Obama Supported release of Lockerbie Bomber

Nothing this lying, incompetent, socialist fool who now occupies the White House does would surprise me. Let's not forget Obama also declined to prosecute the murderers who bombed the USS Cole, and that his head of NASA believes the main purpose of NASA is to soothe Muslim feelings. Is the main obejective of US policy under Obama to promote the cause of Muslims?

White House backed release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi

July 26, 2010 : The Australian

THE US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be "far preferable" to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya.

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama's claim last week that all Americans were "surprised, disappointed and angry" to learn of Megrahi's release.

Scottish ministers viewed the level of US resistance to compassionate release as "half-hearted" and a sign it would be accepted.

The US has tried to keep the letter secret, refusing to give permission to the Scottish authorities to publish it on the grounds it would prevent future "frank and open communications" with other governments.

In the letter, sent on August 12 last year to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and justice officials, Mr LeBaron wrote that the US wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime.

The note added: "Nevertheless, if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose."

Mr LeBaron added that freeing the bomber and making him live in Scotland "would mitigate a number of the strong concerns we have expressed with regard to Megrahi's release".

The US administration lobbied the Scottish government more strongly against sending Megrahi home, under a prisoner transfer agreement signed by the British and Libyan governments, in a deal now known to have been linked to a pound stg. 550 million oil contract for BP.

It claimed this would flout a decade-old agreement between Britain and the US that anyone convicted of the bombing would serve their sentence in a Scottish prison. Megrahi was released by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on the grounds that he had three months to live, making his sentence effectively spent.

The US Senate foreign relations committee launched a probe after The Sunday Times revealed this month that Megrahi's doctors thought he could live for another decade.
A source close to the Senate inquiry said: "The (LeBaron) letter is embarrassing for the US because it shows they were much less opposed to compassionate release than prisoner transfer."

Last week, a succession of British politicians - including Mr MacAskill, Mr Salmond and former justice secretary Jack Straw - delivered a diplomatic snub to the senators by refusing to fly across the Atlantic to answer questions at the Senate's hearing on Thursday (US time) about their role in Megrahi's release.

Despite the controversy over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Megrahi's release, it emerged over the weekend that BP is planning deep-water drilling off Libya.

And BP boss Tony Hayward is poised to quit this week when the company announces its half-year results, London's Sunday Telegraph reported.

Sometimes There Really Is A Conspiracy

I thought for sure at the time that the disclosure of Rev. Wright’s many ranting comments on how much he hated America in general and whites in particular would sink the Obama candidacy as these comments became known – along with the fact that Obama sat there and listened to them for 20 years. At about the same time Obama’s association with the terrorist bomber, William Ayers, also became known, as did Obama’s refusal to salute our flag.

What I failed to realize, however, was that I got my news from Fox News, the internet, and talk radio. The people who watched the main networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN – and who read the NY Times and other liberal newspapers for their news – got to see very little of these outrages

The Vast Left-Wing Journalists' Conspiracy

John Hinderaker July 20, 2010 powerlineblog.com

Did you ever wonder why the Rev. Jeremiah Wright disappeared from the news once it appeared that Barack Obama's relationship with him posed a serious problem for his campaign? We now know at least part of the answer, courtesy of Journolist: a cabal of left-wing journalists urged one another to suppress the story. This has been all over the news today, but we would be remiss if we didn't note it. The Daily Caller has the story; the main thrust is the consensus among the liberal journalists represented on Journolist to ignore the Wright story and do their best to deflect attention from it, while attacking the journalists who brought the story forward:

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama's conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

If you ever wondered whether this is a conscious, cynical strategy of the Left, wonder no more. You may also wonder whether liberals ever get tired of the hypocritical poses their ideology forces on them. At least one Journolist member did:
Katha Pollitt - Hayes's colleague at the Nation - didn't disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. "I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita," Pollitt said.

"Part of me doesn't like this shit either," agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. "But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals."

So there you have it: it's ugly, just as ugly as you probably always suspected. Maybe worse. I would add this observation: Journolist members were mostly dedicated left-wingers, and represent only a small fraction of "mainstream" reporters and commentators. But it seems reasonable to believe that what they were willing to say out loud, more or less in public--that the Wright story should be suppressed so that Barack Obama's Presidential chances would not be damaged--was what a great many liberal reporters, editors and commentators thought to themselves, and acted upon.

BP, the Oil Spill and Al Megrahi

As outraged as I am over the Gulf oil spill, over BP’s carelessness and also over the deliberate dragging of its feet by the Obama Administration; if it should turn out that BP was behind the release of al Megrahi, I would not rest easy until BP was put out of business. Al Megrahi is the Libyan who was convicted of the Pan American bombing over Lockerbie, England that killed 270 people – mostly Americans. Megrahi was released from prison a year ago because he supposedly had only three months to live. Today he is still alive and appears healthy.

To see a CBS video on this, go here

The Al-Megrahi release: Blood & oil

Saturday, July 17, 2010 Pittsburgh Tribune

The fact that BP lobbied the British government for a Libyan prisoner swap adds an even darker murkiness to the mockery of last year's "compassionate" release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber.

British officials this week acknowledged the "mistake" but insist that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi's liberation last August had nothing to do with BP's big deal.

It's all just a shocking coincidence?

Mr. Al-Megrahi was let free after a preposterous prognosis that his cancer gave him only three months to live. Miraculously his life expectancy now has been extended up to 10 years.

When some U.S. senators asked what gives, the Scottish government gave nothing. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a July 29 hearing into the BP-al-Megrahi nexus. And the U.S. State Department should demand an explanation from the British government.

