Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Not with the present leadership.  Boehner and Cantor, along with Mitch McConnell, are spineless wimps when it comes to dealing with media wrath and Democrat hardball tactics.  If Allen West were speaker, or someone of his ilk - we might have a chance.  As is stands, Peggy Noonan's suggestions are a pipe dream.

Either the current Republican leadership is forced out in favor of tea-party types, or we are witnessing the effective death of the party as a national political force.  It has become watered-down and nothing more than Democrat-lite.

Gun Confiscation By Presidential Decree?

Posted By Matthew Vadum On January 10, 2013 - www.frontpagemag.com

President Obama may soon act unilaterally to curtail Americans’ right to keep and bear arms and impose a new national firearms policy without congressional approval.

Spurred on by the Newtown, Connecticut schoolhouse massacre last month that took 26 lives, Obama could restrict, perhaps even abolish, private gun ownership with the stroke of his auto-pen.

Second Amendment backers are justifiably angry after Vice President Joe Biden spoke yesterday about ways to curb violent gun-related crime. He suggested that the president may take swift, decisive action without congressional approval.

“The president is going to act,” said Biden who is heading up a task force that is supposed to make policy recommendations to Obama later this month. The vice president reportedly “guaranteed” Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that President Obama would push through sweeping firearms restrictions before February.

“There are executive orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet. But we’re compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required.”

Biden added, “As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking. But I’m convinced we can affect the well-being of millions of Americans and take thousands of people out of harm’s way if we act responsibly.”

“I want to make it clear that we are not going to get caught up in the notion that unless we can do everything, we’re going to do nothing,” Biden said. “It’s critically important we act.”

In normal times the prospect of gun confiscation might be next to nil, the stuff of conspiracy theories, but in the age of Obama so many bad things seem possible. With the country in a sour mood, the economy stuck in a ditch, and a transformational Marxist in the White House, terrible outcomes that previously appeared farfetched now could become possible.

Consider that Obama is a devout ideologue who deep down doesn’t believe Americans should be allowed to own guns. He’s a longtime supporter of gun confiscation but when he began running for president he began claiming to be a supporter of the Second Amendment in order not to scare away moderate voters.

He has Freudian-slipped from time to time. In his first presidential campaign he mocked small-town Americans as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion,” paraphrasing Saul Alinsky’s attacks on ordinary Americans.

Consider also that Obama is a narcissistic president with a messiah complex who began his political career in the living room of unrepentant bomb-detonating terrorists.

Since winning the 2008 election Obama has: refused to enforce laws he dislikes including laws cracking down on the voter fraud Democrats often need to win elections; routinely assaulted the Bill of Rights; decreed a partial immigration amnesty after it was rejected by Congress; ignored court orders; recess-appointed high government officials when Congress wasn’t actually in recess; attempted to intimidate Supreme Court justices; kept a Nixon-style enemies’ list and labeled his detractors in the Tea Party movement as terrorists; waged class warfare and encouraged racial animosity; presided over the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal that provided weapons to Mexican drug cartels; nationalized large swaths of private industry; ignored politically-inspired violence carried out by his allies; unilaterally moved to impose economy-killing carbon emission controls; openly disdained entrepreneurs; waged war without congressional approval; accepted illegal foreign campaign contributions; tried to get a governor to appoint his crony (Valerie Jarrett) to fill the Senate seat he vacated; said police “acted stupidly” when they dared to arrest his personal friend; turned a blind eye to rampant corruption in his administration; and forced health care providers to violate their religious beliefs.

Now Obama is apparently considering minting a $1 trillion platinum coin in order to evade the congressionally imposed national debt limit.

This is the behavior of a Third World banana republic caudillo, not the supposed leader of the free world.

Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said the president’s proposal to go it alone sounded like “dictatorship” to him. “The Founding Fathers never envisioned Executive Orders being used to restrict our Constitutional rights,” he said in a press release. “We live in a republic, not a dictatorship.”

Two unusually insightful posts on the micro-blogging website Twitter summed up the public’s anxiety at Obama’s overreach and imperial approach to policymaking.

“Executive Orders on 2nd Amendment Rights could cascade into revolt,” tweeted @daxtonbrown. “I don’t think Obama realizes how seriously people take gun rights.”

A user with the handle @siftyboones tweeted, “My family will not be reduced to docile livestock at the whim of the government. The End.”

Any executive order taking Americans’ guns away would be a brutal assault on the rule of law. It could also lead to violent civil unrest in a nation founded upon a healthy distrust of governmental power.

Yesterday NRA president David Keene reaffirmed that the purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution was to prevent tyranny and deter foreign invaders.

“The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunters. Hunters use firearms. Hunters have every right to use firearms, as do target shooters, as do gun collectors, as do others,” said Keene.

“The fact of the matter is that the Second Amendment has to do with personal and national defense. It was put into the Constitution by the Founders who considered it as important indeed as the First Amendment.”

As Charles Krauthammer waxed eloquent on Fox News Channel last night:

We have a 200-year history and culture of gun ownership. And we have a Second Amendment and we have a system that believes that the rights, the Second Amendment, in other words, predate the republic and the point of having a government, as in the Declaration [of Independence], is to secure the rights. In Britain you have no such right, the government will control gun ownership so unless you’re willing to confiscate, which would be unconstitutional and that would cause an insurrection in the country –Australia did– these things are not going to have an effect, except at the margins and that’s the tragedy here.

Although many law enforcement personnel would probably refuse to enforce something as profoundly un-American as a gun-confiscation diktat, it is not at all clear where Obama would get the legal authority to unilaterally impose new gun control measures. Even liberal constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe concedes that –at a minimum– the Second Amendment safeguards the individual right of Americans to “possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes.”

The Supreme Court has blown away gun grabbers in recent years. In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the high court struck down the draconian ban on gun ownership that had long been in effect in the nation’s capital. The court found for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, affirming what serious constitutional scholars had known for years.

The court followed up in the case of McDonald v. Chicago, making it clear that the individual right to keep and bear arms acknowledged in the Heller ruling applies to the states as well. That 2010 decision quashed a Chicago city ordinance banning the possession of handguns.

Complicating matters further for Obama, it turns out then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was correct when she said to lawmakers in 2010, “we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”

A new report from Breitbart.com indicates that a provision is buried in the Obamacare legislation that protects Second Amendment rights. The clause states that the government is not allowed to collect “any information relating to the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm or ammunition.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed that he added the legislative language in order to keep the National Rifle Association out of the legislative battle over Obamacare. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Will any of these legal concerns matter to President Obama who regards the Constitution at best as a living document and at worst as an inconvenience?

As gun and ammunition sales skyrocket nationwide, it is clear the public isn’t taking the chance that Obama will feel restrained by the laws of the land.

Al Gore Profits from the Stealth Jihad

Center for Security Policy | Jan 07, 2013

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Let's call it Al Goreera.  That seems a fitting title for the new network that former Vice President Al Gore is launching with the jihadists' favorite television outlet: Al Jazeera.  The effect will be to create vast new opportunities for our enemies to propagandize the American people, a key ingredient of their "civilization jihad" against our country.
 
It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this treachery.  Imagine the furor that would have erupted if, during the Cold War, one of the United States' most prominent former leaders had enriched himself to the tune of $100 million by giving the Soviet Union's intelligence service, the KGB, a vehicle for engaging in information and political warfare in some 40 million homes across this land.  If anything, the danger posed by Al-Goreera today is even greater since most of us -- and especially our elites -- are unaware that such warfare is even afoot.
 
Yet it is.  In the Holy Land Foundation trial -- the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history -- the government introduced into evidence the Muslim Brotherhood's strategic plan for its operations in America. This 1991 document, entitled "The Explanatory Memorandum on the Strategic Goal of the Group," established that the Brothers' mission here is "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within...by their hands [meaning ours] and the hands of the Believers  so that God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
 
Toward this end, Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood employ various subversive techniques.  Among the most important are those aimed at achieving what the military calls "information dominance."  Al Jazeera is used by jihadists the world over -- including its Wahhabi owner, the Emir of Qatar -- to promote their narratives of hatred of the infidel West in general, and Israel and the United States in particular.
 
The Washington Free Beacon recently identified (http://freebeacon.com/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-al-jazeera/) seven illustrative examples of the network's regular dissemination of praise for terrorists and their sponsors.  These include the likes of the late Yemini-American al Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Sudan's genocidal dictator, Omar al-Bashir.  The virulently shariah-promoting, Qatari-based cleric Yousef al-Qaradawi even has a regular show on Al Jazeera's programming for Muslim consumption.  He uses it to sanction murderous holy war against American soldiers and Israelis, including women and children.
 
Of course, those promoting the network's penetration of the United States -- among them Mr. Gore, who will get a board seat on the new network to be formally known as Al Jazeera America -- tend to pooh-pooh concerns about the Arabic-language mother ship's service to the jihadi cause.  In any event, these apologists insist that the programming in English is objective and fair, claiming that Colin Powell says it is the only network he watches.  Who knows, given their appalling predilections, it may also be the favorite of President Obama's newest nominees, Defense Secretary-designate Chuck Hagel and CIA Director-designate John Brennan.
 
The truth, however, is that over time if not immediately, the dictates of the owner and the editorial board in Doha will ensure that the content of Al Goreera helps obscure, rather than illuminate, the ominous nature of civilization jihad and promotes the shariah doctrine it seeks to insinuate into this country.
 
Regrettably, the Federal Communications Commission has washed its hands of this transaction claiming, in the words of a spokesman, it "doesn't have regulatory oversight of transactions relating to ownership of cable networks."  It's a safe bet that the deeply Islamist-penetrated Department of Justice (see Part 9 of www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com) won't intervene, either.  In light of the stakes, Congress must inject itself into the matter.
 
At the very least, Al Jazeera America should be obliged to register as a foreign agent.  That term is defined by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) as individuals or entities that are wholly owned by a foreign government, that take instruction from the owners or their agents and that attempt to influence public opinion and policy in America.  Al Goreera would certainly fit that description, and Congress should ensure that its broadcasts are identified accordingly.
 
The larger point was illuminated recently in an important essay by Jonathan Tobin at Commentary Magazine's blog (www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/04/the-al-jazeera-liberals-al-gore/):  "The real issue here is not a false argument about diversity [in the U.S. media]. It is instead one about what it means to be a liberal in today's media environment....Gore refused to sell his channel to conservative Glenn Beck saying that he didn't wish to see his vanity project fall into the hands of those who disagreed with his politics. Fair enough. But the fact that Gore sees Al Jazeera as a good match for his brand of American liberalism speaks volumes about the nature of that set of beliefs."
 
With his spawning of Al Goreera, the former Vice President has offered proof positive of the Left's readiness tomake common cause with our enemies. Al Gore and his ilk must be held accountable -- not just for the affinity they feel for jihadists, but for enabling the latters' undermining of America. For a man who was once a heartbeat and then some 500 votes away from the presidency to enrich himself by selling out his country in this fashion is not just contemptible.  It is a threat to the national security.

U.S. MARINE’S SCATHING RESPONSE TO SEN. FEINSTEIN’S GUN CONTROL PROPOSAL: ‘I AM NOT YOUR SUBJECT. I AM THE MAN WHO KEEPS YOU FREE’

Posted on January 2, 2013 at 7:30pm by      Jason Howerton


(CNN iReport)
One U.S. Marine was more than a little displeased with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s draconian gun control proposal, which includes an assault weapons ban and provisions on handguns and even “grandfathered weapons.”

The letter, written by U.S. Marine Joshua Boston, was titled “No ma’am” and was first posted on CNN iReport on Dec. 27. The letter has since gone viral and has been shared extensively on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as it seemingly has resonated with a segment of the American population.

Read Boston’s entire “No ma’am” letter below and then share it with others:

Senator Dianne Feinstein,
I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government’s right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma’am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.
I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.
I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.
I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.
We, the people, deserve better than you.

Respectfully Submitted,

Joshua Boston
Cpl,
United States Marine Corps
2004-2012

2013: Welcome to Very, Very Scary Times

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On January 2, 2013

On the One Hand…

These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of [1], the present administration.

Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging [2] at rates far in excess of our own [3].

In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest food on the planet.

As far as high-tech gadgetry, the global companies that have most changed the world in recent years — Amazon’s online buying, Google search engines, Apple iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops — are mostly American. There is a reason why Mexican nationals are not crossing their border into Guatemala — and it is not because they prefer English speakers to Spanish speakers.

Militarily, the United States is light years ahead of its rivals. And so on…

The New Poverty Is the Old Middle Class

We have redefined poverty itself [4] through government entitlements, modes of mass production and consumerism, and technological breakthroughs. The poor man is not hungry; more likely he suffers from obesity, now endemic among the less affluent. He is not deprived of a big-screen TV, a Kia, warm water, or an air conditioner. (My dad got our first color television during my first year in college in 1972, a small 19 inch portable; I bought my first new car at 39, and quit changing  my own oil at 44.)

