Thanks Barack… Terrorist Group Linked To 9/11 Benghazi Attack Operates Freely In City

Terrorist Haven In Libya – Washington Free Beacon

The Ansar al Sharia Brigade, the Islamist terror group linked to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, continues to operate freely in that Libyan city, according to U.S. military officials.

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The group remains active in the Mediterranean port city, operating patrols and checkpoints, and earlier this year reached an agreement with other Islamist groups allowing it to operate openly, said military officials familiar with intelligence reports from North Africa.

The group “continues to spread its ideology in the Benghazi area, particularly targeting youth,” said one official, who noted that the lack of central government security was the key reason the militia has not been suppressed.

The officials disclosed details of the group’s activities on condition of anonymity.

Ansar al Sharia also is using Facebook to publicize its activities, including charitable work in poor areas, and is constructing some buildings. It also claimed to be operating a medical clinic in Benghazi. Other activities include repairing schools and holding conferences for local youth.

According to the officials, the group successfully exploited the weakness of security authorities in Benghazi and Libya in general to boost its presence. The group is attempting to reinvent itself as a humanitarian and charitable organization after the Sept. 11 attack.

A series of terrorist attacks in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11 killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and government employees Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. The U.S. Special Mission was destroyed and later abandoned during the attack, which featured mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and assault rifles.

President Barack Obama said the day after the attack that the United States would pursue the attackers. “Make no mistake, justice will be done,” he said.

However, at least one of the suspects in the attack was detained in Tunisia and released before the suspect could be captured or questioned by U.S. investigators.

According to news reports from the region, Ansar al Sharia leader and former Guantanamo Bay prison detainee Sufian Ben Qumu was the target of an assassination attempt on April 14 and was wounded in the shootout with unidentified gunmen.

Days earlier, an Ansar al Sharia commander, Yahya Abdel Sayed, was reportedly killed in Sirte.

Fox News reported May 1 that the mastermind behind the attack has been identified and is free in Libya.

The FBI last week posted photos of three men wanted in connection with the attack on the diplomatic compound and asked for help in locating them.

State Department officials are scheduled to testify on the administration’s handling of the attack during a congressional hearing set for Wednesday.

According to an interim report by the House Republican Conference made public last month: “The attackers were members of extremist groups, including the Libya-based Ansar al-Sharia (AAS) and al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).”

The House report said the State Department Operations Center issued an alert Sept. 12 that stated, “Al Qaeda linked Ansar al Sharia (AAS) claimed responsibility for the attack and had called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.”

Additionally, the CIA had drafted talking points for members of Congress to use in discussing the attack publicly that initially mentioned the terrorists had “potential links to Ansar al Sharia,” the House report stated.

The military officials said the Ansar al Sharia Brigade was formed from Islamists who were part of the 2011 revolution to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in early 2012 as an offshoot of the February 17 Brigade.

The goal of the organization is to create a state in Libya run by fundamentalist Sharia law. The name means Supporters of Sharia in Arabic.

Like other Islamist groups, it is committed to conducting jihad or holy war against the United States and Western interests in pursuit of its objectives.

According to a Pentagon-sponsored study of al Qaeda in Libya, the Pakistan-based central al Qaeda terrorist group does not have a formal affiliate in Libya. However, that report said Ansar al Sharia “could be the new face of al Qaeda in Libya.”

After the Sept. 11 attack, protesters drove out Ansar al Sharia from a base it operated in Benghazi and as a result the group assumed a lower public profile.

The Brigade reached an agreement with other Islamist militias in Benghazi in January 2013 to set out clearly defined areas of the city where the militias conducted patrols and operated vehicle checkpoints.

The agreement coincided with reports that Ansar al Sharia was seeking to brand itself as a humanitarian relief organization and to play an open role in Benghazi. The group has downplayed its military activities and played up its social service work.

It opened a women’s clinic in late 2012 and has reported on its Facebook page that it delivered food to needy families in regions outside the city. The group also hosted youth conferences.

An insignia used by the group and posted on Facebook states “Ansar al Sharia Patrols/Your Sons At Your Service.” Among its boasts online were claims the group has intercepted illegal immigrants and seized shipments of illicit drugs from patrols and checkpoints.

News reports from Libya stated that in February Ansar al Sharia commanders were said to be negotiating with the Libyan Interior Ministry on an agreement to hand over detainees to Tripoli government.

According to the officials, the weak central government fears Ansar al Sharia and lacked adequate security and police personnel. As a result, the group has been able to increase its access to both territory and local populations.

Ansar al Sharia militants in March raided the Benghazi European School and searched for textbooks they claimed contradicted Sharia law.

The private school is mainly for children of non-Libyans and raised concerns about the group’s Islamist agenda.

The group is also attempting to generate support for Islamists in Gaza and Syria and has conducted demonstrations demanding the release of Libyan terrorists held in foreign prisons, including Iraq, Russia, and the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.

A second military official who specializes in the region said militias of all types are rampant in Benghazi and Libya because of the weakness of the central government.

“The first problem is capacity: They have none,” he said of the central government in Tripoli. “They can’t even control events in the capital of Tripoli.”

Recently, there was a militia standoff at the Libyan Foreign Ministry with militiamen demanding the removal of officials linked to the ousted regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

“Until the Libyan government is able to stand up a reliable and independent security force of army and police, they will not be able to control Benghazi or anywhere else,” the official said.

Another problem hampering efforts to control militias is the great reluctance of the new Libyans in power to use force against other Libyans, unlike the Gaddafi regime, which cracked down ruthlessly on opponents.

“There is an incredible reluctance on the part of the Libyan government to put themselves in the position where they might draw the blood of Libyan citizens,” the official said. “Nobody in the new government wants to be seen playing the same role as Gaddafi.”

Among the various militias currently operating are the Islamist militias, several rogue militias, and even criminal militias. Some of the militias are pro-government and working with Tripoli.

The official said the pro-government militias are weak or not strong enough or willing enough to impose stability.

The Benghazi attack continues to be the focus of attention on Capitol Hill after a State Department review panel made public in December it found “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department.”

The Obama administration has sought to play down the deadly attack, initially identifying the attack as a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islam video. White House spokesman Jay Carney said May 1, “Benghazi happened a long time ago.”

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30 Reasons To Dislike Barack Obama (John Hawkins)

30 Reasons To Dislike Barack Obama – John Hawkins

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As a conservative, picking out things you don’t like about Barack Obama is kind of like pointing to the wettest part of the ocean. It also goes beyond politics. Not only is Barack Obama wrong politically, he’s not a good guy, “cool,” or even moderately likable. To the contrary, he’s one of the nastiest, least admirable people in politics and he gets by based on a phony persona he created when he ran for President in 2008 – along with the help of press corps liberals that work to protect him like they’re on his payroll. Based on his performance and his personality, Barack Obama deserves to be the least popular man ever to sit in the White House.

1) Nobody but an ass would say, “It’s very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.”

2) He’s a former (maybe, who really knows?) coke-snorting pothead who governs with all the care and due diligence you’d expect from a coke-snorting pothead.