Freed from justice was the only Libyan ever convicted of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the deaths of 270 people -- mostly Americans including four Southwestern Pennsylvanians. He served only eight years.

Days after al-Megrahi's release oily BP inked a Libyan drilling contract that could net $20 billion.

Innocent blood and oil. Britain can't wipe its hands of either until it comes clean on al-Megrahi's release and returns him to a prison cell.

A Look Back at a Pre-Obama Posting

Now that we have had some actual experience with an Obama presidency, it may be interesting to look back and see what we thought, early in the campaign, would be forthcoming. We had no idea just how bad it would be. We are in the midst of being overwhelmed, on a daily basis, by mind-boggling incompetence and by the imposition of failed, socialist policies by people who hate this country. This article was first published on February 27, 2008:

The Age Old Struggle Between Winners And Losers

Winners work and save and plan – and somehow manage to overcome the vagaries and pitfalls of life; losers do not. Through bad luck or a lack of discipline, losers fall through the cracks.

Throughout the ages there have always been winners and losers, and there have always been hugely more losers than winners. Dictators have used this to focus the hatred of the losers on scapegoats to gain and keep power – Hitler and the Jews; Mugabe and the white farmers; Stalin and the bourgeois farmers, for example. In democracies, political opportunists scapegoat the winners to gain power – usually by offering the losers the keys to the public treasury.

From their knowledge of history and of the downfall of almost all democracies, our Founding Fathers set up a system of checks and balances – the basic intent of which was to slow down the impulses of the mob, always incited by the opportunists and the demagogues. The electoral college, the two-thirds vote needed to override a presidential veto, the longer terms of senators (who originally were appointed), the life tenure of Supreme Court Justices – these are some of the devices put in place to ensure the survival of the American democracy.

It’s easy for the demagogues to scapegoat the winners and gain power from the losers - after all, they say, the winners wouldn’t be winners if they weren’t corrupt or born with silver spoons in their mouths. Besides, it just isn’t fair that some people have so much more than others. The scapegoating and the attacks on the treasury always come from the left.

Over the past 50 years, Lyndon Johnson not only greatly escalated the Vietnam War (after the “daisy” ad), but empowered liberals to embark on the “Great Society”, the greatest boondoggle in history. George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey tried and failed, but in 1976 we got the worst president in modern times (misery index of 23%, loss of Iran), Jimmy Carter. We escaped Carter after one term, and Ronald Reagan set many things right, but demagoguery won out again in 1992, followed by the largest tax increase of all time, the besmirching of the American Presidency and 9/11.

We are hearing the message of the demagogue once again in Barack Obama, once again promising to turn over the keys to the Treasury to the losers, but substantially raising the stakes by offering those keys to the entire world (the Global Tax). Since he says little of substance, since his followers act like his movement is a religion and since he is an African-American, exposing and defeating him and his message will be hard to do.

In the past there have been some very real instances where liberal movements have had merit – evil can exist in winners as well as in losers, and evil winners can create great harm from their positions of power and their organizational talents. The oil monopolies had to be broken, coal mines had to be made to restore the plundered earth, a balance of power was needed between labor and ownership, and those willing to sell poisons to people for gain had to be stopped. These necessary movements came from the forces of the left, and were beneficial to all.

This is not one of those times.

Well What Do You Know! Sarah Palin Was Right About Darth Vader

It’s getting tiresome that every time someone points out an Obama lie or that an act of the Obama Administration is socialist or against the law, the minions jump on TV to pooh-pooh the assertion and then try to destroy the reputation of the whistle-blower. Look at what is happening right now to the reputation of J. Christian Adams, the career Justice Dept. attorney who resigned because charges were dropped against the Black Panthers.

Similarly, all those (including Sarah Palin) who try to point out that Obamacare includes rationing of services to seniors (some will die because of rationing – hence “Death Panels”) are subjected to intense character assassination.

With the appointment by Obama of Donald Berwick to head up Medicare and Medicaid (without a confirmation hearing as required), the wraps are off as the leading proponent of redistributing wealth through the healthcare system and of limiting care to the elderly is now in charge of the government health system.

Sarah Palin Outs Darth Vader

By Stuart Schwartz July 12, 2010 American Thinker

Darth Vader is out of the closet...and we have Sarah Palin to thank.

The intrepid crusader from the north cut to the heart of Obamacare a year ago, slashing through the professor-speak and government gobbledygook with a searing summary on Facebook of its bottom line: "death panels." With those words, the grounds for debate had shifted, the mainstream media ideological blackout was circumvented, and now, although it may have been Obama's new head of Medicare, Harvard's Dr. Donald Berwick, who stepped on the shuttle at Boston's Logan International Airport, it is Darth Vader who has exited at Reagan National.

Darth Vader -- really? The man responsible for the death of a gazillion inhabited worlds, through whom the evil Emperor Palpatine -- described as " a middle-aged politician ... who gains power through deception and treachery"...sound familiar? -- sought to enslave the universe in the fictional Star Wars saga? Surely, an exaggeration! Yes, and deliberately so, for Berwick starts off his gig as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid as an enthusiastic proponent of, as one British media commentator noted, a system that routinely denies "some poor suffering victim a remedy that is available in other countries." At the same time, it views the elderly as simply less worthy of care, an expendable segment of the population for whom doctors and heart specialists provide less treatment past the official "cut-off" of 65 years, a British health research journal documented.

