach front properties. Global warming my ass, this is about Eugenics, pure and simple. It is a backhanded way to eliminate the population of Africa, a continent rich in natural resources. The abject poverty there perpetuate continuous states of war among the tribal leaders while the world mostly looks on, waiting for the end so their resources can be exploited; keeping technology away from them perpetuates that situation as well. Under Algore’s leadership, genocide is rampant in Africa. Those who exploit the situation can claim innocents, though, as the Africans are killing themselves; but make no mistake, by perpetuating the poverty and depriving those people of technology, it is on their heads. Think that’s exaggerating? Think why we’re using food to make ethanol instead of shipping that food to Africa? Who is it that’s making such an uproar about the situation in Dafur? Who’s responsible for turning food (corn) into ethanol? In both cases it’s the democrats. Making a problem then complaining about it (and thereby deflecting blame) is their modus operandi in case you never noticed. Starvation and dismal living conditions are the primary causes of war throughout history. Any more questions?

Meanwhile back here, pursuit of happiness and freedom of choice are going away with liberties of all kinds. At some point, should the situation continue unabated, there will be a One-World-Government with the elitists ruling all of us with an iron fist. Hitler and Tojo didn’t live to see it but their dream, or rather our nightmare, is moving ahead full steam, eugenics included. Once it comes to be it will be a long dark time in human history, too, because who will there be to end it? With the weapons available to the super-government, how could the enslaved peoples of the world have any chance at all to stage a successful revolt? We won’t even have basic guns here because surely, once empowered, disarming the people will be a top priority.

I am afraid that this scenario is inevitable, too. All we can do is postpone it. Incrementally, this horror has been coming to be for nearly a century and it’s steps are coming faster and faster with every obstacle that falls to them.

In the end, it is said, we get the government we deserve. Do we really deserve this? We’ll see in a year, at least for a while…

Flower power on the campaign trail

2007-09-15T13:10:00.000-04:00

The Norman Hsu story just won’t go away and gets stranger as it unfolds.

After finding out the Hsu got much, most, maybe all the money he was throwing at a variety of democrats (Hillary’s campaign got more than all the rest by far – (See Note 1) So far, Hillary has pledged (make me gag) to return, first Hsu’s direct contribution of $36,000, and now the bundled money ($850,000)) we learned that the person it came from, Joel Rosenman, was who put on the Woodstock Music Festival. So what, right? It was interesting as an aside; but now I’ve learned that Hillary had attached an earmark on some bit of legislation that gave $1,000,000 of your money to build a Woodstock Museum! (See Note 2)

That doesn’t even make sense though, does it? The guy coughed up $40 million to get one back? It’s like the more I hear about all this the less sense it makes.

Now, after Hsu ran out on a million dollar bail fifteen years ago, and two million dollars a week ago, some judge wants to “see if five million will hold him” (That’s what the judge said). Let me guess... No? He bilked Rosenman of $40M and it seems that there may an additional $30 million+ from other people caught-up in his new Ponzi scheme. (http://tinyurl.com/2jcogl) So, you tell me, with $70+ million of other people’s money to play with, will he willingly go to jail in order to not forfeit $5 million that wasn’t his to start with? Would you?

Surely he has over $60 million stashed away somewhere… OK, he’s throwing it around, after $7 million in bail, a couple million in ‘donations’, a million here and there to things like ‘The New School’ in New York and other such things, like living large, so maybe he’s down to his last $50 million (poor baby). Suicide, indeed (or as it’s being called, Hsu-icide); he’s trying to find a way out of the country that doesn’t involve the obvious checkpoints (from where he was). He took a train from CA to Chicago – how hard is it to cross into Canada from that vantage point? He wouldn’t even have to show his passport driving across (not till June 2009). Once in Canada his US passport would easily get him to China or anywhere. Where is all that money now? That’s what I’d like to know. (That and how can I get my hands on it? LOL)

Of course Hillary knew nothing about any of this; how could she, right? Well, she has Secret Service protection and they run background checks on everybody that comes into contact with her; that’s one way… That begs the question of why they didn’t turn Hsu in from the start, doesn’t it? Surely they knew he was a fugitive, no? Hell, folks, you can’t take more than $4,999 in cash out of the bank without filling out Federal forms demanding to know why you need that much cash; and this guy dumps nearly a million dollars on Hillary’s campaign and nobody asked where the money came from or who Hsu was? (Sounds like something off of a Chinese menu – Who Hsu Was in Spicy Sauce. LOL

Ol’ hubby, Bubba, is in charge of those Secret Service guys; does that have anything to do with the answers to those questions? How many millions did he (presumably) have to return from his campaigns over the years from sources ‘he knew nothing about’? (“You could have knocked me over with a straw.” – that from a man who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘is’ or what ‘sex’ means. … and couldn’t remember having sex “with that woman, Monica Lewinski”! (I never knew a man who forgot a blowjob – but that’s not ‘sex’ right?))

Who knew Hsu and when did they know it? Why in the hell would Hillary give your money away to build a Woodstock Museum? (What would be in a Woodstock Museum? An x-rated casino? Isn’t there one of those in the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor?) The main question is, why would anybody vote for such an obviously corrupt, hedonistic, egocentric, self-absorbed, paranoid, politician with delusions of grandeur? (Personally, I like my corrupt politicians a little more discrete about their shenanigans!) Really now, they do the same things, over and over, learn nothing of a positive nature, and think that makes them savvy enough to be President (again)? Come to think of it, it does, doesn’t it? They may do the same things time and again but they get away with them time and again; so why not? No doubt they have the right to laugh their sick, twisted asses off at the people who continue to support them; after all, who are the stupid ones?

PS: I wrote the above yesterday but neglected to post it. Good, now I won’t have to send a second one with newer information just printed in the New York Post: http://tinyurl.com/2qq2cq …even their style rivals my own. That article concludes with the following (emphasis mine):

“…You might have thought that Hillary's intimate knowledge of that scandal-plagued cash drive would have prompted her to avoid "bundlers" like Hsu.
If so, you would be wrong.
Last June, when the California Democratic Party passed on concerns that Hsu was involved in shady business, Hillary's finance director responded: "I can tell you with 100 [percent] certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a Ponzi scheme. He is COMPLETELY legit."
It then emerged, of course, that Hsu had been a fugitive for 15 years on charges of defrauding investors. He promised to surrender, failed to do so, then got nabbed after having some sort of breakdown on a passenger train.
Clinton's campaign insists that Hsu fell through the cracks of a faulty computer search (though reporters checking the same database found records of a bankruptcy filing, multiple lawsuits and links to possible criminal cases).
And her campaign chairman - Terry McAuliffe, known for his methodical courtship of big-money sources for Bill and Hillary - is pleading ignorance, telling The Washington Post, "I don't know how [Hsu] became involved."
This, despite reports that Hillary told her top finance aides to carefully vet big-money people - so as to avoid anything that would conjure up bad memories of Clinton-Gore '96.
But as one unnamed major fund-raiser told The New York Times: "The Clintons are the ultimate pragmatists in who they hang out with. If you can be useful to them, they will find a way to make it work."
That explains why Team Hillary turned a blind eye to Norman Hsu.
But what about Sandy Berger?
Probably just nostalgia.”

The bottom line, though, is why should she act differently? What she learned was that there are no consequences, none, zero, zip, nada. Charlie Trie, et al were only embarrassments to Clinton’s campaign, he was elected regardless of all of them. Why not take a chance if there is nothing to lose and everything to gain? Wouldn’t we all?

Sandy Burger got his wrist slapped for stealing and destroying National Security documents right out of the National Archives; Scooter Libby’s life was left in shambles for being confused about phone calls three years past in an investigation over absolutely nothing. There’s the difference between the Clintons’ and the rest of the world. For ‘Team Billery’, nothing ventured, nothing gained, with nothing to lose.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The following pieces are off of the Rush 24/7 website. They are followed (there) with links to the news stories from where the information was extracted.

Note 1: “More Democrats announced yesterday that they would dispose of funds that Mr. Hsu gave or raised, including Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York ($25,000), Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts ($35,000), Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu ($11,700), Montana Sen. Jon Tester ($4,750), Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill ($20,700) and Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph Sestak ($2,500).”

Note 2: Yesterday, during our excursion into broadcast excellence, we had a big story from the Wall Street Journal detailing where Norman Hsu (Hsu Xiao Ling) got his money, $40 million. Where did he get it, and how did it end up with the Clintons? We know how it ended up with the Clintons and the Democrat Party. But where he got it was from a guy named Rosenman who is now a financier on Madison Avenue in New York, and it turns out that Rosenman was one of the guys who founded, and orchestrated, and put on Woodstock in 1967 at Max Yasgur’s farm. I got an e-mail yesterday afternoon after the program that said, “Do you realize that Mrs. Clinton has proposed that Congress pay or spend one million dollars to build a Woodstock museum?” You know, Mrs. Clinton is running around like she didn’t know who Hsu is and she didn’t know where Hsu got his money. She has no idea about this. She’s totally surprised. So I read this e-mail with a lot of interest. Well, my gosh, here’s a connection, if she’s authorizing a million dollars spent for a Woodstock museum! So I looked it up. We did Nexis research, ladies and gentlemen, and have two stories to report to you. The first is from the Des Moines Register July 4th of this year.

“A tax-cut group Tuesday took aim at a bill sponsored by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, questioning use of federal money for a Woodstock music festival museum, an online herbarium in New York, and a canoe-making program in Hawaii. Those projects are among more than 1,000 so-called ‘earmarks’ in a spending bill overseen by [Harkin] chairman of an appropriations subcommittee. ... Another earmark highlighted by Americans for Prosperity was $1 million for the Museum at Bethel Woods in New York, which according to its Web site seeks in 2008 to interpret the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. The money was requested by two New York senators, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer.” Then the Jawa Report on July 17th of this year: “Hillary/Schumer want $1 Million For Hippie Museum -- How many Troops will have to go without supplies, armor or food because Hillary and Schumer want to fund a church to hippies? ‘The grassroots free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) today released a list of Senate earmarks slated to be included in the Fiscal Year 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill. The 1,016 earmarks total nearly $392 million, and include millions for questionable projects such as $1 million in tax dollars for a museum dedicated to recreating the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival...”

Now, you may be thinking, “So what, Rush?” Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve warned you I can’t tell you how many times: Nothing that happens with the Clintons is a coincidence. So we can spend all afternoon connecting the dots, or we can suspend disbelief, and we don’t have to spend all afternoon connecting the dots. Here you have this guy Rosenman who started Woodstock, who somehow gets in business with Hsu. He gives Hsu $40 million for what turns out to be a fraudulent investment scheme. He’s now trying to get the money back. Hsu ends up doing whatever with the money, but some of it ends up back to Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats at large. Mrs. Clinton said, “I had no idea who Norman Hsu is! Our vetting process totally broke down. I had no clue. We’re shocked and we’re stunned,” and blah, blah, blah, blah. But there is that $1 million earmark for a Woodstock museum. By the way, folks, remember all of the whining and the moaning and the complaining when that bridge in Minneapolis took the dumper? “We don’t spend enough on infrastructure in our country! We are falling apart! We gotta get people out of Iraq!” Yet we have $1 million for a Woodstock museum, ladies and gentlemen?

;->
Best regards,
Ichabod Crane
i.m.crane@gmail.com
http://neoconservative.blogspot.com/also: http://aimew.spymac.net/blog/

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

“Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.” —Aristotle

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Veritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America, we need it!

China-gate Part II?

2007-09-07T21:51:00.000-04:00

[Note, embedded links should work well; but I also expanded the URLs for your convenience in copy and paste editing. You may want to get comfortable. Reading this and the stories pointed to by these links might consume a large block of time. Understanding Teflon-coated, insidious, nefarious, underhanded, yet complexly motivated megalomaniacs isn't as easy as doing integrals without paper, therefore it takes a bit to lay it all out. Alcohol might help; bookmarking and several visits to it might even be better; maybe both.]
---
No kidding - I’m having deja vu all over again; it’s like 1996, except some of the names have changed between the Normand Hsu story and the China-gate scandal of the 90's. At least that's what it may unfold to become. Really, though, there is not much more than a familiar smell and close similarities, so far; and nothing is sure except for Chinese people, one of their connection with and long visit to Hong Kong (at least), lots of money going around to Dems (most of which, the veritable lion's share, going to a Clinton), and the money's origin that came from Hsu and the Paws (among others) is simply unknown at this time. Simply put, maybe too simply, is that it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and there is (duck) egg on people's faces.

Some libs (see Huffington Post for the sickest) are already trying to shut this up by saying it’s racist, “Why, just because the guy has a Chinese name as do the other ‘donors’, do we have to assume this is the same thing as before?” Maybe because it smells the same way as before?

He skipped town on a felony charge he pleaded guilty to back in, what, 1992 while, at the same time, he was going bankrupt.

Although he is allegedly naturalized here, Mr. Hsu (sounds like shoe) was born and raised in (or near) Hong Kong, China.

He went to Hong Kong for ten years.

He came back and started donating money like it was burning a hole in his pockets.

He claimed he made his millions in the garment industry but nobody in that industry knows him, including where he claimed to work as president of various companies (although he was seen, by employees of one to have dropped in to pick up mail). People are investigating where his money came from, so far unsuccessfully. It would seem that someone who made millions in a well-known industry would have some footprints (besides carbon) wouldn’t he? That is, if that’s where the money came from.

He got people who have no obvious means to do so, to also start donating money like there was no tomorrow. One family (Chinese, if that matters?) who make somewhere around $47,000 a year and just refinanced their $270,000 San Francisco home and after no history of political contributions, suddenly and over the past three or four years (since Hsu returned from Hong Kong) donated some $230,000 ($250,000 by some accounts) to the DNC and a variety of democrat candidates, primarily and by far, Hillary Clinton. [I saw, in another story that I have not been able to recover, but I did see it, that there is another family (or two) in New York, also Chinese and also with no visible means to do so, that contributed another quarter million or so through Hsu, too. If someone can find that please send me the link. I am accumulating many of these stories to see how they change later.]

I am thinking that Mr. Hsu may be in a lot of trouble; not here necessarily, although he has plenty here; but back in China, where he may have neglected to appraise anyone of his criminal status… Time will tell. I predict Mr. Hsu may die a sudden death, soon, and with few leads back to his killers. Neither the Chinese nor the Clintons take kindly to being embarrassed. Then again, Mr. Hsu may have a sudden urge to commit suicide real soon. (Maybe by a bullet to the back of the head or any number of ways the Clinton’s friends have been discovered to have done that.)

Once he was discovered as a fugitive, Hilly (and others) gave back (or donated to their favorite charities) the money that Hsu gave them directly ($23,000 to Hilly, far lesser sums to Obama and others); but no word on the rest of the million that he ‘bundled’ from the washing machine (I mean the other donors he collected from, of course).

The big story here isn’t Hsu or the Chinese connection (if there is one, of course) but how easy it is to launder money through political contributions. With all the (unconstitutional) laws dealing with campaign finance there are none to prevent this sort of thing (if that’s what’s happening here, of course). It seems that all a foreign entity has to do in order to influence our political system is find a patsy (or two, or three, or more) to spread the money around then collect it in a ‘bundle’ and hand it in. By doing so he (they) would get very well known and have the ears of the politicians he ‘contributed’ to. That’s how it worked in the 90’s and the Chinese got their money’s worth, too. Clinton arraigned for them to get access to restricted guidance systems, nuclear bomb making techniques, unrestricted trade (most favored trade status), and who knows what else. [Prior to 1993 the Chinese couldn’t hit a barn door with their missiles; now they are putting men in space and have ICBMs with MIRV warheads! …and they are selling that information to Iran, N. Korea, and who knows who else!?]

The media is getting forced into reporting this one, at least for now; but how many of you know about the (four) felony charges Hilly is facing in CA for some 2000 fundraiser she had unlawful participation in, didn’t pay for, and didn’t report the expense as a contribution? The guy who ran it got pissed and blew the whistle when Bill reneged on a deal he made. It has been stone-walled for over five years and the NY DA has been sitting on evidence that was needed by the plaintiff all this time. (It is now back where it belongs.) http://tinyurl.com/ypft7y and http://www.blackwashingtonmonument.com/52542 for some background and the video in question.

“The smartest woman in the world” may have incriminated herself too deeply with this, IF the judge allows the evidence!? It seems that has gone around a few times already, too.
http://tinyurl.com/3be3d2

A link (a link to the 1996 story, actually) that I previously missed! http://tinyurl.com/ytumn5
If you really want to dig deeply, really deeply, there’s a seven part series about Hilly and her ‘culture of corruption’ at:
http://www.newmediajournal.us/daily_columns/the_fraudulent_senator.htm
This is a very long, sometimes tedious, read but it is the most comprehensive report on the team Clinton you will find anywhere. Some parts may be disputable but there are far too many parts that are far too easily verifiable for those to matter much at all. Besides facts, figures, and history there is a highly plausible motive and character profile that lays her out for all to see clearly.

