Georgia Judge Subpoenas Obama to Prove His Natural Born Citizenship

Eight plaintiffs have joined a lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's legitimacy to appear on the Georgia ballot, based on the admitted non-citizenship of his father. The U.S. Constitution requires that the chief executive be a "natural born citizen" free of divided loyalties. As the son of a British subject, Barack Obama Jr. was born a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (UKC), affording him dual Kenyan/US citizenship.

Georgia election law specifically requires certified candidates for federal office to meet the constitutional qualifications for the office being sought. A Georgia court has agreed to hear the complaint and has ordered Obama to attend the hearing on next Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Via the Washington Post:

A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen and can’t be president. . . .

The hearing is set for Thursday before an administrative judge. Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi on Friday denied a motion by the president’s lawyer to quash a subpoena that requires Obama to show up.

In denying the motion to quash the subpoena, the court found that defendant Obama "is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.”

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
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The Keystone Pipeline: Everything You Never Wanted to Know

Passing on this fantastic Ezra Levant rant (via Big Fur Hat at I Own the World).

Obama's thumbs-down of the Keystone Pipeline isn't all (or even much) about the Leftie Green Coalition, as the optimists among us would have us believe.

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Everything That Looks Like Charity and Tolerance--Isn't

I accidentally deleted today's post, which pointed out that 54% of American Catholics voted for Obama in 2008, despite his previous support of a bill that mandated infanticide for premature newborns who survived induced birth abortions, even horribly depriving those little ones of the barest comforts customarily afforded to the suffering dying. It is being reported that, as the economy tanks under Obama's policies, abortions are rising, mainly because so many pregnant women think they can't afford the children they are carrying.

I'm hoping that, unlike in 2008, the word will spread among Catholics, who represent about 25% of American voters, that Obama is not the charitable good guy that so many of them thought (without doing the requisite research) that he was three years ago.

To that end, a group called Catholic Vote has been putting together videos endorsing Rick Santorum, like the one below:

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New York Taxpayers "Work for All People," Governor Cuomo Says

Well, maybe not "all."

If you are an (ahem) "immigrant" who hasn't been in this country long enough to speak the little bit of English needed to apply for a driver's license, sign up for unemployment checks, get government-subsidized housing, or apply for 24 other types of New York State services or benefits, Governor Andrew Cuomo has vowed to "somehow find the money" to hire an interpreter/translator to take care of that little problem for you. You don't even need to endure the outrageous inconvenience of bringing along a bilingual friend or relative to help. Mind you, New York's legislature didn't vote through this new benefit. Cuomo ordered innumerable state employees to "make it so" via executive order.

Our state works for all people, regardless of where you were born or what language you speak,” Cuomo said. “We are proud that people from all around the world call New York home, making our state a beacon of diversity and tolerance.

Unless, of course, you were born in New York State and speak (horrors!) English as your native language.

If, say, you are a poor and bedridden elderly man or woman who has been a resident of New York State for your entire life, paying New York's exorbitantly high taxes in peacetime and putting your life on the line in wartime, Cuomo isn't inclined to "somehow find the money" to enable you to get some assistance with that bedpan. Ask any health care professional in the state.

I don't know how many bedridden elderly people manage to send in an absentee ballot, but I do know that in New York and at least 24 other states, the inability to speak English is no more a barrier to casting a vote than having a tombstone over your head. Federal law requires states with high "don't bother me with English" populations to provide bilingual voting information, materials, and ballots in 68 covered languages where bilingual census takers indicated that census respondents think they don't speak English "very well."

Cuomo's intention demonstrates the real meaning of "transparency in government." Anyone can see through it.
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Obama Has a Dream . . .

And, of course, he intends them to be. After all, they are growing up on $4 million vacations.
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It Is No Secret What God Can Do -- Jim Reeves

No Shariah Law in OK Courts? Appeals Court Sides with CAIR

Seventy percent of Oklahoma voters approved a referendum (State Question 755) to require their courts to uphold U.S. law without consideration of international law or Shariah law. It took CAIR only two days to sue on the grounds that Muslims' constitutional rights were being violated.

Today, a federal appeals court pat CAIR on the head and sent Oklahoma voters to the corner.

(CNN) – A federal appeals court has blocked an Oklahoma voter-approved measure barring state judges from considering Islamic and international law in their decisions.

