Not Even Close To A Topic....

[CaptApril]

Reportedly, the AOL boards are still there, but they're so far buried behind backdoors that they're finally no longer worth looking for, and none of the remaining headings are even close to fitting for a gathering of Star Trek fans.

Whatever. They're little April Fool's gag has now officially backfired.

On with the festivities...

Founders' Quotes:

"I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful."

--Fisher Ames, letter to George Richard Minot, 23 June 1789

"Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Martha Jefferson, 5 May 1787

"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government."

--Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805

[CaptApril]

Left Coast Report:

A Political Look at Hollywood
By James Hirsen

A Newsmax Report

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. 'Three Stooges' Remake, Three Financial Stooges Real Life
2. 'Special Relationship' Spotlights Bill and Hillary
3. Chris Matthews’ World Currency Fit
4. The Milli Vanilli Movie

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1. 'Three Stooges' Remake, Three Financial Stooges Real Life

Another remake is coming soon to a multiplex near you.

A “Planet of the Apes,” “Superman,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Titanic” or “Psycho” redo?

No, it’s a 21st Century feature film version of — “The Three Stooges.”

Two real-life stooges of Hugo Chavez will be in it. Sean Penn is all set to play Larry and Benicio Del Toro, Moe.

Jim Carrey is slated for Curly, and he’ll reportedly shave his head for the role.

Maybe studio execs should consider doing a flick on the Three Financial Stooges, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner.

These numbskulls had a lot to do with getting us into the economic jam we find ourselves in.

In fact, long before Barney Frank and Chris Dodd threw a gigantic wrench in the works when others were trying to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from hemorrhaging, the Three Financial Stooges laid the groundwork for the current economic catastrophe, and they did so under Bill Clinton’s administration.

Rubin was treasury secretary, Summers was his assistant and Geithner served as an undersecretary.

Rubin, Summers and Geithner lobbied then-President Clinton, and ultimately the Congress, to get rid of the Glass-Steagall Act, which stopped banks from entering into the securities market. They were also part of the group that rammed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act through.

Banks could then gamble with credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations — financial instruments that ordinary folks and even some regulators didn’t really understand.

These were the things that Warren Buffett called “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Banks were then able to use derivatives to make their books look better, buy mass quantities of subprime mortgages and become “too big to fail” institutions.

Geithner went on to become head of the New York Federal Reserve, where he would be instrumental in backing the Paulson bailouts, including the infamous AIG bailout.

Today Geithner is President Obama's treasury secretary, and Summers is a key economic adviser.

These individuals knew about the AIG bonuses. They were informed via a Feb. 28 memo that the AIG bonuses were coming on March 15.

They’re also the ones offering us a new plan, one in which taxpayers would essentially buy back from the banks the very toxic assets the Three Financial Stooges helped to create.

Rubin, recently said he plans to leave Citigroup in April; this after he oversaw the bank’s stock go from $50 a share two years ago to today being worth less than $2.

He’ll apparently still avail himself to the Obama administration to give more sage advice.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.



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2. 'Special Relationship' Spotlights Bill and Hillary

Just what we needed, a movie, likely to be jointly produced by HBO and the BBC, called “The Special Relationship,” which will take us on a trip down Memory Lane to the Clinton years.

The “special relationship” apparently refers to the political one between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and not the “inappropriate” one between little Willie and Monica Lewinsky, although that will supposedly be included, too.

Dennis Quaid will portray the ex-prez and Julianne Moore will play Hillary.

In a hint about how the story will be told, the writer and director is Peter Morgan, the same guy who penned “Frost/Nixon.”

Why can’t Hollywood come up with some more current script ideas, like the story of a man who worked at Freddie Mac, the mortgage entity with an accounting scandal that led to a major management shake-up and huge fines; the story of the same guy being on the board and taking in more than $300 grand for the gig; and the story of a dubious dude who goes on to become chief of staff to the president of the United States?

“Rahmbo,” with a cliffhanger of an ending, would make for a good flick.



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3. Chris Matthews’ World Currency Fit

MSNBC host Chris Matthews was more apoplectic than usual about a line of questioning from Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Matthews hyperventilated about how “nobody on the planet” was “talking about switching to some new multinational currency here.”

Matthews was referring to some inquiries Bachmann made to Secretary Geithner during a Financial Services Committee hearing about whether he would denounce efforts to move towards a new global currency.

The issue hit the news when Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s Central Bank, announced that the U.S. dollar should be discarded as the world’s reserve currency.

Matthews could use a geography lesson, and maybe a few sessions with Dr. Drew.

Rep. Bachmann was merely doing her job when she asked Geithner if he was for or against changing the international reserve currency from the dollar to some new monetary measure. Geithner, incidentally, answered Bachmann’s question in the affirmative; that he would denounce a move away from the U.S. dollar.

A day later, though, the Treasury head made contradictory remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that he was “quite open” to the idea of dumping the dollar for a new world currency.

Guess Geithner was against the Chinese proposal before he was open to it.

Predictably, his remarks caused the dollar to drop in value.

Not surprisingly, George Soros, the U.N., China, and Russia all agree with Geithner’s flop position.

Rep. Bachmann has introduced a resolution that would bar the dollar from being replaced by any foreign or new currency.

We now have a president who’s breaking our grandkids' piggy banks, a secretary of state who blames the U.S. for the Mexican border debacle, and a Treasury secretary who says he’s open to ditching the U.S. dollar in favor of a new global reserve currency.

With leaders like these who needs enemies?



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4. The Milli Vanilli Movie

Milli Vanilli was a duo from the late 1980s and early 1990s that rose to superstar status on Clive Davis’ Arista Records.

The two were forced to give back a Grammy when the public discovered that they didn’t sing their own songs.

Universal Pictures actually optioned a Jeff Nathanson script on the Milli Vanilli story to make into a motion picture.

In a similar inauthentic vein, a rep for “American Idol” has reluctantly admitted, according to The New York Times, that the group performances on the show are lip-synched.

Meanwhile President Obama, who seems to be overly attached to his teleprompter, recently conducted an Internet town-hall meeting that smacked of showbiz sleight of hand.

The event had been promoted as being open to any and all citizens with an Internet connection.

But questioners called on at the event by Obama included a member of the pro-Obama Service Employees International Union; a member of the Democratic National Committee who campaigned for Obama in the Hispanic community; a former Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates who endorsed Obama; and a Virginia businessman who was a donor to Obama's 2008 campaign.

So the virtual deck was stacked with supporters whose questions would give the president the opportunity to launch on his preferred message of the day.

Maybe Obama should lip-synch his next town-hall meeting.

[CaptApril]

Newt Gingrich reacts to Obama's domestic and foreign policies
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:24 PM


Hugh Hewitt: Joined now by the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, welcome back to the program, great to have you.

Newt Gingrich: Oh, delighted to be with you and have a chance to discuss ideas with you.

HH: Tell us about the new Reagan movie before we get going here, because I’ve only seen a couple of stories about it.

NG: Well, Callista and I did a movie with Dave Bossie of Citizens United in which we carry you back. It’s called Rendezvous With Destiny, and we carry you back to Reagan starting really at his childhood. But in 90 minutes we walk you through the damage that Jimmy Carter did to the country with 13% inflation and 22% interest rates, and gasoline rationing, and 444 days of Iranian hostage crisis, and then how dramatically Reagan turned things around. And what the principled leadership was that he brought to government, and how rapidly he was able to recreate a job creating and prosperous America that was proud of itself, and that was capable of winning the Cold War. And it’s truly a remarkable story.

HH: It’s available at www.gingrichproductions.com, and over at www.newt.org, you can find out about it as well. Does the period of time we’ve entered into feel like the late 70s to you, Speaker Gingrich?

NG: Yeah, I think that this administration combines sort of the worst of the Clinton years with the worst of the Carter years. And I think that it’s very clear that they will pile up so much debt, and they will centralize so much power in Washington, that if they get away with what they’re trying to do, we will be a fundamentally different country.

HH: Over at www.newt.org, there is a headline that says heading toward a dictatorship? You don’t really believe that, do you, Mr. Speaker?

NG: Well, I believe that when you get up in the morning and discover that the President has fired the head of one company, and you ask yourself how many other companies can he fire the head of, and when you have Senator Dodd deciding what salary caps ought to be, and you have the Congress deciding to take back money after the fact in a direct violation of the Constitution, how much total bureaucratic management of your life do you need before you begin to worry about how the system is working? Now I do think that we are seeing an enormous transfer of power to politicians and bureaucrats, and that many of them will use it corruptly or dangerously, and capriciously. Read what they said about Chrysler yesterday.

HH: But the word dictatorship carries with it a specific image that does alarm…I’m thinking especially of senior citizens and people who are worried about that sort of thing, and I get those e-mails, and you get them as well, and while I think we want to resist statism and creeping managed capitalism which is an oxymoron, that it’s not really dictatorship, is it?

NG: Well, look, if somebody came in, if the Congress can come in, single you out and take 90% of your income, tell me what it is. If the Secretary of the Treasury can decide who to fire and who to hire, which companies to destroy and which companies to keep, I mean, if the government can say okay, fire the head of GM, and by the way, Chrysler will cut a deal with Fiat or they will be out of business, you tell me what it is. I mean, yesterday, the President decided unilaterally to announce a warranty for new cars as of today.

HH: Yup.

NG: Okay? Well, where did that power come from?

HH: Well, that comes from…

NG: And why, by the way, I bought a car in October, and I want to know why my car doesn’t have the same warranty.

HH: It comes from having bankrupt companies sucking at the public teat, and that’s what it is. It’s all about…

NG: Right, so you’d be a lot better off to have the bankrupt companies go through bankruptcy court. I mean, why is it that Ron Gettelfinger, the head of the UAW, doesn’t get sacked, but Ron Waggoner, the head of General Motors, does get sacked?

HH: Well, I agree that it is a, it’s a very bad idea to have these decisions coming down. But I think it’s a quantum leap to dictatorship, and I do worry about the use of a term which is not descriptive as much as it is alarmist. But let me ask you about GM. Should they go into Chapter 11? Should the public teat be taken away?

NG: Yes, yes.

HH: No hesitation?

NG: Look, Rick Waggoner should have resigned five months ago. They should have gone into bankruptcy five months ago. The whole system would have been healthier. They could have reorganized. They had more resources five months ago than they do today. But this is true across the whole system. We’re in danger of creating a crony capitalism in which again and again and again, personal decisions are being made by bureaucrats and politicians that affect the lives of thousands of people without the rule of law. That’s a very dangerous environment.

HH: Yes, it is. Let’s talk about the other thing that came out, and it’s almost, well, I think it’s more important, a new Afghanistan policy, another four thousand on top of seventeen thousand, for a total of 21,000, up to 60,000 troops in Afghanistan. Do you applaud the President’s move there?

NG: Look, I think it is a responsible position to take. I think he clearly understands that not finding a way to get after the Taliban and al Qaeda is in fact very dangerous for our long term interest, and creates a sanctuary to plan attacks in the United States. But I think there are two keys. One is what do you do about Pakistan and the northwest frontier? And the other is what do you do about the drug environment, the drug economy, and the amount of money that goes to illegal drug producers in Afghanistan, which is a fundamental challenge to the government?

HH: 33% of their GDP up to, probably opium.

NG: And by the way, notice what’s happening on our southern border with the scale of the drug cartel war against the Mexican government. I mean, these are serious times.

HH: And there’s also a missile launch which I want to ask you about. You wrote a column today saying a single missile, an electro-magnetic pulse exploded the United States can cripple us, and that’s true. Should the United States shoot down that North Korean missile if we have the capability of doing so?

NG: Either that, or we should sabotage it before it’s launched.

HH: And what do you think the North Koreans would do in response?

NG: I have no idea.

