Some were shocked that the threat of terrorism man-made disaster still exists, and that they would choose a religious holiday to attack.
The rest of us were shocked to learn people still want to fly to Detroit.
Shoe/ankle bombers are 0 for 2 now. Is there anyone in our national security agencies that think our luck may be running out? Or, are they too busy tracking all those right-wing extremists?
Stewart Baker from blog Skating on Stilts - his first of ten points:
1. According to early reports, the suspect is 23-year-old Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his name "appears to be included in the government's records of terrorist suspects, according to a preliminary review." The first question, then, is how he managed to get a visa to come to the United States.
If Al Qaeda is an idea in the hearts of jihadis everywhere, and he thinks he’s a part of it, why not grant him the full rights and privileges? Off to Guantanamo, give him a dunking, some AC/DC and Barney, you know, a little of the old “I love you, you love me,” and a military tribunal … oh yeah, never mind. Bungled attack by a wannabe in the post-post-9/11 era? Sounds like a suspended sentence, a couple years of probation, community service and maybe some counseling.
Comments from President Obama:
Not available. On vacation in Hawaii.
Check out Steven Crowder's recent visit to Detroit:
This bulletin board posting was photographed at Fort Benning - home to the Army's Infantry and our alma mater, The Benning School for Boys.
Of course, this is in response to the Fort Hood shooting.
If you're not a lib, let us explain: The US military is more interested in diversity than the safety of their personnel.
First, bases are designated 'gun-free' zones where only criminals may possess firearms. Only criminals may defend themselves. Besides, who's going to trust America's fighting soldier with a gun?!
Second, despite fighting a war started by religious fanatics, that same religion is embraced within our military. Those that find this a problem are clearly intolerant and don't belong in our multicultural military.
And now, because a muslim fanatic and criminal who was allowed to co-exist with America's best decided to shoot them, the law-abiding soldiers must now register their firearms. You see, this would have stopped the Fort Hood shooting and will identify those who have similar plans.
Our work schedule has kept us from posting our Weekend Reading posts in recent weeks. It'll still be off-n-on for a while. Please excuse the inconsistency.
We HAVE to start this post with WSJ's Bret Stephens' piece, The Totalities of Copenhagen. He uses the term "totalitarian impulse" much like we use the term "communist-inspirations" when describing the liberalsprogressives communists that are now running our country. He wears a tie to work where we're typing away in our jammies, but the message is the same. The impulses/inspirations he outlines include: "Revolutionary fervor, Utopianism, Anti-humanism, Intolerance, Monocasalism, Indifference to evidence and Grandiosity. He concludes:
The more enlightened among us would say Bret's unspoken connection to communism suggests he has a screw loose. But Charles Krauthammer makes a call to action for Congress in today's Townhall, The New Socialism. That makes 2! Pretty soon right wingers are going to be launching blogs with hammers and sickles in the title bar - unless we put a stop to this nonsense!
Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet. --- Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.
Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn't lurking in CIA cloak. He's knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.
More comments on our Ditherer in DC. Charles Krauthammer reviews the West Point speech in his Townhall article from last week, Uncertain Trumpet. "...so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive".
Words matter because will matters. Success in war depends on three things: a brave and highly skilled soldiery, such as the U.S. military 2009, the finest counterinsurgency force in history; brilliant, battle-tested commanders such as Gens. David Petraeus and McChrystal, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq; and the will to prevail as personified by the commander in chief.
There's the rub. And that is why at such crucial moments, presidents don't issue a policy paper. They give a speech. It gives tone and texture. It allows their policy to be imbued with purpose and feeling. This one was festooned with hedges, caveats and one giant exit ramp.
No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Churchill. But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge -- Iraq 2007 -- with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching -- and salutary -- determination. --- Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets -- some of whom may not return alive -- but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.
Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?
If our leaders today could consult great generals like the Roman Scipio Africanus or William Tecumseh Sherman — who won what were once near-hopeless wars — they might receive the following advice:
Prepare the public to shoulder human and financial costs.
Be candid about why enduring the horrors of war now is preferable to risking even costlier violence later.
Talk always of winning, never leaving or quitting a war.
