Iran’s Revolutionary Guards prepare for war [TELEGRAPH] North Korea making missile able to hit U.S. – Republicans press Pentagon for long-range interceptors [WT] Obama offered his condolences and said deaths of 24 Pakistani troops were ‘regrettable’ but accidental [THE GUARDIAN] A dubious death in Dubai: Emirate police and U.S. officials tight-lipped over Iranian expat’s ‘suicide’ […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10974/pub_detail.asp The U.S. Central Command has a new rapid-response team which uses information, rather than weapons, to combat terrorism, the New York Times recently reported. Hunting down conspiracy theories and bogus reports on Middle East websites, media outlets and in the social media sphere, the Digital Engagement Team works at “containing lies, misinformation or just […]
The Winter of Our Economic Discontent
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
What do the United States, Russia and the Middle East have in common? They all have unpopular regimes run by out of touch kleptocrats who faced popular uprisings. The opposition groups in all those place don’t have much in common, but the governments do.
Obama might have sneered at Mubarak or Putin, but for all the pretense of democracy he was sitting at the top of his own kleptocracy, doling out fortunes to supporters out of the emergency bailout and stimulus plans. The Tea Party was the outraged and vocal response of a working middle-class that was seeing its taxes and its children’s future being squandered to feed the appetites of the oligarchy.
The media elite might bemoan the Tea Party as the second coming of the Klu Klax Klan, but it was a far more honest expression of economic discontent than OWS, which limited its manufactured anger to the junior partners in the kleptocracy, while giving the men in power a pass.
Gunwalker: Friday ‘Document Dump’ Reveals Justice Dept. Misled Congress Posted By Patrick Richardson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/gunwalker-friday-document-dump-reveals-justice-dept-misled-congress/
On Friday, the Justice Department released nearly 1,400 pages of documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed more than 2,000 guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. (The “Friday document dump” is a tactic used to keep controversial issues from dominating the news cycle during the week.)
According to the Associated [1] Press [1]:
[The Justice Department] provided Congress with documents detailing how department officials gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border.
Note that AP refers to the Operation simply as being “flawed,” and as being a legitimate attempt to disrupt arms trafficking.
The most notable information in the release: DOJ is now taking the unusual step of withdrawing a letter it had sent to Congress, admitting the letter contained “inaccurate” information.” NPR reports:
Under fire for losing track of weapons that turned up at crime scenes along the Southwest border, the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of formally withdrawing an inaccurate letter about the episode that it sent to Congress earlier this year.
Outrage over Israeli “come home” ads is a sad reflection on American Jewish life Posted By David P. Goldman URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/05/outrage-over-israeli-come-home-ads/ Why did the mainstream American Jewish organizations react so angrily to Israeli government advertisements urging expatriates in America to come home? In a “Spengler” essay at Asia Times Online today, I observe […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/gingrich-plan-on-immigration-a-good-starting-point/
SO IS THE PERRY PLAN AND HE WAS SCALDED …..YOU CAN’T JUST HIDE BEHIND “SECURE OUR BORDERS”….THAT’S PIETY WITHOUT PLANS….NATIONAL ID CARDS, WORKER VISAS….ARE PART OF THE ANSWER AND THE CRITICAL QUESTION WILL BE USING “PROFILING” IN IMMIGRATION LAWS…..RSK
Gingrich Plan on Immigration a Good Starting Point
In a bold move that enraged folks on both the right and the left, Newt Gingrich recently proposed [1] “a path to legality for those people whose ties are so deeply into America that it would truly be tragic to try to rip their family apart.”
Rest easy. As Gingrich has since attempted to make clear to groups of conservative voters, he would create such a path only after accomplishing a half dozen other objectives on the immigration front. On that menu, you’ll find plenty red meat for the Republican base: withholding federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that prohibit local police from enforcing immigration law; building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border with Mexico; making English the official language of the country; and requiring from immigrants an understanding of American history and how it relates to U.S. citizenship; and speeding up deportations of illegal immigrants who haven’t been in the country long enough to qualify for leniency.