Palin's column on death panels ignited a firestorm of elite media and beltway criticism. Once, that would have been enough to shut down debate, for the broadcast networks and newspapers controlled information -- we knew only what they wanted us to know. Suddenly, the new media (including the site you're now reading) provided reality, and the Tea Parties and Republican Party followed. And now Darth Vader has become a metaphor, a figure of speech signifying that the coming of Harvard's Berwick represents the same thing to the average American that the arrival of the Death Star, the spaceship used to destroy planets, meant for entire populations. All of a sudden, life-and-death decisions are out of our hands, resting with a government determined to control every waking moment of our lives.

As Investors Business Daily headlined, "The President's One-Man Death Panel" has arrived. Berwick has come to Washington to play Vader to Obama's Emperor Palpatine. The Harvard health specialist's job is to transform Medicare, to make the primary medical insurance system for seniors into an instrument of social policy, to take wealth and years from seniors and redistribute them to favored segments of the population. This is not about health care, and it is especially not about seniors; rather, it is all about the social engineering.

Sarah Palin was right, stubbornly hanging in when the mainstream media -- sensing "a great disturbance in the [leftist] force" -- trained its batteries on her. She was ridiculed on network newscasts, in the White House briefing room, by the media "stormtroopers [who] represented the most visible extension of Imperial [Obama] might." Darth Vader and Star Wars serve as metaphor, Palin as Princess Leia, while network anchors, commentator after commentator, all the president's men showered ridicule on her. "Downright evil," screamed Keith Olbermann; "stupid as s**t," proclaimed a popular Democratic blog.

But she persevered, and the truth emerged. The president and his congressional allies were forcing a crazy quilt of statist bureaucracies, socialist dysfunctions, and authoritarian controls. Each day brought more revelations as Tea Party activists, Republican staffers, ordinary citizens, and new media combed through Obamacare legislation. Sarah Palin was right. Popular radio host Mark Levin put it best: "Sarah Palin's not scary. You know who is? Barack Hussein Obama."

Reality had settled in, so much so that the president circumvented the public legislative process and made a recess appointment of Berwick. He hoped to avoid discussion of the views of the Harvard leftist, who, the New York Post pointed out, is a "fervent ideologue [who] puts social engineering ahead of the individual patient's needs." The Berwick view: Good health care must take from the wealthy and the well, the seniors and those less desired by society, and "redistribute" so as to achieve a "just, equitable, civilized and humane" republic of the people.

Berwick is part of a university health policy establishment that grew out of its original mission to train practitioners in the medical field. They did their job well, providing the United States with health care that, for all of its problems, is the best health care system in the world. But then a disease set in, the same disease that produced Barack Obama and his government-by-professor -- the hubris of an educated class that, as economist Thomas Sowell notes, is "not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society."

Health policy schools began popping up, as Ivy League universities led the way in thinking of health services as a means to change society. This is known as "policy," and medical schools were soon accompanied by whole schools of health policy. Professors were not content to produce world-class medical professionals; instead, they wanted to change the United States, telling you what you could and could not do in all matters touching upon health. It was as if your plumber suddenly said, "Enough with the plumbing!" and seized control of your life, telling you what type of fixtures are to be allowed in your house, dictating the meals that would ultimately emerge as waste, regulating the number and type of bathrooms permitted...you get the picture.

But with Berwick and his colleagues, it gets worse. He is associated with Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which is the medical world's equivalent of the leftist community activist group ACORN. PNHP has provided the bodies to fill the white coats on display at Obamacare publicity opportunities and has ties to both elite public health schools (its president is an administrator and professor at the Cornell medical school) and a variety of socialist and communist organizations in vogue in academia (Students for a Democratic Society, the Communist Party, Democratic Socialists of America, etc. -- see Discover the Networks). Their shared goal: replace individual choice with centralized government control.

In the end, it is about power. Donald Berwick and Barack Obama, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine want to dictate the care you can and can't have. Berwick, for example, calls ultrasounds and cesarean sections a "form of assault and battery." Under Obamacare, he (through his rationing bureaucracy), not you or your doctor, decides whether you have a procedure. This is nothing new -- the political systems and policy bureaucracies Berwick and Obama seek to emulate have been doing it with disastrous results for individuals for years (e.g., England, Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany). As one senior staff member at Berwick's base in the Harvard School of Public Health has put it so eloquently in his blogs and books, we will do away with a Constitution and government that are the "enemy of the working class."

But Palin and the Tea Parties, the new media, and finally, a newly energized Republican Party have seen through the rhetoric. They see that when it came time for his wife to be treated for a debilitating illness, Donald Berwick went outside the system he was part of, Boston media revealed, and "used his many connections to get her the best care possible." But this is the way of Obama's Washington, of Berwick's Harvard Square, and the mainstream media's Upper Manhattan...of Darth Vader's empire.

Good for thee, but not for me. Darth Vader is out of the closet, and the Death Star has entered orbit.

My Mother and Senator Kennedy

When Senator Kennedy passed away, I honored the convention not to speak ill of the dead, although I hated him. Something happened today that brought it all back.

Norma is caring for an elderly aunt who lives in senior citizens housing. When she returned today she told me that her aunt places a chair under her doorknob when she goes to bed. Why does she do this in a secure building? Because she is afraid of some of the residents who are not elderly, but are mentally disabled and do crazy things.

This immediately brought back images of my own mother, who, after living peacefully for a time in a nice senior citizens building, suddenly became terrified of living there. It seems that Senator Kennedy, with his warped, liberal mind, decided that senior citizens housing would be a great place for disabled adults to live, as well as senior citizens. He pushed for, and had passed, a bill to accomplish this change in the determination of who would be eligible to live in this housing – formerly reserved for elderly only. Of course, the term, “disabled”, meant mentally disabled as well as physically disabled. This change opened the door for many dangerous people to become tenants of “senior citizens housing”.

