The utter hypocrisy in our media and on the left is on display with the above graph.
The United States has now lost more military men and women in Afghanistan under President Obama than during 8 years of the Bush Administration.
We couldn’t go a day without frontpage headlines emblazoned across every paper and on every nightly newscast about the death toll in Iraq. Each new report vilifying Bush.
There have been some comments lately, concerning the returning vets and how to welcome them. Old Skook has been trying to make this into an art form for several years; give me a few minutes and I’ll share my techniques and I will tell you of the day a few years ago, when I was called upon to be a better man than I am.
This activity requires stealth and nerves of steel. When you are in a fine dining establishment like Denny’s or Elmers, use your scouting skills and spot the ME vets sitting together or singly. Keep them under observation and time your meal so that you finish ahead of them, then estimate the cost of their meal and walk by their table and say, “this one’s on me soldier” and drop a ten or a twenty on their table and walk away before they can protest. That’s a great devious trick for Patriots, it always makes me chuckle when I start my car to leave.
Once I saw the chance to be a real hero and I played it to the max. Every few years, I’ll walk around the streets of Oceanside and recall those nights forty years ago when I walked those same streets with nothing to do. Except on this particular night, I saw a young Lance corporal in Dress Blues with a bride still in her wedding gown, looking to be about seven months along. They were aimlessly looking in store windows and I saw my chance for yet another dastardly deed. Read the rest of this entry »
Love him or hate him, Glenn Beck is a force to be reckoned with, and a major game changer in American Politics. Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Harvard Commencement Speech), has any significant secular person had the guts to stand in front of America and preach what Beck preached: “American must return to God.”
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.“
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24.
Heck, even radio talk show host and constitutional scholar Mark Levin, who by any stretch isn’t a Beck fan, admitted to a caller that “It was a good rally.” I was both shocked and appreciative to hear the acknowledgment by Levin, as it gives a needed reassurance that despite the personality differences between conservative opinion leaders, all who “fight the good fight” must and need to be united in this turning point of American History.
I don’t agree with everything Beck does and teaches, but I’m convinced he’s got the “God and Country” right. I also happen to think he is an extraordinary human being, and sometimes wonder if he isn’t the “one sent to humble the fools.” After all, it was only a few years ago that Beck was a dirt poor dead beat drunk unable to make rent; an uncanny metaphor to the current state of our union. It’s hard to deny that Beck grabbed many Americans at their “grass roots”, reaching demographic groups that until now were simply unreachable. Read the rest of this entry »
“Conservative commentator Glenn Beck and tea party champion Sarah Palin appealed Saturday to a vast, predominantly white crowd on the National Mall to help restore traditional American values and honor Martin Luther King’s message.” — Associated Press
“Attendees at the rally Saturday largely honored organizer requests that they not bring banners or political signs. Instead, the Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Biden on the economy: “We’re turning this great ship of state around that was wandering out to sea and it’s headed back to port. While progress isn’t fast enough, there isn’t any doubt it’s moving in the right direction.”
Joe Biden: “Entire new American industries are being born — the very industries that are going to allow us to lead the world in the 21st century.”
And from the office of the Vice President: “As a result of the Administration’s unprecedented commitment to energy efficiency, more than 200,000 low-income families have been able to save money on their energy bills while saving energy, and thousands of people have been put to work.”
From Black America . Com: “[Glenn] Beck has done more harm than good in the arena of racial politics”
Rachel Maddox: “I have been talking for awhile about the Fox strategy of scaring white people in order to score political points and benefit conservative politicians, and one of the hallmarks is that their most potent `scare-white-people’ stories are not real news stories. They’re stories that they invent out of thin air. That’s true about ACORN. That’s true about the Shirley Sherrod case. That’s true about the fake New Black Panther Party thing. That’s true about Van Jones.” Read the rest of this entry »
Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.
We’ll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there’s one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb. 19, 1945: U.S. Fourth Division Marines move in from the beach on Iwo Jima, the Japanese Volcanic Island. A dead Marine lies at right in the foreground. Mt. Suribachi, in the background, was turned into a beehive of guns by Japanese troops. It was scaled by the U.S. Marines, who took control. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal)
On Sunday a Mormon bishop was shot and killed in California:
(CNN) — A Mormon bishop was shot and killed in Visalia, California, on Sunday, police said.
The suspected gunman was killed later in the day in a gunfight with police, Visalia California Police Chief Colleen Mestas told CNN.
Bishop Clay Sannar, 42, was shot dead in an office at Visalia’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mestas said.
This got no attention in the left wing blogs. Is it less of a crime to kill someone in cold blood if you don’t hate them? Even if the killer hated Sannar, Sannar was out of luck with regard to hate crimes because he wasn’t among the protected.
Shame and public humiliation used to be very effective forms of social conditioning. In Middle Age Europe an offender would often be placed in a pillory or stock and be subject to public humiliation and ridicule for their offense. The idea was that after being subjected to such humiliation the offender would mend their ways in order to avoid a repeat performance. Such discipline was not always effective, but the recidivism rate was probably far below what is seen in the American judicial system today.
