15 June 2007

Laura Ingraham blasts Tony Snow

Listen to Laura Ingraham dismantle Tony Snow yesterday.


Huckabee looks to break from second-tier pack


Mike Huckabee has been stellar in the debates, he's one of those guys that the more people see of him the better he is going to do. I am a Duncan Hunter man right now, but Huckabee is right there.

Best Quote:

"One of the things that is frustrating is there's more attention on Britney Spears getting out of a car without underwear than who's going to be the next president," Huckabee told reporters.

Check out the youtube video of his awesome response to the media ingrate asking him about his stance on evolution. It's a Grand Slam response..

US military prepared for 'worst' with China


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070614/wl_asia_afp/uschinamilitary

Their game since 9-11 is to conduct massive build-ups and grow more aggressive & brazen knowing our attention is focused elsewhere.

Don’t forget the E-3 incident in April 2001?

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44955

14 June 2007

Computer animation of WTC attack

Courtesy of Purdue


http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070612HoffmannWTC.html

Rockford

Bookmark the counterterrorismblog.org  - great resource

They have a link to a .pdf about the attempted terrorist attack in Rockford, IL.  (remember that one?)  You won't if the media has it's way.  They've done a great job of 9-11 so far-is there even footage of 9-11 still in existence? , so how would anyone remember Rockford, Seattle, Ft Dix, San Francisco, LAX, JFK, Sears Tower, Salt Lake City, Chapel Hill, NC………...


http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/06/nefa_series_target_america_the.php



Military officers now targets on Hill (aka Liberals hate the military)

Unfortunately this is what happens when:
1. The administration cedes leadership and self neuters themselves - I would think Gen Pace deserves a more rigorous defense than AG Gonzalez is receiving

2. Political correctness is applied to national security
3. Liberals show themselves for their true feelings of uniform personnel
4. Democrats are elected


http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070614/D8POHGRO0.html

Military Officers Now Targets on Hill

Key passages:


  • On Friday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made the stunning announcement that he would not recommend Pace to serve a second two-year term as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Marine Corps four-star general had not been a target previously of Democrats' ire on the war, but Gates said lawmakers made it clear the confirmation process would be ugly.

  • Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Pace lost standing among members in March when he said homosexual acts were immoral and that the military should not condone the behavior by allowing gays to serve openly. He later apologized, including in a personal letter to Tauscher, for expressing what he said were his personnel views.

  • Tauscher said his comments on gays "showed his ignorance" and "had to be deeply discounted because they came from a man who had presided over a war that we got into on a lie and what I consider to be a serious dereliction of duty in having our troops and our readiness so destroyed by the policies of this administration."



Freedom, not climate, is at risk By Vaclav Klaus

{ The President of Czech Republic has been the only world leader other than John Howard of Australia that has shown any backbone about this snake-oil hysteria of man-made global warming.  It's rare, but it's enjoyable to read something from a leader with courage and simple common sense}


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19ca-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html

Freedom, not climate, is at risk
By Vaclav Klaus

Published: June 13 2007 17:44 | Last updated: June 13 2007 17:44

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s more or less Tony Blair’s Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people including top-class scientists see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).

Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:
Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority

Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction

Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.


The writer is President of the Czech Republic

29 May 2007

Rosie's "greatest hits"


http://www.mrc.org/Profiles/odonnell/welcome.asp


This is "greatest hits" rundown of Rosie's most delusional.  Great exchange in 1999 with Tom Selleck at the bottom



25 May 2007

ISU: Christians need not apply

Shockingly the most hostile campus to Christians in Iowa recently is not Iowa City but Ames ?!?!?

C'mon ISU, I count on you to balance out the hippies in Iowa City and Grinnell. First Dr. Gonzalez is targeted by a "petition" for daring to be a Christian. As we all know from the Duke Lacrosse story "petitions" are always beyond reproach. I have to say that only in academia would signing a "petition" be viewed as an acceptable reaction, what a bunch of wusses.

Considering this is a school that had not too long ago "In the year of our Lord" inprinted on it's diplomas, It's fair to say the hippies have won another one and have once again proven they have no intention of being educators but indoctrinators.

Of course this could all go away with a University President with a spine, but I might as well be asking for a Leprechaun to appear. Also don't forget ISU's Softball team refusing to stand at a Baylor game during the pre-game prayer. Gotta love that tolerance.

By the way, why doesn't the Register mention that religious studies professor Hector Avalos is an atheist and faculty adviser (aka Chaplain??) to the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.

Blood of Iraqi Martyrs


Blood of Iraqi Martyrs 
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2007

There is another tragedy taking in place in Iraq on a daily basis, far from the front pages and the TV news. It does not involve the kidnapping of U.S. troops, nor even the fire-bombing of Muslim shrines by other Muslims, both of which by now are familiar to most Americans.

This is a tragedy taking place in a total media vacuum. Even our government has remained silent as it continues.

