The Smoke Break

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The AP Goes P.C. With Ground-Zero Mosque

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Now that His Transparency has come out in favor of allowing an enormous mosque, ironically to be called “Cordoba House”, to be built a mere two blocks from Ground Zero, the ever-fawning AP is advising its writers that the jig is up and they must be more p.c. in their descriptions of it:

1. We should continue to avoid the phrase “ground zero mosque” or “mosque at ground zero” on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” ground zero, or two blocks away.

WE WILL CHANGE OUR SLUG ON THIS STORY LATER TODAY from “BC-Ground Zero Mosque” to “BC-NYC Mosque.”

In short headlines, some ways to refer to the project include:

_ mosque 2 blocks from WTC site
_ Muslim (or Islamic) center near WTC site
_ mosque near ground zero
_ mosque near WTC site

It goes on to explain that Muslims have always worshipped in the area and points out that the military chapel “close to the area where hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the [Pentagon], killing 184 people accommodates Muslim worshippers.”

In many respects, it may be said the military had no choice, however, we, the people DO.  And no Muslim with a shred of decency would deny that building a monument to Mecca and naming it after the mosque built to proclaim Islamic victory over Spain is at all a kind or neighborly thing to do.  Not to mention the allegations of funding from unsavory sources that have yet to be put to bed.

In poll after poll, whether commissioned by the left or by the right, a majority of Americans and a majority of New Yorkers don’t want the mosque built so close to Ground Zero.  But like everything else under this administration, the “wisdom” (read:  etiquette) will be trumped by the progressive liberal need to destroy the hands that feed them.

Aided and abetted by the lame-stream media.

What Really Counts

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The Wall Street Journal posted an article about His Transparency’s cross-country “cash dash” to raise campaign money for Democrats this coming week before hitting Martha’s Vineyard for yet another vacation, raising the question of whether it will help or hurt those candidates in November.  The gist of the article is that elections all come down to money and this trip is all about prying it out of the wallets of the rich and famous:

Mr. Obama will travel to Milwaukee Monday to raise money for Mayor Tom Barrett’s Wisconsin gubernatorial bid. That night, he will attend a dinner for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the Los Angeles home of West Wing television producer John Wells, co-hosted by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Barbra Streisand, among others. The entrance fee for the cocktail reception: $2,500 a person.  Add a presidential photo and the title of co-host and the figure jumps to $30,400 a couple.

There is a thinly-veiled attempt by the administration to make it appear to be a business trip (“Sandwiched in between will be a speech on his exports push and a visit to an energy-storage company….”) but the article states what is obvious:  “politics is pre-eminent.”

And so a fool and their money are soon parted.  President Walking Eagle and the Democrats may think big campaign coffers are a means to their nefarious ends of redistributing the weath to those who have not honestly earned it (with a hefty skim off the top for themselves, of course), but on November 2nd all the money in the world isn’t going to change the fact that voters – ordinary, hard-working, tax-paying Americans like you and me – are going to walk into voting booths around the country and cast ballots in favor not of a political party, but in favor of the Founders and the Constitution.  Meaning, all the mean-spirited attack ads on television, all the flyer drops and emails from progressive-pushing outfits like moveon.org will only further inflame the average American’s distaste for the socialism and politicizing and political correctness already crammed down their throats by this administration and Congress and they are going to quietly vote in favor of conservative thinkers and those who haven’t spent half their lives breathing the stale air in Washington. 

Because at the end of the day on November 2nd, it’s not about money.  It is about votes.  Those of us who are hanging on by a thread due to economic and other policies too-long dictated by political cronyism and egos that cause us to pay more and more for ever-larger numbers of government bureaucrats and “entitlements” for self-perceived “victims”, including criminals, may not have money to donate to those candidates who would begin to help us restore our beloved Republic but we can, and I predict that we will, give them our blessing in the form of our votes. 