3) Barack Obama actually said, “The private sector is doing fine.” Given that the private sector has never at any point been doing fine since he became President, he’d have to be dumb, dishonest or delusional to say something like that.

4) He is a bigger liar than Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter put together. There’s nothing the man says you can count on him meaning unless he’s saying something nice about himself.

5) He’s made racist comments about white people. Just to name one example,

“That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know that they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn.”

6) His whole campaign in 2012 revolved around telling people Mitt Romney was an awful human being because he had money. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is worth 10 million dollars. What a hypocrite!

7) He once picked his nose on camera.

8) “The same guy who lectured the country on the importance of civility after Gabrielle Giffords was shot also refers to people he disagrees with politically as ‘teabaggers.’“

9) He ate a dog once which is just gross.

10) He actually said, “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you. ” We’re talking about people who murder babies for a living and he’s asking God to bless that? What a despicable man.

11) He went to Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years and considered the man his spiritual mentor even though his utterly vile former pastor is anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-American. Ultimately, the only reason Obama threw him under the bus at all was because Wright criticized him.

12) He looks like a pansy when he rides his little bike in mom jeans.

13) He throws like a six year old girl.

14) Americans dying in Boston or Benghazi? Obama was so indifferent he might as well have been talking about what he was having for lunch. But when gun control failed, that he got upset about.

15) He’s the single least competent man ever to sit in the White House; yet he’s arrogant to the point of narcissism. He’s like a third string high school basketball player who thinks he should be playing in the NBA all-star game.

16) He’s made an ass of himself by publicly inserting himself into both the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the Trayvon Martin case when he should have just shut his big yap and let justice take its course.

17) He habitually demonizes successful people and businesses.

18) He actually told Hispanic Americans that Republicans WERE THEIR ENEMIES, “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.“

19) America lost its AAA credit rating for the first time since 1917 on Obama’s watch and he blamed it on the Tea Party. Yes, seriously.

20) One out of every five Americans is on food stamps thanks to Barack Obama and in his mind, that’s a good thing because it makes those people more dependent on the government and therefore likely to vote for the Democrats.

21) He decimated the American health care system with Obamacare, even though the American people didn’t want it and the bill was universally opposed by every Republican in the House and Senate except Olympia Snowe, who later voted in favor of repealing it.

22) He once threw his own GRANDMOTHER under the bus. HIS GRANDMOTHER.

“I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

23) Time and time again he has said and done things that indicate that he doesn’t like America, is ashamed of the country and finds the whole nation to be slightly embarrassing.

24) Obama passed the DREAM ACT by fiat and illegally, unconstitutionally started the process of giving work permits to illegals.

25) There are Americans and Mexicans dead because of Fast and Furious and Obama is covering it up Nixon-style by asserting executive privilege.

26) He spends more time golfing and going on vacations than he does in meetings on economic policy.

27) He’s spending so much money that it’s almost singlehandedly destroying the economic future of America. One day, kids will be pointing to his picture when they’re asked about the moment when the American dream began to die.

28) This is a man who demands credit for his “bipartisanship” while he says things like, “But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.” What a jerk.

29) After it came out that the Korean rapper Psy had wished death not just on American soldiers, but their wives and children, Obama made a point of shaking his hand publicly even though the fact he was in the same room with him had been controversial.

30) Barack Obama may be the most crooked President ever to sit in the Oval Office. His campaign contributors at Solyndra got 535 million dollars they couldn’t pay back and he broke the law to help his union cronies at GE and Chrysler while taxpayers lost 25 billion dollars on the deal. In a better, more honest world Obama would deserve to face possible JAIL TIME for what he did there.

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Jihad Blows Up The Liberal Utopia (Jeffrey Lord)

Jihad Blows Up The Liberal Utopia – Jeffrey Lord

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Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia.

The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection.

President Obama is not happy – and he isn’t alone.

You know the place.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists have changed their perception of America because the President travels to Muslim nations to give lovely speeches, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere is a wonderful sign of an Arab Spring, and refuses to use the word “terrorist” whether his administration is investigating Ft. Hood, Boston, or Benghazi.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where a 2009 presidential video proclaiming a “new beginning” in American relations with Iran will halt the effort to build a nuclear bomb.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the good intentions of Social Security will never bankrupt the Social Security Trust Fund.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the good intentions of Medicare could not possibility result in trillions of unfunded liability.

• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the War on Poverty was supposed to end poverty – and instead winds up sending violent crime skyrocketing, and, in the words of Thomas Sowell, setting up the American black family for rapid disintegration in the liberal welfare state “that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

One could go on… and on and on… spotting those will-o-the-wisp glimpses of The Liberal Utopia (Obamacare here, the Obama stimulus over there, the promise to close Guantanamo way back there) with example after example of this miserably failed attempt to find or create a Liberal Utopia.

Or what our friend Mark Levin deftly calls Ameritopia.

The search for this Liberal Utopia has been going on in this country since at least 1932 and in fact before that when one keeps going on back to Woodrow Wilson’s progressives and beyond to the late 19th century when the progressive movement began to gain political steam with the likes of William Jennings Bryan and a whole host of other if lesser known figures.

The idea is always the same. To quote Levin: “Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.”

Or, to simplify: if only Americans are made to do X, The Perfect Society will manifest.

What is X? The above list suffices: background checks, a video sending nice words to Iran, opening up to the Muslim Brotherhood, setting up a government-run Social Security or Medicare or Obamacare, declaring a government-run War on Poverty. The Obama stimulus.

And let’s not forget the Philadelphia abortion scandal where live human babies outside the womb were repeatedly killed – a direct contradiction of the entire Roe.v. Wade sacrament.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

Let’s start with two stories that have dominated the news in the last week: gun control and the Boston Marathon murders.

Recall that after the Senate defeated the Toomey-Manchin background amendment, President Obama, outraged, took to the White House Rose Garden to say this:

“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of ‘big brother’ gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry.”

Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences.

Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor? Did the president? Of course not – and for exactly the reason they attributed to those who oppose background checks. Which is to say, pro-choice politicians both, neither Giffords nor Obama have the guts to take on the abortion lobby.

But let’s stay focused on background checks and its role in the liberal Utopia.

Remember the Brady law? So named for President Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady who was seriously and permanently wounded during the assassination attempt on Reagan.

The Brady law mandated background checks across the country. Challenged in the Supreme Court, the law was mostly upheld in 1997, with the exception of the mandate. States however, were free to do background checks. One of the states that picked up on this – as did most states – was, yes, Massachusetts. In 1998 Massachusetts, headed on that endless journey to The Liberal Utopia, passing what has been called “the toughest gun control legislation in the country.” Reported Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby – just two months ago on February 17, 2013 – the “toughest gun control legislation in the country” was signed into law by the-then Republican governor and praised to the hilt by the Democratic Attorney General, as well as a leading anti-gun activist. Jacoby quoted from the Globe story of 1998 that trumpeted the bill’s signing:

“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”

Catch all that? Massachusetts was “cracking down on gun violence.” This “will save lives and help fight crime” in the state’s communities. The new law was a “victory for common sense” that was a “victory for common sense” and “the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” The law “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”

Now let’s leave aside the point of Jacoby’s column – that in fact the law did none of that and that indeed, in Jacoby’s words:

…the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals.

Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month – “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Let’s stay focused on the fact that the Boston bombers did in fact have guns.

That’s right, in addition to bombs, the brothers Tsarnaev had guns. And surprise surprise, in spite of all that “toughest” gun law in the country business – you guessed it.

The brothers didn’t apply for a license.

That’s right. As the Huffington Post has noted here:

WASHINGTON – The Boston bombing suspects engaged in a deadly firefight with police last week, possessing six bombs, handguns, a rifle and more than 250 rounds of ammunition. But the Tsarnaev brothers did not have proper licenses to possess the firearms, according to the Cambridge Police Department – a revelation that comes just days after the Senate voted against strengthening and expanding background checks for gun sales.

Cambridge Police Department spokesman Dan Riviello told The Huffington Post that neither Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, nor Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, appeared to have a license to own a handgun.

“The younger brother could not have applied as he is not 21 years of age and the older brother did not have a license to carry and we have no record of him ever applying,” Riviello said.

Got all that?

So in spite of the Brady law, which subjects law-abiding gun owners to all manner of rules and regulations, and in spite of the Massachusetts law, which was “the toughest” gun control law in the country, and in spite of the hundreds (thousands) of other gun control laws that bind the country, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, hell bent on murder and mayhem, never bothered to get a “proper license.” Brother Dzhokhar, of course, wasn’t permitted to have a license because he was just too young.

Yet somehow, without being licensed, the two managed to have “handguns, a rifle and more than 250 rounds of ammunition.” With which the unlicensed brothers shot MIT policeman Sean Collier to death – and came close to killing Boston Transit policeman, Richard Donohue.

Shocker, isn’t it?

Yet there is no more shock in listening to the reasoning of liberals on gun control than there is in listening to their reasoning on Islamic fundamentalists. The subjects may be different – although they happened to become two stories in one this last week – but the reasoning is always the same.

Let’s hear from Andrew McCarthy, who was the Clinton-era prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh, the brains behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Andy later wrote the more than aptly titled book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and now writes this from National Review in an article headed:

Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away: But willful blindness remains the order of the day.

“Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan – namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims.

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Willful blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario – namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked innocent civilians – became the least likely scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions.

To borrow from the gun control debate, closing one’s eyes to Islamic fundamentalism is not just displaying a lack of common sense (to borrow a phrase from the gun control debate) – it is indeed, as Andy McCarthy accurately calls it, willful blindness.

And this particular willful blindness on jihadists is lethal.

It is exactly the same as the willful blindness that kept the State Department from understanding that there was a reason for the repeated pleas from the now murdered Benghazi diplomats for security assistance. When the attack came on those diplomats last September, the U.S. government had been willfully blinded – right from the top – that such a thing could be the result of Islamic fundamentalism

Ditto with the attack on Ft. Hood by the Islamic fundamentalist Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major. Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – God is Great – as he opened fire, Hasan killed 13 and wounding more than 30. The response from the US government? To declare yet another mass murder in the name of Islam to be “work place violence” – and then have the then-Army Chief of Staff murmur aloud that to treat this as anything else would somehow hurt the military’s diversity push.

And so it goes.

From the promises of Obamacare that you can keep your own doctor to the massive indebtedness of Social Security and Medicare to the War on Poverty that wasn’t and the Obama stimulus that wasn’t either – and on and on and on – liberalism’s Achilles’ heel is that it isn’t about serious, common sense ideas that display an understanding of everyday human reality.

What liberalism is about is creating Utopia.

A Utopian world where gun control stops criminals, being politically correct with jihadists means they won’t attack, the value of helping the aging means Social Security and Medicare cannot possibly be in debt to the tune of trillions, that Obamacare will work just as the War on Poverty worked, and that forcing banks to give millions of Americans the money to buy homes they can’t afford can’t possibly crash the economy.

And on goes the endless parade.

Substituting sentiment for common sense, then watching the results crash and burn in a hurricane of dead Americans, impoverished Americans, massively indebted Americans or continually impoverished, jobless and hopeless Americans.

Does anyone really wonder why so many Americans listen to President Obama say that “the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill” – and believe it’s the President who lies? And that they believe this for the simple reason that all the other liberal Utopian promises haven’t been kept? With a lie just this last week about the results of Massachusetts gun control being all too painfully obvious? Who, based on hard real-life experience with these Liberal Utopians, would ever believe that the Toomey-Manchin bill will never result in what Obama calls “some sort of ‘big brother’ gun registry”? If you believe this, you believe the Boston bombers simply forgot to apply for a license to carry a gun.

The response by liberals to these repeated liberal disasters is to simply ignore the results and walk away. Then finding yet another “problem” on which to visit this same disastrous pattern of emotionally charged non-common sense.

Promising once again that if Americans just do this next X, Utopia will finally arrive.

The question here is whether a majority of Americans will ever come to understand the game.

To know that the real meaning of Utopia is not some visionary system of political or social perfection, as the dictionary says.

Utopianism is, precisely as Mark Levin documents, the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.

It is dumb. It is wrong. It is a call to mindless emotion instead of careful, logical thought. It can and will bankrupt. It can and will – and as we have seen this last week it does – kill.

Which makes the ideas of a Liberal Utopia not just wrongheaded.

It makes them dangerous.

Which makes it time to say enough is enough.

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*VIDEOS* Jeremy Irons Discusses The Nanny State, Homosexual Marriage From A Libertarian Perspective

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*VIDEO* Robert Spencer: Did Muhammad Exist?

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………Click on the image below to purchase Mr. Spencer’s book.

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*VIDEOS* CPAC 2013 Highlights: Day 3 – Saturday (03/16/13)

…TEA PARTY PATRIOTS CO-FOUNDER JENNY BETH MARTIN

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…CONGRESSMAN STEVE KING

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…WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER

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…FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH

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…CONGRESSWOMAN MICHELE BACHMANN

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…AUTHOR ERIC METAXAS AND NEUROSURGEON BEN CARSON

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…FORMER CONGRESSMAN ARTUR DAVIS

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…FORMER ALASKA GOVERNOR SARAH PALIN

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…EAGLE FORUM FOUNDER PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY

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…’10 CONSERVATIVES UNDER 40′ PANEL

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…MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER PRESIDENT BRENT BOZELL

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…SARATOGA SPRINGS, UTAH MAYOR MIA LOVE

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…NRA PRESIDENT DAVID KEENE

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…AUTHOR ANN COULTER

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…SENATOR TED CRUZ

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…………Note: more videos to be posted as they become available.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 1.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 2.