HH: Oh…

NG: But I can tell you that to take the risk that the North Koreans are just going to cheerfully drift along, I mean, this is one of the great challenges, and is maybe one of the debates we need to have as a country. You have a North Korean regime clearly trying to get nuclear weapons in order to blackmail its neighbors. You have an Iranian regime clearly trying to get nuclear weapons with an avowed goal of eliminating Israel as a country. You have Hamas dominating Gaza and firing missiles into Israel every day with the explicit intention of eliminating Israel. And we keep trying to figure out how to have diplomatic ties to people who tell us every day they want to kill us.

HH: And in terms of Iran, Speaker Gingrich, let’s finish there. We’ve got a new Israeli government coming in probably tomorrow or the next day led by Netanyahu, but with Barak in it. Do you expect Israel to preemptively strike Iran? And do you support them? And should the United States support them if they do?

NG: I think that if the Israelis can find the Iranian facilities, and can find a way to take them out, it would be as big a blessing to the world as taking out the Iraqi facility in 1981 turned out to be in retrospect. I think it’s very hard to find it. I think it would be much more responsible of the civilized world to cut off the supply of gasoline to Iran, and to force the regime to change, because I think that as long as that regime is there, it’s going to be a continuing danger to the world.

HH: And in terms of that, should we grant them, if they attempt to do it, overflight rights in Iraq? And do you expect the Obama administration would?

NG: Well, I don’t think we have the power to grant them those rights. I think that’s up to the Iraqi government to grant them, and I doubt if they will. I mean, I think the Israelis have a very hard problem trying to reach Iran unless they decide to do it from submarines.

HH: Newt Gingrich, always a pleasure, thank you, Mr. Speaker. www.newt.org.

[CaptApril]

Why Is Rick Wagoner Fired and Nancy Pelosi Still Working?
by Ann Coulter

04/01/2009


Apparently, it's OK for Obama to fire the head of General Motors, but Bush can't fire his own U.S. attorneys.

It is generally agreed that the Obama administration's demand that Rick Wagoner resign as chairman of General Motors is the price of GM's accepting government money.

To promote the sales of GM vehicles, Obama says the government will stand by your GM car warranty. And all the taxpayers will get a lube job. The new GM owner's manual will come with a disclaimer: "Close enough for government work."

Now that we're all agreed that the government can make hiring and firing decisions based on infusions of taxpayer money, I can think of a lot more government beneficiaries who are badly in need of firing.

Just off the top of my head, how about Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and everybody at the Department of Education?

How about firing all the former Weathermen, like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, whose university salaries are subsidized by the taxpayer?

Nearly every university in the country accepts government money. Is there any industry in America more in need of some "restructuring" than academia? What's Berkeley's "business plan" to stop turning out graduates who hate America?

And what is Obama's justification for keeping Shirley M. Tilghman as president of Princeton University as long as Princeton employs prominent crackpot Peter Singer?

Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's Center for Human Values, believes parents should have the right to kill newborn babies with birth defects, such as Down syndrome and hemophilia, and says there is nothing morally wrong with parents conceiving children in order to harvest them for spare parts for an older child -- or even for society to breed children on a massive scale for spare parts.

His views on these issues are so extreme I'm surprised Singer hasn't been offered a position in the Obama cabinet yet. Perhaps he paid his taxes and was disqualified.

Singer compares the black liberation movement to the liberation of apes, saying we must "extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species." (Imagine if Rush Limbaugh had said that and then go lie down for 20 minutes.)

The esteemed professor Singer also believes sex with animals is acceptable and has no objections to necrophilia -- provided the deceased gave consent when still alive. We're still waiting to hear his views on sex with dead animals. Especially me, as I have no plans for next weekend.

Doesn't a "new vision" for Princeton -- which benefits from massive taxpayer subsidies in the form of student loans and government grants -- require firing the president of Princeton? That university is clearly teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy.

When is the government going to get around to firing 99 percent of public school superintendents? They're clearly turning out an inferior product -- i.e., America's public school graduates -- as compared to some of the foreign models now available.

In New York City, spending on public schools increased by more than 300 percent between 1982 and 2001, coming in at $11,474 per pupil annually -- compared to about $5,000 for private schools.

But in 2003, a New York court ruled that graduates of New York City's public schools did not have the skills to be "capable of voting and serving on a jury." (Worse, some kids coming out of New York high schools are so stupid they don't even know how to get out of jury duty.)

If Obama can tell GM and Chrysler that their participation in NASCAR is an "unnecessary expenditure," isn't having public schools force students to follow Muslim rituals, recite Islamic prayers and plan "jihads" also an "unnecessary expenditure"? Are all those school condom purchases considered "necessary expenditures"?

Illegal aliens cost the American taxpayer more than $10 billion a year, net, in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, free school lunches, prison, school and court costs. And yet cities, counties and states across the nation are openly refusing to enforce federal immigration law against illegal aliens -- all while accepting billions of dollars of stimulus money on top of a litany of other federal payouts.

Shouldn't somebody be fired over this? Like maybe Geraldo Rivera?

How about hauling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom before a congressional committee and firing him? In fact, just being named "Gavin Newsom" should be grounds for dismissal. San Francisco is getting $18 million of stimulus money -- to say nothing of its residents who receive federal money in the form of Social Security payments, government grants, welfare payments, federal highway funds and on and on and on.

Doesn't PBS take federal funds? Obama should really ask Big Bird to step down. While we're at it, shouldn't Tim Geithner be fired?

Now that the government owns everything, there's no end to the dead wood that can be cleared out.

Except the problem is -- as this very partial list demonstrates -- most of the dead wood exists only because of the government in the first place. Capitalism has its own methods of clearing out dead wood, which the government keeps preventing by forcing the taxpayer to bail out capitalism's losers.



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Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" and most recently, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America.

[CaptApril]

Townhall.com's Washington Beat
with Jillian Bandes, National Political Reporter
March 24, 2009

WAGNER WAGS OUT

GM Chairman Rick Wagner has been driven out of his company not in an open-top convertible as part of a going-away parade, but in a burned-out lemon destined for the junkyard. President Barack Obama rejected an additional $22 billion that GM and Chrysler had requested to save their dying brands, and instead ousted Wagner as chair, gave GM a 60-day deadline for cutting costs, and gave Chrysler 30 days to merge with Italian car maker Fiat or face a fiat of no government help that likely means death. The companies have already received $24.8 billion from the Fed. Many think this last gasp of good faith from Obama may not be enough to resurrect the faltering businesses. Meanwhile, Obama guarantees the warranties of both makers' vehicles, the sales of which have declined 45 percent in the past two months.

SPECTER SPECTACULAR

Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) came out against the Employee Free Choice Act, or card check, which almost certainly puts the kibosh on the potentially life-altering legislation during this Congress. Specter's decision removed the one vote necessary to invoke cloture on the bill that would have led to its probable passage, and will have steep consequences for his reelection in 2010. Pennsylvania has strong union lobbies, and Specter's support for the bailouts means he isn't getting much Republican love, either. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he's still trying to find an additional vote to pass the legislation; most analysts say that's a pipe dream, at least until Congressional elections in 2010 when the Dems could gain additional seats in Congress.

GEITHNER?S GAFFES

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has a lot on his plate, but he's made a number of blunders in the past week that have put him in the center of the three-ring circus that is the Treasury, the Congress, and the Executive branch. On Wednesday, Geithner said he rejected the idea of moving away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and then said he was open to the idea the very next day. "Is it too much to ask that your position remain unchanged over a 24 hour period?" asked Rep. John Shadegg, (R-Ariz.). Geithner told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that "we've done a lot in these eight weeks" in response to whether or not he feels like the "comeback kid." Maybe Stephanopoulos meant to ask if Geithner was coming back for more flogging.

EARTH DAY FOR AL GORE: BUSINESS AS USUAL

Saturday was Earth Day, when upstanding citizens were instructed to turn off all electronic appliances for one hour starting at 8:30 p.m. Some conservatives mocked the directive, turning on lights and appliances in defiance, but it turns out that a key lib did as well. Al Gore, mansion-dwelling denizen, decked out his driveway in floodlights and had a number of televisions running right in the middle of the hour, despite being a leading proponent of Earthly objectives. President of the Tennessee Center For Policy Research Drew Johnson wrote that the floodlights highlighted Gore's "gaudy trees" and that "most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work." Sounds like the kind of hard work Gore usually exerts when it comes time for him to follow his own directives on the environment.

REPUBLICANS INTRODUCE PLAN FOR PLAN

House leaders introduced a budget plan that was short on facts but big on glitz; that shouldn't cause concern, they say. The actual figures are coming out this week in the actual unveiling of the plan; Rep. Mike Pence, (Ind.) chairman of the House Republican Conference, told Sean Hannity "When our own Paul Ryan, our lead Republican on the Budget Committee, introduces the Republican budget next week you're going to see a Party that is willing to make the kind of tough choices to put our fiscal house in order." All right, boys - I'm ready for the action.

THE MAN ON AFGHANISTAN

Obama committed 4,200 more troops and hundreds of additional civilians to Afghanistan, flying in the face of campaign promises to decrease U.S. military presence abroad. Along with the surge in troops, Obama announced a system of benchmarks to ensure progress was being made, and insisted that the increased presence would not be permanent. He also noted that U.S. troops would increase coordination with Pakistan, in a very delicate way. No troops were being committed to the country, but if terrorists were hiding there, they could chase them. The U.S. will still not recognize the country as a "sovereign government?" thank goodness.

G20 PREVIEW

Obama waffled on whether or not he would consider further bailouts at the G20 summit that begins on Wednesday, flying in the face of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is expected to get on his hands and knees and pray for more money to be spent, even though his own government is too bankrupt to do the same. Obama didn't write Brown off, but emphasized a dual approach via stimulus and increased regulation. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, directly snubbed Brown, saying "I will not let anyone tell me that we must spend more money," and Spanish finance minister, Pedro Solbes, said there is "no room for new fiscal stimulus plans." Here's to Brown losing the game.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Sunday, March 29 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" "You know, the big mistake governments make in recessions is they put the brakes on too early. That's one thing that happened in the depression. It's happened in Japan, too. It's happened in a lot of countries in the world. They see that first glimmer of light, and the impetus to policy fades and people are putting on the brakes, and we're not going to do that."

- Jillian Bandes
National Political Reporter, Townhall.com

[Mel]

And so it goes. Five posts, all by April. AOT is alive and well, and still the Capt April political folder. (I mean that rather affectionately, April.)

[CaptApril]

Founder's Quote time...

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

--George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

[CaptApril]

The Mighty ACORN
By Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.com
Thursday, April 2, 2009

In conservative circles, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, is the devil. This group mobilizes left-wing voters and champions liberal causes, sometimes using tax money (state and federal grants) to pay expenses. Of course, that makes right-wingers seethe with indignation.

ACORN employees across the country have been indicted for voter fraud and, by its own admission, the group has submitted at least 400,000 questionable voter documents, according to a New York Times report dated October 24, 2008.

Now, two whistle blowers, Anita MonCrief and Marcel Reed, who used to work for ACORN, have testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee that the organization took money to intimidate capitalist organizations like the Carlyle Group and H&R Block and worked closely with the Obama presidential campaign to get voters to the polls. It is here where the story begins to rise to the next level.

According to Ms. MonCrief, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom was getting close to documenting a story directly linking the Obama campaign to ACORN through the "Project Vote" organization. President Obama himself worked for "Project Vote" in the 1990s. There is speculation that "Project Vote" did a number of illegal things last November during the voter registration process. Apparently, Ms. Strom was zeroing in on the situation.

But then the Times investigation suddenly stopped dead, prompting a call from Ms. Strom, the reporter, to Ms. MonCrief, her source. A voice mail by Strom was left on October 21, 2008:

"Hi, Anita, it's Stephanie. I've just been asked by my bosses to stand down... they want me to hold off on coming to Washington. Sorry, I take my orders from higher up."

The Times did run a story about ACORN's left-wing partisanship, but stopped there. The paper would not make Stephanie Strom available to talk with me. Spokeswoman Catherine Mathis sent a statement saying, "Every day we make news judgments about which stories to publish and which ones not to pursue. Political considerations played no role in our decision about whether to cover this story."

