Muslims Bombing Muslims!!!

Muslims (Saudis) are shelling and bombing Muslims (Yemenis) and we are not getting hourly photos of the civilian casualties!

Read the rest at American Thinker.

Rep Cao vs retired Lt Gen Honoré

The single Republican to vote for Speaker Pelosi's version of ObamaCare was Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, who replaced William "Cold Cash" Jefferson in Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District. Rep. Cao's engagement in bi-partisanship immediately raised the obvious question as to what was offered in return, and Michelle Malkin provides an answer:

Cao wrote he obtained commitment from President Obama that he would work together to address...issues related to Charity and Methodist Hospitals.

Read the rest at The American Thinker.

President Obama: Afghanistan is yours! You wanted the job, you've got it!

Make of this what you will.

US Military Fatalities In Afghanistan/OEF By Year (from icasualities)
Year-----US
2001-----12
2002-----49
2003-----48
2004-----52
2005-----99
2006-----98
2007-----117
2008-----155
2009-----276
Total-----906

Note the numbers for the last four months (June - October) as compared to all the previous history. President Obama announced his new strategy last March, three months before the monthly death toll jumped into the seventies from previous highs in the forties.

Coalition Military Fatalities by Month and Year.













Note the sharp upward trend in KIA by IED:

Washington Post, March 28, 2009
Obama Outlines Afghan Strategy
He Pushes Stability and Regional Partnerships

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 28, 2009

President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. "The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks," he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to "kill as many of our people as they possibly can."

Charles Krauthammer points out what should be obvious:





From a CRS (Congressional Research Service) Report to Congress, November 2007, entitled "Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)in Iraq and Afghanistan: Effects and Countermeasures":

In July 2007, DOD officials reportedly accused four captured Iranians of smuggling explosives and personnel from Iran into Iraq. Iran is suspected of supplying Iraq insurgents with training and new IED technology, such as “passive infrared” electronicsensors that are used for triggering roadside bombs. The new sensors are more resistant to electromagnetic countermeasures now employed by U.S. forces. DOD officials also suspect that Iran is supplying Iraq insurgents with a more lethal IED bomb design called an explosively formed projectile (EFP). An EFP is made from a pipe filled with explosives and capped by a specially shaped metal disk. When the explosives detonate, they transform the disk into a jet of molten metal capable of penetrating armor. EFPs reportedly strike with enough power to cause pieces of a targeted vehicle’s heavy armor to turn into shrapnel, making them much more deadly than traditional IED weapons.

DOD officials report there were 69 attacks utilizing EFPs in April 2007. The same type of EFP device has been used by Shiite organizations in Lebanon, where Hezbollah receives military support from Iran. However, Iranian government officials deny involvement with any transfer of these weapons to Iraq.

UPDATE: As to what Krauthammer calls Obama's "disgusting" continuous bashing of his predecessor, there is a precedent for that and it might be what Obama is following. That was how FDR and the New Dealers treated Hoover, with never ending attacks for years that were often bold faced lies but served a political purpose for FDR. Roosevelt stands as a giant success to Democrats not because he ended the Great Depression but because he won four Presidential elections in a row. Truman respected and came to rely on Hoover for counsel, but Truman didn't carry the FDR baggage.

AP: Jerusalem's Holiest Site Is - Muslim!!!???

Yes, that's the AP headline:

Israeli police storm Jerusalem's holiest site
By RAWHI RAZIM, Associated Press Writer Rawhi Razim

JERUSALEM – Israeli forces stormed Jerusalem's holiest shrine Sunday, firing stun grenades to disperse hundreds of stone-throwing Palestinian protesters in a fresh eruption of violence at the most volatile spot in the country.

A wall of Israeli riot police behind plexiglass shields closed in on the crowd, sending many protesters — overwhelmingly young men — running for cover into the black-domed Al-Aqsa mosque.

