Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Do You Believe In Conspiracies?

Titled by author as "The Left's Blind Eye to the Obvious"

by Jack Cashill - December 29th, 2009 - American Thinker

All witnesses who saw Timothy McVeigh on the morning the Murrah Building blew up saw him with a short, swarthy fellow. According to the Washington Post, a judge detained McVeigh without bail "after listening to four hours of testimony from FBI special agent John Hersley in which he described eyewitness accounts of a yellow Mercury with McVeigh and another man inside speeding away from a parking lot near the federal building."

•Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, the so-called "field commander" of the Oklahoma City task force, played an even more aggressive role managing the TWA Flight 800 investigation a year later. The Clintons appear to have rewarded her for her steely performance with the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a job for which she had no known credentials.

•Six years and about $25.6 million in salary and bonuses later, Gorelick responded to the call of duty once more and took one of five Democratic seats on the 9-11 commission.

•By the FBI's own count, no fewer than 270 eyewitnesses gave formal reports to the FBI describing a red-tipped object with a smoky contrail striking TWA Flight 800. About a hundred witnesses tracked the object from the surface. Astonishingly, the New York Times would interview none of them.

•Four weeks after the disaster, the Times' Don Van Natta would report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."
•Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a mechanical failure. The Times reporter who got the call to document both shifts was Andy Revkin, the same reporter at the center of the Climategate scandal.

•Bizarrely, Richard Clarke, Clinton's anti-terror czar who knew next to nothing about aircraft technology, claimed to have discovered the official cause of the TWA 800 crash months, if not years, before the NTSB did.

Whether you believe Jack Cashill's litany of stories that the MSM never seems to want to get to the bottom of or not, the growing efforts to tout our President as "brilliant" - in the face of overwhelming evidence he is a propped up amateur - has resonated with almost everyone on the left politically and clashed with almost everyone on the right politically.

I wonder if some of them would like to go back and take a closer look at these stories of Cashill's? It certainly would seem Jamie Gorelick deserves a closer look than most writers were willing to expend.


Friday, December 25, 2009

Where Did These Guys Come From?

by Victor Davis Hanson - December 23rd, 2009 - Pajamas Media

The Origins of Obamism

I do not think it will be easy to delay Obamism. It is not just that both houses of Congress are under liberal leadership with ample majorities, with a White House and captive media egging them on. The problem is that now the entire engine of the federal government is harnessed in the most unapologetic way to pushing through a far left agenda. There is no shame, no hesitancy in using the full powers of the state.

How does that work out? Without qualification (remember we are in a new age of transparency and ethical reform) votes are bought with hundred-million-dollar earmarks; the attorney general predicates judicial action on the political ramifications of indicting or not indicting; federal bureaucracies (watch the EPA if cap and trade stalls) are devoted to the new Caesar rather than the letter of the law.

Such a strange scenario we have found ourselves in—a clear majority of Americans is opposed to almost everything Obama has to offer; congressional representatives know they are acting against the will of the people, but know too that they are offered all sorts of borrowed money for their districts to compensate for their unpopular actions. And a charismatic commander in chief believes that he can charm even the angriest of critics, and that anything he promises (Iran’s deadlines, closing of Guantanamo, new transparency, no more lobbyists, etc) means zilch and can be contextualized by another “let me be perfectly clear” speech spiced with a couple of the usual “it would have been impossible for someone as unlikely as me to have become President just (fill in the blanks) years ago”

No, I would not count Obama out. So what drives his agenda? What are its origins?

I am usually impressed with whatever Victor Davis Hanson writes. An historian, his logic does not mock what has happened in the past as so many writers seem to do. He also gives a unique and different take on what is happening that is helpful to understanding important aspects of our public dialog.

Hanson is not the first to note that Obama is an Alinsky acolyte who follows the global socialist dogma. However he has usefully updated the specific criticism of Obama to note the emphasis on redistribution of wealth as the key element of that movement's focus.

Hanson has also refocused the belief in immigration as an element in the destruction of our culture. Obama is not just dedicated to larazanism, but has a broader love for any form of multiculturalism that weakens our culture. That has resulted in an emphasis by Obama on the concept of white exploitation that many have rejected as nonsense. It is being resold as if it is a new concept under Obama - making the rejection premature.

Finally, Hanson sees how much of his implementation methodology Obama has taken from the Chicago style of government corruption, replacing bribes that go directly into the politician's pocket with bribes that indirectly benefit those who support the politician. Our courts have essentially gutted any attempt to hold politicians accountable for these second hand bribes.

In short, we have a traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words, not mine), updated with the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out to enemies and shun allies), all energized by an ends justify the means Chicago bare-knuckles apparat.