In classical terms, today’s poor man is poor not in relative global terms (e.g. compared to a Russian, Bolivian, or Yemeni), but in the sense that there are those in America who have more things and choices than does he: a BMW instead of a Hyundai, ribeye instead of ground beef, Pellegrino rather than regular Coke, Tuscany in the summer rather than Anaheim at Disneyland, and L.L. Bean tasteful footwear rather than Payless shoes. I was in Manhattan not long ago, and noticed that my cheap, discount-store sportcoat and Target tie did not raise eyebrows among the wealthy people I spoke to, suggesting that the veneer of aristocracy is now within all our reach. When I returned to Selma, I noted that those ahead of me at Super Wal-Mart were clothed no differently than was I. Their EBD cards bought about the same foods.

Put all the above developments together, and an alignment of the planets is favoring America as never before — as long as we do not do something stupid to nullify what fate, our ancestors, and our own ingenuity have given us. But unfortunately that is precisely what is now happening.

The New Hubris

These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.

There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning [5], whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.

Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.

Read the News and Weep

That is not conspiracy talk, but simply a distillation of what I read today. On the last day of the year when I am writing this, I offer you just three sample op-eds.

A journalist, Donald Kaul, in the Des Moines Register offers us a three-step, presto! plan [6] to stop school shootings:

Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. … Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. …Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Note the new ease with which the liberal mind calls for trashing the Constitution, outlawing those whom they don’t like (reminiscent of “punish our enemies” [7]?), and killing those politicians with whom they don’t agree (we are back to Bush Derangement Syndrome, when novels, movies, and op-eds dreamed of the president’s assassination [8].)

What would be the Register’s reaction should a conservative opponent of abortion dare write, “Repeal the First Amendment; ban Planned Parenthood as a terrorist organization; and drag Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi from a truck”? If an idiot were to write that trash, I doubt the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal would print such sick calls for overturning the Constitution and committing violence against public officials.

Ah Yes, Still More Redistribution

Turning to a column in The New Republic, John Judis, in honest fashion, more or less puts all the progressive cards on the table in a column titled “Obama’s Tax Hikes Won’t Be Nearly Big Enough [9]” — a candor about what the vast $5 trillion deficits of Obama’s first term were all about in the first place.

Here is the summation quote: “But to fund these programs, governments will have to extract a share of income from those who are able to afford them and use the revenues to make the services available for everyone.”

Note that Judas was not talking about the projected new taxes in the fiscal cliff talks, but something far greater to come. He understands well that the “gorge the beast” philosophy that resulted in these astronomical debts will require enormous new sources of revenue, funds “to extract” from “those who are able to afford them” in order to “make services available for everyone.”

That is about as neat a definition of coerced socialism as one can find. Implicit in Judas’s formulation is that only a very well-educated (and well-compensated) technocratic class will possess the wisdom, the proper schooling, and the morality to adjudicate who are to be the extracted ones and who the new “everyone.”

The Constitution — Who the Hell Needs It?

The third item in my year-end reading was the most disturbing. A law professor (could it be otherwise?) named Louis Michael Seidman enlightens us with “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” [10] — yet another vision of what the now triumphant liberal mind envisions for us all:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Did Madison force Obama to borrow a half-billion dollars to fund Solyndra and its multimillionaire con artists?

Note Seidman’s use of “evil,” which tips his hand that our great moralist is on an ethical crusade to change the lives of lesser folk, who had the misfortune of growing up in America — a place so much less prosperous, fair, and secure than, say, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Japan and Germany (in the earlier 20th century history) . When I lived in Greece, traveled to Libya, and went into Mexico, I forgot to sigh, “My God, these utopias are possible for us too, if we just junked that evil Constitution.”

White Guys Did It

The non-archaic, un-idiosyncratic, and anti-downright evil Professor Seidman presses his argument against his inferiors who wrote the “evil” document: “Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”

Ah yes, old white male Madison, who lacked the insight, character, and morality of our new liberal technocrats in our successful law schools, such as, well, Mr. Seidman himself:

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official —  say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress  –  reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

I suppose human nature changes every decade or so [11], so why shouldn’t constitutions as well?

I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their “considered judgment” and favored “particular course of action” trump the archaic and evil wisdom of “white propertied men.”  But if we wish to avoid the baleful influence of white guys, can Seidman point to indigenous Aztec texts for liberal guidance, or perhaps the contemporary constitution of liberated Zimbabwe, or the sagacity of the Chinese court system?

The Law Is What We Say It Is

Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.” [12]  Ginsburg obviously vacations in Johannesburg, goes to Cape Town for her medical treatment, and has a vacation home and bank account in the scenic South African countryside.

Seidman looks fondly on Roosevelt’s war against the Constitution (especially the notion that law is essentially what an elected president who has proper “aspirations” says it is):

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation.

No doubt.

Free at Last from Constitutional Chains

In the age of Obama, the constitutional law lecturer who once lamented that the Supreme Court had not gone far enough by failing to take up questions of forced redistribution, Seidman writes:

In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

But I thought it was the Constitution, not the anti-Constitution or egalitarian good will, that separated us from Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Tojo’s Japan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and most of the miserable places that one sees abroad today, from Cuba to North Korea, which all had and have one thing in common — the embrace of some sort of national, republican, or democratic “socialism” guiding their efforts and plastered about in their sick mottoes.

The progressive mind, given that it is more enlightened and moral, alone can  determine which parts of the “evil” Constitution should be summarily ignored (e.g., the Second Amendment) and which should not be: “This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.”

Give Real Freedom a Chance

I am sure that history offers all sorts of examples where people without evil documents like our Constitution protected free speech and religious worship — out of “respect.”  Ask Socrates, Jesus, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, or those with eyeglasses [13] during the days of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, what stops such carnage is not the rule of constitutional law, but good progressive minds who care for others and show respect. I’ll try that rhetoric on the next thief who for the fourth time will steal the copper wire conduit from my pump.

So just dream with Professor Seidman:

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity…What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit… before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

I have seen their future and it is almost here right now. Scary times, indeed.

Kwanzaa: Holiday Brought to You by the FBI

Posted By Ann Coulter On December 27, 2012 @ www.frontpagemag.com

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year? And let’s face it, Kwanzaa’s gotten way too commercialized.

A few years ago, I suspended my annual Kwanzaa column because my triumph over this fake holiday seemed complete. The only people still celebrating Kwanzaa were presidential-statement writers and white female public school teachers.

But it seems to be creeping back. A few weeks ago, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., complained about having to stick around Washington for fiscal cliff negotiations by accusing Republicans of not caring about “families” coming together to bond during Kwanzaa. The private schools have picked up this PC nonsense from the public schools. (Soon, no one will know anything.)

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga — founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution (although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers). Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves.

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” are currently in prison?)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear.

Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt” — an interesting standard of proof.)

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”

Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot to death two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus: Al “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Karenga’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming legacy of the Worst Generation.

In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani — the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa praises collectivism in every possible area of life — economics, work, personality, even litter removal. (“Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.”) It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites. (Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)

While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” — excluding, one hopes, the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor — Karenga said Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.” There’s an inclusive philosophy for you.

Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves — the violence, the Marxism, the insanity.

Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas. (Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!)

Sing to “Jingle Bells”:

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

Modern Wisdom from Ancient Minds

Victor Davis Hanson - December 18, 2012

The Tragic View

Of course we can acquire a sense of man’s predictable fragilities from religion, the Judeo-Christian view in particular, or from the school of hard knocks. Losing a grape crop to rain a day before harvest, or seeing a warehouse full of goods go up in smoke the week before their sale, or being diagnosed with leukemia on the day of a long-awaited promotion convinces even the most naïve optimist that the world sort of works in tragic ways that we must accept, but do not fully understand.


Yet classical literature is the one of the oldest and most abstract guides to us that there are certain parameters that we may seek to overcome, but must also accept that we ultimately cannot.

You Can’t Stop Aging, Nancy

Take the modern obsession with beauty and aging, two human facts that all the Viagra and surgery in the world cannot change. I expect few readers have endured something like the Joe Biden makeover or the Nancy Pelosi facial fix (I thought those on the Left were more inclined to the natural way? Something is not very green and egalitarian about spending gads of money for something so unnatural). Most of you accept wrinkles, creaky joints, and thinning hair. Oh, we exercise and try to keep in shape and youthful, but a Clint Eastwood seems preferable looking to us than a stretched and stitched Sylvester Stallone.

The Greek lyric poets, from Solon to Mimnermus, taught that there is nothing really “golden” about old age. That did not mean that at about age 50-70 one is not both wiser than at 20 and less susceptible to the destructive appetites and passions — only that such mental and emotional maturity come at the terrible price of a decline in energy and physicality. When I now mow the lawn or chain saw, in about 10 minutes a knee is sore, an elbow swollen, a back strained — and from nothing more than a silly wrong pivot. Biking 100 miles a week seems to make the joints more, not less, painful. At 30 going up a 30-foot ladder was fun; at near 60 it is a high-wire act. There is some cruel rule that the more it is necessary at 60 to build muscle mass, the more the joints and tendons seem to rebel at the necessary regimen.

The ancients honored old age, as the revered Gerousia and the Senate attest, but on the concession that with sobriety came far less exuberance and spontaneity. I suppose old Ike would never had mouthed JFK’s “pay any price” to intervene and oppose communism. Yet we must try to stay competitive until the last breath, if not with our bodies, then with our minds — like old blabbermouth Isocrates railing in his 90s, or Sophocles writing the Oedipus at Colonus (admittedly not a great play) well after 90. Cicero’s De Senectute reminds us that knowledge and learning can bridge some of the vast gap between the age cohorts. I remember an 80-year-old woman in one of my Greek classes who palled around with the 20-somethings; apparently when they were all reading Homer, they all forgot trivial things such as looks and age — at least for the ephemeral two hours they were reading The Iliad. (One young man after a class said, “She looks good in jeans.”)

In term of relative power, the Greeks and Romans felt that youth often trumped wisdom, at least in the sense that the firm 21 year old held all the cards with her obsessed 50-year-old admirer.  When I sometimes read of the latest harassment suit that involved consensual adult sex involving an “imbalance in power,” I wonder what a Petronius, who wrote about crafty youth using their beauty to incite and humiliate the foolish aging, would think. Was Paula Broadwell really a victim in a “power imbalance”? Over the decades I have seen a number of adept young graduate students who fooled silly old goats (often the same nerds that they were in high school) into consensual relationships that aided their careers, but then, when the benefits were exhausted, they moved on, only to define themselves as victims as the need arose. A Greek would laugh at that idea of victims and oppressors.

As far as beauty goes, what is so attractive about either the perfect Stepford wives’ look or the starved model appearance? From red-figure vase painting to Rubens, Western tastes have appreciated curves, not lines. Where did the new beauty profile come from that is abnormal and usually achieved only through surgery: 5’ 10” females, weighing 120 lbs., with micro-waists and huge breasts and rears, as if more than 1% of the population is born that way? Ovid also reminds us that, on occasion, a blemish can mesmerize the beholder, in the way perhaps Cleopatra’s ample nose incited Caesar and Antony. I used to find the actress Sandy Dennis’s uncorrected overbite appealing in the way I don’t find today’s oversized, bleached, spot-lighted, and perfectly capped choppers inviting. A mole for the Greeks should not be removed. The classics remind us that a small defect is no defect at all. Forty years ago, I once knew an undergraduate with a scar across running across her chin, maybe six inches in length, and a few millimeters wide. It was hypnotic. And what happened to the classical emphases on voice, comportment, grace, and gesture as ingredients of beauty? Have they simply fallen by the wayside in our boobs/butt obsessed popular culture? Are there voice or posture classes anymore, or has it become all liposuction and implants?

Hoi Aristoi/Polloi

Admittedly classical literature is aristocratic, at least in the sense that the well-read and learned had more money than those whom they often wrote about. But that said, it is striking how frequently over a thousand years of Greek and Latin masterpieces arise words like “mob” (ochlos) and “throng” (turba) to describe the herd-like desire for entitlements without worry as to how they were to be funded. Virgil (vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur) and Horace (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo) would assume that even the Wall Street Journal is not read at Super Wal-Mart. (But be careful: at a local electric motor shop, the two Hispanic mechanic/owners once asked me how I would rate Peter Green’s Alexander the Great — and then cited four other biographies — while I was waiting to have a motor rewound.)

Alexis de Tocqueville put forth a thesis that American democracy had a chance because the small-scale entrepreneur (see above) and autonomous, self-reliant agrarian were not so prone to the Siren-calls of the European mob. He felt that we in American would not perhaps follow the model of the fourth-century Athenian dêmos or imperial Roman vulgus that flocked to the cities for the dole, and hated the wealthy the more they taxed them (don’t think Obama will be happy with just raising rates on “millionaires”) — as if the ability to pay high taxes was always proof of the ability to pay even more. Tocqueville derived that pessimistic view from Aristotle whose best democracy was a politeia — rule by owners of some property, who were largely agrarian and self-reliant, and did not expect subsidies from others. Classics, then, teaches us to beware a situation when 47% of the population do not pay income taxes and nearly half of us receive federal and state subsidies. Perhaps we should go over the cliff so that the 53% all understand the burdens of higher taxes to subsidize the 47% who pay no income taxes. If we hike taxes on those who make over $1 million a year, then cannot we not insist that everyone pays at least $500 per year in federal income taxes — to appreciate that April 15 is not Christmas?

