http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/soft-pedaling-stalinist-genocide/print/ Max Fisher, foreign affairs blogger for the Washington Post, recently posed “nine questions about Ukraine you were too embarrassed to ask.” Fisher’s answers are informative but someone with a master’s degree in security studies from John Hopkins University, should be embarrassed, or even ashamed, about his account of a crucial part of Ukraine’s. Fisher […]
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-schnee/george-washingtons-spies-how-they-saved-the-american-revolution/print/
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” declared Henry L. Stimson when, as Secretary of State in 1929, he promptly closed the cryptanalysis department of the United States.
Had George Washington been inhibited by such diplomatic niceties, it is likely he would have lost the revolutionary war. This possibility was described by Brian Kilmeade, who cohosts Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends, when he spoke about his new book “George Washington’s Secret Six-The Spy Ring that Saved the American Revolution” at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club at the Beverly Hills Hotel on January 16th.
During a riveting presentation, Kilmeade described the activities of Washington’s group of disparate patriots who frequently risked certain death over many years in order to secure victory against Great Britain, the world’s only real superpower at the time. Almost nothing was known of them or their activities until a horde of letters was discovered in 1929 and handed over to Long Island’s premier historian, Morton Pennypacker, for study and analysis.
The letters revealed the identities of the Culper Spy Ring. It included Robert Townsend, a Quaker merchant and reporter; Austin Roe, a tavern keeper; Caleb Brewster, a longshoreman who ferried messages between Connecticut and New York; Abraham Woodhull, a Long Island bachelor with business and family reasons for traveling to Manhattan; James Rivington, the owner of a swanky coffeehouse and print shop where high-ranking British Officers congregated to gossip about secret plans and operations; and Agent 355, a woman whose identity is still unknown but who used her charm to coax information out of British officers.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/threatening-for-peace/print/ Secretary of State John Kerry has been repeatedly warning Israel of dire consequences if the current talks with the Palestinians do not lead to a negotiated peace. In November he warned of a third intifada on Israeli TV. And on Sunday at the Munich Security Conference, Kerry had this to say: Today’s status quo, absolutely to a certainty, I […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.
In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.
There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.
The film Groundhog Day showed us a man who was doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he learned to use his time to become a better person. Islam has been stuck in its own form of that cycle, repeating the same few decades over and over again, moving from religious ecstasy to holy war, seeking redemption through religious tyranny and Jihad, and finding that there was no escaping the internal decay and instability in the veins of the religion.
Islam’s only redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence, led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.
The Islamic leaders of one generation endorse the tyrants whom the Islamic leaders of another generation strive to overthrow. Hardly had Mohammed kicked the bucket than his nearest and dearest were fighting a civil war over supreme rulership. The origins of the Shiite-Sunni split lay not in theology, but in a vulgar power play between Mohammed’s son in law and his father in law’s clan. That greedy infighting has hardened into theological variations, but the real split is what Muslim wars are always really about, money and power.
Over a thousand years later the Muslim world is still dedicating all its energies to civil wars and external conflicts whose only true goal is to put money and power into the hands of its leaders. The confrontations between the prominent Persian Shiite families running Iran and the Arab Sunni families running the Arabian gulf states are not theological, though they take place under the guise of theology. They are ethnic and economic conflicts dressed up as religious conflicts.
The ugliest elements of Islam, its bigotry toward Jews and Christians, its endless Razzia raids, its need to remove the faintest doubt about the parentage of the children of its women, are pure tribal pettiness distilled into religion by warlords and clan leaders whose understanding of theology did not extend beyond personal power.
http://www.steynonline.com/6067/al-gore-contemplates-the-inconceivable
Barry Rubin, a great strategic thinker and cartographer of the emerging post-American world, died today in Tel Aviv. I read him regularly and cited him in After America re the collectively insane urge of almost everyone Nidal Hasan encountered as he wafted upwards through the US Army to look the other way and not see what was staring them in the face:
As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in US history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave it to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors – some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic”, the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”.
I remember when I read Rubin’s line about the PowerPoint presentation. Many of us had been groping in the same direction, but he was the one who came up with the perfect, piercing image for the madness that was going on. He did that a lot, right up to the end. Rest in peace.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370259/print
Obama’s global fantasies are falling to earth along with him.
In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the Sunni Gulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.
Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.
In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.
The Dreyfus Affair, which splintered French society of the fin de siècle and continued to divide it well into the 20th century, began on the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, with the arrest for high treason of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old artillery officer, a high-ranking graduate of the elite École Polytechnique and […]
Dinesh D’Souza Gets Israel Wrong in Acclaimed Debate with Bill Ayers By Sam Levine…..See note please
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/03/dinesh-dsouza-gets-israel-wrong-in-acclaimed-debate-with-bill-ayers/?print=1
D’Souza is wrongly prosecuted and Ayers is a superannuated radical…but D’Souza has gotten a lot wrong…..This is what he said about 9/11 in his book “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11”-
“In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice—but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.”