Hanson has given us an incredibly accurate summation of Obama and one that everyone who opposes the Obama agenda needs to have memorized.


Monday, December 21, 2009

The Fight Over Fascist ObamaCare

... Is Only Just Beginning

by
Matthew Vadum - December 20th, 2009 - American Thinker

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who may be unaware that he is currently enjoying his final term in the U.S. Senate, claims to have the 60 votes he needs to muscle ObamaCare through his chamber. God help us if he does.

The current iteration of ObamaCare is classic Mussolini-style Fascism (i.e. corporatism). It forces Americans at gunpoint to purchase health insurance, a requirement never before imposed on the American people. The big insurance companies and the federal government have combined to subject the public to this tyrannical mandate that Americans overwhelmingly oppose. This is the economic essence of Fascism.

Shame on them on all.

This rallying call to fight is not the first since Obama has been elected. The entire TEA Party movement has been a rallying cry to fight for freedom. However it is encouraging to see that the Washington conservative suck-up movement has finally joined in. As Vadum notes, even the usually near fascist pretend conservative William Kristol is finally starting to fight, instead of postulating pompously about what should be done.

The comments at the end of the article are the most interesting. They are angry and uncivilized. I think they say more about the mood of conservatives and libertarians than anything in the article.

What is that mood? The mood is getting ugly and the Democrats are going to pay.


Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Rot At Duke -- And Beyond

by Stuart Taylor Jr. - December 19th, 2009 - National Journal

Duke's rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit "verbal or nonverbal" consent, which must be so "clear" as to dispel "real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion" (emphasis added).

The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her -- but not him -- the right to be treated with "sensitivity"; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.

The revised policy, among other things, shows that Duke is still in the grip of the same biases, indifference to evidence, and de facto presumption of guilt that led so many professors and administrators to smear innocent lacrosse players as rapists (and as racists) for many months in 2006 and 2007.

America has become an overtly racist nation, but not as many think - against blacks. Blacks and the black community have become such a pack of racist bigots that they are pathologically unable to see how their own rage blinds them to their hypocrisy against whites. A large part of the white community has been brain washed to agree, or at least suffer in silence.

This article explains more clearly than anything I have seen the blatant white hating racists on the college campuses. The article ends with "Try imagining a white male professor who had smeared innocent black students enjoying a similar path of advancement in academia today."


I have a better suggestion. Try imagining a nation where white has not become an insult and where blacks can get away with the most egregious insults to whites with absolutely no consequence. For instance, how about a nation where the President cannot insult an entire community of police officers with the claim they are "stupid" and the majority of the nation does not defend the action?


Saturday, December 19, 2009

Noble Beats Nobel

by Rowan Scarborough - December 9th, 2009 - Human Events

The Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to recognize and reward contributions to world peace. But, for decades, the Prize Committee has made the award a tool of left-wing politics and UN chicanery, risibly awarding the prize to recipients including the late Yassir Arafat, a terrorist, global warmist Al Gore and now President Obama, in recognition of what they believe are Obama’s good intentions and not for anything he has accomplished to date.

HUMAN EVENTS believes there are people who actually do contribute to our nation’s peace and prosperity far more than the Nobel recipients. From this year forward, we will recognize those who actually accomplish great tasks in the cause of peace, and do so to contrast vividly their achievements to those of the Nobelists.

You can be sure that the liberals in the Democrat Party will go ballistic when they read this article. Democrats have accepted that weakness is the same as peace for some time. They do not accept peace through strength. Crawling has become their only recogniztion of acceptable behavior.


Who Needs Data?

by Randall Hoven - December 18th, 2009 - American Thinker

The IPCC's worst-case scenario over the next 100 years is a temperature rise of 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) and a sea-level rise of 26 to 59 centimeters (10 to 23 inches). Why would that wipe us out?

The average annual temperature in Memphis, Tennessee is 62.3 degrees F. The temperature of Lexington, Kentucky is 54.9 degrees F. That is a bigger difference than the IPCC's worst-case scenario.

Could mankind handle that kind of adaptation - moving from Memphis to Lexington in the next 100 years?

The hysterical insistence by the chicken little propoonents of global warming is that you must not stop and think. Don't you dare try to understand their data. Just let them rule the world and they will save you. And by THEIR OWN data, they are saving you from the catastrophe of moving from Memphis, Tennessee to Lexington, Kentucky.

That is the worse case scenario of their data. The best case, which is equally likely, means they are saving you from moving from Menphis, Tennessee to the suburbs of Memphis. Oh what a catastrophe. We have to avoid that at all costs!