In that regard I now often think of Solon’s seisachtheia, the “shaking off” of debts by those small farmers of Attica burdened from having to pay 1/6th (or so scholars still believe) of their produce to their creditors — or the Messenian helots who were obligated to give ¼ to ½ of everything they produced to their Spartan overlord. Yet at this point, with a looming 40% federal tax rate, 12% California tax, returning payroll and higher Medicare taxes, and the new Obamacare hit, millions would prefer the oppressive take of classical serfdom to the present 55-60% of their income grabbed by the state. The new American helots, after all, will fork over sixty percent of their almond crops to the IRS, build six out of ten houses for their government, drive their trucks until July for Washington — and write thirty PJ weekly columns a year for Obama. The Tea Party might have been better named the Helot Party.

Stasis

I was thinking of the class strife in Sallust’s Conspiracy of Cataline the other day as well; I used to teach it and the Jugurthine War in third-year Latin. In my thirties I never quite understood the standard hackneyed redistributionist call of the late Roman republic for “cancellation of debts and redistribution of property!” But recently I reread Sallust with a new awareness — in the context of all the talk of mortgage forgiveness, credit card forgiveness, student loan forgiveness, wealth taxes, and new estates taxes. The subtext of those Catalinian platforms, of course, is that someone else was culpable for having enough money in the first place (rather than prudence, character, dutifulness, etc.) to pay what he had borrowed — and therefore as atonement should pay for others who were defrauded by the system.

In the Roman state, those who borrowed unwisely periodically needed a clean slate — paid for by those who mostly did not, albeit always dressed up in the sense of the noble poor and the rapacious rich. “Pay your fair share,” “fat cat,” “you didn’t build that,” “at some point you’ve made enough money,” etc. are right out of the demagoguery so brilliantly chronicled by Aristophanes, Plutarch, and Sallust. Debt relief and redistribution were not quaint classical topoi, but inherent in the human condition. For now our would be Gracchus in the White House seems a lot more like a Publius Claudius Pulcher (author of the expansion of the grain dole), an upscale elite who chose demagoguery as the best route to power, fame, influence, and riches — and who can’t finish a sentence without blasting “millionaires and billionaires” as the source of all our woes. How did it happen that those in government, with higher than private sector salaries, with access to free perks, with better than normal pensions and benefits, so often talk about the need for higher taxes without anyone replying that they were selfish in asking the worse off to subsidize the better off?

The Golden Mean

One theme sort of resonates through classical literature. Character consists of moderation, of avoiding hubris and thereby escaping nemesis. Character is formed through balanced behavior, from the trivial of not overeating, oversleeping, and overdrinking (“glutton,” “sloth,” and “drunk” have disappeared from the American vocabulary, though they were ubiquitous in Western languages for the last 2500 years), to being humble in success and resilient in humiliation and defeat as well. But here is the warning: the good man — whether Ajax or Socrates — should expect — perhaps even welcome? — the disdain of the crowd, and usually will not win acclaim or receive what he deserves in this life. (Achilles finally came to accept that.)

Once upon a time in Hollywood, great directors grasped that, and so in their versions of the Iliad or the Sophoclean play — think Shane, Ride the High Country, High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence — the man with character, if not killed, rides off into the sunset alone, glad to be free of those he saved. We don’t like our George S. Pattons and Curtis Lemays, at least until we are faced with the Waffen SS and the Japanese imperial military. Today, Marshall Will Kane might be dubbed a “loser,” or Ethan Edwards as “obsessed.”

Whatever character is, it was not Susan Rice’s recent letter/op-ed bowing out of consideration for nomination to the office of Secretary of State. Instead it was Euripidean projection, Pentheus-style, as she alleged politicization and cheap partisan distraction on the part of her critics, even as she unleashed a pattern of obfuscation of her own and race/gender pandering from her supporters.

Ave atque Salve

I was given a great gift to have been a student of classics, to have lived on a farm, and to have had a father who was nobly self-destructive in the Ajaxan sense (on his Selma gravestone reads Sophocles’ chiastic aphorism, “live nobly, or nobly die”). He practiced an archaic code that won him admiration, but made his job, his career, and his life almost impossible, whether over Tokyo in a B-29, or on a tractor, or in the Byzantine labyrinth of junior college administration, at which he excelled with his colleagues and students, but was deemed too eccentric by his administrative superiors. When I came home at 26 puffed up with a PhD, he met me in the driveway and said “The shed needs new shingles,” a not too subtle reminder right out of Hesiod that with intellectual progress can come moral regress.

One of the great, though inadvertent gifts of the Obama administration has been to remind us that the Rhodes Scholarship, the Harvard Law degree, the Stanford PhD, the Princeton BA mean, well, nothing much at all, if not perhaps a suspicion that a lot of intellectual branding and grandstanding came at the expense of two years on a tuna boat, or a year picking apples, or four summers at Starbucks, of anything to remind the young genius that he was not so smart after all, and that character is not created by getting an award or being stamped by an unworldly elite institution.

In this age of Obama and a corrupting equality of result, we must continue to speak out, with dash and style, with the knowledge that most of our peers prefer sameness and mandated equality to freedom and liberty, if the latter result in inequality. But at least we are not alone, the best of the ancient world nods with us.

And that is the point, is it not — to keep the ancient faith and so welcome rather than fear the popular anger of the age?

A Turkish 'Trojan Horse' for Loudoun?

Center for Security Policy | Dec 10, 2012

By Frank Gaffney, Jr. - December 10, 2012.

It is a commonplace, but one that most of us ignore:  If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  That applies in spades to a proposal under active consideration by the school board in Virginia's Loudoun County.  It would use taxpayer funds to create a charter school to equip the children of thatWashington exurb with enhanced skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.  Ostensibly, they will thus be equipped to compete successfully in the fields expected to be at the cutting edge of tomorrow's workplace.
 
What makes this initiative, dubbed the Loudoun Math and IT Academy (LMITA), too good to be true?  Let's start with what is acknowledged about the proposed school.
 
LMITA's board is made up of a group of male Turkish expatriates.  One of them, Fatih Kandil, was formerly the principal of the Chesapeake Science Point (CSP) Public Charter School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Another is Ali Bicak, the board president of the Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation, which owns CSP and two other charter schools in Maryland.  The LMITA applicants expressly claim that Chesapeake Science Point will be the model for their school.
 
The taxpayers of Loudoun County and the school board elected to represent them should want no part of a school that seeks to emulate Chesapeake Science Point, let alone be run by the same people responsible for that publicly funded charter school.  For one thing, CSP has not proven to be the resounding academic success the applicants claim.  It does not appear anywhere in the acclaimed US News and World Report lists of high-performing schools in Maryland, let alone nationwide - even in the subsets of STEM or charter schools.
 
What is more, according to public documents chronicling Anne Arundel Public Schools' dismal experience with CSP, there is significant evidence of chronic violations of federal, state and local policies and regulations throughout its six years of operations, with little or inconsistent improvement, reflecting deficiencies in fiscal responsibility and organizational viability.
 
Why, one might ask, would applicants for a new charter school cite so deeply problematic an example as their proposed institution?  This brings us to aspects of this proposal that are not acknowledged.
 
Chesapeake Science Point is just one of five controversial schools with which Mr. Kandil has been associated: He was previously: the director at the Horizon Science Academy in Dayton, Ohio; the principal at the Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee and at the Baltimore Information Technology Academy in Maryland; and one of the applicants in a failed bid to establish the First State Math and Science Academy in Delaware.
 
These schools have something in common besides their ties to the peripatetic Fatih Kandil.  They have all been "inspired" by and in other ways are associated with Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish supremacist and imam with a cult-like following of up to six million Muslims in Turkey and elsewhere around the world.  More to the point, Gulen is the reclusive and highly autocratic leader of a global media, business, "interfaith dialogue" and education empire said to be worth many billions and that is run from a compound in the Poconos.
 
This empire - including its roughly 135 charter schools in this country and another 1,000 abroad - and its adherents have come to be known as the Gulen Movement.  But those associated with it, in this country at least, are assiduously secretive about their connections to Imam Gulen or his enterprise.  For example, the LMITA applicants, their spokeswoman and other apologists have repeatedly misled the Loudoun school board, claiming that these Turkish gentlemen and their proposed school havenothing to do with Gulen.
 
There are several possible reasons for such professions.  For one, the Gulen schools are said to be under investigation by the FBI.  A growing number of them - including Chesapeake Science Point - have also come under critical scrutiny from school boards and staff around the country.  In some cases, they have actually lost their charters for, among other reasons, chronic financial and other mismanagement and outsourcing U.S. teachers' jobs to Turks.
 
The decisive reason for the Gulenist lack of transparency,however, may be due to their movement's goals and modus operandi.  These appear aligned with those of another secretive international organization that also adheres to the Islamic doctrine known as shariah and seeks to impose it worldwide: the Muslim Brotherhood. Both seek to accomplish this objective by stealth in what the Brotherhood calls "civilization jihad" and Gulen's movement describes as "jihad of the word."
 
This practice enabled the Gulenists to help transform Turkey from a reliable, secular Muslim NATO ally to an Islamist state deeply hostile to the United States - one aligned with other Islamic supremacists, from Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to al Qaeda.  Fethullah Gulen's followers clearly don't want us alive to the obvious dangers posed by their penetration of our educational system and influence over our kids.
 
The good news is that members of the Loudoun County school board have a code of conduct which reads in part: "I have a moral and civic obligation to the Nation which can remain strong and free only so long as public schools in the United States of America are kept free and strong."  If the board members adhere to this duty, they will reject a seductive LMITA proposal that is way too "good" to be true.

Obama Pushing Federal Control of Public Schools

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On December 10, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

The effort to turn public school classrooms into laboratories for government propaganda has reached a new milestone. Common Core State Standards in English is a program already adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. It calls for an increase in the reading of “informational text” instead of fictional literature. When the new standards are fully implemented in 2014, nonfiction texts will comprise 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, with a required increase to 70 percent by grade 12. Thus, timeless literature such as Of Mice and Men, or Catcher in the Rye will be replaced by recommended nonfiction works such as “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” or “Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency.”

Proponents of Common Core, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, claim U.S. students have grown used to easy reading assignments that leave them unprepared to comprehend complex nonfiction. This leaves too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and the demands of the workplace, experts say. And while some of the recommended texts are legitimate, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” those mentioned in the first paragraph, or a New Yorker essay titled “The Cost Conundrum,” which would give students the impression that the Affordable Healthcare Act is good policy, are little more than thinly-veiled efforts to promote a progressive agenda masquerading as education.

Jamie Highfill, an eighth-grade English teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, AK reveals some of the “unintended consequences” of the rollout. “I’m struggling with this, and my students are struggling,” said the Arkansas 2011 middle school teacher of the year. “With informational text, there isn’t that human connection that you get with literature. And the kids are shutting down. They’re getting bored. I’m seeing more behavior problems in my classroom than I’ve ever seen,” she added.

David Coleman, the chief architect of the Common Core, who led the effort to write the standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said educators are overreacting as the standards move from concept to classroom. “There’s a disproportionate amount of anxiety,” he contended.

There ought to be, but not just for the concerns expressed by teachers such as Ms. Highfill. As National Review’s Stanley Kurtz explains, there is a good reason why control over public schools was kept out of federal hands by the Founding Fathers. They realized that one political party or ideology shaping the curriculum in public schools was a direct route to tyranny. What the Obama administration has done has conditioned Department of Education funding and regulatory waivers on state acceptance of Common Core. That such a move is constitutionally suspect at best, and another naked power grab at worst, should infuriate Americans who still believe an education is about teaching children how to think, not what to think. (Furthermore, considering the reality that this is being sold as an alternative to “easy reading assignments,” they should ask themselves how and why the public school curriculum was dumbed-down in the first place).

Accuracy in Media’s (AIM) Mary Grabar reveals how 48 state governors were lured into entering a contest called “Race to the Top” for a portion of $4.35 billion of funds made available by the stimulus package. “It was one of the many ‘crises’ exploited by the Obama administration,” she writes. “While the public was focused on a series of radical moves coming in rapid-fire succession, like the health care bill and proposed trials and imprisonment of 9/11 terrorists on domestic soil, governors, worried about keeping school doors open, signed on.”

Far more importantly, she reveals the players involved. The educational component of Common Core is controlled by Linda Darling-Hammond, a radical left-wing educator and close colleague of William Ayers, former member of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, who became a professor of education — and a friend of Barack Obama’s. Both Darling-Hammond and Ayers have advocated ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking “white privilege.” The big picture here is to eliminate objective measurement of knowledge and skills, and replace them with teachers offering up subjective appraisals of students’ attitudes and behavior.

