Liberals: Are You Running Out of Other People's Money?

 Randall Hoven at American Thinker asks us to think about this:

A good class warrior wishes for three things (at least).

* (1) For tax rates to be highest on the richest. Ideally, only the rich would pay taxes. The Father of Class War, Karl Marx, made "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax" one of the ten planks of his Manifesto.

* (2) For no one to be super-rich. Ideally, no one would make more than some amount considered too much. Barack Obama, the Son of Class War, once said, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."

* (3) For Government to have plenty of money so that it can spread the wealth and help the needy. The Democratic Party, the Holy Ghost of Class War, put in its 2008 platform, "For families making more than $250,000, we'll ask them to give back a portion of the Bush tax cuts to invest in health care and other key priorities."

Now think about that for a moment. If the class warriors got their first two wishes, their third wish would be impossible. If you tax only the rich, yet you have no rich, then government collects no revenue. You can't spread wealth if there is no wealth.

Oops.

And here is the punch line: that is exactly what is happening now, just not as starkly.

Yet. 

Read the rest here.

H/t: BackyardConservative.
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Obama Off the Teleprompter Again

As Jay Leno sees it:

Heh, heh, heh.

H/t: theblogprof.

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December 7, December 8: Some Lessons from Pearl Harbor

Earlier today I neglected to write a post about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and now I am having regrets. As FleeceMe correctly pointed out, "World War II was the most important event during the 20th century, and the United States’ role in securing victory is unquestioned," yet the importance of December 7, 1941 was never mentioned to FleeceMe's children in school.

I am sure FleeceMe's children and their classmates are not the only ones who didn't hear about the cause of the U.S. entrance into World War II. In fact, today it is quite possible to make it through college without ever finding out who the combatants were and why they were fighting. I believe that, in large part, schools can no longer talk about wars because, to explain the causes and conduct of any given war, some group or other must be exposed as the bad guys. In this topsy-turvy age of multiculturalism, and according to the dictates of political correctness, only one country--the U.S.--can ever be identified as the bad guy.

Nevertheless, the facts reveal that, on December 7, 1941:

All together the Japanese sank or severely damaged 18 ships, including the 8 battleships, three light cruisers, and three destroyers. On the airfields the Japanese destroyed 161 American planes (Army 74, Navy 87) and seriously damaged 102 (Army 71, Navy 31).

The Navy and Marine Corps suffered a total of 2,896 casualties of which 2,117 were deaths (Navy 2,008, Marines 109) and 779 wounded (Navy 710, Marines 69). The Army (as of midnight, 10 December) lost 228 killed or died of wounds, 113 seriously wounded and 346 slightly wounded. In addition, at least 57 civilians were killed and nearly as many seriously injured.

The Japanese lost 29 planes over Oahu, one large submarine (on 10 December), and all five of the midget submarines. Their personnel losses (according to Japanese sources) were 55 airmen, nine crewmen on the midget submarines, and an unknown number on the large submarines. The Japanese carrier task force sailed away undetected and unscathed.

The next day, December 8, the Japanese attacked and invaded the Philippines. Over 30,000 people (on both sides of the war) died in the the Battle of the Philippines, which lasted more than a year, and Manila became the second most destroyed city of World War II, after Warsaw.

On a previous December day in 1937, the Japanese had already accomplished the Rape of Nanking in China, during which the Imperial Japanese Army murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers (POWs) and gang raped more than 50,000 Chinese women, impaling infants on bayonets and photographing and filming the events. That's not to mention what the Japanese did to Korea, before it was divided into North and South Korea following the end of the War. Japan also had some "interesting" plans for the U.S. for December 24, 1941, Christmas Eve, but that's a story for another post.