Have no apologies for crushing the enemy. The quicker the enemy loses, the fewer get killed on both sides.
Inform the public of the other side’s losses just as you do your own.
And be magnanimous to the defeated — after the war, not during the fighting. --- President Obama talked of many things in his recent Afghanistan speech. But he never once mentioned the words “victory” and “win.” All that may seem like an out-of-date idea to postmodern Americans. But it is still a very real one to the premodern Taliban, who seem to understand the ageless nature of war far better than we do.
First - our apologies for our recent unannounced absence. Despite the end of capitalism, we've found reason to 'live in the past' in recent days. We can't multi-task like Tiger Woods hence the dust on the blog.
The big news of this past week was the Ditherer in Chief finally making a decision, sorta, regarding that troublesome thing he chose to inherent by becoming President - Afghanistan. We've collected some images and comments on this event and share with you below. The cartoons were found at Townhall.
President Obama visited West Point to give his speech. It was not lost on anybody that the rat sleeping under the stage knows more about national security than the guy reading the teleprompter.
One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan -- and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war -- and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.
Lib Bob Sheiffer doesn't have much good to say about the speech:
How do you on the one hand say we need to send these troops over there? It's critical. It's in our national security interests to do this. But, then say we're only going to keep them there for 18 months?
Iain Martin at the WSJ ponders the Taliban view of this speech:
...it sounds like you’re going to have to steel yourself for a year more of increased fighting. But what’s one more year in Afghanistan’s long and troubled history? And your opponent has just told you, on television in front of the world, that after that he’s going to start withdrawing.
Now, Taliban commander, do you feel depressed or perhaps rather encouraged?
A Camacho SLR burned as we continued reading Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. A book about the first man made famine after the Bolshevik takeover.
A GOP lawmaker, in a tense exchange Thursday with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called on Geithner to resign immediately, blaming him for rising unemployment, growing federal deficits and accounting flaws in the number of stimulus jobs created, among other economic problems.
The request, made at a Joint Economic Committee hearing, sparked an intense and remarkable back-and-forth between Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Geithner, who countered that the economy was in significantly better shape today than it was a year ago when Republicans controlled the White House, a view that was supported by a number of Democrats on the committee.
So if the economy is so much better than it was a year ago, why is President Obama holding a Jobs Summit next month?
The deserter, when he was still a citizen, pursued his own comfort and profit and embezzled the precious property of the state. For that, he was sentenced to six years reeducation and admitted to Tule Lake No.12 Reeducation Camp in 2013. Having committed an indelible sin against the country and its people, it is only right for the prisoner to admit his offense and take on the reeducating labor faithfully.
However, this person challenged the generous legal punishment, filled his stomach through larceny, neglected his duties and finally betrayed the kind mother country that gave him a chance to repent and ran away. He was, however, detected by the self-conscious people of the village and got caught. Therefore, following the decision of the Democratic People’s Republic of America’s Central Reeducation Department, we sentence him to death!
The towers fell in New York on 9/11/01, Kabul fell to American led forces on 11/14/01. That’s 65 days.
President Obama’s hand-picked replacement commander in Afghanistan, GEN McChrystal, delivered his Afghanistan war plans to President Obama on 8/30/09, and President Obama hasn’t acted on his General’s recommendations as of today, 11/11/09. That’s 73 days, and waiting.
I think it is time that a decision is made that this country comes together and supports our troops or whatever (Obama) decides. God will guide him. But it is time. It is time.
A group has emerged on several college campuses called Campus Gulag. They setup fake gulags on campus to educate others on the direction this country is going.
Of course, this lowers the political discourse and should be stopped immediately! In fact, one campus did shut it down. If only campus administrators had that kind of power in North Korea or the former Soviet Union....
UPDATE 11.2: Video of campus gulag. The liberalprogressive communist administrators played right into their hands!! Just like a certain hope & change guy has given credibility to our Commie Obama hat's prophetic warning...
SOCIALISM!!!! Seams a perfect, equal system for all, a Shangri-La if you will, not realizing it is nothing but a bridge to Communism, which is total government control! Socialism at its best is corrupt, rotten to the core, a government without overseers! The idea of Socialism is not new in the United States , but it is not openly identified as such in the places it exists. If you live near by, drove through, or happen to live in the projects, you have seen and experienced Socialism in America!
