Hamas=Taliban (maybe not so light)

Like the meeting of two tectonic plates, what we have here is a clash of civilizations. How do you negotiate with people of this mindset.

Hamas Bans Women Dancers, Scooter Riders in Gaza Push (Update1)
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By Daniel Williams
Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The Islamic Hamas movement banned girls last month from riding behind men on motor scooters and forbade women from dancing at the opening of a folk museum. Girls in some public schools must wear headscarves and cloaks.
Signs of Hamas’s creeping Islamization are everywhere in Gaza, the Mediterranean coastal enclave that Hamas has run by itself since 2007. Gaza is already politically divided from the West Bank, the Palestinian territory administered by the secular Fatah movement.
“Ruling by itself, Hamas can stamp its ideas on everyone,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Gaza’s al-Azhar University. “Islamizing society has always been part of Hamas strategy.”
Hamas-Fatah infighting has diverted Palestinians from their quest for statehood and from presenting a united front at proposed U.S.-brokered peace talks with Israel. With no Palestinian elections on the horizon -- a vote scheduled for January was canceled -- Hamas has free rein to rule in Gaza.
Hamas swept Palestinian legislative balloting in 2006 and took over the Gaza Strip a year later when its gunmen routed forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who still governs the West Bank. Syria and Iran back Hamas, while the U.S., its Middle East allies and the European Union support Abbas’s rule.
Caftans in Court
Some of the efforts are meeting resistance. When Supreme Court Justice Abdel Raouf Al-Halabi ordered women lawyers on July 26 to wear headscarves and caftans in court, attorneys contacted satellite television stations including Al-Arabiya to protest. On Sept. 6, Hamas’s Justice Ministry rescinded the directive.
Hamas officials say they have no plans to impose Islamic law. “What you are seeing are incidents, not policy,” said Younis al-Astal, a Hamas legislator. “We want Islamic law to be the standard, but we believe in persuasion.”
In an Oct. 13 speech, Abbas said Hamas was establishing an “emirate of darkness” in Gaza. Abbas’s Fatah movement has long viewed itself as a secular nationalist movement open to Muslims and Christians.
At the immigration office at Gaza’s border with Israel, a sign warns that alcoholic beverages, forbidden under Islam, will be poured out “in front of the owner.”
The government’s Islamic Endowment Ministry has deployed Virtue Committee members to preach at public places to warn of the dangers of immodest dress, card playing and dating.
Dancing Ban
The opening of the Palestinian Heritage Museum on Oct.7 was meant to include a rendition of the dabke, a line dance performed by girls and boys. Except that no girls were allowed.
Black-shirted men from Hamas carrying AK-47s appeared at the gates of the museum, on Gaza’s waterfront, said Jamal Salem, the curator. They said girls shouldn’t dance because it wasn’t religiously proper. Nor could they share the stage for the inaugural speeches, said Salem.
“They are trying to take Palestinian culture and make it all their own,” Salem said. “They say our traditions are against the law. Their law.”
In August, headmasters of several schools ordered girls to don white head scarves and black cloaks called jilbabs. They sent several girls in jeans home, according to Gaza press reports. The Education Ministry later said the orders were unauthorized acts of individual school officials.
No Defiance
“The episodes had an effect anyway,” said Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and human rights campaigner. “What parent wants to be seen to defy Islamic rules?”
Abusada, the Gaza political science professor, said Hamas only retreats from overt Islamization for fear of “provoking” such secular-ruled Arab countries as Egypt, with which it competes for support with Abbas.
“At the same time, Hamas is under pressure from some of its own members as well as even more radical groups to implant a purist version of Islam,” he said.
Hamas is also wary of openly pressing for rule by religious edict because it undermines the group’s claim to legitimacy under Palestinian civil law, which set guidelines for the 2006 legislative vote, said Subhia Juma, a lawyer at the Independent Commission for Human Rights in Gaza.
“Hamas backs off when it looks like they are governing under Islamic law and people complain,” she said.
Israel, the U.S. and the EU say Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Swimming in Pants
In June, black-clad constables approached journalist Asmaa al-Ghoul, 27, and friends on a north Gaza beach, al-Ghoul said. Her offense: swimming in trousers and a blouse, not robes.
Male companions, including her brother, tried to defend her. Al-Ghoul said she phoned the government spokesman, who called off the police.
Hamas police spokesman Rafik Abu Hani said the crackdowns were abnormalities.
“Even here, we don’t make everyone wear Islamic-style beards,” he said, pointing to a clean-shaven aide.
Everyone backs alcohol prohibition, Abu Hani said, and the motorcycle restriction is a safety issue.
Al-Astal, the Hamas legislator, said it wasn’t a coincidence that youth were the principal targets of the push.
“We are working on young people, the next generation, to be more correctly Islamic,” he said. The older generation “is lost.”
And as for motorcycles: “A girl has to hold onto a boy’s waist to ride in the back. Things can happen. You know what I mean,” he said.

History: Science and politics

"Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.
Lysenko's experiments were heralded, although the experiments were never replicated. The Soviet Union was full of botanists, biologists, geneticists, and other life scientists, and it was obvious to anyone with a free mind that Lysenko was propounding nonsense. But it was not until 1962 that the Soviet government allowed a real critique of his cartoon science. Why?
Because in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, truth was never "objective." Science could literally be "Aryan," or "proletariat," or otherwise fit into some sort of sociopolitical mindset. God was dead in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, so no one was there to acknowledge the lies or account for the intellectual mischief. Honest scientists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed because they rested on the thin reed of the scientific method, which ill withstood the hurricane of politically correct science"

Read the whole piece here: The Ghost of Lysenko

Thanks BrutallyHonest.org

Setting the Tora Bora record straight
Following up on John Kerry and his Senate Committee's attempt to besmirch President Bush comes this piece posted over at BlackFive by UncleJimbo:
Tora Bora, let me make this simple.
1. We invade A-Stan with small number of Spec Ops guys and partner w. Northern Alliance and in amazingly successful operation kick Taliban and al Qaeda asses.
2. Many of them die, some run to Paktia province, some (incl. bin Laden) run toward Pakistan and stop in highly-fortified Tora Bora.
3. We do the math and since Tora Bora is way the hell up high in the mountains figger out we would have a wicked time resupplying any troops we managed to get up there w/ our limited helicopter support and also they would be ambush bait for bad guys who are real good at that.
4. So we decide to try the same thing that worked to kick their asses already. We partnered with local tribes to provide the manpower while we sent Spec Ops support and massive air power.
5. We push up there and even the Spec Ops guys have a helluva time because of the terrain. The local tribes more or less screw us and take the money but don't fight much.
6. We still kills hundreds of Taliban and AQ but bin Laden slips off to become a ghost.
7. A talking point for the ignorant left, their enablers and military geniuses like F John Kerry is born.
8. Rinse and repeat whenever the left needs a club to try and lose a war.
Next freakin' slide.
Next freakin' slide indeed.

The absurdity of the KSM civil trial

For those who say giving KSM a civil jury trial will show the world our commitment to justice. Now that both Obama and Holder have said that KSM will never be released or acquitted what exactly are we showing the world? That's right, a show trial. How quaint.