I don’t know how she’ll get away with all of this but I feel she will; it may well be that she is destined to be the next President. If you thought Janet Reno was bad (over 200 Americans killed by her – and she was Hilly’s pick) just wait and see what happens during her administration. At least Bill had a republican Congress to hold him in check (somewhat); Hilly will have dictatorial powers, at least for her first two years. Unlike Bill, who was new to the job during his first two years of a democrat Congress, she now has all the experience they need (and then some). We may well have an entirely new country under her iron fist. God help us, we all have to do everything we can, pull out all the stops, make any sacrifice, do whatever we can to stop that from happening. I truly fear it will not be enough. I actually know people who are ready to vote for her for the single and simple reason that she’s a woman, period. Add people like that to the lunatic fringe, people with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) who don’t understand that he’s not running, and the idiot faction and she may well have it sewn-up.

A new, dark era is around the corner. All that the current batch of republicans in congress can do is throw their own under a bus; one for being a sinner, another for a comment to a 100 years-old cracker who used to be a segregationist (as a democrat, before switching parties), a speaker for selling a textbook (who was a collage professor), and others for similar, minor actions (mainly for not being perfect human beings). Meanwhile Kennedy (killed a woman), Jefferson (took $100,000 bribe), Bill Byrd (KKK member), Barney Frank (had a gay brothel running out of his apartment), too many to name all, Murtha (ABSCAM), etc. (who was it with Kennedy that was talking about a ‘waitress sandwich’?) are all still there running the country and laughing their sick, twisted asses off at how the republicans actually demand integrity.

Washington has become a cesspool and may get much worse before/if it gets any better. How can it be stopped?

[Another blogger here, The_City_Troll (as he bills himself) makes a valiant attempt at untangling this story with the Clinton-gate story of the 1996. Find his blog at:
http://thecitytroll.blogspot.com/2007/09/reminder-of-who-clintons-are-owned-by.html if the name/link above is broken.

He/it is well worth the read and I highly recommend him/it to everyone who wants to understand how it all fitted together then and why the dots are coming to the fore now. (FWIW, some of his other blogs are quite good, too. I’ve bookmarked his site.)

This excerpt from his blog might impress how important this all is:
“…Needless to say, China does not share Clinton’s enthusiasm for globalism or multi-polarity. The Chinese look out for No. 1. “War [with the United States] is inevitable; we cannot avoid it,” said Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian in 2000. “The issue is that the Chinese armed forces must control the initiative in this war.”
Bill Clinton has given them a good start. by Richard Poe
(http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/26/214938.shtml)…”

Spin & Fear

2007-01-04T21:41:00.000-05:00

All news, it would seem, is spin. How it is reported and/or how those reporting it want to project an image is what spin is.

Read this short analysis, for a very good example of how spin is used to control national policy through public opinion:
http://newsbusters.org/node/9932

Now, how about if we throw in highway statistics into that mix? Which is the most dangerous country to live in?

Of course, except for New Orleans, different years had to be used for our cities but it was just to make quite a startling point, after all.

Should we abandon those cities here in the USA? Should we abandon the war on terror? The only way that can be won is to change how those countries that are run by despots are run. The despots have to be removed and safe harbors have to be denied to the terrorists. Once the despots are removed there will naturally be a power grab attempted by those who do not want changes made. They have to be defeated, too. That’s what’s happening in Iraq now.

It is the opinion of this writer that we’d have an easier time doing this if we did it in more places at the same time. If we had deposed the Syrian and Iranian governments at the same time that we deposed Saddam Hussein, there would have been turmoil enough in those countries to have inhibited their coordinated interference in Iraq or with each other.

At the same time, perhaps the House of Saud would have been more eager to help stop terrorism, too; or they should certainly be next. Oil be damned, these people at the top need to be eliminated and the people their take charge of their own fates. Only then would they be occupied with their own fate enough to leave others to theirs.

That would have taken a real ballsy leader, though; and that’s something the world hasn’t seen in a democratic state since WWII; and then only because there was no other option.

Of course a lot of that is due to how the news is spun, how we mostly feel about what’s happening and what needs to be done. The example shown (above) is just a small example of how our thinking is manipulated all the time by people who really don’t know what’s going on but are afraid. They fear the truth, they fear the bad guys, but they fear the power to stop them even more. That’s insane and they are taking us into that insanity with them to our destruction.

Me, I’m on my side. I want to continue living in the best country the world has ever produced. I want this country to continue being the best ever produced and to get even better; but it isn’t. It started getting worse back in the middle of last century and the decline is accelerating, thanks to the spin-masters in control of the main stream media.

Few people can withstand the spin and our elected leaders are no exception. Fear permeates society; fear to do the right thing for fear of repercussions is the killer fear that will be our demise, more even that what the terrorists can ever instill in or do to us. That is why the bureaucracies just keep growing when action is needed. Nobody wants to take responsibility so they just add layers of paper pushers to deflect it.

[How did it help to add yet another layer of bureaucracy to the Intelligence infrastructure (Homeland Security) after 9/11 help, when it was determined that the biggest problem with the Intelligence Community was too much bureaucracy to begin with? How is that even considered sane? Have we lost sight of what sanity is? Simply put (by Albert Einstein), insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Use that as a minimum definition and what does it tell you about that solution?]

Doing the right thing isn’t easy; but it is what has to be done. Watch out for the spin, that is the source of the fear.

[If you’d like to know what needs to be done or if you truly don’t understand the problems facing us, read Colonel (US Army, Ret.) David Hunt’s book, “They Just Don’t Get It How Washington is Still Compromising Your Safety – and What You Can Do About It” – he has some great ideas and presents chilling facts; but, as he’ll tell you, it’s the fear of responsibility that inhibits any good ideas from being implemented.]

The only this that I fear is that there isn't nearly enough being done to win this defining battle for Civilization and that people just don't get it.

I'm Ichabod Crane in the 21st Century, and that's what i think!

Sly as a Fox

2006-10-28T19:52:00.000-04:00

October 28, 2006

I wrote the following article yesterday and was intending to finish it today and possibly blog it. I was at the Rush Limbaugh website (Rush 24/7 is a paid subscription webpage) and saw the dialogue from him to Katie Couric and decided to include it after my comments (and signature) for the clarity that it offers. I saw that there was a link in the story that was subject to become inactive; so, I went to that page and copied it in its entirety. I have made no alterations except color, font, and point size here.

I also elected to leave what I wrote yesterday, before reading Rush’s comments, as they were so that you can see how far off that I was from what actually said. (I don’t think it was off at all; but you decide.)

All material below my signature file is copyrighted and the property of the owners; my reproduction there is not intended to violate any copyright laws and is used to clearly express the opinions of the authors’ therein; as well as to validate what I wrote following this (and above my signature file, inclusive.

From Ichabod Crane on 10/27/06:

Look, I don’t know if any of you have been listening to all the hoop-la about the controversy between Rush Limbaugh and Michael J. Fox but if you are then there is something you should know about it all.

First off, Rush never accused Fox of faking his illness; what he said was simply that he either was acting or had gone off of his meds for the commercial. It turns out, at least according to a source close to Mr. Fox, that he does go off his meds occasionally to make a point. If that’s the case, then Rush simple told the truth.

Insofar as ‘picking on’ a sick man, please, anyone who makes a political commercial is fair-game; maybe it’s more shameful to exaggerate one’s illness to make false accusations. What do you think about people, like Fox, who do that? What does that do for others who are sick once the public becomes aware that they’ve been lied to? Should sick people exaggerate their illness, either by acting or by going off their medication, at all? What would you think of a cripple to whom you had given money to if you saw him get up and walk at the end of the day?

The commercial that I saw (and the one that Rush commented on) did have a lie and several misdirections embedded in it besides Fox’s exaggerated condition, too. Should they be ignored because the messenger who stated them is sick? The guy Fox was endorsing seems to have voted against the very thing that Michael was promoting; that was the lie. That embryonic stem cells have only failed in every promising experiment done with them; whereas the two other kinds of stem cells (adult and umbilical cord blood) have proven an invaluable source of dozens, maybe hundreds of medical breakthroughs, ‘hot leads’, and outright cures, is part of the misdirection. Another misdirection is saying that ‘stem cell research’ is illegal, is so far over the top and is so fraught with deception that it is beneath contempt for someone, anyone, to declare it.

No stem cell research is illegal, none! There is a restriction on the use of Federal money for one of the three types of stem cell research going on; but even that is deceptive. President Bush is the first President to approve of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research! He is the only one to have done that! That is a fact! The only caveat he put on that was that it can only be done, with federal funding, on a finite number of existing lines of stem cells. That is all. The only restriction on any type of stem cell funding is for use with new lines of embryonic stem cells. That’s it! You’d think he was stealing your grandmother’s teeth!

I figured it out though, I think so anyway; anything that doesn’t promote abortion is simply not suitable for the loud-mouth liberals that seem to control the press. That’s right, if it doesn’t further the cause of abortion they don’t even want to hear it at all. I came to that conclusion (although I had been toying with the idea) when I was discussing it with a friend. I asked her where she thought ‘production quantities’ of embryonic stem cells would come from if there was ever a need for them. She hesitated but then implied that aborted fetuses would supply, at least some of, those needs. That was only after I suggested that a bounty or some sort of payment could be arraigned for young women to get pregnant just to have their fetuses harvested for that purpose. That’s when it hit me, clear as day.

The reason that LML (Loud-Mouthed-Liberals) do not want to even acknowledge the existence of other types of stem cells, why they don’t want to acknowledge that President Bush has furthered their cause, that they don’t want to acknowledge that other types of stem cells are succeeding in making breakthroughs, that embryonic stem cells have heretofore always ended with teratomas and other disastrous conclusions, that they don’t want to acknowledge that embryonic stem cells are a distinct type of stem cell, is that they need to have a buffer argument if and when “Roe v Wade” ever comes up to be overturned. They don’t care about cures or medical breakthroughs at all; all they care about is the continuation of abortion!

I don’t know where Michael J. Fox stands on that issue but I suspect that he is being used by the LML to further their cause and to further it at any price.

Clearly abortion is a controversial issue; but do even those in favor of it want to be bamboozled to accomplish their aims? Should people be lied to on one issue to further another? Hell people, if the American people want abortion to remain an ‘on demand’ item on the medical menu, why does it have to be lied about? Why can’t the issue go before the voters of the country and let them decide what is right for the country, once and for all time? Why do the LML need liberal judges to make laws when the Constitution clearly says that is our job (via our elected, not appointed, representatives) to make them?

Whenever you hear a loud argument about illegal stem cell issues, don’t hear ‘stem cells’ - hear abortion and you’ll be closer to what is being shouted about. There is no debate, no argument, no vote, just rabid screaming and subterfuge over stem cells/abortion. That’s what it’s about; that’s what it’s always been about! Stem cell research in all but the very narrowest definition is going on and is federally funded, all the time.

Just one more thing to make my case: if this research was so promising then why isn’t there private money coming in hand-over-fist? None of it is illegal at all, none of it, and the profits for a breakthrough or cure would be enormous! Where is that money? Why aren’t private parties funding it? The answer to that question is simple: There is no future in embryonic stem cells, period.

;->

Best regards,
Ichabod Crane

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.--Pascal

Veritas vos LiberabitGod Bless America

>>>>

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End of Ichabod Crane’s original work.

Begin Rush Limbaugh’s transcript:.
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Rush’s E-mail to Katie Couric

October 26, 2006

Thanks, Katie, I’ll try to make it simple:

I believe Democrats have a long history of using victims of various things as POLITICAL spokespeople because they believe they are untouchable, infallible. They are immune from criticism. But when anyone enters the POLITICAL arena of ideas they forfeit the right to be challenged on their participation and message.

I have not met Mr. Fox, do not know him. I have admired his work in film and TV and his appearances on Letterman were howlers. I have nothing personal against him. But I believe his implication that only Democrats want to cure disease(s) is irresponsible (as I believed about John Edwards assuring voters Christopher Reeve would walk if only John Kerry were elected). I think this is ultimately cruel and gives people who suffer these terrible afflictions false hope.

As of now there is NO EVIDENCE that embryonic stem cells even hold promise, while other approaches, such as adult stem cells, already have yielded results. Michael’s TV spots mislead and misinform on this. (You might ask him about the gene therapy research at a Chicago hospital which has produced encouraging results on Parkinson’s patients. A VIRUS is inserted in the gene, which is then inserted in the brain. The Michael J. Fox Foundations has committed $1.9 million to further research on this...story from earlier this month.) 1

I did NOT mock or make fun of Mr. Fox. I have seen him many times on TV but never have I seen him as he appears in the ads. I read from his own book that he will not take his medications before certain appearances (Senate, 1999) in order to illustrate the ravages of Parkinson’s, which I understand and applaud. So the concept of manipulating meds has been stated by Mr. Fox, which is what caused me to question his appearance in his ads.

He is stumping for Democrats, in the political arena, and is therefore open to analysis and criticism as we all are. His suffering is NOT fair game and I am sorry if people drew that conclusion about my comments, but I believe this happens precisely because NO criticism of victims is ever allowed, at all, which as I say is the Democrat strategy in putting them forward.

*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time

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End of Rush’s transcript. All text is unaltered from the original as it appeared on the Rush 24/7 website except for choice of font and point size.
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[Because links may become inactive, I have included the data pointed to, unaltered, below:]

1 (From the link in the story above: )

From Monsters and Critics.com

Health News

Parkinson’s treatment reduces symptoms

By UPI

Oct 11, 2006, 19:00 GMT

CHICAGO, IL, United States (UPI) -- Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago have said a new Parkinson’s disease treatment reduced symptoms by 40 percent.

However, researchers said the test only involved 12 patients and may have been affected by the placebo effect, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday.

Further tests of the gene therapy method could solidify the treatment as the first known to slow, halt or possibly reverse damage done by the progressive disease. Treatments are currently available to relieve symptoms of the illness, but do not stop the disease from progressing.

The procedure features two nickel-size holes drilled into the top of a patient’s head by a brain surgeon. A virus containing the desired gene is then inserted into the brain using a needle, and the virus carries the gene to the brain cells. The cells are then instructed by the gene to produce a protein that protects and regenerates cells that make dopamine.

The results were announced at a meeting of the American Neurological Association in Chicago. The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has donated $1.9 million for a follow-up study.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

© Copyright 2003 - 2005 by monstersandcritics.com.

This notice cannot be removed without permission.

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End of transcript from www.monstersandcritics.com

For what it’s worth, Ichabod Crane has never been to this site prior to reading this article and has no idea of the owner’s ideology.

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Profiling is needed

2006-08-27T20:29:00.000-04:00

Is there anyone reading this that is still opposed to profiling insofar as security, especially at airports, is concerned? (Was anybody, ever, opposed to doing that?) If there are holdouts, I’d like to direct your attention to the following list of ‘terrorist’ and/or ‘illegal’ activities perpetrated in the last half century by Middle-Eastern men between the ages of 17 and 40, found after my signature…

Perhaps we should just continue to harass Blacks and Caucasians on the off chance that some one of us has gone over to the side of madness? Maybe more grandmothers should be strip-searched in the event that the AARP has gone over to Islamofascism? Maybe more baby carriages should be taken apart at the gate to insure that toddlers haven’t been converted to the ‘religion of peace’ that is blowing up the world?

I know that I had issued a statement of caution immediately after the events of 9/11, stating the Islam was a peaceful religion and not all Muslims are associated with these murderous terrorists and that remains largely true; however, insofar as who is doing the evil deeds, we need to look more closely to those who fit the description. Not all of them are guilty but all of the guilty fit that description.

The innocent people who fit the description are just going to have to do their part and hold their tongues and tempers while we scrutinize them more carefully than other people. They can also do their part by being more cooperative with law enforcement in reporting their fellow Muslims that are involved. The sooner we put an end to Islamofascism, the sooner we can all get back to a normal life; but no sooner, lest we surer dire consequences.

What sense does it make to scrutinize grandmothers, babies, white and black businessmen, white and black women, when all the terrorism is being done by Middle-Easterners between the ages of 17 and 40? Those women of Middle-East extraction are going to have to be included in the profile as well, simply because women in the Middle-East have been increasingly involved with terrorism as well. What’s good for the goose, as the saying goes, is good for the gander, as well.

Take a look below and see if you can find fault with my reasoning…

Go to The Patriot Post for more… Best regards,
Aimé Watts

-- Ichabod Crane

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe;
the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.
Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find Him.
--PascalVeritas vos Liberabit!

God Bless America>>>>

From: The Patriot Post

-----Original Message-----
From: PatriotPost.US [mailto:patriot-AI06518846@m1.PatriotPost.US]
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 4:10 PM
To: Ichabod Crane
Subject: E-mail Subject Line: Anyone for Terrorist Profiling?

To ensure we Americans never offend anyone -- particularly fanatics intent on killing us -- law enforcement and security screeners are not allowed to “profile” people in public places or security checkpoints. However, they will continue to perform random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, Secret Service agents who are members of the President’s security detail, 85-year-old congressmen with metal hips and even Medal of Honor recipients. But targeting Middle Eastern male Islamists between the ages 17 and 40 constitutes “ethnic profiling.”