Is this journalistic objectivity or is the AP being religiously correct or merely allowing a certain amount of editorializing from a Muslim point of view so as to prevent troubles to - AP? If that had read "Jerusalem's holiest Muslim shrine" or "holiest" Muslim site", it would be entirely accurate and fair. Or perhaps the AP editors are blissfully unaware of the Jewish and Christian shrines in Jerusalem, every one of which predates the Al-Aqsa mosque! There is the Jewish Western Wall and the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher, for example!

Or is this one of those cases that if the AP didn't call the Muslim shrine the holiest site in Jerusalem some would consider that blasphemy?

By way of contrast, Israel Today calls the Temple Mount, upon which the Al-Aqsa mosque site, "the holiest site in Judaism".

We can expect reports of crowds of angry Christians shouting "death to AP" for the blasphemous insult any moment now...

UPDATE: AP has probably noticed a problem that maybe got through those layers of editors! At the Yahoo News link above to the AP story by Rawhi Razim there is now an updated AP story by Matti Friedman in its place. The stories have switched but not the title, which still alludes to the Al-Aqsa mosque being the holiest site. However, the body of the story now calls that mosque Israel's most volatile shrine!

UPDATE #2: Even Drudge has the headline "Israeli police storm Jerusalem's holiest site..."

UPDATE #3: For those who may not know;

The Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) is a remnant of Herod's Temple, built about 20 B.C. The Temple was virtually destroyed by the Romans about 70 A.D.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was first built around 330 A.D. by Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was believed to have been built on the spot where Jesus' body was laid to rest in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathia and that therefore was also the place at which Jesus rose from the dead. It is also believed to have been built on the Hill called Golgotha where Jesus was crucified. The original church was destroyed by the Persians during a siege of Jerusalem around 614 A.D. and rebuilt. The Muslim Egyptian caliph al-Hakim destroyed that church around 1010 A.D. Most of the current standing church was built by the Crusaders who completed their construction in 1168 A.D.

The Al-Aqsa mosque is where Mohammed is believed to have prayed and received from Allah the commandment to pray fives times a day. Mohammed is believed to have traveled from Mecca to Jerusalem on a flying white horse. The mosque was built over what was the remains of the mostly destroyed Jewish Temple in about 709 A.D. It is considered the third holiest Muslim site after Mecca and Medina.

The Obama Thesis Mess, involving Michael Ledeen, Rush Limbaugh and Joe Klein, and my sorry part in it all!

Yesterday was not a good day! I found myself at something close to the center of an embarrassing controversy (The Obama Columbia Thesis Affair!), and though not alone in that uncomfortable location, much if not most of it was totally my fault.

Early in the day I ran across a two day old post at Faster, Please!, Michael Ledeen's blog. I've read and respected Mr. Ledeen's work for years. It was entitled Obama and the Constitution; He Has His Doubts.

Mr. Ledeen wrote at the very beginning of his post:

Brian Lancaster at Jumping in Pools reported on Obama’s college thesis...

So very early to make a critical assumption and mistake, but not too early for me! I have used similar formulations, such as "as reported by Robin at Chickenhawk Express". When I do so, I am invariably making reference to someone who has credibility with me. I read Mr. Ledeen's words projecting my own sense of confidence in that way and didn't follow the link to Brian Lancaster's site. Huge mistake!

Noting that Mr. Ledeen's post was two days old (Oct. 21), I searched Google news for sources that would have picked up the story of these eminently newsworthy quotes attributed to a young Barack Obama at Columbia. I got nothing.

At that point and considering some very verifiable history of the GUANOs (Government's Unoffically Authorized News Organizations) as regards Barack Obama, I thought we might have another case of media 'ho-hum, move along, nothing to see here' when something might reflect badly on Obama!