In a 2009 article for the Harvard Educational Review, Darling-Hammond extolled these initiatives as the Obama administration’s “opportunity to transform our nation’s schools.” Grabar reveals what such “transformation” is intended to achieve. ”When these dangerous initiatives are implemented, there will be no escaping bad schools and a radical curriculum by moving to a good suburb, or by home schooling, or by enrolling your children in private schools,” she warns.

Some state governors have wised up. Virginia opted out when Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell was elected. Georgia, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina, and others have also begun, or completed, the effort to do the same. Last February, Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley explained her rationale for doing so. “Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government,” she wrote in a letter to a state lawmaker, “neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states.” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan characterized Haley’s fear of losing control as “a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy.” Yet when Utah dumped the program, Duncan was far more conciliatory. “States have the sole right to set learning standards” he wrote in a letter.

Legally they do, but the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) application says exactly the opposite, noting that any applicant is required to adopt “a set of content standards…that are substantially identical across all States in a consortium.” In other words, any states that wish to compete for RTTT school funding must embrace Common Core. Thus, a portion of federal funding for schools is nothing less than an effort to coerce the states into adopting a de facto national educational system. In many instances, such coercion is hardly necessary: the public school system is dominated by progressive-supporting unions who contribute virtually all of their campaign dollars to Democrats. Thus, the progressive agenda is already welcomed in many public schools. The Common Core curriculum is nothing less than an effort to coordinate that agenda on a national level.

In 2009, Bill Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group. The other two speakers were Secretary of Education Duncan and U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter. The Renaissance Group is purportedly interested in finding ways to educate the “New American Student,” part of which deals with the alleged inability of white teachers to deal with the issues of poverty, diversity and multiculturalism that affect their students. While some Americans might contend that the emphasis on such obvious progressive talking points is overblown, they should still ask themselves why those in charge of overseeing the federal government’s education programs would associate with a terrorist thug whose contempt for American culture, tradition and history is well-documented.

Just before he was elected in 2008 President Obama told his followers, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” It would appear that he and his progressive minions intend to make good on that promise, state by state, school by school–and child by child.

No ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Middle Ground

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On December 7, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

The latest machinations surrounding the so-called fiscal cliff, a combination of tax increases and spending cuts many economists insist would put the nation back into recession, continue. Ironically, the current impasse has far less to do with economic realities than ideological intransigence. The lion’s share of that intransigence belongs to the president, who has made it increasingly clear that any deal, even one that includes increased revenue, is DOA unless it includes higher taxes on the “rich.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner illuminated the administration’s position on Sunday. “There’s no path to an agreement that does not involve Republicans acknowledging that rates have to go up on the wealthiest Americans,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Yet on Monday, Republicans made an offer described as a “savvy tactical move,” or an effort to regain the high ground in the debate. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) sent a letter to the president that embraced many of the ideas put forward by Democrat Eskine Bowles, who was part of the Simpson-Bowles Commission put together in 2010 by Obama himself. It was an ostensible effort to rein in the nation’s burgeoning debt, currently standing at more than $16.2 trillion. The commission came up with a series of recommendations, including a cap on discretionary spending, some tax increases, and overall tax reform. It was subsequently rejected by the president, likely due to the reality that it recommended cutting individual tax rates to as low as 23 percent, and capping federal spending and revenue at 21 percent of GDP. It is the latter proposal that likely irked a president determined to maintain government spending and revenue at the current 24 percent of GDP, matched only by FDR during WWll.

The proposal offered by Boehner endorsed a 10-year plan, including $800 billion in new tax revenues, $600 billion in health savings, another $600 billion in a combination of “mandatory” and “discretionary” savings, and a revision of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) used to calculate future Social Security benefits that would save another $200 billion. Such savings total $2.2 trillion. It was a genuine compromise, as evidenced by the reality that it irritated many Republicans.

In his letter, Boehner explained the rationale for such a plan. After noting that the election essentially maintained the status quo of a Republican House, along with a Democratic Senate and presidency, Boehner contended that “the American people rightly expect both parties to come together on a fair middle ground and address the nation’s most pressing challenges.” He further emphasized that the plan Obama submitted to Congress last week was a re-hash of the president’s ”Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction,” submitted in September 2011. ”We cannot in good conscience agree to this approach, which is neither balanced nor realistic. If we were to take your Administration’s proposal at face value, then we would counter with the House-passed Budget Resolution [Paul Ryan's budget plan].”

Boehner then put the proverbial ball in the administration’s court. “This is by no means an adequate long-term solution, as resolving our fiscal crisis will require fundamental entitlement reform. Indeed the Bowles plan is the kind of imperfect but fair middle ground that allows us to avert the fiscal cliff without hurting our economy and destroying jobs. We believe it warrants immediate consideration.”

The administration did consider it — sort of. Senior administration officials contended the plan wasn’t serious enough to merit a counter-proposal. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer claimed it “does not meet the test of balance. In fact, it actually promises to lower rates for the wealthy and sticks the middle class with the bill.” He then reiterated the administration’s immutable demand. ”Until the Republicans in Congress are willing to get serious about asking the wealthiest to pay slightly higher tax rates, we won’t be able to achieve a significant, balanced approach to reduce our deficit,” he added. CNN then laid out the administration’s real aims: “Senior administration officials said they are confident the public will blame Republicans and not the president if the United States reaches the end of the year without a deal to avert the fiscal cliff.”

With ample assistance from the mainstream media, that is virtually certain. But such thinking reveals an almost unprecedented level of cynicism. In effect, administration officials have admitted that what benefits Democrats politically trumps what benefits the nation. So much so, they are willing to let the country slide back into recession, as long as Republicans get blamed for it.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) revealed the disingenuousness of the administration’s insistence that taxing the rich is a panacea. “The president’s plan to increase taxes on the upper two percent covers the spending by this federal government not for eight years, not for eight months, not for eight weeks but for eight days. Eight days only,” said Price. “It’s not a real solution. So, again, I’m puzzled by an administration that seems to be more interested in raising tax rates than in gaining economic vitality.”

Furthermore, a usually reliable media is not marching in lockstep with Democrats. Politico’s Ben White called the GOP’s proposal “significant,” noting that it is “less fanciful than the original administration request, which included phony savings (the war wind-downs), a gratuitous fork-in-the-eye (unlimited debt ceiling authority) and some new stimulus (just to make GOP blood boil and warm liberal hearts).” Bloomberg’s Josh Barro also saw the cynicism expressed by the aforementioned senior officials, contending that “if the White House really is willing to risk an austerity crisis unless it gets its way on an unrelated policy matter — then the Obama Administration is as irresponsible as it often accuses Republicans of being.”

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuels laid it out even better. “Put Social Security on the table — clearly and irrevocably,” he writes. “Protecting retiree benefits is the left’s political equivalent of the right’s ‘no new taxes’ pledge. Congressional Republicans are abandoning their untenable position. Now it is time for President Obama and congressional Democrats to do the same. As long as they don’t, they aren’t bargaining in good faith, or in the national interest.”

Even Erskin Bowles, who insisted that the GOP plan was not representative of his efforts, or those of the Simpson-Bowles plan, called for compromise. ”Every offer put forward brings us closer to a deal, but to reach an agreement, it will be necessary for both sides to move beyond their opening positions and reach agreement on a comprehensive plan which avoids the fiscal cliff and puts the debt on a clear downward path relative to the economy,” he said in a statement.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) offers a sobering look as to why such an agreement is necessary. In 2012, non-interest federal spending totaled $3.25 trillion. $762 billion was for Social Security, $469 billion for Medicare, $251 billion for Medicaid, and $651 billion for defense. These expenditures account for 66 percent of the federal budget. Since the federal government borrows forty cents of every dollar it spends, America is already in the red financing just these four programs – and that’s before the bulk of the Baby Boomer generation retires, driving at least three of these costs far higher.

Interest payments on America’s outstanding debt are also part of the mix. In 2012 that payment was $359 billion, financed at record low interest rates of approximately 2.8 percent. The Federal Reserve claims it will keep interest rates at near-zero until 2014. Based on current rates of spending, the national debt will likely approach $20 trillion by then. If interest rates return to a historical average of 4 percent, a staggering $800 billion will be needed just to pay the interest on that debt. There is also the “unfunded obligations” problem. Unfunded obligations are promises the government has made to such entities as seniors, veterans and retired employees. By 2011, America’s unfunded obligations totaled $61.6 trillion.

In short, the idea that “taxing the rich” is a make or break part of any deal — even as entitlement reform remains off the table — borders on insanity.

Yet two realities are readily apparent. First, that insanity is ideologically driven. This was made clear during the 2008 Democratic primary debates, when ABC’s Charlie Gibson asked the president why he supported an increase in the capital gains tax rate, given a historical record that repeatedly shows the government losing revenue as a result. ”Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness,” he answered. This goes a long way towards explaining why the president would rather kill a deal than accept tax reform as a viable alternative for raising revenue.

If such “fairness” precipitates a recession–or worse–in 2013, due to an inability to reach a compromise? As long as Republicans get blamed, all is well. That Democrats as a party, or the president as an individual, see themselves as the ultimate arbiters of fairness–for the entire nation–demonstrates a breathtaking level of arrogance.

Second, whether they realize it or not, it is this combination of arrogance and fiscal irresponsibility that Americans re-empowered on November 6. Despite an election that reinforced the status quo, Obama and Democrats believe they were given a mandate, and that Republicans are nothing more than an inconvenient impediment in their efforts to transform the nation into a Euro-style welfare state, even if another recession is necessary to do so.

Finally, Americans need to realize that President Obama’s campaign pledge to raise taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” is really targeting individuals making $200K, and families making $250K — right now. Since that additional revenue would only run the government for eight days, the public might want to consider what other sources of revenue the president and his party will subsequently target. That is worth remembering when the definition of millionaires and billionaires is “revised” once again. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, anyone earning $150K — or less — will be surprised find themselves on the “wrong” side of the Democrats’ never-ending class warfare campaign. They shouldn’t be. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, the middle class will be the next target because, “that’s where the money is.”

This is absolutely on-target.  Whittle is one of the wisest conservative voices out there, IMHO:

http://blip.tv/davidhorowitztv/bill-whittle-6444929

Pro-Islamist Losing Grip on Republican Party

Arnold Ahlert - November 28, 2012 - www.radicalislam.org

Anti-tax promoter Grover Norquist is losing his vice-like grip on the Republican party. The head of Americans for Tax Reform, who as recently as last year counted 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate among those who had signed his anti-tax pledge, has seen those numbers decline to 217 in the House, one shy of the 218 needed for a majority, and 39 in the Senate.

Both totals represent an all-time low. Last Wednesday, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) disavowed his pledge not to raise taxes, even as he acknowledged doing so could hurt his reelection chances in 2014. ”I don’t worry about that because I care too much about my country,” he said. “I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist.” Americans might not like seeing their taxes go up, but Grover Norquist’s fall from grace has its benefits: As he goes down, so goes his pro-Islamist agenda.

That agenda was laid bare by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) in a speech on the House floor, October 4, 2011. “My conscience has compelled me to come to the floor today to voice concerns I have with the influence Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has on the political process in Washington,” said Wolf. “My issue is not with ATR’s goal of keeping taxes low ... My concern is with the other individuals, groups and causes with whom Mr. Norquist is associated that have nothing to do with keeping taxes low.”

Wolf mentioned Norquist’s “association and representation” of terrorist financier and vocal Hamas supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi and terrorist financier Sami Al-Arian.

In 2004, Alamoudi, one of the most prominent and influential Muslim Brothers in the United States, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for supporting terror. Alamoudi, a self-described supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, had cultivated ties with the Clinton White House that eventually enabled him and his associates to select, train and certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military.

Fearing a loss by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, Alamoudi befriended Norquist to ensure his access to senior levels of the U.S. government would be maintained if Republicans took charge. He gave Norquist $20,000 to establish the Islamic Free Market Institute and Alamoudi’s longtime deputy, Khaled Saffuri, became the founding director.

Norquist and Saffuri eventually became an integral part of the Bush administration’s Muslim outreach efforts during the 2000 campaign, with Saffuri named as Muslim Outreach Coordinator. During that campaign, Bush was also introduced to Sami Al-Arian. In 2006, Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Wolf illuminated the bigger picture of that relationship, noting that Norquist was an “outspoken supporter of Al-Arian’s effort to end the use of classified evidence in terror trials.”

Al-Arian ran the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), and Norquist supported their efforts to weaken or repeal the Patriot Act as well, despite the terrorist atrocities perpetrated on 9/11.

Wolf also revealed that Norquist “was scheduled to lead a delegation to the White House on September 11, 2001, that included a convicted felon and some who would later be identified by federal law enforcement as suspected terrorist financiers.” One of the members of that delegation was Omar Ahmed, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was named an un-indicted co-conspirator when the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of sending million of dollars in funding to Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations.