Let’s pause a moment and review....

In 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by: (a) A salesman from Utah (b) An construction worker (c) A college student on Spring Break (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics by: (a) Your grandmother (b) A Midwest auto-parts dealer (c) A mom and her 6-year-old son visiting from Indiana (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by: (a) A bluegrass band (b) Dallas Cowboy fans (c) A tour group of 80-year-old women (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

During the 1980’s numerous Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by: (a) A family on their way to Disney World (b) Jesse Ventura (c) A Boy Scout Troop (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by: (a) A pizza delivery boy (b) The UPS guy (c) Geraldo Rivera making up for a slow news day (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked, and a 70-year-old disabled American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard by: (a) A girls’ choir (b) A hardware store owner (c) A secretary (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens, and a U.S. Navy diver was murdered by: (a) A Marine officer with two weeks leave (b) A plumber going to visit his mom (c) A Catholic nun (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by: (a) A college-bound freshman (b) A cardiac surgeon on his way to Houston (c) A waitress (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by: (a) A starving actress (b) A mom with a newborn (c) Twin six-year-old boys (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1995, a plot to blow up U.S.-bound international flights over the Pacific was attempted by (a) Hawaiian school kids (b) An decorated Vietnam Veteran (c) Twin sisters on their way to Paducah (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by: (a) A local TV weatherman (b) A dad and his two sons on a ski trip (c) A widower going to visit his grandchildren (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2000, 17 sailors died in an attack on the USS Cole (DDG 67) in Yemen by: (a) A child in a stroller (b) A high school class on their way to visit Washington, DC (c) Newlyweds on their way to Miami (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked -- two flown into the World Trade Centers, one into the Pentagon and one into the ground in rural Pennsylvania. They were hijacked by: (a) A retired police officer on a mission trip to Haiti (b) A firefighter going to Maryland for training (c) An paramedic on his way to vacation in Hawaii (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2002 the United States liberated Afghanistan from: (a) USAID relief workers (b) Jewish Pilgrims (c) Christian missionaries (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl and other Westerners were kidnapped and beheaded by: (a) The Peace Corp (b) Scottish clansmen (c) Cuban refugees (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2002, more than 330 hostages in Beslan and 130 hostages in Moscow were murdered in sieges by: (a) Russian exchange students (b) The Red Guard (c) Church planters (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2003 the United States liberated Iraq from “The Butcher of Baghdad,” but most American military personnel were killed by: (a) Iraqi school-girls (b) Street vegetable venders (c) Women without burkas (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2004, more than 200 Spanish civilians were murdered on trains by bombs in Madrid, detonated by: (a) Morning commuters (b) A three-year-old Chinese girl (c) Flamenco dancers (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2005 more than 50 UK citizens were killed by bombs on trains in London, detonated by: (a) Rail workers (b) Those unable to hail taxis (c) Wheelchair-bound grandmothers (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2005, there were hundreds of casualties, men, women and children, killed by bombs in Jerusalem, Riyadh and Amman. These innocent civilians were murdered by: (a) Construction workers (b) Farmers (c) Christian missionaries (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2005, the city of Paris, and other European cities experienced an extended period of riots and destruction. The unrest was led by: (a) “Youth” (b) Soccer fans (c) Catholic nuns (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than 2,500 Americans have been murdered by terrorists. 35,000 Iraqi men, women and children have also been murdered by terrorists. Most of the combat and civilians casualties were the result of bombs detonated in civilian population centers by: (a) Fruit vendors in Baghdad (b) Disgruntled transit union workers (c) Iraqi schoolteachers (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2006, hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets launched by: (a) the Salvation Army (b) remnants of the ‘Jackson Five’ (c) the cast of ‘Friends’ (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 2006, a plot to blow up 10 U.S.-bound planes from the U.K. was attempted by (a) members of the royal family (b) Japanese tourists (c) groupies of the band ‘Cream’ (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

Since 2001, the FBI reports that there are major terrorist cells still in U.S. urban centers. Several of these cells have been uncovered and cell members arrested. In every case, the terrorists cell members were: (a) Southern Baptists Conventioneers (b) Lutheran Youth Groups (c) Presbyterian Elders (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

President George Bush said this week, “America is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an immediate objection to the President’s reference to “Islamic fascists”. Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR protested, “We have to isolate these individuals because there is nothing in the Koran or the Islamic faith that encourages people to be cruel or to be vicious or to be criminal. Muslims world wide know that for sure.” In light of this objection, we are left to ponder why every Islamic leader in the U.S., and the world, does not publicly condemn every terror action being undertaken in the name of the god of Islam.

Their silence is deafening...

Between 1970 and present, there were more than 60 other notable examples of terrorism perpetrated by Middle Eastern male Islamists between the ages 17 and 40, but we think you get the point. Singling out “Middle Eastern male Islamists between the ages 17 and 40” is not “ethnic profiling,” it’s “terrorist profiling” -- acting on prolific evidence.

Anyone for Terrorist Profiling?

Semper Vigilo, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander Publisher, The Patriot
(Circulation of this e-mail is sponsored by The Patriot Post -- the most widely read conservative e-journal on the Internet. If you have not already joined the ranks of American Patriots receiving this highly acclaimed conservative digest of news, policy and opinion, link to: http://PatriotPost.US/subscribe/atp and The Patriot will be delivered FREE by e-mail to your inbox each week. If you don’t have Web access, send a blank e-mail to: subscribe@PatriotPost.US and you will be subscribed automatically.)

“Anyone for Terrorist Profiling?” is posted on the Internet at http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=341

Meet Dr. Walter E. Williams

2006-08-27T17:14:00.000-04:00

My friends, if you have a few moments to reflect of what life it and what it should be, take the time to read an interview of a fine gentleman by the name of Walter E. Williams, at:
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/ct-1750-.aspx

He is a modern renaissance man, in spite of being black (that is not surprising to me and I mention it for reference only). He has, if you will forgive the expression, ‘his shit together’ and attributes that to teachers who didn’t care about ‘self-esteem’ the way it is viewed today. They looked at self-esteem as something a person earned, not something that everybody should be given. (That is how it should be, in this man’s opinion.)

He is, among many other things, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University. I came to know him from his stints as a guest host on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. Don’t let that put you off, if you are not a fan of Rush’s, Dr. Williams’ is a unique personality that has earned, not only his self-esteem but the respect of his peers in academia and the economic world.

I am sure that I cannot do him the justice that he merits, so judge for yourself. The interview is at: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/ct-1750-.aspx and his personal webpage is at: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/ Don’t miss his biography there, at: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/vita.html
I don’t think you will be disappointed in knowing him.

-- Ichabod Crane

Terrorist are 'immigrating'

2006-08-27T17:05:00.000-04:00

As if the millions of illegal immigrants weren’t bad enough of a problem to our economy and autonomy, this (below) displays that immigration is a bigger problem than all of that; it is a National Security problem that isn’t being view properly at all, by anyone in authority to do anything about it. If you think that the government could have prevented 9/11 if they could only have ‘connected the dots’ you should see that this is exactly the same problem and with a similarly catastrophic conclusion if these dots, which are huge and well defined, are not connected and dealt with.

If, like me and other clear thinking people, you see the 9/11 problem as something that was inevitable due to the prohibitions on connecting the dots that were imposed by the Clinton Justice department, particularly Jamie S. Gorelick, you will see that this is a dangerous situation of politicizing a politically-correct (politically insane) issue that will ultimately lead to a tremendous loss of life and possibly a loss of our way of life.

The dots are connected, in other words, but the politicians are refusing to call it for what it is – invasion!

Our cities are already under siege from the central American gang called MS-13, that import drugs, prostitution (white slavery - a misnomer, as the women enslaved are from all races), and violence that has been unseen since the days of prohibition. (Drugs are today’s prohibition, with the same problems and with the same call for the same solution, repeal!). Now there are signs: mid-east money, clothing, and newspapers, found at border crossings, that clearly indicate that terrorists are coming through our porous borders as well!

What the hell is it going to take for us all to come together and stop politicizing every god-damned thing the President does to try and secure the country? Sometimes I think it will take a mushroom cloud, reaching into the stratosphere, to get us all on the same page; sometimes I think that even that will be used by envious politicians and demagogues to further tear us apart and lead us to our ultimate annihilation. Some of the pundits on the left are so deranged that I believe they would do that, just to satisfy their twisted egos.

People on the left (and some on the right) need to stop and regroup. They need to take a fresh look at what is happening in the world around them and refrain from the ‘politics of destruction’ that has a grip on them. Politics aside, this is a bigger problem than ‘who won what election’ and ‘who lied about whatever’; we have a real enemy that is winning because of our inability to unite and deal with them. Once the Islamofascists are defeated we can get back to bickering about the trivialities of life.

Gay marriage, killing babies (for whatever reason), minimum wage, evolution, all of these ‘oh so important issues’ are nothing compared to whether we continue to exist at all! Can’t you see that? Once we end the threat of annihilation, we can get back to these trivialities, let’s just get together for now and make a coordinated effort to win the global war on terror. After that, hell, after that you can impeach, hang, draw and quarter, whatever, to anybody you want; let’s just make a future where those, and other things, are even possible.

If we continue to bicker while the enemy plans, we won’t have anything to fight over in ten to twenty years. We will all be under Sharia Law and that will be the end of the dream of our founding fathers anyway. That will be the end of a thousand years of human advances; does it really matter if Bush really won FL once that happens? Get real, get a life, fight for our lives; that’s what’s at stake! John Kerry, Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, et al, will be able to escape to Bora-Bora when the terrorists win; where will you go?

I want to stay here – and fight the bastards, all of them!

-- Ichabod Crane

From: The Patriot Post :

Texas sheriffs: Terrorists crossing U.S.-Mexico border

The Texas Sheriffs’ Border Coalition believes that terrorists are linking up with drug cartels and the Mexican military, learning Spanish and Mexican culture, and then sneaking into the United States. Items found along the banks of the Rio Grande include Iranian currency and military badges in Arabic.

The Sheriffs note that many border crossers are not Mexican, and though fluent in Spanish, they speak with a non-native accent. One particular Arabic patch garnered attention: It read “midnight mission” and displayed an airplane flying over a building heading towards a tower. Department of Homeland Security statistics show that 40,000 non-Mexican illegals were rounded up between October, 2003, and June, 2004.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office numbers non-Mexican illegal crossers at almost 120,000 from January through July 2005. Perhaps if Congress and the President began treating this as a security issue rather than a political chess game, the problem could be solved.

Goodbye America

2006-07-11T21:27:00.000-04:00

Even though this does, indeed, check out at Snopes.com, I still have a problem with these things that circulate forever, yet have no reference dates, and still go on to say things like, “Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington, DC, filled to capacity by many of American’s finest minds and leaders.”

Next year, when this goes around again, what will “last week” mean? To me, it means that it has little credibility and usually will get sent to the ‘deleted items’ folder. I only believed Dick enough to go to Snopes myself and see what they did say. (Yes, I believe that Dick would try and pull a fast one by me, just to call me on it later! He keeps me honest in that fashion.)

I went to Snopes.com and found it here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp There it said, “Origins: Richard D. Lamm was a Democrat who served as governor of Colorado for twelve years from 1975 to 1987. Of the above-quoted third person account regarding his speech on the perils of multiculturalism, he told us in mid-June 2005: “Yes, it is a speech I gave a year and a half ago in Washington D.C. It was a 5 minute speech, and I am amazed and gratified it has received so much coverage.”

Got that? The actual speech was given around January, 2004! That’s what “Last week” means here. Here you all thought that last week was July of 2006; don’t you feel silly now?

As to Dick’s statement that this is worthy of rereading ‘with the current immigration situation.’: I would also add today’s climate of racial divides; victimhood; sexual tensions on homosexuality, gender war, and marriage; political divisions where treason is scripted as patriotism; and a long list of other ills that are tearing the fabric of our society apart. This is worth rereading every single day, with your morning coffee.

I weep for the future…

;->
Best regards,
Ichabod Crane i.m.crane@gmail.com

http://neoconservative.blogspot.com/also: http://aimew.spymac.net/blog/

There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find him.--Pascal

Veritas vos Liberabit!
God Bless America!
>>>>

From: Dick C
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 9:45 AM
To: All Y’all
Subject: Fwd: Goodbye America]

Ichabod, this does check out on Snopes. See, I do verify things some times.
This or something similar went around before, but it does seem appropriate to read again with the current immigration situation.

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

Take the time to read this; It ought to scare the pants off you! A Frightening Analysis:

We all know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration-overpopulation conference in Washington, DC, filled to capacity by many of American’s finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor named Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, “*Mexifornia,” explaining how immigration — both legal and illegal — was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America. The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States.

He said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that ‘An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.’"

“Here is how they do it,” Lamm said: First to destroy America, “Turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way: ‘The histories of bilingual and bi-cultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.”

Lamm went on: Second, to destroy America, “Invent ‘multiculturalism’ and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal. That there are no cultural differences. I would make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.

Third, “We could make the United States a ‘Hispanic Quebec’ without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: ‘The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved! Not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.’"

Lamm said, “I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America reinforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.”

“Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school.”

“My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of ‘Victimology.’ I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.”

“My sixth plan for America’s downfall would include dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity! Unity is what it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic Games.

A common enemy Persia threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to over come two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell.

“E. Pluribus Unum” — From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the ‘pluribus’ instead of the ‘Unum,’ we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.”

“Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits ~ make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of ‘diversity.’ I would find a word similar to ‘heretic’ in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like ‘racist’ or ‘x! xenophobes’ halt discussion and debate.”

“Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multiculturism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of ‘Victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.”

In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said, “Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis’s book *Mexifornia. His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America. If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don’t read that book.”

There was no applause.

A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Every discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate ‘diversity.’ American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America — take note of California and other states — to date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell’s book “1984.” In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.”

Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy are deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don’t get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Note: Both Governor Lamm and the writer of the e-mail misidentify the author of the book Mexifornia, whose correct name is Victor Davis Hanson. (From Snopes.com)

If you care for and love our country as I do, take the time to pass this on just as I did for you. Trust me NOTHING is going to happen if you don’t!

[Nothing is going to happen? Nothing good is going to happen, is what this means. All that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing! -IC]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Governor Lamm also passed along to us the following "revised version" of his speech (Find it at the end of the page at): http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp (From Snopes.com)
__________________________________________________________

Cradles not sinks!

2006-05-28T13:30:00.000-04:00

Where I think many people lose the point is in where the debate on abortion should be held. I subscribe to State’s Rights on this issue. Abortion is not a Federally guaranteed freedom at all and I challenge anyone to show me where in the Constitution it is. Read Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion and see how he is reduced to subterfuge and rationalization in his opinion of the issue at: http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/roefl-o2.htm where his very first sentence is, “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.” Then read the clear reasoning of Associate Justices Byron R. White (a democrat!) and William H. Rehnquist (a republican) in their descent at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade (the decent is around midpoint; but the entire article is noteworthy.) They say what I’ve been saying, only more eloquently, detailed, and rationally.

Putting this back where it used to be would not end abortion nationwide but just in those states where the people decide it shouldn’t be. This has happened in S. Dakota; but most assuredly, states like NY, CA, and MA (among many others) would doubtlessly endorse it. Women who want an abortion but live in a ‘ no abortion’ state would have to add the price of a bus ticket (etc.) to the price of the procedure.

Like so many things taken over by the Federal government, that has not the authority to do so, it has become the debacle that it has. The states have lost many of their right since the signing of the fourteenth amendment; and it’s time they got them back. We are supposed to be a society of many semiautonomous states overseen by the Federal government, not ruled by it. The federal government role is strictly defined in Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution. That role is to see to it that the states ‘play nice’ with one another, that the states treat their people fairly and uniformly (in the way the Bill of Right define), and to protect us all from foreign aggression. In a nutshell, that’s all the federal government’s role is. Each state is to be left alone to govern the people therein as those people decide.

Some states could be near-socialists, some ultra conservative, most would be somewhere in the middle. If a person doesn’t like his state’s government they are free to move to one that more suits their temperament. (Don’t even get me going on the hardships for some to move; if poverty stricken Mexicans (and others) can do it, so can anyone with strong motivation.) Nothing is ideal but the stronger the central government gets the weaker the states and by extrapolation, the people become until we are all enslaved by the federal government. We see a taste of that now, in that from January first until sometime in May, we are all pretty much enthralled to the government – that’s how long it is taking to pay for all the taxes, federal, state and local (mostly federal) that we pay.

Prior to the sixteenth amendment, the federal government consumed about 3% of the nations GDP; now it is consuming over 20% - that can be equated to how enslaved we are.
In a way I am wondering far from the original topic; but this is all interrelated. The federal government is out of control and we are being victimized by it!