And that is why His Transparency’s so-called “Midas touch” will fail.  Tea Parties are just the tip of the iceberg that is the silent American majority.  A silent majority who sees as bullying the derision heaped upon those who voice their beliefs in America’s founding ideas and sees as unethical the utter lack of responsibility encouraged by the progressive liberal ideology.  A silent majority who sees the hypocrisy in the federal government suing Arizon over legislating reinforcement of federal law while ignoring the fact that California has the very same law on its own books.  A silent majority who knows you don’t sign a contract (or vote for a bill) unless you know exactly what’s in it.  A silent majority who knows that “illegal” means “criminal” and who believes that, if for no other reason, simple consideration of the unending pain still felt by others would trump even thinking about building a monument of sorts to Islam anywhere near the site where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell at the hands of Islamic jihadists on 9/11. 

America’s silent majority has at long last come to realize that government “of the people” means every individual must be informed and involved and that their most effective weapon is their vote. 

Not the amount of money in some campaign coffer earmarked for a smear ad against one’s political opponent.

Understanding The 14th Amendment

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If you are to understand any issue, you must do your homework.  So as the debate rages on about “anchor babies” and citizenship for illegal immigrants, I thought it might be helpful to share the following pieces of testimony of Edward J. Erler before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims on June 25, 1997.  (Mr. Erler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and Professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino and the author of The American Polity (Crane Russak, 1993); he has also authored articles on the fourteenth amendment, affirmative action, the death penalty and other topics.)  In it, he puts things into plain English:

Senator Jacob Howard, the author of the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, defined who would fall within the “jurisdiction of the United States”:

[E]very person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

What Mr. Erler has layed out is called “original intent” and in a world where the “rule of law” superscedes the “rule of man” it is the basis for interpretation.  Avoiding original intent for perceptions of political gain is what has created the problem of “anchor babies” in the first place:

…it seems to be beyond cavil that the jurisdiction clause of the fourteenth amendment was intended by its framers to have independent force; not all persons born in the geographical limits of the United States are within the jurisdiction of the United States. To be within the jurisdiction of the United States means to be within its political jurisdiction. Those who today advocate birth-right citizenship for children of illegal aliens born within the geographical boundaries of the United States believe that the fourteenth amendment extends to these children what the framers of the fourteenth amendment said did not extend to Native Americans.

In the case of the children born to aliens illegally in the United States, their citizenship would follow the citizenship of their parents or be determined by the laws of the country in which the parents hold citizenship. The fact that illegal aliens have violated laws of the United States precludes any possibility that they can be properly said to be within the jurisdiction of the United States as the aliens surely have demonstrated that they do not believe themselves to be subject to the laws of the United States, or are only partially subject. Contrary to a currently fashionable argument, the denial of birth-right citizenship to children of illegal aliens does not punish the children for the sins of the parents because the children don’t have a right to citizenship in the first place they are being denied nothing that is rightfully theirs. It would, of course, be a different matter for the children born of legal aliens who have been admitted by the laws of the United States. Whether their children would be citizens at birth or upon the attainment of citizenship by the parents would be a matter for Congress to determine.

Jurisdiction is not a geographical concept; it is a matter of political allegiance. Birth-right citizenship has no place in republican government; it is the relic of monarchy and should be recognized as such once again by Congress.

 To read Mr. Erler’s testimony in full (highly recommended), click HERE.

Obama Appointee Training Offshore Workers

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This sounds like a wicked bad joke, but unfortunately it’s true.  Your tax dollars are hard at work helping to create jobs.  Overseas.  InformationWeek is reporting that $22 million is being spent by a hand-picked Obama appointee  to train workers in South Asia.

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.

“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.

As recently as Monday, Obama, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Atlanta, boasted about his efforts to reduce offshoring. The President said he’s implemented “a plan that’s focused on making our middle class more secure and our country more competitive in the long run — so that the jobs and industries of the future aren’t all going to China and India, but are being created right here in the United States of America.”

Let The Beatings Begin

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The August primaries kick off today with voters in Kansas, Missouri, and bleeding-blue Michigan heading out to the polls to create the election slates for November.  Tomorrow will be a good indicator of just how bloody the next few months will be as turnout numbers are released.

I hope the Democrats have their Depends and binkies within reach.

Remember, if you don’t vote, don’t bitch.

Another Sign Unions Are Now Irrelevant

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“For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else,” is the quote of the week here, found in a Wall Street Journal article detailing how unions are hiring non-union people to walk their picket lines for them.