Perhaps it’s because the victims are Christians. Indeed, members of the most ancient Christian communities in the world.

Over the past three years, Iraqi Muslim extremists have targeted Christians in systematic attacks, aimed at driving them from their homes, their work places, and their churches.

Just last week, a group of armed Muslims set fire to St. George’s Assyrian Church in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, completely decimating what remained of a church already hit by a deadly fire-bombing in October 2004.

The Christians of Iraq include Chaldeans, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrians. All trace their roots to the early church and use a liturgy still written and sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Read it all here:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28448



22 January 2007

If We Fail.Been there, done that.



If We Fail…Been there, done that.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Read it all:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODk0NDc4ODYyOGM1YzA0MTc3YjgwMjY5Mjg4OGY5MmE=

 

18 January 2007

3,000 Christians added daily in China

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53808

3,000 Christians added daily in China
Faithful undefeated by beatings, arrests, confiscations and destruction of churches

osted: January 18, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Worship services are being broken up by baton-wielding police officers, participants arrested, Bibles confiscated and Christian church buildings demolished. But still, an estimated 3,000 people every day come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ in China.

The report comes from Voice of the Martyrs, a U.S.-based Christian group that works specifically to help those members of the persecuted Christian church worldwide.

The most recent arrests happened just a few days ago, when a house church meeting in Henan province was broken up and 11 people arrested, the organization said.

(Story continues below)


"Police from Yongfeng township police station in Xiuwu county, Henan province, raided a Christian meeting in a home in Chencun village. Eleven Christians were arrested, two were released the next day and nine remain in jail," the report said.

"Police broke in and proclaimed the gathering a cultic and illegal activity," the report said.

Legal and financial help is being provided to those people during their detention.

However, VOM said that a more than 50-year campaign to eradicate Christianity from China has left that nation with the equivalent of a new mega-church being added each day.

"Chairman Mao Zedong declared the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 and quickly sought to purge society of anything religious, causing China's people to endure great hardship ever since," a VOM analysis of the nation said. "Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late '50s and the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s left millions of his countrymen dead or victimized.

"Today, with its policies of forced abortion and sterilization, China's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Authorities reportedly sell the organs of executed prisoners to meet the demand for transplants. It system of 're-education through labor' detains hundreds of thousands each year in work camps without even a court hearing. China's 'strike-hard' policy, presented as a crackdown on criminals, is hardest on Christians, putting more believers in prison or under detention than in any other country. The confiscation of church property and Bibles continues even Bibles officially printed by the government," the report said.

"Yet the church grows: an estimated 3,000 Chinese come to Christ each day. China's house church movement, which comprises approximately 90 percent of China's Christians, endures unimaginable persecution, yet stands on its commitment to preach the gospel no matter the cost."

Two of the people in the latest raid by police were released a day later, but nine remained in jail, according to VOM and China Aid Association, which also reported on the arrests.

Among those still being held in detention for worshiping in the home were Ju Xiang, 48; Liu Xiaoduo, 42; Wang Shegin, 40; Fu Juyi, 36; Hong Xia, 37; Xue Xianghuo, 49; and Xue Xiaona, 34, officials said.

VOM said the persecution is having little effect on the desire to know more about Christ. "In the past year, we received more requests for Bibles and Christian books from Chinese believers because they wanted to share the gospel with others," a VOM source within the restrictive nation said. "The Communist government of China does not see Christ as the most important person in an individual's life. Christians count it a privilege to believe in and suffer for Jesus Christ."

The contact said Christians simply adjust to the persecution at hand including arrests, demolished buildings and confiscated materials.

VOM currently is supplying Bibles and copies of other Christian books, including "Tortured for Christ" by VOM founder Richard Wurmbrand, to Christians in China.

"American Christians have also mailed more than 107,310 New Testaments to China through Bibles Unbound (www.BiblesUnbound.com)," VOM said. "Pray God will protect believers in China and give them strength and courage to continue their faith in him."

VOM is a non-profit, interdenominational ministry working worldwide to help Christians who are persecuted for their faith, and to educate the world about that persecution. Its headquarters are in Bartlesville, Okla., and it has 30 affiliated international offices.

It was launched by the late Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, who started smuggling Russian Gospels into Russia in 1947, just months before Richard was abducted and imprisoned in Romania where he was tortured for his refusal to recant Christianity.

He eventually was released in 1964 and the next year he testified about the persecution of Christians before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee, stripping to the waist to show the deep torture wound scars on his body.

The group that later was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs was organized in 1967, when his book, "Tortured for Christ," was released.



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


The secret for which Sandy risked his all

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53812

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel "Sandy" Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now-storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: Just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure? Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the committee, in fact, that Berger "indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review."

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, "designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents." Berger was Clinton's go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security adviser, not because of Berger's foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of national security adviser in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. "The full extent of Berger's document removal," reports the House committee, "is not known and never can be known."