I am not in favor of the federal government banning abortion either, that is not anywhere near what I’ve been saying. There are too many people opposed to that, however, to leave it in the hands of the judiciary. That is why I’d like to see Roe v Wade overturned. All that would do is put it back into the various states to decide for themselves. This issue is tearing the country apart and the people have never had an opportunity to vote on it! What kind of democratic society does that make us? At the very least, make a constitutional amendment that clearly states this ‘right to privacy’ and let the people (or their representatives) vote on it and get it done with, once and for all time!

Don’t even get started on things like personal responsibility, the ‘right to privacy’ overrules any of that nonsense; and for a lot of things.

I’ve got to go clean the ‘foam’ off of my mouth now; I’ll talk to y’all later…

Your government at work! Not!

2006-05-19T17:09:00.000-04:00

Gas prices seem high? “Tough!” says your government. Just blame the oil companies for gouging their $0.09 a gallon, is their solution. Does that make you feel better? It better, because that’s all this Congress is going to do for you.

While Cuba is cozying with China to drill for gas and oil 75 miles off of Key West, our wonderful Congress has decided to protect tourism (well, that’s what they said). It doesn’t matter that tourists can’t afford to go there, our coasts are ‘safe’ from the blight of drilling companies (that would otherwise be so far out of sight that you’d need a passport to get to them, never mind see them).

Click over to: http://www.local6.com/news/9243096/detail.html to see how we’re being saved from ourselves (and, of course, those ‘gouging’ oil companies who are actually trying to do something positive about the problem of spiraling energy prices). Have I mentioned, lately, that there hasn’t been a new refinery built in over thirty years? Congress won’t allow them either!
We need to get all the incumbents out! We don’t want more democrats, though; that would be more disastrous. What we need to do is exchange the republicans who are ‘in’ with the primaries; and outright replace the democrats with fresh, new republicans who, with the new leadership arising in Congress, will BE conservative! I know, I know, there isn’t much difference in them as it is; but at least the republicans are not promising to further liberalize the government. We just need to get new republicans in with the message that if they don’t follow through, they, too, will be replaced. (God help us, sooner or later they will get the message.

This will be hard to do, of course. The McCain/Feingold campaign finance “reform” (attack on the First Amendment) is making it harder and harder to dig the incumbents out of there! (Well, that’s why it was passed, after all is said and done: to protect the incumbents!)

For some straight talk on what needs to be done, in the long and short run, look at what former Speaker Newt Gingritch is saying, at: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=14837 He, at least, is talking plainly about what needs to be done, and what can be done, if we can get the Congress and White House filled with people who have some real balls! (Which is why no democrat need apply; and we need some new republicans, or more to the point, conservatives! Joe Lieberman is the one exception I could tolerate.)

I'd 'Rather'-not-gate

2006-03-19T03:00:00.000-05:00

(Cited as Symbol of Abu Ghraib, Man Admits He Is Not in Photo By KATE ZERNIKE
Ali Shalal Qaissi had claimed to be the man in the photograph that has become the international icon of the abuse scandal.)
- from the NYT
--- ---
No matter how hard they wish this shit were true, just saying it, over and over, just doesn’t make it so. Didn’t they learn anything from Dan Rather (not)? Of course not, that isn’t their point, is it? Like Joseph Göbbels (Goebbels) always said, “If you tell a lie often enough, no matter how outrageous, people will accept it as fact.” Or, as Wikipedia states it, “His (Joseph Göbbels) primary rules were:
1. never allow the public to cool off;
2. never admit a fault or wrong;
3. never concede that there may be some good in your enemy;
4. never leave room for alternatives;
5. never accept blame;
6. concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong;
7. people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one;
8. and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2]”
- from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

Sounds like reading the NYT or, actually, any MSM outlet these days, doesn’t it?

Read more about these insidious tactics at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels - after all, the liberal left does; and it is very important to know how the enemies of America are operating.

More information on one of the ‘big lies’ on WMDs, as another example of that strategy, can be found here: http://patriotpost.us/alexander/print.asp?id=340 – Be sure to read the end to get the point, that this IS their strategy!

Item 4, above, is clearly demonstrated in a lack of alternative plans by the liberal left. They know that the current administration’s plans to win the GWT is valid; but it is their plan! That the resolution to go to war with Iraq was nearly unanimous is clear proof that they knew the reality of the situation; but the reality that they saw was an opportunity to recreate the Vietnam debacle all over again. They have no interest in the security of the nation; they are only interested in opportunities to regain power at any cost. Money, reputations and even the lives of our troops and allies are only tools in their insane quest for power.

Take this latest ‘big lie’ about domestic spying: of course it is essential to know what the enemy is doing during wartime (or at any high-risk time), they know that; but by twisting it and making people believe that the government is spying on them, they continue playing on item 1 of Göbbels’ strategy. The Dubai Ports’ deal was another way to keep the heat on; only now, with a mid-term election coming up, they’re getting help from the right as well.

Keep in mind that there are bad people on both sides of the political isle, it is insanely optimistic to assume that people seek high office for purely altruistic reasons; but the liberal left has an embedded hatred of our republic. They desire, at any cost, to impose a centrally controlled regime of socialism. That socialism, as a political philosophy, has proven to be a failed economic structure throughout the world (The USSR, China, etc.) doesn’t deter them in the least; it’s the centralization of power that they crave. There is no desire to make people’s lives better with their power-lust, they only crave to control every aspect of those lives. That was the same impetus that made the USSR so hard to displace; and for China to be so slow in changing from their equally failed system: the people in charge are so completely addicted to their absolute power, they’d rather see the people in their counties reduced to abject poverty than give up their power over them.

In assessing our (what used to be our) system of free enterprise, one thing is clear: under it, people are encouraged to reach for whatever level of fulfillment they can attain. Under socialism, people are reduced to the lowest common denominator to achieve ‘equality’. In the Declaration of Independence, it is stated that all men are created equal. What that means is that we all have equal rights to grow and be all we can be. It doesn’t mean that everybody is entitled to whatever anybody else has; insofar as material good are concerned.

Inalienable Rights are rights that we have that doesn’t infringe upon other’s rights. My freedom of speech doesn’t cost anybody anything; they can listen or not and they can even exercise theirs to rebut what I say. That isn’t the case where things such as healthcare are concerned though, is it? In order to provide a ‘right’ to healthcare (or housing, or education, etc.) money has to be taken (stolen) from people in order to provide for others. Whereas that may be a desirable goal, it is not to be confused for a RIGHT – it is a redistribution of wealth.

It is also something that the congress is not empowered to do, insofar as the Constitution defines their enumerated powers (Article I, section 8). If, or when, congress imposes this model of healthcare on the people, it will do so by usurping the power of the States and/or of the people. [Note, if this is something you really think the Federal Government should be involved in, ask your congressmen to initiate a Constitutional Amendment to give them the authority to do it. Personally, I don’t like the idea of a federal government with more authority that is granted them now, in the Constitution.]

Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” – But then, Abe Lincoln never met Joseph Göbbels.

I weep for the future. (with a collumn by Michelle Malkin)

2006-03-16T00:12:00.000-05:00

Take a moment to read Michelle Malkin’s column, below.

(FWIW, Michelle Malkin on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Malkin)

These things used to make me angry; now they just make me very, very sad. We, as a society, are indeed reaping what we’ve sown. Diversity leads to isolation and segregation and hatred; tolerance is a cover-up for festering hatred, hidden by a smile and a handshake.

Anyone who opposes diversity and tolerance is labeled a bigot with circular solipsistic logic. (Like anyone who denies being an alcoholic is considered to be one, in denial.)

Real integration is loving your fellow man; and allowing growth based on merit, irregardless of race, religion, origin, or creed; a person’s behavior, qualifications, and demeanor should be the only things they are judged on. Actions speak louder that words; words speak louder than feelings. People isolated into groups, for good or ill, inspires contempt for all others.

Take Michelle Malkin as an example. She simply claims to be an American, born and bred; but her detractors on the left seem to think that her Asian heritage is more important than where she was born. Isn’t it the left who are constantly hopping on racial profiling? How about Tiger Woods, who has ¼ African American heritage; but is always referred to as a black golfer? The Oscars, a few years ago, was touted as a tribute to black actors and Halle Berry won Best Actress that year; but her mother is Caucasian. What I see here is that, although the left lays claim to being ‘color blind’; they adhere to the old adage of ‘even a single drop of black blood makes you black’. What a shameful way to think.

The hypocrisy within the philosophy of ‘diversion and tolerance’ is staggering. If a person of non-Caucasian heritage has a conservative leaning, they are vilified and ridiculed; they don’t fit into the liberal mould. On the other hand, if a non-white is a liberal, then any outrageous behavior or speech is perfectly acceptable; at least they know their place, right?

It’s the same for woman, too. No matter how egregious her behavior or speech, if she is a liberal, it is OK; let her speak out against feminism or abortion, however, and she becomes a target of all the hatred the left can muster. Tolerance and diversity is only for them that think alike, no others need apply.

Non-white, conservative women have the toughest row to hoe. How much contempt is too much from the liberals for Condolesa Rice? There is never enough, that’s how much.

I like people, or not, by what they do, first, and by what they say, second; what they look like has little place in human relationships outside of hunting for a mate; but what do I know? I like Michelle Malkin (and Condi Rice, and Ann Coulter, even when she goes a tad overboard. At least she isn’t hypocritical about what she says.)

Really, this all makes me very sad.

I weep for the future.

;->
Best regards,Ichabod Crane
http://neoconservative.blogspot.com/also: http://aimew.spymac.net/blog/
There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find him.--Pascal
Veritas vos Liberabit!
God Bless America!
>>>>

redstatesusa: I Pledge Allegience To My Black People
http://www.redstatesusa.com/archives/2006/03/i_pledge_allegi.html

By: Michelle Malkin

One of the nation’s fastest-rising poetry prodigies is a 7-year-old New York girl whose poisonous demagogic advocacy of black separatism makes Al Sharpton look like Mister Rogers.

Autum Ashante’ of Mount Vernon, N.Y., has performed at HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, The Cotton Club in L.A., The Apollo Theater in Harlem, the African Street Festival, Caroline’s on Broadway, the Russell Simmons Phat Farm Fashion Show, Steve Harvey’s “Big Time,” a prestigious Grammy Foundation event, and at universities and other venues across the country. She recites her verses not only in English, but also in fluent Swahili and Arabic (she attended the Islamic Darul Arkam School in Mount Vernon).

Autum has appeared at a tribute to black nationalist Marcus Garvey, America-bashing 9/11 conspiracy-monger Amiri Baraka’s annual family cookout and the extremist New Black Panther Party’s Million Youth March. The city of New York honored her with a proclamation for inspiring “her peers, as well as adults, while also demonstrating the power of a father’s love, the importance of education and the limitless boundaries of the human mind.” New York City councilwoman Yvette Clark called her “one of the most precious young talents that this world has ever known.”

Most recently, as New York Post education reporter David Andreatta reported this weekend, she was invited to perform at public middle and high schools in Peekskill, N.Y., for Black History Month.

Here, in full, is what precious little Autum -- groomed by her single father, Batin Ashante, a Nation of Islam poet/activist -- spewed:

White Nationalism Put U In Bondage

White nationalism is what put you in bondage
Pirate and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin
Drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with
Steel, tricks and deceit.
Nothing has changed take a look in our streets
The mis-education of she and Hegro -- leaves you on your knee2grow
Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse
They took the gold, the wisdom and all of the storytellers
They took the black women, with the black man weak
Made to watch as they changed the paradigm
Of our village
They killed the blind, they killed the lazy, they went
So far as to kill the unborn baby
Yeah White nationalism is what put you in bondage
Pirates and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin
They drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with
Steel laden feet, throw in the tricks alcohol and deceit.
Nothing has changed take a look at our streets.

Autum’s performance also included commanding white students to remain seated as she led black students in a recitation of the “Black Child’s Pledge,” by Black Panther Shirley Williams, which reads in part:

I pledge allegiance to my Black People.
I pledge to develop my mind and body to the greatest extent possible.
I will learn all that I can in order to give my best to my People in their struggle for liberation.
. . . I will discipline myself to direct my energies thoughtfully and constructively rather than wasting them in idle hatred.
I will train myself never to hurt or allow others to harm my Black brothers and sisters . . .
These principles I pledge to practice daily and to teach them to others in order to unite my People.

Complaints from shocked students and parents led to a tape-recorded apology sent to all parents apologizing for the performance. Autum’s father condemned white district officials as “racist crackers.” Autum defended her poem by explaining to the Westchester Journal News that white people are “devils and they should be gone. We should be away from them and still be in Africa.”

And make note of this: The official who invited Autum to speak, Melvin Bolden, is a public school music teacher, Peekskill councilman and producer of her first spoken word album.

Who is surprised? If you set aside a separate holiday for Black History Month in the public schools, if you set aside separate graduation ceremonies, college dorms, academic departments, recruiting programs, and government contracts and subcontracts by race, you send a message that hard-core racial separatism is not only acceptable -- but desired.

Autum Ashante’ is the natural offspring of militant multiculturalism and government-sanctioned identity politics. We reap what we sow.

Posted by redguy on March 15, 2006 07:27 AM to redstatesusa

The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis and Al-Qaeda . By John Loftus

2006-02-07T05:02:00.000-05:00

Some Stories are painful to read; the truth can hurt; but the truth needs to be told in order that mistakes of the past are not repeated. It is written, “As you sow, so shall ye reap; and now we are reaping the whirlwind.

The mistakes talked about in this story were made for over half a century and only now begun to be righted. These mistakes cross political boundaries and should not be politicized now. They should be corrected and policies set to never allow them to happen again.

I looked at the links and I did a Google search for “Banna Nazi” and saw that this is indeed an old story and has cost the lives of countless people. Some of them were made under the philosophy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend - sometimes they are simply enemies waiting their turn. We should be more discrete in whom we choose to ally ourselves with, lest the beast come at us when the ‘common enemy’ is defeated. Beside the example in this story we can also look at our pack with the devil called Saddam Hussein, when he was warring with our enemy, Iran.

I was looking at several articles, always on the lookout for understanding of how these terrorists that are warring on us now have broken with the normally peaceful tenants of Islam when I came across this story. It would seem to explain a lot.

Mr. Loftus is a former US prosecutor, and his name is a live link in the article, as is Sleeping with the Devil which is an interview with an ex-CIA agent (Robert Baer) about a need for major house-cleaning within the CIA. I believe this is happening but as with any bloated bureaucracy, it is a long, uphill battle.

The other two live links are: 555 Grove St., Herndon, Virginia and charities that reveal a network of charities that were in this country for decades before finally being shut down, largely (it would seem) on the pressure created by Mr. Loftus.

All of these links refer to other pages in Frontpagemag.com but a Google search on the topics will quickly bring you to corroborating accounts.

Rants will be useless; what we need is stronger accountability in Washington and especially from the bloated bureaucracies that have been created over the years. Accountability, however, starts with Congress and they are only accountable to us, the people. That is the first place that needs a major house-cleaning (and Senate cleaning, if you want to acknowledge the pun.) The best way to do that is to vote out all of the incumbents in every election for the next twenty years. The rot is too deep and the arrogance too strong to leave any of them there any longer. Just read the stories, below and at the links, to see what a mess that they’ve made and why they need to be replaced – every single man and woman in Congress, especially those in the Senate!

Some of these guys have made a life’s work at these making debacles and have built political machines in their home states to insure that they will stay there forever; but all we have to do is say “ENOUGH” and simply vote for whoever runs against them. After all, how much worse can a stranger be, look at the mess the incumbents have made.

I don’t want to rant any further on this, I’m just asking to make these guys accountable for what they’ve done instead of continuously rewarding them for the messes they’ve made. The following story (or stories, if you prefer) exemplify the mess. There are more, many more, and they need to be stopped. In the name of world peace and working with our fellow man, they need to be stopped! As the story below states:

NEVER AGAIN!

-- Ichabod Crane

-----------------------------------------------------------------
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The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis and Al-Qaeda - By John Loftus

Jewish Community News

October 4, 2004

It always seems a little strange to have an Irish-Catholic talking about Yom Ha Shoah.

I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C., and that's where the U.S. government buries its secrets -- literally.

There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone see the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? The last scene of that movie is what the underground vaults are really like, only not as organized as they are in the movie. And in those underground vaults I discovered something horrible.

I learned that many of the Nazis that I had been assigned to prosecute were on the CIA payroll, but the CIA didn't know they were Nazis because the British Intelligence Service had lied to them. What the British Intelligence Service didn't know was that their liar was Kim Philby, the Soviet communist double agent -- a little scandal of the Cold War. But our State Department swept it all under the rug and allowed the Nazis to stay in America until I was stupid enough to go public with it.

What do you do when you want to go public with a story like this one? You call up “60 Minutes.” We had a great time. Mike Wallace gave me 30 minutes on his show. For a long time, it was the longest segment that "60 Minutes" ever did. When the episode about Nazis in America went on the air back in 1982, it caused a minor national uproar. Congress demanded hearings, Mike Wallace got the Emmy award, and my family got the death threats. It was a great trip.