Returning to the events of December 8, 1941:

. . . within less than an hour after a stirring, six-minute address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Congress voted, with only one member dissenting, that a state of war existed between the United States and Japan, and empowered the President to wage war with all the resources of the country.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Congress, this time without a dissenting vote, immediately recognized the existence of a state of war with Germany and Italy, and also rescinded an article of the Selective Service Act prohibiting the use of American armed forces beyond the Western Hemisphere.

It's up to Americans to keep each other and our children informed of our history. Our children (not to mention our Libs) desperately need to know why America has acted in ways that might seem incomprehensible to someone who has not yet accepted the existence of evil and faced the danger of threat, and--dare I say it?--come to the understanding that all cultures are not now, and never have been, in possession of "the same" values.

As the Roman Cicero pointed out half a century before the birth of Christ:

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is
 to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the
 world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

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Breaking: Obama Cuts Deal on Bush Tax Cuts

He just couldn't quite pull off the tax grab he wanted so badly.

So it became "unacceptable."

My oh my:


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We're in Trouble Now: Washington Ranked 3rd Brainiest City in US

Washington, DC, is the third brainiest city in the USA, according to a recent study in which a "brainpower index" was created based on the percentage of the population with advanced degrees.

Taking first position: Boulder, Colorado. In second place: Ann Arbor, MI.

And how are the three brainiest cities in the country doing?

#1. Boulder, ranked by Chris Palko of The Daily Caller as "the best university-based setting for liberals," takes its lead from the University of Colorado, which entices students with such offerings as "endless ways to get involved with local and global causes."

#2. Ann Arbor, another college town, is not without its own contributions to society, especially focused on the development of radical anti-war and counterculture organizations, including the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose parent organization was the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

#3. Washington voters gave 92.5% of their votes to Barack  Obama.
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Ground Zero Church Celebrates Feast of St. Nicholas in a Tent Today

In a "tremendous irony," New York City permits the clergy and parishioners of a historic church "utterly obliterated" on 9/11 to hold services twice a year, in a little tent near Ground Zero, even as the building of a brand-new Ground Zero mosque is being supported by the president of the United States, the mayor of NYC, and a host of other New York officials.

Today, the Feast of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, the Patron Saint of the Church, is one of those days. (The other day is September 11, the day the church was crushed by the falling South Tower.)

An invitation from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:

On this solemn day, parishioners of the St. Nicholas Church, will be joined by faithful from the many other parishes of the New York metropolitan area, not simply to observe the Feast Day of their Church, but to unite and intensify their prayers and supplications so that the church dedicated to St. Nicholas, the only house of worship destroyed on 9/11, be re-built at Ground Zero soon.

Everyone who shares the firm conviction that St. Nicholas Church, which stood at that site since 1916, must be rebuilt as a tribute to a nation that celebrates diversity and is united in prayer, is welcomed at this service. The Greek Orthodox faithful, the parishes, and the organizations and people of faith from across the region are encouraged to attend this historic and inspirational afternoon of prayer, and demonstrate their steadfast support to the efforts of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the St. Nicholas community to re-built the historic St. Nicholas church at Ground Zero.

This service will be held at the construction site near the corner of Liberty and Greenwich streets - Gate 7, an active construction site. Conditions will require thick sole shoes/boots and weather appropriate dress is advised. Members of the Media are advised to call in advance and arrive at 1:30 pm.

This Vespers Service begins at 2:00 p.m.
 
The following video shows the service of 2008:

As Father Arey of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese said, "I think it's very symbolic that this church be rebuilt . . . to show that the values that were attacked on 9/11 are not going to be overcome by this evil. The light does need to shine on in this darkness."

Amen.

Listen to an interview with Father Arey here.
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Bigotry Against Satan Worshipers -- Oh, No!

Andrew Klavan does it again:



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How Much Does Obama ♥ MSNBC? $16 Billion Worth!

Just had to pass this on, from Stilton Jarlsberg at Hope n' Change:

It turns out that there's a very good reason that MSNBC's alleged news coverage slants so heavily in favor of the Obama administration. In fact, there are 16 billion reasons...because that's how many taxpayer bailout dollars were secretly given to MSNBC's parent company, General Electric.

