Birdblog: July 2011

America's Rehoboam Moment

Timothy Birdnow

The Media Research Center has analyzed the blame game of the media, and concluded that the reporting on the debt limit is hopelessly biased.

From the MRC report:

http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/realitycheck/2011/20110726061313.aspx

"On Election Day 2010, then-CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith posed a hypothetical question about newly-elected Republicans to Ann Coulter: “There’ll be a routine vote, for instance, to increase the debt ceiling and the Tea Party guys are going to say, ‘Over my dead body,’ and the government comes to a screeching halt. Then what happens?” The conservative author confidently predicted: “Well, the media will blame the Republicans.”

And that’s precisely what has occurred. A Media Research Center study of the Big Three network evening and morning programs finds that, when it came to assigning blame for lack of a debt ceiling resolution, ABC, CBS and NBC’s coverage has placed the overwhelming majority of the blame on Republicans’ doorstep.

MRC analysts watched all 202 stories on the debt ceiling from July 1 through July 22, looking for statements which assigned blame or responsibility for the failure to reach a settlement. Of the 85 stories that included such statements, the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican, with 56 stories (66%) mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse. Even though Democrats control both the Senate and the White House, only 17 network stories (20%) suggested they bore more responsibility, a greater than three-to-one disparity (see chart). Twelve stories offered a balanced discussion of which party ought to be blamed."

End excerpt.

This comes as no surprise, but it is good to have actual confirmation in numbers. The fact is, the media hasn't even tried to explain this, prefering to use Democrat talking points as actual hard news.

For those who do not understand the issue (and it does not include regular readers of this website) a quick rundown of this is in order.

The debt ceiling is simply a cap on borrowing. Much like the credit limit on a credit card, it theoretically restricts the amount of money government can borrow - with the intention of controlling runaway spending. It has been disregarded nearly since it has been instituted by Congress. Obama argues that nobody worried about extending the limit in the past, but nobody ever blew money like this in the past, and we are getting to the point where servincing the debt will absorb too much of GDP. There comes a point where you simply cannot keep borrowing. The Tea Party was born of that very thing; many average Americans realize that we simply cannot keep spending more than we take in. That is why the House GOP has made a stand here; there has to be some long-range plans to cut spending.

According to Title 31, Subtitle III, Chapter 31, Subchapter I, subsection 3101, paragraph (b), the debt limit is;

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title31/html/USCODE-2008-title31-subtitleIII-chap31-subchapI-sec3101.htm

"The face amount of obligations issued under this chapter and the face amount of obligations whose principal and interest are guaranteed by the United States Government (except guaranteed obligations held by the Secretary of the Treasury) may not be more than $11,315,000,000,000, outstanding at one time, subject to changes periodically made in that amount as provided by law through the congressional budget process described in Rule XLIX of the Rules of the House of Representatives or otherwise."

End excerpt.

This amount is, of course, grossly out of date as the limit has been raised numerous times since.

What must be understood is that taxes are still being collected on a continual basis - the government is not without income. What is happening is that it can no longer issue new bonds to borrow more money. And the money already in the pipeline is still there.

In the event that the debt limit is reached, the President would be required to give a list of necessary services that he cannot cut, and if the money isn't there Congress could authorize a temporary spending bill.

But this President has refused a temporary bill, because he wants to blame Republicans for any bad things that happen. And he is threatening by innuendo to withhold payments on vital services - like social security or military - to blackmail the GOP House of Representatives. Either they raise the ceiling, infuriating the Tea Party, or they do not and the One can blame them for the collapsing economy. Two agencies have already downgraded the U.S. credit rating and Standard and Poors has said they will downgrade us without serious budget cuts - larger than anyone's plan would entail. As Obama refuses to sign any legislation that makes such cuts he is the cause of the coming downgrade - but he wants to lay this on the Republicans.

And to anyone who knows any economic history raising taxes would be catastrophic; the fragile recovery of 1931 was destroyed by a tax increase, leading the modest depression to become The Great Depression, and this has been the result whenever such action has been taken. Should Obama get his way we would end with an economic armageddon. Tax collections would actually drop as the economy slowed. We would be in worse shape than before.

So the Democrats are prepared to do precisely what they accuse Republicans of doing; they are ready to starve grandma and toss cripples into the ditch for political gain. The media has to know this, yet they continue to lay blame on the real grown-ups in the room.

When King Solomon died, the Israelites came to his son and demanded that the government reduce taxes and quit spending. Solomon's son Rehoboam listened to his Democrat Party advisors and instead offered more taxes and more spending. The result was the dissolution of the Israelite kingdom. This has happened many times in history; governments spend more than they take in because spending is power. The result is invariably the collapse of said nations.

We are at a Rehoboam moment; do we march down to the precipice and leap off or get control of ourselves? The media would like us to leap. So would our President who would prefer being the President of Mankind.

They must be stopped.

Playing Submarine in the U.S. Navy

Brian Birdnow takes on the newest dunderheaded scheme of liberals - this time women are being placed in combat situations on U.S. submarines, and Brian points out the great folly in a piece at Townhall.

http://www.townhallmail.com/xchldymplljtdplptpdhmtnbbctbbpcmsshyqdjpcvjdvs_gyrcnkrcnlg.html

This is ripe for innuendo; "Run silent, run deep!" , "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!," etc.

How about these quotes:

"Suction on After Trim, Sea venting."

USS Sea Owl (SS-405) Auxiliaryman Mike Aarons, at the air manifold, to a Sub School trainee Diving Officer following his command to pump after trim to sea.

-- submitted by Theron (Dave) Davis, USN-Ret.

"Never Give In, Battle Cry:

Take her fast,
> Take her deep,
> Take her where the fishes sleep..
Damn the depth,
Damn the pressure,
> Take her down just like the Thresher... "

From the Olympia SSN 717 book of poems. Author unknown
Submitted by Henry Arevalo

"It's a hard fight with a short stick”

Chief Officer Steward Dogan on the USS Gurnard during WWII - said when the going got rough.
-- submitted by Glenn Milhorn

"Remember to keep a fox tail handy and your drain tubs clear.”

Found this in the back of one old Piping Tab given to me by Don Gotta (Popeye Don).
-- Andrew "Papa Rose" Rose, YNC(SS), Hammerhead and Henry Clay.

"Too much ship to throw away for one small hole.”

Commander Johnny Hyde upon deciding to not scuttle USS Bergall after a 5" enemy shell ripped a 5 foot hole in her pressure hull just above the waterline, 2,000 miles from home on her second war patrol, Dec. 15, 1944.
-- submitted by Mike Brood

"Take her down!”

Howard Gilmore, Captain of USS Growler, badly wounded, ordering her down without him to save the boat.
-- submitted by John Clear

Sort of gives new meaning to the phrase "playing submarine".

Unleashing Americans

By Alan Caruba

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.

The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.

Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.

While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.

A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.

It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.

Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.

In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.

In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.

The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.

Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.

The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.

Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.

The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.

We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.

I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.

The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.