Then a funny thing happened. Over the last 25 years, every retired spy in the U.S. and Canada and England all wanted me to be their lawyer, for free of course. So I had 500 clients, they paid me $1 apiece. So I am the worst paid lawyer in America, but among the better employed.

Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it's called Sleeping with the Devil. I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA how bad the files were.

He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, “Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago.” He said, “What do you mean?”

Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood -- and you can do this, too. I said, “Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word “Banna,” B-a-n-n-a. He said, “Yeah.” Type in “Nazi.” Bob typed the two words in, and out came 30 to 40 articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, “Oh my gosh, what have we done?”

What I'm doing today is doing what I'm doing now: I'm educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al-Qaeda.

Here's how the story began. In the 1920's there was a young Egyptian named al Bana. And al Bana formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930's, al-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.

When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too, was a man -- The grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the “Handjar” Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa -- grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened.

Instead of prosecuting the Nazis -- the Muslim Brotherhood -- the British government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain was not alone. The French intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, but they failed to quash the State of Israel.

What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid; it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt or be imprisoned, and we would execute them all. During the 1950's, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.

Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam -- the Saudi version of Islam -- is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That's how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood, and fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools. And there was a young student who paid attention - - and Azzam's student was named Osama Bin Ladin. Osama Bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

In 1979 the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.

And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.

Azzam and his assistant, Osama Bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to '89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, “We won, let's go home!” and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

Saudis didn't want to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama Bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated apparently by Osama Bin Ladin himself. The radical group -- the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists -- Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda.

Osama Bin Ladin's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the results of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as “Hammas” is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin a month ago, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East and on 9/11, it began to spread around the world.

I know this sounds like some sort of a sick fantasy, but go to your computer and type in the words “Banna,” B-a-n-n-a and the word “Nazi,” N-a-z-i, and you will see all of the articles come up. Those are all the pieces of information that the CIA was trying to hide from its employees. It did not want them to know the awful past. So, in 1984, when I was exposing European Nazis on the CIA payroll, at the same time they were trying to hide from Congress the fact that they had Arab Nazis back on the payroll to fight the Russians -- a stupid and corrupt program.

So, when Bob Baer studied his files, he was just stunned. A whole generation: the current CIA people know nothing about this. And believe me, the current generation CIA are good and decent Americans and I like them a lot. They're trying to do a good job, but part of their problem is their files have been shredded. All of these secrets have to come out.

So, of course, my clients in the intelligence community said, “Well, what are you doing?” They gave me an example. They said, “Here's how the Saudis finance these groups. The Saudis have established a group of charities on a street in Virginia. It's 555 Grove St., Herndon, Virginia.” So I said, “OK the Saudis are terrorists, so what?” These charities fund Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda. The Saudis are getting tax deductions for terrorism. They have set up front groups so all the terrorists groups in the U.S. and the front groups get the Saudi money as a charitable donation.

I said, “You're kidding me.” Nope. And they told me that right near where I lived in Tampa, Florida was one of the leading terrorists in the world. There were these two professors at the University of South Florida. One had just left -- and he was now in Syria -- and he was the world head of Islamic Jihad. His number two, the head of Islamic Jihad in the Western Hemisphere, was Dr. Sami al-Arian, who is still employed as a professor at the University of South Florida. You've got to be kidding. This can't be true.

Yes, these guys are raising money all across America and shipping it to Syria to go down to Palestine, the Palestinian areas, and hire suicide bombers to kill Jews. They sent me the videotapes. There was Professor al-Arian on stage and one of his friends gets up and says, “Now, who will give me $500 to kill a Jew? There are people standing by in Jerusalem who will go out in the street and stab a Jew with a knife, but we need $500.” And he said, “All of this money will go to the Islamic committee for Palestine.” And that is the front group in the United States for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

So I had all my friends in the FBI and CIA send in these files. I said, “Why haven't you prosecuted this guy? You've known about him since 1989.” “We'd love to. We've tried to prosecute him but we were told we couldn't touch him because he gets all of his money from the Saudis, and we are all under orders not to do anything to embarrass the Saudi government.”

I said, “I don't mind embarrassing them.” You know what I did? I donated money to the charity that was the terrorist fund, because under Florida law, that gave me the right to sue the charity to find out where my money was going. It was hilarious.

In early March, 2002, I drafted a long lawsuit exposing Professor Sami al-Arian, naming all the crimes he'd committed, all the bombings in Israel, the fundraising in America with terrorism. I mentioned how his money got to him from the Saudis and how the Saudis had convinced our government not to prosecute him for political reasons. Because of my high-level security clearances, everything I write is sort of classified material and has to be sent back to the government before publication, for censorship. So I sent my long lawsuit complaint to the CIA, and they loved it. They said, “Oh, great. We don't like the Saudis either. Go sue them.”

Three days later two FBI Agents showed up at my door, saying, “You know, there are only 21 people in the U.S. government that knew some of this information, and now you're 22. How did you find out?” I said, “I'm sorry, I can't tell you, attorney-client privilege.” That's why my clients pay me $1.00 each.

The day before I went to file the lawsuit, I got a frantic phone call from the United States Department of Justice. They said, “John, please don't file the lawsuit tomorrow. We really are going to raid these Saudi charities. We're going to close them down. Just give us more time.” “Oh yeah, you're going to raid them. That's what you told me in January - - and again in February, and now it's March. You want more time? I'll give you until 4:00 o'clock tomorrow. I'm filing my complaint at 10:00 a.m., so that at 4:00 p.m., I'm going to release the address of the Saudi charities. Back tomorrow. I filed my lawsuit at 10:00 o'clock, and told the press I was going to hold something back for a little bit.

At 10:15, the U.S. government launched Operation Greenquest, a massive raid on all the Saudi charities in homes and businesses, and in one hour we shut down the entire Saudi money-laundering network in America.

From March 20, 2002 to the present, the government has found more and more evidence seized in those archives on that single raid that day. The evidence was so compelling that Professor al-Arian is no longer giving his speeches. He is now in federal prison awaiting trial. His accomplice, Hammoudeh, has also been indicted. Some 32 different people have been indicted in the United States as a direct result of these efforts.

But not the Saudis -- not the Saudis.

A month after I filed my lawsuit against al-Arian, I did it: I caused some trouble. I invited some 40 of the top trial lawyers in America to come down to St. Petersburg, Florida. Boy, did I have a deal for them. I wanted them to put up millions of dollars of their own money -- I'm poor, I had no money to give them -- but I wanted to do something for America.

These are lawyers like Ron Motley that had won billions of dollars in their lawsuits against the tobacco industry and the asbestos industry. I said, “What I want you to do is look at the evidence I've collected. It's the same Saudi banks and charities that funded Sami al-Arian that also funded al Qaeda.” I said, “I want you to bring a class action in Federal Court in Washington on behalf of everyone who died on Sept. 11th. I'm going to work for free and collect all the evidence, introduce you to the experts, provide all the exhibits and documents . . . and we have to do this for America.”

The lawyers studied all the documents I collected, and on August 15, 2002, they filed the largest class-action lawsuit in American history in the Federal District Court in Washington D.C., asking for one trillion dollars damages against the Saudis. The lawsuit said essentially that all these Saudi banks had one thing in common. They were bribing Osama bin Ladin 300 million dollars a year to stay out of Saudi Arabia and go blow up someone else.

Well, on 9/11, we found out we were someone else, and the Saudis had to pay for their negligence. So that lawsuit is coming along very well.

And more and more people in the CIA and FBI are sort of using me as a back channel to get our information. So, believe it or not, they've actually given me my own TV show now on Sunday mornings on FOX TV nationwide. I'm on at 11:20 eastern standard time. And ABC Radio has given me a national radio program, but I'm on at 10:30 at night and it's past your bedtime.

What I've become in my old age is a teacher. Twenty-five years ago I was a lot younger, a lot thinner, but now every day I get 500 to 1,000 e-mails from honest men and women around the world from the intelligence community.

And we have to end the evil in this world. We have to recognize that al Qaeda simply didn't spring up on its own. The evil route was Nazism. The al Qaeda Doctrine is the same as the Arab Nazis held. They hated Jews, they hate democracy, and they hate Westerners for Western culture. Al Qaeda is nothing more than the religious expression of Arab Fascism. We allowed this branch of the Nazi trunk to survive, to flourish, and it has come back to haunt us.

We must do a better job. Look at these children. They are our legacy. If we are to keep our children safe, we must teach them the lessons of the past. Every generation should know what these candles mean. Not only that one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the world really happened, but the evil that caused it -- Nazism -- survived because we didn't fight hard enough. We didn't finish the job.

But we must tell our children that in every generation the men and women of America have stood side by side with our Jewish, Christian, and Moslem brothers. We have risen up together against hatred. America is united now.

We will win the war on terror, and we will finish the job that these soldiers and survivors started more than a half-century ago. We must set the standard that to teach a child to hate is the worst form of child abuse. We must work together to end racism in our children's lifetime. We must teach our children to remember the Holocaust and be proud, so proud of those who survived and inspired us with their courage. In their name, in their honor, let us go forward and fight together.

NEVER AGAIN.

Saber Rattling for Iran

2006-01-31T02:04:00.000-05:00

I was reading an op-ed from the Washington Post (http://tinyurl.com/b4w48) and feelings of déjà vu and dread came over me. I couldn’t help recall all the rhetoric from the left when the President was beating the drums of war against Iraq. They were all for it. The loudest voices against it now were the loudest voices for it then. Most of these hot-air bags had already given long-winded speeches back in 1998 stating that Saddam had to go, that his use and possession of WMDs was an intolerable situation, yadda, yadda, yadda. Now they are all calling Bush a liar for saying the Saddam had WMDs. F**cking hypocrites, all; and now they are all saying the same things about Iran. “the idea of a nuclear armed Iran is intolerable, yadda, yadda, yadda. (I wonder if they have their ‘Bush is a liar’ speeches ready to go for after (if) we go and take out Iran’s nuclear facilities?

What say you liberals out there? Care to go on record now, before the ‘fun’ begins, as to what the President should or shouldn’t do? According to the op-ed, “Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian Choice -- and both endorsed military action.” Of course, ever the one to avoid taking a real stand, John Kerry said we should take the problem to the UN if diplomacy fails. Right, like that has ever done any good. The UN was rattling their empty saber sheath for over ten years before we went into Iraq; can we wait ten years for the Iranians to stop doing what they’re doing and ‘play nice’ with their neighbors?

John Kerry, the war hero, figures if we dump it on the UN and Iran blows up Tel Aviv, well the UN can be blamed and we’re in the clear. Never mind the actual people killed in Israel, just as long as he can ‘blame’ somebody else, that’s good enough for him. The amount of courage it must have taken for him to state that publicly is amazing, isn’t it? Just make it somebody else’s problem. He would make a President that Jimmy Carter could look up to.

Is there anyone out there foolish enough to think it’ll be more than three or four years before Iran is ‘testing’ their new toys in Tel Aviv? They are building a bomb and that is exactly what they said they’d do with it.

So the Democrats are putting the President into a lose-lose scenario and demanding he act. He’ll be blamed for all the deaths resulting from an Iranian bomb, if he doesn’t do anything about it; and he’ll be called a nuclear madman, if he does what needs doing.

What exactly can he do? Invade Iran? That’ll be costly in lives and money way beyond what we’ve incurred to date with Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Who would help us? Sanctions won’t work because China will supply Iran with whatever they need, in order to get their oil, as may Russia.

What about my favorite solution: nuke their nuclear facilities with cruise missiles before an invasion? The biggest problem with that, of course, is the response from China and Russia. Are we prepared for another cold-war? How could we even be sure that we got all of them without invading afterwards? They have been digging deeper and deeper, burying their facilities in order to hide their activity.

So, think about it. I’m pretty sure I know what the conservatives on this list would want: follow the cruise missiles with the Marines, Air Force, Army, and Navy (they have a lot of coastline). What do my liberal friends think we should do? That’s what I’d like to know and have on record for after its begun.

2006-01-29T22:00:00.000-05:00

Technorati'>http://technorati.com/claim/qm8m7udk">Technorati

The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling!

2006-01-29T15:50:00.000-05:00

Global Warming

January 29, 2006

There was a long article today in the Washington Post about global warming entitled, “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change” [http://tinyurl.com/dkyts], screaming that the sky is falling, once again. They use the term “most scientist agree” as though that means anything at all, which it doesn’t. There are actually a small minority of so-called scientists that agree with the position stated in this article. First of all, is global warming happening; and if so, what is causing it?

It does seem as though some of the worlds largest and oldest glaciers are receding. Weather patterns also seem to be changing, insofar as we can tell what a normal weather pattern is. So, perhaps there is some reason to think that the Earth is going through some change. OK, so what? The Earth has been going through changes for eons and probably will continue to do so for eons to come. It’s done that before people walked the Earth and has done it several times since. In fact, change seems to be the norm for the climate if the Earth. Why would people start thinking that we have anything to do with it now; and why do they think we can do anything about it at all? Greenhouse emissions are down considerably (at least in this and other Western industrial countries) since the sixties, yet whatever is changing continues unabated.

The first thing we need to understand about all these changes is that it is the sun that drives them. Our sun, Sol, goes through all sorts of changes, sometimes involving cycles that last tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. We cannot possibly do anything to affect the cycles of the sun. Only the severest megalomaniac would think otherwise. That this (possible) current climatic change is originating from the sun is evidenced by the fact that even Mars is experiencing the same phenomenon. NASA has reported that, since measurements started some decades ago, the Martian ice-caps have been receding by 10-20 meters per Martian year (about two Earth years). Are the ‘Chicken Littles’ of the Washington Times intimating that the greenhouse gasses produced here also affecting the Martian climate? That is blatantly preposterous!

While it is true that a continued warming trend here on Earth would be catastrophic, especially for the coastal regions of the world; it is simply silly to say that we, or any group of countries, are to blame. Were we to discontinue the burning of any fuels and huddle in caves, the sun would continue to cycle through its current phase and the world will, or will not, continue to get warmer depending on the length of the solar cycle. The glaciers would continue to melt and the coasts will be flooded if the sun continues to warm. What would be gained but ceasing to be warm and mobil?

What we need to do is get realistic about what is happening, and especially why it’s happening, and make plans to salvage what can be salvaged from the threatened areas. Plans for evacuating the coastal cities of the world should be made now, before it’s too late. The task will be monumental and costly beyond anything ever undertaken by mankind since Noah built his ark. So monumental, in fact, that people are refusing to see the obvious and will continue to blame the industrial Nations of the world until it’s too late and millions of people are displaced, drowned, and/or world-wide panic ensues.

Going around saying that the sky is falling will be as effective as it was for Chicken Little.

That's what I think; and I'm Ichabod Crane!

If you are Stuck on Stupid, get help and get off it.

2005-10-28T21:32:00.000-04:00

[Excerpts from President Bush’s address to Congress (in 2003) requesting authorization for invading Iraq, and some comments by yours truly at the end. Highlights are mine.]

Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction. For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement.1 He pursued chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, even while inspectors were in his country. Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons -- not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities. [See Note 1]

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm2. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world. The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq’s regime is disarming. It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He’s not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq’s recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming3. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.

Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations4. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.

Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.

With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda5. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option6. (Applause.)

The dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning7. (Applause.) [See Note 2]

And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. (Applause.) And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. (Applause.)

The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm. America will not accept a serious and mounting threat to our country, and our friends and our allies. The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi’s legal -- Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.

We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. (Applause.)

Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces: Many of you are assembling in or near the Middle East, and some crucial hours may lay ahead. In those hours, the success of our cause will depend on you. Your training has prepared you. Your honor will guide you. You believe in America, and America believes in you. (Applause.)

Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not. For the brave Americans who bear the risk, no victory is free from sorrow. This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come.

We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail. (Applause.)

And as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom. (Applause.) [See Note 3]

---End of Excerpt---

-----------------------
Note 1 - [In fact, the Oil for Food kickbacks were supporting his efforts.]
Note 2 - [Put that in perspective of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and ‘Gitmo.’]
Note 3 - [Mission accomplished and continuing!]
-----------------------

I counted 7 independently sufficient reasons for invading Iraq in this speach, and all the left can say is, “We didn’t find WMDs.” I’ll say two things about this:
First, we still need to find many of them. He had them and not all of them have been accounted for.

(From the Federalist 05-43 Digest:
As for those still “Stuck on Stupid”, insisting that there were no WMD found in Iraq, here’s a partial list of what didn’t make it out of Iraq before the invasion: 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium, 1,700 gallons of chemical-weapon agents, chemical warheads containing the nerve agent cyclosarin, thousands of radioactive materials in powdered form designed for dispersal over population centers, artillery projectiles loaded with binary chemical agents, etc.