Since the Senator’s action, I would guess that millions of elderly people have lived in fear, and many have been subject to physical attacks. Oh well, just another case of the unintended consequences of a liberal program. Of course, this nasty bit of liberal meddling is very minor compared to some other measures – a few of which I list here:

1. AFDC Welfare – which has destroyed black families in America and created an underclass of vicious, illiterate savages that we cannot build prisons fast enough to keep them off our streets. Prior to Welfare, the percentage of black, single mothers was the same as for white, single mothers.

2. Banning of DDT – which killed millions of poor Africans (especially children) from malaria until the World Health Organization stepped in to modify the ban.

3. Forcing banks to give mortgages to deadbeats –which created a housing crisis and a credit meltdown not seen in America since Depression days and created an opportunity for wild speculation by ordinary Americans and on Wall Street.

Liberals have destroyed our culture, our money, our educational system and civility in politics, but at least these have mostly been unintended consequences of their actions and beliefs. What we are experiencing now is unprecedented in American history – the deliberate destruction of our country’s foundations by liberals who are really socialists, and who actually hate our country.

Policies creating continued unemployment and business stagnation, the disorganization and hampering of efforts to stop and clean the oil spill, the insulting of friendly nations and the cozying up to enemies, the passing of major bills that aim to take wealth from producers and give it to non-producers, the efforts to include reparations for blacks that are hidden in many bills – these are not in the category of unintended consequences; they are deliberate attempts to reduce America to a second class nation.

A prominent psychiatrist once wrote a book in which he claimed that liberalism is really a mental disease. I never really agreed with that until I began witnessing the policies and pronouncements of the Obama Administration.

Another View of Steele’s Gaffes

Ann Coulter’s tongue-in-cheek article below states some important facts about the mess we now find ourselves in Afghanistan. Perhaps if Michael Steele had given this explanation for his stupid remarks, and perhaps if he hadn’t made so many other gaffes, we would not be calling for him to resign.

What is true is that Obama has transformed the war there into an un-winnable situation that is costing us heavy casualties without purpose. For once I agree with Joe Biden – that the counter-terrorism policy of President Bush should be continued with minimum exposure of our troops.

BILL KRISTOL MUST RESIGN

by Ann Coulter July 7, 2010 AnnCoulter.com (Excerpt)

"Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was absolutely right. Afghanistan is Obama's war and, judging by other recent Democratic ventures in military affairs, isn't likely to turn out well.

It has been idiotically claimed that Steele's statement about Afghanistan being Obama's war is "inaccurate" -- as if Steele is unaware Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. (No one can forget that -- even liberals pretended to support that war for three whole weeks.)

Yes, Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. Within the first few months we had toppled the Taliban, killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and arranged for democratic elections, resulting in an American-friendly government.

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Having some vague concept of America's national interest -- unlike liberals -- the Bush administration could see that a country of illiterate peasants living in caves ruled by "warlords" was not a primo target for "nation-building."

By contrast, Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

If Saddam Hussein had been a peach, it would still be a major victory in the war on terrorism to have a Muslim Israel in that part of the globe, and it sure wasn't going to be Afghanistan (literacy rate, 19 percent; life expectancy, 44 years; working toilets, 7).

But Iraq also was a state sponsor of terrorism; was attempting to build nuclear weapons (according to endless bipartisan investigations in this country and in Britain -- thanks, liberals!); nurtured and gave refuge to Islamic terrorists -- including the 1993 World Trade Center bombers; was led by a mass murderer who had used weapons of mass destruction; paid bonuses to the families of suicide bombers; had vast oil reserves; and is situated at the heart of a critical region.

Having absolutely no interest in America's national security, the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman) wailed about the war in Iraq for five years, pretending they really wanted to go great-guns in Afghanistan. What the heck: They had already voted for the war in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 when they would have been hanged as traitors had they objected.

The obsession with Afghanistan was pure rhetoric. Democrats have no interest in fighting any war that would serve America's interests. (They're too jammed with their wars against Evangelicals, Wal-Mart, the Pledge of Allegiance, SUVs and the middle class.) Absent Iraq, they'd have been bad-mouthing Afghanistan, too.

So for the entire course of the magnificently successful war in Iraq, all we heard from these useless Democrats was that Iraq was a "war of choice," while Afghanistan -- the good war! -- was a "war of necessity." "Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan!" "He got distracted by war in Iraq!" "WHERE'S OSAMA?" and -- my favorite -- "Iraq didn't attack us on 9/11!"

Of course, neither did Afghanistan. But Democrats were in a lather and couldn't be bothered with the facts.

The above complaints about Iraq come -- nearly verbatim -- from speeches and press conferences by Obama, Joe Biden, and Obama's national security advisers Susan Rice and Richard Clarke. Also, the entire gutless Democratic Party. Some liberals began including them in their wedding vows.

(By the way, Democrats: WHERE'S OSAMA?)

Obama hasn't ramped up the war in Afghanistan based on a careful calculation of America's strategic objectives. He did it because he was trapped by his own rhetorical game of bashing the Iraq war while pretending to be a hawk on Afghanistan.

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there.

In the entire seven-year course of the Afghanistan war under Bush, from October 2001 to January 2009, 625 American soldiers were killed. In 18 short months, Obama has nearly doubled that number to 1,124 Americans killed.

