FARC hostages rescued
Colombian soldiers staged one of the greatest hostage rescues in history last week, all thanks to a little acting. A disgruntled member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) decided to help the Colombian army rescue three American contractors, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 11 others held captive in the Colombian jungle. The double agent convinced the commander in charge of the hostages that FARC leaders wanted the 15 hostages transported to another location. The rescue crew of 12 Colombians—some dressed as FARC members and others wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and pretending to be part of a fake group called the International Humanitarian Mission—had a helicopter waiting to transport the hostages to their next destination. Everyone, including the hostages, was fooled until the Colombians revealed themselves once they were safely in the air.
Ironically, it was the Che T-shirts that were the most convincing part. “They were wearing Che Guevara shirts, and I thought: It’s the FARC!” said Betancourt. The Associated Press couldn’t bring themselves to mention that fact, calling the apparel simply “white” shirts. As Betancourt’s story is told, however, it will serve to bring down the myth that Che was a romantic hero instead of a terrorist thug. Indeed, Investor’s Business Daily notes, “In reality FARC is Che in action. No group has more right to claim the Guevara legacy than these jungle terrorists who actually have been at it since the days of Che.” The story also is damaging for FARC in that even Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are distancing themselves from the terrorist group they have long supported.
As a thank you for Colombia’s daring rescue of three American citizens, we suggest that Congress pass the free-trade agreement currently being held hostage by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Maybe if Republicans wear Che T-shirts, they can trick her into it.
"They spoke with Commander Enrique and Cesar," she said of her captors. As she looked closer, she saw that the men from the helicopter were wearing shirts emblazoned with the likeness of Che Guevara, the Argentine hero of the Cuban revolution. "I thought, this is FARC," she said.
Not to mention just about any other requirement of holding the office.
This week, Iranian Islamist Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad tested his new ballistic missile, the Shahab-3—range 1,250 miles. Next door in Iraq, 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” uranium ore, which Saddam intended to weaponize for use in his non-existent WMD program, were removed from Tuwaitha. (That’s enough for more than 100 medium-sized nuclear boomers.) And while al-Qa’ida has been routed in Iraq, there was plenty of evidence this week that jihadis are putting up fierce resistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Seems like this is as good a week as any to pause and ponder, “Who should be our next commander in chief?”
The most important constitutional role of our president is that of commander in chief—which is why every Patriot, every American, every human on the planet, should be deeply concerned about the prospect of a “President Obama.”
If Barack Hussein Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, persuades voters that he is a “centrist candidate” and parlays that deception into defeating John McCain, there will be plenty of “change” in the coming years—unpleasant at best and catastrophic at worst.
Arguably, since our nation’s founding, no candidate has been less qualified than Obama to be his political party’s nominee for president of the United States. And nowhere is Obama more ill prepared than in matters of national security.
Last week in Denver, almost all the values of the post-1960s left were exhibited in one act.
It happened on the Denver mayor's most important day -- the one in which he was to deliver his annual State of the City Address. The day was to begin with the singing of the National Anthem by the black jazz singer Rene Marie. But Ms. Marie had, by her own admission, long had other plans. Instead of the National Anthem, she sang "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," a song written in 1899 and often referred to today as the Black National Anthem.
What Marie did embodied a plethora of leftist ideals and characteristics: Ethical relativism, multiculturalism, the supremacy of feelings, the belief that artists are above normal ethical standards and group victimization.
What's troubling, in my mind, is that the same people who watch "the View" or applaud The Dixie Sluts would think how wonderful this is. The same people who have been teaching our children for a generation what an evil country the United States has become.
It should be noted that many individuals on the left condemned what Marie did. And it is not for me to judge whether they did so out of conviction or political necessity; one must generally judge actions, not motives. But to the sincere liberal and leftist, I ask: Do you not see how left/liberal values made this episode possible?Be afraid. Be very afraid (especially if you're a conservative white man).Individuals on the left may condemn what happened in Denver City Hall on July 1, 2008. But, in fact, it was a triumph of leftist values.
Final note: If you do not now fear for America's future, please go on the Internet and watch the Denver city officials respectfully watch a woman substitute her own song for that of the National Anthem. Watch how not a single official stopped her, or even demanded that the National Anthem be sung afterward. And listen to the applause. Then you will fear for our country's future.
Read the entire article here.American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror. (emphasis mine - CTD2006)
After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.
A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.
Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.