 
Another relationship Norquist cultivated was with Suhail Khan, who has ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), whose anti-Semitic activities at American colleges has been documented on numerous occasions, including their latest attempt to organize a divestment campaign against Israel at the University of California, Irvine.

In 2007, Norquist promoted Suhail Khan’s candidacy for election to the American Conservative Union’s (ACU) board of directors. He was subsequently appointed. In 2012, at an irregular meeting of that organization, the board voted to dismiss accusations made against both Khan and Norquist by Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy and a former defense official in the Reagan administration.

Gaffney has been hammered by the ACU and others for suggesting that the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood reached the highest levels of the U.S. government despite the reality that it was Gaffney who drew attention to Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami Al-Arian, both of whom ended up as convicted felons for their terrorist activity. Yet it is Gaffney’s credibility that has been called into question for daring to draw attention to Norquist’s unseemly activity.

Wolf also pointed out that Norquist was “an outspoken advocate for moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States,” and “led a public campaign to undermine Republican-led efforts to block the Obama Administration’s transfer of 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed to New York City” in 2009.

In 2010, Norquist inserted himself into the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, which he characterized as a “Monica Lewinsky ploy,” distracting from the core Republican message heading into the 2010 elections. Yet according to Wolf, Norquist “used Americans for Tax Reform to circulate a petition in support of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” completely undermining his own contention that the issue was a distraction.

For years, Grover Norquist’s reputation as a staunch anti-tax advocate has overshadowed his dubious associations with Islamists, and anyone who has dared to criticize him for those associations has drawn rebuke from both sides of the aisle.

Thus, it is more than a little ironic that his ability to influence Republicans with respect to taxes is waning, even as Islamists, most notably Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are attempting to establish a dictatorship in Egypt, are becoming ever more powerful.

Sen. Chambliss isn’t the only Republican distancing himself from Norquist. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH) has referred to him as “some random person.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) noted that “fewer and fewer people are signing this, quote, pledge.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK.) called the pledge a “tortured vision of tax purity.” House newcomer Rep. Ted Yoho, (R-FL), who declined to sign the pledge, was sarcastic. “I’ll pledge allegiance to the flag. I’ll pledge to be faithful to my wife,” he quipped.

Yet it was Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who best summed up the growing rebellion. “A pledge is good at the time you sign it,” he said. “In 1941, I would have voted to declare war on Japan. But each Congress is a new Congress. And I don’t think you can have a rule that you’re never going to raise taxes or that you’re never going to lower taxes. I don’t want to rule anything out.”

Republicans can resist raising taxes without signing a pledge should they choose to do so for the good of the nation. Yet without the pledge Grover Norquist has long wielded like a hammer, his leverage among Republicans is precipitously diminished. Considering his dubious ties to Islamists and their agenda, that’s more than a reasonable tradeoff.

Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net

Copyright © 2009 Clarion Fund, Inc. All rights reserved.

Pro-Islamist Losing Grip on Republican Party

Arnold Ahlert - November 28, 2012 - www.radicalislam.org

Anti-tax promoter Grover Norquist is losing his vice-like grip on the Republican party. The head of Americans for Tax Reform, who as recently as last year counted 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate among those who had signed his anti-tax pledge, has seen those numbers decline to 217 in the House, one shy of the 218 needed for a majority, and 39 in the Senate.

Both totals represent an all-time low. Last Wednesday, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) disavowed his pledge not to raise taxes, even as he acknowledged doing so could hurt his reelection chances in 2014. ”I don’t worry about that because I care too much about my country,” he said. “I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist.” Americans might not like seeing their taxes go up, but Grover Norquist’s fall from grace has its benefits: As he goes down, so goes his pro-Islamist agenda.

That agenda was laid bare by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) in a speech on the House floor, October 4, 2011. “My conscience has compelled me to come to the floor today to voice concerns I have with the influence Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has on the political process in Washington,” said Wolf. “My issue is not with ATR’s goal of keeping taxes low ... My concern is with the other individuals, groups and causes with whom Mr. Norquist is associated that have nothing to do with keeping taxes low.”

Wolf mentioned Norquist’s “association and representation” of terrorist financier and vocal Hamas supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi and terrorist financier Sami Al-Arian.

In 2004, Alamoudi, one of the most prominent and influential Muslim Brothers in the United States, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for supporting terror. Alamoudi, a self-described supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, had cultivated ties with the Clinton White House that eventually enabled him and his associates to select, train and certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military.

Fearing a loss by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, Alamoudi befriended Norquist to ensure his access to senior levels of the U.S. government would be maintained if Republicans took charge. He gave Norquist $20,000 to establish the Islamic Free Market Institute and Alamoudi’s longtime deputy, Khaled Saffuri, became the founding director.

Norquist and Saffuri eventually became an integral part of the Bush administration’s Muslim outreach efforts during the 2000 campaign, with Saffuri named as Muslim Outreach Coordinator. During that campaign, Bush was also introduced to Sami Al-Arian. In 2006, Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Wolf illuminated the bigger picture of that relationship, noting that Norquist was an “outspoken supporter of Al-Arian’s effort to end the use of classified evidence in terror trials.”

Al-Arian ran the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), and Norquist supported their efforts to weaken or repeal the Patriot Act as well, despite the terrorist atrocities perpetrated on 9/11.

Wolf also revealed that Norquist “was scheduled to lead a delegation to the White House on September 11, 2001, that included a convicted felon and some who would later be identified by federal law enforcement as suspected terrorist financiers.” One of the members of that delegation was Omar Ahmed, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was named an un-indicted co-conspirator when the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of sending million of dollars in funding to Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations.


 
Another relationship Norquist cultivated was with Suhail Khan, who has ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), whose anti-Semitic activities at American colleges has been documented on numerous occasions, including their latest attempt to organize a divestment campaign against Israel at the University of California, Irvine.

In 2007, Norquist promoted Suhail Khan’s candidacy for election to the American Conservative Union’s (ACU) board of directors. He was subsequently appointed. In 2012, at an irregular meeting of that organization, the board voted to dismiss accusations made against both Khan and Norquist by Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy and a former defense official in the Reagan administration.

Gaffney has been hammered by the ACU and others for suggesting that the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood reached the highest levels of the U.S. government despite the reality that it was Gaffney who drew attention to Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami Al-Arian, both of whom ended up as convicted felons for their terrorist activity. Yet it is Gaffney’s credibility that has been called into question for daring to draw attention to Norquist’s unseemly activity.

Wolf also pointed out that Norquist was “an outspoken advocate for moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States,” and “led a public campaign to undermine Republican-led efforts to block the Obama Administration’s transfer of 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed to New York City” in 2009.

In 2010, Norquist inserted himself into the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, which he characterized as a “Monica Lewinsky ploy,” distracting from the core Republican message heading into the 2010 elections. Yet according to Wolf, Norquist “used Americans for Tax Reform to circulate a petition in support of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” completely undermining his own contention that the issue was a distraction.

For years, Grover Norquist’s reputation as a staunch anti-tax advocate has overshadowed his dubious associations with Islamists, and anyone who has dared to criticize him for those associations has drawn rebuke from both sides of the aisle.

Thus, it is more than a little ironic that his ability to influence Republicans with respect to taxes is waning, even as Islamists, most notably Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are attempting to establish a dictatorship in Egypt, are becoming ever more powerful.

Sen. Chambliss isn’t the only Republican distancing himself from Norquist. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH) has referred to him as “some random person.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) noted that “fewer and fewer people are signing this, quote, pledge.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK.) called the pledge a “tortured vision of tax purity.” House newcomer Rep. Ted Yoho, (R-FL), who declined to sign the pledge, was sarcastic. “I’ll pledge allegiance to the flag. I’ll pledge to be faithful to my wife,” he quipped.

Yet it was Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who best summed up the growing rebellion. “A pledge is good at the time you sign it,” he said. “In 1941, I would have voted to declare war on Japan. But each Congress is a new Congress. And I don’t think you can have a rule that you’re never going to raise taxes or that you’re never going to lower taxes. I don’t want to rule anything out.”

Republicans can resist raising taxes without signing a pledge should they choose to do so for the good of the nation. Yet without the pledge Grover Norquist has long wielded like a hammer, his leverage among Republicans is precipitously diminished. Considering his dubious ties to Islamists and their agenda, that’s more than a reasonable tradeoff.

Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net

Copyright © 2009 Clarion Fund, Inc. All rights reserved.

Hanif Mohebi, executive director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations said, “Since the beginning our ultimate goal was to get justice for Sister Shaima Alawadi.”

He referred to the case as “a family tragedy,” and said that domestic violence “has no place in our faith.”

“She has been a piece of our heart,” Mohebi said of Alawadi. “We need to do what we can to bring about justice.”

This is the typical lying engaged in by CAIR - which is trying to appear sympathetic to the victim in order to appear reasonable to non-Muslims in this country.  The reality is that Mohebi MOST LIKELY KNEW FROM THE START that this was very likely an attack by the husband on the wife to "salvage his honor."  This is all-too-common in Islamic countries, and is becoming common here in the U.S., although it is only in the last year or two that it has been reported widely - largely thanks to people such as Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Jamie Glazov, Robert Spencer, and yes - Pamela Geller - who are demanding that these incidents be exposed for what they truly are.  Framing the murder as a "hate crime" is a common tactic used by Muslim family members and CAIR to hide the truth about these honor killiings.

How ironic that the Russian Pravda is now reporting truth about the United States and our ignorant voters, while the U.S. media shills for the Obama administration:

Obama's Soviet Mistake

By Xavier Lerma - November 26, 2012


Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.

After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.

Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.

Putin said regarding the military,

"...instead of solving the problem, militarization pushes it to a deeper level. It draws away from the economy immense financial and material resources, which could have been used much more efficiently elsewhere."

Well, any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis . O'bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like "fast and furious" and there is still no sign of ending it.  He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia.  Obama's fools and Stalin's fools share the same drink of illusion.

Reading Putin's speech without knowing the author, one would think it was written by Reagan or another conservative in America. The speech promotes smaller government and less taxes. It comes as no surprise to those who know Putin as a conservative. Vladimir Putin went on to say:

"...we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.

 The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.

There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.

Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt - are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.

During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself."

President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.

"We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success."- Vladimir Putin

The red, white and blue still flies happily but only in Russia. Russia still has St George defeating the Dragon with the symbol of the cross on its' flag. The ACLU and other atheist groups in America would never allow the US flag with such religious symbols. Lawsuits a plenty against religious freedom and expression in the land of the free. Christianity in the U.S. is under attack as it was during the early period of the Soviet Union when religious symbols were against the law.   

Let's give American voters the benefit of the doubt and say it was all voter fraud and not ignorance or stupidity in electing a man who does not even know what to do and refuses help from Russia when there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead we'll say it's true that the Communists usage of electronic voting was just a plan to manipulate the vote. Soros and his ownership of the company that counts the US votes in Spain helped put their puppet in power in the White House. According to the Huffington Post, residents in all 50 states have filed petitions to secede from the Unites States. We'll say that these Americans are hostages to the Communists in power. How long will their government reign tyranny upon them?

Russia lost its' civil war with the Reds and millions suffered torture and death for almost 75 years under the tyranny of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Russians survived with a new and stronger faith in God and ever growing Christian Church. The question is how long will the once "Land of the Free" remain the United Socialist States of America?  Their suffering has only begun. Bye bye Miss American Pie!  You know the song you hippies. Sing it! Don't you remember? The 1971 hit song by American song writer Don McLean:

"And, as I watched him on the stage my hands were clenched in fists of rage.

No angel born in Hell could break that Satan's spell

And, as the flames climbed high into the night to light the sacrificial rite, I saw...

Satan laughing with delight the day the music died

He was singing, bye bye Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing...

This'll be the day that I die

This'll be the day that I die

So, the question remains:

How long will America suffer and to what depths?

 

Xavier Lerma

Contact Xavier Lerma at xlermanov@swissmail.org

His popular articles can be seen at http://xlerma.wordpress.com/

Hyperlink to Pravda is mandatory if you republish this article.

 

 

 

Дмитрий Судаков
Copyright © 1999-2012, «PRAVDA.Ru». When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors.

Four Islamists on Gov. Christie’s Muslim Outreach Committee

Ryan Mauro - www.radicalislam.org - November 15, 2012.

A RadicalIslam.org investigation has discovered that at least four Islamists sit on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Muslim outreach committee, which was formed after Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa concluded in May that NYPD intelligence-gathering operations in New Jersey did not break any laws.

All of the information about the Islamist backgrounds of these four committee members is publicly available, yet the Christie Administration picked them to serve as liaisons to the Muslim community of the state. As a result, they are having private meetings with N.J.’s top security officials. This is just the latest example of Christie’s embrace of Islamists that should be shunned, not exalted.

The discovery that the Islamists were on the committee was made when RadicalIslam.org obtained a previously unreleased list of committee members present at a September 5, 2012 meeting at the Leroy Smith Building in Newark.