The three-judge panel at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier injunction preventing State Question 755 from being certified until the free speech questions are resolved. The decision Tuesday allows a lawsuit brought by Islamic-American groups to move ahead to a bench trial.

“The proposed amendment discriminates among religions,” said the judges. “The Oklahoma amendment specifically names the target of its discrimination. The only religious law mentioned in the amendment is Sharia law.”

A federal judge last summer had issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which had sued to nullify the law completely.

The amendment would require Oklahoma courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using” either international law or Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, which the amendment defined as being based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. The group’s local leader, Muneer Awad, has said the amendment passed in November 2010 under a campaign of fear and misinformation about Islam.
(H/t Weasel Zippers)

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the lawyer of a German Muslim who opened fire on a group of U.S. soldiers at the Frankfort airport, killing two of them and wounding two others, is being defended because he is "well meaning." It is worth noting that Shariah law has made inroads in

to the legal system of Germany, where, for example, Jordanian immigrants are married and divorced in accordance with Jordanian law, and polygamous marriages are recognized.

Arid Uka, 21, who was born in Kosovo but grew up in Frankfurt, “wanted to make his personal contribution to the holy war” but not knowing how to get to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, opted to act closer to home, the federal prosecutor told the court.

He should serve at least the usual maximum sentence in Germany of 15 years, argued prosecutor Jochen Weingarten, saying the case involving two charges of murder and three of attempted murder was a particularly severe one.

Defence lawyer Michaela Roth did not contest Uka’s guilt but argued extenuating circumstances, describing the difficult background of the “shy, quiet and well meaning” young man who had never previously been aggressive and was “without future prospects.”

The March 2 attack took place at Frankfurt airport, where Uka allegedly opened fire on a group of US soldiers on their way to fight in Afghanistan. Airmen Nicholas Jerome Alden, 25, and Zachary Ryan Cuddeback, 21, were killed. Two more soldiers were wounded. (H/t: @fuzislippers)

A little closer to home on Planet Earth, a judge found that a woman has no legal protection from frequent beatings and rapes by her husband in New Jersey as long as he thinks that beating and raping her is, uh, A-Okay according to Shariah law.

And now a New Jersey judge sees no evidence that a Muslim committed sexual assault of his wife -- not because he didn't do it, but because he was acting on his Islamic beliefs: "This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited."

Rick Santorum on Shariah law and the U.S. Constitution:

“Jihadism is evil and we need to say what it is,” Santorum said last March [3/2011]. “We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.” He added correctly, and in sharp contrast to the prevailing view, that “Sharia law is not just a religious code. It is also a governmental code. It happens to be both religious in nature and origin, but it is a civil code. And it is incompatible with the civil code of the United States.”

That's a view that gets my vote.

Santorum speaking last October:

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Obama's Defense Policy: Ramirez Sums It Up

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The Fiery Badge of Zilla

It isn't every day that this blogger gets credited with "awesomeness," but . . .

In her First Annual Zilla Awards for Awesomeness in the Dextrosphere, the indefatigable Zilla of the Resistance has included yours truly under the category, "Nicest Bloggers," in some very classy company, including Adrienne at Adrienne's Corner, DaTechGuy at DaTechguy's Blog, Jimmie at The Sundries Shack, Jill at Pundit & Pundette, and The Lonely Conservative.

This is one awesome experience!

Thanks, Zilla.

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I Know Who Holds Tomorrow -- Gospel Ukelele by Ken Middleton

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Obama and the I-Word

For once, the I-word appearing in the same headline as Obama's name is not the narcissistic I that Obama usually uses to decorate his limp oratory. Nor is it the word Imperial, Immigration, Idiot, Illegal, Islam, or any other of a number of other words usually associated with Obama's name.

This time, it's the word Impeach, as in: Obama's Recess Appointments: An Impeachable Offense?

I personally do not see the current House of Representatives as capable of sufficient force of character to impeach Obama for crossing "from socialistic extremism into lawlessness" by making recess appointments when Congress is not legally recessed. Judging from past experience, Obama has every reason to rely on an irresolute House (where impeachment proceedings must lawfully begin) to permit his "subjective whim" to override the "clearly written" constitutional power of Congress to determine whether and when they is in session.