In fact, the bailout money quietly went everywhere - not just in the United States, but around the world; to banks, companies, private businesses, and anyone else with connections. In other words, the trillions in giveaways went to everyone except the people footing the bill: the American taxpayers. You know, the people that MSNBC is currently saying should pay higher taxes.

But MSNBC didn't mention their financial windfall when giving leg-tingling praise of all things related to the Obama administration, or hint that they were on the government payroll as surely as (other) Whitehouse Spokesman Robert Gibbs.

No, the money quietly went to things like MSNBC's advertising campaign for their new slogan: "Lean Forward." Which must have been created by a woman who didn't realize that these are the most dreaded words that men of a certain age can hear when in their doctor's office.

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How Many Non-Gov't Workers Does It Take to Pay One State Worker?

That is one terrific question.

Wouldn't you like to know the answer to that question in your state?

In New Jersey, inquiring (Republican) minds in the state assembly wanted to know just how many private sector workers it takes to keep one New Jersey state worker on the payroll (via Chris Wysocki at Wyblog).

The answer produced by New Jersey's nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services is somewhere between 67.5 and 90 non-gov't workers.

The short story: to pay the salary and benefits of New Jersey's close to 60 thousand state workers requires contributions from somewhere between 4 and 5.4 million private-sector workers. However, New Jersey only has 3.2 million private-sector workers.

That makes New Jersey short somewhere between 800,000 and 2.2 million non-gov't workers.

Hmmm.

Clearly, something's got to give.

One word of advice to New Jersey. Don't go looking at New York State for a bailout. That would be like Ireland asking Greece for a bailout.

New Jersey, at the very least, knows how many employees it has on its payroll: 58,518.

New York doesn't even know: it has to "estimate" how many people are employees of the state. That estimate: about 294 thousand state workers, with a little over 7 million private-sector workers to pay their freight.

Going by New Jersey's calculation that each state worker needs about 90 non-gov't workers to pay his or her salary, New York's non-gov't workers can afford to pay for 78 thousand state workers.

However, New York currently is paying for 294 thousand state workers.

Hey, New York State is only short 19.5 million non-gov't workers to meet our payroll!

Let's see, that's almost equal to the entire population of New York City (8.4 million), plus the populations of Long Island and Northern New Jersey, or the equivalent of 1 out of every 16 Americans.

Maybe New Jersey could get a loan from California, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia?

No. Those are among the 41 states, including New Jersey and New York, that are on the verge of bankruptcy.

I wonder how Texas or Alaska would feel about paying for New Jersey's gov't workers?
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Pelosi's "Global Warming" Committee Going Out With Trash

I'm starting to have some confidence in the soon-to-be Republican majority in the House.

Wisconsin Republican congressman, Jim Sensenbrenner, has announced that one of the invasive species tenderly cared for in Speaker Pelosi's Congressional Shop of Horrors will be thrown on the compost heap by the incoming GOP majority. The name of this invader: the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

This is great news.

From The Wall Street Journal via Watts Up With That?:

Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey will hold one last media spectacle at his Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming today, allowing such oracles as green activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to preach about the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Let’s hope Speaker-designate John Boehner makes it the committee’s last hurrah.

Current Speaker Nancy Pelosi created this outfit in 2007 as a way to outflank then Energy Committee Chairman John Dingell, for whom climate change is not a religion. The committee provided Mr. Markey a prominent perch from which to work closely with California’s Henry Waxman (who later deposed Mr. Dingell) on the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and helped so many Democrats lose their seats in November.

Mr. Markey held more than 50 hearings, at which he demeaned reputable scientists, attacked oil and gas companies, and in general evangelized about the need to replace carbon energy with windmills and solar panels. With no bill-writing powers, committee Members spent $8 million or so on hearings, global “fact-finding” missions and reports of little consequence. Oh, and Mr. Markey elbowed his way into investigating the BP spill, which he used as a platform to demonize oil exploration.