The four committee members of concern are:

Imam Mohammad Qatanani, whose deportation is sought by the Department of Homeland Security for not disclosing on his green card application that he was arrested and convicted by Israel in 1993 for his involvement with Hamas;
Ahmed Shedeed, a fervent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and President of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, a mosque with a history of Islamist leadership. Its website currently contains disturbing statements about jihad, the West, wife beating and polygamy;
Mohammed Younes, the President of the American Muslim Union, a group with Islamist leadership and close ties to Qatanani’s mosque, which was founded by a Hamas fundraiser; and
Imam Abdul Basit of the New Brunswick Islamic Center, a mosque founded by a radical cleric. In July, it held a Brotherhood-linked seminar featuring multiple extremist speakers.
Addressing the committee were: Attorney General Chiesa, NJ State Police Superintendent Colonel Rick Fuentes and the Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness Director Edward Dickson. These addresses were followed by dialogue with committee members.

Other NJ officials that were present at the meeting were: First Assistant Attorney General Calcagni, Special Assistant Christopher Iu, Special Assistant Paul Salvatoriello, State Police Major Gerald Lewis and Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness Community Affairs Chief John Paige.

Profiles of the Four Islamist Committee Members

Imam Mohammad Qatanani

The most notorious of the committee members is Mohammad Qatanani. He was arrested in Israel in 1993 because of his links to Hamas, including the fact that his brother-in-law was a Hamas official in the West Bank. Qatanani told the Israelis that he had been a member of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood but left in 1991 because he had limited time for this project. The Israeli government says he admitted to being a Hamas member and was convicted, but he was released as part of a plea bargain. The Department of Homeland Security is seeking his deportation for failing to disclose this on his green card application.

In 1994, Qatanani moved to NJ to lead the Islamic Center of Passaic County in Paterson, a mosque founded in 1989 by Hamas fundraiser Mohammed El-Mezain. In November 1994, El-Mezain stated that ICPC was collecting money for Hamas, according to an FBI report. The two men jointly led the ICPC and lived together as El-Mezain raised money for terrorism until he stepped down in 1999. In July 2006, the Department of Homeland Security began deportation proceedings against Qatanani.

The DHS says Qatanani “engaged in terrorist activity” and is guilty of “material misrepresentation” and “engaging in unauthorized employment … by allowing an out-of-status alien to reside with him.” It also describes a “highly dubious” transfer of thousands of dollars to the West Bank.

“It is certainly suspicious when a person who has been convicted of being a member of, and providing services, to Hamas, who has personal ties to a Hamas militant leader, and a Hamas fundraiser also sends undisclosed cash to the West Bank,” the 2008 DHS court filing states.

Qatanani is the only Hamas supporter identified by name in a July 2008 NJ Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness intelligence report about the Hamas network in the state. His preaching between 2007 and 2009 reflected his radical views, as shown in translations made by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. For example, he prayed for the defeat of “occupation and oppression” in Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya in 2007. The enemies of Islam are the U.S., Israel and Russia in this context.

He also preached that Jews and Christians “will be swiftly punished by Allah” and that Muslims should not speak poorly of Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, a top Muslim Brotherhood cleric that endorses suicide bombings and Hamas. He also defended donations to the families of suicide bombers. Just this September, Qatanani said the U.S. should outlaw criticism of Islam.

Under Qatanani’s leadership, the ICPC has held various Islamist speakers, such as Hamas-supporter Imam Reda Shata, Hamas-linked activist Abdelhaleem Ashqar (who is now in prison for refusing to testify about the Hamas network in the U.S.) and Wagdy Ghoneim, who was voluntarily deported from the country in 2005 for his terror ties and now preaches extremism in Egypt.

In April 2004, a former chairman of the ICPC’s board, Esam Omeish, praised Palestinians who “[understand] that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land,” pointing out the “beloved” founder of Hamas as an example to follow. He also supports the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” force and once was the president of the Muslim American Society, a Brotherhood front. He also “likes” Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi on Facebook.

Despite this record, Christie defended Qatanani against the DHS in 2008, calling him  a “man of great goodwill.” His Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna was as a character witness for him during the trial. The immigration judge granted Qatanani permanent residency, but the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned the ruling. The next deportation hearing is scheduled for November 26.

In May, Attorney General Chiesa met with Qatanani after he cleared the NYPD of breaking state laws. On July 24, Qatanani attended an Iftar dinner at the Governor’s Mansion. During his address, Christie pointed out Qatanani, calling him a “friend” and attacking his critics as anti-Muslim “bigots.”

Mohammed Younes

The President of the American Muslim Union, Mohammed Younes, is also on the Muslim outreach committee. This organization is very closely tied to the Hamas-linked Islamic Center of Passaic County led by Imam Qatanani, having had five common officials as of 2004. For example, Younes has served on the mosque’s board of trustees.

Younes sounds sympathetic to the cause of Hamas. He said in 2001, “I put myself in the Palestinians’ shoes, the suffering, the pain, the hunger. I don’t know what I would do. Are they dogs? Are they garbage? I don’t want to see anyone killed. But you can’t be selective.” He called the U.S. hypocritical for condemning Hamas but not Israel. However, he said he would not donate to Hamas because “they are killers,” but supports giving aid to the children of killed Hamas operatives.

During Qatanani’s deportation trial, Prosecutor Alan Wolf said that a pamphlet was found at the ICPC after the 9/11 attacks that explained what Muslims should not tell the police. Wolf also mentioned that a newspaper quoted Younes in 2002 where he advised against giving personal information to law enforcement. As he left, Younes complained, “The FBI is abusing us.”


 
Younes seems to have a pattern of defending guilty Islamists while accusing the government of misconduct. He defended the ICPC by saying it “did not know everywhere their money was going, and they would have not meant to give it to Hamas.” As mentioned, El-Mezain publicly stated that the fundraising was for Hamas. When five Muslims were convicted of planning to attack Fort Dix, Younes said, “I don’t think they actually meant to do anything. I think they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke.”

One common official between AMU and ICPC is Mohamed El-Filali. Media reports have titled him the executive director of ICPC, but the mosque’s website says he is the Outreach Director. IslamWeb described him as an AMU official in 2002. Joel Mowbray writes that the Associated Press identified him as an “Executive Committee member” of AMU around the time he led a rally that said Israeli Prime Minister Sharon is equivalent to Hitler. He refused to condemn suicide bombings, saying “I am not in their shoes. My house has not been destroyed; my brother has not been shot dead.” El-Filali met with Attorney General Chiesa after he cleared the NYPD.

Another concerning AMU official is Magdy Mahmoud. He was on the executive board of the Muslim Arab Youth Association at the same time as the FBI learned of extremist rhetoric at its events. In 1994, Hamas fundraiser Mohammed El-Mezain spoke for the group. He spoke after an individual that the audience was told led the “Hamas military wing.” An FBI report documents the speaker saying, “I’ve been told to restrict or restrain what I say … I hope no one is recording me or taking any pictures, as none are allowed … because I’m going to speak the truth to you. It’s simple. Finish off the Israelis. Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever!”

Mahmoud was the chairman of the AMU’s Chapters Committee from 1999 to 2001. He is also the co-founder and a former president of the NJ chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial. The federal government says CAIR is an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. A CAIR-NJ official met with Attorney General Chiesa after he cleared the NYPD.

Another official is Waheed Khalid, who is the chairman of AMU’s Bergen County chapter and the former president of Dar ul-Islah Mosque in Teaneck, N.J.  In May 1998, he expressed sympathy for Hamas, saying, “They are trying to get the occupiers out of their home.” In 2002, he refused to comment on the authenticity of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion but suggested it has credibility by saying that most people believe it. He also defended an Egyptian television show based on it, saying, “They have the right to show it, and I think it is news, and it is quite interesting to know what it says.”

In 2002, AMU sponsored a rally with the Muslim American Society, a Brotherhood front, and the pro-Hamas Islamic Association for Palestine, another Brotherhood front. The event demanded the indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a war criminal and that the U.S. cut off aid to Israel. In contrast, the AMU did not endorse the 2005 “Free Muslims March Against Terror” that condemned all terrorist groups including Hamas, according to Discover the Networks.

In 2004, AMU’s online newsletter said a “Zionist commando orchestrated the 9-11 terrorist attacks” and praised Neturei Karta, a Jewish extremist group that supports Iranian President Ahmadinejad and the elimination of the state of Israel.

Governor Christie picked the AMU’s general counsel, Sohail Mohammed, to be a Superior Court Judge in 2011. Mohammed was the attorney for Imam Qatanani and also defended Sami al-Arian, who was convicted of being a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in the U.S. Christie reacted to the controversy over his appointment by saying, “This Sharia Law business is crap. It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. I mean, you know, it’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.”

Ahmed Shedeed

Muslim Brotherhood supporter Ahmed Shedeed is the president of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, an Islamist mosque. His Facebook page has a photo of him at a rally in New York City for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi. He also “likes” the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and three Arabic pages that have Morsi as their main photo, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Circle of North America. Shedeed repeatedly shares Brotherhood-themed photos on his page.

According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Islamic Center of Jersey City has a history of links to extremism. Its director from 1978 to 1990, Mohammed Al-Hanooti, was the president of a pro-Hamas group called the Islamic Association for Palestine from 1984 to 1986. The American Muslim Brotherhood’s internal files identify it as one of its fronts. He also attended a secret Brotherhood-organized meeting of Hamas supporters in Philadelphia in 1993. In the late 1990s, he served as the imam of the radical Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, which has extensive Brotherhood and Hamas ties.

According to his biography from the website of an Islamist conference  to be held in Chicago this month, al-Hanooti left the Islamic Center of Jersey City to serve as an imam at Qatanani’s ICPC from 1990 to 1995. From 1995 to 1999, he served as the imam of the radical Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, another mosque with extensive Brotherhood and Hamas ties. From 2000 to 2001, he was the imam of the Islamic Center of Capital District in Albany, New York.

Mohammad Salameh, a terrorist convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, often attended the mosque in the early 1990s. Al-Hanooti was also named a “possible unindicted co-conspirator” in the Trade Center plot.

In 2000, the mosque’s imam, Sayyid Askar, said that “jihad is an absolute obligation upon those land has been occupied, and all Muslims have to stand together to repulse the enemy.”

The Islamic Center of Jersey City’s website features Islamist preaching. It advises Muslims to respond to questions about jihad by attacking U.S. foreign policy:

“Why should we be on the defensive? Why don’t we adopt a more assertive attitude? If they confront us on one question, we should respond with ten of our own. If they ask us about jihad, we should ask them about America’s openly aggressive policies in many parts of the world, not to mention all of their covert operations.”

It also justifies jihad as a fight against oppression (which it previously accused the U.S. of being guilty of) and “worldly” rule:

 “The Islamic teachings about jihad are what uproots oppression and guarantees people the freedom to think and to choose their religion for themselves without being under any compulsion. Islam seeks to have people freely submit themselves to their Creator and not be placed under the subjugation of any worldly dictator, race, tribe, or nationality.”

It preaches that the West is racist:

“We can stress how Islam teaches equality between all people. There is no preference for anyone over anyone else except by a person’s piety and virtue. This is the way to do away with the problem of racism that people in the West suffer from.”

It justifies polygamy:

“If they ask you about polygamy, ask them about the sexual promiscuity that is rife in their societies that has brought humiliation to so many women and allowed men to absolve themselves of their responsibilities towards them and towards their children?”

The ICJC’s website also links to an article asking the question, “Does Islam Allow Wife Beating?” The answer is yes, as long as it is warranted, the face is not touched and no marks are left. It explains, drawing upon the teaching of former Islamic Society of North America President Muzammil Siddiqi:

“However, in some cases, a husband may use some light disciplinary action in order to correct the moral infraction of his wife, but this is only applicable in extreme cases and it should be resorted to if one is sure it would improve the situation.”

“The Prophet (p.b.u.h.) explained it ‘dharban ghayra mubarrih’ which means ‘a light tap that leaves no mark.’ He further said that face must be avoided. Some other scholars are of the view that it is no more than a light touch by siwak, or toothbrush.”

“It is also important to note that even this "light strike" mentioned in the verse is not to be used to correct some minor problem, but it is permissible to resort to only in a situation of some serious moral misconduct when admonishing the wife fails, and avoiding from sleeping with her would not help. If this disciplinary action can correct a situation and save the marriage, then one should use it."

It then quotes from Jamal Badawi, another Islamic Society of North America official:

"There are cases, however, in which a wife persists in bad habits and showing contempt of her husband and disregard for her marital obligations. Instead of divorce, the husband may resort to another measure that may save the marriage, at least in some cases. Such a measure is more accurately described as a gentle tap on the body, but never on the face, making it more of a symbolic measure than a punitive one.”

“Based on Quran and Hadith, this measure may be used in the cases of lewdness on the part of the wife or extreme refraction and rejection of the husband's reasonable requests on a consistent basis (nushuz). Even then, other measures, such as exhortation, should be tried first.”