More on the GW hoax

The great green fraud

Till now, I have avoided more than very limited comment on the whole global-warming-carbon emissions controversy. But now that colossal spending and regulating programs impend on these issues, I must say that the Al Gore-David Suzuki conventional-wisdom hysteria is an insane scam.
The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal factor in global warming, and despite dire contrary forecasts and ever-increasing carbon-emissions in the world -- especially as the economies of China and India, representing 40% of the world's population, expand by 6% to 10% each year -- the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since the start of this millennium. And its mean temperature rose by only one centigrade degree in the 25 years before that. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emissions does have a gentle warming effect if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.
The chief source of apparently informed hysteria on this subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has estimated that the mean world temperature will increase by between 1.8 degrees C and 4 degrees C in this century, although a tenth of that warming has already failed to occur in the last decade. But even this prediction does not remotely justify all the cant and hype that the end of the world is nigh.
Even the IPCC admits that the upper end of its forecast would, in fact, substantially increase world food production. There is no chance of achieving stated -- or even (by some countries) committed -- emission-reduction targets, nor any reason to believe that the attainment of these targets would accomplish anything useful. Yet the president of the United States has been promising radical progress toward an international covenant in Copenhagen next month to spend trillions of dollars in pursuit of this unattainable, undesirable target.
It would be infinitely more sensible to intensify research, and invest where necessary or advisable in mitigation, adaptation and geostrategy, such as the infusion of sulphates into the stratosphere, as happens naturally with volcanic eruptions, to reduce the intensity of the sun and provide countervailing cooling influences without thinning the ozone layer. We should keep in mind that the IPCC's worst case in its preferred (very negative) scenario is that in the next hundred years, living standards in what is now the developing or under-developed world will improve by only 750%, instead of the 850% improvement that would allegedly occur if the world's temperature remained constant, as it has in the last decade.
All responsible people want to assist the disadvantaged parts of the world and do what we reasonably can for our own descendants, but not to the point of self-impoverishment now for the sake of a marginal gain against a wildly unproved prognosis a century from now. This is the flimsiest justification imaginable for the mad slogan parroted endlessly by the eco-Zouaves, from Hollywood to the UN to Ducks Unlimited: "Save the Planet!," as they try to force-march the world into biodegradable pastoralism.
Nor is this the grim tipping point Al Gore has made scores of millions of dollars and won a Nobel Peace Prize for decrying as the imminent apocalypse. Gore's scurrilous film, An Inconvenient Truth, is based on no original research and is a teeming rain forest of false and irrelevant claims, such as that the Pacific island country of Tuvalu is losing population because the sea level around it is rising under the relentless pressures of global warming on the Polar ice caps; and the claim that, for the same reason, mosquitoes have afflicted Nairobi, Kenya, with a constant epidemic of malaria.
The inconvenience of the truth falls on Gore, not his credulous viewers, as water levels have in fact declined slightly at Tuvalu, and the country's modest population shrinkage is due to economic migrants; and malaria was much more prevalent in Nairobi a century ago, and has risen only slightly in recent years because of the ecologists' attack on the use of insecticide. The Polar ice caps aren't melting at all; the ice sheets over the oceans are, but that over land is actually thickening, so water levels are not being affected.
The much-vaunted British Stern Review is in fact, largely rubbish, devised to give the environmental baton to Tony Blair, so he could wave it like a magic wand to placate the left of the British Labour Party for whom he delivered nothing else but an indiscriminate increase in public spending. It warns of a 70% decline in world food production this century if its temperature forecast increases are met, relying exclusively on a study that predicts such a decline will occur to the harvest of Northern Indian groundnuts only, not the world's food supply. Stern purported to forecast 200, 300, or a thousand years ahead, which is nonsense, and warns of the "deaths of hundreds of millions, social upheaval, large-scale conflicts," if $25-trillion is not spent in the next 15 years to reduce carbon emissions by 70%, (and disemploy scores of millions of people).
This leads directly to the farce of the Kyoto agreement, which was supposed to be escalated at the Copenhagen discussions next month. Bill Clinton pledged to support this mad enterprise, as well as the monstrous racket of international trafficking in unused permissible emission balances. The U.S. Senate long ago repudiated any such adherence, 95-0, in one of its few unanimous acts on a serious subject since Pearl Harbor.
Barack Obama is trying to replicate this poker game domestically in the trade part of cap-and-trade, which, as passed by the House of Representatives, will neither reduce carbon emissions nor raise government revenues, but will impose a heavy burden of heating and air-conditioning cost increases on the families and employers of America. (In all of the circumstances, for the unfeasible former Canadian Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, to have named his dog "Kyoto" could be considered cruelty to animals.)
Two of Canada's greatest and most undersung recent heroes are environmental economist Ross McKitrick and statistical minerologist Steven McIntyre, who by their tireless research in the teeth of the entire ecological establishment, proved the former IPCC claim of drastically accelerated global warming was a fraud. These men have been prominently mentioned in the hacked emails that have just revealed the outrageous lengths the scientific propagators of the Great Green Fraud have gone to to suppress the facts.
The immensely respected former British chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, had great difficulty finding a publisher for his expose of these matters, An Appeal To Reason, A Cool Look at Global Warming, such is the pressure the eco-lobby can assert. He believes Green is the new Red, the anti-capitalists taking over the relatively inoffensive tandem bicycle of naturalists, and turning it into a nihilistic juggernaut, the treads having been blown off their great Red Marxist tank that careened through the world for most of the last century. The ecoextremists allow the conservationists and butterfly collectors and Sierra Clubs to front their activities, just as the pacifist naifs were often the witless dupes and "useful idiots" (in Lenin's words), of the Communists.
As Lord Lawson wrote in his book, those worried about imminent environmental catastrophe, as compared, for examples, to nuclear terrorism or even large meteoric collisions, "need not worry about saving this planet. They are already living on another one ... We appear to have entered a new age of unreason ... It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet."

Help Wanted, No Private Sector Experience Required

Here's an interesting chart from the American Enterprise Institute. It shows the percentage of presidential cabinet members with prior private sector experience back to Teddy Roosevelt. So in the worst economic crisis in over half a century, only 8% of Obama's cabinet has any private sector experience.

Just the facts...