Why is the death of this Committee a major victory for sentient life everywhere on the planet (particularly people and animals suffering from hunger)--and for plant life too?

One reason is explained by Dr. Sylvan Wittwer in his book, Food, Climate and Carbon Dioxide. As CO2-phobes always overlook, plants, including food crops, love this rare gas. When the level of CO2 in the air increases, plants grow faster and healthier. That's because plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that they need to grow (and that taste good to the rest of us). More plant life on the planet, more food for everybody! Or, in more formal terminology, greater global food security:

[T]he effects of an enriched CO2 atmosphere on crop productivity, in large measure, are positive, leaving little doubt as to the benefits for global food security. It is, therefore, inappropriate for public discussion of the issue to focus only on the hypothetical dangers of global warming that might result from higher CO2 levels. It is equally important to stress the known benefits.... 

...The rising level of atmospheric CO2 is a universally free premium, gaining in magnitude with time, on which we can all reckon for the foreseeable future. Direct effects of increasing CO2 on food production and the output of rangelands and forests may be more important than the effects on climate.

Now if we can only get this message to the folks gathered in Cancun who are worried about how to get Americans to pay penalties to much of the rest of the world for daring to participate in Nature's carbon cycle. It won't be easy. As the UK Telegraph has pointed out, "In the pre-Hispanic language Cancun means "nest of serpents." 

H/t: Elmer at Minnesotans for Global Warming.
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I'm Still Thinking about These Carolers . . .

Some of the intended victims of Mohamed Mohamud's Portland, OR, bombing plot, sing a joyful Christmas carol as the Christmas tree is lit in Pioneer Courthouse Square. (AP Photo, The Oregonian, Torsten Kjellstrand)

. . . but, predictably, the Portland police, who have a "proud" history of refusing to work with the FBI to confront Islamic terrorism, "have increased patrols around mosques and other Islamic sites in Portland." (H/t Critical Narrative.) Now that Attorney General Eric Holder has assigned the FBI with the extra duty of investigating the cause of a small fire that broke out in Mohamed Mohamud's mosque on Sunday, I have no doubt that the Portland police will not refuse to cooperate with that investigation.

A young fellow leaving flowers at Mohamed Mohamud's mosque on Sunday. (AP Photo, Rick Bowmer)

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Wikileaks: You Can't Fix Stupid

Bradley Manning demanding equality "on the battlefield"

In his own words, 22-year-old Pvt. Bradley Manning, sitting in a base 40 miles east of Baghdad, had "unprecedented access" to classified U.S. networks "14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight+  months." And he used it to get U.S. military and diplomatic secrets published around the world. Here's how Wikileaks got its start (h/t The Guardian via Ed Morrissey):

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.

Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

These things will happen when you entrust U.S. secrets to nervous children, particularly those with bones to pick with the U.S. military and with "society at large." Bradley Manning's anger with his nation and his nation's military centered around his desire for "transgender equality."

Last August, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway was reported to have "expressed his fear" that the effort to repeal "Don't ask, Don't tell" would "distract from the military's mission of protecting the nation." It looks like Bradley Manning was among the distracted.

Worse, far worse, and more dangerous, in my opinion, are the "distracted" leaders in America's political and military structures, who are easily led by whatever politically correct demand marches down the pike, whether it be gay marriage, Muslim extra-sensitivities, new home mortgages for credit risks, citizenship for the "undocumented," or any other feel-good "cause."

In times of danger and economic stress, reasonable people focus first on the most basic matters of survival, and later work on improving those areas on which survival does not depend.

It's time our country's leaders did the same.

H/t AJ Strata.
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New Finding: Global Warming "Highly Beneficial to Human Health"

AccuWeather.com is predicting a storm system emerging from the Rockies that will coat Plains and Midwest roads with freezing drizzle and traffic-snarling snow. Message: Drive carefully, if at all.