If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Republican Cowards and Death by a Thousand Papercuts

Timothy Birdnow

Bill Wilson tackles the lie of default - and why the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating is the opposite of what we are being told. http://netrightdaily.com/2011/07/aa-an-albatross-around-obama%e2%80%99s-neck/

From the article:

"S&P head of sovereign ratings David Beers told CNBC host Larry Kudlow that a failure to raise the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling “would not be default so long as the government is continuing to pay its debt as it matures and its interest payments.”

Which means August 2nd as a deadline to avert default is nothing more than a lie by Obama. Republicans have all but ceded that debate, however, and refuse to call Obama out.

The agencies are not rating Washington’s unwillingness to borrow more, but politicians’ reluctance to stop borrowing so much. Said Beers, “we’re rating debt.”

Meaning, whoever votes for a bill that ensures a downgrade — or signs it — owns that downgrade politically. Like the ancient Mariner who killed the ship’s good luck, the albatross, politicians will be made to wear AA as a shameful reminder of Washington’s greed, avarice, and profligacy.

It is a disgrace. All because Reid and Obama refused to cut at least $4 trillion, which amounts to less than $100 billion a year. In the end, the only bill that might have prevented a downgrade was the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan, which promised almost $6 trillion in cuts."

End excerpt.

Wilson concludes that the House should do nothing; they have already passed Cut, Cap, and Balance and should force the Senate to take action. He's right; the House Republicans should be out stumping for their bill, not endlessly generating new ones. This was a trap laid by Democrats and Obama, and the GOP has walked right into it. They never learn.

The trap is simple. Wilson puts it clearly:

"Barack Obama is trying to run out the clock. He is attempting to get the debt ceiling debate as close to Aug. 2 to back House Republicans into a corner which they cannot get out.

Likely at the last minute, the Senate will send its own bill to the House as “the only bill that can pass the Senate” and dare the House to defeat it. If the Reid bill is defeated, they will blame Republicans for obstructing it, and pin any ensuing economic calamity at their feet.

That is why the Senate has thus far refused to pass a plan of its own.

If Republicans capitulate to the Senate plan, and vote for it, the White House can live with that too. When the U.S. has its credit rating downgraded, they will attempt to make House Republicans own it — no matter how members voted.

Democrats will peddle the lie, as they have already begun, that the cause for the downgrade was because of political intransigence to raising the debt ceiling."

End excerpt.

John Boehner and other GOP leaders promised back in January during the government budget battle that this would be the hill they would make their stand upon, and the Democrats immediately began looking for ways to destroy them using it. As always, our brave heroes advanced tentatively without a plan, figuring they could b.s. their way through. Obama and company know that if the GOP caves they will take the blame - and the Tea Party will split. That is the plan. If the GOP doesn't take the bait they can at least be accused of hurting the country for their political interests, and the media will give full backing to this lie. The Republicans lost this fight when they refused to correct Obama's assertion that this will lead to a default; they should have made it plain that Obama decides where money goes and a default would be HIS choice. As always, our side didn't want to go to the trouble of correcting The One, and now they are backed into a corner.

Some very good conservatives are calling for us to eat the excrement sandwhich, too. They see any standing firm as a pyrrhic victory. But what everyone is failing to grasp is that this is a fight not with Democrats (you know who they are and how they'll react) but a fight for control of the GOP. People are tired of electing Republicans to have them co-opted by the inside-the-beltway gang. If the GOP caves here, they will cave evermore, and business as usual will be restored. The only hope of making real change is to hold their feet to the fire now. Not next week, next month, next year. It is not enough to say "we need to hang on to the next election" because there is ALWAYS a next election and we were given this song and dance throughout the 2000 decade. Instead of making gains we were treated to a decade of defeats, death by a thousand papercuts. By the end of the Bush era we saw Congress dominated by Democrats, and Bush sounded more like Jimmy Carter than Carter himself. There is a reason for that; it was because of this "baby steps" approach, where we took half a loaf, then half THAT loaf, then half of the half, etc. We will follow an identical trajectory if we surrender here. Unfortunately, we are going to surrender here.

There is no more time, and the next election will not be satisfactory. There won't be enough votes to override a Presidential veto, certainly, and probably not enough in the Senate to end a filibuster. We will be told to wait again, even if we hold the Presidency. Things will return to "normal" and the nation will continue it's long, agonizing slide.

No, sir; this is Waterloo. There won't be a tomorrow if the GOP surrenders now. The public is fed up, and the Tea Party put the Republicans in office on probation. This will violate the terms of that probation. I cannot fathom how people on our own side cannot see that.

The Obama plan is to do nothing and hang the GOP with their own noose. Our side simply has to avoid hanging it around our own necks.

I fear we have already failed.

Boehner's Non-Cuts

Timothy Birdnow

Does Boehner's new debt reduction plan actually cut spending?

Nope.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/boehners-new-plan-doesnt-cut-spending/

According to the article:

"Actually, the revised Boehner plan doesn’t cut spending at all. The chart shows the discretionary spending caps in the new Boehner plan. Spending increases every year—from $1.043 trillion in 2012 to $1.234 trillion in 2021. (These figures exclude the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an assumed path of constantly rising spending. If Congress wanted to, it could require CBO to increase its “baseline” spending by, say, $5 trillion over the next decade. Then Boehner could claim that he was “cutting” spending by $5.9 trillion, even though his plan hadn’t changed. You can see that discretionary “cuts” against baselines don’t mean anything.

The way to make real spending cuts is to abolish programs and agencies. But it’s been eight months since a landslide election that focused on the issue of spending cuts, and the Republican leadership hasn’t proposed any major terminations."

End excerpt.

More smoke-and-mirrors from this Speaker who I believe doesn't want to cut anything. Boehner is reacting to the political climate, and little more; he wants to return to business as usual, to the easy life of membership in the ultimate gentleman's club.

And as for the elites in the GOP telling us to take half a loaf, it isn't half a loaf at all; it is no loaf. It is not "a good start"; that was what we were told during the budget battle six months ago, and Boehner and the other GOP leaders said they were going to make their stand here, at the debt ceiling. We were told that the budget battle was a good start, and Boehner expressed surprise when he "learned" his budget deal cut only a couple of MILLION dollars. Well, SHAZAM! And now we are being fed more fertilizer.

What the elites - and that includes Laura Ingraham, who went on a tirade on her program yesterday about Tea Partiers demanding accountability from the people they put into office - fail to understand is that the public is fed up with "business as usual" and with deal making. We've had it with deal making. We are endlessly told that politics is about compromise. Yet it is our side that always compromises; we have been deal-made to death. This has gone on for decades. No matter how much we deliver the GOP always says they need more. We gave them control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, yet the liberal agenda still continued to advance. Once these guys get into office the desire to be liked and to have an easy time of it turns them into jellyfish. And people like Boehner then betray our wishes with smoke-and-mirrors, making it look like they are trying to do something when they are not.

It's crunch time; the Republic is at cliff's edge. Always we were able to put these things off, kick the can down the road, but we have run out of road and if we fail to clean up the mess we have made this nation will perish. These are not idle comments. The public intuitively understands that we have reached land's end, and the public wants something done now. The games must end, yet both sides continue to play by the old rules.