As The Patriot noted in October, 2002, our well-placed sources in the region and intelligence sources with the NSA and NRO estimated that the UN Security Council’s foot-dragging provided an ample window for Saddam to export some or all of his deadliest WMD materials and components. At that time, we reported that Allied Forces would be unlikely to discover Iraq’s WMD stores, noting, “Our sources estimate that Iraq has shipped some or all of its biological stockpiles and nuclear WMD components through Syria to southern Lebanon’s heavily fortified Bekaa Valley.”

In December of 2002, our senior-level intelligence sources re-confirmed estimates that some of Iraq’s biological and nuclear WMD material and components had, in fact, been moved into Syria and Iran. That movement continued until President Bush finally pulled the plug on the UN’s ruse.

---end of Federalist comments---

Just how many WMDs and their components did we need to find before the pro-Islamist faction here in America realize that we found them?

Second, there are still six valid reasons for going there, so get over it and start supporting the troops by rooting for America, instead of for the terrorists, to win.

If we’d all been doing that from the beginning, especially the Main Stream Media, there wouldn’t be 2000 KIA’s there now. Instead of being emboldened to ‘stay the course to victory’ the terrorists would be cowering in their caves, being systematically routed out one-by-one. Now they think that they’ll win once the Main Stream Media and the liberal-left force us to surrender in defeat (like they did in Vietnam), so the fight goes on, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don’t let those 2000 heros’ lives be lost for nothing, their sacrifice needs to stand for something; it needs to be for winning the War on Terror! America needs to win this one, the stakes are too high; the stakes are for the existence of the civilized world to prevail over this insane Jihad!

Wanting us to lose just because you hate Bush is totally and simply insane, and proves that you are indeed, Stuck on Stupid! Get help, get off of Stupid! Bush will be gone in three years, but the terrorists and Jihadists will still be here! -IC

The Katrina Debacle - by Ichobod Crane & edited by Steve Saltsman

2005-09-25T18:11:00.000-04:00

The Katrina Debacle

… And those who figured prominently in it.

The players:

Local Authorities:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

Although he had twenty-four hour advance notice of the region being declared a disaster area, he failed to dispatch any buses to evacuate the people who had no transportation, nor did he give notice of his lack of intent to provide any assistance in their evacuation. His reckless indifference left the city buses for public transportation and the city school buses to be destroyed or damaged in their parking lots, rather than having them used to evacuate the citizens of New Orleans. He sat on his hands and complained of not having any Federal support, when it was his duty to have acted in the first place. The man is clearly incompetent to hold any public office.

His further response to Rita showed him to be criminally incompetent and badly in need of being replaced.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco

She failed to oversee the evacuation of the populated regions in the path of the storm. After the President declared the region a disaster area, she should have dispatched the National Guard under her control to assist in the evacuations. At the very least they could have driven the buses and urged people to leave. She showed a level of incompetence on a par with Mayor Ray Nagin and should suffer the same fate with him.

She also, again, failed to control the situation in New Orleans and left the incompetent Ray Nagin to flounder and further endanger the citizens in that city. She is clearly as incompetent, negligent and criminally liable as the Mayor.

Federal Agencies in the loop:

Department of the Interior Secretary Gale Norton

Along with:

Department of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

And through the:

Secretary of the Army Dr. Harvey

Control the:

US Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District

Executive Office:

Col. Richard P. Wagenaar, District Engineer

Maj. Murray Starkel, Deputy District Engineer

Gregory Breerwood, Deputy District Engineer for Project Management

This agency had been prohibited from building stronger flood defenses for New Orleans by the Courts that favored several environmental groups who had sued the Corps to cease and desist from further encroachment into the wetland in order to protect several wild, indigenous species of plants and animals. Their response subsequent to the breaches of the levees was exemplary. Their plan to reinforce the levees and other flood protection designs should be allowed to proceed unhindered and forthwith.

The LA Senators have consistently diverted funds from levee work for other ‘pet’ projects as well. What can be done about these Senators?

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff

He has a case of arrogance of the first order. His most poignant statements were “I’ve got this down,” …and… “There’ll be plenty of time,” Chertoff told Tim Russert, “to do the after-action analysis.” …and… “After- action analysis should not interfere with current recovery operations.” … and repetitions ad infinitum. His complete inattention to his undersecretary’s lack of performance is astounding. He is guilty, at the very least, of lack of leadership and total disregard of the entire situation. This man should resign immediately, or be fired by the President if he fails to do so. Otherwise he should be impeached by the Congress.

Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response Michael D. Brown (Head of FEMA)

His lack of experience was painfully obvious in his lack of leadership and preparedness in the wake of the disaster. He utterly failed to provide even the minimum response from FEMA. Subsequently, he also showed great arrogance in disavowing any responsibilities. This man should also resign immediately, or be fired by the President if he fails to do so. Otherwise he too, should be impeached by the Congress.

Thank God he resigned; but criminal charges should be considered against him notwithstanding.

The Senate of the United States of America

This body was totally and completely negligent in its duties of ‘advice and consent’ in allowing either Michael Chertoff or Michael Brown to be approved to their current positions. These men’s absolute lack of qualifications demanded that they not be elevated into these critical roles. Undoubtedly they will pass this off onto the President, although it was their duty to stop this appointment.

Of course many liberals in the Senate made a fuss about them; however, with the current political climate, where every move the President makes raises a fuss, they were discounted as yet again crying wolf. Here is a prime reason that this heretofore August Body badly needs to regain some semblance of dignity and stop all the caterwauling from both sides. All of them share blame in this political crisis.

The current leaders of both parties who have been engaging in such juvenile antics should be reprimanded and removed from their current leadership roles; they have shown no leadership whatsoever. The time for such behavior, if there is any such time, is prior to elections and other important votes, not after the fact. This only serves to obfuscate current and more important business; like engaging in level-headed debate on candidates’ qualifications for important positions, not on what their political affiliations are. We know their affiliations simply by them being appointed by a President, be he a Democrat or Republican.

President of the United States George W. Bush

In appointing Michael Brown to be promoted as the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response (Head of FEMA), and Michael Chertoff, the President made the most grievous errors of his Presidency; however, it was still the responsibility of the Senate to disqualify the appointments. That is their role; they are the ones who do the investigations. Nevertheless, the President will suffer politically for having nominated this unqualified man, and his clueless boss, in the first place. These positions should be promoted from within the ranks of FEMA, the Coast Guard, or even from the Pentagon, where people have the needed experience and skills with handling emergency management. These two appointments will cast serious doubts on all subsequent Presidential appointments, particularly now, with the Supreme Court vacancies, as well as other lower court appointments. Hopefully, the Senate will look very hard indeed on all Presidential appointments.

I can’t see how the President can be impeached for these appointments, however, unless all the Senators who approved of them resign first. When that happens, then perhaps the other should as well. After all, a President might appoint an unqualified person who feels he is owed an appointment by helping the President get elected; but then, when the Senate rejects them the President has been cleared of any further obligation to that person. Politics are messy, and these things happen in the course of things, hence the Senate’s role in the process. From that perspective, the Senate was even more remiss in their duty to the country than the President, who has political obligations that need paying. That is the purpose behind the Founder’s reasoning for the Senate’s “advice and consent” clause. Such has always been the way of politics.

The President’s initial response was timely in declaring the parts of the Gulf region (that were threatened by Katrina), a disaster area over a day prior to its making landfall. This should have been time enough to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people had the local government simply followed their existing plans that had been in place for just such an emergency.

It isn’t understood what more he, personally, could have done subsequent to the storm. The entire chain of government had broken down under him, particularly at the local level. Federal agencies that should have acted after the Executive Order of the declaration of the disaster area, acted as though stunned by the magnitude of the event, especially with the local governments doing nothing to help themselves.

The President’s perceived lack of action after the disaster manifested was no doubt, not due to the scope of the devastation, but to the massive incompetence at the state and local levels. Indeed what could he do in the face of that disaster? The federal government can only do its job when the local governments do theirs; ours is a bottom up governmental organization on the home front. This breakdown should be addressed by a conference of the Governors from all of the States to formulate local contingency plans for the Federal Government’s involvement when the local structure breaks down. Should Martial Law have been declared? That is a most extreme response, but perhaps necessary for the situation in New Orleans, particularly in the face of the anarchy that broke out there. Again, that was due to the utter failure of the local government.

In previous disasters, like the four hurricanes that hit in Florida last year, the local governments did their jobs, making the tasks of the Federal agencies easily integrated into the relief efforts. When the local governments drop their responsibilities by having no local operation for the Federal assistance to integrate into, the Fed’s must develop a plan before they can act on it. In all cases, with the exception of an unqualified head of FEMA, the breakdown of the local government is what inhibited the smooth response of the Federal agencies.

Clearly, the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin and the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, should be removed from office and prosecuted criminally for the deaths that resulted due to their incompetence and indifference. Under Secretary Michael D. Brown [who has resigned while this was being written] should also be prosecuted criminally, although on what charge(s) is questionable. His first act of incompetence was in accepting an appointment for which he was severely under-qualified. The Senators who voted for his appointment should receive an official censure at the very least.

The courts that prohibited the Army Corps of Engineers should be investigated and their judgments reviewed for judicial malfeasance. Any judge found guilty of said malfeasance should be removed and prosecuted as required.

Hurricane Rita found a country more ready because of Katrina, but the Texas government, at all levels, were prepared and professional in the execution of their plans and should be commended. Ray Nagin was still trying to get the population of New Orleans back into the city – he learned nothing at all.

The biggest difference between the two states might be seen by their ‘entitlement mentality’ – LA seems to thrive of it; TX seems well off without it. This has been a great study in “less is more” for all to learn from.

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Some great thoughts to ponder from The Federalist. (www.federalist.com)

SELECT READER COMMENTS:

(Our servers automatically delete "Reply" messages to this e-mail. Submit comments for publication or to view reader comments: http://FederalistPatriot.US/comments.asp Join the debate at the Patriot Blog: http://PatriotPostBlog.US/ )

"So Junior Sen. Hillary Clinton and House Mini Leader Nancy Pelosi say they want a commission to investigate what went wrong in New Orleans—in other words, an open and extended forum to blame Republicans. Last week, Republicans proposed a review board for this purpose and Democrats balked. Pelosi now says Democrats should boycott this review, and claims it will lead to a whitewash of the facts. I guess that, as more facts are now becoming available, Pelosi and Clinton are less anxious for a review."—Albany, New York

Editor's Reply: Democrats don't really want anyone looking that closely at the Demo machinations in the Big Easy. As Patriot No. 05-36 noted Friday, "Indeed, Democrats may get their 'inquisition commission,' hoping for colorful headlines trumpeting 'Republican failures' in the upcoming election year, but they had best take care what they ask for, lest they get it. Inquiring too deeply into factual communication, material distribution and evacuation failures after Katrina will likely yield answers that sink Louisiana Democrats—from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to Governor Kathleen Blanco. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who diverted Corps of Engineer funding from NOLA levees to her pet projects, just might need to pack her bags." Republicans called Pelosi's bluff, but you have to hand it to her, the "boycott protest" tactic is a clever dodge. Fact is, Republicans should go on the offensive now, and insist on a review. Let the Demos wiggle out of this one.

"'Natural Disaster'? Natural: for all but New Orleans. N.O. was a man-made disaster. For generations, state and local governments continued to develop the area around New Orleans—below sea level development—against the advice of the Corp of Enginieers. They ignored the possibilities and embraced the long odds of a Cat 4+ hurricane. They gambled and lost—and while the politicians are trying to tie losses to the Bush administration (how ludicrous), the real losers are those folks who trusted Louisiana government to protect them from catastrophic disaster—the result of catastrophic ignorance."—Biloxi, Mississippi

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Opinions:

"A republican form of government presupposes self-government—the capacity of citizens to govern themselves according to reason—and does not, if it intends to survive, champion them as 'victims' when they don't." —George Neumayr ++ "Ours is a federal system. The President is sworn to uphold and support the Constitution. He is not a dictator. And not to be blamed for failing to act like one. The problem was not the Constitution or the President, but Louisiana's officials." —Michael Gaynor

"The worst thing the federal government could do is to increase the size, reach and cost of government. If government failed in its response to the hurricane, the answer is not more inefficient government." —Cal Thomas

"No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush." —Charles Krauthammer

"What we are witnessing is a well-honed black political public-relations operation geared to obfuscation, stoking hatred and fear, and nurturing helplessness and dependence among black citizens. Such efforts keep black politicians powerful, diversity businesses prosperous and blacks poor." —Star Parker

"[A]rtificial [gas] price caps will work no better now than they did in the 1970s. They won't get petroleum refined faster. They won't reduce motorists' demand for gasoline. All they will create is shortages—the one thing price controls always bring in their wake." —Jeff Jacoby

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Dana Summers by Dana Summers

FDR Proposed Private Accounts - By Rod D. Martin

2005-08-22T23:20:00.000-04:00

It is amazing how many people are listening to our underhanded politicians (from both parties) about this issue. All these rich bastards want is the money that would go into your account, where they would no longer be able to get their hands on it to spend on pork projects that get them reelected if this plan goes into effect.

This is the only way to go, this way empowers the people and disempowers the politicians. Who should own your money, you or Congress? Who worked for it?

-- Ichabod Crane
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FDR Proposed Private Accounts
By Rod D. Martin
August 22, 2005

To hear today's Democrats talk, Franklin Roosevelt would be spinning in his grave if he heard today's debate about Social Security private accounts.

They're only half right. He'd be spinning if he heard today's Democrats.

Roosevelt was many things, but he was no fool, not on this point. The man who gave us the New Deal understood perfectly the limitations of Social Security. In honest moments, politicians correctly note that "Social Security was never meant to pay for 100% of your retirement." And to pay for the part a government pension scheme couldn't, FDR had a very modern-sounding idea.

Announcing his plan on January 17, 1935, Social Security's founder said: "in the important field of security for old people, it seems necessary to adopt ... voluntary contribution annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age."

In other words, private accounts.

Seventy years later, Roosevelt's words ring truer than ever. Social Security taxes -- just 1% back then -- now consume between 12 and 15% of most Americans' income. They effectively eliminate any possibility of separate retirement savings without serious sacrifice.

And for what? Social Security checks remain a pittance, certainly nothing anyone should have to depend on as a monthly income; and with a $255 death benefit, they don't even pay enough to bury you.

Worst of all, you don't own your own money. You can't pass it on to your wife, you can't pass it on to your kids. And since government spends every dollar as soon as it comes in -- the trust fund is a myth -- there's not even any guarantee you'll get to keep your money yourself.

But as President Roosevelt taught us, there really is a better way.

Under President Bush's plan, Social Security could finally fulfill its promise. Private account-holders could look forward to between three and five times the monthly check available under the current system. Most Americans would retire on a higher monthly income than they had when they were working.

And they wouldn't have to invest in anything risky to achieve this, or give up the safety net of government Social Security, or even obtain any specialized knowledge of investing. The tens of millions in (incredibly successful) private accounts around the world -- from Chile to Britain to Australia to the public employees in Galveston, Texas -- have already shown us the way.

Some pundits have pronounced the President's plan dead; but the rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. Social Security reform can still happen, and happen this fall once Congress returns.

The best bill before Congress -- by a wide margin -- is Ryan-Sununu. It proposes placing half of your Social Security tax money in an account which you alone control: you will own it just like your IRA or 401(k). This would not only give every American a much higher retirement income than any other bill before Congress, it would also solve the problem of Social Security's impending bankruptcy: as more Americans use their private accounts instead of burdening the current system, the Ryan-Sununu plan would create an ongoing multi-trillion dollar surplus roughly twenty years out.

This would completely eliminate the solvency crisis. More than that, it would give the current generation of retirees a huge benefit increase, and everyone else an enormous tax cut.

President Roosevelt understood: Americans need the right to contribute their hard-earned money to their own voluntary personal retirement accounts. These PRAs will let every American -- even our very poorest -- accumulate real assets, real nest eggs for retirement, and real inheritances for their children.

No one will benefit from this more than the lower and middle income working-class, who can never quite get out of poverty because the current system taxes away too much for them to save. No one, that is, except black Americans, whose lower life expectancy means they frequently die before ever receiving Social Security at all, and aren't allowed to pass anything on.

IRAs and 401(k)s have sparked an enormous capitalist revolution, transforming millions of regular Americans from ordinary workers into investors. It's time to complete that revolution. Let's help every American participate in this very American dream. It's time the poorest among us had the same benefits from our free market system that most of us take for granted.

It's the least we can do, for their sake, and for President Roosevelt's vision.

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Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter Thiel, he is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy, a Vice President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), and editor and co-author of Thank You President Bush, the definitive handbook to the second term.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

The Long War or the Short Surrender - from The Federalist

2005-08-17T17:37:00.000-04:00

This, IMHO, is the finest publication on the web or anywhere. I'm posting this here, now, to remind those who have lapsed in their memories of what we're fighting for and why. The cause never changes, just the enemy and the place. this is a fundamental battle for the right to exist.
The following is an excerpt from the 29 July 2005 Federalist Patriot No. 05-30 Friday Digest
-- Ichabod Crane

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THE FOUNDATION

"[I]t is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own." --Benjamin Franklin

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THE PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE

Top of the fold -- U.S. National Security: The Long War or the Short Surrender (Part III of a three-part series)

In the 1990's, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was a new sense of security in the West, particularly in the U.S. But the Free World had unwittingly traded the Cold War for the Long War -- "unwittingly" because after eight years of Clinton administration antics, and eight months of the newly-installed Bush administration's effort to reorder national priorities, most Americans were unaware that another deadly enemy had coalesced in our midst.