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*VIDEOS* CPAC 2013 Highlights: Day 2 – Friday (03/15/13)

…CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN

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…NRA EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT WAYNE LAPIERRE

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…FORMER SENATOR RICK SANTORUM

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…CONGRESSMAN STEVE SCALISE

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…LOUISIANNA GOVERNOR BOBBY JINDAL

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…CITIZENS UNITED PRESIDENT DAVID BOSSIE

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…………Note: more videos to be posted as they become available.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 1.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 3.

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5 Reasons Barack Obama Is A Creep (John Hawkins)

5 Reasons Barack Obama Is A Creep – John Hawkins

Is Barack Obama the Vladimir Lenin of American Presidents? No, Lenin was competent in an evil sort of way. Obama is more like Leonid Brezhnev: an ultra left-wing, belligerent doofus who isn’t laughed at by the general population primarily because the mainstream media liberals say nice things about him out of fear that they’ll end up in a gulag if they’re too harsh. Of course, we don’t have gulags, but reporters who criticize Obama would be snubbed by their peers at cocktail parties in Manhattan and Old Town, which seems almost as bad to liberals. This is how a narcissist who scores at “Nixon after Watergate” on the presidential likability scale can be perceived by much of the public as a long suffering, bipartisan nice guy. The real picture is less Van Gogh and is more Andy Warhol, if Andy Warhol were a five year old coloring with cow dung crayons.

1) Obama NEVER stops campaigning: Barack Obama almost seems disinterested in actually governing the country. Apparently the only thing he does passably well is campaign; so he has just decided to do that. His agenda, from Obamacare, to free birth control, to amnesty for illegals has nothing to do with the country’s immediate problems and everything to do with politics. This is a big part of the reason that Washington has become even more nonfunctional than usual under Obama – because he ALWAYS acts as if there’s an election next week and winning it by trying to make the GOP look bad is his first priority.

2) What he says is completely unrelated to what he does: Barack Obama is like an alcoholic who pledges to quit drinking and then gets hammered every night. Afterwards, his doting family full of enablers (played by the part of the mainstream media) pats him on the back and talks about what a great example he is for other people because he pledged to quit drinking. This is how Barack Obama can demand a sequester and then turn around and run against it or yammer on incessantly about transparency while he stonewalls on Fast and Furious. We’re talking about a man who’s worth nearly 10 million dollars, who has campaign events with celebrities and millionaires on a regular basis, and who just seems to squeeze in a little bit of work in between lavish vacations and golf outings with Tiger Woods; yet he spent most of last year campaigning against rich people. This is almost like listening to Bill Maher complain about loud mouth know-nothings who regularly say incredibly stupid things just for shock value.

3) He works overtime to pit Americans against each other: Barack Obama’s entire campaign strategy – and don’t forget, he’s always campaigning – is based on convincing different groups of Americans to hate each other. He tries to convince black and Hispanic Americans that Republicans hate them for their skin color, gays that Republicans hate them for their sexuality, women that the GOP is pro-rape, poor people that the rich are taking all their money, people who’ve had children killed that gun owners are in favor of their children dying – it just goes on and on. There have been campaigns of genocide across the world that have featured less vitriolic rhetoric against the people who were murdered than Barack Obama and Company have engaged in since he became President. Then they turn around and wonder why Republicans in Congress have trouble working with them. Go figure.

4) His hypocrisy on bipartisanship never ends: Politics is a brass-knuckled street fight in a phone booth and if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog or alternately, if you’re Robert Menendez, you hire an underage Dominican prostitute. What’s so frustrating about Barack Obama is that he’s as much of a diehard partisan as Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, but he never stops yapping about the importance of bipartisanship. This is a man who has done everything short of screaming, “Screw you, Republicans,” over and over at the State of the Union and yet he keeps claiming other people put “party before country.” It would be nice if he ever put his country before his party. Once. Ever. In his entire presidency. But, we’re still waiting.

5) He’s such a liar: Calling a politician a liar is a little bit like calling the Occupy Movement lazy and violent. It just sort of goes with the territory. But, even in a profession known for lying, Obama is the “lyingest” liar ever to spew lies out of his lie hole because he is allowed to get away with it. Obama’s coverage by the press is like that movie, The Invention Of Lying, where the main character is the first person on the planet to ever figure out how to lie and everyone simply takes whatever he says at face value. In this case, the part of “everyone” is played by the mainstream media which starts with the uncritical assumption that Obama is always right, good, and truthful, while the people who disagree with him are mean, partisan liars. Obama could sacrifice a child to Satan at a press conference tomorrow, get ripped for it by Republicans, and the headlines would read, “Republicans Accuse The President Of Child Murder. Have They No Shame?” Afterwards, Obama would blame the child sacrifice on Bush and we’d have weeks of “Republicans and Satan team up to wage war on children” stories in the media.

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

Poll: Who Poses The Greatest Threat To The United States Of America?

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Ed’s NFL Playoffs Third Round Picks – 2013

San Francisco 49ers @ Atlanta Falcons –

Baltimore Ravens @ New England Patriots –

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——— 2013 Playoffs Second Round Picks ——— 1 Right – 3 Wrong ———
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——— 2013 Playoffs First Round Picks ——— 3 Right – 1 Wrong ———
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——— 2012 Regular Season Picks Record ——— 186 Right – 69 Wrong ———
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——— Week 17 Picks ——— 13 Right – 3 Wrong ———
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——— Week 11 Picks ——— 12 Right – 2 Wrong ———
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——— Week 9 Picks ——— 12 Right – 2 Wrong ———
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——— Week 8 Picks ——— 11 Right – 3 Wrong ———
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——— Week 4 Picks ——— 14 Right – 1 Wrong ———
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——— Week 3 Picks ——— 7 Right – 9 Wrong ———
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——— Week 2 Picks ——— 10 Right – 6 Wrong ———
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——— Week 1 Picks ——— 10 Right – 6 Wrong ———
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——— 2011 Regular Season Picks Record ——— 179 Right – 77 Wrong ———
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*VIDEO* I’ve Got Just Four Words For The Obama Regime

Can you guess which four?

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When I Was A Kid: Reflections Of A 50-Year-Old American (Edward L. Daley)

When I was a kid…

If you mouthed off to an adult – even a teacher in school – you’d more than likely get the taste slapped out of your mouth, and anybody who saw you get smacked would assume you had it coming.

Doctors made house calls, and they were usually paid in cash for that service.

Boosting a kid’s self-esteem was maybe the last thing any teacher cared about. Forcing their students to study and get good grades was the top priority, and accomplishing that goal naturally led to kids feeling better about themselves.

Climate change was a concept we were keenly aware of, although, back then we just called it weather.

Black folks were called blacks, colored people or negroes by most whites and blacks alike. There was no such thing as an African-American. Even immigrants from Africa who had passed their citizenship tests weren’t called African-Americans, they were just Americans like the rest of us.

There wasn’t a single kid in my school who couldn’t read, write, do basic math or recite the Pledge of Allegiance by the time they were eight years old… not one.

The word gay just meant cheerful.

Wearing a helmet while riding your bike was far more dangerous than not wearing one, because if other kids saw you in sissy gear like that, they’d beat the crap out of you.