A "good start" is not good enough. We need to force the One against the spending cap. There has to be forced austerity; this government cannot continue as it is. This is about the survival of the Republic, not about scoring political points.

That is what the elites cannot seem to grasp. This isn't just another political game.

Army Strong

Timothy Birdnow

Naser Jason Abdo, the new Ft. Hood plotter and Islamist, was also into child pornography and was granted conscientious observer status by the U.S. military, a status traditionally reserved for pacifists.

Turns out Abdo refused to fight against other Moslems, but had no problem with killing "infidels". And while investigating him they found kiddy porn on his computer.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fort-hood-plot-awol-us-serviceman-arrested/story?id=14179096

These are the people we are taking into the military. These are also the people we are supposed to be worried about in terms of civil rights.

This nation is being destroyed by political correctness. No wonder the Islamic barbarians are overrunning us.

Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism at American Thinker

Timothy Birdnow

I have a blogpost at American Thinker this morning about the attempt to link conservatives and Christians to the terrorist attacks in Norway by a neo-Nazi. See it here. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/07/the_protocols_of_the_elders_of_liberalism.html

Worthless

Ron De Haan posts a fascinating piece at Sullivan's Travelers about the many currencies which no longer exist. How long before the U.S. dollar is replaced?

http://rarereaders.seablogger.com/2011/07/worthless

A Letter from Congressman John Kline

Dana Mathewson

This might contain some good news. Note that there is a bill out there that prohibits funding to implement the light bulb ban. There's more than one way to skin a cat...

July 26, 2011

Dear Mr. Mathewson:

Thank you for contacting me to share your support for the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (H.R. 2417). I appreciate learning of your views.

I share your objections to the provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that effectively bans the incandescent light bulb. I voted for repealing this ban (H.R. 2417), but the measure did not gain enough votes to pass the House of Representatives.

You will be pleased to know that the Energy and Water Appropriations bill, which passed the House of Representatives July 15, contains an amendment that prohibits funding to implement the light bulb ban. It is now under consideration in the Senate, and I am hopeful it will become law.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to do so again on any issue of importance to you.

Sincerely,

JOHN KLINE
Member of Congress

This e-mail box is unable to accept responses. If you would like to send a comment to Congressman Kline, please visit: http://kline.house.gov/.

Roger Cohen's Blood Libel

Timothy Birdnow

If anyone needs to get their heart rate up, read this despicable piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26iht-edcohen26.html

That Cohen, in a tirade attempting to link Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik to conservatives, would drag attempted assassin Jared Loughner out as proof that "right wing extremists" are engaging in acts of political violence when Loughner was proven to be mad as a march hare is way beyond any reasonable discourse. This man should be fired by the Times, at bare minimum.

He states;

"Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a “Muslim takeover” as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward."

End excerpt.

Except that Loughner suffered from none of these; he was a heavy drug user (thank you liberals), a fairly well-off college youth who was likely in love with Rep. Giffords. He never spoke of economic problems, anxiety, or immigration as having anything to do with what he did.

Cohen is a monumental liar!

He also fails to see any difference between conservatives, Christians, and Nazis, lumping them all together. Breivik is a Nazi, a believer in a socialist utopia under nationalistic principles rather than international. Nationalism itself is not patriotism, and comes from the same roots as the French Revolution ie Rousseau. It was Rousseau who advocated elevating the nation to the level of a church, of making the State god and worshipping the nation as a way to channel religious beliefs into what he considered more "positive" directions. It was this concept of Nationalism - a concept very worrisome to the "right wing" of the 19th century - that filtered down to Hitler, Rosenberg, and the rest via the German philosophers. It is no more conservative than the Sexual Revolution.

And it is not Christian in any way. Christ taught to love one's enemy, to do good to others, to not kill. If the intent is to restore a Christian Europe then that would be antithetical to Breivik's murdering. Cohen may be a Jew, but he still should know this - or he should keep his mouth shut. Mischaracterizing an entire religion to smear it is precisely what the authors of the Protocals of the Elders of Zion had done. Cohen is as shameful - and frankly evil - as they.

Take notice of Cohen's tirade against those who disagree with him:

"Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam."

End excerpt.

So now Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Newt Gingrich, Peter King are all the equivalent of Breivik and Osama Bin Laden; monsters itching to kill! kill! kill! Subhuman brutes on the verge of genocide. And any attempt to defend ourselves is an act of aggression against a harmless people who just happen to cut off heads, blow up pizza parlors and airplanes, etc. No! The real villains are those E-VIL right wingers who say "you will not destroy us".

When Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Kennedy there was a concerted effort at revisionism to claim that right-wingers were behind the plot. Yet that didn't happen when Ronald Reagan was shot; John Hinckley Jr. was rightly described as a nut. The Left tried to pin conservatism on Timothy McVie as well, and he turned out to be a Nazi and pretty much to the left. When a man flew his plane into the IRS building in Texas they quickly moved to claim he was a Tea Partier, then it turned out he was strongly liberal. This has been an ongoing effort by the Left to smear opponents.

In point of fact, most violence comes from the Left, yet those in the media rarely report it as such, while the most innocuous of things involving anyone remotely to the Right are reported as acts of terrorism. Remember the Missouri Fusion Center report? http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/missouri_police_given_chilling.html Remember the DHS report warning of "conservative terrorists", people like returning veterans, Christians, pro-lifers, etc.? There has been an ongoing effort to demonize good, normal Americans.

And the despicable Roger Cohen has shown just what kind of man he is; he has gone beyond shameless here. This is a blood libel.

The genesis of the Nazi Party occured in Russia, where a visiting young man named Alfred Rosenberg discovered a (planted by the Tsar's Secret Police) copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a rewriting of a French work attacking Napoleon III, but changed to accuse Jews of every form of evil.
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm

The Protocals were monstrous lies - a blood libel - and led eventually to Kristelnacht and the Ovens. What Roger Cohen is doing here is not much different.

A half-hearted apology is not acceptable at this time; the man must at least lose his job. He is obscene!

World Trade Center Tales - Ten Years After

Jack Kemp

In researching a possible second 9/11 movie, and coming up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I read some interesting and informative accounts of what happened. I am reluctant to go into a lot of facts and stories that are more technical, but I felt compelled to mention two dramatic tales.

The Phantom Phone Calls

Days after the Twin Towers fell, relatives of victims were getting phone calls from loved ones saying they were alive. One teenage girl contacted the NY Port Authority Police requesting that they go to a site of a bar and breakfast food stand in the underground mall where her father said he was located. Unknown to both the girl - and the Port Authority Police at the time - is that the flood of cell phone calls going both into and out of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 resulted in an overload that got the calls transferred to computer storage at the cell phone company. Over the course of days, the backed up calls were parceled out to a diminished capacity system. The teenage girl had, in fact, gotten a two day old phone call from a father who was probably deceased.