CLICK HERE to view "Finish the Job," an ad featuring eight veterans and one blue star mother—VFF members all. The ad was previewed Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and will be the first television ad to air during our “Four Months, For Victory” campaign. The over $1 million ad buy will begin running in select markets on Wednesday, July 9th.
The presidential primary season is finally over, and it is now time for gun owners to take a careful look at just where apparent nominee Barack Obama stands on issues related to the Second Amendment. During the primaries, Obama tried to hide behind vague statements of support for “sportsmen” or unfounded claims of
general support for the right to keep and bear arms.
But his real record, based on votes taken, political associations, and long standing positions, shows that Barack Obama is a serious threat to Second Amendment liberties. Don’t listen to his campaign rhetoric! Look instead to what he has said and done during his entire political career.
- FACT: Barack Obama voted to allow reckless lawsuits designed to bankrupt the firearms industry.
- FACT: Barack Obama wants to re-impose the failed and discredited Clinton Gun Ban.
- FACT: Barack Obama voted to ban almost all rifle ammunition commonly used for hunting and sport shooting.
- FACT: Barack Obama has endorsed a complete ban on handgun ownership.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports local gun bans in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities.
- FACT: Barack Obama voted to uphold local gun bans and the criminal prosecution of people who use firearms in self-defense.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports gun owner licensing and gun registration.
- FACT: Barack Obama refused to sign a friend-of-the-court Brief in support of individual Second Amendment rights in the Heller case.
- FACT: Barack Obama opposes Right to Carry laws.
- FACT: Barack Obama was a member of the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation, the leading source of funds for anti-gun organizations and “research.”
- FACT: Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America.
- FACT: Barack Obama voted not to notify gun owners when the state of Illinois did records searches on them.
- FACT: Barack Obama voted against a measure to lower the Firearms Owners Identification card age minimum from 21 to 18, a measure designed to assist young people in the military.
- FACT: Barack Obama favors a ban on standard capacity magazines.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory micro-stamping.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory waiting periods.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, which prohibits information on gun traces collected by the BATFE from being used in reckless lawsuits against firearm dealers and manufacturers.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports one-gun-a-month sales restrictions.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports a ban on inexpensive handguns.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports a ban on the resale of police issued firearms, even if the money is going to police departments for replacement equipment.
- FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory firearm training requirements for all gun owners and a ban on gun ownership for persons under the age of 21.
For attribution to B. Hussein Obama's records on this issue, see the NRA-ILA website.
Quite simply, Obama would rather address his religious views and his optimism about America and his embrace of diversity than talk about his plans to raise taxes, let gasoline prices soar, and socialize healthcare.
In our new book, "Fleeced," we try to bring the debate back down to earth, focusing on the specific plans that Obama has announced during his presidential primary campaign and discussing the consequences. This is the debate Barack Obama hopes he can avoid.
Consider his proposals:
- In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present.
- So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5 percent-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
- He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
- He’d double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
- He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
- He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation. He says that unless they can establish that there is “probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group,” Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be “relevant” to a terror investigation.
- He does not oppose $5-per-gallon gasoline but only says that he wishes there had been a more “gradual adjustment” to the higher prices.
Obama can talk about the Rev. Wright and flag lapel pins and his wife’s love of
America all day long. But what he resists is a specific discussion of his own
plans for our country. That’s the discussion he fears and he avoids.
The mainstream media has pandered to islam for many years, including and especially Hollywood. One particular movie brings islam to mind, but I think it's wholly unintentional: The Chronicles of Riddick."They are an army unlike any other... crusading across the stars toward a place called UnderVerse, their promised land - a constellation of dark new worlds. Necromongers, they're called. And if they cannot convert you, they will kill you."
Appearing before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) in Washington Saturday, each tried to assuage these concerns—and court a community whose votes could prove pivotal in Florida and a handful of western battleground states.
McCain, speaking first, promised the approximately 700 attendees that resurrecting the bipartisan immigration bill he helped shape last year would be at the forefront of his agenda as president.
“It would be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow,” McCain said in response to a question about whether he would pursue a comprehensive approach beyond his campaign promise to secure the border in his first 100 days in office.
Seeking to win some points for his initial support for a comprehensive immigration bill, McCain oted that his position “wasn’t very popular…with some in my party.”
And, in remarks that could inflame those Republican border hawks, the Arizona senator made lear he would not just seek to secure the border first, as he promised in the primary.