Israelis were known as the survivors of the worst genocide in modern history, and Palestinians were thought of as just a bunch of Arab Nazis pretending to be the victims of Jewish tyranny.

A rich person was somebody you aspired to be like, not somebody you sought to punish.

Communism was an almost treasonous concept that only doped-up, America-hating hippies experimented with.

Every classroom in my grammar school had a Christmas tree in it at Christmas time, and if any parent had complained and tried to force us to remove them, that person’s car would have ended up with sugar in its gas tank, a busted windshield, four flat tires and the words ‘Merry Christmas’ spray-painted on its hood.

Our heroes were people like George Washington, Neil Armstrong, Mother Teresa, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, General George S. Patton and Albert Einstein.

We understood that the Vietnam War wasn’t lost by U.S. military forces, it was lost by incompetent politicians in Washington DC.

Only wimps played tee-ball.

Most folks had home computers, although they were more commonly known as calculators.

After school, on weekends and during the summer months – unless the weather was particularly bad – kids could be found outside playing with their friends. We didn’t hang around inside, watching TV or playing board games before dinner, and even if we’d wanted to do that, our parents would have forbade it.

Most black voters were Republicans.

Popular music was incredibly diverse, and most performers knew how to play instruments, compose complex melodies and lyrics, and sing entire songs without proving to their audiences that some notes can, indeed, be strangled to death.

Able-bodied people who received public assistance were pitied by other folks, and most of them felt shame for allowing themselves to become dependent on the government for their sustenance.

Nobody played any game just for the fun of it. That’s why we always kept score. If you weren’t playing to win, the game was pointless.

If you saw a grown man cry, it was probably because either his mother or his dog had just died.

It was mostly Europeans who thought of Hitler’s Nazi party as a right-wing political movement. Americans generally understood what the term National Socialist implied.

Reality TV shows included Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Candid Camera and The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau.

We didn’t need government warming labels on everything. We knew that electrical appliances were dangerous if used improperly, that smoking was bad for you, that swallowing things like marbles and those little, plastic, toy soldiers could choke you to death, and that placing a scalding hot cup of coffee between your thighs while riding in a car was as good a way as any of proving to emergency room staff just how freakin’ stupid some people can be.

Books were more popular than food stamps.

Respect was something that your parents were entitled to, your friends earned, and politicians pretended they deserved.

Gas station attendants didn’t just take your money, they pumped your gas, washed your windshield, checked your oil level and even applied a pressure gauge to your tires if you asked them to. And their service didn’t cost you a penny extra.

Only teenage boys bragged to their friends about having sex, especially when they hadn’t. Most teenage girls denied that they’d had sex, especially when they had.

Heavy drinkers didn’t have a disease, they simply lacked self-control. Diseases were things you had no control over.

A liberal was an open-minded, intellectually honest individual who looked at all sides of an issue before arriving at a thoughtful conclusion, not a scatterbrained, reactionary jackass whose natural inclination was to spout socialist theory as a default position on practically every topic.

Everybody who was born in America was a native American.

Men were builders, risk-takers, hunters, warriors, protectors and heads of their households. Women were refiners, nesters, nurturers, teachers and disciplinarians who were usually willing to let their male counterparts delude themselves into thinking that men were the heads of their households.

Most folks understood the difference between discrimination and bigotry.

Marriage was an institution that a man and a woman entered into when they wanted to exhibit their commitment to one another, their willingness to accept adult responsibilities, and their desire to legitimize their offspring. It had nothing to do with making a political point.

Teenagers bringing guns to their high schools was commonplace – especially during hunting season – and anyone who complained about such a thing was generally considered a nutcase.

Illegal aliens were called illegal aliens by practically everyone, because that term best described foreigners who’d snuck into our country in defiance of our laws.

The greatest movie ever made was The Great Escape.

On the scale of human trustworthiness, the vast majority of politicians fell somewhere between used car salesmen and coke whores. In fact, the only people who ever exhibited any level of trust in politicians were the people who had enough money to buy them off.

Plumbers were more respected than Harvard law students.

My friends and I genuinely cared about nature because we spent a lot of time hanging out in it. We went into the woods and built forts, fished in streams, and made campfires, employing the lessons we’d learned in the Boy Scouts and from studying American Indian cultures. We respected nature because we knew what nature really was; a hostile, unforgiving place that would kill you if you didn’t know your way around it. We loved the challenge of the wilderness, and soldiering through it made us appreciate our cushy home lives all the more.

Making fun of other kids or calling them names – while generally frowned upon – wasn’t considered bullying. A bully was a guy who punched you in the head and took your lunch money.

The President of the United States wasn’t a father figure to anybody but his own kids.

Mainstream news reporters were pretty much the same sort of biased, dim-witted, arrogant, assclowns that they are today, only we didn’t have the internet at our disposal to easily prove just how unreliable they were.

Video games were things you played at arcades, unless you were lucky enough to get an Atari Pong console for Christmas.

Abortion wasn’t a privacy issue, it was a moral issue, and people who committed abortions weren’t “pro-choice”, they were baby killers.

The application of oil and its byproducts to run machinery and generate electricity was widely understood to be as important to the advancement of human civilization as the discovery and utilization of fire, the practices of cultivating crops and breeding livestock, and the development of a written language.

Nobody I knew gave half a damn what people in other countries thought about anything.

Concepts like honor, integrity, courage and chivalry were alive and well.

The United States of America was the greatest nation in the history of the world, bar none, and just about every American school kid knew why. Our brilliantly conceived Constitution, Judeo-Christian ethic, free market economic system, adherence to the rule of law and willingness to embrace people from every culture on Earth made us great, and we were conspicuously proud of that fact.

By Edward L. Daley

Sandy Victim Blasts “Phony” And “Liar” Obama For Failing On Hurricane Relief (Video)

Sandy Victim Blasts “Phony” And “Liar” Obama For Failing On Hurricane Relief (Video) – Gateway Pundit

Hurricane Sandy victim, Scott McGrath of Staten Island, gives his opinion of FEMA and the Obama administration’s handling of the storm relief effort.

He blasts “phony” and “liar” Obama.

Via Your World with Neil Cavuto:

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Could you imagine if Bush was president right now? The liberal media would be all over this. Scott McGrath would be on every channel.

Hat Tip Mara

The Right Scoop has more.

Sandy victim Scott McGrath who spoke directly to Obama right after the hurricane hammered Obama today saying that he’s a phony and a ‘straight out liar’. He said it’s been 2 months now and that no red tape has been cut.

He also says that even though they need the aid money from Congress, they shouldn’t lard it up with pork because tax payers will have to pay for it down the road. Love hearing that, especially from a Sandy victim. Also, he said Chuck Schumer is full of it after lambasting Republicans for not passing it with all the pork in it. This guy needs his own show!