Republicans used to think seriously about deploying the military. President Eisenhower sent aid to South Vietnam, but said he could not "conceive of a greater tragedy" for America than getting heavily involved there.

As Michael Steele correctly noted, every great power that's tried to stage an all-out war in Afghanistan has gotten its ass handed to it. Everyone knows it's not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands.

Based on Obama's rules of engagement for our troops in Afghanistan, we're apparently not even fighting a war. The greatest fighting force in the world is building vocational schools and distributing cheese crackers to children.

There's even talk of giving soldiers medals for NOT shooting people, which I gather will be awarded posthumously. Naomi Campbell is rougher with her assistants than our troops are allowed to be with Taliban fighters." AnnCoulter.com

Someone from the RNC called me yesterday for another donation. I told him "no more contributions until Michael Steele resigns". I still feel that way very strongly. My only donations this year will be directly to candidates who are strong conservatives - candidates recommended by Sarah Palin.

Two Liberal Dishonesties Revealed

Two articles this morning caught my eye: the first one dealt with the strange case of President Obama making an interim appointment of a new Health-care Czar. Apparently the reason for this underhanded and unprecedented move is to avoid, during the normally-required confirmation hearing, any public discussion of Obamacare and of this Czar’s extreme positions and pronouncements.

The second article concerned the whitewashing of the group mainly exposed by Climategate – the revealing of the data falsified by dishonest, so-called scientists who are global warming alarmists. The whitewash was carried out by the University of East Anglia in Britain investigating itself – the same East Anglia where the data was falsified.

Both articles reveal the continuing proclivity of liberals to avoid factual confrontations, relying mainly on dissembling, distortions, outright lies and on attacking the personalities of those who oppose them.

Dodging a health-care fight

By JOHN PODHORETZ July 8, 2010 New York Post (Excerpts)

"On Tuesday, the Obama administration decided to do something rather peculiar, somewhat shocking and politically fascinating: It circumvented the process by which the Senate advises and consents on executive-branch nominees.

The move, which seems unprecedented in subtle but important ways, promises increased chaos in Washington -- but also hope on health care.

President Obama wants a distinguished doctor named Donald Berwick to head up the office that administers Medicare and Medicaid -- two of the most expensive programs in the federal government. Ordinarily, the nomination would have gone through the process known as "confirmation," with a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee followed by a full vote of all 99 senators. (One seat is vacant due to the death of West Virginia's Robert Byrd.)

Instead, Obama decided to invoke his constitutional authority to appoint Berwick (and two other officials of lesser moment) to his post without having to be confirmed by the Senate. This is possible only when Congress is not in session, as is the case right now, and it's called a "recess appointment." It is designed to be temporary; it is valid only until that session of the Congress adjourns, which in this case will come at year's end.

Past presidents have resorted to recess appointments when they believe a nominee's appointment has been subjected to unjust political and ideological gamesmanship. And the White House said it was resorting to the recess appointment because of Republican recalcitrance.

"Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points," Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said on the White House blog Tuesday.

That was astoundingly untrue. The only way Republicans, who have 41 votes in the Senate compared to 58 for the Democrats, could have "stalled" the nomination would have been to organize a filibuster, and that would happen only when the nomination came to the Senate floor.

They couldn't have blocked a favorable vote on Berwick's nomination from the Senate Finance Committee, which has 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans.

As ABC's Jake Tapper reported yesterday, "Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick's nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick's past statements about health-care rationing and his praise for the British health-care system."….

So what's going on here?

First, it appears Obama likes to muscle things through. It makes him feel like he's cutting through the nonsense and getting things done.

This unorthodox and questionable move is of a piece with his administration's bullying of Chrysler creditors last year -- insisting, in contravention of eight centuries of common law, that the contracts those creditors signed with Chrysler should simply be ignored so as to get the United Auto Workers the deal it wanted.

But procedure, precedent and tradition exist for good reason; ignoring and undermining them blazes a path to political disorder.

Second, this is as glaring an admission as there is that Obama and his people know they've lost the public on health care. Rather than using these hearings to bolster popular support for the landmark legislation they rammed through in the spring, they can't bear to submit to public questioning about it.

By running away from this fight, Obama is signaling that the possibility of repealing the health-care monstrosity before it really begins to sink its teeth into the American system by 2014 is very real indeed."

****************************************

Climategate: reinstating Phil Jones is good news – the CRU brand remains toxic

By Gerald Warner July 8th, 2010 Telegraph Co/UK (Excerpt)

> “Move along now, please… Nothing to see here…” was the predictable burden of Sir Muir Russell’s investigation into Climategate. Are we surprised? Any other conclusion would have made world headlines as a first for the climate change establishment. This is the third Climategate whitewash job and it would be tempting to see it as just as futile as its predecessors. That, however, would be to underrate its value to the sceptic cause, which is considerable.

This is because Russell’s “Not Guilty” verdict has been seized upon as an excuse to reinstate Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia CRU, this time as Director of Research. That is very good news. It spells out to the world that the climate clique looks after its own; that there is no more a culture of accountability and job forfeiture for controversial conduct in AGW circles than there is in parliamentary ones; that it is business as usual for Phil and his merry men. Or, to put it more bluntly, the brand remains toxic.

Apart from Michael “Hockeystick” Mann, there is no name more calculated to provoke cynical smiles in every inhabited quarter of the globe than that of Phil Jones. The dogs in the street in Ulan Bator know that he and his cronies defied FOI requests and asked for e-mails to be deleted and that people only do that if they have something to hide. Every time some UN-compliant government or carbon trading interest group tries to scare the populace witless with scorched-earth predictions of imminent climate disaster and cites research from the East Anglia CRU – of which Phil Jones is Director of Research – it will provoke instant scepticism….