Eleven more NHS hospitals at centre of safety scandal

The worse his economy gets the more dangerous he becomes

Drawing the line on Hugo Chávez

Islam and women

Subduing Women’s Sexuality – by Hege Storhaug
Posted By Hege Storhaug On November 30, 2009

My first encounter with Pakistan in 1993 took my innocence. I discovered a culture pervaded with sexuality – sexuality in a very negative sense. Absolutely everything, from the most trivial day-to-day matters to the most earth-shaking issues, had to do with sex – at least where girls and women were concerned. The same fixation on sex has found its way to the West through immigration.
For example, the use of hijab, which is a key element of Islam’s view of sex, has all but exploded in Norway during the last few decades. Earlier this year we had a big national debate about hijab. It’s time to ask why Islam is so preoccupied with subduing women’s sexuality. Women had a pretty high level of sexual freedom in the heathen, pre-Islamic society on the Arabian peninsula. A woman could have relationships with several men at once, she could divorce easily, and she could decide who would get to be the father of her children. Above all, women and children were, socially and economically, part of the tribal society. A striking example of women’s freedom prior to Islam is that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadja, was a leading businesswoman in Mecca, and it was she who proposed to Muhammad, who was twenty years her junior. One could look far and wide in today’s Mecca without finding such a free woman in today’s Mecca. What happened?
In order to make Islam a reality, Muhammad introduced the idea of the family as a system. Through the institution of the family, a man would be able to realize personal financial success. But how to ensure that a man could know that his wife’s children were his own progeny and therefore deserving of his inheritance? This is where Islam’s strict law against extramarital sex comes in. Not to mention sexual segregation in public spaces. And the covering of women, because women were viewed as wielding a dangerous sexual power – as fitna, which is Arabic for social chaos, chaos in the sense that if the woman is not subjected to severe sexual control, she will tempt men to break Islam’s harsh sexual prohibitions. So it is that women are given the primary responsibility for ensuring that this essential element of sharia law is obeyed. For the same reason, she is placed under the authority of men.
Islam doesn’t attack sexuality in itself, but rather women’s potential for exercising total power over men. In Islam, sexuality is seen to have three main positive aspects: the human sexual drive ensures reproduction; it produces intellectual energy; and the sexual act itself provides the man with a foretaste of what he will experience in paradise – the eternal orgasm. On earth, however, man’s most important task is devotion to Allah. Therefore, love between man and wife is viewed as an enemy of Muslim society. Marital love can disturb the husband’s attachment to Allah.
Imam Ghazali (1050-1111) is considered the greatest and most influential theoretician of Islam. Woman, according to Ghazali, is synonymous with the Satan. She is the hunter; man is the passive victim. By controlling women’s sexuality and limiting it to marriage, society protects the male outsider from being lured into illicit sexual activity. Ghazali believed that a man has an absolute need to have his sexual needs met – and that if these needs are not satisfied, he is more likely to commit adultery. A wife can therefore not refuse to sleep with her husband. If she does, she will be punished on earth by her husband, who has the right to stop supporting her, and she will also be punished after death.
To counteract the possibility of real intimacy and affection between husband and wife, Ghazali prescribed religious formulas that the man is to recite during the sex act itself and when he achieves orgasm, the purpose being to reduce the act to its most elementary purpose – that is, reproduction. Why did Islam introduce polygamy for men and simple and fast divorce laws for men? Again, it’s all about Islam’s fundamental idea that the man’s ability to abandon himself fully and entirely to Allah is weakened by a lack of sexual satisfaction. Polygamy and simple divorce laws make it possible for a man to fulfill this obligation to Allah – and prevent infidelity.
In the view of the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the notion of man as an almost notoriously sexual animal, a beast who will throw himself at any woman who is not “decently” covered in public, is essential to an understanding the stagnation of the Muslim world and of the immense problems with integrating Muslims in Europe. As Hirsi Ali points out, Islam places all sexual morality on the woman’s shoulders. From a very early age, she notes, girls are viewed with suspicion and learn that they are untrustworthy creatures who represent a potential danger to their extended families – for there is, in them, something that makes men lose their minds.
What consequences does Islam’s radical fixation on sex have for the West? Without a doubt, Islam’s sexual obsession represents a major obstacle to integration – and an impediment to the free participation of Muslim girls and women in our society. The control of their sexuality closes them in – and thus closes them out of key social arenas. The severe social control of females also prevents natural contact between the sexes across religious lines and within the religion itself – a situation which seeds the ground for forced marriage.
But there are more serious factors. At the age of 50, Muhammad became engaged to a six-year-old girl named Aisha, whom he married when she was nine. The idea was that she was, by that age, sexually mature. This explains why Ayatollah Khomeini set the minimum legal age at which girls could be married in Iran at 9 years old. If a girl is sexually mature, she possesses fitna. Little girls are also married off in the West, in accordance with Muhammad’s example.
The most extreme form of biological sexual control of women is genital mutilation. Many people claim that genital mutilation has nothing to do with Islam. This is untrue. Muhammad issued a blanket prohibition against eating pork. But he did not forbid genital mutilation. Instead he encouraged his followers not to perform the most radical form of mutilation, telling them in his sunna not to “overdo it.” Thus we have the practice known as “sunna circumcision.” Today, Muhammad’s statements continue to be cited in support of the tradition. According to the shafi school of Islamic law, which is followed by Somalis (among others), it is an obligation to “circumcise” girls. This rule, naturally, has consequences for Muslim girls throughout the Western world today.
Another dramatic result of the strict control of Muslim female sexuality in the West is the “dumping” of girls in their families’ countries of origin, either to prevent integration (the concern being that they may violate sharia’s sexual laws) or because they already have been integrated.
Islam’s obsession with sex must become a subject of debate in the West. If Muslim women and girls (and men) are not liberated from a view of sex based on religious law, integration into Western societies based on freedom and sexual equality will never become anything more than an illusion.
This piece first appeared, in Norwegian, in the newspaper Bergens Tidende, and has been translated into English by Bruce Bawer

100+ Years of Looming Doom

From Tim Blair:

From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”

Global warming and the IPCC

Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body, says chairman

Science corrupted by politics and greed are just fine as long as it fits UN goals. I am encouraged by the scepticism among Guardian readers. Here is a link to . Dr. R.K. Pachauri's biography. See if you can see the financial links between the good Dr. and his support for Global Warming?

http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/bios/pachauri.htm


Climate change data dumped

Exactly what you would do if your data was solid, right?

An important piece...dissecting the Marxist/Hegelian/feminist link

The Feminine Mistake

Pay attention to the way the concept of "equality" has been defined and hijacked by the left.

Hey, Al Gore science is never settled, fool.

"Sensational" Archaeological Find
Tornedalen today
The Polar ice cap during the last Ice Age might not have been as extensive as previously thought, according to archaeologists looking at the remains of human settlements in the north of Sweden.
People may have lived in the northern region of Tornedalen as far back as 11,000 years ago, according to Olof Östlund, speaking to the Norrländska Socialdemokraten newspaper.
The 2 settlements were found in the area around Kaunisvaara, where a new mine is about to be built. Carbon dating of the finds show that they are much older than previously thought, and mean that previous theories that the area would be covered by the huge polar ice cap are wrong.
"We will now have to re-think our theories on how people migrated to northern Sweden and northern Norway. They didn't get here from the south via the coasts, the finds in Kaunisvaara make this very clear", Östlund told the newspaper.

Notice how the value of contracts has diminished in recent years?

This professor of law proves once again that lawyers are without honor.

Professor advises underwater homeowners to walk away from mortgages
Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, says that it's in the homeowners' best financial interest to stiff their lenders and that

Global warming is all about power and money

Detroit News: Climategate prof raked in $22.6 million in grants


"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." - H. L. Menken.