Of course, the motto of the New York Times is "All the News That's Fit to Print." "Standing down" on a story with presidential implications does not seem to fit that motto. Or am I wrong?

But Congressman John Conyers, a fervent Democrat and head of the Judiciary Committee, is not standing down. He is calling for a full House investigation of ACORN's role in the Presidential election and beyond. Good for him.

The story is somewhat technical, thus does not hold much appeal for TV news operations, but it is important. According to the whistleblowers, ACORN is a corrupt organization with close ties to the Obama administration. That sounds kind of ominous. Let's hope Conyers continues to step up.

[CaptApril]

Jewish World Review April 3, 2009 / 9 Nissan 5769

Obama Census Plan: No Illegal Alien Left Behind

By Michelle Malkin

www.JewishWorldReview.com | I have seen the electoral future, and it is rigged. With fraud-prone, ideologically driven interest groups swarming the census-gathering process, the left is solidifying its chances of a permanent ruling majority. Lax immigration enforcement is the not-so-secret key to the Democrats' power grab. And the Obama administration is all too happy to aid and abet.

At a meeting to mobilize volunteer trainees assisting with the decennial national headcount, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke encouraged the government's partners to spread the word that privacy rights of census-takers would not be violated, and that accuracy and fairness would be ensured. Locke assured the activists: "We all recognize what is at stake."

But do you?

The volunteer groups Locke is entrusting to protect accuracy and fairness include the voter registration con artists of tax-subsidized ACORN, the amnesty activists of Voto Latino and the labor bosses of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The fate of $300 billion in federal funding — and, most importantly, the apportionment of congressional seats — rest in their hands.

As for "privacy rights," it's not your privacy rights they care about. It's the privacy rights of millions of illegal aliens, whose advocates have enshrined for them a sacred right never to be questioned about their immigration status. Obama's census partners are using the process to pressure homeland security agents to halt interior enforcement efforts and workplace raids so that illegal alien cooperation with the national survey is maximized. Inclusion of the massive illegal alien population has resulted in a radical redrawing of the electoral map.

The census is used to divvy up seats in the House as a proportion of their population based on the headcount.

More people equals more seats. More illegal immigrants counted equals more power.

This is not hypothetical. The Center for Immigration Studies determined that in the 2000 election cycle, the presence of non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, temporary visitors and green-card holders, caused nine seats in the House to switch hands. As the think tank's analysis reported: California added six seats it would not have had otherwise. Texas, New York and Florida each gained a seat. Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin each lost a seat. Montana, Kentucky and Utah each failed to secure a seat they would otherwise have gained.

Translation in plain English: Open borders have profound consequences. And they don't end with congressional apportionment. The redistribution of power extends to presidential elections because the Electoral College is pegged to the size of congressional delegations.

Under the Carter administration, the men and women who enforce our immigration laws were ordered not to do their jobs during the census count; non-enforcement was the unspoken policy during the Bush administration in 2000. Bipartisan policy, in other words, was to put political interests above security interests and leave No Illegal Alien Left Behind.

The Obama Department of Homeland Security is already continuing the tradition — reversing the work of investigative agents who have uncovered massive document fraud at illegal alien worksites, and cutting immigration and customs enforcement operations at the knees.

During the eight years of the Bush administration, groups such as ACORN received millions of dollars in subsidies. The pro-amnesty faction of the GOP pandered to unions such as the SEIU and ethnic lobbying groups such as Voto Latino seeking to boost their membership rolls.

Now Republicans can only stand by helplessly while the political opponents they helped fund use the census to wipe them off the electoral map. You reap what you sow.

[CaptApril]

Jewish World Review April 2, 2009 / 8 Nissan 5769

Obama's Ultimate Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer

www.JewishWorldReview.com | Five minutes of explanation to James Madison, and he'll have a pretty good idea what a motorcar is (basically a steamboat on wheels; the internal combustion engine might take a few minutes more). Then try to explain to Madison how the Constitution he fathered allows the president to unilaterally guarantee the repair or replacement of every component of millions of such contraptions sold in the several states, and you will leave him slack-jawed.

In fact, we are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside. The last Treasury secretary brought the nine largest banks into his office and informed them that henceforth he was their partner. His successor is seeking the power to seize any financial institution at his own discretion.

Despite these astonishments, I remain more amused than alarmed. First, the notion of presidential car warranties strikes me as simply too bizarre, too comical, to mark the beginning of Yankee Peronism.

Second, there is every political incentive to make these interventions in the banks and autos temporary and circumscribed. For President Obama, autos and banks are sideshows. Enormous sideshows, to be sure, but had the financial meltdown and the looming auto bankruptcies not been handed to him, he would hardly have gone seeking to be the nation's credit and car czar.

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes — even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government — Obama stuck to the tax hike "for purposes of fairness.") The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda.

The big sideshows, of course, are the credit crisis, which Obama has contracted out to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and the collapse of the U.S. automakers, which Obama seems to have taken on for himself.

That was a tactical mistake. Better to have let the car companies go directly to Chapter 11 and have a judge mete out the bitter medicine to the workers and bondholders.

By sacking GM's CEO, packing the new board, and giving direction as to which brands to drop and what kind of cars to make, Obama takes ownership of General Motors. He may soon come to regret it. He has now gotten himself so entangled in the car business that he is personally guaranteeing your muffler. (Upon reflection, a job best left to the congenitally unmuffled Joe Biden.)

Some find in this descent into large-scale industrial policy a whiff of 1930s-style fascist corporatism. I have my doubts. These interventions are rather targeted. They involve global financial institutions that even the Bush administration decided had to be nationalized and auto companies that themselves came begging to the government for money.

Bizarre and constitutionally suspect as these interventions may be, the transformation of the American system will come from elsewhere. The credit crisis will pass and the auto overcapacity will sort itself out one way or the other. The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama's real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state; social and economic leveling in the name of fairness; and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government.

If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: "fair," leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.

[Mel]

April, why did you call this thread, "Not Even Close to a Topic?" Just curious. Thanks.

[Wahrheit]

Apr 5, 2009 17:18:49 GMT -5 Mel said:

April, why did you call this thread, "Not Even Close to a Topic?" Just curious. Thanks.

I'm gonna guess he's referencing the recently departed *A*OT (Almost Off-Topic) board.

[Mel]

I'm gonna guess he's referencing the recently departed *A*OT (Almost Off-Topic) board.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

[CaptApril]

Insider Report from Newsmax.com

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):


1. Kissinger, Shultz Behind U.S.-Russian Arms Talks
2. Media Shun ‘Illegal Alien’ Designation
3. 100-Plus Scientists: Obama ‘Simply Incorrect’ on Global Warming
4. White House Staffers Prefer Foreign Cars
5. Arab Summit ‘Led Nowhere’
6. We Heard: Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Netanyahu, New York Times

1. Kissinger, Shultz Behind U.S.-Russian Arms Talks

A meeting in London between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ended with the announcement that the U.S. and Russia will seek to further reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

But Newsmax has learned that progress toward arms reduction was set in motion by a little-publicized meeting last month involving Russian strong man Valdmir Putin and the two American elder statesmen, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Schultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, traveled to Moscow along with former Sen. Sam Nunn and former Defense Secretary William Perry.

They were acting as private citizens and not on an official visit, but Obama was using the statesmen to sound out the Russians on arm reduction.

A source revealed that Obama and Schulz spoke by telephone before the Russian meeting, and that Obama voiced his strong support for their nuclear initiative. Obama reportedly said the matter was a priority for his new administration, though economic issues were taking center stage for the moment.

Kissinger told the Los Angeles Times that after meeting with Putin he had found ample grounds for cooperation.

“I’m happy to report that the differences were not so remarkable and the agreements were considerable,” he said.

Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn and Perry made their views on arms reduction clear in an article that was published in The Wall Street Journal in January.

The four statesmen advocate “reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”

They argue that the end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual deterrence obsolete, but warn that the world is now “on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era” in which North Korea and Iran could become nuclear powers and terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons.

To deal with the threat, what is needed is “intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise,” the Kissinger team wrote in the Journal.

“Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran.”

Among the steps the statesmen suggest are “continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.”

That is precisely what Obama and Medvedev discussed in London. In a statement released after their meeting, the two leaders announced talks aimed at replacing the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in December.

Obama accepted Medvedev’s invitation to visit Moscow in July to assess negotiators’ progress on arms reduction, which would give the U.S. Senate enough time to debate and approve a new treaty before the December expiration date.




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2. Media Shun ‘Illegal Alien’ Designation

Ingmar Guandique, recently charged in the 2001 slaying of Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy, is an illegal alien — a fact that has been widely ignored by much of the mainstream press.

“The designation of Guandique — who entered the U.S. illegally in 2000, was convicted of two nonfatal attacks on women and incarcerated — has reignited a debate over whether a person’s immigration status is relevant to the story,” conservative activist Howard Phillips writes in his Issues and Strategy Bulletin.

“Journalists also are debating whether the words ‘illegal’ and ‘immigrant’ are too loaded to use in an already emotionally charged story.”

Phillips — chairman of The Conservative Caucus, an advocacy group — notes that the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has campaigned against the use of the word “illegal” in copy and headlines, saying it “stereotypes” undocumented people.

But Brent Baker of the Media Research Center said: “Too many journalists don’t want to provide ammunition to those who want stricter immigration laws, so avoid connecting illegal immigrants to evidence which will bolster the argument that illegals cause harm.”

And John Solomon, executive editor of The Washington Times, has stated: “The suggestion that immigration status somehow is irrelevant or should be treated like race in a crime story seems flawed. Being white or black or Hispanic or Asian isn’t a crime. Entering the country illegally is.”

Phillips, who has run for president three times as the candidate of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, said The Washington Post referred to Guandique as a “Salvadoran day laborer,” ABC News called him an “incarcerated felon,” and CNN said he was a “jailed laborer.”

MSNBC called Guandique an “imprisoned Salvadoran immigrant,” CBS News and the Los Angeles Times said he was a “Salvadoran immigrant,” and The New York Times referred to him as a “suspect.”

The Washington Times, Time magazine and USA Today are among those that have called him an “illegal immigrant.”


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3. 100-Plus Scientists: Obama ‘Simply Incorrect’ on Global Warming

Over 100 prominent scientists from more than a dozen countries — including a Nobel Prize winner — have signed a letter to President Barack Obama charging that his views on climate change are “simply incorrect.”

The letter — sponsored by the Cato Institute — cites a statement Obama made in November: “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.”

Under the headline, “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true,” the scientists state:

“We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now…

“The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.”

The 115 signatories include Ivar Giaever, Ph.D., who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for his work with superconductors at General Electric; John Blaylock, formerly with the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and William Gray, Ph.D., the respected hurricane expert at Colorado State University.

The signers include scientists at Princeton University, U.S. Naval Academy, University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Colorado, and University of Missouri.

Among the countries represented by the signers are Britain, Canada, Italy, Norway, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Argentina and South Africa.

A number of the scientists are current or former reviewers with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with climate change crusader Al Gore — and have since reversed their views on man-made global warming.



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4. White House Staffers Prefer Foreign Cars

President Barack Obama has taken steps to encourage Americans to buy more U.S.-made cars — but administration officials show a clear preference for vehicles from foreign-owned firms.

Obama said the government will guarantee warranties on any GM or Chrysler vehicles, and the IRS is notifying consumers who purchased cars after Feb. 16 that they can deduct the cost of any sales and excise taxes.

Yet Politico.com took a look at the vehicles on West Executive Drive, where White House staffers park, and found only five American cars out of 23 vehicles there.

As for several members of Obama’s presidential task force on the auto industry, The Detroit News reported:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner owns a 2008 Acura.
Larry Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, owns a 1995 Mazda.
Peter Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, owns a 2008 Honda and a 2004 Volvo.
“Climate czar” Carol Browner doesn’t currently own a vehicle, but previously drove a 1999 Saab.
Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein owns a 2005 Honda.
Obama’s economic adviser Austan Goolsbee owns a 2004 Toyota.