So, this is an important and encouraging development for everybody dedicated to blowing the AGW scam out of the water. It means one of the principal pillars of the IPCC that might have been cosmetically repaired now remains irretrievably compromised. The next few years will be critical for the survival of the AGW superstition: it is now, partly due to Climategate and partly to the global recession, fighting for survival. This latest blunder significantly lessens its prospects of pulling through. A big thank you to Professor Edward Acton and the climate establishment at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere, without whose purblind sense of entitlement the eventual overthrow of this false orthodoxy might not have been possible.

"Green Zone" - A Review

Today I finally watched the DVD video, "Green Zone", the most outrageous piece of left-wing junk propaganda I've ever seen. The movie stars the liberal Matt Damon, one of the most ignorant of Hollywood personalities who are always commenting on subjects about which they know nothing.

The theme of this movie is that the Bush Administration knew that there were no WMD in Iraq (Bush lied) well before we went there to remove Saddam and encourage the emergence of democracy there. To this end the film shows Special Forces soldiers loyal to Bush attacking and even murdering other American soldiers who were looking for and not finding WMD. Matt Damon's role is that of a Warrant Officer who began to question whether there ever were WMD recently in Iraq. Damon is hunted down by Special Forces soldiers in order to kill him and silence him.

The movie is ridiculous, but it is well-done and interesting if you can watch it without throwing up.

A Message of Hope on the Fourth

Some see (article below) the deliberate mishandling of the economy and the oil spill, the trampling of our laws, and the overreaching and outright thuggery of the Obama Administration as an overall overreaching that will undo the progressive (statist) movement for a lifetime. Unfortunately for my mental and emotional health, I am not so sanguine – especially when Republican idiots like Michael Steele and John Boehner seem determined to torpedo potential election victories this fall with inane and unnecessary comments.

Steele should resign today, and Boehner should just shut up.

The 4th of July and the Progressive Overreach

By Steve McCann July 04, 2010 American Thinker

On this 4th of July, 2010, when the future of the United States appears to be in serious jeopardy, it should be noted that sometimes in the history of a nation, what appears to be an event that could lead to long-term disaster may, in fact, be its long-term salvation. A case in point: the election of Barack Obama as president and the Democrats in full control of the Congress. To be sure, the far-left domination of government is not a situation to be wished for, but in a perverse way, it was necessary.

Over the past fifty years, regardless of who was in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of Progressivism in our institutions and the concurrent uncontrolled spending and growth of government. When a president as accomplished as Ronald Reagan was unable to do so, no future Republican president or Congress, short of a major national catastrophe, could ever fully turn back this tide, as they could not overcome the apathy of the people and the hostility of the media, academia, the entertainment establishment, and federal bureaucracies.

A long as the American people remained largely disengaged (the result of unprecedented prosperity), the damage done to the society as a whole and to the long-term financial health of the country was unknown to the vast majority. This indifference has begun to undergo significant change as the reality of the nation's future comes into focus, but that reality has started to come to the fore only as the result of the policies being pursued by a far-left government.

Today, thanks to a confluence of two factors, the opportunity exists to reverse the course the United States has been on and change the political power structure in the country.

The first: the emergence of alternative news sources that has broken the stranglehold on the dissemination of news by the traditional outlets dominated by the left.

The second: The election of a president steeped in socialist/Marxist ideology and a Congress controlled by the Progressive element of the Democratic Party.

A trait common to those on the far left is an inability to have any humility; there is an intense conviction of superiority, both intellectually and in their capability to rule the masses. The true believers are incapable of hiding their philosophy and, once elected, are convinced that nearly everyone does or should share their dedication to the power of a central government. Those who do not conform will be demonized. These extremists will move heaven and earth to achieve their ends, regardless of any long-term consequences, and they cannot avoid shouting from the rooftops what they are doing as tribute to themselves.

The determination of Obama and the Congress to exploit the financial and economic crisis and, more recently, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in order to pass their agenda has had the effect of kicking over the rocks and exposing for all to see the undermining of the social and fiscal foundation of the nation by the left-wing radicals in Congress, the administration, and many of our institutions.

The general public has now been exposed to the following:

1) The current regime's uncontrolled spending policies and willingness to triple the national debt within nine years have laid bare the actual and unvarnished state of the country's debt and its potential financial future (further revealed by the pending bankruptcy of nations such as Greece).

2) The once-mainstream media's willingness to lose all credibility with the vast majority of the public with its not-so-subtle cheerleading for their preferred politicians.

3) The Democratic Party, at one time the self-declared defender of the little guy and now captive to Progressive ideology, has openly declared war on small business and capitalism.

4) The current majority of the members of Congress has been unmasked as politicians incapable of reading bills, indifferent to voters, and fully in the pockets of liberal special interest groups.

5) President Obama and Congress intentionally used lies and deception to pass an unwanted health care reform bill in a not-so-subtle attempt to control the day-to-day lives of the American people. The use of bribery and intimidation to pass legislation or regulations was on stage for all to see.

6) To the current ruling class, slavish adherence to ideology trumps the needs and best interest of the people of the United States.

Not only are the readers of conservative websites, viewers of Fox News, and the listeners to talk radio aware of these factors, but with the backdrop of unfettered spending, the high jobless rates, and the potential for national bankruptcy, more and more of the general public has become aware of the radical nature of the present government, despite the efforts of them once-mainstream media.