In other words, it is a SCAM. A Fraud. Because they manpiplate the data to get even that exaggerated claim. Why do you think they are the same people who were trying to convice the world that the risk was global cooling only 40 years ago? Cooling or warming, they don't care. All they want is for you to panic and give them control, of your life, your money and your freedom.

Why would anyone who is not insane do that?


Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Socialism In Stages

Even soft, incremental expansions of government produce poverty.

by Dan Oliver, Jr. - December 15th, 2009 - National Review

America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted “roll back” — dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted détente — which is French for “surrender.” The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise. America had but to be patient.

Kennan may have been the first to realize that a society based on Communism would not survive politically, but it was Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 work Socialism, who demonstrated that any such society could not survive economically.

It is the intellectual incompetence of our American school system that has seriously undermined our society. The problem with the incremental socialism that is taking over America is simple. Our own people are too uneducated to understand what is happening. Thanks to teachers who wanted a perfect society built along their passionate belief in socialism we have a citizenry that cannot think.

Why is it so hard to believe in the results that capitalism has delivered? Why is it so hard for people to compare the two systems and pick the one that has proved to work? Why do people so fervently desire the prefection of perceived results that they will turn over their nation to a system that always is corrupt and evil and over the long haul always fails?

Wishful thinking is not going to change the world. Plenty of leading thinkers have explained again and again why socialism doesn't work. Yet again and again, smart people delude themselves with the belief that - THIS TIME - they can make it work.

It doesn't.


Sunday, December 13, 2009

Tyranny Of The EPA

By Jay Ambrose - December 12th, 2009 - Washington Times

Get ready for the tyranny of the Environmental Protection Agency, because if Congress balks at passing cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this bureaucratic behemoth will strike, mangling industry and further damaging a recession-plagued economy.

It's the rage, you know, this religious-like dogma about a global warming apocalypse in the absence of turning everything upside down. There's a world summit on the issue in Copenhagen, and even the U.S. Supreme Court got on board two years ago, saying the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide and other suspected greenhouse gases if they were hammering human health.

The EPA has now said it is doing just that, although EPA knows no such thing, cannot in fact begin to know any such thing.

Insanity. Pure insanity. That anyone would believe they have the right to pursue such dogmatic idiocy without legislative concurrence proves these people on the left are indifferent to the whole concept of elective democracy. That our courts concur is frightening. Are both of these groups truly that delusional about the science? How did our government become so filled with insane idiots?


Saturday, December 12, 2009

Don’t Cry For Me, America

bt directorblue - November 21st, 2009 - Hotair.com

In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. While Great Britain’s maritime power and its far-flung empire had propelled it to a dominant position among the world’s industrialized nations, only the United States challenged Argentina for the position of the world’s second-most powerful economy.

This is an interesting article that documents the 100 year slide of Argentina from one of the worlds great powers to just another failed socialist state. It is certainly a major risk that America could follow this disastrous course. It started with last years election of a dedicated socialist to the most powerful position in the world, President of the United States.

Those who think it cannot happen here are simply deluded.


Thursday, December 10, 2009

Copenhagen's Political Science

by Sarah Palin - December 9, 2009 - Washington Post

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

The entire chicken little campaign to convince the world that there is a man caused global catastrophe which we must counter by world socialist government, has finally started to unravel. This article is an excellent, well written explanation of why we must NOT listen to the climate extremists.

CO2 is not a green house gas. It is time to start developing the most effective energy options possible so that economic success can fund the smooth transition to other cost effective options for the long term future.

Some day many of the so-called "green" solutions will be the basis of our energy use. However they should wait until we reach the point where they are the most cost effective. Rushing to artificially implement them while better options still exist is pure insanity.


Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Sarah Palin Is Coming to Town

by Stanley Fish - December 7th, 2009 - New York Times

When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.

This short story is reality among liberals!

A great number of the people who think of themselves as America's elite are the intelectually pompous kind of people who work in bookstores. They do not see themselves as merely clerks who can help you buy what you want to buy to read. They see themselves as leaders who can tell you what books you should read. They also are the most severe censors in the world, reserving the right to guard against your reading something that postulates truths they do not believe. If they disagree with a book they simply refuse to stock it.

The article by Fish, no conservative by a long shot, is at least honest about the biased attacks on Sarah Palin coming from orgnizations like the Associated Press. They have had "fact checkers" poring over her book as if it was a biography, not an autobiography. They have, in an equally pretentious manner to the clerk in the book store, decided that they can determine whether Sarah Palin believes something better than she. Their opinion? She doesn't believe what she claims to believe. If she were the cliche conservative they think she represents she would believe something else. Therefore her book is dishonest and false. According to them.

ROTFL

I can't think of a single additional thing that needs to be said about her critics.