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5. Arab Summit ‘Led Nowhere’

If the recent Arab summit was intended to demonstrate solidarity within the 22-member Arab League, it was an utter failure — instead exposing deep rifts within the Arab world.

The summit in Qatar got off to a raucous start on Monday when Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi grabbed a microphone and insulted Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, calling him a “British product and American ally” — then stormed out of the gathering, according to The Associated Press.

Next, various factions got into a dispute over Iran. Egypt — whose leader Hosni Mubarak boycotted the summit — has expressed concern over Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its effort to promote Shia Islam in predominately Sunni nations, and Morocco went so far as to sever diplomatic relations with Iran over that issue.

But Syria let it be known that it stands staunchly beside Iran, and the host of the summit, the Emir of Qatar, defended Iran’s position.

The envoy from Egypt proceeded to issue a veiled criticism of the Al Jazeera network, which the Emir owns, saying that Arab media should be more responsible and refrain from exacerbating differences of opinion between Arab states, according to the Jerusalem Post.

But by the end of the first day of the scheduled 2-day summit, “it had become clear to the participants that they were going nowhere. So profound were the differences of opinion that there was no point of going on and no hope of reaching a consensus,” the Post reported — so the second day of the summit was cancelled.

But the Arab leaders did form a united front on one issue — they expressed support for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court due to the genocide in his nation’s Darfur region.

A final statement read at the summit rejected an international arrest warrant issued against al-Bashir, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

“We reiterate our solidarity with Sudan and our rejection of the measures of the … International Criminal Court against his Excellency,” the communiqué read.

Zvi Mazel wrote in the Post: “Once again, an Arab summit led nowhere. [The leaders’] weakness and indecision was made all too evident in the early closure of the summit.”



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6. We Heard . . .

THAT people in more than 1,000 cities in over 80 countries observed Earth Hour 2009 on March 28, turning off lights in homes, offices and landmarks for 60 minutes to raise awareness about climate change.

The Hour began at 8:30 p.m. local time all around the world.

But when Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, drove past the Nashville mansion of global warming alarmist Al Gore, he found floodlights illuminating the driveway and lights on inside the house.

THAT President Barack Obama has signed a bill designating the birthplace of former President Bill Clinton as a National Historic Site.

Clinton’s boyhood home on Hervey St. in Hope, Ark., joins 32 other presidential historic sites maintained by the National Park Service, according to the Texarkana Gazette.

The house was built in 1917, but has been restored to the era when Clinton was living there, from 1946 through 1950. It is now owned by the Clinton Birthplace Foundation, which has operated the home as a museum.

THAT a newspaper in Israel is reporting that new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Politicians in touch with Netanyahu say he has already made up his mind to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations,” the Haaretz newspaper reports.

Haaretz cited a statement Netanyahu made during the campaign: “I promise that if I am elected, Iran will not acquire nuclear arms, and this implies everything necessary to carry this out.”

THAT New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said The Times will be “left standing after the deluge” of newspapers shutting down or going Internet-only.

Speaking at Stanford University to mark the opening of a new building for the student newspaper, Keller also quipped that the event felt a bit like a “ribbon-cutting at a new Pontiac dealership.”

[CaptApril]

"There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage."

--John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776

[CaptApril]

A Political Look at Hollywood
By James Hirsen

A Newsmax Report

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Alec Baldwin Character Loves Michelle Obama, Disses Ann Coulter
2. Blondes Have More Professional Trouble
3. Tweeting With the Stars
4. ‘Bruno’ Movie Mocks Angelina and Madonna
5. Review of Pirated ‘X-Men’ Costs Fox News Columnist His Job

1. Alec Baldwin Character Loves Michelle Obama, Disses Ann Coulter

If Alec Baldwin is able to get his way, his character on "30 Rock" will fall in love with first lady Michelle Obama.

The actor actually told Hollyscoop.com that he craves the president’s wife as a potential love interest for his “30 Rock” character, and he has apparently already penned the first lady’s part.

“I think my character falls in love with Michelle Obama, of course,” Baldwin blurted. “You know, if it doesn't work out with Barack . . .”

Since Baldwin’s character is a womanizer with designs on the characters played by Tina Fey and Salma Hayek, the president might be wise to step in and provide some of that famous change — to the script.

NBC refers to Baldwin’s character as “the brash new network executive who has turned the show upside down with his meddling ways.”

It seems Baldwin’s onscreen alter ego deosn't care for women of the right-leaning kind, however. His character has been known to diss conservative firebrand Ann Coulter.

“The closest I came to vomiting tonight is when I saw Ann Coulter's shoulder blades,” Baldwin via Donaghy declared in an episode.

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2. Blondes Have More Professional Trouble

According to a new survey, almost a third of women with naturally blonde hair have opted to go darker in color.

Why are some of the fair-haired messing with their tresses?

Evidently, it’s being done to shake a bimbo stereotype and to be taken more seriously by employers and co-workers.

The survey was taken by a group called Superdrug, which queried 2,500 women.

Thirty-eight percent of the participants indicated that for employment purposes their hair color had been a disadvantage in some way, and 62 percent were of the opinion that brunettes have an edge over blondes in professional appearance.

Guess when it comes to hair, old stereotypes really dye hard.


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3. Tweeting With the Stars

Lately Twitter has been getting a terrabyte’s worth of celebrity buzz.

After a tweeting addiction got pinned with the blame for John Mayer’s breakup with Jennifer Aniston, Mayer opined that posting on the micro blogging social network is “inherently silly and inherently dumb.”

He proceeded to put up a non-silly and fairly astute post on the subject of self-esteem.

“Living by the power of other people's suggestion will slowly kill you. Genuine self esteem isn't a roller coaster. It comes from within,” Mayer texted.

Look for esteem or something like it to end up in a new Mayer song.

Meanwhile Demi Moore’s Twitter wits may have helped save a life.

A distressed woman had sent the “Charlie’s Angels” star an ominous Twitter message that read: “Getting a knife, a big one that is sharp. Going to cut my arm down the whole arm so it doesn’t waste time.”

The alert actress and Ashton Kutcher spouse forwarded the terrible tweet to her 350,000 Twitter followers, adding this supplemental message: “Hope you are joking. Everyone was very torn about responding or retweeting that woman’s post but felt uncomfortable just letting it go.”

Demi’s followers sprang into action and contacted the police who were able to find the woman and prevent the potential suicide.

“Thanks everyone for reaching out to the San Jose PD,” Moore later tweeted. “I am told they are aware and no need to call anymore. I do not know this woman . . .”

“It is my understanding that the situation was not a joke and that through the collective efforts here action was taken to provide help!” Moore added.

It just goes to show that social networks can be used for more than mere amusement.

They can be twitterly important and at times tweetastic.

BTW, I’m a twitterer, too, and if you’re so inclined, please forward me your choicest news twips and H-tweets.

Twanks.

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4. ‘Bruno’ Movie Mocks Angelina and Madonna

Despite the large number of children in the U.S. who have no parents, there seems to be some kind of contest going on in Hollywood to see who can adopt the most kids from abroad.

Right now Angelina Jolie has a sizable lead, but Madonna appears to be trying to play catch up.

The Material Girl recently filed a petition to adopt a 3-year-old girl from Malawi named Chifundo James. Chifundo translated means “mercy.”

Because the law in Malawi states that the adopting person must be a resident in the region for 18 months prior to the adoption, Madonna's petition to adopt a second Malawian child was rejected by a Malawian judge.

The judge said that she had “a gripping temptation” to give Madonna a little “mercy.”

But the judge also expressed the belief that granting the petition might induce a dreadful situation: “Removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children . . . could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals,” Justice E.J. Chombo wrote in the ruling.

Human rights activists claimed Madonna was using her fame to skirt the residency requirement for foreigners adopting in the country. They also pointed out that the child is at an orphanage being well taken care of and is enrolled in school.

Madonna reacted in true diva fashion. First, she was able to keep reporters at bay via a shut-down of the road leading to the airport. She then promptly filed an appeal seeking to reverse the High Court’s adoption judgment and skipped town on her private jet.

Incidentally, Madonna does not have to appear before the Malawian Supreme Court of Appeal for the matter to be adjudicated.

Meanwhile Sacha Baron Cohen, who much like Madonna is a master manipulator of the press, leaked a scene from his upcoming film, “Bruno,” which lampoons the celebrity penchant for overseas adopting.

The trailer for the movie has a scene in which Bruno, the gay Austrian fashion journalist character, pulls an African baby out of a cardboard box while at an airport baggage claim. He simultaneously announces, “Angelina's got one; Madonna's got one; now Bruno's got one.”

Bruno then gives his new baby boy a “traditional” African name — “O.J.”


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5. Review of Pirated ‘X-Men’ Costs Fox News Columnist His Job

After more than 10 years of acerbic writing, Foxnews.com columnist Roger Friedman has been let go.

The moral of the story is if you work for a company that owns a movie studio, it’s not a good idea to download and review a stolen copy of an upcoming movie.

But that’s apparently what Friedman did.

The entire entertainment industry has been talking about the stolen copy of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which was posted on the Internet about a month before the movie’s planned debut.

The pirated version was an early, unfinished, special effect-free print, and execs were debating how much of a loss to the box office the leak would represent.

Friedman evidently liked what he saw in the pilfered flick and wrote in his column about ticking off Fox movie execs.

“Right now, my ‘cousins’ at 20th Century Fox are probably having apoplexy,” Friedman professed. “But everyone can relax. I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn. I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer.”

Friedman then made the mistake of rubbing the entire creative community the wrong way.

“I did find the whole top 10 [released films], plus TV shows, commercials, videos, everything, all streaming away. It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer. I could have downloaded all of it but really, who has the time or the room? Later tonight I may finally catch up with Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man. It’s so much easier than going out in the rain!”

Unfortunately for Friedman, he was accurate in his assessment of his “‘cousins’ at 20th Century Fox.” The studio issued a statement saying, “We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com — an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -— watched on the internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Orgins: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -— whether the review is good or bad.”

As industry blogger Nikki Finke posted, Fox News sacked Friedman, explaining that “Roger Friedman’s views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”

Sources indicate that Fox News head Roger Ailes personally handled the termination.

The FBI is now investigating how the movie made it to the Web.

Notwithstanding the politics of the entertainment business, the private property rights issue hits home when hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line.

[CaptApril]

Jewish World Review April 6, 2009 / 12 Nissan 5769

Exporting their mistakes worldwide

By Mark Steyn

www.JewishWorldReview.com | During the Obama administration's foray to London this past week, officials provided a special telephone number to journalists interested in discussing foreign-policy issues in an "on-the-record briefing call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor Jim Jones."

Unfortunately, as part of the curious run of bad luck currently afflicting our new secretary of state, upon dialing the number the gentlemen of the press were greeted by a honey-voiced seductress, presumably not Secretary Clinton, offering them "phone sex" and seeking their credit-card number if they "feel like getting nasty."

No, it wasn't a White House April Fools' gag. This was April 2.

Alas, what with the collapse of the newspaper industry and major metro dailies filing for bankruptcy every 20 minutes, sticking phone sex on your expense tab isn't as easy as it once was. So many of these bigshot correspondents were forced to hang up, call the White House Press Office, get given the correct number and listen to Hillary droning on about the NATO summit for a half-hour. The Deputy Press Secretary, Bill Burton, insisted that the White House handing out sex-line numbers was no big deal and only Fox News would make a fuss about "a corrected phone number."

I'm not sure why the White House needed to correct it. It's the perfect radio ad for the administration. Call 1-900-OBAMA, and Timothy Geithner will demand your credit-card number and ask whether you feel like getting nasty, because he certainly does. He'll be wearing a steel-tipped basque, and the squeals in the background will be an AIG executive or the former CEO of General Motors hanging upside down in the Treasury Department basement while he feels the firm lash of government "regulation" from Barney Frank and Mistress Pelosi.