“We have to secure our borders—that’s the message,” McCain said. “But we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary.”
Thanks to an interesting inteview on the Glenn Beck show this morning with Brad Thor, author of the new historical novel The Last Patriot, I did some research on the Barbary Wars. [I don't recall this getting a lot of coverage in history class way back when, but I do recall the goofy 70's tv show The Barbary Coast with William Shatner. That's my only reference to this period in US history]
It seems that several muslim states of the Ottoman empire were involved in piracy on the high seas in the late 1700's and early 1800's. The navies of Great Britain and France kept them at bay until American independence in 1776, when we were left to fend for ourselves. The USA paid "tribute" to the muslims to keep them away from our commercial ships, but when Thomas Jefferson took office as president he declared the USA would no longer pay their extortion money. The result was the First Barbary War as the USA flexed its muscle with her tiny fleet to defeat the pirates.
The war is commemorated by The Tripoli Monument, the oldest military monument in the US (after the Revolutionary War), which currently resides at the Naval Academy.
Here's an interesting little tidbit from the Wiki:
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to negotiate with Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman or (Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Upon inquiring "concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury", the ambassador replied:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.
Sound familiar? And they say we're fighting the Islamists because of GW's foreign policy. I don't think so...
Read about the 18th Century Jihad here.
Don't bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN's political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money. Let's take a closer look at the ACORN Obama knows.
Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including "Leon Spinks," "Frekkie Magoal" and "Fruto Boy Crispila." Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October. A King County prosecutor called ACORN's criminal sabotage "an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls."
Last July, Obama said “more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, “We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:
“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."
Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: “We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from." Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.
But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses:
“In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. ... From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders." Do police excessively arrest blacks? “The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data."
288/434 : Why Islam Cannot Reform
Following 9/11, in order to try to discover for myself the true nature of this purported Religion of Peace, whose ardent followers had just been responsible for the worst attack ever to take place on American soil, I began to research Islam. I started by reading the Qur’an, at the painfully slow rate of 5 hate-filled pages a day. It soon became apparent that this revered Book of Peace had more in common with Mein Kampf than with the New Testament. In fact, there were many similarities between the two. Both were filled with violence and threats of violence, both shared an arrogant contempt for those who dared to disagree with their authors, both advocated for the complete and utter subjection of all unbelievers, and sought an eventual worldwide hegemony.
Both are difficult books to endure. And basically for the same reasons: incessant redundancy, awkward literary style and structure, an annoying tendency to digress and wander off subject; and, although both books were written by undeniably powerful and charismatic leaders, both displayed a fundamental lack of basic literary ability.
However, for me, the most difficult part of the laborious challenge of the Qur’an was in wading through page after page of the incessant and obsessive hatred and violence — by this author’s count, of the 434 total pages in my Penguin Classics version of the Qur’an, 288 pages contained some form of usually quite graphic violence, invariable directed against the unbeliever or the apostate.
For me, the question had been resolved. Resolved by the power of unquestionable numbers. 288/434. No longer could anyone ever convince me that the Qur’an is a Book of Peace, that had merely been misinterpreted. Numbers don’t lie, people do.
Wow. A voice of reason amid insanity. As Robert Spencer at JihadWatch said, he must be an islamaphobe.Khudayr Taher, an Iraqi Shi'ite writer living in the U.S. and a regular contributor to the liberal Elaph website, had a quite illiberal suggestion - he asked why Europe and America shouldn't deport their Muslim populations. He wrote:
"Countries have the right to defend themselves and assure their citizens' safety from terrorism. Likewise, it is clear that the source of the terrorist crimes in Europe and America is the Muslims who live in these countries.
"The security services cannot know people's intentions and sort out who is the noble immigrant and who is a terrorist criminal. [But] wherever there are Muslims, their presence has produced crimes of terrorism and murder.
"Among those Muslims in Europe and America who do not practice terrorism, most of them do not have loyalty and sincere attachment to these countries that have offered them all of the means of life in dignity - housing, studies, work, and citizenship…
"The legitimate question is this: Since the security services cannot sort out the good immigrant from the bad terrorist… why don't these countries deport all Muslims, of all races, from Europe and America, and [thus] find rest from the danger of terrorism, and protect their peoples?
"I, as an Arab Muslim immigrant, sincerely call on the countries of Europe and America to deport all Muslims from their territories - including myself, despite my love and my sincere attachment to the U.S…"