Slighted Democrats hoping to even the score by
demanding the impeachment of a Republican,
G.W. Bush, after Ceegar Willie escaped impeachment
convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice.

If the legislative apathy continues, this Molotov cocktail aimed at the U.S. Constitution will have found its mark, and the debris of what once was the Senate's role of "advise and consent" will soon be reincorporated to mean "rubber & stamp."

But, say, patriotic conviction (or even jealous guarding of Congressional or personal power) favorably inclines the ears of House members to the murmurs of impeachment abroad in the land.

That would produce for Obama the victim label that might suit a crafty president--and his political party--quite well in their efforts to revive the passions of their lethargic fans. If there's anything a Democrat likes, it's an underdog--real or imagined. 

And then again, a huge fight over whether Obama is guilty of an impeachable offense might be just what Dr. Soros ordered to replace Obama with a more palatable candidate on the Democrat ticket.

The one thing that Americans can count on, it seems obvious, is that whatever the Socialist Democrats and their top guy are up to, they are up to no good.
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A Patriot Speaks: Bachmann's Magnificent Withdrawal Speech

Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States

But make no mistake: I'll continue to be a strong voice. I'll continue to stand and fight for the country and for the American people, and for our freedom because Mr. Franklin and all the founders, all the men, all the women, who have given their last full measure of devotion, and our military, our veterans, are watching us. They're expecting us to stand up and protect what they fought to give us, and so we owe it to them and to our posterity and to the God that we serve Who created us, Who gave us life in our very being, to keep our Republic free. 

 ~ Michelle Bachman, 1/4/12

Words worth hearing:

 

Obama Trying to Earn that Nobel Prize by Freeing Taliban Held in Gitmo?

Hot off the press via Weasel Zippers:

(Guardian) — The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned.

According to sources familiar with the talks in the US and in Afghanistan, the handful of Taliban figures will include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, and Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan.

More controversially, the Taliban are demanding the release of the former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund. Washington is reported to be considering formally handing him over to the custody of another country, possibly Qatar.

The releases would be to reciprocate for Tuesday’s announcement from the Taliban that they are prepared to open a political office in Qatar to conduct peace negotiations “with the international community” – the most significant political breakthrough in ten years of the Afghan conflict.

The Taliban are holding just one American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, a 25-year-old sergeant captured in June 2009, but it is not clear whether he would be freed as part of the deal.

“To take this step, the [Obama] administration have to have sufficient confidence that the Taliban are going to reciprocate,” said Vali Nasr, who was an Obama administration adviser on the Afghan peace process until last year. “It is going to be really risky. Guantánamo is a very sensitive issue politically.”

Nasr, now a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the Taliban announcement on the opening of an office in Qatar was a dramatic breakthrough.

Read the whole thing here. Lowlights:

• "The next phase will need concessions on both sides." 
• "Even if all five of these people they release went straight back to Quetta [the Taliban stronghold in Pakistan] to rejoin a fight, it wouldn't make any real difference."

Words fail.
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Obama's Night Cap

Remember when Obama wondered whether he could "mobilize the citizenry" into accepting "skyrocketing" electrical rates and bankrupted coal-burning power plants?

The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

Obama made that statement in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle as the nation moved into January of the last presidential election year.

Here in Progressive Paradise, even Obama's most ardent supporters never did get entirely "mobilized" into the "really important" desire to suffer from the cold all winter because they couldn't afford to pay for heat.

Regulatory chicanery via unelected czars being what it is, however, Obama did manage to mobilize the owner of my local coal-fired power plant into bankruptcy, and he did mobilize the folks who sell electricity and natural gas to the people in our area to include the following friendly note with our December energy bills. Read it and weep.

Help Avoid Hypothermia

Cold Weather Can Put You at Risk of Hypothermia, a dangerous condition caused by a lowering of body temperature. Symptoms include feeling very cold, tired and weak; shivering and confusion. To help avoid hypothermia:

• Wear a hat indoors, outdoors and even in bed. Half of our body heat is lost through the head and neck.

It used to be that the power company focused on selling energy to consumers. Now, it seems, they are worried that those customers might freeze to death.

Reality check:

Current temperature here in Progressive Paradise: 12F.

Current temperature in Obama's vacation paradise hometown, Honolulu: 79F.