Well, we all hate "the rich," don't we? Last week, David Paterson, the governor of New York, said that if he'd known his latest tax increase would persuade Rush Limbaugh to sell his Manhattan apartment and leave the city, he'd have raised taxes earlier. Ha-ha. Very funny. In New York City, as Mayor Bloomberg has pointed out, the wealthiest 1 percent contribute 50 percent of municipal revenue. How tiny a number of people does Gov. Paterson have to drive out before it causes significant shortfalls in the public coffers?

On the other hand, the rich can only be driven out if they've got somewhere to be driven to. At the ludicrous G-20 summit in London last week, the official communiqu� crowed over a "clampdown" on tax havens - those British colonies in the Caribbean and a few other offshore pinpricks in the map. "The era of banking secrecy is over," the G-20 proclaimed.

Does anyone seriously think a Swiss bank account or a post office box in the Turks and Caicos are responsible for the global meltdown?

No, but the world's governments have decided to focus on irrelevant scapegoats. In the current crisis, Japan, Germany and Italy (plus Russia) are in net population decline that's only going to accelerate in the years ahead. So, unlike the U.S., they can't run up the national debt and stick it to their kids and grandkids, because they don't have any kids and grandkids to stick it to. If New York is running out of rich people, Germany is running out of people, period. The Chinese and other buyers of Western debt know that. If you're an investor, and you're not tracking GDP versus median age in the world's major economies, you're going to lose a lot of money.

If government has a role in this crisis, it ought to be to reverse the combination of unaffordable social programs and deathbed demographics that make a restoration of real GDP growth all but impossible in many European nations. But that would involve telling the citizenry unpleasant truths, and Continental politicians who wish to remain electorally viable aren't willing to do that. President Sarkozy, The Times of London reported, "said that the summit provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience." What he means by "a conscience" is a global regulatory regime that ensures there's nowhere to move to. If you're France, which has a sluggish, uncompetitive, protectionist, high-unemployment business environment whose best and brightest abandon the country in ever-greater droves, it obviously makes sense to force the entire planet to submit to the same growth-killing measures that have done wonders for your own economy. But it's not good news for the rest of the world. The building blocks for a global regulatory regime and even a global central bank with an embryo global currency (the IMF and the enhanced role of "Special Drawing Rights") are an ominous development.

Let it be said that in recent years in America, the United Kingdom and certain other countries the "financial sector" grew too big. In The Atlantic, Simon Johnson points out that, from 1973-85, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By this decade, it was up to 41 percent. That's higher than healthy, but it wouldn't have got anywhere near that high if government didn't annex so much of your wealth - through everything from income tax to small-business regulation - that it's become increasingly difficult to improve your lot by working hard, making stuff, selling it. Instead, in order to fund a more comfortable retirement and much else, large numbers of people became "investors" - albeit not as the term is traditionally understood: Instead, you work for some company, and it puts some money on your behalf in some sort of account that somebody on the 12th floor pools together with all the others and gives to somebody else in New York to disperse among various corporations hither and yon. You've no idea what you're "investing" in, but it keeps going up, so why do you care? That's not like a 19th century chappie saying he's starting a rubber plantation in Malaya and, since the faster shipping routes out of Singapore, it may be worth your while owning 25 percent of it. Or a guy in 1929 barking "Buy this!" and "Sell that!" at his broker every morning. Instead, an exaggerated return on mediocre assets became accepted as a permanent feature of life.

It's not, and it can never be. Especially given the long-term structural defects in many Western nations. A serious G-20 summit would have seen France commit to the liberalization of its economy; Germany to serious natalist incentives; Britain to a reduction of the near-Soviet size of state spending in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and the United States to allowing its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned money and thus reduce both the dependency on ludicrous asset inflation as the only route to socio-economic improvement and the risk of a Euro-style decline in birthrate caused by the unaffordability of kids.

Instead, the great powers are erecting a global regulatory regime to export their worst mistakes to the entire planet.

As they say on the State Department phone-sex line, it's going to get nasty.

[CaptApril]

Jewish World Review April 6, 2009 / 13 Nissan 5769

America's naive President

By Dennis Prager

www.JewishWorldReview.com | "The basic bargain is sound: countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them."
—President Barack Obama, Prague, April 6, 2009

As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, the President of the United States wants America to disarm: "Countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament."

It is hard to imagine a more destructive goal. A nuclear disarmed America would lead to massive and widespread killing, more genocide, and very possibly the nuclear holocaust worldwide nuclear disarmament is meant to prevent.

There is nothing moral, let alone realistic, about this goal.

Here is an analogy. Imagine that the mayor of a large American city announced that it was his goal to have all the citizens of his city disarm — what could be more beautiful than a city with no weapons? This would, of course, ultimately include the police, but with properly signed agreements, vigorously enforced, and violators of the agreement punished, it would remain an ideal to pursue.

One has to assume that most people would regard this idea as, at the very least, useless. There would be no way to ensure that bad people would disarm; and if the police disarmed, only bad people would have weapons.

The analogy is virtually precise — but only if you acknowledge that America is the world's policeman. To idealists of the left, however, the notion of America as the world's policeman is both arrogant and misguided. A strengthened "world community" — as embodied by the United Nations — should be the world's policeman.

To the rest of us, however, the idea of the United Nations as the world's policeman is absurd and frightening. The United Nations has proven itself a moral wasteland that gives genocidal tyrannies honored positions on human rights commissions. The weaker the U.N. and the stronger America, the greater the chances of preventing or stopping mass atrocities.

On the assumption that the left and the right both seek a world without genocide and tyranny, it is, then, the answer to this question that divides them: Are genocide and tyranny more or less likely if America is the strongest country on earth, i.e., the country with the greatest and most weapons, nuclear and otherwise?

Moreover even if you answer in the negative and think that the world would experience less evil with a nuclear disarmed America, the goal of worldwide nuclear disarmament is foolish because it is unattainable. And unattainable goals are a waste of precious time and resources.

For one thing, it is inconceivable that every nation would agree to it. Why would India give up its nuclear weapons? There aren't a dozen Hindus who believe that Pakistan would give up every one of its nuclear weapons. And the same presumably holds true for Muslims in Pakistan with regard to India disarming.

And what about Israel? Would that country destroy all its nuclear weapons? Of course not. And it would be foolish to do so. Israel is surrounded by countries that wish not merely to vanquish it, but to destroy it. It regards nuclear weapons as life assurance. And it regards the United Nations (with good reason) as its enemy, not its protector.

As for states like Iran and North Korea, they have already violated agreements regarding nuclear weapons. What would prompt them to do otherwise in a world where America got weaker? United Nations sanctions? And why would Russia and China even agree to them?

Finally, there would be no way to prevent rogue scientists from selling materials and know-how to terrorists.

The result of this left-wing fantasy of worldwide nuclear disarmament would simply be that those who illegally acquired or made but one nuclear weapon would be able to blackmail any nation.

What any president of the United States should aspire to is: 1). to keep America the strongest country in the world militarily (as well as economically, but that is not the question on the table); 2) to destroy those individuals and organizations that seek nuclear weapons so as to kill as many innocent people as possible; and 3) remain the world's policeman. These aims cannot be achieved if America aims to disarm.

President Obama said "I am not naive" in his talk. That, unfortunately, is as accurate as his statement before the joint session of Congress that "I do not believe in bigger government."

[CaptApril]

Let's All Surrender Our Weapons -- You First!
by Ann Coulter

04/08/2009


The rash of recent shooting incidents has led people who wouldn't know an AK-47 from a paintball gun to issue demands for more restrictions on guns. To be sure, it's hard to find any factor in these shootings that could be responsible -- other than the gun.

So far, this year's public multiple shootings were committed by:

-- Richard Poplawski, 23, product of a broken family, expelled from high school and dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who killed three policemen in Pittsburgh.


-- Former crack addict Jiverly Wong, 41, who told co-workers "America sucks" yet somehow was not offered a job as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, who blockaded his victims in a civic center in Binghamton, N.Y., and shot as many people as he could, before killing himself.

-- Robert Stewart, 45, a three-time divorcee and high school dropout with "violent tendencies" -- according to one of his ex-wives -- who shot up the nursing home in Carthage, N.C., where his newly estranged wife worked.

-- Lovelle Mixon, 26, a paroled felon, struggling to get his life back on track by pimping, who shot four cops in Oakland, Calif. -- before eventually being shot himself.

-- Twenty-eight-year-old Michael McLendon, child of divorce, living with his mother and boycotting family funerals because he hated his relatives, who killed 10 of those relatives and their neighbors in Samson, Ala.

It might make more sense to outlaw men than guns. Or divorce. Or crack. Or to prohibit felons from having guns. Except we already outlaw crack and felons owning guns and yet still, somehow, Wong got crack and Mixon got a gun.

After being pulled over for a routine traffic violation, Lovelle Mixon did exactly what they teach in driver's ed by immediately shooting four cops. Mixon's supporters held a posthumous rally in his honor, claiming he shot the cops only in "self-defense," which I take it includes the cop Mixon shot while the officer was lying on the ground.

I guess Mixon also raped that 12-year-old girl in "self-defense." Clearly, the pimping industry has lost a good man. I wish I'd known him. I tip my green velvet fedora with the dollar signs all over it to him. Why do the good ones always die young? Pimps, I mean.

Liberals tolerate rallies on behalf of cop-killers, but they prohibit law-abiding citizens working at community centers in Binghamton, N.Y., from being armed to defend themselves from disturbed, crack-addicted America-haters like Jiverly Wong.

It's something in liberals' DNA: They think they can pass a law eliminating guns and nuclear weapons, but teenagers having sex is completely beyond our control.

The demand for more gun control in response to any crime involving a gun is exactly like Obama's response to North Korea's openly belligerent act of launching a long-range missile this week: Obama leapt to action by calling for worldwide nuclear disarmament.

If the SAT test were used to determine how stupid a liberal is, one question would be: "The best defense against lawless rogues who possess _______ is for law-abiding individuals to surrender their own _______________."

Correct answer: Guns. We would also have accepted nuclear weapons.

Obama explained that "the United States has a moral responsibility" to lead disarmament efforts because America is "the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon."

So don't go feeling all morally superior to a country whose business model consists of exporting heroin, nuclear bombs and counterfeit U.S. dollars, and of importing Swedish prostitutes, you yahoo Americans with your little flag lapel pins.

On the other hand, the Japanese haven't acted up much in the last, say, 64 years ...

Fortunately, our sailors didn't wait around for Obama to save them when Somali pirates boarded their ship this week. Stop right now or I'll ask the U.N. to remind the "international community" that "the U.S. is not at war with Somali pirates."

Gun-toting Americans are clearly more self-sufficient than the sissy Europeans. This is great news for everyone except Barney Frank, who's always secretly wondered what it would be like to be taken by a Somali pirate.

Police -- whom I gather liberals intend to continue having guns -- and intrepid U.N. resolution drafters can't be everywhere, all the time.

If a single civilian in that Binghamton community center had been armed, instead of 14 dead, there might have only been one or two -- including the shooter. In the end, the cops didn't stop Wong. His killing spree ended only when he decided to stop, and he killed himself.

"The shooter will eventually run out of ammo" strategy may not be the best one for stopping deranged multiple murderers.

But it's highly unlikely that any community center in the entire state would be safe from a disturbed former crack-addict like Wong because New York's restrictive gun laws require a citizen to prove he has a need for a gun to obtain a concealed carry permit.

Instead of having Planned Parenthood distribute condoms in schools, they ought get the NRA to pass out revolvers. It would save more lives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" and most recently, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America.