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

*VIDEO* Bill O’Reilly: Al Gore Is A Sleazy, Disgraceful Hypocrite

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2013: Welcome To Very, Very Scary Times (Victor Davis Hanson)

2013: Welcome To Very, Very Scary Times – Victor Davis Hanson

On the One Hand…

These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities – an energy bonanza despite, not because of, the present administration.

Demographically, our rivals – the EU, China, Russia, and Japan – are both shrinking and aging at rates far in excess of our own.

In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest food on the planet.

As far as high-tech gadgetry, the global companies that have most changed the world in recent years – Amazon’s online buying, Google search engines, Apple iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops – are mostly American. There is a reason why Mexican nationals are not crossing their border into Guatemala – and it is not because they prefer English speakers to Spanish speakers.

Militarily, the United States is light years ahead of its rivals. And so on…

The New Poverty Is the Old Middle Class

We have redefined poverty itself through government entitlements, modes of mass production and consumerism, and technological breakthroughs. The poor man is not hungry; more likely he suffers from obesity, now endemic among the less affluent. He is not deprived of a big-screen TV, a Kia, warm water, or an air conditioner. (My dad got our first color television during my first year in college in 1972, a small 19 inch portable; I bought my first new car at 39, and quit changing my own oil at 44.)

In classical terms, today’s poor man is poor not in relative global terms (e.g. compared to a Russian, Bolivian, or Yemeni), but in the sense that there are those in America who have more things and choices than does he: a BMW instead of a Hyundai, ribeye instead of ground beef, Pellegrino rather than regular Coke, Tuscany in the summer rather than Anaheim at Disneyland, and L.L. Bean tasteful footwear rather than Payless shoes. I was in Manhattan not long ago, and noticed that my cheap, discount-store sportcoat and Target tie did not raise eyebrows among the wealthy people I spoke to, suggesting that the veneer of aristocracy is now within all our reach. When I returned to Selma, I noted that those ahead of me at Super Wal-Mart were clothed no differently than was I. Their EBD cards bought about the same foods.

Put all the above developments together, and an alignment of the planets is favoring America as never before – as long as we do not do something stupid to nullify what fate, our ancestors, and our own ingenuity have given us. But unfortunately that is precisely what is now happening.

The New Hubris

These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.

There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.

Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument – that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie – was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.

Read the News and Weep

That is not conspiracy talk, but simply a distillation of what I read today. On the last day of the year when I am writing this, I offer you just three sample op-eds.

A journalist, Donald Kaul, in the Des Moines Register offers us a three-step, presto! plan to stop school shootings:

Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. …Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. …Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Note the new ease with which the liberal mind calls for trashing the Constitution, outlawing those whom they don’t like (reminiscent of “punish our enemies“?), and killing those politicians with whom they don’t agree (we are back to Bush Derangement Syndrome, when novels, movies, and op-eds dreamed of the president’s assassination.)

What would be the Register’s reaction should a conservative opponent of abortion dare write, “Repeal the First Amendment; ban Planned Parenthood as a terrorist organization; and drag Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi from a truck”? If an idiot were to write that trash, I doubt the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal would print such sick calls for overturning the Constitution and committing violence against public officials.

Ah Yes, Still More Redistribution

Turning to a column in The New Republic, John Judis, in honest fashion, more or less puts all the progressive cards on the table in a column titled “Obama’s Tax Hikes Won’t Be Nearly Big Enough” – a candor about what the vast $5 trillion deficits of Obama’s first term were all about in the first place.

Here is the summation quote: “But to fund these programs, governments will have to extract a share of income from those who are able to afford them and use the revenues to make the services available for everyone.”

Note that Judas was not talking about the projected new taxes in the fiscal cliff talks, but something far greater to come. He understands well that the “gorge the beast” philosophy that resulted in these astronomical debts will require enormous new sources of revenue, funds “to extract” from “those who are able to afford them” in order to “make services available for everyone.”

That is about as neat a definition of coerced socialism as one can find. Implicit in Judas’s formulation is that only a very well-educated (and well-compensated) technocratic class will possess the wisdom, the proper schooling, and the morality to adjudicate who are to be the extracted ones and who the new “everyone.”

The Constitution – Who the Hell Needs It?

The third item in my year-end reading was the most disturbing. A law professor (could it be otherwise?) named Louis Michael Seidman enlightens us with “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” – yet another vision of what the now triumphant liberal mind envisions for us all:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Did Madison force Obama to borrow a half-billion dollars to fund Solyndra and its multimillionaire con artists?

Note Seidman’s use of “evil,” which tips his hand that our great moralist is on an ethical crusade to change the lives of lesser folk, who had the misfortune of growing up in America – a place so much less prosperous, fair, and secure than, say, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Japan and Germany (in the earlier 20th century history). When I lived in Greece, traveled to Libya, and went into Mexico, I forgot to sigh, “My God, these utopias are possible for us too, if we just junked that evil Constitution.”

White Guys Did It

The non-archaic, un-idiosyncratic, and anti-downright evil Professor Seidman presses his argument against his inferiors who wrote the “evil” document: “Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”

Ah yes, old white male Madison, who lacked the insight, character, and morality of our new liberal technocrats in our successful law schools, such as, well, Mr. Seidman himself:

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official – say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress – reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

I suppose human nature changes every decade or so, so why shouldn’t constitutions as well?

I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their “considered judgment” and favored “particular course of action” trump the archaic and evil wisdom of “white propertied men.” But if we wish to avoid the baleful influence of white guys, can Seidman point to indigenous Aztec texts for liberal guidance, or perhaps the contemporary constitution of liberated Zimbabwe, or the sagacity of the Chinese court system?

The Law Is What We Say It Is

Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.” Ginsburg obviously vacations in Johannesburg, goes to Cape Town for her medical treatment, and has a vacation home and bank account in the scenic South African countryside.

Seidman looks fondly on Roosevelt’s war against the Constitution (especially the notion that law is essentially what an elected president who has proper “aspirations” says it is):

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation.

No doubt.

Free at Last from Constitutional Chains

In the age of Obama, the constitutional law lecturer who once lamented that the Supreme Court had not gone far enough by failing to take up questions of forced redistribution, Seidman writes:

In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

But I thought it was the Constitution, not the anti-Constitution or egalitarian good will, that separated us from Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Tojo’s Japan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and most of the miserable places that one sees abroad today, from Cuba to North Korea, which all had and have one thing in common – the embrace of some sort of national, republican, or democratic “socialism” guiding their efforts and plastered about in their sick mottoes.

The progressive mind, given that is it more enlightened and moral, alone can determine which parts of the “evil” Constitution should be summarily ignored (e.g., the Second Amendment) and which should not be: “This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.”

Give Real Freedom a Chance

I am sure that history offers all sorts of examples where people without evil documents like our Constitution protected free speech and religious worship – out of “respect.” Ask Socrates, Jesus, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, or those with eyeglasses during the days of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, what stops such carnage is not the rule of constitutional law, but good progressive minds who care for others and show respect. I’ll try that rhetoric on the next thief who for the fourth time will steal the copper wire conduit from my pump.

So just dream with Professor Seidman:

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity… What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit… before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

I have seen their future and it is almost here right now. Scary times, indeed.