That false sense of security terminated abruptly on 11 September 2001, when one of this enemy's brigades attacked the World Trade Center -- for the second time. The first WTC attack on 26 February 1993 was treated by the Clinton administration as a "criminal act." Subsequent attacks by this enemy against Khobar Towers, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole were also investigated as criminal acts. The same would have been true after 9/11, except that President George Bush had the resolve to call this attack what it was -- an "act of war" -- terrorism carried out by an asymmetric enemy calling itself "al-Qa'ida" (The Base), which was part of an international unified Islamic terrorist network supported, in part, by nation states like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

This was a new kind of war, but it was war nonetheless.

Unlike symmetric threats emanating from clearly defined nation states like Russia and China -- nation states with unambiguous political, economic and geographical interests -- this asymmetric enemy defies nation-state status, thus presenting new and daunting national-security challenges for the executive branch and U.S. military planners.

Perhaps the most difficult of these challenges is the task of keeping Americans focused on why this asymmetric threat must be engaged (short of periodic catastrophic wake-up calls). Unfortunately, in deference to sensitivity and diversity, the Bush administration has yet to use the words "Muslim" or "Islamic" when attempting to define or, dare we say, "profile" this enemy. But the Bush administration, and the administrations of our Allies, depend on public support to prosecute the Long War ahead with Islamists.

Targeting al-Qa'ida and its Saudi protagonist Osama bin Laden may have initially precluded diminishing public support for the so-called "War on Terror," but protests against operations in Iraq and elsewhere are taxing morale both at home and on the warfront. Only two things can curtail this retreat. Either the Bush administration can do a better job of defining this enemy and its lethality, or the enemy can hit us again -- and as noted in parts I and II of this series, this enemy has the potential to hit much harder than it did on 9/11.

The latter is assured if the former fails.

President Bush must rightly define this enemy as Islamist zealots of Jihadistan, a borderless nation of Islamic extremists constituted by al-Qa'ida and other Muslim terrorist groups, calling for jihad, or "holy war," against "all the enemies of Allah." (If you're reading this, you are likely a non adherent -- and an enemy of Allah.) These Jihadis seek to disable the U.S. economy using any means at their disposal, and thus, undermine our political, military and cultural influence around the world. Ultimately, they want to contain or kill those who do not subscribe to their Islamofascist cult of hate.

The President must also convince our countrymen of the certainty that against Jihadistan, there is no neat Cold War doctrine like Mutually Assured Destruction to stay offensive measures. In this war, the only doctrine that can keep the enemy at bay is that of preemption -- and it must be maintained as long as there are Islamists capable of doing the West harm.

President Bush told the nation, "This is a long war, and we have a comprehensive strategy to win it. We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to face them here at home. We're denying our enemies sanctuary, by making it clear that America will not tolerate regimes that harbor or support terrorists."

Indeed, it will be a long war, and his Doctrine of Pre-emption is the best directive for strategy. But short of clear public comprehension of what constitutes "the enemy," which is a prerequisite to sustained public support, this essential war will be short-circuited, and Jihadis will, once again, move the warfront to our homeland.

There are plenty of domestic enemies who would undermine public support for the war against Jihadistan for purely political reasons. After all, there are midterm elections in 2006 and a presidential election in 2008. Rep. Nancy Pelosi claims, "The president's frequent references to the terrorist attacks of September 11 show the weakness of his arguments. He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of September 11, knowing that there is no connection between September 11 and the war in Iraq."

Sen. Harry Reid (who voted for Operation Iraqi Freedom) says, "The president's numerous references to September 11 did not provide a way forward in Iraq. ... 'Staying the course,' as the president advocates, is neither sustainable nor likely to lead to the success we all seek."

John Kerry alleges that President Bush has fabricated a "third rationale" for the war: "The first, of course, was weapons of mass destruction. The second was democracy. And now...it's to combat the hotbed of terrorism."

The President, in the national interest, must take the offensive against these opportunistic detractors in order to restore public support and confidence in the Long War. For we can be certain that this war will last beyond his presidency. Just how long might it last? That depends, in part, on how one defines its origin.

If the war began in 627 AD, five years after Islam's founding, when Mohammed committed his first genocide against a Jewish tribe, then the war is an epic struggle between Islam and other religions, especially against Jews and Christians, which is to say its conclusion is not foreseeable. If the war is an extension of the middle-age invasions of the West by rapacious Islam, whether the start date is the victory of Charles Martel at Tours (732 AD), the back and forth of Crusades (1095-1669) or defeats like Constantinople (1453 AD), the siege of Vienna (1529 AD), the fleet at Lepanto (1571 AD), or the gates Venice (1683 AD), then the war is a clash of civilizations which likely has centuries of conflict yet ahead.

But if the war against Jihadistan began, as suggested here, on 11 September 2001, taking into account that Jihadi attacks on Western targets date back to the 1960s, then it will likely continue for decades. After all, it took 70 years to topple the Evil Empire.

"Our generational commitment to the advancement of freedom, especially in the Middle East, is now being tested and honored in Iraq," says President Bush. As we approach the fourth observance of 9/11, we can be sure that Pelosi, Reid, Kerry, Kennedy and their Leftist cadre will run a masterful campaign of disinformation. Such a campaign will surely test the resolve of the American people, and the Bush administration would be well advised to begin vigorously cultivating public support by forthrightly defining this mortal enemy.

The Long War may yet end on a day when the West and its beacon of liberty, these United States, surrender. Of course, the consequences of surrender will be much worse than the consequences of the war itself, but a free nation must be free to do as its collective will chooses -- even it that means choosing to lose.

For the duration, pray that our capability to defend the U.S. on more than one theater warfronts while prosecuting the long war against Jihadistan is not tested.

Quote of the week...

"September 11 for me was a wake up call. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again." --British Prime Minister Tony Blair

On cross-examination...

"Thousands of innocent civilians such as [Theo] van Gogh have been murdered by Islamic extremists -- in Darfur, Gaza, India, Israel, Lebanon, London, Madrid, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States. The carnage gives credence to the adage that while the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of global terrorists most certainly are Muslims. The killers always allege particular gripes -- Australian troops in Iraq, Christian proselytizing, Hindu intolerance, occupation of the West Bank, theft of Arab petroleum, the Jews, attacks on the Taliban, the 15th-century reconquest of Spain, and, of course, the Crusades. But in most cases -- from Mohamed Atta, who crashed into the World Trade Center, to Ahmed Sheik, the former London School of Economics student who planned the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, the suspected American-educated bomb-maker in London -- the common bond is not poverty, a lack of education or legitimate grievance. Instead it is blind hatred instilled by militant Islam." --Victor Davis Hanson

Open query...

"British citizens, who happen to be Muslim, murdered over 50 people, including themselves. Or, was it Islamists, who happen to be British, killed innocent people? It makes a difference. Brits today, Americans tomorrow, must know who their domestic enemies are and what kind of war they are fighting to win. Assuming Brits or Americans have the will to win. This World War is between a totalitarian ideology, born of a relatively barbaric culture, against all humankind." --James Atticus Bowden, military futurist (Does anyone think these bloody attacks will cease because we wish it were so?)

Spreading Hate - By Linda Chavez

2005-08-11T17:05:00.000-04:00

The real question is why are the leaders of the Black Community doing this? The Republicans seem to be all about extending the clause that is about to expire, after all; and, no one that I’ve heard, on either side, have spoken out against it. The most egregious abuses have been fixed, and are a permanent part of The Voter Rights Act of 1965; the part that is scheduled to expire are those things that southern democrats originally balked at, saying they were ‘unconstitutional’, leading to the compromise to put a sunset clause on them.

What are their motives in tarring the very people who are working to keep this going? Indeed, it sounds like they’d rather see section 5 expire! -- Ichabod Crane

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Spreading Hate

By Linda Chavez

August 11, 2005

Passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 was a proud moment in U.S. history. For the first time, millions of African Americans living in the Deep South, who had been excluded from fully participating in the political process for 200 years, were finally enfranchised. The battle to secure those rights cost many lives of both blacks and whites. So why is it that some black leaders have taken the occasion of the 40th anniversary of this seminal event to engage in hate speech?

On Saturday, thousands of activists gathered in Atlanta to commemorate the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Speakers at the rally included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.; Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and entertainers Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory and Greg Mathis, a Michigan Superior Court judge who stars in his own TV series. But instead of celebrating the triumph of this great law, many -- if not most -- of the speakers used the occasion to try to scare African Americans into thinking the Republicans in Congress and President Bush were about to rescind the protections the Act guarantees.

There was much talk of “stolen” elections. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said, “The last two elections were stolen. They were stolen and so we will not rest until we reclaim our democracy, and this is what today is all about.” Judge Mathis referred to the 2000 elections as “the biggest election crime in history.” He told the enthusiastic crowd that the “thieves” in the Republican Party “need to be locked up.” Harry Belafonte warned, “We must stand vigilant, as there are those among us who would steal our liberty and steal our souls.”

Belafonte referred to blacks serving in the Bush administration as “black tyrants,” and went even farther in an interview with Marc Morano of CNSNews.com. “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich,” Belafonte told Morano, an anti-Semitic canard meant to smear as neo-Nazi both the Bush administration and the African Americans who serve in it.

You’d think by the vicious rhetoric at the march that President Bush was trying to revoke the Act. Nothing of the sort is true. Most sections of the landmark legislation are permanent, including the ban on literacy tests, once a favorite method to keep qualified black voters from exercising their right to vote. Certain provisions of the Act -- most notably Section 5, which requires covered jurisdictions to submit even the most minor changes in voting procedures to the Department of Justice for pre-clearance -- will expire in 2007, but they were always meant to be temporary. Indeed, these provisions might have been declared unconstitutional, despite the incredible recalcitrance of Southern politicians in 1965, but for the promise that they would expire after a time.

Congress should drop the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act and another section enacted in 1975 requiring non-English ballots to be provided in some jurisdictions. The pre-clearance provision makes little sense today. There is no evidence that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 -- many of them now governed by African-American politicians -- would try to disenfranchise black voters.

And non-English ballots were a bad idea in 1975 and an even worse one today. The Hispanic population in 1975 was predominantly U.S.-born and English-speaking. Today, there are virtually no U.S.-born Hispanics or other minorities who do not speak, read and write English. Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born -- about half of adults in this group -- English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship. As for the relatively small number of eligible voters who can’t read an English ballot well enough to make an informed decision, letting such voters bring someone into the ballot booth to assist them would be far more efficient than printing up millions of ballots in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and other languages.

The irony is that no prominent Republican politician is even suggesting that Section 5 or the bilingual ballot provisions of the Voting Rights Act not be extended when they expire in 2007. To the contrary, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom Delay and Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner want these provisions extended another 25 years. But that won’t stop some demagogues from spewing hate and spreading lies.

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For more information on how unions spend their members’ money, see www.usuw.org. Linda Chavez’s latest book, “Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down their Members and Corrupt American Politics,” is now available in paperback.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

Our Tratorous Press, by me and several others (credits included)

2005-08-10T01:50:00.000-04:00

I’ve made mention of this before:

Where was the story about the only woman to win a Silver Star since WWII? You’d think that the liberal media (and their love of all things feminine) would have kept this story in the headlines for days. Did you see it? …at all? What was her name? It is: Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, of the 617th Military Police Company, a National Guard unit out of Richmond, Ky. Remember her, you’ll hear her name again from me, at least, no one else seems to have the balls to mention her! (Item #1, below.)

There was also a Congressional Medal Of Honor recipient, did you know that? What was his name? PAUL R. SMITH Sergeant First Class, United States Army (Item #2, below.)

Where is our fucking press? It would seem that they are to busy pushing an agenda to report the fucking news! I am so fucking pissed (even in the British meaning), I could just spit!
The traitorous press, at least during Vietnam, gave the enemy ‘body count’ back then; today there is only the daily drone of American casualties and stories about their families. I call that 20 minute segment of the news, “the anti-conservative, anti-war, anti-American news segment.” What else can it be called?

The press is showing, beyond reasonable doubt, that they are in charge of the liberal agenda. Hopefully, with the help of me, and others, it will be their entire undoing!
I am so incensed I can hardly contain myself. See item 3. below as well, for what got me going (again).

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There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust. The former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe.Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find him.--Pascal

Veritas vos Liberabit!God Bless America!

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First:
Woman Soldier Receives Silver Star for Valor in Iraq
By Sgt. Sara Wood, USA
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 16, 2005 – For the first time since World War II, a woman soldier was awarded the Silver Star Medal today in Iraq.

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, vehicle commander, 617th Military Police Company, Richmond, Ky., stands at attention before receiving the Silver Star at an awards ceremony at Camp Liberty, Iraq, June 16. Hester is the first woman soldier since World War II to receive the Silver Star.

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester of the 617th Military Police Company, a National Guard unit out of Richmond, Ky., received the Silver Star, along with two other members of her unit, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mike, for their actions during an enemy ambush on their convoy. Other members of the unit also received awards.

Hester’s squad was shadowing a supply convoy March 20 when anti-Iraqi fighters ambushed the convoy. The squad moved to the side of the road, flanking the insurgents and cutting off their escape route. Hester led her team through the “kill zone” and into a flanking position, where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 grenade-launcher rounds. She and Nein, her squad leader, then cleared two trenchs, at which time she killed three insurgents with her rifle.

When the fight was over, 27 insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one was captured.
Hester, 23, who was born in Bowling Green, Ky., and later moved to Nashville, Tenn., said she was surprised when she heard she was being considered for the Silver Star.

“I’m honored to even be considered, much less awarded, the medal,” she said.

Being the first woman soldier since World War II to receive the medal is significant to Hester. But, she said, she doesn’t dwell on the fact. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with being a female,” she said. “It’s about the duties I performed that day as a soldier.”
Hester, who has been in the National Guard since April 2001, said she didn’t have time to be scared when the fight started, and she didn’t realize the impact of what had happened until much later.

“Your training kicks in and the soldier kicks in,” she said. “It’s your life or theirs. ... You’ve got a job to do -- protecting yourself and your fellow comrades.”

Nein, who is on his second deployment to Iraq, praised Hester and his other soldiers for their actions that day. “It’s due to their dedication and their ability to stay there and back me up that we were able to do what we did that day,” he said.

Hester and her fellow soldiers were awarded their medals at Camp Liberty, Iraq, by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, Multinational Corps Iraq commanding general. In his speech, Vines commended the soldiers for their bravery and their contribution to the international war on terror.

“My heroes don’t play in the (National Basketball Association) and don’t play in the U.S. Open (golf tournament) at Pinehurst,” Vines said. “They’re standing in front of me today. These are American heroes.”

Three soldiers of the 617th were wounded in the ambush. Hester said she and the other squad members are thinking about them, and she is very thankful to have made it through unscathed. The firefight, along with the entire deployment, has had a lasting effect on her, Hester said.
“I think about it every day, and probably will for the rest of my life,” she said.

Second:
News Archive http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2005/20050616_1745.html

Our first Medal Of Honor Recipient from Iraq-
PAUL R. SMITH
Rank and Organization: Sergeant First Class, United States Army
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:
Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with an armed enemy near Baghdad International Airport, Baghdad, Iraq on 4 April 2003.

On that day, Sergeant First Class Smith was engaged in the construction of a prisoner of war holding area when his Task Force was violently attacked by a company-sized enemy force. Realizing the vulnerability of over 100 fellow soldiers, Sergeant First Class Smith quickly organized a hasty defense consisting of two platoons of soldiers, one Bradley Fighting Vehicle and three armored personnel carriers.

As the fight developed, Sergeant First Class Smith braved hostile enemy fire to personally engage the enemy with hand grenades and anti-tank weapons, and organized the evacuation of three wounded soldiers from an armored personnel carrier struck by a rocket propelled grenade and a 60mm mortar round.

Fearing the enemy would overrun their defenses, Sergeant First Class Smith moved under withering enemy fire to man a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier.

In total disregard for his own life, he maintained his exposed position in order to engage the attacking enemy force. During this action, he was mortally wounded.

His courageous actions helped defeat the enemy attack, and resulted in as many as 50 enemy soldiers killed, while allowing the safe withdrawal of numerous wounded soldiers.

Sergeant First Class Smith’s extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Third Infantry Division “Rock of the Marne,” and the United States Army.

Third:

Trashing our history: troops in Iraq
www.townhall.com
Thomas Sowell (back to web version)
August 10, 2005

Back in June, this column pointed out that it is impossible to fight a war without heroism -- but that you would never know that from the mainstream media. Nothing heroic done by American troops in Iraq is likely to make headlines in the New York Times or be featured on the big three broadcast network news programs.