[CaptApril]

Why They Won't Fight
By Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.com
Thursday, April 9, 2009

Let's begin by emulating Al Gore and stating an inconvenient truth: If every law-abiding nation in the world would join together to oppose the Taliban, Iran, and North Korea, presently the biggest troublemakers on earth, they would be neutralized. For example, if NATO and Pakistan joined forces, the Taliban and al-Qaeda would be routed from their mountain sanctuaries within days. If the world refused to trade with Iran, that government would fall very quickly. If China cooperated, North Korea would run out of fuel and that dictatorship would collapse.

But none of those things are likely to happen.

President Obama went to Europe to ask for more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan. The crowds cheered when he spoke; the press wrote glowing things about him. The President then came home with no more fighting capacity than when he left.

The European excuse used to be that they hated Bush, the Texas gunslinger. That's why Germany and France and Spain wouldn't cooperate against villains. So what's the excuse now?

In London, President Obama met with Putin's Russian surrogate and asked for cooperation in stopping Iran from developing nukes. Everybody knows that Israel will likely attack Iran if the Mullahs don't cease and desist from the weapons of mass destruction platform. But Russia, according to reports, told Mr. Obama that they would not stop trading with Iran because the Mullahs are NOT developing nuclear weapons.

Sure. Thanks so much, as the President often says.

So there you have it--a world of apathy and cowardice. A world that is content to allow terrorism and nuclear threats to exist. But why? Well, there are multiple answers.

After World War II, Europe basically said "no mas" to war. With the exception of Great Britain, the Europeans were happy to let the USA fight the Cold War and every other conflict. And even while we were protecting them, many Europeans resented us, because if they acknowledged our sacrifice and courage, they would also have to admit their own spinelessness.

Right now, the Taliban are killing innocent people in Afghanistan. They have thrown acid in the faces of young girls who have dared to attend school; they have beheaded young men deemed not militant enough for them. Like Darfur, the atrocities are well documented, and again, everybody knows that if the Taliban regains power, al-Qaeda gets a nice safe haven again.

But still, Europe, Russia and China do little.

Currently, only the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and Poland are actively fighting the Taliban. The other NATO countries have all kinds of rules of engagement which are confusing and often contradictory. There is little coordination in the Afghan theater.

President Obama loudly trumpets the change he believes he is bringing to America and to the world. But there seems to be little change among the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese. They continue to ignore or enable evil throughout the world. And I think it is safe to say that this posture will not have a happy ending.

[CaptApril]

Inside Cover RSS ARCHIVE

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White House Claims Obama Didn't Bow to King

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 11:34 PM

Barack Obama's White House says the president did not bow to the Saudi King when they met during the recent G-20 meeting in London.

If you think he did, you're just believing your lying eyes.

So reports Politico's Ben Smith Wednesday.

"It wasn't a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he's taller than King Abdullah," an anonymous Obama aide told Politico.

The aide made the assertion despite a video showing Obama bending almost to a 90-degree angle as he met King Abdullah.

And Politico notes that the Arab press have reported on the "bow" — with favorable reviews.

The occasion may mark the first time a U.S. president has bowed to a foreign potentate.

By the way, if you want to see how your eyes lie, take a look at the video of Obama "not" bowing to the Saudi king:

[CaptApril]

The Humbling of a Superpower
by Nile Gardiner

04/09/2009


It is hard to imagine a bigger slight to the memory of the more than 100,000 American soldiers who died liberating Europe than the image of a U.S. president attacking the “arrogance” of his own country on French soil. President Obama’s speech last week ahead of the NATO summit in Strasbourg, barely 500 miles from the beaches of Normandy, marked a low point in presidential speechmaking on foreign policy.

The largely French and German town hall audience cheered like ancient Romans in a packed Coliseum. This time, however, it was not Christians being fed to the lions but the symbolism of U.S. power, as the president lashed out at America’s “failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.” Obama bemoaned that “instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

The Franco-German crowd also clapped mightily in approval and bayed for more when the president boasted of closing down the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, declaring that “without equivocation or exception that the United States of America does not and will not torture,” as though his own country had been some sort of brutal tyranny that had suddenly seen the light with his election. It was a thoroughly distasteful attack on the previous administration’s interrogation of extremely dangerous terror suspects, feeding into the very anti-Americanism that Obama had half-heartedly challenged earlier in his address.

This was a humiliating spectacle to behold as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth prostrated his country before a European audience that lapped up his message as though it was manna from heaven. Obama’s actions represented the humbling of a superpower on the world stage, a defining moment for a new administration that is weakening American global leadership and taking every opportunity to engage with its enemies, such as Iran, or its strategic competitors, including Russia and China.

It was an approach that failed to reap any dividends on the president’s European tour. If anything, this trip proved there is little to be gained from bending to the whims of European governments, who simply view it as weakness to be exploited and used to their own advantage. When Obama urged Europeans to play a bigger role in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, his words were met in the Strasbourg amphitheatre with an eerie silence, as though this was a ridiculous request and an affront to their delicate sensibilities.

Behind the scenes at the NATO summit, there was no evidence of goodwill towards the pleas of the rock star-like American president. Obama succeeded only in securing a weak-kneed pledge of 5,000 European trainers and military police to join the NATO-led International Security Force in Afghanistan, most of whom will remain in the country only until the elections in August. Great Britain was the only European nation to offer a significant number of additional combat troops -- 1,000 -- to be added to the 8,300 British forces already on the ground.

It is continental European leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who should be apologizing for the failure of their own countries to fight in Afghanistan, while American, British and Canadian troops are dying in large numbers on the battlefields. The brutal fact is that Obama achieved nothing at all at the NATO summit, and the war in Afghanistan remains overwhelmingly a conflict fought by a small group of English-speaking nations who continue to take 85 percent of the casualties in the fight against the Taliban, while most of Europe sits pathetically on the sidelines with cowardly indifference.

In world affairs, popularity rarely brings with it concrete results. Ronald Reagan was reviled in Europe but together with Margaret Thatcher brought down the might of the Soviet Empire. President Bush was burnt in effigy in almost every capital city across the European Union but succeeded in liberating sixty million Muslims from tyranny and kept the United States safe from terrorist attack in the years following 9/11.

It wasn’t much better for Obama at the preceding G-20 summit in London, where European leaders made all the running. Obama may have stolen the limelight and the best photo-ops but shaped little of the policy. Eventually the United States signed up to a communiqué that pledged $750 billion for the IMF, a European-dominated highly ineffective organization, as well as laying the foundations of a new global regulatory architecture for the financial industry, that poses a huge threat to American national sovereignty and the freedom of American companies to operate in global markets.

As the Obama administration will gradually begin to realize, world leadership is not a popularity contest. Rather, it is about taking tough decisions and positions that will be met with hostility in many parts of the globe. It is about the assertive projection of American power, both to secure the homeland and to protect the free world. It is often a lonely and unenviable task that at times will require the use of maximum force against America’s enemies and a willingness to face the scorn of countries whose glories are way behind them, or who lack the courage and conviction to do what is right.

Obama faces a world that in many ways is even more dangerous than the one that existed during the Cold War, with an array of rogue regimes close to developing offensive nuclear weapons capability, as well as a global terrorist network that seeks the very destruction of the United States and its allies. This is not the time for flower power speeches repenting for the so-called “arrogance” of the globe’s only superpower, or pointless declarations about creating a “nuclear free world.”

The president must deal with the world as it is now, not as he imagines it. This requires confronting the Mullahs of Tehran and tyrants such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, and standing up to Russian aggression in its ‘Near Abroad.’ It also involves a determination to wage a global war, not an “Overseas Contingency Operation,” against Islamist groups and networks in the form of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and an array of other terrorist organizations. This will require significantly increased military spending not less, as well as the full implementation of a global missile defense system.

This is not a moment for faint hearts and 60s-style pacifism, but a time for America to project its might on the world stage and defeat its enemies. Europe can mock and jeer on the sidelines all it likes, but will quickly rediscover that its own security ultimately lies in supporting a United States that roars like a lion rather than bleats like a lamb.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, and a Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

[CaptApril]

Mexico, Don't Blame Us
by Ted Nugent

04/08/2009


Border security and gun control? No problem here. Got both. In fact, I have virtually perfected both culture war issues at Ground Nuge to the point of untouchable. You see, even though I am just a guitar player, these are the tip-o-the-spear culture war lies I have railed against for more than forty years. I control my borders, and I control my guns. Wild, huh?

Take, for example, the fact that the Nugent property has never been invaded, for we, like all life loving, law abiding Americans we know, have sent out a loud and clear message that even mentally deficient felon wannabes understand without pushing "1" for English: Invade my home, and I will kill you. Case closed. No invasions and no one killed. Perfect.

Reminds me of when Mayor Daley decreed to the National Guard and law enforcement "shoot to kill" all looters caught out after curfew during the 1968 Chicago riots. No one shot and no one killed and no one dared be on the streets of the Windy City, because everyone knew old Dick meant it. Well, this guy means it too. Good, effective, logical win-win policy. Maybe our government should give it a whack.

Now if I can do it, why can’t Fedzilla? I figured it out: because they don’t want to point their guns in the right direction. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano -- she who kept Arizona’s border’s open to illegal immigrants and all the mayhem they can bring -- thinks it’s all our fault. She -- and Hillary, of course -- buy into that absurd report that 90% of the guns involved in Mexican drug war killings come from America.

How can they be so dumb to fall for that? Well, they are liberals.

It matches nicely with the insane message that our unaccountable Fedzilla beast has been sending loud and clear to law breakers and America-haters for at least 30 years: Come one, come all to the good ol’ USA, invade us at will and we will reward you handsomely with all the healthcare, welfare and hand-held lessons in recidivism that an out-of-touch, anti-American government could possibly provide you with.

And the icing on the invader cake is that if any of our heroes of law enforcement, dedicated and sworn to defend our sacred U.S. Constitution and enforce our laws while, dare interfere with your invasion, we will give you a free get out of jail card while we actually imprison our own warriors if they shoot you in the butt.

Bring drugs, destroy America, bloodsuck us dry while maintaining allegiance to the corrupt hellhole of a tyranny you so desperately take your life into your own hands to escape, and you will be treated better than many Americans will be.

The producers of Planet of the Apes would reject a script like the one unfolding before our very eyes because it's too stupid to believe. Too stupid, that is, for everybody but cult of denial leftists hell-bent on collaborating with the invaders to assist in the destruction of America from within. Liberalism is cannibalism.

Liberals are immune to facts. That’s why Hillary Clinton -- when she’s not tossing ash trays at Bill -- spouts the absurd lies that estimate over 90% of Mexican drug cartel guns come from the U.S., including the weapon of choice down there, the machine gun.

Lighten up, Hill baby. And write this down: the irrefutable fact of the matter is that the actual number of machine guns from the U.S. used by Mexican or any other criminals anywhere is zero. As in none, zilch, nada, nuthin, nary a one. You can’t just buy one in any U.S. gun store, and to get one at all requires a mountain of Fedzilla paperwork that few Americans are willing to put up with.

And according to ATF, DEA, FBI and every other boot on the ground on the border wars, at the very most "a possible 17% of semi-automatic rifles and standard handguns" can be traced back to a U.S. origin.

I’ll tell you where 90% of the gangbangers firepower comes from. All that artillery is supplied by the demonically corrupt Mexican government, their own “law enforcement” gangs and from places like China, Venezuela and an unstoppable pipeline of uncontrolled gunrunners from countries where guns are virtually banned from private citizens.

Mexican residents are not allowed to keep and bear arms, so based on law, Mexico should be a gun-free zone. Guess how that worked out for them? About as well as it has in Afghanistan.

And remember, even Amnesty International will tell you that at any given time, more than 2000 Americans are incarcerated in Mexican prisons and jails without any formal charges brought. Including simple American tourists who committed the horrible "alleged" crime of being in possession of a spent .22 shell. No guns, no loaded ammo, just a tiny piece of used brass "allegedly" found in their vehicle. And these innocent Americans will sit in those cages until the out of control Mexican Federalis extort every dime from their families.

But like all other gun-free zones, this is the guaranteed recipe for the most innocent lives being gunned down. Forced unarmed helplessness is such a peace and love kind of thing.