Current temperature in the White House: 80F.

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Turning the Table in 2012

For three long, painful years, the blogosphere has provided evidence aplenty that an increasing multitude of Americans have been longing for the arrival of 2012 to signal the start of our opportunity to remove from office the current president of the United States.

Starting with a trickle of the economically alert and the politically astute whose numbers were soon bolstered by the newly unemployed, underemployed, and the nervous, for at least the past three years Americans have been hoarding money and supplies against the deepening economic winter, even as our stores of faith in the survival of our political system grow thin (along with, ironically, the celebrated "hope" for our future pleasure and prosperity).

Americans greeting 2012 as the opportunity to reclaim our eroding liberties are a special blend: we are a motley crew of descendents of the hardiest and bravest escapees of some of history's most villainous political and economic oppression. It is more than likely that your parents, your grandparents, yourself--or whoever it was in your family who first set foot on American soil--arrived here in the face of incredible odds against them. And, if you look over your shoulder at your family's past, you cannot escape noticing that a whole lot of surviving has been accomplished since then.

In our wait for 2012, those of us who have refused to be partisans of Barack H. Obama have been carrying on a defensive strategy: we have contested and annoyed Obamatons and we have gathered together as TEA partiers to study, entrench, and build and fortify our own networks. Lacking a leader in the executive office and a majority in the Senate, we have resolutely maintained our defensive position, but we are itching to climb of the trenches.

Now is the moment for us to oblige Obama to take full ownership of his gains, not merely in the luxurious privacy of whatever vacation resort he happens to be occupying at the moment, but far less comfortably in the eyes of the Americans on whose suffering he has built those gains.

The songs of schoolchildren establishing Obama as a juvenile superhero have quietened. Nobody believes that Obama is a deity anymore. His fingerprints are on so many of America's current problems that even formerly fierce supporters of Hope and Change have gone AWOL. In conversations in which former Obama supporters complain about their difficulties paying the most recent jump in their utility or food bill or finding a doctor who takes Medicare, a few well placed words can plant seeds of awareness.

Convincing Americans that a gain for Republicans is a loss for America is a game that Democrats have been playing for a long, long, time, using every kind of chicanery at their disposal.

The time is ripe to turn the table on them--but all we need to use is the truth. It is Democrats who ought to be fearing their own legislative or judicial victory because it will cost them the votes of people who recognize that, for them, that Democrat victory creates a real, tangible loss.

Our opportunities are everywhere. 2012 is a year in which I plan to make use of those opportunities.

Happy New Year to All!
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Psalm 67 -- Lionel Valdellon

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A New Year's Resolution We Can All Share

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A Snow Globe in My Pocket

Back at my desk today, transitioning from my Christmas interlude, a time of shutting out the world and taking up the pleasures of showering family and friends with tokens of love and care and receiving same.

A shower of love trapped in a holiday, like a snowstorm trapped in a snow globe.

How difficult it is to open the door to the world again.


  
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Oh Holy Night -- Mahalia Jackson

Merry Christmas, Dear Friends.




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And a Tax on My Christmas Tree . . .

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Taxpayers pay $257,000 for each Chevy Volt

At more than $250K a pop, it's really the U.S. taxpayer who's being charged.

This article, linked by William Jacobson, caught my attention today:

If you’ve been revolted by the fact that every $40,000 electric Chevy Volt sold by Government Motors enjoys a $7,500 rebate at the expense of taxpayers, then better have some Dramamine before you read any further. James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has calculated that the total subsidies—direct and indirect, federal and state—poured into this white elephant could add up to $3 billion or $250,000 for every Volt sold to date. And this is not counting the 26 percent ownership that Uncle Sam still has in the company.

Nor does it count the subsidies that taxpayers like you and I provide to the manufacturers of the batteries used in the Volt. Add on an additional nearly $7,000 for that.

I say, if you want to drive a "green car," you should pay for it yourself.

This government swindle of the rest of us has got to stop.
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A Baroque Magnificat -- Ensemble européen William Byrd

This astonishing composition by Polish composer Mikolaj Zielenski was published in Venice in 1611, four-hundred years ago. Here it is performed by the Ensemble européen William Byrd under the direction of Graham O'Reilly.