When the judiciary has no moral compass then the fabric of society is in trouble

Taxpayers shell out for judges' frivolous expenses

It's really just another ruse to keep the population from focusing in on the failures of Communism

Cuba conducts war games with U.S. invasion in mind

There will be no opposition to the Democrat Party plan even if it is well founded

WhiteHouse.gov Plays Media Critic: Calls Krauthammer’s Washington Post Column 'Wholly Inaccurate'

JFK must be rolling in his grave to see what's become of his Democrat Party

U.S. workers can't hide from competition

By Ruben Navarrette Jr., Special to CNN

San Diego, California (CNN) -- When I speak to college students, I always push two messages: If you work hard, take risks, leave your comfort zone and never give up, you can do anything you want to in life; and part of life is competition, because no matter what you want, you can bet that someone else wants it too.
Competition. A simple concept and a beneficial one. It makes us better by forcing us to work harder. Sadly, it's also an idea that is going out of style in a society where students expect to get good grades just for showing up, where everyone gets a ribbon no matter where they finish, and where parents scheme to get their kids into college by lobbying state legislatures to create set-asides for in-state residents at public universities.
When we're not hiding from domestic competition, we're trying to shield ourselves from the foreign variety. High-skilled workers don't want to compete with those from China, India or Pakistan. Low-skilled workers are just as afraid of those from Mexico, Guatemala or El Salvador.
Politicians only make matters worse. While Republicans exploit the immigration issue, Democrats do the same thing with trade. In last year's Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to give displaced workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania a convenient villain to blame -- the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Both parties use lies and demagoguery to exploit fears and convince frightened Americans that we can fence ourselves off from competition. Build a wall. Impose a tariff. All so we don't have to put up with the annoyance of being forced to out-work, out-produce and out-hustle someone else to make a living.
Imagine that. What people in other countries accept as the natural order, we continue to resist. What our own parents and grandparents came to expect decades ago when they went after a job, we think we're above. We've come to think that competition is cruel because there are winners and losers; so we spend all our time devising new ways to minimize the losing.
Our elected officials should inspire us to be better people, and to learn to accept competition as part of life. Instead, most of them are too busy telling us what we want to hear so we'll like them better and buy whatever they're selling at the moment.
Consider what Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, is pitching. He has just written a new 10-point immigration reform bill that he plans to introduce any day now. In addition to providing a pathway to legalize 12 million illegal immigrants, Gutierrez proposes to manage future immigrant flow by establishing a commission that ties foreign visas to labor market demand.
"Here's the guiding principle," Gutierrez said on National Public Radio's "Tell Me More with Michel Martin" in explaining the rationale for his bill. "No American worker, no citizen of the United States, no one born here in this country should ever have to lose an opportunity for gainful employment at the expense of someone not born here."
As principles go, that one is dreadful. Gutierrez's bill has some good things in it, but it also has some things we could do without. A commission that protects American workers from competing with foreigners belongs in the second category.
Think about it. Why should "no one born here in this country ... ever lose an opportunity for gainful employment at the expense of someone not born here?" Remember, these aren't illegal immigrants but legal immigrants coming on visas.
Why should U.S. citizens get a benefit not from education or hard work but from something they had nothing to do with -- where they were born? If a job is available, U.S. workers should be free to compete for it, but not have it handed to them on a silver platter. Likewise, foreign workers who come here legally should have a shot at competing for that same job.
Of course, protectionists claim that the playing field isn't level since foreign workers will often accept less money to do the same job, thus putting American workers at a disadvantage.
Tough. President John Kennedy had it right. At a press conference in March 1962, while fielding a question about military reservists who were upset at being mobilized and deployed to Europe and Southeast Asia, Kennedy made the point that there is no level playing field -- not ever.
"There is always inequity in life," he said. "Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic, and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair."
Exactly. Bad news, Rep. Gutierrez. You're no Jack Kennedy. How sad that our current crop of elected leaders has strayed so far from such straight talk. Instead, they coddle us and make us comfortable with our fears -- all so we'll keep re-electing them.
That way, they don't have to go into the private sector and compete for jobs with the rest of us. You see, our aversion to competition starts at the top.

With the exception of the mandatory jab at Republicans about immigration this article is right on. Notice how the Democrats seem always to head towards government control of the uncontrollable.

By the way the Republicans want to deal with illegal immigration not immigration.

California's budget has increased by 80% in the last 10 years. Is the state 80% better off?

Public employees doing very well, thank you

Standards of journalism, they must be kidding

Guerrilla stings of ACORN don't meet standards of journalism

Here's my email to the article's author:

There's plenty to investigate about ACORN beyond what these young investigators found. ACORN was a prime mover in the sub prime mortgage crisis, voter intimidation and fraud, obstruction of justice, and more. But, the LA Times has been lame in doing any investigative journalism.

Tell me the last time you left your office to do any direct investigative research? I guess ACORN may be crooks but, they're your crooks, right?

Absurd knee jerk articles like this are a reason the readership is falling. Who needs to read a paper when you already know what's in it: Democrat Party talking points.

So, he wasn't forced by Hitler to hate Jews...