It is sad and pathetic that there are still so many Americans complicit in the life destroying death orgy of drug running by maintaining a huge criminal consumer base to keep the drug terrorists in business. But like the terrorists' allies in gun running, they represent an evil lunatic fringe that must never dictate policy forcing good Americans into unarmed helplessness.

Unarmed, helpless Americans are exactly what criminals and liberals dream of, and as the invasion of America throttles on, we the people must be dedicated to stopping any attempt of the Obama administration to make it easier for invaders to breech our borders, or the disarmament of U.S. citizens with more counterproductive gun control. Don't tread on me, and I won't Ted on you. Send the ultimate message of freedom: join the NRA today.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rock legend Ted Nugent is noted for his conservative political views and his vocal pro-hunting and Second Amendment activism. His smash bestseller Ted, White & Blue: The Nugent Manifesto, is now available at www.amazon.com. Nugent also maintains the Official Ted Nugent Site at www.TedNugent.com.

[MicahBee]

Apr 5, 2009 18:00:13 GMT -5 Wahrheit said:

Apr 5, 2009 17:18:49 GMT -5 Mel said:

April, why did you call this thread, "Not Even Close to a Topic?" Just curious. Thanks.

I'm gonna guess he's referencing the recently departed *A*OT (Almost Off-Topic) board.

Then shouldn't it be called "Not Even Close To Being On Topic"?

[MicahBee]

Apr 10, 2009 0:00:38 GMT -5 CaptApril said:

The occasion may mark the first time a U.S. president has bowed to a foreign potentate.

By the way, if you want to see how your eyes lie, take a look at the video of Obama "not" bowing to the Saudi king:

Sure looks like he was bending down to be at eye level with the Saudi dude. Obama's six-foot whatever. The Saudi's barely five feet tall.

Oh by the way: Dubya held hands with and kissed the Saudi King when he was in town. But of course, that's somehow different, right?

[CaptApril]

Insider Report from Newsmax.com

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):

1. Obama Appoints Pope-Basher to Religious Panel
2. Obama 'Bitterly Disappointed' in Biden
3. U.S. Expecting Clash With Netanyahu
4. Obama Taking U.S. to 'Very Different Place'
5. Cheney Keeping Records From Bush Library
6. Conservative Rips GM's 'Puma' Scooter
7. Russian Auto Bailout — No Strings Attached
8. We Heard: Tony Blair, David Patterson

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1. Obama Appoints Pope-Basher to Religious Panel

President Barack Obama has appointed a gay-rights activist and a critic of Pope Benedict XVI to the federal government’s faith-based initiative board.

Harry Knox has been appointed to Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Knox is director of the religion and faith program at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a homosexual activist organization.

He has referred to the Pope as a “discredited leader” and attacked the Catholic Knights of Columbus because of the group’s support of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that passed last November and defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.

“The Knights of Columbus do a great deal of good in the name of Jesus Christ, but in this particular case they were foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression,” Knox told the San Francisco-based Bay Area Reporter on March 19.

The newspaper reported, “Knox noted that the Knights of Columbus ‘followed discredited leaders,’ including bishops and Pope Benedict, ‘a Pope who literally today said condoms don’t help in the control of AIDS.’”

During his trip to Africa, Pope Benedict said that distributing condoms was not the answer to the problem of AIDS, and asserted that the best strategy was the church's efforts to promote sexual responsibility through abstinence and monogamy.

On April 6, Knox told the Cybercast News Service’s Web site CNSNews: “The Pope needs to start telling the truth about condom use. We are eager to help him do that.

"Until he is willing to do that and able, he’s doing a great deal more harm than good — not just in Africa but around the world. It is endangering people’s lives.”

Knox posted a statement on the HRC Web site on Monday saying that as a member of the 25-member Advisory Council, he “will support the president in living up to his promise that government has no place in funding bigotry against any group of people.”

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, told CNSNews that the appointment of Knox “is exactly the kind of bastardization of common sense that the Obama people are putting forth. Quite frankly, I would prefer to see the entire faith-based initiative closed down . . .

“I’d rather people simply be honest and say we don’t believe in faith-based initiatives as they were initially intended by the previous administration, and what we’re going to do is thoroughly politicize them with these gay activists.”

President George W. Bush’s faith-based efforts focused on religious non-profit organizations, while Obama “has changed the focus to target community groups, religious and secular,” CNSNews reported.

Other members of Obama’s Advisory Board include the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., whose son replaced the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as pastor of Obama’s former church, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago; the Rev. Jim Wallis, who has been called the “leader of the religious left” by The New York Times; and Rabbi David Saperstein, who denounced the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 for upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions.


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2. President ‘Bitterly Disappointed’ in Biden

Newsmax has learned from sources in Washington that President Barack Obama is “bitterly disappointed” in his vice president, Joe Biden.

The sources say Obama feels Biden was excellent in the Senate, where he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. But they whisper to the media that the president and some advisers believe Biden has been a dismal failure as vice president, often being “not on message” and unpredictable.

Biden raised concerns within the Obama camp even before the November election, when he said that if his running mate was elected president, he would almost immediately be challenged with an international crisis that would test his strength and character.

The remarks prompted newsman Dan Rather to say that the Obama campaign “can’t be happy” about the comments.

Obama also couldn’t have been happy when Biden poked fun at the president’s ego at the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner on March 23. He said Obama “can’t be here tonight, because he’s busy getting ready for Easter.” Then he added in a hushed voice: “He thinks it’s about him.”

More recently, Biden caught heat from Republican strategist Karl Rove, who called Biden a “liar” for concocting a story about President George W. Bush “out of whole cloth.”

Biden told CNN on Tuesday about what he claimed was a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office: “'Well, Joe,' he said, 'I’m a leader.' And I said, 'Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one’s following.'”

Said Rove, a close Bush adviser: “It didn’t happen . . . He’s making these things up out of whole cloth.”

Rove also called Biden a “blowhard” and “serial exaggerator.”


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3. U.S. Expecting Clash With Netanyahu

The Obama administration is preparing for a possible confrontation with new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his reluctance to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

U.S. officials have briefed senior Democratic congressmen in recent weeks about the possibility of deep differences between the U.S. and Israel over the peace process.

The briefings are intended to “foil the possibility” that Netanyahu may attempt to bypass the White House by rallying support in Congress, the Israeli paper Haaretz reported.

Administration officials have made it clear to congressmen that while President Obama is committed to the security of Israel, he considers the two-state solution central to his Middle East policy.

In his speech before the Turkish parliament last week, Obama declared, “Let me be clear: The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.”

After the speech, a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem said, “You’d have to be blind not to be able to see the writing on the wall,” ynetnews.com reported.

Obama intends to ask Netanyahu to fulfill the commitments made by previous Israeli governments, including the acceptance of a Palestinian state, the freezing of settlement activity, evacuating illegal settlements and providing economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority.

However, new Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman insists Israel is not bound by previous agreements. He said on Wednesday: "Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong. It's the other way around — it will lead to more wars."

American officials say they will listen to Netanyahu’s position when he meets with Obama in Washington next month, according to Haaretz.

But the U.S. and Israel could also be headed for a clash over Iran and its nuclear program. Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday issued a warning to the Israeli government, saying it would be "ill-advised" to carry out a military strike against Iranian nuclear sites.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4. Obama Taking U.S. to ‘Very Different Place’

For President Barack Obama, America’s ship of state is an oil tanker, not a speedboat.

At a town hall meeting with 100 Turkish university students in Istanbul, Turkey, on Tuesday, Obama promised a “new chapter of American engagement” with the world, but cautioned that turning American policy in a new direction would take time.

“States are like big tankers. They’re not like speedboats,” he said in response to a question about the differences between himself and his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“You can’t just whip them around and go in another direction. You turn them slowly, and eventually you end up in a very different place.”

The remarks confirm that Obama envisions serious changes ahead as the U.S. heads for that “very different place.”

Obama also used a maritime analogy when discussing the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

“Moving the ship of state takes time,” he said, adding that the withdrawal has to be done “in a careful enough way that we don’t see a collapse into violence.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5. Cheney Keeping Records From Bush Library

Officials with the Bush Foundation expected that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s papers and artifacts from office would be stored at the Bush Library in Texas, but Cheney wants to keep them in Washington, D.C., for the time being.

An architect working on the library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas said in October that Cheney’s records would be located at the library, and space has been allotted for his papers there.

But Cheney later asked the National Archives to store his records in Washington, and a Cheney spokesperson said he anticipated needing access to his papers while working on his memoirs, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Vice presidents can choose where to keep their official and personal records, which are given to the National Archives and Records Administration when they leave office.

George H.W. Bush’s Vice President Dan Quayle sent his records to Bush's library in College Station, Texas, while the records of Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s veep, remain at the National Archives in Washington.

The Cheney spokesperson said no decision has been made about the ultimate destination of Cheney’s records.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6. Conservative Rips GM’s ‘Puma’ Scooter

Peter Flaherty, president of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center, is sharply critical of an experimental vehicle being developed by cash-strapped General Motors.

The vehicle, called the Puma, is an odd-looking two-wheel, two-seat scooter that runs on batteries and can reach a top speed of 35 miles per hour.

Flaherty appeared on CNBC on Tuesday after a prototype of the Puma was unveiled and declared: “I question what GM is doing. They have days and weeks to figure out how the company is going to survive. They don’t have years. What in the world are they doing working on this experimental project?

“Perhaps it has something to do with the availability of federal funding . . . meant to encourage electric cars. That’s what you get when you introduce government money — you get unintended consequences, and in this case, very weird results.”

Flaherty continued his attack on GM, which was granted a $17.4 billion loan by the federal government in December and is seeking additional funding to avoid bankruptcy.

“How long is the taxpayer going to have to fund this process?” said Flaherty, whose organization monitors abuse and corruption in the public and private sectors.

“I want them to build cars that they can sell at a profit to consumers who want them. In a capitalist system, in order for companies to survive at some point they have to turn a profit. When is GM going to turn a profit?

“What I’m worried about is that the 'anticar' activists, who are really behind things like this Puma, want us all riding bicycles. They want us riding bicycles to light rail so that we have socialized transportation.

“And what’s with this name, 'Puma'? I thought the puma was an endangered species. Is it because GM is an endangered company?”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

7. Russian Auto Bailout — No Strings Attached

Russia is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up its troubled auto industry — without any of the strings the U.S. government attached to its bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.

The Russian government has promised $730 million in interest-free loans and $230 million in loans from state banks at favorable rates to benefit the auto manufacturer Avtovaz, which makes its Lada car at a sprawling factory in Tolyatti, 460 miles southeast of Moscow.

State banks have promised to help Avtovaz raise an additional
$2.6 billion from banks.

But the factory is “one of the least efficient automobile factories anywhere in the world,” according to The New York Times, producing an average of just eight vehicles a year per worker compared to 36 per worker at a GM plant in Kentucky.

And new car sales in Russia are projected to fall by as much as 50 percent this year.

Yet the government has not pressured the company to fire its executives, renegotiate workers’ contracts, or produce better or more fuel-efficient vehicles, and there have been no layoffs.

“But the auto bailout, Russian style, is intended more to ensure peace in the streets than to restructure a business, much to the lament of some critics who think tough love might be better,” according to the Times.

There has been growing unrest in Russia over the country’s economic downturn and layoffs. Riot police had to be called out in December to disperse an angry crowd when a GM joint venture at Tolyatti laid off 400 workers.

More than 100,000 assembly line workers are employed at the huge Tolyatti factory, which has over 90 miles of production lines, and the plant’s management claims that the factory and its suppliers support 2 million jobs.

So, to keep the peace, the Russian government, one union official told The Times, “will print enough money to pay these people.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

8. We Heard . . .

THAT former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is commanding larger speaking fees than former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Blair earned more than $570,000 for two half-hour speeches during a recent visit to the Philippines, and has made over $21 million since leaving office nearly two years ago, according to The Times of London.