The Port Authority Police, familiar with the shops underneath the entire Trade Center, climbed down into the area with high powered flashlights, over jagged metal and near openings that could lead to a four story drop. They found the breakfast stand in the bar in fine condition, its bottles covered with thick dust but unbroken - yet there were no people in the place. This is the result of a phenomenon of physics called a "shock cocoon" where some areas are relatively untouched by great force. This is why we have skeletons - and wine bottles - found at Pompei after the Mt. Vesuvius volcano exploded in 79 A.D. Had the girl's father stayed in the bar, he may well have survived 9/11. But now the Police couldn't make that happy call and had to tell her they couldn't find him.

Before leaving, the Port Authority Police decided that the rows of dust covered but intact liquor bottles behind the bar were too tempting an invitation for recovery workers to get drunk in a very dangerous underground place full of sharp metal and open voids. They started smashing the bottles against a far wall. The more they smashed, the more they let out their frustrations over what they had seen those two days and what they'd soon have to tell the teenage girl on the phone.

King Solomon's Decision at Ground Zero

At one point, the night commander of the Port Authority Police, Lt. William Keegan, Jr., was forced to make a decision for real that King Solomon only "made" as a bluff when he decreed that a live baby should be cut in two to "satisfy" two competing women's claim of motherhood.

Rescue workers had found the bodies of two Port Authority Police Officers wedged near the surface with a dangerous steel beam overhang that had to be quickly removed. It looked like there was no other way to get the bodies out but to cut off their lower halves, leaving the grieving families without even a head and chest to view in a coffin at their funerals. Reluctantly, Lt. Keegan was forced to agree that if there was no other way, he would agree to the cutting.

But two volunteer rescue teams working seperately on the two bodies, were able to dislodge them whole from the rubble. The teams were volunteers from San Diego and Miami, each one having a surgeon as a member. Covered with blood from incisions made to release bloating, the surgeons' hard work was able to avoid a real Wisdom-of-Solomon-type decree from becoming a horrid reality.

The Real Racists

This from the Federalist Patriot:

"Black U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, says 'the minority community' blames racism for the Republican refusal to increase the debt limit without conditions. ... [S]he took to the House floor with the subtlety of a woodchipper: '(O)nly this president ... only this one, has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work, only this one. Read between the lines.' ... [Q]uestioning Obama's costly government takeover of health care, his failed $800 billion 'stimulus' plan and the over $4 trillion in new debt equals racism. Lee says she speaks on behalf of the 'minority community.' Would this be the minority community with 16.2 percent black unemployment, up from 12.6 percent in the two-and-a-half years of the Obama administration? In what category does Lee place black House members like Allen West, R-Fla., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., who also oppose Obama's agenda? Are they anti-black black racists -- or black anti-black racists? ... It isn't the color of [Obama's] skin -- it is the complete and total rejection of his policies."

Larry Elder

A Tale of Two Redistrictings

Timothy Birdnow

One of the tricks employed by the Democrats is to accuse the opposition of that which they are guilty. We see this year in and year out, with the Democrats claiming Republicans are disenfranchising voters while they themselves manufacture tens of thousands of false votes http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/25349. We see this in their fornication with Wall Street companies (like GE, Goldman Sachs) while claiming it is the Republicans who represent "big business" and "the wealthy". (Strangely, Congressional Democrats are wealthier than GOP members. http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/democrats-party-rich )

Recently, Democrats in Wisconsin have exploded over redistricting plans by the GOP-controlled state Congress. They claim the GOP has gerrymandered the state map so they can never have a Democrat elected again! They have gone to court (a friendly court, as is their custom) to bar this terrible power grab by their evil governor Scott Walker and the state GOP.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/125988098.html?page=1

In fact, GOP legislators have been receiving death threats. http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/article/20110311/WDH0101/303110067/18-Republican-senators-from-Wisconsin-report-getting-death-threats-after-passing-bill-end-collective-bargaining-most-public-workers

But is this really what they claim?

According to the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/125988098.html?page=1

"Under the legislation, Democrats have little chance of attaining and retaining a majority in either the Senate or the Assembly, or in the congressional delegation, giving them little ability to overcome minority status at any point over the next decade," the lawsuit argues.

[...]

The lawsuit, filed against the state Government Accountability Board, which runs state elections, seeks an injunction preventing elections from being conducted under the new boundaries. The suit also asks a panel of three judges to draw its own lines if the Legislature cannot draw valid ones.

The filing takes issue with how minorities are treated in the maps. Milwaukee could have seven Assembly districts with African-American majorities, but is provided only six, the lawsuit says.

[...]

The lawsuit also says the maps violate requirements that districts be compact and follow county, municipal and ward lines to the extent possible. It notes, for example, that Beloit has traditionally been in one Assembly district and one Senate district but would now be split into two of each."

End excerpts.

Oh?

According to Moe Lane at Real Clear Politics:

http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2011/07/10/the-wisconsin-redistricting-maps-are-out/

"As was reported last month, this new map will primarily buttress freshman Republican Sean Duffy in WI-07, mostly by sending over Democratic-voting areas over to Democrat Ron Kind in WI-03. Mind you Kind doesn’t need them, although you’d never know that from his bawling on cue like a stuck calf about this. Including some shouting about ‘bipartisanship’…

Ahem. Death. Threats.

…which would be funny if it wasn’t actually offensive in this context. This map will probably be adopted: the GOP was careful to preserve that federally-mandated racial gerrymander in WI-04; none of the existing Democrats are actually getting targeted; and the GOP controls the redistricting process. What’s that I hear? “For right now?” Yes, let’s talk about the state legislature redistricting process. Here’s where the gutter war really heats up.

Link via Ann Althouse: the short version is that the state Republican party is not only gearing up to pass a redistricting map that will have significant impact on the recall elections*; it’s also planning two pieces of legislation that will uncouple the redistricting process from having to wait on local municipalities to redraw their ward lines (read: eliminates a likely Democratic delaying tactic) and reform/fast-track the map appeal process in the state courts (read: eliminates a likely Democratic delaying tactic). The Democrats are, predictably, starting just now to scream about this – but, if one of the commenters to that particular link is correct, then the state GOP very carefully followed federal racial gerrymandering guidelines on the state legislative level, too, thus neatly eliminating the most likely avenue for a successful court challenge**. And absent a successful court challenge, the map is inevitable. More to the point, it’s inevitable in the short term; this may be all resolved before the bulk of the primary phase of the recall election process is quite finished. Which is almost certainly one reason why the GOP made sure in the first place that almost all of the races involved had primary challengers on one side or the other.

Bottom line: we have an extremely motivated state Republican party out there in Wisconsin; one with a definite sense of determination and an uncritical willingness to get on with business and not particularly care what people say about it. Then again, if threatening people’s families doesn’t work as an intimidation tactic the first time…"

End excerpt.

Go to the Real Clear Politics website and look at the redistricting map. The changes are not apparent to the eye unless one is looking for them.

Now, look at what they Democrats have done in neighboring Illinois:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/illinois-redistricting-de_n_869342.html

Eldridge Gerry was a piker next to the Illinois Democrats; this new map looks like snake pit, with long serpentine districts or dragon-shaped horros carved out of GOP districts. The Democrats are the ones trying to disenfranchise those who do not agree with them.