That fact has now been belatedly recognized in a New York Times opinion piece, but with a strange twist.

After briefly mentioning a few acts of bravery in Iraq -- including a Marine who smothered an enemy grenade with his own body, saving the lives of his fellow Marines at the cost of his own -- the Times’ writer said, “the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”

Think about that spin: The reason we don’t hear about such things is because of the Pentagon, Bush and “the culture at large.”

Neither the Pentagon, the White House or “the culture at large” can stop the newspapers or the televisions networks from publicizing whatever they want to publicize. They all have reporters on the scene but what they choose to feature in their reports are all the negative things they can find.

The very issue of the New York Times in which this essay appeared -- August 7th -- featured a front-page picture of a funeral for a Marine killed in Iraq. If you judged by the front page of this and many other newspapers, our troops in Iraq don’t do anything except get killed.

The plain fact is that the mainstream media have been too busy depicting our troops as victims to have much time left to tell about the heroic things they have done, the far greater casualties which they have inflicted on their enemies, or their attempts to restore some basic services and basic decencies to this country that has been torn apart for years by internal and external wars -- even before the first American troops arrived on the scene.

The unrelenting quest for stories depicting American troops as victims -- including even front-page stories about the financial problems of some National Guardsmen called to active duty -- has created a virtual reality in the media that has no place for heroes.

Senator John Kerry has called the activation of reservists and National Guardsmen “a backdoor draft,” as if joining the reserves or the National Guard is supposed to mean an exemption from ever having to fight. The theme of troops as victims has been a steady drumbeat in the media, because of the way the media have chosen to filter the news, filtering out heroes, among other things.

This virtual reality can become more important than any facts. Even a young lady interviewer on Fox News Channel -- of all places -- recently asked a guest how long the American people will be able to continue supporting the war in Iraq with all the casualties.

All the American deaths in Iraq since the war began are not even half of the deaths of U.S. Marines taking the one island of Iwo Jima in a couple of months of fighting. And Iwo Jima was just one battle in a war that was raging on other fronts around the world simultaneously and continuing for nearly four long years.

It is not the casualties which are unprecedented but the media filtering and the gullibility of those who accept the virtual reality created by the media.

This is a re-creation of the media’s role in the Vietnam war, where American victories on the battlefield were turned into defeat on the home front by the filtering and spin of the media.
Even the current Communist rulers of Vietnam have admitted that they lost militarily in Vietnam but hung on because they expected to win politically in the United States -- as they did, with the help of the Jane Fondas, the Walter Cronkhites and a cast of thousands in the streets and on campuses across the country.

The very people who have been anti-military for years, who filter out American heroes in battle, are now proclaiming that they are “honoring” our troops by publicizing every death by name, day in and day out.

Has the dumbed-down education in our schools left us so ill-equipped that we cannot see through even the most blatant hypocrisy?

©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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Advice For Ambassador Bolton - By Oliver North

2005-08-05T19:50:00.000-04:00

This needs no further verbiage, except, perhaps, to say "Well said, Ollie!" -Ichabod Crane
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Advice For Ambassador Bolton

By Oliver North

August 5, 2005

Congratulations, John, on your new assignment as the United States’ permanent representative to the United Nations. Please know that these good wishes are offered in the same spirit that I would applaud Hercules on his willingness to cleanse the Augean stables.

He, of course, had to divert the waters of the Peneius and Alpheus to accomplish his task. To flush the effluence from the corridors of the U.N., you may have to do the same with the Hudson and East Rivers. Please permit me to assist you in that task by throwing in my two cents -- which is, by the way, more than I think we ought to waste at the United Nations next year.

First, look under every rock. The corruption at the U.N. didn’t begin with the Oil for Food scandal and it certainly doesn’t end there. The United Nations is nothing more than bureaucracy piled atop waste, wrapped in fraud, covered with abuse -- all of it funded by American taxpayers who foot 22 percent of U.N. dues -- more than any other nation. We also pour billions of dollars more into the coffers of its related agencies.

As with the Oil for Food rip-off, these entities have no accountability. Lord only knows what the U.N.’s unelected globo-crats are doing with our money. Since Kofi refuses to hold his cronies accountable, John, you must.

Second, use the carrot and stick approach. The U.N. is run by people who wander through life like Rodney King, wondering, “Can’t we all just get along?” America’s big carrot is money. Kofi and cronies are addicted to American cash and dream daily of new ways to get more of it. Withholding the greenbacks -- along with the threat of sanctions -- are the big sticks.

Remind your new “colleagues” that last month the U.S. House of Representatives voted 221 to 184 to withhold 50 percent of U.S. dues to the U.N. until reforms are implemented.

By now, you’ve seen Kofi’s plan to expand the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). John, we don’t need more of these characters weighing in on America’s national security and sovereignty. Only three times in the U.N.’s history has the UNSC acted expeditiously and appropriately.

On June 27, 1950, the council adopted a resolution to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.”

In 1990-1991, George H.W. Bush convinced the Security Council to endorse the coalition he had built to turn back Saddam Hussein’s aggression in Kuwait.

And in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, the Security Council agreed to help the United States oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Three times in 60 years is not a record of great accomplishment.

The U.N. “Human Rights Commission” is a sick joke. If your “fellow ambassadors” don’t fix it or finish it next month, tell ‘em that the American taxpayers are going to cut off the cash and stop underwriting dictatorial makeovers for the likes of Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi.

The same thing goes for the U.N.’s so-called “peacekeepers,” who have been accused of child rape in the Congo and killing unarmed civilians in Haiti. If the keepers of the keys in the Big Blue Building on Turtle Bay fail to apprehend and punish the pedophile perpetrators of these crimes, cut the cash.

Don’t be afraid to stick it to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), either. The Iranians are building nuclear weapons, the North Koreans are making more of them, and the IAEA can’t decide what to do about either rogue dictatorship. Let Mohamed El-Baradei know that we’re blowing the whistle on his Keystone Cops -- and the Russian, Chinese, French and German firms that provide the nuclear weapons know-how and technology.

John, because this is a family-friendly publication, let me put this next piece of advice in Latin: Non illegitemi carborundum est. Hate to put it this way, John, but Kofi and his cronies really don’t like you any more than the liberals in the U.S. Senate do. You’re not going to be invited to the all-night cocktail parties at Manhattan’s hot spots. The New York Times welcomed you to the Big Apple by observing that you “will not be wreaking diplomatic havoc anywhere else.”

Take these as compliments. You no longer have to travel halfway around the world just to have a maniacal dictator like North Korea’s Kim Jung Il call you “human scum.” At the U.N., you can get those kinds of kudos every day. Hang each one in your heart as a trophy to American ideals.

After the treatment you received at the hands of Senate liberals, the striped pants set at the Big Blue Building are pikers. Shame them with your work ethic -- you get more done before breakfast than these guys do in a month.

Finally, John, try to bring a little humor to the place. U.N. bureaucrats are the most uptight, self-righteous group of pompous, incompetent airheads to gather in one place since Jimmy Carter’s last Cabinet meeting. Before your first meeting in the Security Council, go over and say hello to the French ambassador and, just before he sits down, slip a whoopee cushion on his chair.

The Chinese communists secretly love that kind of humor. The Brits will be appalled at the flatulent nature of the joke, but will endorse the target. If anyone complains, tell ‘em it’s U.S. retaliation for Jacques Chirac slobbering all over the first lady during her last visit to France.

Oh, and one more thing. When speaking with Kofi and his cronies, try to avoid using words like “sovereignty,” “national security” or “integrity.” You can tell by the corneal glaze-over -- those words only confuse him.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

Erasing a Century of Civil Rights

2005-07-30T01:08:00.000-04:00

Look at the two articles then the comments that follow. This gets twisted, naturally, it’s about liberals! -Ichabod Crane
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Sen. Clinton: GOP Erasing Century of Civil Rights Progress
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
July 29, 2005
Washington (CNSNews.com) -- New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton Thursday warned that Republican conservatives were on the verge of erasing a century of “progress” on civil rights, feminist and worker-related issues.
“So much of what we built in the 20th century is at risk,” Clinton said at the National Urban League’s annual conference in Washington D.C. She spoke to a crowd of several hundred at a panel discussion entitled “The Black Male: Endangered Species or Hope for the Future?”
“There are people -- unfortunately too many of them in this town -- who believe the progress that we celebrate -- that the Urban League was part of creating in the 20th century -- was not in the best interests of Americans,” Clinton said, apparently referring to Republican-elected officials.
“I don’t know who they’re talking about because it sure was in the best interests of women and of African Americans and of Latinos and Asian Americans. It sure was in the interests of workers and people who wanted a fair shake and a better life,” Clinton said.
“I think it’s fair to say that your government is not holding up its part of the bargain right now,” she added.
Clinton accused the Bush administration of budget “cuts” in a variety of federal programs, including food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, Pell Grants, higher education, and Head Start.
She also called for “racial justice empowerment” and asserted that the “promise of America” was “still missing for millions of our fellow Americans.
“We still have too many of our children who are being left behind ...You know, I do think it takes a village to raise a child. A village needs strong families, it needs good schools,” she said to applause.
Copyright © 1998-2005 CNSNews.com - Cybercast News Service
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Wow, I am (nearly) speechless. Where to begin with this stinking pile of skunk feces? OK, the ‘cuts’ – absolutely none of these budget items are smaller this year than they were last year, which were larger than the year before, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Every year huge allotments are proposed and, when a teensy-weensy, itty-bitty bit of reason enters and the PROPOSALS are reduced, that’s called a cut; even if the final figure is 100% larger than the previous year, if it is smaller than what was proposed, it is a cut, get it?
Then there is the “…we built…” comment, like she, or her ilk, had anything to do with it. It was the Democrats, lead by ‘sheets’ Byrd, who attempted to filibuster the Civil Rights Bill in the sixties. It was Richard Nixon who signed it, once a way was found to shut the southern Democrats up.
Let’s see, when he was a Southern Democrat (Dixicrat, as it was called), Strom Thurmond was a segragationalist; then he changed parties and his stance on Civil Rights. Once you scratch the surface, it looks like the Democrats talk the talk, but are short legged when it came to walking the walk. They do a great job of slandering the Republicans, though, so that it’s easy to forget that it was those Republicans who made the great strides in Civil Rights legislation.
Lincoln was the first Republican President and he certainly made the first great efforts at Civil Rights, didn’t he? John Wilkes Booth was a Southern Democrat; he prevented the reconstruction that Lincoln wanted – simple amnesty, forgiveness and education for the freed slaves.
After the Civil War, southern whites uniformly voted Democrat and when the 15th Amendment was passed, they ‘urged’ blacks to vote along those same lines. Blacks were largely illiterate back then and pretty much did what they were told. Old habits die hard (that is, the habit of voting Democrat, not subservience; they overcame that soon enough) and for no other reason than habit, southern blacks vote democrat. It’s like licking the boot that kicks them.
Don’t just listen to me, here’s what the Reverend Al Sharpton (I never thought he’d be agreeing to anything I said) has to say about it all: -Ichabod Crane
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Sharpton Slams Blacks for Blindly Supporting Clinton, Democrats
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
July 29, 2005
Washington (CNSNews.com) -- Former Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton blasted blacks Thursday for what he described as their blind support of the Democratic Party without demanding anything in return.
Sharpton, during his remarks at the National Urban League’s annual conference in Washington, noted that his fellow Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, have taken African-American voters for granted and failed to act in the best interests of the black community.
“The whole network of incarceration (of African-American men) happened under this president and the last president. So it wasn’t just George Bush. Bill Clinton -- I wish Hillary had hung around -- Bill Clinton built a lot of jails and passed the omnibus crime bill,” Sharpton said shortly after Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had addressed the same panel discussion, entitled “The Black Male: Endangered Species or Hope for the Future?”
Sharpton noted that African-American men make up 6 percent of the U.S. population but 44 percent of the nation’s prison population.
“And just because Bill can sing “Amazing Grace” well doesn’t mean the omnibus crime bill was not a bill that hurt our people,” Sharpton told the several hundred people gathered at the Washington Convention Center.
Clinton enjoyed significant African-American support and was affectionately referred to by many in the black community as America’s “first black president.”
“We must stop allowing people to gain politically from us if they’re not reciprocating when dealing and being held accountable,” said Sharpton, referring to the allegiance that African-American voters maintain to the Democratic Party.
Sharpton said many politicians who court the black vote “come by and get our votes ‘cause they wave at us on Sunday morning while the choir’s singing. And we act like that is reaching out.”
The problem is these same politicians “never addressed why they sit here in Washington with an epidemic proportion of HIV AIDS in our (black) community, unemployment in our community and they do nothing to deal with eliminating those problems,” Sharpton explained.
“Imagine me going to a convention of whites who half of them were unemployed and I smiled, waved, sing a hymn and leave. They would whip me in the parking lot before [I left],” he said to laughter and applause.
“As long as we allow people to get elected off of us and deliver nothing to us, then part of our problem is that we have such low political self esteem,” he said. “Every time we give them support for no support, we add to the marginalization of black men.”
Sharpton said the situation has “gotten so bad that we hold black leaders accountable and give white leaders a pass.”
‘People emulate what they see’
Sharpton also took aim at black popular culture. Noting that in some U.S. cities, black male unemployment exceeds 50 percent, Sharpton said black music and movies only aggravate the situation.
“We come out in response to that with movies like (the 2005) “Hustle and Flow” and tell our kids that the personification of black men is a black pimp of a white prostitute that wants to be a rapper who shoots the rapper and at the end of the movie, [a] black woman he had as his prostitute has his baby and the white prostitute becomes the head of the record company and makes the money while he’s in jail. That don’t make sense,” Sharpton said to applause.
“People emulate what they see ...We cannot succumb to a generation that acts like it’s all right to celebrate being down. It’s one thing to be down, it’s another thing to celebrate being down,” he explained.
Referring to gangster rappers, Sharpton said, “We’ve gone from ‘black and proud’ to groups now calling themselves “Niggers with an attitude.”
Sharpton told the panel discussion of how he has confronted rappers about their lyrics only to be told that the rappers simply “reflect the times.” Sharpton said black art and culture used to project its “hopes for the future.”
“In slavery we wasn’t singing, ‘you a low down cotton pickin ho.’ That would’ve reflected the times,” he said to more laughter and applause.
“In the civil rights era, we sang “We shall overcome” we didn’t sing ‘You in the back of the bus, got gum on your show, no good MF.’ I mean we’ve been down before. We never romanticized it and put melody to it and acted like it was all right,” he added.
Sharpton concluded his discussion with a call for the black community to help itself and return churches to “the center of our community.”
“Even if we [are] not responsible for being down, we [are] responsible for getting up,” he said. “And if we wait on those who knocked us down to lift us up we’ll never get up ‘cause if they wanted us up we would have never been down,” he said.
Copyright © 1998-2005 CNSNews.com - Cybercast News Service
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You Democrats out there who think that the nice words and good intentions of the Democrat’s leadership is enough, you are the problem, or at least a good part of it. Why do you never demand the results that are never forthcoming from that party?
All that seems to come from the democrats is good intention and failed social programs. Then you accuse the Republicans of ‘mean spiritedness’ when we try to patch your debacles. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Welfare Society” is a prime example. This piece of crap caused generations of blacks and other poor people to be enslaved to the system that offered no way out, no hope, nothing but the prospect that having more kids was the way to make more money. I personally knew a woman who was third generation welfare recipient and her mother and grandmother were still drawing checks along with her.
Fixing the system to prevent that hopelessness is not mean-spirited; it is a way to instill self-respect back into those people.
Oh, on the twisted logic front, why are liberals so adamant about Judge Roberts’ views on Roe v Wade? If, as they say it is, the Constitution is a moving target, a living document, changing with the times, why would Roe v Wade be the only part cast in stone? Wouldn’t that be just as malleable as the rest of it?
Then, Ted Kennedy, the Senate’s most famous drunkard, wants to know who’s side Judge Roberts is on. Huh? Walter E. Williams compared that question to a baseball organization hiring a new umpire and asking him who’s side he would be on? (I saw that in an editorial cartoon as well, but I don’t have it and can’t remember who created it.) All you need to know about an umpire (or judge) is if he knows the rules, will adhere to them, and how much experience he has doing his job. It would be correct to look into his record and see what complaints he’d had against him and how they were resolved. (With a judge you might want to see how many of his decisions were overturned as well.) The rest, with any judge, especially with a lifetime appointment, is a crapshoot; seven of the current justices were appointed by Republicans and only two of them are staunch conservatives. By that tally, I would think that the liberals would just shut up and let the President pick another ringer for them.
Ah, but I digress somewhat, although the court has been very activist in Civil Rights as well. Consider affirmative action and forced bussing. (Why didn’t they just bus the teachers? That would have been way cheaper and just as effective - that is, not at all.)
I think I’ll leave it at this and let Rich feed me some fuel in the name of a rebuttal.
-Ichabod Crane