Well I make no excuses for the vulgarity and moral decadence-but- and this is a big but- their motivation came from Islam and Jihad- and all “infidels” including conservatives are the enemies they wish to conquer…..rsk
After their anticipated debate at Dartmouth College, Dinesh D’Souza and Bill Ayers took questions from the audience.
D’Souza’s answer to an audience member’s question about Israel was unfortunate (see 1:31:31 of the debate).
The audience member libeled Israel as an apartheid state, accused it of codifying into law discrimination against Arabs, then asked the debaters why the United States supports such a country.
The answer to this question is obvious.
Israel is not an apartheid state.
More than 1 million Arabs live in Israel and have full civil rights. Arabs constitute 10 percent of the Israeli parliament, and one sits on the Israeli Supreme Court. Arabs make up a large portion of the student population at elite Israeli universities where Arabs teach and have full tenure. The only place where Arabs have freedom of speech and association is in Israel.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/i-am-afraid-of-my-government?f=puball
I came into this world when Franklin D. Roosevelt was President and I have never been afraid of my government until now.
I am not alone. A consistent and growing theme of commentaries on the conservative news sites and blogs that I read every day is the fear of the Obama administration that has been cracking down on those who criticize it. They get audited by the IRS. They are refused the same status as non-profit entitles engaging in public education as Left-leaning organizations. They are accused of being racists, homophobes, anti-immigration, and anti-women.
This goes beyond the ordinary disagreements between individuals and groups that express opposition to the Obama administration. It has the look of a deliberate campaign and we have three more years of Obama as President in which to endure it.
In a speech to the leftist nonprofit Center for American Progress, Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-BY) recently urged the IRS to “redouble” its intimidation tactics against the Tea Party. He represents a State whose governor recently said that conservatives were not welcome to live and do business. Its largest city, New York, just elected a Marxist as its mayor.
Jim Lakely, the director of communications of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has led the effort to debunk the global warming hoax, recently posted a commentary, “The Unceasing Political Thuggery of Obama’s Gangster Government.” He noted Michael Barone’s description of the Obama administration as a “gangster government.”
Lakely cited the growing list of actions taken against who have expressed criticism. It includes Dinesh D’Souza who produced a documentary about Obama’s life, “Obama’s America” and who arrested on felony charges for violating campaign finance law. “This is beyond absurd-especially in light of what the FBI and IRS have found not worthy of any investigation, let alone indictment” in the past. A Hollywood group of conservatives, the only one there, received an IRS demand for its complete donor list; this is a repeat of similar demands of Tea Party groups seeking non-profit status. James O’Keefe whose Project Veritas exposed the nonprofit status of the leftist ACORN is being audited as was Frank VanderSloot, a big Republican donor as was conservative journalist Wayne Allen Root-twice. The list keeps growing.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/build-the-keystone-pipeline-already?f=puball
KXL was AWOL from SOTU – along with real energy, job, economic and revenue solutions
President Obama frequently says he wants to turn the economy around, put America back to work, produce more energy, improve public safety, and open new markets to goods stamped “Made in the USA.” In his State of the Union address he said, if congressional inaction continues, “I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible.”
Unfortunately, like Arafat, he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do all these things.
Most Americans are no longer fooled by empty hope and change hype. In December only 74,000 jobs were created (many of them low-paying part-time seasonal positions), while 374,000 more people gave up looking for work. Not surprisingly, recent polls have found that three-quarters of Americans say the country still appears to be in a recession, two-thirds don’t trust the President to make the right decisions for the country, and barely 30% say the nation is “heading in the right direction.”
The President needs to use his pen and phone to free our energy, economy and entrepreneurial instincts. But ANWR, OCS, HF, KXL and other solutions were AWOL from the SOTU. They were sacrificed on the CO2 and CMGW altar, by the POTUS, EPA, DOI and DOE, in obeisance to the EDF, NRDC, other environmentalist pressure groups, and assorted unelected, unaccountable, unconstitutional autocrats.
(Don’t you love Washington-speak – from the land of acronyms, that pricey patch of real estate on the banks of the Potomac River, bordered by reality and places where people actually work to earn a living, despite presidents and hordes of legislators and regulators doing their level best to make that difficult. For those whose Wash-speak is as bad as their Spanish and German, translations are provided below.)*
Our nation is blessed with vast energy, metallic, mineral, forest and other resources, waiting to be tapped. But they are locked up in favor of crony-capitalist, eco-unfriendly, land-hungry, subsidy-dependent, nigh-useless pseudo-alternatives that are dearly beloved by utopian environmentalists – and by politicians hungry for campaign contributions from businesses that they repay with billions in other people’s money, taken from taxpayers at the point of an IRS gun to prop up renewable energy schemes.