The Magnificat, also known as the Canticle of Mary, is one of the oldest hymns in Christendom, recording the words used by the Mother of God as she announced her pregnancy to her cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant with a son who would grow to become John the Baptist.

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name. And His mercy is upon those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with His arm, He has scattered the proud in his imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever."

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I Sure Do Like Those Christmas Cookies -- George Strait

An annual favorite about those annual favorites!

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Money Money Money Money: The Candidates Address Global Warming

Global warming alarmists fail to mention that the up-and-down trends of Earth's climate made the planet much warmer than today when the Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids, the Romans built their empire, and Medieval British Islanders made wine from grapes they grew in their gardens.

Blaming a temporary warming trend (that has since reversed to a cooling trend) on a trace gas that is conveniently impossible to remove from the atmosphere, Europeans developed "emissions trading" schemes that Obama, his Obamatons, and the founders of fledgling "climate science" recognized as extremely lucrative to the "right" people, and I do not mean conservatives.

How has emissions trading been working out for Europe? According to a study by the Swiss bank, UBS:

The EU's emissions trading regime . . . has already cost European consumers $283 billion....

And what did Europe get for that money? "Limited benefits and embarrassing consequences," according to the report. 

Anything Europe can do, the US can do better: 

In a separate study, the U.S. Energy Department said the domestic cost could reach as much as $570 billion a year. And it would kill nearly 5 million jobs here. 

So what kind of climate policy leadership can the American people expect from the various presidential candidates?

The following quotes, I think, pretty fairly sum up the expressed views of the people who hope to be in charge of U.S. policies on climate spending beginning in 2012.

Purveyors of Climate Alarm

• Barack Hussein Obama: Not only is [climate change] real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.  

Obama wants to cut carbon emissions by 80% through governmental regulations that sidestep Congress and thus the voters who are required to pay for the "hope and change" through higher taxes; lost jobs and individual freedoms; more expensive energy, goods, and services; more highway fatalities in "greener" (smaller and lighter) cars.

• Newt Gingrich: Our country must take action to address climate change.

Gingrich has made numerous public statements supporting cap and trade legislation, if it were to include bi-partisan incentives for "development of new technologies . . . to achieve significant reductions in carbon loading." Read: money, money, money, money for "green" energy producers, even if they don't actually produce energy or produce it much more inefficiently at much higher cost.

• Mitt Romney: I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer . . . ." "[I]t's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors. 

Under Romney, Massachusetts set strict state limitations on CO2 emissions from power plants, but Romney has opposed cap and trade.

• Jon Huntsman, Jr.: To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

Huntsman is named after his billionaire father, Jon Huntsman, Sr., who made his fortune manufacturing chemicals. Huntsman Corporation holds global leadership positions in, among a number of other chemicals, ethylene and propylene carbonates. which are used in the production of lithium batteries.

Call me crazy, but I can think of certain financial benefits accruing to Huntsman Corporation from massive increases in the use of lithium batteries resulting from government subsidies for "green" automobiles, windmills, and solar devices and government restrictions on conventional energy production.

Climate Realists

• Rick Perry: [The climate change scare] is all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.

Last year, Perry sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to prevent their regulation of CO2.

• Michele Bachmann:  The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax. 

Bachmann has called the cap-and-trade bill "tyranny, and the EPA "the job-killing organization of America."

• Ron Paul: Washington bureaucrats have classified the very air we exhale as a pollutant and have gone unchallenged in this incredible assertion.

Paul sponsored or cosponsored legislation that would allow drilling in U.S. waters and ANWR, increase tax incentives for investing in oil refineries, streamline federal approval for oil refinery construction, and suspend the federal gas tax when retail gasoline prices hit $3 pr gallon.

• Rick Santorum: [The climate change scare is] just an excuse for more government control of your life, and I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.

As a representative of a coal mining state who believes that "coal is not a dirty word," Santorum has vowed to reverse Obama's goal of "shutting down 60 coal fired power plants" and to "open up energy in America."

Although CO2 levels have been gradually rising, global warming stopped 12 years ago. Isn't it time we stopped paying for it?
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Come, Let Us Go Back to God -- Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers

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Sunset & Vine Shooter More "Workplace Violence"?

Uh huh.