All of the new districts contain panhandles, bootheels, and crazy appendages. Look at Chicago in particular; it looks like a mass of intestines.

Any rational comparison of the two maps shows who the partisans really are; the Wisconsin map is drawn in largely smooth circles while Illinois looks like an earthworm colony on LSD.

Just more proof of what criminal liars those on Left have become. And how power is all they care about. And more proof that the mainstream media is the engine that drives liberalism; with competent and honest media coverage the nation would be shocked at these differences.

This is more than a gentlemen's disagreement with these people; this is a political war of extermination. The sooner our side realizes it the better.

Thanks to Mike W.

Dimming Liberty's Torch

Timothy Birdnow

The DOE has hired an ad firm to stump for energy-saver light bulbs.
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/172281-energy-department-touts-efficient-light-bulbs-in-new-ad-campaign

From the article:

"The campaign comes as conservative groups have launched an attack on provisions in a 2007 energy law that require traditional incandescent light bulbs to be more efficient. Republicans, led by Rush Limbaugh and others, have blasted the light bulb efficiency standards as an example of federal overreach, arguing that they limit consumer choice."

End excerpt.

Notice the attempt to say it is Rush Limbaugh leading the GOP. Also notice that they say the argument is about consumer choice, and no other reason is given. It should be pointed out that a free society does not regulate things unless they pose a direct danger to the public. This should be an argument about freedom versus paternalism. This is the same thinking that has been employed by every tyrant and dictator in history. The Russian Tsar saw himself as the father of his people, and were he around today would likely impose such a regulation. Free people make these decisions, not governments.

But there are other arguments against these things. They put out less light. They are far more expensive. They pose a hazardous waste risk if they break, requiring a hazmat team to do cleanup. The government regulates the amount of mercury a person can be exposed to, yet they are going to require dangerous, mercury-filled devices be put into every home. Thermostats must be digital these days to avoid the off-chance of the mercury in them spilling, but light bulbs...

And depression can result from low light levels; it is a notorious problem in northern areas where long winter nights lead to depression and suicide, and now we are going to impose low light levels on the public at large. Depression is already at epidemic levels.

The article also states:

"The average household can save $50 a year by switching 15 traditional incandescent light bulbs to more efficient ones, DOE says."

End excerpt.

Hmmm. Really?

Sure you can save some money on energy, but it costs you even more to replace your 50 cent bulb with a five buck CFL. It costs even more if you go with LED (around $25 dollars a bulb). Replace all 15 bulbs with CFL's and you are talking about $60 - a loss of ten bucks. But it doesn't stop there. These bulbs were originally advertised as lasting for several years but it is now said that they last at most a year. I get only slightly less out of my Edison bulbs, and then I can cushion dive my couch for a replacement. It's going to get DARK for poor people before payday; those bulbs are no longer cheap afterthoughts.

And they put out dimmer light. As a result, instead of getting enough light from your overhead fixture you are going to have to add a lamp, and so your costs increase. Granted, you probably still come out ahead on energy costs, but at what price? You now have TWO lights running instead of one, and they are both dim. Your eyes bother you. You find it hard to read.

In the end you lose money.

And God help you if you break the damned thing!

The whole notion of CFL's is predicated on the theory that you will bring prices down if everyone has to buy. It's the same reasoning employed by Obama and the Democrats on their Obamascare scheme; force people to accept it and it will get cheaper due to lack of competition. Or, uh, does that make it more expensive? No, wait, cheaper because of higher demand. Like the Chevy Volt; new CAFE standards could drive the price of gas-powered cars to beyond the volt costs, then people will have to drive the golf carts to be able to afford to drive at all (their car loans will be bigger than their mortgages). Perhaps we can establish a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for car loans? Bring the government into "affordable driving" schemes. Siphon money off for Democrat re-election campaigns and securitize those loans. Create a driving bubble...

If anyone wanted an electric car, if there was a real demand for them, they would have been developed. There is no real demand for them, and there is no real demand for CFL's. Governments can create an artificial demand, but that always recoils in hideous ways. The consumer is hurt in the end. Consider low-flow toilets; government banned the five gallon toilet, and sewage systems nationwide are backing up. There was no demand for low-flow toilets; they exist solely by government decree. And they do not work as well. Engineers knew what they were doing when they decreed five gallons was required to flush a toilet properly.

But the point was, and always has been, control of the public. Force the public into a straightjacket of regulation and intervention. Get the average citizen used to the idea that government can and should tell us how to live, how to work, how to exist. Make people believe they are children of Obama-the-Most-Benevolent. Make Americans into a permanent adolescent class, dependent on the good shephards in our intelligentsia.

There is a reason why the Statue of Liberty holds a torch; light is the necessary ingredient for freedom. Unfortunately, our government is working dilligently to darken our way.

Not Evil Just Wrong (Well, Maybe Evil)

Timothy Birdnow

Here are a few posts by Dr. Roy Spencer that demolish the IPCC and the alarmist vision of Anthropogenic Global Warming:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/modeled-ocean-temperatures-from-1880-through-2010/

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/oh-the-insensitivity-more-on-ocean-warming-1955-2010/

Spencer shows that the IPCC has grossly overexaggerated climate sensitivity and that the thermogeddon predicted is just bunk.

From the second article:

The evidence for anthropogenic global warming being a false alarm does not get much more convincing than this, folks.

Using a combination of the GISS-assumed external forcings for long-term temperature changes, and an El Nino/La Nina internal forcing term for year-to-year variability, a simple Forcing-Feedback-Diffusion (FFD) model explains 90% of the variance in ocean heat content variations in the surface-to-50 meter depth layer since 1955 (click for full-size version):

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/FFD-model-fit-top-layer-1955-2010.gif

The dashed lines are 3rd order polynomial fits; I have included a small offset between the model and observation data so you can see those trend curves, otherwise they would lie on top of each other. Note that the model captures the lack of warming since about 2003.

End excerpt.

This IS convincing; be sure to read the whole thing!

It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-just-heat-wave.html

Plimer's "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science" Condensed

William Kay has a great new piece at Ecofascism. Don't miss it!

http://www.ecofascism.com/

Ian Plimer is a world-class geologist with a successful career in mining and academia. The author of 120 scientific papers and seven books, Plimer has earned many commendations including two of Australia’s top scientific awards. His 493-pageHeaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science (1) demolishes the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. What follows is an attempt to lathe this text down to its 7,500-word filament.
Table of Contents
Intro
Paleoclimatology 101
Mann-made Warming
Real Climate Drivers
Melting Scare Meltdown
Extinction Fears Extinguished
Much Ado about CO2
Degrees of Uncertainty
Consensusology 101
Afterword

Yeah; He's THAT Guy!

Dana Mathewson forwards this:

We've Figured Him Out

By Ben Stein

Why was President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized medicine bill passed? Because he and his cunning circle realize some basic truths:

The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a pig in a poke in 2008.
(Pig in a poke means: an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted without being examined first. A poke means sack.)

They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith.

They ignored his anti-white writings in his books.

They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes by his minister, Jeremiah Wright.

They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a student.