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

Ed’s NFL Week 17 Picks – 2012

New York Jets @ Buffalo Bills –

Carolina Panthers @ New Orleans Saints –

Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ Atlanta Falcons –

Baltimore Ravens @ Cincinnati Bengals –

Cleveland Browns @ Pittsburgh Steelers –

Houston Texans @ Indianapolis Colts –

Jacksonville Jaguars @ Tennessee Titans –

Philadelphia Eagles @ New York Giants –

Chicago Bears @ Detroit Lions –

Miami Dolphins @ New England Patriots –

Green Bay Packers @ Minnesota Vikings –

Oakland Raiders @ San Diego Chargers –

Kansas City Chiefs @ Denver Broncos –

Arizona Cardinals @ San Francisco 49ers –

Saint Louis Rams @ Seattle Seahawks –

Dallas Cowboys @ Washington Redskins –

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——— 2012 Picks Record So Far ——— 186 Right – 69 Wrong ———
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——— Week 11 Picks ——— 12 Right – 2 Wrong ———
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——— Week 9 Picks ——— 12 Right – 2 Wrong ———
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——— Week 8 Picks ——— 11 Right – 3 Wrong ———
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——— Week 7 Picks ——— 12 Right – 1 Wrong ———
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——— Week 6 Picks ——— 6 Right – 8 Wrong ———
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——— Week 4 Picks ——— 14 Right – 1 Wrong ———
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——— Week 3 Picks ——— 7 Right – 9 Wrong ———
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——— Week 2 Picks ——— 10 Right – 6 Wrong ———
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——— Week 1 Picks ——— 10 Right – 6 Wrong ———
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——— 2011 Picks Record ——— 179 Right – 77 Wrong ———
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P.J. O’Rourke: Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn’t Add Up

P.J. O’Rourke: Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn’t Add Up – Wall Street Journal

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you’ve been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first. And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn’t have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list:

• Telling the Taliban to play by the rules or you’ll take your ball and go home;

• Leaving Iraq in a lurch (and in a hurry);

• Watching the EU go down the sink drain and into the Greece trap and wanting to take America along on the trip;

• Miscalculating human rights and strategic engagement in the Chinese arithmetic of your China policy;

• Being the personification of bad weather during the Arab Spring with your chilly response when you encountered its best aspects and your frozen inaction when you encountered its worst;

• Playing with Russian nesting dolls, opening hollow figurine after hollow figurine hoping to find one that doesn’t look like Vladimir Putin;

• Sitting and doing nothing like a couch potato watching a made-for-TV movie as the Castro and Chávez zombies continue their rampage;

• Hugging the door on your date with Israel;

• Putting the raw meat of incentives in your pants pocket when you go to scold the pit bulls of Iran and North Korea;

But the worst thing that you’ve done internationally is what you’ve done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney‘s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got – with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the… Well, actually, you didn’t mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

Or maybe you just find it easier to pursue a political policy of sneaking in America’s back door, swiping a laptop, going around to the front door, ringing the bell, and announcing, “Free computer equipment for all school children!”

However, domestic politics aren’t my first concern here. The question is whether you want to convince the international community that zero-sum is the American premise and redistribution is the logical conclusion.

I would argue that the world doesn’t need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.

Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos.

Redistributionist political ideologies, in decline since the fall of the Soviet bloc, are on the rise again. Will you help the neo-Marxists of Latin America redistribute stupidity to their continent?

The Janjaweed are trying to redistribute themselves in Darfur. The Serbs would like to do the same in Kosovo. The Chinese have already done it in Tibet. Al Qaeda offshoots are doing their best to redistribute violence to places that didn’t have enough.

And Russia and China would like the global balance of power to be redistributed. Since China has plenty of money to lend and Russia has plenty of oil to sell, your debt and energy policies should go a long way toward making the balance of power fairer for the Russians and Chinese.

While redistribution – or “plagiarism,” as we writers call it – is a bad idea, zero-sum is even worse. Zero-sum assumptions mean that a country that doesn’t pursue a policy of taking things from other countries is letting its citizens down. That’s pretty much the story of all recorded history, none of which needs to be repeated. It has taken mankind millennia to learn that trade is more profitable than pillage. And we don’t have to carry our plunder home in sacks and saddlebags when we’re willing to accept a certified check.

The Chinese don’t seem to understand this yet. They think trade is a one-way enterprise, the object of which is for China to have all the world’s money. They’ve got most of ours already. Mr. President, validating China’s economic notions isn’t a good thing.

A zero-sum faith in getting what’s wanted by taking it can extend to faith itself. In some places there is only one religion. If other people have a religion of their own they must be taking away from my religion. Give up that faith, infidels.

Speaking of infidel faiths, Mr. President, please consider the message of this Christmas week – a message of giving, not taking. And consider your prominent position as a messenger of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. When you embrace a belief in the zero-sum nature of what’s under the Christmas tree and propose to redistribute everything that’s in our Christmas stockings, you’re asking the world to go sit on the Grinch’s lap instead of Santa’s.

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FLASHBACK: Ed Disproves The Fallacy That Conservatives Are Better Off Abandoning The GOP

Don’t Abandon The GOP, Grow A Pair And Take It Back! – Edward L. Daley (07/31/12)

When you figure in the $85 million million (aka trillion) worth of unfunded liabilities from Social Security and Medicare, the total debt amassed by the federal government of the United States comes to about $100 million million, give or take a few million million. That number is equate to roughly seven times the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of our country. In fact, if we were to liquidate all of America’s assets today for cold, hard cash – in an effort to meet the obligations of just those two programs – Social Security and Medicare would still be about $10 million million in the red.

Think about that for a minute. If our federal government seized everything of monetary value in our country, and used those assets to make good on the promises its made to America’s elderly, disabled and poverty-stricken citizens, it would still find itself in greater debt than most nations on Earth.

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This is a picture of Ed when he was 30 pounds heavier than he is now… and his beard had some brown hairs in it.

Now consider this: Social Security and Medicare spending currently accounts for nearly half of all federal spending, yet even though we devote more money to these programs than most of our other budget items combined, we still find ourselves facing a real debt number (not that puny $15 million million the mainstream media keeps babbling about) so massive that the combined GDPs of every other country in the world – roughly $55 million million dollars – equal only a little over half of it.

Let me put that another way. If every nation on this planet pooled together all the wealth they produced in a year’s time and gave every penny of it to the United States, we’d still end up roughly $45 million million in the hole. To give you an idea of how much money that is, here’s a little visualization exercise for you. Imagine you were to stand forty-five million million dollar bills end to end. If it were possible to do so, they would stretch from the Earth to the moon and back approximately nine thousand times.

Now that you’ve got that image in your head – a wall of greenbacks eighteen thousand bills wide, stretching into space to a point so distant that you can’t see the end of it – go ahead and double that amount, and then add another four thousand dollar-wide section to that imaginary money wall for good measure. THAT is our national debt; a wall of singles well over a mile and a half wide, and nearly 239.000 miles high.