President Obama and his party have failed to understand the basic character of the American people and the many polls taken over the years showing this to be a right-of-center country. They further underestimated the power of the alternative media before they had an opportunity to silence it. But above all, they could not repeal the Constitution, which would allow the citizens the means to change the failed policies of any elected government.

While the timing may have been there to have a "moderate" Barack Obama elected president, the timing to turn the United States into a bastion of socialism was not. The infiltration of the entertainment and educational institutions by the Progressives has not been in place long enough to change the character of the majority of the population. Further, the use of the strategy of guilt to intimidate American citizens has run its course. It has been overdone.

While the damage to date has been considerable, it is not irreversible. In essence, Barack Obama and the present Congress won their offices at the wrong point in the history of our nation to achieve all their objectives; but by attempting to do so and overreaching, this left-wing government has given the country an opportunity to awaken from its fifty-year slumber and repair the foundation. Only a radical presidency and Congress could have accomplished this before it was too late to turn back the tide.

The only questions that remain: Will the aroused and more knowledgeable populace continue to be aware and elect those who will make the necessary changes and repeal or roll back the policies of this and previous administrations and Congresses? Will we as a nation take advantage of this potential reprieve before it is too late?

Why We Are So Angry

This article by Victor Davis Hanson is, though lengthy, well worth reading to give a sense to where we are and how we got here. That we need to get rid of Obama and his minions is quite clear – and we can’t wait until 2012. We will be in irretrievable ruins by then. The sense that America can overcome any obstacle has left us, and we are in further dismay with lightweight Republican leaders like Steele and Boehner spouting nonsense at every turn. The only hope for us that I can see is that the Tea Party movement will grow so much, and the fast growing anger will bring such turmoil to the doors of every liberal that Democrats will force Obama to resign, with Biden just keeping the Oval Office seat warm until 2012.

For me, the final straw to turn my reasoned opposition into thoughts of violence was seeing Obama exacerbate the Gulf oil spill by using every means to stop and delay the cleanup while standing aside pouting for months. He just may be successful in using this crisis to destroy the oil industry in the US, just as he promised to do.

Why is the Angry Public so Angry?

Victor Davis Hanson On June 29, 2010 Pajamas Media

I think we all know why the Tea Party movement arose — and why even the polls do not quite reflect the growing generic anger at incumbents in general, and our elites in particular.

Anger at Everything?

There is a growing sense that government is what I would call a new sort of Versailles — a vast cadre of royal state and federal workers that apparently assumes immunity from the laws of economics that affect everyone else.

In the olden days, we the public sort of expected that the L.A. Unified School District paid the best and got the worst results. We knew that you didn’t show up at the DMV if you could help it. A trip to the emergency room was to descend into Dante’s Inferno. We accepted all that in other words, and went on with our business.

But at some point — perhaps triggered by the radical increase in the public sector under Obama, the militancy of the SEIU, or the staggering debts — the public snapped and has had it with whining union officials and their political enablers who always threaten to cut off police and fire protection if we object that there are too many unproductive, unnecessary, but too highly paid employees at the Social Service office. In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot.

The Tea Party is not over

There is another Tea Party theme that those who play by the rules are being had, from both the top and bottom. The Wall Street bailouts and financial help to the big banks smelled of cronyism, made worse by the notion that liberal “reformers” like Obama got more from Big Money than did the usual insider Republican aristocrats.

(The continual left-wing trend of wealthy elites is an untold story, but it suggests a sort of noble disdain: “We make so much that we are immune from the hurt of higher taxes, but like expanded entitlements as a sort of penance for our privilege.”)

Emblematic of the anger at both top and bottom was the 2008 meltdown: those who had not played by the rules still got their mortgages, then defaulted, and left the taxpayer with their bills; those who made the loans and profited without risk took the bailout money, and left us with the cleanup. Those in between with underwater mortgages and higher taxes pay the tab.

We are not 19th-century poor

Somehow we forget that we are in the 21st century with our multitude of cell-phones, laptops, no-down-payment new car leases, big-screen TVs, cheap food, and accessible rent that have permeated all society and given the proverbial underclass appurtenances that only the very rich of the 1960s could have dreamed of. Yet the Dickensian rhetoric has only intensified. There is rarely any acknowledgment of the public’s investment in anti-poverty programs or of its efforts to promote social equality. Instead, an overtaxed electorate is constantly reminded of its unfairness and its moral shortcomings. (I just left a multimillion dollar ICU unit in Fresno, where I was visiting a relative. Over a third of the visitors there did not seem to speak English, and so I was impressed by the public generosity that extends such sophisticated care to those who that day seemed largely to have arrived here recently from Mexico. The notion that a visitor to Mexico could walk into such a unit in Mexico City and get instant, free — and quality — care is, well, inconceivable. Yet politicians talk of our heartlessness, not our generosity.)

Existential Blues

There is a sense of futility: new higher taxes won’t lower the deficit and won’t improve infrastructure or public service. Much of it will go to redistributive plans that, the middle believes, will only, fairly or not, acerbate social problems. In California there is a sense (born out by statistics) that we lack a civil and humane public culture brought on by two often neglected facts: a small cadre of overpaid public employees ensures that we don’t have the money for continuance of basic public services; and, second, we feel our tax money is going to redistributive entitlements rather than focused on improving a collapsing infrastructure of dams, canals, freeways, airports, and trains. The idea that a California could ever again build its share of the transcontinental railroad, recreate its Sierra network of dams, copy the Central Valley Water Project, or match the 1960s standards of the UC and CSU university systems is laughable. (But we surely could write a position paper on why the above are either ecologically unsound or in fact counterproductive.) In short, our intent now is not achievement, but equality by any means necessary.