Government housing, government healthcare, government schools, government food stamps, and what you see there is as good as it gets, when the government decides what is good for the people, takes the power out of the hands of the people, and they spread the wealth. Our government imposed full blown Socialism on our inner cities, and in over fifty years hasn’t been able to raise the living standard of those who live there! And look how happy and motivated are those, living in the projects with all that the government is providing for them.
Is that the best we can dream for our children and grandchildren? Is that the America we want to see? I certainly hope not, but that is exactly what the government means when they tell you they want to spread the wealth. They will make us all poor by breaking down our economy, forcing on us taxation on a level never seen before, and if we don’t like it and cause too much difficulty for them, at that point they will have the power to no longer tax us at all, simply take over completely, shut down the borders and impose full blown Communism. Not in America you might say! Think again, look around and see how much we lost just in the last year!
And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope. --- It is a tribute to Reagan's moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.
Here is a screen shot of our survey from today. Says it all, don't you think?
On the bright side: at least "we came back from the brink" and that we're in a "jobless recovery".
As Rush has mentioned, it is easier to get socialized medicine passed when more and more Americans are losing their coverage along with their jobs. It is as if this was all planned....
Current tally: 12 dead, 31 wounded, three loser gunmen one of which is dead.
It just happened a few hours ago, so with little information to go on we decided to post some pictures.
And we'll wait for more details before we read anything into the dead gunman's name, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan.
UPDATE 7:15pm:
It appears GatewayPundit has the best list of links to this story so far. Click here to view. Here are his latest updates:
UPDATE: US Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan Identified As Primary Shooter At Fort Hood. ABC has more on Malik. He is a convert to Islam. FOX News: “This was a deliberate act of execution.” Hasan was an MD psychiatrist.
UPDATE: Malik was previously stationed at Walter Reed.
UPDATE: This was jihad.
Gun Free Zones and Evil do not mix. Libs want to social engineer away evil, GOD bless them. Conservatives? Oh, we want to get rid of every single death trap gun free zone out there. Who's right?
The Democrats did not lose a 2-1 squeaker last night. They lost two huge races, saw an overall evaporation of 25 basis points of support -- and lost by nearly 500,000 cumulative votes in the three high-profile elections.
Or put another way, Republicans won two races decided by millions of voters -- and Democrats won a small race dominated by party operatives. In addition, the GOP made some historic gains in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Washington state special elections to boot.
Conservatives owe NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman immeasurable gratitude. He overcame impossible odds (single digits just a month ago) to come within two points of defeating Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman had zero name recognition. National Republican Party officials dumped nearly $1 million into the race on behalf of radical leftist GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava, who then turned around, endorsed Owens and siphoned off 5 percent of the vote with her name still on the ballot after she dropped out.
Conservatives’ money went to pay for specious attack ads against Hoffman run by the NRCC like this.
Conservatives’ money went to support a GOP candidate who shares the same socialist alliances with fellow SEIU/ACORN/New Party/Working Families Party activist Patrick Gaspard, the Obama White House political director who intervened in the race to secure Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens.
The ACORN accusation potentially can be traced in part to an e-mail, allegedly from the husband of a hospital worker, claiming his wife saw and spoke with the activists.
A New Jersey GOP official provided the e-mail to FoxNews.com but could not corroborate its authenticity.
"ACORN is working the hospitals in Orange in Newark. Registering up to 10 people for absentee ballots and submitting it for them on their behalf," the e-mail said.
If true, the official said, this would be a clear "oversight" on the part of the hospital.
New Jersey law allows third parties to collect a limited amount of absentee ballots, but the official said it would be troubling if activists were involved.
"There's no way to tell if there was any pressure involved," the official said.
Dick Cheney made the following comments on October 21st:
Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.
President Obama has said he understands the stakes for America. When he announced his new strategy he couched the need to succeed in the starkest possible terms, saying, quote, "If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban - or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged - that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." End quote.
Five months later, in August of this year, speaking at the VFW, the President made a promise to America's armed forces. "I will give you a clear mission," he said, "defined goals, and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That's my commitment to you."