As the report clarifies, "Archives staff would have no way to know" if any part of a given National Security Council document was removed. Further, had Berger removed papers from a Staff Member Office File these more loosely enumerated than the NSC documents "It would be almost impossible for the Archives staff to know."

Among his more flagrant acts of criminal mischief, Berger purloined some highly classified documents and stashed them "at a construction site where they could have been found by anyone." This behavior does not exactly classify as "inadvertent," the media's original characterization of Berger's motivation.

As the House report also establishes, the FBI never questioned Berger about those first two visits nor submitted him to a polygraph about any of the visits as his plea deal required. The Department of Justice's only source of information about possible theft during Berger's first two visits was the man himself, and Berger has proved almost comically unreliable.

In fact, Berger has changed his story about the documents as often as his boss did about Monica, in both cases to adapt to the emerging evidence. Berger even refused to be interviewed by the House committee, the one honest enterprise in the whole investigation.

We know too that on his first visit, according to Archives staff, "Berger was especially interested in White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's personal office files." Again, this confirms my suspicions. According to the committee, "Had Berger seen 'a smoking gun' or other documents he did not want brought to an investigatory panel's attention, he could have removed it on this visit."

The much-discussed Millennium After Action Review was hardly the gun that smoked. In fact, the DOJ saw the Millennium Review as "beneficial to the Clinton administration" in that it made them look "engaged" in the war on terrorism.

The Millennium Review made the news only because it was the first document Berger got caught swiping, then on his third visit. The benign nature of this review led the DOJ to conclude that Berger took the documents for his "personal convenience," and the media predictably played right along.

To understand what that "smoking gun" might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time, Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high-security assignments. One morning in "late-summer," Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."

As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The president's handwritten comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef's uncle.

Understandably, the 9/11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was asked on her first real question: "Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?"

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old, "5 years, 6 years old." He asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam's National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the president was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his handwritten notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before Sept. 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the "exit strategy" that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a "mechanical failure." In his book "Against All Enemies," he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied "wall" and work together on the creation of the notorious "zoom-climb" animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3,200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the "mechanical failure." The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security adviser. Berger's boss, the less "reliable" Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the "planes-as-bombs" talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger's task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with handwritten notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke and Clinton.

On Friday April 1, 2005, the Department of Justice announced its embarrassingly lenient plea deal with Berger. The timing was more than fortuitous. On March 31, Terri Schiavo had died. On April 2, Pope John Paul II would die. DOJ could not have chosen a day better calculated to give a casually indifferent media an excuse for ignoring a bombshell of a story.

"It remains unclear," asked the Washington Post about the Berger story line as it existed in April 2005, "why he destroyed three versions of a document, but left two other versions intact."

As I responded at the time, the answer to this question was too obvious to ask handwritten notes on a document make one version entirely more dangerous than an identical document without those notes.

The Wall Street Journal, among other media, did not take kindly to ruminations like mine above. I will flatter myself that its editors had me at least somewhere in mind when they opined April 8, 2005, "Some people won't let a bad conspiracy theory go."

The Journal continued in full hauteur, "We're referring to those who loudly assert that former NSC adviser Sandy Berger was trying to protect the Clinton administration when he illegally removed copies of sensitive documents from the National Archives in late 2003."

The Journal cited chief of DOJ's Public Integrity Section, Noel Hillman, who claimed that "no original documents were destroyed, and that the contents of all five at issue still exist and were made available to the 9/11 Commission."

According to the Journal, the "confusion" stemmed from the "mistaken idea" that Berger destroyed handwritten notes by various Clinton administration officials in the margins of these documents. This, said Hillman, was simply an "urban myth."

As we know now, the only urban myth in play was that presumed Republicans like Hillman were, as Berger claimed, trying "to assassinate his character to pursue their own ends." In fact, they were covering for him. "Nothing was lost to the public or the process," said Hillman of Berger's theft in April 2005. This was transparently false.

The House Committee found the DOJ to be "unacceptably incurious" about investigating Berger's time in the Archives, especially his first two visits. Although Hillman would publicly claim that Berger "did not have an intent to hide any of contents of the documents or conceal facts from the [9/11] commission," Hillman had been told on at least four prior occasions that the opposite was true.

According to the House report, "The 9/11 Commission was specifically interested in the office files of White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, and never was told that Berger had access to Clarke's original office files on May 30, 2002, and July 18, 2003."

If not exactly apologizing to us humble conspiracists, the Journal has at least admitted its error. Hillman was indeed dissembling, Journal editors acknowledged last week: "Mr. Berger was in a position to remove documents from Mr. Clarke's files, and thanks to lax security, breaches of protocol and undue deference on the part of Archives staff, we may never know whether Mr. Berger took documents other than the five he's admitted to removing."

The media will assuredly "never know" for one good reason: They refuse to look. If they do, they will discover a rat's nest of conspiracy that will make Watergate seem as consequential as a Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.