In America circa 2010 one could make the argument that the very notions of shame and public humiliation have almost vanished in both public and private spheres. Paris Hilton, Eliot Spitzer, Barry Bonds, Charlie Crist, the Salahis, the popularity of Reality TV etc. In an America where almost anything seems to go, where nothing is reproachable, where everyone’s position is equally valid regardless of its substance, it’s no surprise that we have a President and administration who have the audacity to make ludicrous arguments to demonstrate the success of their policies and then expect us to accept them – and that’s before the sycophants in the media begin to spin them.
President Obama set the tone early on. In the administration that promised an unprecedented level of transparency, they were going to be crystal clear in demonstrating the efficacy of their policies in the place where it mattered most: Jobs. While previous administrations traditionally utilized the traditional Payroll or Household Surveys to measure the effect of their policies, this administration was turning a new page in government accountability, jobs that were “Saved or Created”. Rather than tethering themselves to what was actually going on in the economy, President Obama created a fantasy measurement with no correlation to anything but their imagination, something that could be neither be proved nor disproved. Saved or Created is such a vacuous measure that it would actually be possible for the administration to claim they had saved virtually every job in America. One could imagine President Obama giving the following statement to start off the Summer of Recovery: Read the rest of this entry »
Great article by Victor Davis Hanson on the Ground Zero Mosque today focusing on Mayor Bloomberg’s scolding of those who oppose the mosque, and the vast gulf between the elite and us regular folk:
We’ve had nearly a month now of fruitless acrimony over the Ground Zero mosque.
About everything that can be said has been said. Little-read Newsweek and Time have published a near dozen “I accuse” essays about America’s supposedly yokel intolerance — as if we did not get their message at about screed two.
The past inflammatory statements and hypocrisies of the Janus Mr. Rauf have been widely aired, and juxtaposed with his occasional Aspen-like ecumenical “I feel your pain” outreach. We have learned that to emphasize the former is considered bigoted calumny, but to cite the latter is called context.
In varying degrees, all four possible motivations of Mr. Rauf have also been widely dissected. For a brief moment let’s review them.
1) Rauf is a sincere ecumenicalist, who simply wants to turn the “tragedy” of 9/11 into a teachable moment of interfaith bridge-building: the mosque, in other words, will be a beacon of America’s tolerance; Read the rest of this entry »
Over the weekend our troops in Afghanistan beat back two complex attacks on two of our forward bases by members of The Haqqani Network. A network of fighters that have links with both al-Qaeda and the Taliban as well as the Pakistan ISI agency. They have a foothold in North Waziristan and make that area their headquarters.
The Haqqani Network has been implicated in some of the biggest terror attacks in the Afghan capital city of Kabul, including the January 2008 suicide assault on the Serena hotel, the February 2009 assault on Afghan ministries, and the July 2008 and October 2009 suicide attacks against the Indian embassy.
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The Haqqani Network is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son, Sirajuddin. Jalaluddin is thought to be ill and is considered the patriarch of the network. Siraj runs the daily operations and is the group’s military commander.
Siraj is one of the most wanted Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in the Afghan-Pakistan region. The US military has described Siraj as the primary threat to security in eastern Afghanistan. He is the mastermind of the most deadly attacks inside Afghanistan, including suicide assaults in Kabul, and he is the senior military commander in eastern Afghanistan. He is the leader of the Taliban’s Miramshah Regional Military Shura, one of the Afghan Taliban’s four regional commands.
Siraj is considered dangerous not only for his ties with the Afghan Taliban, but also because of his connections with al Qaeda’s central leadership, which extend all the way to Osama bin Laden. Siraj is a member of al Qaeda’s Shura Majlis, or top council, US intelligence sources told The Long War Journal. In a tape released in April 2010, Siraj admitted that cooperation between the Taliban and al Qaeda “is at the highest limits.” On March 25, 2009, the US Department of State put out a $5 million bounty for information leading to the capture of Siraj. Read the rest of this entry »
Mexico has seen unprecedented gang violence since President Felipe Calderon stepped up the fight against drug trafficking when he took office in December 2006, deploying thousands of troops and federal police to cartel strongholds.
In 2008, a war began between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. Since then, more than 28,000 people have been killed in violence tied to Mexico’s drug war.
In our backyard
Dona Ana County with about 53 miles of international boundary is one of three New Mexican counties that borders Mexico.
While Obama takes a “what me worry?” attitude towards this issue, he persecutes those who would uphold the law. Obama has joined a foreign nation in suing Arizona.
Obama calls out Arizona in a report to the UN Human Rights Commission.
Joe Arpaio, a stalwart defender of the border of the United States, finds himself under federal investigation.
But under President Obama, the numbers of arrests and deportations of illegals taken into custody at work sites plummeted by more than 80 percent from the last year of the Bush administration. In the current fiscal year 2010, which ends Sept. 30, ICE has arrested 900 workers.