If that mental image doesn’t convince you that the people currently in charge of our federal government are so monstrously inept that they shouldn’t be allowed to manage an ‘Orange Julius’ stand, let alone the budget of the United States, then I’m afraid nothing else you’ll read in this article will be of any use to you. I suggest you move on immediately to more pressing endeavors, like – say – staring at small, shiny objects, but whatever you decide to do, please accept my humble apologies for interrupting medication time at the home.

Okay, so now that I’ve whittled down my readership to only those individuals with a firm grasp on reality, let me see if I can adequately summarize my previous assertions in a single sentence.

Our federal debt is really, REALLY big, and our representatives in Washington DC are really, REALLY incompetent.

Moving on…

Glenn Beck, the prominent radio (and former TV) talk show host, has stated on numerous occasions that the only difference between the DNC and RNC is that the latter party is taking our country down the road to statism and, ultimately, economic collapse at a slower pace than the former. And in a way he’s right. The leaders of these two political groups are fairly similar in that few if any of them seem to give a rat’s pucker about future generations of Americans, and the socio-economic hell they face as a result of this generation’s utter lack of fiscal responsibility.

That having been said, Mr. Beck – if, indeed, that is his real name – has failed time and time again to point out that the overwhelming majority of conservatives who constitute the foundation of the Republican party, strenuously oppose the out-of-control spending practices of our elected representatives. He also doesn’t bother to mention that the vast majority of leftists who comprise the Democrat party’s base, exhibit exactly ZERO interest in restraining the growth and irresponsible budgetary habits of our federal government.

As a matter of fact, today’s leftists wholeheartedly support the insane (yes, I said INSANE) increases in spending that the current administration has already inflicted upon our nation, and apparently wishes to double as soon as possible. What’s their primary justification for this endorsement? Well, the Republicans increased spending over the past eight years by more than $4 million million, so now that the Democrat party is in charge, it gets to spend at least double what George W. Bush did on thousands of fatuous, government programs, idiotic make-work schemes and more freedom-smothering, federal bureaucracies than ever before. NEENER NEENER NEE-NER!

Tell me, is any part of what I just wrote inaccurate?

Okay, so maybe that “NEENER NEENER NEE-NER!” thing was a little over the top, but still…

Is there any doubt that the notion of expanding the scope and authority of the federal government originated with the left in this country, or that its subsequent growth momentum has been fueled by the “progressive” movement ever since?

Wacky, yet impassioned Glenn – the self-proclaimed “rodeo clown” and outspoken critic of government waste, fraud and abuse – seems to believe that we can just ignore the two main political parties in this country on election day and come together as a nation of independent voters to solve the myriad problems we face.

Talk about naiveté!

Regardless of how independent-minded one may be, if disseminating throughout the federal establishment the conservative ideals of limited government, personal accountability and fiscal restraint is one’s aim, there’s no viable delivery vehicle available other than the Republican party. After all, that’s where the overwhelming number of politically active right-wingers reside today, and to abandon it at this point in history is akin to calling for the forces of conservatism to further fragment in the face of an aggressive and unified leftist front.

If he were a soldier in General George S. Patton’s army, Private Beck would likely be relegated to the position of chief latrine scrubber for merely suggesting so foolish a strategic battle plan. Suffice it to say that no political ideology can be advanced in the United States without the assistance of an organized party of substantial wealth and influence. Independent political candidates don’t win federal elections very often, and the few who do, usually find themselves alone in the wilderness when it comes to garnering support among their peers for their policy initiatives.

Like it or not, changing the culture of irresponsibility and corruption that defines our national government these days, means changing the culture of at least one of the two major parties currently running it, and to accomplish that, one needs to confront the problem from within. It simply cannot be done by standing outside the gates of power, shaking one’s fists and wailing at the gathering storm.

Sure, there are times when large demonstrations by rag-tag coalitions of citizens can make a difference in the way our public officials behave at any given time, and you’ll find no stronger proponent of such peaceful revolts than I. That having been said, truly influential mass protests are rare and their impact fleeting. Lasting change only comes about as the result of a concerted effort among people of like-mind to repeatedly vote into public office, honorable candidates from a common political party who are capable of persuading others within their ranks to do the right thing.

There will always be a certain amount of corruption in any group, however, which is why it’s important to expose and punish as swiftly as possible the bad eggs in one’s own party. For all their flaws, the leaders of the GOP do have some integrity in this regard, whereas Democrat bigwigs are utterly shameless in their repeated defense of demonstrably corrupt leftists.

It’s going to take a lot of hard work to get the Republican party back on its conservative feet again, no question about that, and the transition from a party of wishy-washy RINOs to one controlled by genuine right-wingers, won’t happen overnight. But think about the ramifications if we don’t even try to salvage it. We’ll be stuck with essentially two versions of the same party controlling the political direction of our country for at least a generation to come; one which continues to slide seemingly irrevocably into the cesspool of Marxism, while the other dances precariously on a sheet of thin ice above that same, putrid sewer.

That doesn’t have to happen, Mr. Beck, but if you insist upon preaching the gospel of “to hell with both major parties” to a sizable audience of disenfranchised former GOPers, Libertarians and right-leaning independents, it probably will. If such a tragedy should come to pass, national bankruptcy and severe economic depression is not only probable, but a near certainty.

Indeed, if our nation is to survive the hopey-changey era of President Obama and his left-wing lackeys in Congress, electing vast numbers of true conservative REPUBLICANS to their respective high government offices is the only rational course of action available to us, and it is a course we must embark on sooner rather than later.

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*VIDEO* Mike Gallagher Moderates The First Virtual U.S. Presidential Debate – Big Voices Media

………………..Click on the image above to watch the debate.

……………………….This event was brought to you by:

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Video-Michelle blasts lying crap weasels AKA Obama administration

Not sure what a crap weasel is, maybe it is like a regular weasel, just more crappy, but that definition fits Team Obama like a glove!

Via American Power Liz Cheney calls the Benghazi Debacle one of the worst cover-ups in our history

She is right, they are desperate to paint Obama as competent on foreign policy, which he is clearly not. And, ultimately, we can blame whomever we want, but it is the President who is in charge, and garners the blame. The most disturbing element for me is that repeated pleas for extra security were denied.

The State Department scaled back U.S. security staff in Libya in the weeks and months before the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, despite requests for additional personnel, former U.S. security officials told a politically charged congressional hearing.

The requests were detailed on Wednesday in testimony by two former security officers in Libya to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and in diplomatic correspondence released by the panel.

These four Americans would be here, alive, today, if that security had been given. And I do not want to hear any excuses. If we have an embassy then we get to control the security, period! If a nation wishes to tell us we cannot have the security measures we need, then we get the people out immediately! Of course, I am sure the president would call such an attitude arrogant, and might even launch another apology tour over it, but for me this is easy. You can call us arrogant, but by God you will never accuse us of weakness. And let me remind you the cost of the weakness Team Obama has shown. Four dead Americans, sacrificed on the altar of appeasement!