I think this is a great moment to thank Elmer over at Minnesotans for Global Warming for pointing out a new peer-reviewed study that "Climate Change" alarmists will never tell you about: Global warming would actually save lives.

Anybody who has ever spent serious time freezing their buns off or digging their way out of a heavy snowstorm could'a told you that, but . . .

Three UK researchers (N. Christidis, G. C. Donaldson, and P. A. Stott) decided to make it official by scientifically testing a claim made "with very high confidence" by the UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that "climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality". . . .

After studying UK death and cause-of-death statistics for the period between 1976 and 2005, the researchers found that a warmer summer would cause 1.6 more deaths per million people, but a warmer winter would result in 47 fewer deaths, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, representing a huge net benefit of the warming.

However, if people made efforts to adapt to the warming trend, less than one (0.7) additional death per million would occur in the summer, but 85 fewer deaths would occur in the winter, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.

What the researchers concluded:

Clearly, the IPCC's "very-high-confidence" conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

Read more about it here.
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Savior of the Nations, Come

The lyrics to this beloved Advent hymn were originally written in Latin by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in about 370, translated into German by Martin Luther in 1523 and set to music in 1524. The lyrics were eventually translated into English in 1851.

Watch this video on VideoSurf or see more Videos or Advent Videos

Lyrics of this version:

Savior of the nations, come;
Virgin’s Son,  make here Your home!
Marvel now, O heav'n and earth,
That the Lord chose such a birth.

Here a maid was found with child
Yet remains a virgin mild.
In her womb His truth was shown:
God was set upon His throne.

From the manger newborn light
Shines in glory through the night.
Darkness will no more reside;
In this light faith now abides.

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Christmas Jihadist Planned Mass Destruction in Portland, OR (Updated)

Faces in the crowd at Pioneer Courthouse Square

Because of the cold weather, residents of Portland, Oregon were wearing boots, not Birkenstocks, yesterday evening as they stood in a crowd in Pioneer Courthouse Square to enjoy the city's annual tree-lighting ceremony, when a Somalian immigrant named Mohamed Mohamud dialed his cell phone to detonate a van loaded with a half-dozen 55-gallon drums of explosives. Mohamud had parked the van at the corner of Southwest Yamhill Street and Sixth Avenue.

Luckily for the crowd, the FBI was on top of the situation and had arranged for dummy explosives to be in the van.

As soon as Mohamud attempted to detonate the car bomb, at 5:42 p.m., FBI agents arrested him. As they took him away, kicking and screaming, he shouted the terrorist slogan, "Allahu akbar!" He is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

That sounds like light sentence to me. Look at the faces of the families in the crowd yesterday evening.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud

Mohamed Mohamud, who is now 19 years old, first came to the FBI's attention last year when he carried on e-mail correspondence with an "unindicted" terrorist in Pakistan about the possibility of his going to Pakistan to practice jihad. Soon, an FBI operative had joined the e-mail discussion and face-to-face meetings in Portland were arranged.

During one of those meetings, Mohamud talked about articles he wrote for the online magazine, Jihad Recollections. He asked for help putting together a dream he had since he was 15 years old: committing a "spectacular," violent "fireworks show" of "personal jihad." The targets Mohamed Mohamud had selected were the families attending the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square on Nov. 26, 2010. 

From The Oregonian:

The FBI operatives cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event, and that Mohamud could abandon his plans at any time with no shame.

"You know there's going to be a lot of children there?" an FBI operative asked Mohamud. "You know there are gonna be a lot of children there?"

Mohamud allegedly responded he was looking for a "huge mass that will ... be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays."

Mohamud dismissed concerns about law enforcement, explaining that, " ... It's in Oregon; and Oregon, like, you know, nobody ever thinks about [it]," according to the affidavit.