Clinton was earning about $150,000 per speech but cut back on his speaking engagements after his wife Hillary became secretary of state, and Bush has reportedly commanded $150,000 per speech since leaving the White House.

THAT New York Gov. David Patterson’s chances of winning re-election in 2010 are bleaker than ever.

Democrat Patterson’s approval rating stands at all-time low of just 28 percent, while 60 percent of voters — the highest percentage for any New York governor — disapprove of his performance, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

Only 22 percent of respondents believe that Patterson, who became governor in March 2008 after Eliot Spitzer resigned in the midst of a call-girl scandal, deserves to be elected to a four-year term in 2010; 63 percent — including 52 percent of Democrats — say he does not deserve to be elected.

Patterson has raised the ire of voters by sharply increasing taxes.

The poll also disclosed that New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo would thrash Patterson in a Democratic primary — 61 percent to 18 percent.

[CaptApril]

"Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1784

[MicahBee]

Okay, then. If this is April's news articles 24/7 without bothering to respond to comments made, I won't bother posting here.

[CaptApril]

Monday Brief
Vol. 09 No. 15
13 April 2009

THE FOUNDATION
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." --John Marshall

INSIGHT
"The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful." --President Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933)

THE GIPPER
"[April 15] is the last day for filing income tax returns -- a day that reminds us that taxpayers pay too much of their earnings to the Federal Government. ... While April 15 serves as a reminder, the people of the United States truly do not need to be reminded. They are victims of inflation, which pushes them into higher tax brackets. They are robbed daily of a better standard of living. They are discouraged from work and investment. ... The choice before us is clear. I strongly feel that the great majority of Americans believe that nothing would better encourage economic growth than leaving more money in the hands of the people who earn it. It's time to stop stripping bare the productive citizens of America and funneling their hard-earned income into the Federal bureaucracy." --Ronald Reagan

GOVERNMENT
"What's called the public debt stands at $11 trillion and growing. That pales in comparison to the federal government's unfunded liability -- obligations that are not covered by an asset of equal or greater value. Mike Whalen, former policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, commenting on last year's Social Security Trustees annual report on the state of the Social Security and Medicare programs, said, 'The report on the state of entitlement programs is rather grim -- the combined unfunded liabilities of both programs are $101 trillion.' What that means is that in order for government to make good on its promises, Congress would have to put aside tens of trillions of dollars in the bank today. Keep in mind that our GDP is only $14 trillion. In the absence of massive tax increases or cuts in benefits, in order to meet its promises Congress must cease spending on one in four programs by 2020, such as education and highway construction, and one in two by 2030, and by 2050 or so all federal revenue will be spent supporting Social Security, Medicare and prescription drug benefits. Such a scenario is unsustainable. There will be economic and political chaos. Today's politicians are not likely to take measures to avoid the coming chaos because senior citizens, the major beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare, vote in large numbers and will exact a high political price. Plus, neither today's senior citizens nor today's politicians will be alive in 2050. I'd be more optimistic if my fellow Americans were simply suffering from congressional deception as opposed to their not caring about the economic calamity that awaits tomorrow's Americans." --George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

FOR THE RECORD
"Didn't the President, with a straight face, promise to reduce the deficit by half in five years? The Congressional Budget Office forecasts government spending over the next 10 years will quadruple the annual deficit of Bush's presidency. The CBO expects the nation's debt to double in five years and triple in 10. But according to The Heritage Foundation, Obama's claim of '$2 trillion in savings over the next decade' is 'simply not true. His budget increases spending by $1 trillion over the next decade, which he attempts to offset by reclassifying as "savings" $1.4 trillion in tax increases and $1.5 trillion in reduced spending in Iraq.' First he describes tax increases as 'savings.' Then he falsely projects spending on the war in Iraq to remain high. By manipulating 'future spending,' Obama can then 'reduce it' and pronounce it 'savings.'" --columnist Larry Elder

FAITH AND FAMILY
"Economic conservatives have aggressively opposed President Obama's agenda to radically expand government, financed by deficits that run into the trillions. If social conservatives want to protect America's families and social values, they must join with fiscal conservatives to oppose President Obama and reverse America's culture of debt. America was built on individual opportunity. This is the core of the economic conservative agenda. The family unit is the core building block of American society. This is the heart of the social conservative agenda. There is a key overlap here that many conservatives -- and even their leaders -- overlook. Living within your means and managing your finances to avoid long-term debt is part of building strong families, providing for your children and teaching them to provide for themselves. ... Both economic and social conservatives need to grasp the common ground here. Strong families are essential to strong economies, and financial management is a key family value." --columnist Ken Blackwell

CULTURE
"omething very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power. The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. ... For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. ... It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play." --columnist Camille Paglia

OPINION IN BRIEF
"In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Obama took note of North Korea's missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed: 'Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.' A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What 'strong international response' did Obama muster to North Korea's brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 -- 'binding,' as it were -- U.N. resolution prohibiting such a launch? The obligatory emergency Security Council session produced nothing. No sanctions. No resolution. Not even a statement. China and Russia professed to find no violation whatsoever. They would not even permit a U.N. statement that dared express 'concern,' let alone condemnation. Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the U.N. -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the 'realism' Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy." --columnist Charles Krauthammer

LIBERTY
"'Words must mean something,' President Obama said in Prague last week in response to North Korea's missile launch. He was speaking about the numerous resolutions and condemnations of North Korea's actions over the years by the United Nations and others. It is a standard the president should apply not only to North Korea, but also to the Middle East and the Muslim world. In a speech to Turkey's Parliament, the president said, 'The United States is not, and never will be at war with Islam.' It was a noble sentiment. Such a unilateral declaration may sooth many in the West, but there is a central question that comes from Mr. Obama's declaration of conscientious objection: What if Islamic extremism is at war with America, Europe and Israel and everyone who stands in the way of its attempt at supremacy in religion and politics?" --columnist Cal Thomas

RE: THE LEFT
"President Obama has said that the science of global warming is 'beyond dispute,' and therefore settled. This is the justification for the imposition of a carbon cap-and-trade system that will cost $2 trillion. But Obama does not understand science. 'Settled science' is an oxymoron, and anyone who characterizes science as 'settled' or 'indisputable' is ignorant not only of science, but also history and philosophy. Aristotle, who lived and wrote in the fourth century B.C., was one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever known. He invented the discipline of logic, and founded the sciences of ecology and biology. Aristotle's physics were accepted as correct for nearly two thousand years. ... Aristotle taught that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Over the centuries, a few unreasonable persons expressed skeptical concerns. But the consensus was that the physics of motion were described by Aristotle's dicta. The science was settled. Around the year 1591, an irascible young instructor at the University of Pisa demonstrated that Aristotle was wrong. He climbed to the top of the tower of Pisa and dropped cannonballs of unequal weight that hit the ground simultaneously. Aristotelean professors on the faculty were embarrassed. The university administration responded by not renewing Galileo's contract, thus ridding themselves of a troublemaker who challenged the accepted consensus. ... President Obama, a lawyer and politician, would now have us believe that the process of history has stopped. For the first time, scientific knowledge is not provisional and subject to revision, but final and settled. Skepticism, which has been the spur to all innovation and human progress, is unacceptable and must be condemned. But in fact, it is our awareness of what we do not know that determines our scientific level. ... Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit." --University of Oklahoma geologist David Deming

POLITICAL FUTURES
"[T]here's a small but determined movement to abolish the link between citizenship and voting that would surely leverage victory into a national initiative. Unlike the Maine politicians, most advocates of granting the vote to foreigners make no pretense that it's anything but a naked left-wing power grab. 'Imagine the progressive possibilities in jurisdictions of high numbers of immigrants such as New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago,' says Ron Hayduk, a leftist political scientist at the City University of New York and a founder of the Immigrant Voting Project. Whatever you think of Hayduk's goals, his grasp of numbers is good. In nearly 900 U.S. cities, 10 percent or more of the voting-age population is composed of non-U.S.-citizens. In nearly 200, it's greater than 25 percent -- and in 21 cities, it's more than 50 percent. Don't imagine for a minute that the immigrant-voting movement will stop with seats on school boards and zoning commissions. ... Even if you like the lefty political agenda that these men pursue, their tactics bear some careful consideration. In effect, they seek to abolish the concept of American citizenship -- the U.S. government would be turned into a matter of geographical whimsy, under the control of whoever happened to be physically present at a given moment. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, play an important role in the U.S. economy. But if they're interested in voting, they need to learn the language, the history and the political culture -- that is, they need to become citizens." --columnist Glenn Garvin

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
(To submit reader comments visit our Letters to the Editor page.)

"I have been reading The Patriot for about three weeks now. I used to be a Democrat up until the terrorists attacked the Twin Towers. God was more or less an afterthought when times were good. This Easter, however, I have a conservative outlook that includes Jesus Christ in my daily life. Even though I look around in amazement at the moral decay of my beloved nation, I am comforted by my Creator. I am assured that God is in control of all things. Our government used to use God's word for a point of reference, but now they have targeted Him as an enemy to their desires for more power over the people. Thank you for your efforts to fight this." --Carroll, Ohio

"I am a rare breed, a Pagan who is also politically libertarian/conservative. However, I recognize that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to practice my faith. I found your Easter Special Edition moving. I respect your faith in Christianity, and I offer you Bright Blessings on your Holy Week." --Fairfax, Virginia

THE LAST WORD
"Liberals tolerate rallies on behalf of cop-killers, but they prohibit law-abiding citizens working at community centers in Binghamton, N.Y., from being armed to defend themselves from disturbed, crack-addicted America-haters like Jiverly Wong. It's something in liberals' DNA: They think they can pass a law eliminating guns and nuclear weapons, but teenagers having sex is completely beyond our control. The demand for more gun control in response to any crime involving a gun is exactly like Obama's response to North Korea's openly belligerent act of launching a long-range missile [last] week: Obama leapt to action by calling for worldwide nuclear disarmament. If the SAT test were used to determine how stupid a liberal is, one question would be: 'The best defense against lawless rogues who possess _______ is for law-abiding individuals to surrender their own ________.' Correct answer: Guns. We would also have accepted nuclear weapons. ... If a single civilian in that Binghamton community center had been armed, instead of 14 dead, there might have only been one or two -- including the shooter. In the end, the cops didn't stop Wong. His killing spree ended only when he decided to stop, and he killed himself. 'The shooter will eventually run out of ammo' strategy may not be the best one for stopping deranged multiple murderers. But it's highly unlikely that any community center in the entire state would be safe from a disturbed former crack-addict like Wong because New York's restrictive gun laws require a citizen to prove he has a need for a gun to obtain a concealed carry permit. Instead of having Planned Parenthood distribute condoms in schools, they ought get the NRA to pass out revolvers. It would save more lives." --columnist Ann Coulter


*****

Veritas vos Liberabit -- Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot's editors and staff.

(Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world, and for their families -- especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)

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[CaptApril]

Apr 13, 2009 13:25:57 GMT -5 MicahBee said:

Apr 10, 2009 0:00:38 GMT -5 CaptApril said:

The occasion may mark the first time a U.S. president has bowed to a foreign potentate.

By the way, if you want to see how your eyes lie, take a look at the video of Obama "not" bowing to the Saudi king:

Sure looks like he was bending down to be at eye level with the Saudi dude. Obama's six-foot whatever. The Saudi's barely five feet tall.

Oh by the way: Dubya held hands with and kissed the Saudi King when he was in town. But of course, that's somehow different, right?

Different in that Bush didn't show subservience to the Saudi king. Not to say it wasn't disturbing on a certain level, and certainly unseemly for an American president to be engaging in such behavior with anyone but his spouse, but if holding the little shit's hand means heading off another oil embargo, then ya suck it up, look straight ahead, and think of England.

Bush's treatment of the Saudi king was borderline (and also exhibited by every previous president who had to deal with the Saudis), but Obama's finally crossed that line. Heads of state do not bow to each other! Ever!