It's time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger.
Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.
Bravo Mr. Vice President. May we say on behalf of all Americans who give a s**t about the security of this country, we miss you. Click here for the full speech.
For over a year, there have been warnings that our military face deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan. Candidate Obama, remember, claimed that if elected, he would withdraw from Iraq, the so-called war of choice, and focus on Afghanistan -- which he said was the "war of necessity."
Well, despite all the promises and all the warnings (including dire pleas for additional troops from Obama's handpicked general on the ground), the military still awaits a decision from their Commander-in-Chief. This week, while they wait, multiple bomb attacks killed more American soldiers, making October the deadliest combat month since the war began after 9/11.
As terrorists become emboldened, the death toll in Pakistan and Iraq is also rising. There was even a deadly terror strike against Iran. The entire region seems to be imploding.
Democrats here upbraided Dick Cheney after he called out Obama for "dithering" in Afghanistan, yet the State-Controlled Media will not ask Obama why his decision is taking so long, or if domestic politics are a factor. Nor do they question the time he spends fundraising, campaigning, golfing (poorly, I might add), playing basketball, attending White House concerts -- while the troops wait... and die.
If you don't like the word "dithering," then come up with another word. But it is clear: neither national security, nor the war in Afghanistan, is top priority for this "young administration", but it is a top priority for our brave fighting troops -- and for the parents of those fallen, who are still waiting, in vain, for presidential leadership.
Cartoons on the topic from Townhall, with text below for those of us with reading glasses...
"It's another "Heads" Mr. President." Obama: "Flip again. We'll make it best out of 2,750."
"You'll have to wait, General... We're planning our strategy against Fox News, First."
Chess Board with all the pieces on Obama's side: "Afghanistan"
Obama: "To be or not to be." General: "Still no decision, huh?"
Soldier: "We just got word from Washington. Obama declared swine flu an emergency."
"68,000 reasons whey the President should "listen to the generals" as candidate Obama promised."
Are there still those that will argue that Democrats aren't weak on national security?
The Gun Blogger at Gun Nuts Media was mugged last week. The bad guy brought a knife, the victim held a cup of coffee and had a concealed hand gun. If was the coffee that was discharged at the assailant. Click here to read his story.
While the bad guy didn't suffer a violent perforated death at the hands of the blogger/victim, what we did like about the story is some of the graphics his readers sent in.
A deal between the Treasury Department and a key House Democrat would give the government sweeping new powers to police the country's largest financial companies, including the ability to seize and break up failing companies and order large firms to shrink. --- The proposal would require financial firms with more than $10 billion of assets to pay for the unwinding of a collapsed competitor. The measure would also give the Federal Reserve the power to direct any large financial holding company to sell or transfer assets or stop certain activities if the central bank determined there could be a "threat to the safety and soundness of such company or to the financial stability of the United States."
What about those unsupervised medium-sized companies?!
What about average Americans with savings? Shouldn't they be told to share their savings for those without?
And why not let the other unions cover the costs of failed pension plans by their peers? We're starting to see the logic here....
Members of the Obama administration have taken turns deploring the billions of dollars in year-end bonuses the finance industry is getting ready to hand out. Never mentioned is what they think firms should do with the money. Give it back to their customers? Spend it on office decorations?
Firms can't just wish away revenue sitting on their books. That's an accounting crime. More to the point, aren't surging banker bonuses amid a general downturn the proximate and necessary outcome of Washington's recovery Heimlich, which involves doling out free money to banks and artificially goosing asset prices?
It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon.
We have steered away from this firearm for the related reason that we associate it with evil. Kalashnikov's comment, unfortunately, only refers to the evil in the criminal elements of society. He continues:
I created this weapon primarily to safeguard our fatherland.
But like the Ushanka hat that we named this site after, we associate the AK-47 to the logical next step that Kalashnikov cannot - Communism. Kill millions. Imprison millions more. All, or at least most, at the point of his AK-47.
It is not the weapon. It is who uses it, how it is used, and if it compliments a sexy ushanka...
. A book about the first man made famine after the Bolshevik takeover. 