According to a recent determination by the Defense Department, the Fort Hood Massacre of 14 people (including one unborn child) and the wounding of 29 others, was "workplace violence," not terrorism.

By that standard, the gunman who stood on the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, picking out motorists to shoot at, was an irate worker too: both he and Nidal Malik Hasan were reported by eyewitnesses to have shouted out their rationale for the shootings as "Allahu Akbar!"

Not that the mainstream media or the Obama administration want you to know that.

I imagine word will get around Hollywood, though, thus testing the Hollywood crowd's capacity for denial.

In the following video, an on-the-scene reporter makes much of the fact that the shooter was shouting, but shows little curiosity about the content of those shouts. One of the eyewitnesses sets him straight (around 2:40).

The names of the shooter's two victims, one of whom is in critical condition after being shot in the neck, the other of whom suffered a minor gunshot wound in the leg, have been made public.

The name of the gunman, who was killed by police fire, has not yet been released. (UPDATE: The shooter's name has now been released. It is Tyler Brehm, age 26.)

Zilla of the Resistance reminds us that, since September 11, 2001, nearly EIGHTEEN THOUSAND incidences of workplace violence "deadly islamic jihad terrorist attacks have transpired."

The long list of the Obama administration's aggressive support of Islam includes Eric Holder's lawsuits supporting Shariah law, Janet Napolitano's cleansing of mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror materials (via Zilla), and Tim Geitner's use of taxpayer funds to help Muslim religious authorities collect religious taxes.

The 2012 Republican primaries will soon be at hand, and it is of utmost importance that the Republican nominee who will challenge Obama for the Presidency is not only cognizant of, but willing to fearlessly fight against the ever increasing force of islamic supremacist infiltration of the United States and the global threat presented by islamic supremacist conquest to freedom loving people everywhere.

Zilla offers a very convincing argument that Rick Santorum understands the threat of jihad and should be that nominee. Read her endorsement here.

Want more convincing? Start at The Other McCain's Santorum Sunday Express, which I found via Santorum supporter teresamerica.
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Global Warming Scare Dying Death of 1,000 Cuts

This December I'm following up on some of the news stories I've covered in this blog in 2011.

One of my pet peeves has been the Progressive War on CO2 as an agent of global warming, a fiction used to bolster countless money-grabbing schemes through the simple method of frightening schoolchildren and their parents with the supposedly evil specter of CO2, which is in fact a rare gas essential to life on Earth.

Here's an interesting climate reality check from Climate Depot via Watts Up With That:

The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. . . .

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.

Reality Calls: The Antarctic Summer Ice Melt Actually is at the Lowest Levels in the Satellite Era

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On December 7, 2011 and Rewriting American History

A Japanese photo taken during the aerial torpedo attack on "Battleship Row" on the far side of Ford Island. A torpedo has just struck USS West Virginia (center). Also seen are (from left) Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, Oklahoma (torpedoed and listing) alongside Maryland, and California. (Courtesy: The History Place)

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy drew the U.S. into World War II by conducting a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, killing 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians and wounding 1,178 others. The U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called that day "a date that will live in infamy."

Indeed it was. By the time the Pacific War was over, Japan's killing rampage had taken the lives of about 30 million other people, including more than 100,000 U.S. military personnel.

Chinese man being used for bayonet practice.

Imperialist Japan was a militarist aggressor nation allied with fascist Germany and Italy that had already invaded and enslaved Korea (not yet divided into North and South); invaded China and conducted the Rape of Nanking, in which 50,000 Japanese soldiers murdered half of the Chinese capital city's 600,000 unarmed residents by stabbing, shooting, beheading, disemboweling, burning alive, or burying alive. All of these activities were photographed by Japanese military photographers. Among the dead were an estimated 20,000 - 60,000 females (including small girls and old women) who were first gang raped by Japanese soldiers. Japan had also invaded and taken over Manchuria and unsuccessfully tried to extend Japan's territory into the Soviet Union.

Three of Japan's prisoners of war

World War II, the product of the militarist ambitions of Japan, Germany, and Italy, disrupted the entire world. The war took the lives of somewhere between 62 and 78 million people, most of whom were civilians. In all, WWII killed about 3 of every 100 people alive on the planet at the time.