In Bed with Benito
Sex Diaries Reveal Mussolini's Soft Side
By Alexander Smoltczyk
Mussolini's mistress, Clara Petacci, recorded intimate details of her affair with Il Duce in her journal. Her newly published diary reveals Mussolini as a sex-addicted anti-Semite who found Hitler "very likeable" -- and who occasionally suffered from impotence.
On one occasion, Il Duce's little Führer apparently let him down. "It was as if I were made of wood. Not even a hair on my body was erect," Benito Mussolini said in amazement. Maria José di Savoia, the wife of the later King Umberto II, had done absolutely everything in her power to seduce the leader of the Italian fascists on the beach. But Benito simply couldn't rise to the occasion. "I wasn't a man, but a politician," he said.
This, at least, was the way Mussolini, who was prime minister of Italy for 21 years and was known as "Il Duce," later described the scene to his mistress Clara "Claretta" Petacci, who then recorded his words in her diaries.
Those diaries were published for the first time last week, to the considerable consternation of one of Mussolini's descendents. "This woman would be convicted of stalking today," says Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce's granddaughter. She insists that "not a word" of what Petacci wrote about her grandfather is true.
'Your Giant'
The Mussolinis never had a very high opinion of Petacci, the only woman who was faithful to Mussolini literally to the bitter end.
Her father was a doctor at the Vatican, and as a teenager she rhapsodized about the "Duce, mio grandissimo Duce." She became his mistress at 19. In 1936, after a two-year separation, she became Mussolini's principal and permanent concubine, the only one who was entitled to bodyguards, a chauffeur and quarters at the Palazzo Venezia.
She called him "Ben," and he referred to himself, none too modestly, as "your giant." He would complain to Claretta, his confidante, about the tight boots he always had to wear. A sentimentalized version of her story was made into a film in 1984, with Claudia Cardinale as the lead.
Mussolini was as obsessed with sex as he was with his own power. Until the day of his removal from power, July 25, 1943, he had "a woman brought to him every day, every afternoon," as his valet Quinto Navarra recalls. The women were recorded in the guest book as "fascist visitors."
"There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four them every evening, one after the other," Mussolini said. But now, he insisted, Claretta was the only one. "Amore," he said, "why do you refuse to believe me?"
Mussolini spent much of the night before March 13, 1938, when Austria was annexed into the German Reich in the Anschluss, trying to persuade Claretta not to be jealous, and his efforts were successful. As she wrote: "We make love as we have never made love before, until he has heart pain, and then we do it again. Then he falls asleep, exhausted and blissful."
'Your Precious Little Body Shall Only Tremble for Me'
Mussolini himself was intensely jealous and had his "bambina's" every movement observed. "Your precious little body shall only tremble for me," he told Claretta, who was 29 years his junior. Petacci wrote to pass the time she spent waiting for him. She wrote quickly and copiously, writing almost 2,000 pages in 1938 alone. Writing was "therapy" for Petacci, according to publisher Mauro Suttora, "because she spent her days doing nothing but living for Mussolini."
For the most part, however, the pillow talk Petacci describes, interspersed with diatribes against Mussolini's wife Ráchele, is a record of sex addiction, infatuation and hypocrisy. In one instance, for example, Mussolini weeps as he describes the horrors of the war in Spain, where 150 children had just been killed during an air raid. "Just think, entire buildings destroyed, as if they were made of cardboard." But Italy had just ordered the intensification of the bombing.
There have been several questionable publications in recent years that portray Mussolini as a driven man, a tragic figure coerced into persecuting the Jews by Hitler. But Petacci's notes from their love nest leave little doubt that Mussolini was anti-Semitic through and through. "I have been a racist since 1921," Mussolini confided to Petacci in August 1938. "I don't know how they can believe that I am merely imitating Hitler, who wasn't even born at the time. One must give the Italians a sense of race, so that they don't produce any mongrels, so that they don't ruin what is beautiful in us."
'Hitler Really Likes Me a Lot'
After returning from the Munich Conference in 1938, he summoned Claretta. "The Führer is very likeable," Il Duce told his mistress. "Hitler is an emotional person at heart. When he saw me, there were tears in his eyes. He really likes me a lot."
Mussolini was, however, somewhat irritated by Hitler's fits of rage. "Sparks flew from his eyes, his body was shaking and he could only pull himself together with difficulty. I, on the other hand, remained completely calm." In Mussolini's opinion, it was he who had saved the conference. "I was always the one who brought them back to the matter at hand, they got lost in discussion. Hitler sincerely adores me."
After the conference, Mussolini and Petacci went on a vacation to the beach. Mussolini, while flipping through French newspapers, suddenly got into a bad mood. "These disgusting Jews, they should all be destroyed," he said. "I will create a bloodbath the way the Turks once did. I will isolate them and imprison them. They will come to know the steel fist of Mussolini. It is time that the Italians realize that can no longer exploited by these snakes."
Five weeks later, he had pushed through a new race law that declared "mixed marriages" invalid. When Pope Pius XI objected, he became enraged. "Never before has a pope done so much harm to religion as this one. He has already lost almost the entire world." And, he continued, "he does dishonorable things. How can he say that we are the same as the Semites? We have fought with them for hundreds of years, and we hate them."
It is an age-old story and not one that is exclusive to Italy: The story of short, powerful men who wear their hearts between their legs, surround themselves with showgirls and, in the end, are only attracted by anything that is even more powerful and unscrupulous than they are. One sentence that Petacci attributed to Mussolini, "I am like Napoleon," could just as easily have been uttered by one of his modern-day successors, someone who likes to be called, not il Duce, but il Cavaliere or "Papi."
Sweet Nothings
After he was deposed in 1943, Mussolini, with Hitler's help, established the puppet state of the Republic of Salò on Lake Garda. Carletta remained behind in Rome, but the couple eventually reunited and, after fleeing and being arrested by Italian partisans, she and Il Duce were executed together in April 1945.
Petacci entrusted her diaries to the countess Rina Cervis. In 1950 the police unearthed them from where they had been hidden in the countess's garden. After that, they were kept in a box in the national archive, not to be released until 70 years after they had been written.
But was it truly just "pillow talk," as some Il Duce experts contend? And, in Petacci's case, did the old Roman saying hold true: Tell your lover everything, just not the truth?
"Of course, the sweet nothings aren't worth discussing. But the supposed remarks on politics are interesting," says Lutz Klinkhammer of the German Historical Institute in Rome. "When it came to politics, why would Mussolini want to hide anything from her?" he asks. "Petacci wasn't interested in politics. For instance, her notes on Il Duce's anti-Semitism essentially confirm the conclusions of our most recent research."
When the miniature Salò Republic came to an end in April 1945, Mussolini offered his mistress the option of fleeing to Spain, but Petacci declined. A short time later, she was hanging upside-down next to Il Duce above the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, shot by partisans. A passerby is believed to have said: "One thing you can say for her: She did have nice legs."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

What scandal? How many soldiers would have been killed when the Taliban used the fuel trucks as bombs?

Minister Jung Resigns amid Afghanistan Airstrike Scandal

The Taliban and its Islamists cohorts kill civilians all the time, intentionally. It's not as if the fuel trucks were left out as bait cars. The trucks were ambushed and the truck drivers were killed or wounded. What the heck is going on here? Has defending yourself become unacceptable? Do you think our enemies see this as an act of compassion or weakness?

Courtesy Atlas Shrugged

Where are the defenders of our great nation? Where are our checks and balances? Where are the decent men elected to protect us from carpetbaggers like Obama and his criminal gang?
ACORN has been found guilty of voter fraud, illegal voter registration, conspiracy to traffic in child prostitution, human trafficking, and G-d knows what. My taxpayer dollars cannot be used to fund these vile criminals.
And they dump this on a Friday night during the Thanksgiving holiday. Who are these people?
NY TIMES: Attorney General Says ACORN Can Be Funded by Federal Govmnt...WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress enacted a law banning the government from providing funds to the group.
The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.
Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about $53 million in federal aid, much of it grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for providing various services related to affordable housing.
But the group has become a prime target for conservative critics, and on Oct. 1, President Obama signed into law a spending bill that included a provision that said no taxpayer funds — including funds authorized by previous legislation — could be “provided to” the group or its affiliates.
"Conservative critics" -- man, what asshats reside at the Times. Is "rule of law" a conservative issue? Is prostitution, ripping off the government, child trafficking a progressive platform for liberals?
A Housing and Urban Development lawyer asked the Justice Department whether the new law meant that pre-existing contracts with Acorn should be broken. But in a memorandum signed Oct. 23 and posted online this week, Mr. Barron said the government should continue to make payments to Acorn as required by such contracts.

They may be bastards but they're Obama's bastards so it's okay.

Jonah Goldberg

And of course, global warming also causes:

Best Buy travesty

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/27/best-buy-ditches-christmas-but-celebrates-muslim-holiday-in-fliers/

Another reason not to go to Best Buy.

Don't you wonder what these countries are afraid of?

Rwanda: African nations block genocide suspects hunt

He doesn't enforce the law on Leftist crooks

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/27/calif-attorney-general-offers-incoherent-troubling-answers-when-asked-about-acorn-doc-dump/

Jerry Brown was an ass when he was Governor Moonbeam. He was a failure as mayor of Oakland (one of America's murder capitals) and he continues as AG.