[snip]

. . . FBI operatives quizzed Mohamud about whether he was capable of looking at the bodies of those who would be killed in his planned Portland attack.

"I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured," Mohamud reportedly told the FBI operatives. . . .

Mohamud spent months arranging the logistics of the bombing, which included a "trial run bomb in a secluded area of Oregon earlier in November." From the NY Daily News:

"This threat was very real," said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI's Portland office. "Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale."

Mohamed Mohamud is scheduled to appear in court on Monday. 

Sources:The Oregonian, The First Post, NY Daily News.

Update:  Oh, yes, and then there's this reminder to the people of Portland of their previous efforts to stop terrorism, courtesy Michelle Malkin:

You may recall that loony Portland officials several years ago threatened to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force under the Bush administration and refused to cooperate with federal efforts to conduct voluntary interviews of local Muslims in order to uncover terrorist plots.

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Only in America: Muslim Terrorist Groups Get Tax Exemptions

Photo from the Gaza Suicide Bombers Parade, 2006

The IRS and your state and local tax collectors may be bleeding you dry, but then, you probably are not registered as a tax-exempt charity like three suicide bomber support groups in the U.S.

U.S. authorities have known about the activities of these groups since at least 2008, when a Dallas jury convicted the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. of raising money to support the suicide bombers of the Palestinan terror group, Hamas, an activity that has been illegal in the U.S. since 1995. That "charity" for terrorists raised money under the pious-sounding name, the Holy Land Foundation, but it was founded by the "international Muslim Brotherhood, the parent group of Hamas," to be used as a tool to "eventually undermine the American constitutional government."

During that public trial, FBI agents fingered some powerful U.S. Islamic groups as Hamas front groups. You are likely to recognise the name of at least one of these front groups from countless appearances of their members as advocates for Muslim "concerns" on television talk shows. That group is, of course, CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which poses as a Muslim "civil rights" group and is headquartered within three blocks of the U.S. Capitol.

You may not have heard of the two other groups in the terrorist trio, but they are very important:

• ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, which, posing as a Muslim "advocacy" group, controls most of the Islamic centers and Islamic schools in the country from its base in Indianapolis; and
• NAIT, the North American Islamic Trust, a Saudi-funded subsidiary which holds the deeds to hundreds of American mosques, including the infamous 9/11 mosque in Washington, DC.

From Investors Business Daily:

Outrageously, these dangerous fronts, cloaked as they are in religious garb, still enjoy charitable tax status. The IRS exempts their funding, much of which comes from the Middle East.

And they are still free to lobby Congress, Homeland Security and the TSA against airport profiling and other anti-terror measures.

Yet none are even registered as lobbyists, let alone foreign agents.

After the trial, when it was clear that the three Hamas front groups had been placed on a government list of organizations and people who conspire with terrorists, the trio brazenly sued to have their names cleared. No such luck. U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis ruled that there is "ample evidence" that the three groups' supported Hamas suicide bombers and their families. The ISNA and NAIT paid suicide bombers and their families "hundreds of thousands of dollars." CAIR's founding chairman, Omar Ahmad, and acting executive director, Nihad Awad, plotted to disguise those payments as charity. Judge Solis pointed out the inconvenient truth that the designation of the three groups as terrorist co-conspirators is supported by bank records, wiretap evidence, and FBI agent testimony.

Although the FBI has severed ties with CAIR, other government agencies have not. For instance, CAIR continues to select Muslim guests to speak and pray in Congress. CAIR chief Awad even prayed alongside Anwar Awlaki, now a fugitive al-Qaida cleric.

The FBI, meanwhile, still does outreach with ISNA. And the White House has solicited the group for resumes. Many Muslims tied to ISNA have been hired for sensitive positions within the government.