“As defined by Hadith, it is not permissible to strike anyone's face, cause any bodily harm or even be harsh. What the Hadith qualifies as ‘dharban ghayra mubarrih,’ or light striking, was interpreted by early jurists as a (symbolic) use of siwak! They further qualified permissible ‘striking’ as that which leaves no mark on the body.”

Imam Abdul Basit

Qari Abdul Basit is the imam of the New Brunswick Islamic Center, a mosque founded in 1987 by the Islamist cleric Zaid Shakir, who continues to be a guest lecturer. In 2006, the New York Times reported that Shakir said “he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law.”

Shakir legitimizes attacks on U.S. troops, specifically the hijacking of airplanes transporting soldiers. He argues that the 1983 Marine barracks bombing by Hezbollah was not an act of terrorism. In April, he wrote a poem about how U.S. soldiers rape girls and murder Muslim civilians. In September, he coupled his condemnation of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Stevens with a condemnation of how four Afghan women, in his view, were “brutally murdered by NATO bombs.”

Shakir believes in 9/11 conspiracy theories and accuses the U.S. of “demonizing” Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez, while characterizing Al-Qaeda, Hamas and other Islamist terrorists as fighters against oppression, though he condemns some of their tactics. In 2003, he preached that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam and Muslim-Americans should wage jihad through institution-building.

The Center has gotten funding from Saudi King Fahd. The Saudi government promotes a radical version of Islam often called “Wahhabism.” On July 7, the New Brunswick Islamic Center hosted an Islamic Society of North America seminar about Sharia. FBI investigators identified ISNA as a Muslim Brotherhood front as early as 1987. A U.S. Muslim Brotherhood strategy document from 1991 lists ISNA among “organizations and the organizations of our friends.” ISNA was also designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation affair, the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. The federal government said is an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.

The ISNA event at Imam Abdul Basit’s New Brunswick Islamic Center featured numerous Islamists. This includes the aforementioned Muzammil Siddiqi who explained the limitations of wife-beating. In 2001, he expressed his hope that Sharia law, including its criminal law, would one day be implemented in the U.S. He also supports Muslim countries that have the death penalty for homosexuals and suggests that Muslims were not involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Siddiqi taught about worshipping Allah and community engagement. Joining him in the latter session was Saffet Catovic, who used to be the New York representative of Benevolence International, a charity shut down for its ties to Al-Qaeda. In 1992, Catovic spoke at an Islamic Association for Palestine conference (a Brotherhood entity) where he said the “long-range” goal is building an Islamic Caliphate. He also spoke at a military-themed “Jihad Camp” in 2001.

Teaching about Sharia was Imam Qatanani and Jamal Badawi. Badawi is another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial because he raised funds for the Hamas front. His name is in a 1992 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood phone directory. He has justified suicide bombings and refers to Hamas terrorists as “martyrs.” He also explicitly endorsed Palestinian “combative jihad” in 2010. Badawi also spoke about how Muslims can implement Sharia in their own lives.

Ryan Mauro is RadicalIslam.org's National Security Analyst and a fellow with the Clarion Fund. He is the founder of WorldThreats.com and is frequently interviewed on Fox News.

As Mark Levin has been saying - getting Romney in the White House is only the first step.  Our work will be just beginning.  If the way he ran his campaign is any indication of how he will govern/deal with the Dems - we have our work cut out for us.  But - the first step is getting him across the finish line - I think Dick Morris and Michael Barone are going to be quite close to correct in their predictions, both of which have Romney winning by a decent margin both the popular vote and the electoral vote.

Obama’s Army of Illegal Election Workers

Posted By Matthew Vadum On November 5, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

Democrats have enlisted thousands of young illegal immigrants to drag their supporters to the polls on Election Day tomorrow.

These get-out-the-vote workers may or may not be breaking the law by helping with voter mobilization. Because the workers are already unlawfully present in the United States, presumably all employment they engage in –including electioneering— already violates laws against unauthorized employment.

It’s not like their patron, President Obama, would do anything about it anyway. This past summer Obama swept aside federal law in order to pander to this growing constituency. In a move more imperial than presidential, Obama bypassed Congress and partially implemented the so-called proposed DREAM Act which would have offered a path to U.S. citizenship for youthful illegals who served in the armed forces or attended college. Up to 1.4 million illegal aliens could benefit from the move.

Using undocumented aliens as election workers is a new low for the activist Left.

“For people who aren’t supposed to be in the country in the first place to be deployed for partisan advantage is the last straw,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors limits on immigration levels.

“‘The strategic deployment’ of illegal immigrants who benefit from the Obama administration program is a ‘corruption of the political process,’” he said.

And there can be little doubt that some of the Obama supporters these election workers cajol into voting booths will themselves be illegal immigrants ineligible to vote in the national election. Lax, and in some cases non-existent ID requirements, at the state level will allow people to vote who have no legal right to vote.

In the battleground state of Nevada, Culinary Workers Union Local 226 is strong-arming union members who are bona fide U.S. permanent residents into unlawfully casting ballots. (Permanent residents, or green card holders, are allowed to reside and work in the U.S. permanently but are not allowed to vote unless they become naturalized as U.S. citizens.) The union is affiliated with the UNITE HERE labor federation.

Union members who have a shaky grasp of the English language told Glenn Cook of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they were tricked into signing voter registration forms and are now being pressured to vote. President Obama and Democrats are counting on the unions in Nevada to help get them across the finish line tomorrow.

“One of the immigrants was visited at home by a Culinary representative and said the operative made threats of deportation if no ballot was cast,” Cook writes. He notes that in Nevada no proof of citizenship is required in order to register to vote or to vote. “One would establish identity and one would establish residence,” Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said. “Just like every other voter in Nevada, they will not be asked to prove citizenship.”

In the swing states of Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, the young illegal aliens doing the voter-mobilization work are “often referred to as Dreamers after the failed DREAM Act legislation that would have offered them a path to citizenship.” They are knocking on doors, working in telephone banks, and asking students on college campuses to vote, the Wall Street Journal reports. They are also active in solid-blue California and in Republican-dominated Texas.

The illegal campaign workers are targeting Latinos, a fast-growing demographic that President Obama has urged to “punish” its “enemies.” Obama is reportedly running ahead among Latino voters so the efforts of the so-called Dreamers could help down-ticket candidates in congressional and state races.

One of the leading groups exploiting the free labor of undocumented workers is the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition (CIRC). Illegal campaign workers “are winning the hearts and minds of Coloradans through their efforts,” said CIRC executive director Julien Ross.

CIRC pushed the Obama administration to enact a policy, now called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that lets those under the age of 31 who arrived in this country by age 16 and have lived here for the last five years to seek a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and work permit.

CIRC has some unsavory friends. It is a “partner” with the far-left Center for Community Change (CCC) and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON).

CCC is headed by Deepak Bhargava, who worked for a decade at ACORN. CCC sponsored a December 2007 forum for thousands of community organizers from across America. Bhargava introduced speaker Barack Obama at the event and said America was “a society that is still deeply structured by racism and sexism.” He elicited a pledge from Obama that if elected the president in 2008 he would invite CCC and other Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizing groups to “help [the new administration] shape the agenda.”

NDLON’s mission is to interfere with the enforcement of immigration laws and its “strategy is to make legal everything about the illegal immigrant except his immigration status.” The group pressures local governments to set up day laborer centers and works with labor unions to unionize day laborers.

Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez from Brazil thinks illegal aliens getting involved in electoral politics is a great idea.

“We can’t vote but we can get people to vote who support our issues. It’s our way to participate in this democracy,” said Sousa-Rodriguez, who is supervising a get-out-the-vote drive in Florida and Ohio that is co-sponsored by United We Dream, a national undocumented youth network.

United We Dream’s stated mission is to create “meaningful alliances with other national immigrant and education rights organizations and making sure there is a voice for immigrant youth in these organizations.”

One of the group’s more high profile board members is Josh Bernstein. Bernstein is “director of immigration” at the radical labor union SEIU. (Who knew labor unions had directors of immigration?) Back in the 1980s he was director of Californians for a Fair Share, a group created to fight welfare cuts.

Take a guess which political party Bernstein’s illegal election workers –and all the other illegal election workers mentioned in this article— will benefit from all this unpaid labor.

Libyan Leaks: Secret Document reveals Al-Qaeda ‘brother’ put in control of U.S. Embassy in Tripoli

by Shoebat Foundation on OCTOBER 31, 2012

Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack

A treasure trove of secret documents has been obtained by a Libyan source who says that secularists in his country are increasingly wanting to see Mitt Romney defeat Barack Obama on November 6th. This charge is being made despite Muslim Brotherhood losses in Libyan elections last July which resulted in victory for the secularists. One of those documents may help explain this sentiment.

It shows that in supporting the removal of Gadhafi, the Obama administration seemed to sign on to an arrangement that left forces loyal to Al-Qaeda in charge of security at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli from 2011 through at least the spring of 2012.

The National Transitional Council, which represented the political apparatus that opposed Gadhafi in 2011 and served as the interim government after his removal, made an extremely curious appointment in August of 2011. That appointment was none other than Abdel Hakim Belhaj, an Al-Qaeda ally and ‘brother’. Here is a copy of that letter (translation beneath it):



Translated, the document reads:

National Transitional Council – Libya
8/30/11

Code: YGM-270-2011

Mr. Abdel Hakim Al-Khowailidi Belhaj

Greetings,

We would like to inform you that you have been commissioned to the duties and responsibilities of the military committee of the city of Tripoli. These include taking all necessary procedures to secure the safety of the Capital and its citizens, its public and private property, and institutions, to include all international embassies. To coordinate with the local community of the city of Tripoli and the security assembly and defense on a national level.

Mustafa Muhammad Abdul Jalil

President, National Transitional Council – Libya

Official Seal of National Transitional Council

Copy for file.

As for Belhaj’s bonafides as an Al-Qaeda ally, consider the words of the notorious Ayman al-Zawahiri. In a report published one day prior to the date on the memo above, ABC News quoted the Al-Qaeda leader as saying the following – in 2007 – about the man the NTC put in control of Tripoli in 2011:

“Dear brothers… the amir of the mujahideen, the patient and steadfast Abu-Abdallah al-Sadiq (Belhaj); and the rest of the captives of the fighting Islamic group in Libya, here is good news for you,” Zawahiri said in a video, using Belhaj’s nom de guerre. “Your brothers are continuing your march after you… escalating their confrontation with the enemies of Islam: Gadhafi and his masters, the crusaders of Washington.”

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was founded by Belhaj.

In a BBC report from one month earlier – on July 4, 2011 – a man named Al-Amin Belhaj was identified as an NTC spokesman and said the following:

“Everyone knows who Abdel Hakim Belhadj is. He is a Libyan rebel and a moderate person who commands wide respect.”

Abdel Hakim Belhaj had been identified in a video report embedded in the the BBC article as…

“…about the most powerful man in Tripoli.”

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is many things but moderate is not one of them.

Interestingly, according to a report by the Jamestown Foundation in 2005, the man who attributed the ‘moderate’ label to Abdel Hakim Belhaj was actually a leader with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood:

This last week Al-Amin Belhadj, head of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, issued a press release on the Arabic language section of Libya-Watch, (Mu’assasat al-Raqib li-Huqquq al-Insan) calling for urgent action on behalf of 86 Brotherhood members imprisoned since 1998 at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison and on hunger strike since October 7.

The nexus between Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood comes into clearer focus when one looks at the Libyan Ambassador to the United States. His name is Ali Sulaiman Aujali. He had the following to say about Belhaj according to an ABC News report:

“(Belhaj) should be accept(ed) for the person that he is today and we should deal with him on that basis… people evolve and change.”

Really? How many times do westerners have to fall for this line before they trip over it?

In fact, about one month prior to Aujali’s vouching for Belhaj, he appeared at the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention. ISNA is a Muslim Brotherhood front group in America.

Aujali represents one individual who is willing to bridge the gap between Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, fast forward to 9/13/12, two days after the attack in Benghazi. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrated the Muslim Eid holiday in the Ben Franklin room in Washington, D.C. and shared a podium with none other than Ali Sulaiman Aujali and a woman named Farah Pandith, who is a prominent name inside the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

In 2009, Pandith was sworn in as a U.S. Representative to Muslim Communities by Hillary Clinton. Pandith followed the path of the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress and was sworn in on the Qur’an.

Another interesting alliance revealed itself in various cities across America in the days after the death of Ambassador Stevens. In at least both Los Angeles, CA and Columbus, OH the Libyan American Association aligned with CAIR to hold a vigil for Ambassador Stevens.

While in Jamaica in June of 2011, Hillary Clinton rhetorically asked:

…whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people…

At that very moment – and in light of the release of this secret document – the appropriate question would have been:

…whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of Al-Qaeda…

When put that way, Hillary’s position isn’t nearly as unassailable.

Walid Shoebat is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood and author of For God or For Tyranny

Why Our Forces Were Told to ‘Stand Down’ in Benghazi

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 29, 2012 @ www.frontpagemag.com


To understand what went wrong in the Benghazi mission, it’s important to begin by looking at what was so unique about it.