Today I am thinking about a conversation I had with a young historian who expressed his impatience for the opportunity to rewrite the history of WWII--after all the eyewitnesses and participants, who have written the current history, are dead. His goal is to demonstrate the failures of America and Americans during that war; the trespasses of soldiers in the heat of battle, the failure of American society to fight for our survival as a free nation in a manner that meets today's standards of political correctness.

His chance will come soon enough. The attack on Pearl Harbor was 70 years ago. No more than I can fully understand what it was like to grow up in a Victorian household with a set of Victorian ideals and standards, this young historian, raised in an atmosphere of moral equivalency and schooled ad nauseam in the supposed failures and evils of the American system, cannot understand that many of those who fought that war were men of honor and dignity.

I've known many of them. I have had the privilege of being introduced to the ideals of honor and dignity held by so many who sacrificed for liberty during World War II. I have known many men whose conduct, both during the war and until the end of their days, well reflected George S. Patton's admonition, "Duty is the essence of manhood."

This self-congratulatory young historian has almost no idea of what constituted the ideals of duty, honor, and dignity for Americans during World War II, and he doesn't want to know. But, by the looks of it, in today's educational system where duty, honor, and dignity are such conspicuously old-fashioned anachronisms that they are seldom if ever mentioned, he has in front of him every hope for a successful career furthering the cause of Blame America First.

If the truth were told, many more of those who today hold the U.S. in contempt would realize that they would not even be alive if it were not for the sacrifices made by Americans during WWII. 

Are the lives they are living worthy of the sacrifices made to preserve them?

This is a question, I am convinced, that many Blame America First-ers do not dare to ask themselves.

If the cost is to weaken the U.S. by minimalizing the actual contributions of Americans to human liberties, the true history of World War II, however painful to today's sensibilities, should not be forgotten.

Update: You may toss your cookies when you read this post by Marooned in Marin: Obama Daughters' School Has Japanese Lunch for Pearl Harbor Day; He Uses Dec 7 To Push Class Warfare.

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Lord, Let Us See Your Kindness -- Sunday Psalm

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Occupy SF Starts Bank, Will Hire Homeless & Students

 
Of course, the occupiers are not calling their financial institution a bank. They are calling it a credit union: the People's Reserve Credit Union.

The occupiers plan to accumulate capital assets of $7 million or more through "investments" by organizations and individuals.

Each of the credit union's two planned branches will include a cafe and a commercial kitchen "available to rent."

The occupiers plan to employ homeless people and students to handle their members' sensitive information and money and to loan that money to other homeless people and students (the 2010 Obama takeover of the student loan industry notwithstanding).

Occupy SF already has filed the paperwork to make their financial institution a reality, they say.

America knows by now that government agencies have gone out of their way to "bend the law" to accommodate lawless occupiers in cities all over the country and have permitted occupiers to ignore laws and local regulations with impunity.

With that kind of "experience" under their belts, the SF occupiers have reason to believe that banking regulations for anti-capitalists will be just a little (shall we say) less stringent than for other financial institutions.

This should be interesting to watch. From afar.

It surely will be less interesting when the final bill is delivered to taxpayers--in one form or another.

Ht: PJ Tatler via Mad Minerva.
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What Ever Happened to the Wisconsin "Sick Note" Doctors and their "Patients"?

This December, I'll be looking around to see how events have played out, so far, for some of 2011's newsmakers.

I'm starting out with the Wisconsin "sick note" doctors who, last February, cavalierly and shamelessly supplied hundreds of Wisconsin teachers with bogus sick notes so that those teachers could collect sick pay for days during which they were in fact healthy enough to attend a political rally at the state capitol. More than a thousand teachers skipped school to protest Governor Scott Walker's attempt to help balance Wisconsin's budget by requiring them and others paid from the public coffer to chip in a bit more for their own benefits and pensions.

Except for one doctor who works in a clinic, the "sick note" doctors were mostly faculty of the University of Wisconsin--Madison's Department of Family Medicine, where the healing arts curriculum apparently included how to perform the "public health and community outreach" of writing bogus sick notes to enable government employees to accomplish fraud.

Copies of the bogus sick notes and photos and on-the-scene video interviews of the doctors were quick to hit the blogosphere. Under pressure from this highly publicized breach of public trust in the medical profession by their own medical faculty and residents, the University "reviewed" 22 UW doctors said to have been involved in the sick note scam. By early July, most of the reviews (and appeals) had been (secretly) "resolved." Doctors found to be involved in the sick note scam reportedly received written reprimands or suffered some loss of pay and leadership position.