Political correctness gone suicidal.
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The Pilgrims and the Shining City on the Hill

My recent research project has taken me into journals and correspondence of some of the early Pilgrim colonists of Massachusetts. The more I read about these people's values and activities, the more I respect them. They were intelligent and hard-working, and they valued education very highly. Their religious beliefs eventually evolved into the founding principles of the American Revolution.  



Happy Thanksgiving to All!

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Dreams of Obama's Father: Hot Dogs and Beans for Velma Hart

Velma Hart, hardworking middle-class American veteran, hitched her hopes to Obama's "change" wagon and was rewarded with the persistently sinking feeling that her outgrown "hot dogs and beans" era was again on the horizon. Now Velma's "new reality" under Obama includes unemployment: she lost her job as CFO of the veterans service organization, AMVETS.

From Fox News:

Am Vets executive director Jim King told The Washington Post that the nonprofit was looking for ways to survive financially.

"It's not anything she did," King told the Post Monday. "She got bit by the same snake that has bit a lot of people. It was a move to cut our bottom line."

Velma was considerably more patient with Obama's policies than most veterans, I suspect. Just a few weeks after taking office, Obama demanded that combat-injured veterans pay for their own medical care, even including prosthetic limbs to replace legs and arms lost in combat. When veterans' groups protested, Obama challenged them to come up with another way to pay the medical expenses of combat injured veterans. Because, apparently, even when you shed blood and suffer permanent disability for your country, you still haven't done enough "to spread the wealth around."

H/t: theblogprof.
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Sometimes the Burqa Babe is Really a Burqa Guy

As Nice Deb, quoting AJ Strata, pointed out, the Obama administration has traded protection of terrorist's "rights" for protection of ordinary American citizen's rights. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal summed it up on Meet the Press yesterday:

I think the American people are worried when they see an administration worried about reading Miranda rights to the underwear bomber. . . .[They're] so worried about rights of the terrorists, what about the rights of innocent American travelers?

Sharon Beshenivsky, mother of 5, murdered by Mustaf Jama's gang.

What's the point of protecting the sensibilities of Muslims at airports while trampling on the privacy of everyone else?

Back in 2005, 29-year-old Mustaf Jama, one of Britain's "most wanted" criminals and a immigrant from Somalia, eager to escape capture after the shooting of two British women, grabbed his sister's passport, threw on a burqa, covered his face with a veil, and hopped on a flight to his native Somalia.

Mustaf Jama, unveiled.

Turns out, security personnel at London's Heathrow Airport made no attempt to match his face with her passport picture, even though the airport was on a heightened state of alert after the 7/7 terrorist attack. Indeed, the Times (London) writes that "British immigration officers rarely carry out a visual check to match a passport photograph with a departing female passenger's veiled face."

Jama spent the next two years living in a remote region under the protection of  his powerful warlord family.

Back in the UK, Jama was still wanted for his part in the ruthless shooting of the two women, both of whom were police constables. One of the women, Police Constable Sharon Beshenivky, died almost instantly, on the fourth birthday of her youngest daughter. The other was seriously injured.

Paul Beshenivsky, Sharon's widower.

In 2007, the UK paid Somali authorities a "bounty" and then launched a secret military operation to capture Jama. When 15 armed soldiers caught up with him, he was armed and driving a Land Rover loaded with alcohol and 2 young women.

Two trials later, Jama was finally jailed for life. Almost. There's always a chance to appeal, and for Jama, that appeal began last week at the Court of Appeal in London.

There's no appeal for Sharon Beshenivsky's widower, Paul, her three natural children, and her two adopted children.

So why is it again that American and British authorities insist on protecting the privacy of anyone who traipses through an airport or a bank wearing a burqa and a veil?

The rest of us know that it's not for our protection.

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"Simple Gifts," Alison Krauss and Yo Yo Ma

"Simple Gifts" is a Shaker dance song composed by Elder Joseph Brackett in 1848, and a charming, joyful hymn of praise and thanksgiving.  Listen for the dance instructions to bend and turn.

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