When the Islamist mobs began their September 11 rampage, they found embassies with high walls, heavy security and police protection. Even in Tunis and Cairo, where the Arab Spring Islamist regimes have been accused of collaborating with their fellow Salafists, there were credible military and police forces capable of preventing the kind of full scale assault that took place in Benghazi.

The mission in Benghazi, however, was an American diplomatic facility with few defenses in a city where the police were virtually helpless against the Islamist militias and where the national government had announced that it would allow the Salafists to destroy Sufi tombs rather than intervene.

On September 1, I wrote that the real implication of these remarks was that the Libyan government had given the Islamists a free hand and would take no action no matter what they did. And bloodshed was sure to follow. Ten days later it did.

After the fall of Saddam, American diplomatic facilities in Iraq did not remain unguarded or protected only by local militias. It was always understood that American diplomatic facilities in a country whose government had recently fallen were sitting ducks and needed heavy protection. The State Department cables show that this was something that quite a few of the Americans on the ground also understood. The Benghazi consulate had been attacked, and its next attack would only be a matter of time.

When Al Qaeda decided to commemorate September 11 with a wave of attacks on American diplomatic facilities across the Muslim world, from Tunis all the way to Indonesia, in a recreation of its own 1998 embassy attacks, its planners paid special attention to the one facility that was a soft target and surrounded by jihadist fighters. A facility that was a perfect target because it was completely exposed.

Benghazi should have either had the same protection that a similar facility in Iraq would have or it should have been closed down. Instead the State Department chose to rely on its friendly relations with the jihadists, having forgotten the story of the scorpion and the frog, trusting in an Islamist militia linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and to its future Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al Sharia attackers to protect it.

The State Department was not being cheap. Its budget had climbed steadily under Obama and it could have set up another Green Zone in Benghazi if it chose to. But that would have been a flashback to the Bush era that represented everything the appeasement lobby had hated about those eight years.

Libya was meant to be a new kind of war. Not a display of American arrogance and unilateralism, but a show of submissiveness to the goals and ambitions of the Muslim world. In post-American diplomacy, the Americans did not arrive with a show of force, surrounded by Marines and heavy fortifications, but bent humbly under the defensive shield of the Islamist Ummah. Rather than exporting the Dar Al Harb, the Americans would ask for the protection of the Dar Al Islam.

The reason that the Navy SEALS were denied the support of a Spectre C-130U gunship was the same reason that the consulate had been left nearly unguarded. And it was the same reason that so many soldiers had died in Afghanistan because they had been denied air and artillery support or even the permission to open fire.

What happened in Benghazi was only extraordinary because it caught the attention of the public, but American soldiers in Afghanistan had been suffering under the same conditions ever since it was decided that winning the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians was more important than the lives of American soldiers.

The four Americans killed in Benghazi lived and died by the same code as thousands of Americans in Afghanistan. And that code overrode loyalty to one’s own people in favor of appeasing Muslims. The two former SEALS broke that code, violating orders by going to protect the consulate and were abandoned in the field by an administration that prioritized Muslim opinions over American lives.

From the post-American diplomatic perspective, the lives of a few Americans, who knew what they were getting into, was a small sacrifice to make when weighed against the potential of turning the entire Muslim world around. A Spectre gunship blasting away at an Islamist militia in the streets of Benghazi would have ended the fiction of a successful war in Libya and infuriated most of the Islamist militias. Worst of all, it would have made Americans seem like imperialists, instead of helpful aides to the Islamist transition of the Arab Spring. It would have ruined everything and so it was shut down.

Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were not the first Americans to be abandoned by their country for diplomatic reasons. They will not be the last. And while we investigate and expose the decisions that their government made, it is important for us to remember that such decisions come out of a mindset that says there are diplomatic goals that are more important than American lives. This mindset did not begin with the War on Terror and it will not end until it is exposed for what it is.

During Israel’s descent into peace madness, its left-wing government coined a phrase for those Israelis killed in terrorist attacks, calling them, “Sacrifices of Peace.”

Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods are our government’s sacrifices of peace. They died so that we might go on in our futile effort to win over the Muslim world. And they are not the only ones. There is no way of knowing how many of the 1,500 Americans who were killed in Obama’s surge died because they were prevented from firing first or denied air support. But the number is likely to be in the hundreds.

Similarly 3,000 died in the attacks of September 11 because our diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia were too important to close the revolving door that allowed the terrorists such easy access to our country. They too were sacrifices of peace, burned on the altar of appeasement by a diplomatic establishment that puts the opinions of our enemies first and American lives last.

What went wrong in Benghazi is the same thing that went wrong in Afghanistan. It is the same thing that went wrong on the original September 11. It is the same thing that has gone wrong throughout the War on Terror. If we are to learn any lesson from what happened in Benghazi, it should be that American lives come before Muslim diplomacy and that any government which does not put American lives first, which does not take whatever measures are necessary to save their lives, regardless of what Muslims may think, is not an American government, but a post-American government.

G M:  THAT is the burning question - I agree.  WHERE are the autopsy results???  I don't trust ANYTHING being reported about how these guys died until/unless we see the autopsy reports.  It is very significant that nothing has been released regarding this.  If I were a family member, I would demand that the body exhumed for autopsy - assuming it has already been buried in Arlington - which I believe is the case.  My guess is that this administration is blocking this at every turn with whatever excuse they can come up with to get past the election.

This is just one of many reminders that Romney is FAR from the ideal candidate - as most forum members will acknowledge.  We have to deal with this reality.  As Mark Levin has repeatedly said:  "Our fight will be only beginning - as we struggle to constantly hold Romney's feet to the fire.  He is not a true conservative."

Mitt Romney's Embrace of Kenny Gamble

David J. Rusin - October 23, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

Mitt Romney's embrace of Kenny Gamble, an operator of Philadelphia charter schools who doubles as a prominent suit-and-tie Islamist calling himself Luqman Abdul Haqq, raises questions about a potential Romney administration's readiness to identify and steer clear of smooth-talking radicals. The Republican candidate should treat this blunder as a learning opportunity. The lesson: never make the mistake of promoting a Muslim leader without properly vetting him first.


The story begins on May 24, when Romney's desire to push his education policies and reach out to urban voters prompted a visit to West Philadelphia's Universal Bluford Charter School, one of several managed by Gamble's conglomerate, Universal Companies. According to an ABC News report, Romney "had heard about Universal … and asked for an invitation." Gamble claimed as much in a radio interview.
Seated beside Gamble, Romney joined other local figures for a roundtable (video here) in which he discussed ideas for attracting good teachers, involving parents, and boosting achievement. Romney generously praised Gamble, at one point turning to him and saying, "I'd like to get your experience from the front lines and first salute you for the investment you've made, financial and personal, in establishing a pathway for hundreds, thousands of young people to have changed lives." Gamble led Romney on a tour of the facilities as well.

No less disconcerting, the Romney campaign appears not to have done any serious follow-up on Gamble despite drawing criticism from bloggers for the trip to an "Islamist-owned charter school." Thus, Romney compounded the previous error by eagerly dropping Gamble's name multiple times during NBC's Education Nation summit in New York on September 25.

"I saw a school in the inner city of Philadelphia," Romney explained. "And I understand that the school was closed down, that 90 percent of the kids in that school were not reading at grade level. … A guy named Kenny Gamble … put in place a charter school." After recounting his surprise at the art, music, and computer instructors there, Romney touted how Gamble runs it "like a business." He continued: "As I recall, almost 90 percent of the students there now are reading at grade level. And it's the same students." (Note, however, that Universal's education record is very much a mixed bag.)

Wherever Romney originally heard about Gamble and Universal, it probably was not from the websites of Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, Islamist Watch, or Militant Islam Monitor, which for years have documented Gamble's troubling agenda — a history that should make him toxic to any politician knowledgeable about stealth jihad.


An African-American music and real estate mogul, Gamble has long been listed — under his alternate name, Luqman Abdul Haqq — as part of the governing council of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), which is among the most radical U.S. Muslim groups. Its formation was inspired by Jamil al-Amin, a convicted cop killer and Islamic separatist who dreams of a Shari'a-run state; he enjoys MANA's support to this day and even has phoned into MANA meetings from prison. Gamble's other MANA colleagues have included Luqman Ameen Abdullah, who preached jihad against the U.S. and was shot to death after initiating a gunfight with federal agents in 2009, and Siraj Wahhaj, one of the "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Just as several MANA leaders have championed the building of closed Islamic communities, Gamble outlined his own "model" for them during an interview on Saudi television. Worse, he is suspected of actually using his enormous South Philadelphia real estate holdings to assemble what has been dubbed a "black Muslim enclave." Confronted in 2007, Gamble responded with a rant portraying segregation as natural. "It's like cats," he insisted. "They're all cats. But you don't see the lion with the tiger. You don't see the tiger with the panther." Equally alarming are Gamble's intimate ties to the Jawala Scouts (photos here), aptly described as an "Islamic paramilitary boys group" featuring "hand-to-hand combat, firearms training, and survival tactics."

Additional background is available in an Islamist Watch article from 2008, published after Gamble left his fingerprints on that year's election by hosting an Obama office. Alternatively, a simple online search yields plentiful data.

What makes the Romney-Gamble flirtation so unsettling is the apparent lack of due diligence in determining who does and does not get endorsed by the man who could be the next leader of the free world. Ten minutes on Google should suffice to raise red flags, but did anyone from the campaign bother to look? More disturbing is the possibility that uncomfortable facts turned up but were dismissed as tangential to Gamble's work in education.

"Saluting" somebody like Gamble for one facet of his life while ignoring the rest imparts an aura of respectability to the individual as a whole, easing the path for his less savory projects. This seems to be understood for every group except Muslims. Imagine, for example, a senior figure in a radical Christian organization whose luminaries have been linked to violence and terrorism, a man who has shrugged off charges of constructing a "white Christian enclave" and been involved with a youth movement whose participants march in fatigues and brandish weapons. Regardless of his other accomplishments, would this person be asked to share camera time with a presidential hopeful? The question answers itself.

The role of the media is significant here. Though they would hammer any candidate who bolstered the analogous Christian radical, mainstream news sources that covered Romney's Bluford visit made no mention of the skeletons in Gamble's closet, illustrating that their see-no-evil mentality vis-à-vis Islamism trumps even their instinct to shame Republicans. Indeed, the obvious hypersensitivity and double standards protecting Islamists can foster complacency among politicians of both parties, who assume that they will not be held accountable for palling around with them.

This certainly has been the case in Philadelphia, where Mayor Michael Nutter has suffered no ill effects from having Gamble on his inaugural committee, personally presenting the sign to rename a block in Gamble's honor, and headlining the dedication ceremony for a taxpayer-supported mural that lauds him. Such legitimization has paved the way for Gamble to build his Islamist-tinged empire through massive government assistance, including dirt-cheap property from the city, sweetheart deals with the School Reform Commission when it was chaired by a onetime Universal board member, and regular feedings at public troughs that span the municipal, state, and federal levels.

Rather than provide a "they do it too" excuse for politicians caught befriending Islamists, the Philadelphia establishment's cozy relations with Gamble only underscore the importance of a critical eye and the will to act on it — in other words, real leadership. As radical Muslims aggressively seek similar openings to win undeserved respect and influence governments both nationally and internationally, a president capable of recognizing and shunning them is more vital than ever. Washington's colossal and bipartisan failures in Muslim outreach — most recently seen in the mind-boggling selection of an Islamist to represent the U.S. at a conference on human rights — have done enough damage already.

Islamists have grown adept at hiding in plain sight, so great care must be taken when choosing which Muslims to engage and extol. With luck, airing the embarrassing facts behind his unfortunate promotion of Kenny Gamble / Luqman Abdul Haqq will be the wake-up call that Mitt Romney needs to learn this lesson now and, should he prevail on November 6, be in a better position to succeed where past presidents have faltered.

David J. Rusin is a research fellow at Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

As a freshman in college that year (1980), I will never forget the way that the overwhelming majority of college students were absolutely convinced Reagan would get us into a nuclear war with Russia.  I wasn't - and other kids looked at me in disbelief and told me I was a "fascist" if I voted for Reagan.  Yawn.

Yes, Crafty - you do seem to be a bit obsessed with this idea, no?  LOL.    

Before you crack me over the head with that stick - I fully acknowledge my own fixation on other issues...

Leaving aside the desperate and crazy assertion that the use of this term was anything but a clumsy choice of words (I chuckled as he said it live, and thought: "he means to say binders of women's resumes" - big deal), the answer to Crafty's question is YES. 

This thought occurred to me as well as I watched debate #2.  I would have preferred that Romney had attacked the entire idea of a "gross disparity in women's pay" as demonstrably false for at least the last 20 years.  However, that admittedly might have been getting into the weeds in an unwise manner during a political debate.  The average person watching would need to have this explained in detail to grasp it, and this wasn't the right forum.

But yes - this is unquestionably affirmative action, and is as ill-advised as any other form of mandated hiring or admission preference IMHO.