ElBaradei's work is done. He's covered for Iran nuclear bomb program from the beginning

U.N. Nuclear Agency Calls Iran Inquiry ‘Dead End’


Iran rebuked over nuclear 'cover-up' by UN watchdog


The UN nuclear watchdog's governing body has passed a resolution condemning Iran for developing a uranium enrichment site in secret.

The IAEA resolution was passed with rare Russian and Chinese backing. Only Cuba, Venezuela and Malaysia voted against it.

Read the comments for some fine examples of modern Jew hatred

Hate Radio
The long, toxic afterlife of Nazi propaganda in the Arab world

What the bean counters did for General Motors the government will do to our hospitals

NHS trust faces probe into high death rate and blood-spattered equipmentRead more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231197/NHS-trust-investigation-inspectors-blood-spattered-equipment-unusually-high-death-rate-patients.html#ixzz0XzocFpn1

In the past...

We've used the term ChiComs to refer to the Chinese Communists but oddly enough it also describes the Chicago Communists now running the con try.

Not news to us...

John Bolton Was Right After All
Richard Grenell: Stonewalling By Iran, Compromises By The Obama Administration

Cultural imperialism at work in Britain

Mapping out the strain on your NHS: 243 sick babies treated in one London hospital ward.... and just 18 mothers come from BritainRead more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231150/Mapping-strain-NHS-243-sick-babies-treated-London-hospital-ward---just-18-mothers-born-UK.html#ixzz0Xzayy3LR

Mind boggling stupidity military edition

Navy SEALs May Go to Prison for Giving a Fat Lip to Islamic Terrorist

The left condemns the imperfections of everyone but themselves.

As I understand it when the SEALS are sent after someone it's a kill or capture order. So, by doing the more productive thing they are being persecuted by prosecution. We are being led by Code Pink. The aim I believe is the total demoralization of the military by those who want us on our knees.

More proof that ACORN should have it 503(c)(3) stutus revoked.

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/25/roseanne-barr-confirms-bon-bon-shock-admission-acorn-got-obama-elected/

How wonderful

It's so good sounding that Obama plans to double the medical device tax on it once it arrives here.

Device spells doom for superbugs By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA.
The device works by creating something called a plasma, which produces a cocktail of chemicals in air that kill bacteria but are harmless to skin.
A related approach could see the use of plasmas to speed the healing of wounds.
Writing in the New Journal of Physics, the authors say plasmas could help solve gum disease or even body odour.
Plasmas are known as the fourth state of matter, after solid, liquid, and gas. They are a soup of atoms that have had their electrons stripped off by, for example, a high voltage.
Plasmas are common elsewhere in the cosmos, where high-energy processes produce them, and they are even posited as a potential source of fusion energy. Their properties have recently been harvested for use in plasma televisions.
Deadly cocktail
But the new research focuses on so-called cold atmospheric plasmas.
Rather than turning a whole group of atoms into plasma, a more delicate approach strips the electrons off just a few, sending them flying.
“ You can even make it battery operated so you can use small devices - I have one in my hand right now ” Gregor Morfill Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
Collisions with nearby, unchanged atoms slows down the electrons and charged atoms or ions they leave behind.
It has been known for some time that the resulting plasma is harmful to bacteria, viruses, and fungi - the approach is already used to disinfect surgical tools.
"It's actually similar to what our own immune system does," said Gregor Morfill, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who led the research.
"The plasma produces a series of over 200 chemical reactions that involve the oxygen and nitrogen in air plus water vapour - there is a whole concotion of chemical species that can be lethal to bacteria," he told BBC News.
Professor Morfill and his colleagues have worked out the precise details of the plasma production that effectively kills off such bugs without doing harm to skin, and demonstrated a number of prototype devices that do the job efficiently.
"To produce plasmas efficiently at low cost so you can really mass produce these things for hospitals, that's the big breakthrough of the last year," Professor Morfill said.
The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million - a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water.
More applications
Professor Morfill said that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odour.
"The idea is scalable to any size, it can be produced in any shape; it's very flexible," he said.
"You can even make it battery-operated so you can use small devices - I have one in my hand right now."
A similar approach, using the element argon instead of plain air, has been demonstrated for application directly to wounds, and initial indications are that speeds healing.
Michael Kong, a bioelectrics engineering researcher at Loughborough University, said it remains unclear whether those effects are through the chemical cocktail that the plasma produces, or simply from the effect of reducing the number of bacteria crowding a wound.
"Either way, it is still a very important breakthrough," Professor Kong told BBC News.
"The ideas are not new - but only recently, collectively, has this community of researchers come up with plasma sources that achieve disinfection but also have minimal impact on skin cells."
Professor Morfill said that more testing of the devices is necessary before they end up in widespread use, but he said that there is already significant interest from industry.

The schools were obviously not hatefilled enough

Iran clerics start taking control of schools

The Jew hating Obama State Department at work again

This is evil. I am speechless. Obama is busy busy spying on the Jews while leaving our soldiers to die in Afghanistan while deliberately doing nothing, setting them up like sitting ducks.

Residents Warned Not to Speak with US Snoops Israel National News
(IsraelNN.com) Veteran settler and ex-MK Elyakim Haetzni warns Judea/Samaria towns against divulging construction information to Obama’s roving representatives.
Emissaries of the Obama administration have been traveling around Judea and Samaria in recent weeks, asking residents about construction in their towns and passing the information back to Washington. In Efrat, for instance, the “capital” of Gush Etzion, Regional Council head Sha’ul Goldstein met with an American diplomat who asked for a briefing on the pace of construction in the region.
if Goldstein said, “I told the residents to tell the truth: that we have come home to build and to remain on our land.”
Elyakim Haetzni, a long-time resident of Kiryat Arba, 25 minutes to the south, is more wary. In a letter to his fellow settlers this week, Haetzni wrote, “It is likely that an American investigator/supervisor will arrive in your town. We should not cooperate in any way with those who come openly to restrict our progress and to actually uproot us from our roots.”
“In light of the pressure constantly being exerted upon us from the Americans,” Haetzni continued, “cooperation with them is like a victim cooperating with his executioner.”
“Any piece of information, no matter how insignificant it seems, can be used against us by a hostile element. The talks that they are having with our people is the first step in a large intelligence gathering and supervisory network that [U.S .envoy George] Mitchell is building here. It would be very strange for us, of all people, to cooperate with something that will be used against our own government.”
“It’s great chutzpah [nerve] of a foreign government to openly collect information and supervise a country on that country’s own territory. We must not cooperate with this brazenness.”

(Hat tip Atlas Shrugged)

Obama can't just get enough of himself

Notice Obama is carrying a magazine that has himself on the cover (hat tip: Drudge)

Joke of the Day

From Best of the Web:

Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There's a consensus that it's going to change, so they've decided to keep us in the dark.