They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois state legislator, and Senator.

The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being touted as a scholar.

Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack Obama is a super likeable super leftist, and not a fan of this country.

The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat interest groups, and in no way helped all Americans.

The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health costs while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of something that never was and never can be --
"a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society." Either the costs go up or the free society goes away... an historical truth.

These are perilous times. Mrs. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, has given Iran the go-ahead to have nuclear weapons, an unqualified betrayal of the nation. Now, we face a devastating loss of freedom at home in health care. It will be joined by controls on our lives to "protect us" from global warming, itself largely a fraud, if believed to be caused by man. She has also signed on to a Small Firearms Treaty at the U.N. This is a back door gun control move. This is approved by the Senate and a 2nd Amendment majority doesn't exist in the Senate now. It will supersede all U.S. Law and the 2nd Amendment. All citizen possession will be eliminated through confiscation. Just Like Great Britain and Australia .

Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays at all in taking away our freedoms. There is his urgency and our opportunity. Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America

Rewritting History and Biased Reviews

Timothy Birdnow

My brother Brian - who is fighting an endless, one man war against one of the most sophomoric and biased rags in the country (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) patched me in to a tiff with their movie critic about his review of Captain America. I reproduce it here with my own e-mail to Brian (which will get back to Joe Williams) at the end.

Here she blows!

Dear Mr. Williams,

In your column reviewing the new "Captain America" movie you cite the flick as stylish, spectacular, and embodying American values. You hasten to add that the America celebrated in the movie :...is not the flag-waving aggressor that's been masquerading as Uncle Sam for the last decade." What decade are you talking about? Is it , perhaps, the 1960s? Are you talking about Viet Nam? Do you take President Kennedy and his liberal wonderboys to task here? I think not. We know where you're coming from, but, I don't think you were leading any cheers against American "hegomonism" when President Clinton ordered seventy-eight days of bombing in Serbia, either. It depends on who is calling the shots, doesn't it!

With Kindest Regards,
Brian E. Birdnow

Mr. Williams replies:

Hello Brian,

In my adult life I have decried wars of aggression whenever and wherever they have occurred. Were I old enough, I would have marched against the unjust and unprovoked war in Vietnam. Officially, however, and in contrast to Iraq, the U.S. was invited there. In my (considerably educated) opinion, one reason JFK was killed was because he wanted to end the low-level police action in Vietnam. Within days of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson--a Democrat but nobody's idea of a liberal--reversed JFK's draw-down order. He made his corporate backers, such as Brown & Root (a predecessor of Halliburton), rich with defense contracts. As you surely know, under his Republican successor, the mass slaughter of civilians escalated. Henry Kissinger even had to talk him out dropping nuclear weapons on Hanoi.

My nephew served in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Fortunately for him and for our other brave soldiers, Pres. Clinton did not spill American blood or establish imperial rule in Yugoslavia. Clinton's successor was not nearly so judicious, sacrificing 4,000 American lives, one trillion American dollars and 100,000 Iraqi civilians to a supposedly honest mistake about WMDs. “Oops” does not suffice, and I will continue to denounce such un-American behavior whenever I review a movie that alludes to the justifications for war.

Best wishes,

Joe Williams

Brian made the following reply:

Hi Joe,

You know, of course, that the low level police action in Viet Nam escalated first under JFK. We had roughly 750 military men on the ground there in 1960. They instructed SVA personnel in counter-insurgency techniques. We had 17, 600 men, mostly combat troops, in South Vietnam in 1963. We also toppled a South Vietnamese leader in October of that year. This was the type of CIA excess that liberals usually decry.

Viet Nam was the liberals war. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the entire Viet Nam era and the same Democrats who engineered the Great Society funded the military intervention in Viet Nam. Kennedy, an avowed liberal, intensified the American commitment in Southeast Asia. His braintrust...men like Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, and his younger brother RFK were all certified liberals. We could talk, too, of liberalism's contributions to peace with regards to Cuba in 1961-63, as well.

Finally, I notice that you mention the Iraq conflict here, but say little about Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan the right war, as our President said in 2008? Were we correct in attempting to apprehend the perpetrators of 9/11 there in 2001? President Obama is guilty of the same shifting explanations and changing rationales for this war as was his GOP predecessor, but I hear no howls of outrage from yourself, and precious little from the PD editorial page.

Best Regards,
Brian Birdnow

And then this reply to Brian - and Joe Williams - from me:

Hi Brian,

I guess Joe Williams, in his "considerably educated opinion" doesn't remember that Johnson was the force behind the Great Society - as liberal a policy inititative as any America has ever seen. I guess he forgot the million plus refugees from North Vietnam in 1956 who fled the South, and I suppose he doesn't remember that we were asked into Vietnam by the South, which was actually the original government under Emperor Bao Dai. We came first as advisors. Kennedy, of course, escalated U.S. involvement, and Johnson brought us directly into the conflict. I suppose Mr. Williams considerably educated memory failed him there.

I wonder how Mr. Williams can back up the statement that Kennedy was killed for not escalating Vietnam. Strange; no mention was ever made of that by Lee Harvey Oswald. I suppose Mr. Williams would launch into some conspiracy theory that about the Military/Industrial complex, the CIA, and Colonel Sanders plotting to kill Kennedy. (Let's face it; that Sanders is EVIL!)

I guess the esteemed Mr. Williams also has considerably educated failure about Saddam Hussein using poison gas on the Kurds, and pretending he still had weapons. I suppose he forgot that every intelligence agency on Earth thought he still had them. I suppose he doesn't know that it should have been possible to find where those weapons were dismantled as easily as where they would be if still in existence. I suppose he doesn't know that we telegraphed the invasion with plenty of time for those weapons to be destroyed or moved. I guess they weren't a threat if you couldn't see them. Like typhoid. Nobody sees typhoid so nobody ever died of it!

I guess bombing from the stratosphere on people who never lifted a finger against US is great if it involves a Democrat President, but is terrible if it involves a Republican and U.S. interests. Oh, and you can call a Democrat a Republican and pretend he is some sort of Tea Party predecessor if you can't justify his actions. It must be an interesting way of life, to be a liberal film critic.

Film critic? I didn't know their job was to make political statements in reviewing films. Gee, I thought they were supposed to, oh, I don't know, talk about the film and not their personal opinions. No wonder the Post-Dispatch and other liberal news outlets are dying.

Tim

The Budget Debate in Song

Jack Kemp

What's happening is so outrageous and incomprehensible, like a game of chicken with Thelma and Louise as the opposing drivers, that I can only describe it in a song parody. And I believe the government will have to "bomb the budget deadline in order to save it."