I wrote a short piece comparing what I thought was media inaction in reporting on what I thought was an Obama thesis and the many reports in the media on the decades old thesis written by the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia. I sent that to American Thinker mid-morning, and it was posted as Obama's Columbia thesis excerpt surfaces. That post had:

What on earth does this President have to do to get the media coverage he so richly deserves! In the Virginia Governor's race, Republican candidate Robert McDonnell wrote a graduate thesis twenty years ago that could be politically damaging to his campaign. That decades old thesis has been covered by the Washington Post on August 30 and again on September 1. It has been reported on in some depth across the spectrum of media outlets from NPR to US News to the CS Monitor to FOX and on and on!

That was the main point of the post. I also quoted the supposed thesis by Obama as having this written by him:

... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.

I didn't then and do not now consider those sentiments to be beyond the pale of possibility that Obama could think and write such as a very young college student who by his own admission sought to hang out with the radicals at Columbia, some of whom I've known! In this 2001 interview video, Obama the State Senator speaks of the Constitution as a document of negative liberties that avoided discussion of distribution of wealth, his "redistributive change".

Having said that, my main point was still about the GUANOs covering for Obama, a very current topic as the administrations has sought to keep the GUANOs in line by the example of ostracizing and demonizing FOX.

AT published the post and I had other things to do, but in spurts as I could I began to search Google news for any connection, as the Ledeen post had claimed, between Joe Klein and the thesis, and came up empty. I started to have growing doubts about the story. When the post went up at AT, the first comment to it was time stamped at 9:13. The times on the comments do not reflect the real time here on the East Coast where I write, but they do properly show intervals. By 9:59, three quarters of an hour later by time stamp, I commented as DenisK, identifying myself as the author, that I have doubts that the story I picked up from Michael Ledeen's blog was real and I was having trouble verifying it from other news sources. I wrote:

...I am having no success now in further verifying the quote and a growing sense of doubt that it is real.

In the interim and afterward, I tried without success to contact Mr. Ledeen (but did get through to PJM, the host for Mr. Ledeen's blog, with my concerns) and to continue to try to find any news source connecting Joe Klein to a supposed thesis. PJM later replied to me that they were also doubting the story. In frustration I finally, belatedly, unforgivably went to Mr. Ledeen's source for the story at Jumping in Pools- and found it to be a satire! I had certainly found - confirmation!

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh while doing so and he started to reference the Ledeen claim on his radio show, and believing in abject shame that he picked it up from my post at AT (he did as he later read from my piece), I immediately e-mailed him (subject line: Obama Thesis Quote Phony) and stated that I was the AT author, that I checked Ledeen's source and found it to be satire and that he should back away from a story that was totally bogus. If you go to the transcripts of Rush's show, you will find that he backed off the story within minutes of talking about it, though I don't necessarily believe it was my e-mail or solely my e-mail that got to him on it! Rush said this, and did so making his own satirical point about the GUANOs:

I'm also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama's thesis is a satire blog. So it's one of these sites like ScrappleFace or The Onion or some such thing. So I shout from the mountaintops: "It was satire!" But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He's mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That's how it works in the media today.

Immediately after that I posted in the comments again at AT (11:42 a.m.) with a correction stating that Ledeen had inadvertently taken a satire seriously and that I had taken Ledeen's post seriously and the story was bogus. Not long after that Mr. Ledeen posted a link at the top of his blog post to an apology he offered for the mistake, and he also personally contacted Joe Klein and apologized to him:

The Obama “thesis” hoax
It’s a hoax, or a satire, depending on your point of view. Joe Klein has said that he never read any part of an Obama “thesis” from his Columbia days, and that’s conclusive, as far as I’m concerned.

The hoax/satire was written in August, so it’s not connected to any current event. I cam across it on Twitter, read the blog, found it interesting, and posted on it. I failed to notice that one of the tags was “satire.” So he got me, and lots of others. It worked because it’s plausible...

So I should have picked up some hint, but I didn’t. Shame on me.

I’m posting this as quickly as possible. Apologies to the president and to Joe Klein, and to Rush Limbaugh, who had many very wise things to say about the Constitution and the views of the Founders today, and to everyone else who got involved.