Obama Acts to Suppress Dissent in Iran

Apparently, one of Obama's first actions was to declare the Free Life Party of Kurdistan a terrorist organization despite the fact that it is a Iranian opposition group that is in favor of a free and democratic Iran and is even half female. Check out comments from their leader:

In an exclusive interview, Ahmadi told Newsmax that the decision by the Treasury Department to designate his party as an international terrorist organization on Feb. 4, 2009 "directly benefited the Iranian regime."

Efforts by PJAK and others to forge a common front with a wide variety of Iranian pro-democracy groups over the past year came to an abrupt halt as a result of the U.S. action in February. “We were very close to success in bringing these groups together,” Ahmadi said. But the Treasury action “made the other groups afraid to work with us, for fear of U.S. government reprisals.”

The Treasury Department explained its actions by labeling PJAK “a splinter group” of the PKK, a Kurdish organization that has been fighting for Kurdish rights in Turkey for the past 25 years. Tens of thousands have died on both sides over that time.

Both the Iranian and the Turkish governments welcomed the Treasury order to freeze PJAK assets in the United States. The Treasury Department order also prohibits U.S. persons from conducting any financial transactions with the group. But lawyers for PJAK say that the Treasury Department violated U.S. law by making the designation without any prior consultation with PJAK or allowing the group to counter the allegations against it.

The Obama administration failed to take into consideration a recent German court decision that rejected a similar effort by the German government to designate PJAK as a terrorist organization.

The German court “found no factual basis for this terrorism determination,” PJAK counsel Morton Sklar wrote to theTreasury in March.

Sklar is a well-known human rights lawyer who chaired the Helsinki Watch Committee in the late 1970s to monitor human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain, at a time when most human rights organizations were turning a blind eye to Soviet abuses.

In his interview with Newsmax, Ahmadi extended a hand to other Iranian opposition groups to coordinate their efforts against the Iranian regime.

“We as Kurds cannot overthrow the regime by ourselves. Neither can the Persians, or the Azeris, or the Balouch. If we want to get rid of this regime, we must work together. We must unite. The only reason this regime has stayed in power for 30 years is that they have managed to sow hatred among Iran’s minorities and false rivalries among Iranian political parties. It is time for that to end.”

PJAK operates several camps in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq, where it also trains activists as “self-defense” fighters. Newsmax visited the PJAK camps in October 2007 and found no evidence of a PKK presence.

Ahmadi referred to the camps as “our university,” because of the intense political, social, and economic classes PJAK activists take in addition to receiving rudimentary military training. For more, read “Kurdish Rebels: ‘We’re Not Terrorists.'”

PJAK activists insist that what differentiates them from other Kurdish groups that are based on tribal loyalties is their dedication to “changing the feudal and tribal culture” of Iranian Kurdistan.

PJAK activists played key roles in the post-election protests this summer, organizing demonstrations at Tehran University and at other universities across the country.

“We lost a lot of our people” when the regime cracked down, Ahmadi said. The Kurdish leader said that his group will continue to defend Kurdish rights in Iran and to work with other groups to promote a secular Iranian republic no matter what the Obama administration does.

“We have many common interests with the United States,” he said. “First and foremost is our stance against political Islam. Americans need to understand that Iranian nuclear weapons are not as dangerous as political Islam. This is the No. 1 danger, not just for the region, or the United States, but for the whole world.”

Ahmadi said that there was no evidence "that PJAK ever committed a single terrorist act anywhere . . . It does not exist."

Thanksgiving Day

"The Pilgrims held an even greater Thanksgiving celebration in 1623, after a switch from communal farming to privatized farming finally resulted in a larger harvest.[7] Irregular Thanksgivings continued after favorable events and days of fasting after unfavorable ones. In the Plymouth tradition, a thanksgiving day was a church observance, rather than a feast day."

......

As President, on October 3, 1789, George Washington made the following proclamation and created the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government of the United States of America:
“
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.[8]
”
George Washington again proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1795.

Question from today's US News and World Report...

It's time to start filling up the Thanksgiving dinner guest list. Which political figure would you like as a guest?
24.56% President Barack Obama
19.19% Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee
54.19% Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
2.06% House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

narcissism

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/rids/20091121/i/r1624575763.jpg?x=311&y=345&q=85&sig=D0qSaYah4ni4SPPkxdUCNg--


"personality disorder: in psychiatry, a personality disorder characterized by the patient's overestimation of his or her own appearance and abilities and an excessive need for admiration. In psychoanalytic theory, emphasis is placed on the element of self-directed sexual desire in the condition."

Sounds spot on to me.

Shades of the 1930s

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/24/kenneth-gladney-speaks-out-county-officials-blow-him-off/

It's how they stay afloat (no pun intended)

Illegal Subsidy Backs Airbus

Funny how hate crimes is a one way street

3 held in attack with racial overtones are due in court today
City officials claim it wasn't a hate crime
By T.J. Pignataro

Three Buffalo teenagers arrested Tuesday are accused of the savage beating of a 19-year- old white man last August, after he walked his black girlfriend home on the city's far East Side.
Police charged two Newburgh Avenue brothers — Donte A. Lee, 18, and Antoine Blackmon, 16 — along with a 13-year-old male in the Aug. 18 attack on Brian Milligan Jr., who suffered severe head trauma, a fractured jaw and broken teeth. The incident occurred just before 11 p.m. in the 2100 block of Genesee Street near Floss Avenue. At one point, Milligan was struck with a chunk of concrete, police said.
During a news conference, city officials reiterated that no facts or evidence suggest the attack was a "hate crime," despite the fact that Milligan and family members told police he and his girlfriend had been the target of verbal abuse in the neighborhood in the weeks prior to the attack.
"It wasn't what many people thought it was and the facts and the evidence prove that this was just stupid, senseless and unprovoked violence," said Mayor Byron W. Brown.
Milligan has no recollection of the actual beating, authorities said, and the police investigation revealed that Lee, Blackmon and the juvenile didn't know Milligan and were not among those who previously targeted them with racially derogatory remarks.
"The victim was walking one way with the suspects coming the other way," said Daniel Derenda, deputy police commissioner.
"We believe that words were said to the victim that led to this act of violence. The facts or the evidence do not support the allegations this was, in fact, a hate crime," he said. "Whether it was white, black had nothing to do with it other than stupidity."
Derenda said there was no apparent motive for the attack.
Milligan's parents, when reached at their Depew home Tuesday evening, were elated about the arrests and expressed gratitude to Buffalo Police Detective Barbara Lark, who tirelessly worked on the case.
"She played her cards right. She kept everything "hush, hush,' knowing that sooner than later, she'd crack the case," said Brian Milligan Sr., the victim's father.
The family still believes Brian Jr. was targeted because of his race.
"If it wasn't a hate crime, what was it?," Milligan Sr. asked. "They didn't take his money. They didn't take his jewelry. He was wearing very expensive shoes; they didn't take those. How can it not be?"
The Milligans plan to see Lee and Blackmon for themselves at 9 a.m. today when they are arraigned in Buffalo City Court on felony charges of first-degree gang assault.
The two were being held in the Erie County Holding Center. The juvenile was in custody at the East Ferry Detention Center and is scheduled to be taken into Family Court as a delinquent.
The Rev. Darius G. Pridgen, pastor of True Bethel Baptist Church, made a plea to his congregation in the week following the attack to help police in finding those responsible. Lark believes Pridgen's help inspired some to come forward.
After spending four days in the trauma Intensive Care Unit at the Erie County Medical Center and several more days hospitalized with two fractures to his jaw, a broken tooth and a gash to his neck requiring seven staples to close, Milligan Jr. was discharged on Aug. 26.
That was only the beginning of his long road to recovery.
His jaw was wired shut for 8½ weeks, he lost three bottom teeth, still has numerous others out of place and will require braces to fix his teeth. Furthermore, Milligan Jr. still has some bleeding on his brain that is expected to subside eventually, his father said.
Milligan Jr., on Tuesday evening, was also in his third day back at work at the Walden Avenue McDonald's, which kept his job open for him while he healed.
"It's good to have him back," said Jody Purpura, the manager at the McDonald's. "I heard someone in the back saying to him earlier, "Everything's coming together, you got your job back and they caught the guys.' We're all glad."