The Great Big Spender
to the tune of "The Great Pretender"
as sung by Barack Obama

Oh, yes, I'm the Great Big Spender
Pretending that I'm doing well
My need is such
That I pretend too much
I'm driving
the country to Hell

Oh, yes, I'm the Great Big Spender
Adrift in my own I.O.U.s
I've played the game
Of giving Bush the blame
Everybody
Thinks I'm on the booze

You reel when I talk about Make Believe
My real worthless deal -
A joker up my sleeve

Oh, yes, I'm the Great Big Spender
Just laughing while you must stay home
I seem to be
What I'm not, you see
I'm wearing my job like a crown
Assuming you'll want the shakedown

You reel when I steal with my Make Believe
A TSA cop-a-feel -
I laugh up my sleeve

Oh, yes, I'm the Great Truth Bender
Just laughing on my private jet
I want you be
On line for your cheese
That don't come from Obama's stash
It comes from the last of our cash
Chorus: Of our caaa..sh

Left at the altar - or moving goal posts

Jack Kemp

Erica Johnsen, writing at TownHall.com makes a valiant effort to understand the Obama-Boehner "negotiations" - or is it "Dancing with the Stars?"

Here's a link and a quote:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/erikajohnsen/2011/07/22/no_deal,_because_obama_is_the_only_one_who_never_thinks_about_getting_reelected,_or_something

Yikes - apparently the President felt pretty miffed at that one, taking to the podium for an impromtu presser and telling reporters that he had once again been "left at the altar." Besides some more clever metaphors (truly, the President has a dizzying intellect!), Obama just offered up more of the usual tripe: Rich people need to share in the sacrifice of our runaway spending. Somebody, but not me, better put forth a good plan, or else. The American people just want fairness. We've run out of time. Nobody understands me. (Okay, he didn't say that last one, but his tone was so petulant, you know he was thinking it. Honestly, I think the President feels so mistreated he would rather sink this ship than let anybody else steer it.)

The President said he would be willing to sign a debt ceiling hike to carry us through to 2013, but hopes that Congress can accomplish something a bit closer to epic budgetary reform in the here and now. He sternly called upon Congressional leaders to meet at the White House at 11:00 a.m. Saturday morning - but if you don't bother to build a plan, will they come?

Hezbollah in Mexico

Timothy Birdnow

Hezbollah is partnering with Mexican drug cartels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0VuDfZoMYA

This puts a whole new spin on Operation Gun Runner/Fast and Furious; we have been arming a terrorist horde.

Terror Executions

Timothy Birdnow

Texas has executed a killer who murdered Muslim men at convenience stores after the 911 attacks.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/20/mark-stroman-executed_n_905292.html?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl3%7Csec1_lnk1%7C219514

Strange; a Google search didn't reveal how many Muslim terrorists we have executed. I suspect few. We seem more worried about protecting them than about protecting our own citizenry.

Now, I have no problem with this guy being executed; murder must be punished severely. I do have a problem with the numbers of terrorists we are holding without taking any real punative action. Why aren't we publicly executing these guys?

Because we are cowards - and the Islamic world knows it. What we pretend is mercy is really a politically-correct vision that it would appear mean to be executing brown, Third World peoples. And we fear reprisal. Now THAT reeks of cowardice, and the Islamic world understand how cowardly that really is. It engenders contempt for us.

You cannot win a war if the enemy does not feel beaten, yet we won't do what is necessary to beat the enemy. They have to fear you. Unfortunately, the way we have gone about this they are too busy laughing at us to fear us.

Does anybody have the numbers of terrorists executed in the U.S.? A Google search didn't turn anything up.

Impeachment Proceedings and the Art of War

Timothy Birdnow

"Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content."

- Sun Tzu

I'm all for a balanced budget amendment. I think we need one to hold spending to a loud roar (it's still going to be waaayy past a dull one) and it would be great if we would implement such an amendment. Unfortunately, I fear the notion that we will pass one as part of the debt ceiling imbroglio is daft.

Right now we need to concentrate on forcing Obama to send out social security checks and military pay. This man is fully intending to hold these for a week or so to bring wrath upon the GOP should he not get his way, and the House Republicans must take steps to prevent this - or make it obvious to the American People that it is Obama's choosing to take food from their mouths. This balanced budget idea is a concept whose time is yet to come; now is not the time, and it is simply going to be used as an example of the "unwillingness" to act soberly by the GOP.

I'm not alone in thinking this; Lawrence Hunter has a piece at Forbes making the same exact argument.
http://blogs.forbes.com/lawrencehunter/2011/07/17/its-time-for-the-republicans-to-play-budgetary-small-ball/#comments

As Mr. Hunter observes;

"Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is not the disaster; failing to raise the debt ceiling with a rogue president and no plan to preempt and constrain him is a disaster. We have a disaster in the making on our hands. Wake up, Republicans!"

End excerpt.

I fear he's right; this is indeed a disaster in the making. As Donald Trump observed, Republicans are the worst negotiators, and have repeatedly been caught with their pants down on this.

Rush Limbaugh understands how this should be done; he has argued that the GOP should be still and force the President to move. Obama has laid a trap for them, a trap that will split the party elites away from the Tea Party and thus split the Republican vote. The Tea Party will turn to the Libertarians, or the Constitution Party if the GOP caves, yet Boehner and his fellows will be hurt by moderates if they propose some foolish scheme that gives the President what he wants. Obama comes out looking like a winner, and like the adult. No, what Boehner should do is go play golf, quit meeting in private with Il Duce and point out that Congress gives the Executive Branch money but it is up to him to apportion how it is spent, so HE is the one who has to propose a realistic plan. Tax hikes are off the table. Obama himself said tax hikes would tank the economy not six months ago, and history shows clearly that it does; Republicans raised taxes in 1931, turning a fragile economic recovery into The Great Depression. They should be saying this very thing to the media. Say that this is what the President has to work with, and make him propose a budget. If he says he'll have to stop SS checks then you can howl to the public the truth; that he would rather pay his buddies in SEIU by taking the food out of the mouths of senior citizens. Many of those SEIU members are there because of the Stimulus anyway, money that should never have been spent.

But you have the McConnell types who are ready to capitulate to avoid being blamed, and that at the cost of losing the Tea Party. Foolish. You also have the types who still think this is ordinary politics, and that at the end of the day they can go to the pub and quaff a few hefeweizens with Bam and the boys. Those times are past. The time of the sunshine legislator is over; these are the times of storms, and the faint-hearted should return to their think-tanks and their media and academia jobs. But we must be wise.

And we must attack at Obama's weak flank, not "hey, diddle, diddle, straight through the middle" (as was said to be the invasion plan for Iraq in the First Gulf War.) This balanced budget amendment idea is clearly hey diddling.

No, it is time to be still, to force Obama to make the next moves.

Remember Psalms 46:10 "Be still, and know that I am The Lord".

Be Still and Know Obama Isn't the Lord

Timothy Birdnow

"Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content."

- Sun Tzu

I'm all for a balanced budget amendment. I think we need one to hold spending to a loud roar (it's still going to be waaayy past a dull one) and it would be great if we would implement such an amendment. Unfortunately, I fear the notion that we will pass one as part of the debt ceiling imbroglio is daft.

Right now we need to concentrate on forcing Obama to send out social security checks and military pay. This man is fully intending to hold these for a week or so to bring wrath upon the GOP should he not get his way, and the House Republicans must take steps to prevent this - or make it obvious to the American People that it is Obama's choosing to take food from their mouths. This balanced budget idea is a concept whose time is yet to come; now is not the time, and it is simply going to be used as an example of the "unwillingness" to act soberly by the GOP.