Sure, hire someone else at minimum wage while you protest the use of lower-paid non-union labor at a construction site.  Only a moron would attempt to spin it into anyting more than it is by claiming altruistic motives but spin they do.

Frankly, I call it stupid.  And this kind of lazy greed on the part of union members is why unions, like Democrats, are now past their expiration date and no longer deserve respect.

Bad Bush Only Eavesdropped, Obama Assassinates?

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This is beyond the pale of the pale.  Anyone who continues to defend this administration needs to be institutionalized, for the hypocrisy shown by this activity is beyond staggering. 

And of course the lame-stream media doesn’t give a damn.

 

More from Glenn Greenwald:

Friday, Jun 25, 2010 08:26 ET
How many Americans are targeted for assassination?
By Glenn Greenwald

When The Washington Post’s Dana Priest first revealed (in passing) back in January that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens targeted for assassination, she wrote that “as of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens.” In April, both the Post and the NYT confirmed that the administration had specifically authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Today, The Washington Times’ Eli Lake has an interview with Obama’s top Terrorism adviser John Brennan in which Brennan strongly suggests that the number of U.S. citizens targeted for assassination could actually be “dozens”:

Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday. . . . “There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us,” said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. . . .

“If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response,” Mr. Brennan said. “If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms.”

Nobody — or at least not me — disputes the right of the U.S. or any other country to kill someone on an actual battlefield during war without due process. That’s just obvious, but that’s not remotely what Brennan is talking about, and it’s not remotely what this assassination program is about. Indeed, Brennan explicitly identified two indistinguishable groups of American citizens who “will face the full brunt of a U.S. response”: (1) those “on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq”; and (2) those “in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place.” In other words, the entire world is a “battlefield” — countries where there is a war and countries where there isn’t — and the President’s “battlefield” powers, which are unlimited, extend everywhere. That theory — the whole world is a battlefield, even the U.S. — was the core premise that spawned 8 years of Bush/Cheney radicalism, and it has been adopted in full by the Obama administration (indeed, it was that “whole-world-is-a-battlefield” theory which Elena Kagan explicitly endorsed during her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General).

Anyone who doubts that the Obama administration has adopted the core Terrorism policies of Bush/Cheney should listen to the concession — or boast — which Brennan himself made in his interview with Lake:

Mr. Brennan toward the end of the interview acknowledged that, despite some differences, there is considerable continuity between the counterterrorism policies of President Bush and President Obama.

“There has been a lot of continuity of effort here from the previous administration to this one,” he said. “There are some important distinctions, but sometimes there is too much made of those distinctions. We are building upon some of the good foundational work that has been done.”

I would really like never to hear again the complaint that comparing Bush and Obama’s Terrorism and civil liberties policies is unfair, invalid or hyperbolic given that Obama’s top Terrorism adviser himself touts that comparison. And that’s anything but a surprise, given that Brennan was a Bush-era CIA official who defended many of the most controversial Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies.

I’ve written at length about the reasons why targeting American citizens for assassination who are far away from a “battlefield” is so odious and tyrannical, and I won’t repeat those arguments here. Suffice to say — and I’m asking this literally — if you’re someone who believes, or are at least willing to acquiesce to the claim, that the U.S. President has the power to target your fellow citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process, what unchecked presidential powers wouldn’t you support or acquiesce to? I’d really like to hear an answer to that. That’s the question Al Gore asked about George Bush in a 2006 speech condemning Bush’s claimed powers merely to eavesdrop on and imprison American citizens without charges, let alone assassinate them: “If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? . . . If the president has th[is] inherent authority. . . . then what can’t he do?” Can anyone defending this Obama policy answer that question?

One other thing that is truly amazing: the U.S. tried to import this same due-process-free policy to Afghanistan. There, the U.S. last year compiled a “hit list” of 50 Afghan citizens whose assassination it authorized on the alleged ground (never charged or convicted) that they were drug “kingpins” or funding the Talbian. You know what happened? This:

A U.S. military hit list of about 50 suspected drug kingpins is drawing fierce opposition from Afghan officials, who say it could undermine their fragile justice system and trigger a backlash against foreign troops. . . .

Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts . . . said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial . . . “They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes,” Daud . “We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own” . . . .