Starting in April, Wisconsin's Department of Safety and Professional Services investigated 11 of the doctors and eventually referred the names of 9 licensed physicians to the state's Medical Examining Board, which is responsible for licensing and disciplining physicians in Wisconsin. The Department suspected the doctors of failure to meet state standards for medical recordkeeping at their "get your free doctor's excuse table" at the Wisconsin Capitol protest.

In a closed session on November 16, the Medical Board decided to place letters of reprimand for the infraction of insufficient recordkeeping in the files of 7 of the doctors, 6 of whom teach at the University. Those seven are: Adam H. Balin, 51; Mark B. Beamsley, 41; Hannah M. Keevil, 50; Bernard F. Micke, 67; Kathleen A. Oriel, 47;  James H. Shropshire, 50; and Louis A. Sanner, 59.

The Board is requiring the doctors to take a few hours of a continuing education course on medical record keeping, at their own expense, and to pay the cost of the Board proceedings against them.

The Board issued administrative warnings to the 2 remaining doctors, Patrick A. McKenna and Ronni L. Hayon, not to try "insufficient record keeping" again.

As the doctors' attorneys were quick to point out, the Medical Examining Board issued "no finding" that the doctors had "issued any fake sick notes or engaged in fraudulent behavior," a distinction that was not entirely lost on the Board's chairwoman, Dr. Sujatha Kailas, who opined:

"There may be other issues but, at this point, we felt disciplining them on the medical records would be enough to prevent such behavior in the future and send a message."

That message was received loud and clear by Republican Senator Glenn Grothman:

"This confirms my suspicion that the Medical Examining Board is a joke. Their goal is not to look after the public at large but to protect their buddies from an undue interruption in their careers," Grothman said.

The doctors, however, are not without numerous supporters among their fellow protestors. As one commenter at the Madison Journal Sentinal observed:

"I don't know why they are being disciplined, I was physically ill when I was there in February. Prove that I wasn't. Being around hardcore Republicans makes me ill."

Apparently, being around "hardcore Republicans" also makes that commenter more financially secure. As RB at The Right Sphere pointed out:

[P]assage of Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill . . . has led to a reduction in school tax levies across the Wisconsin, among other benefits (aka a healthy budget).

What happened to the Madison teachers who wanted to be paid by taxpayers to attend a political protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol?

Despite the brouhaha, 84 Madison teachers reportedly persisted in submitting "fraudulent sick notes that appeared to come from doctors at the protests." Those teachers were given until April 15 to "rescind" their submission of the fraudulent notes. The 38 teachers who clung to the swindle had "letters of suspension" placed in their personnel files. At least 1,000 other Madison teachers handed in sick notes from other doctors. Those sick notes were all deemed "legitimate" by the Madison School District. Nevertheless, two thirds of Madison teachers lost at least one day's pay for participating in the protest.
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Kaboom! Iranian Nuclear Facility Explodes

From The Australian via Jihad Watch :

Satellite imagery seen by The Times confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.

The images clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was "no doubt" that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was "no accident".

That uranium enrichment facility used to look like this:

Courtesy AP

Now, not so much.

But that's not all:

The explosion at Iran's third-largest city came as satellite images emerged of the damage caused by one at a military base outside Tehran two weeks ago that killed about 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the head of the Iranian missile defence program.

Iran claimed that the Tehran explosion occurred during testing on a new weapons system designed to strike at Israel. But several Israeli officials have confirmed that the blast was intentional and part of an effort to target Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Here's a view of that military base before the November 12 explosion:

 Courtesy ISIS: Institute for Science and International Security

Here it is after the explosion:

Courtesy ISIS: Institute for Science and International Securit

Major-General Giora Eiland, Israel's former director of national security, told Israel's army radio that the Isfahan blast was no accident. "There aren't many coincidences, and when there are so many events there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it's the hand of God," he said....

Linked by Chris at Wyblog, who also reports the good news that the solar energy boondoggle is fizzling out and that Mark Steyn reads our dear Pundette (being the smart fellow that he is). Thanks for spreading the word, Chris.
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