I'm not alone in thinking this; Lawrence Hunter has a piece at Forbes making the same exact argument.
http://blogs.forbes.com/lawrencehunter/2011/07/17/its-time-for-the-republicans-to-play-budgetary-small-ball/#comments

As Mr. Hunter observes;

"Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is not the disaster; failing to raise the debt ceiling with a rogue president and no plan to preempt and constrain him is a disaster. We have a disaster in the making on our hands. Wake up, Republicans!"

End excerpt.

I fear he's right; this is indeed a disaster in the making. As Donald Trump observed, Republicans are the worst negotiators, and have repeatedly been caught with their pants down on this.

Rush Limbaugh understands how this should be done; he has argued that the GOP should be still and force the President to move. Obama has laid a trap for them, a trap that will split the party elites away from the Tea Party and thus split the Republican vote. The Tea Party will turn to the Libertarians, or the Constitution Party if the GOP caves, yet Boehner and his fellows will be hurt by moderates if they propose some foolish scheme that gives the President what he wants. Obama comes out looking like a winner, and like the adult. No, what Boehner should do is go play golf, quit meeting in private with Il Duce and point out that Congress gives the Executive Branch money but it is up to him to apportion how it is spent, so HE is the one who has to propose a realistic plan. Tax hikes are off the table. Obama himself said tax hikes would tank the economy not six months ago, and history shows clearly that it does; Republicans raised taxes in 1931, turning a fragile economic recovery into The Great Depression. They should be saying this very thing to the media. Say that this is what the President has to work with, and make him propose a budget. If he says he'll have to stop SS checks then you can howl to the public the truth; that he would rather pay his buddies in SEIU by taking the food out of the mouths of senior citizens. Many of those SEIU members are there because of the Stimulus anyway, money that should never have been spent.

But you have the McConnell types who are ready to capitulate to avoid being blamed, and that at the cost of losing the Tea Party. Foolish. You also have the types who still think this is ordinary politics, and that at the end of the day they can go to the pub and quaff a few hefeweizens with Bam and the boys. Those times are past. The time of the sunshine legislator is over; these are the times of storms, and the faint-hearted should return to their think-tanks and their media and academia jobs. But we must be wise.

And we must attack at Obama's weak flank, not "hey, diddle, diddle, straight through the middle" (as was said to be the invasion plan for Iraq in the First Gulf War.) This balanced budget amendment idea is clearly hey diddling.

No, it is time to be still, to force Obama to make the next moves.

Remember Psalms 46:10 "Be still, and know that I am The Lord".

Where is the Social Security Lock Box?

Timothy Birdnow

This from the Ben Shapiro, courtesy of the Federalist Patriot:

"[P]resident Obama's statements that he may have to stop Social Security checks, veterans' checks and disability checks shows just how bankrupt our country is. If we literally don't have the cash to pay those checks out of our current stockpiles, how is borrowing more money going to cure the problem? ... By tacitly admitting that government benefit schemes are month-to-month, [Obama's] admitting that the underlying structure of these systems is not self-sustaining. That's a major shift for a man who, in August 2010, proclaimed, 'Social Security is not in crisis.' ... President Obama has now embraced a binary choice: either he can screw current taxpayers or he can screw past taxpayers. Those who depend on their Social Security check to pay the rent are now being asked to suffer a double burden: The burden of paying their original Social Security tax as well as the burden of forgoing their expected return. The alternative is asking those who currently pay taxes to suffer a double burden: paying a higher tax rate and then forgoing their check somewhere down the road."

End

Indeed! This shows Il Duce Obama has no intention of doing anything to pay down the debt. He wants to borrow to pay so that he may borrow again. If social security had a "lock box" as the Democrats have often claimed, why would it be affected by the debt ceiling? The money is supposed to already be set aside.

Because it has never been set aside, but has been spent as soon as it has come in. This is a way to encourage dependency, nothing more. It has been structured to look like an investment plan, but it has been just another tax with less returned to the public.

Obama is blackmailing the GOP with a thinly-veiled threat to withhold social security from the elderly and disabled. This is one of the most shameful acts in recent memory, and should be touted as such by the Republicans.

Herman Cain says communities should be able to prevent establishment of mosques

Dana Mathewson

And he defends his position very well, I believe. http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/nation/2011/07/herman-cain-communities-have-right-ban-mosques

". . . Islam is both religion and (a) set of laws, Shariah law. That's the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it's just about religious purposes."

Naturally, the CAIR spokesman disagrees and says Cain's statement is unconstitutional. However, somebody (wish I could remember his name) said some time ago that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."

The Obama War with EastAsia

Timothy Birdnow

Judicial Watch has uncovered documents proving that the Obama Administration actively blacklisted Fox News.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/07/judicial-watch-uncovers-documents-prove-white-house-press-office-

To their credit, the other news outlets - the Liberal outlets - protested one action taken to keep Fox from covering an event.

The sad fact is that the Left demands total media access on all occasions in the interest of the "public's right to know" yet many on the Left have no problem with censoring news sources unfriendly to their particular agenda. Consider the endless efforts at reimposing the "Fairness Doctrine" and "Net Neutrality", efforts designed to force Conservative bloggers and citizen journalists from the field. Consider the legal attacks on James O'Keefe for exposing Planned Parenthood and ACORN, or the constant assaults on Andrew Breitbart.

No, most of those on the Left view truth as a moldable commodity, and through repetition of their own views they can MAKE reality what they want it to be. What they cannot tolerate is a strong dissenting voice.

George Orwell said it best in his novel 1984;

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"

End excerpt.

And it is this viewpoint that keeps the Left engaged in all manner of things. The sillier things "visualize World Peace" for example, or the "Coexist" bumper stickers may be laughable, but other concepts aren't so funny; cultural relativism, for instance, which puts cultures such as the Islamic World not just on an equal footing with our own but actually elevates them to higher status, despite being morally evil in many ways. How about the concept that everyone has their own reality and we cannot understand another's fully so we cannot judge? That one emerged back in the '80's and it said that judgementalism was the only moral evil, so anything, no matter how detestable, should be tolerated. They called it "tolerance" which meant excusing bad behavior. No wonder we had a terrible crime problem in the 1990's.

White guilt is a triumph of liberal thought; the notion that whites are the root of all evil. The wealthy white liberals are infected with this bad idea, and many of them detest who they are, and indeed the whole country as some sort of evil when in fact that has never been the case.

These things would have remained ivory-tower parlor games had it not been for a leftist media eager to promote them to the general public. With media pressure they ended up the the schools, being taught to innocent minds who would then accept it as reality. These are not reality; they are lies. But these lies were built and are constantly reinforced by the leftist media.

And the key to this game is to maintain a blackout of opposing views. Everyone has to hear only their side or the "concensus" falls apart - like the "concensus" for global warming has collapsed. It never would have without the internet, talk radio, and a few Conservative news outlets.

So Obama tries to marginalize his critics. It's no surprise; he not only loves Big Brother, he seeks to emulate him!

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Sunday, July 31, 2011