The U.S. military and NATO officials have authorized their forces to kill or capture individuals on the list, which was drafted within the past year as part of NATO’s new strategy to combat drug operations that finance the Taliban.. . . . “There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty,” [Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister] said. “If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?”

In other words, Afghans — the people we’re occupying in order to teach about Freedom and Democracy — are far more protective of due process and the rule of law for their own citizens than Americans are who meekly submit to Obama’s identical policy of assassination for their fellow citizens. It might make more sense for Afghanistan to invade and occupy the U.S. in order to spread the rule of law and constitutional values here.

What makes all this most remarkable is the level of screeching protests Democrats engaged in when Bush merely wanted to eavesdrop on and detain Americans without any judicial oversight or due process. Remember all that? Click here and here for a quick refresher. Yet here is Barack Obama doing far worse to them than that without any due process or judicial oversight — he’s targeting them for assassination — and there is barely a peep of protest from the same Party that spent years depicting “mere” warrantless eavesdropping and due-process-free detention to be the acts of a savage, lawless tyrant. And, of course, Obama himself back then joined in those orgies of condemnation, as reflected by this December, 2008, answer he gave to Charlie Savage, then of The Boston Globe, regarding his views of executive power:

5. Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?

[Obama]: No. I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.

So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges; indeed, when asked if “the Constitution permit[s]” that, he responded: “no.” Yet now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documented in April, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here. Given Brennan’s strong suggestion that there are not merely three but “dozens” of Americans who are being targeted or at least could be (“they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response”) — and given the huge number of times the Government has falsely accused individuals of Terrorism and its demonstrated willingness to imprison knowingly innocent detainees — is it time yet to have a debate about whether we think the President should be able to exercise a power like this?

It begs the question of exactly how one defines a “terrorist group”, doesn’t it?

How Time Flies

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This week we celebrate a special birthday.   Monica Lewinsky turns 37.

 

 

It seems like only yesterday she was crawling around the White House on her hands and knees, putting everything in her mouth.

You Are Now Paying For Someone Else’s Abortion

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Though many of us saw this coming, there was no preparing for the anger and sheer disgust that rises at the blatant hypocrisy of this administration with its latest actions.  President Walking Eagle continues to live up to his name through the auspices of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is reportedly giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that is legal in the state.

That means that YOUR tax dollars will now go directly to help fulfill someone else’s choice to abort their unborn child.

That means that for all his disdain towards those who tried so hard to keep the Hyde amendment intact in that farce progressive liberals call health care “reform”, the Executive Order penned to appease some in Congress to vote for turning over the health care industry to bureaucrats in the federal government isn’t worth the paper on which it was printed.

President Obama pledged that under his health care plan “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

The conservative Family Research Council says the $160 million in taxpayer funds for Pennsylvania is the first known instance of direct federal funding of abortions through the new high-risk insurance pools.
 
The abortion funding for pool participants validates the arguments pro-life groups made throughout the health care debate – that taxpayer dollars will fund abortions, said Tom McClusky, senior vice president of the Family Research Council’s political action arm.
 
“For our efforts to remove the bill’s abortion funding, we were called ‘deceivers’ by President Obama and ‘liars’ by his allies. Now we know who the true deceivers and liars really are,’ McClusky said.
 
“This action by the Obama Administration also exposes the worthlessness of President Obama’s Executive Order that supposedly would prevent federal funding of abortion, but which both sides, including Planned Parenthood, agreed was unenforceable.

McClusky noted that the new health care law also includes $12.5 billion for community health centers, and $6 billion for co-ops, both of which can fund abortions.  And some people will use tax credits to help them pay for plans that cover abortion.

And some still wonder why there is such a “backlash” against the majority in Congress and those in this administration.  Their lying can’t be demonstrated any more clearly than with this.

Campaigning On The Taxpayer’s Dime

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I suppose that blundering Joe Biden has to do something to earn the money we pay him to be Vice-President.  But campaigning for other Democrats seems a bit…shall we say, excessive.  I don’t recall ever agreeing to such a thing being in his job description; do you?

Biden, who has been designated as the administration’s political point man for House Democratic campaigns, will be on the road three of seven days a week campaigning for candidates, this official said.