Nevertheless, Gingrich said, it’s time for Americans to have “an honest conversation about what we are going to do about the people who are already here.” Most of those folks should be deported, he insisted. But there would be an exception for longtime residents with families and deep roots in the community. Workers would get “red cards” to identify them as having the right to work legally in the United States, but they wouldn’t get U.S. citizenship as part of the deal.
I like what Gingrich has in mind, and I consider it a step in the right direction. It’s certainly a big improvement over what’s happening now, with Congress afraid to even broach the subject and President Obama having deported more people in a three-year period than any president since Dwight Eisenhower.
Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)
The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden release last week of another 5,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University—ground zero of “Climategate I” in 2009—immediately raised the question of whether this would be one of those rare exceptions or Revenge of the Nerds II.
Before anyone had time to get very far into this vast archive, the climate campaigners were ready with their critical review: Nothing worth seeing here. Out of context! Cherry picking! “This is just trivia, it’s a diversion,” climate researcher Joel Smith told Politico. On the other side, Anthony Watts, proprietor of the invaluable WattsUpWithThat.com skeptic website, had the kind of memorable line fit for a movie poster. With a hat tip to the famous Seinfeld episode, Watts wrote: “They’re real, and they’re spectacular!” An extended review of this massive new cache will take months and could easily require a book-length treatment. But reading even a few dozen of the newly leaked emails makes clear that Watts and other longtime critics of the climate cabal are going to be vindicated.
Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.
http://www.galganov.com/editorials/12-5-2011/barack-obama-and-israel/obamas-spin-on-israel/
Obama’s Spin On Israel
It is really NOT nice to call a President, especially a sitting President a LIAR, but, it is much worse to “pretend” that the President is NOT a liar when in fact he is.
OBAMA – THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE RECIPIENT IS POISON TO WORLD PEACE:
Because of Obama, which he will never admit, it was his personal initiative to intervene in Middle East and Moslem politics that have resulted in the beginning of a Caliphate, stretching from Europe/Asia (Turkey), all the way through to North Africa, including countries such as Egypt, Libya, Yemen.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=66342
Defense Secretary Reaffirms U.S. Commitment to IsraelBy Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON | U.S. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta emphasized here Dec. 2 that despite upheaval in the Middle East, the United States remains committed to safeguarding Israel.
The secretary spoke at the opening session of the 2011 Saban Forum, an annual conference of U.S. and Israeli officials and policymakers.
“In this time of understandable anxiety, I would like to underscore one thing that has stayed constant over the past three years of the Obama administration – the determination of the United States to safeguard Israel’s security,” he said. “And that commitment will not change.”
Panetta cited multiple reasons Israel could depend on the United States to continue its staunch commitment to the country’s security.
“I want to be clear,” he said, “that Israel can count on three enduring pillars of U.S. policy in the region, all of which contribute directly to the safety and prosperity of the Israeli people: first, our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security, second, our broader commitment to regional stability, and third, our determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”
The defense secretary cited periods of “great progress” and “great challenge and uncertainty” for Israel and U.S. security interests over the course of his career.
“Yet nothing I have seen compares to the dramatic events of the past year — one of change, one of promise, one of uncertainty, [and] one of turmoil,” he said. “A year, we hope, of Arab awakening, a year of setback for al-Qaida, and a year, we believe, of frustration for Iran.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203687504577005972874755662.html
The State Department vs. Free Speech
Hillary Clinton chats up the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which demands world-wide bans on criticizing Islam.
Last July in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired a “High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance” with the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Mrs. Clinton invited the OIC to Washington for a conference to build “muscles of respect and empathy and tolerance.” That conference is scheduled for Dec. 12 through Dec. 14.
For more than 20 years, the OIC has pressed Western governments to restrict speech about Islam. Its charter commits it “to combat defamation of Islam,” and its current action plan calls for “deterrent punishments” by all states to counter purported Islamophobia.