Beyond words...

Stalin Added to D-Day Memorial
Posted by Van Helsing at November 25, 2009 10:11 AM
With the fifth column having taken control of our government, now is a perfect time to reconstruct America's worst enemies — who also tend to be humanity's worst enemies — as heroes.
Arguably the second-worst tyrant in human history (after Mao Zedong, a favorite in Obama's set; see Bill Ayers and Anita Dunn) was Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who killed as many as 43 million of his own people, subjected the rest to the most wretched extremes of state slavery, and helped launch WWII by invading Poland, an event Chairman Zero commemorated last September 17 by yanking away Poland's promised missile defense.
One thing Stalin did not do is send even a single soldier to take part in D-Day — which is why a patriot might wonder why his statue has been added to the National D-Day Memorial. Maybe it's because liberal hero FDR affectionately regarded his fellow leftist as "Uncle Joe."

A Progressive Constitution

Larrey Anderson suggests some changes to the Consititution to make it more amenable to the Left.

If the left is going to change America, first they should change the basic rules set down to guide (and limit, and in some cases prevent) their proposed changes to our country's laws and legal procedures. With that in mind, I have decided to put together a progressive guide for rewriting the Constitution.

Most of the problems the left has with the Constitution are in the Bill of Rights. But let's start with the body of the Constitution. The progressives need only make a couple of changes there. (My second recommended revision for the articles of the Constitution will come later.)

Six changes are needed to give us a progressive Constitution. (In case I missed some progressive modifications, American Thinker readers are invited to add your proposed amendments to the Constitution in the comments section to this article.)

Here are my six proposals:

1) Article I, section 8 of the Constitution lists 17 specific powers granted to the Congress. Progressives believe that the "general welfare of the United States" clause, in the first line of section 8, gives congress power outside of its 17 enumerated powers. I don't. I think the Constitution means what it says and says what it means.

I have already shown that the general welfare clause of section 8 applies only to the day-to-day functioning of the federal government, and not to the citizens of the United States. But the left can fix all of that with one amendment:

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution is hereby repealed. Article I, section 8 shall now read: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States and the citizens of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States."

Progressives should feel free to leave in the italics so the message is clear. The words in italics are not in the Constitution as it is now written. With the ratification of this amendment, the Congress could constitutionally enact national health care legislation, national education "reform," national energy mandates (like telling us what light bulbs we can use), etc.

2) Let's move on to the Bill of Rights. The left often claims that the First Amendment erects a "wall of separation" between church and state. (I have demonstrated elsewhere that it does no such thing.)

What the opening clause of the First Amendment says is this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... [Emphasis added.]

Progressives have been ignoring the actual words of the Constitution and have focused on one obscure line in a letter from Thomas Jefferson instead. (That's where the "wall of separation" comes from.) So the first clause of the First Amendment of our new progressive Constitution should be amended to read:

Congress shall build a wall of separation between church and state.

This clause is, of course, nonsense. What wall? Where? With the ratification of this amendment, leftist jurists and lawyers would be free to figure it out. The First Amendment would now mean whatever progressives want it to mean. (And they wouldn't have to twist the evident meaning of "make no law.")

3) It is crystal clear from the dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller that progressives do not believe that the Second Amendment provides the individual citizen of the United States a right to bear arms. (By the way, they are wrong about this.) Wrong or right, this one is easy to fix:

The Second Amendment to the Constitution is hereby repealed.

Done...and done. America will be progressive, safe, and hip -- just like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

4) Moving to the Fifth Amendment, the "taking clause" at the end of the amendment states, "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." [Emphasis added.] Progressives on the Supreme Court (in the 5-to-4 decision in Kelo v. New London) held that "public use" really means "public purpose," which means...well, whatever the government declares a "public purpose" is a "public use."

The Kelo decision had a very progressive outcome. The lower-middle-class riverfront homes that were torn down in New London, Connecticut are long gone. The lots those homes sat on are empty and overgrown with weeds because the giant pharmaceutical company decided to abandon its plans for building on the property in New London. Now that's a progressive "public purpose."

In keeping with this utopian attitude, the new "taking clause" of the Fifth Amendment should read:

... private property may be taken for any purpose whatsoever, with just compensation.

The "with just compensation" verbiage is optional for our new Constitution. Progressives may choose to omit "with just compensation" at their discretion -- and property owners would be able to contribute to the left's "greater good."

5) Let's proceed to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. These were, after all, written by a bunch of dead white guys who actually believed that people should be free to make their own decisions whenever possible and that the states should be free to respond to the particular desires and needs of the citizens of each particular state.

The Ninth Amendment essentially says that the rights specifically granted (“enumerated”) to the central government in the Constitution do not “disparage” or “deny” the rights reserved by the people. The Tenth Amendment makes it clear that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government ("the United States") belong to the individual states and the people. That’s not progressive.

Easily remedied with one amendment:

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution are hereby repealed.

Repealing these two amendments would leave the determination of all of our rights (abortion, prayer in school, gun control, land use planning, election laws, etc.) in the hands of the central government. That's what progressives want -- let them make it happen. And they just might -- if it were easy to amend the Constitution.

6) Unfortunately for the left, it isn't easy. This brings us back to the body of the Constitution and to Article V. It is titled "Amendment." Here are the important bits from Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress.... [Etc.]

This is a huge hurdle for initiating my modest proposals for a progressive Constitution. So far, no progressive judge has declared, "What the Founders actually meant in Article V was one-half of both Houses and none of the several States could amend the Constitution." (The judge could nuance the heck out of such an interpretation -- maybe something about how the ink has faded on the original document.) But alas, Article V stands in the way of a truly (and honestly and logically coherent) progressive Constitution.

Here is the solution:

Article V is hereby repealed. Article V shall now read, "Congress may amend the Constitution by a majority vote, without the input of the states, whenever it damn well pleases."

Problem solved.

Get with it, progressives. If you really have the courage of your convictions, then amend the Constitution. You would finally have the law of the land on your side. You would no longer have to rely on progressive judges making a laughingstock of logic, common sense, and the English language in their outrageous decisions.

Most important, you would have a Constitution that allows you to proceed with a progressive agenda...constitutionally.