Law — what law?

There is an anger that the law is now malleable. Creditors are bumped at Chrysler, violating contractual agreements. We hear of rumors that cap and trade and amnesty can be accomplished by administrative fiat rather than by law. Of course, BP is demonic in its Gulf performance, but where does Obama obtain the legal right to demand $20 billion in confiscated capital (why then not $50,100, or 200 billion?).

Federal immigration law — as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis recently demonstrated — is not to be enforced, since it is now a race/class/gender issue, or rather a question of demography as seen in purely political terms. Most accept that “government” goes after the misdemeanors of the law-biding citizen to justify its existence, while ignoring the felonies of the lawbreaker, whose enforcement requires expense, and occasional danger. (Why else would the federal government declare some border spots as “no-go” areas [1] in the style of Sadr City?). Are we in Jacobin times, when revolutionary fervor determines which laws are enforced and which not, as if their validity is a political matter alone?

Success in not an accident, but then neither is failure

For some reason, our elite classes either cannot or will not explain openly and without artifice why it is that innately wealthy countries like Mexico or those in the Arab world or in Africa cannot adequately feed, educate, house, and employ their own citizens. Instead, we are to assume that some sort of ubiquitous oppression exists that that makes us wealthy, and others thousands of miles away poor, and requires apologies rather than exegesis. (Don’t dare suggest that the age-old causes of wealth and poverty still apply everywhere: either one ensures the rule of law, private property, an open economy, a free press, independent judiciary, constitutional protections, and religious tolerance, and allows science to evolve free from government and religious interference, or one does not and stays impoverished).

The Wages of Never Waste a Crisis

All of which brings us back to Obama. Why has he crashed in just 18 months, or, better yet, why still at 47 percent approval? Perhaps many don’t want to be accused of racism in openly stating their disappointment. Others feel that to admit his failures is a sort of self-incrimination of having voted for him; others still believe in a honeymoon and want to give their relatively fresh president a fair shot. All that said, I think his polls will soon reach historic lows, largely because he did not address middle class unease, but instead manipulated it to press for a transformational neo-socialist agenda, when most wanted less not more government.

The point is not that Obama is ipso facto as president responsible for the recession, the 10% unemployment, the ongoing wars, the congressional corruption, or the BP spill, but rather that he sold himself on the notion that he was not merely a different politician (originally, distinct from Hillary and Bush, and then McCain), but an entirely new sort of public figure altogether, beholden to no one, eager for bipartisan 21st century-change, ready to address long-festering problems in untraditional ways.

You were had

After 18 months, the people feel they have been had — in the way that a blow-dried mansion living, philandering John Edwards is hardly an advocate for the “other America,” or a green-scheming, instant multi-millionaire Al Gore is hardly a disinterested advocate for welcoming reasonable debate about a sustainable planet. Prophets fall harder, especially when “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” prove to be a reflective of the Chicago way, the snooty ineptness of the Harvard lounge, and the shrill leftism of SEIU.

Rangel, Dodd, Geithner, the Blago mess, the lobbyists, the earmarks, and the political bribes to pass health care together have convinced half the electorate in just a few months that Obama is not merely not a reformer, but perhaps the most ethically compromised president since Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon.

Stimulus is Still Borrowing

His massive borrowing and poorly focused “stimulus” simply squandered federal cash and made things worse. As we go over the cliff, we are told by some that the stimulus was too small or we need to be bolder still and print ever more money — sort of like the madman who screams he needed wings as he jumps into the abyss. By constantly demonizing business, and libeling everyone from surgeons to investors, the administration scared the private sector. If that were not enough, serial loose talk of new taxes, health-care surcharges, income tax increases, caps coming off income exposed to FICA hikes, rumors of federal VAT or excise taxes, all coupled with the states raising income and sales taxes, has persuaded employers either to hold off buying equipment and hiring, or to look for part-time workers only. Psychology, of course, matters.

War on the war on terror?

The war on terror is seen not as a war at all, but a showcase of good intentions, and so constantly renamed, punctuated by apology, and characterized by complete hypocrisy and contradiction, whether flip-flopping on Guantanamo or the KSM trial, the politically correct new euphemisms, the appointments like Janet Napolitano or John Brennan, or the Orwellian adoption of the very Bush protocols (Predators, renditions, tribunals, wiretapping, intercepts, etc.) that Obama not long ago demagogued as unconstitutional. I fear the threat has grown, not passed.

Reset Nauseas

Abroad, there is a general rule: any nation that was well intended toward the United States between 2001-09 (e.g., Britain, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Israel, Poland, etc) is now suspect; those that clearly were anti-American in that era (eg., Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, etc.) now earn American outreach and deference. Is it better to have been a friend or enemy of the U.S? The Russian spy ring, the Chavez socialist tour, the Syrian sale of missiles to Hezbollah, the Iranian full speed ahead on nuclear attainment, the increase in foiled terrorist plots at home, the China snub, and the Turkish furor all suggest that both neutrals and our enemies are not swayed by magnanimity as much as emboldened by tentativeness.

The recession, anger with Bush, deficits, the furor at Wall Street, unease with the long wars abroad — all that put the American people into a restive, herd-like mood by 2008 to the point that they were liable to charge at any given target. Barack Obama, however, focused that anger by using their hoof-stomping to sneak in a neo-socialist agenda that he knew in normal times had no public support. But he thought the current crisis of public confidence and the fawning media together might help him get it through.

Horns lowered

Instead, the herd turned, roared, and now with horns lowered is charging at Obama — and of all people!