I ended up posting two more comments, one yesterday when it seemed some readers weren't getting the point that the story was in error. The other was today, with more detail, and in that one I directly answered one critical commentor, CommonSense, as follows:

Yes, CommonSense, bad mistakes, very much including mine. However, how quickly did we seek to correct them? Mr. Ledeen, Rush Limbaugh and PJM and the blog post author here at AT all posted corrections or backed off the story or both within hours or less. Was that the case with the major media and many on the left with the fake Limbaugh quotes, or the fake TANG documents about Bush, or Jimmy Masssey, or...as you write this:

"Have you all no shame? As the president he deserves that much."

CommonSense, have you ever in the last several years heard the totally bogus claim that "Bush lied" about Iraq, and who has climbed down on that false charge? On the left it was just keep repeating the lie until it is believed! That's the difference.

I also have to say this. I believe Mr. Ledeen's apology, especially to Joe Klein, was gracious. Mr. Klein's response, not so very much:

A report is circulating among the wingnuts that I had a peek at Barack Obama's senior thesis. It is completely false. I've never seen Obama's thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from--but I can assure you that it's complete nonsense.
Update: Michael Ledeen now has apologized to me on his blog, claiming that he, Limbaugh and others were punked by a satire. I appreciate the apology...but I wonder about what the willingness to take this cheesy crap as gospel says about Ledeen's--and Boss Rush's--sensibility. Actually, on second thought, I don't wonder all that much.

All I can say to Mr. Klein is that people make mistakes. Some try to correct them and even make strenuous effort to do so. Others, when having been accused of writing things that were in error, say things like:

I have neither the time nor...background to figure out who's right.

I didn't write that. Joe Klein did, and it comes from Editor & Publisher, November 29, 2007, and reads:

Klein, under persistent pressure since, backtracked to some extent in recent days, offering repeated updated clarifications, which critics also deemed inadequate. Finally he wrote, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Now the next issue of Time magazine, due out Friday, runs a correction of sorts that Greenwald and others may still find lacking as it suggests the factual matter is under dispute. The Chicago Tribune, however, which carried Klein's column, ran a full-fledged, unqualified correction, today.

Yes, Mr. Klein, we can all make mistakes, and some of us seek to correct them quickly and apologize with sincerity, without pressure or equivocation. Yesterday I wrote this (4:59) in the comments at AT:

The source I relied on for the news about the supposed Obama thesis and the quotes that appeared "Obama Not Getting Media Coverage He Deserves!" was Michael Ledeen at PJM. He has now retracted his story and apologized for any trouble his post has caused to any, stating that he was taken in by what was either a fraud or a satire. I too sincerely apologize to American Thinker, its readership and Rush Limbaugh, for my part in having spread what turned out to be entirely false. I should have checked further than a single source for something with such volatile content.

But then again, Mr. Klein, I'm not a professional journalist who does this for a living or any compensation, so I didn't have to be pressured to make correction to error.

UPDATE: One might almost think there's a pattern of behavior here....

Another blog, Left Coast Rebel, also fell for the satire as being real and then also corrected and apologized without the need for any kind of pressure! Gosh!

Rush should make CNN an offer it can't refuse

CNN just keeps embarrassing itself. Oddly enough, Rush Limbaugh could help them out, while doing himself a little good at the same time.

Following close on its much-derided ‘fact checking' of an SNL skit poking fun at President Obama, and the humiliating pat-on-the-head it got as an Obama administration-certified legitimate news organization, CNN has now queried a psychiatrist as to why folks listen to conservative talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. CNN's Carol Costello interviewed psychiatrist Gail Saltz. (Video courtesy of Breitbart. Watch it!)

Read the rest at American Thinker.

Proposed: Hollywood Follow NFL’s Limbaugh Example

Principled action prevented the divisive and arguably racist Rush Limbaugh from becoming part owner of an NFL team. That welcome turn of events is owed in no small part to the courageous stand taken by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who said this about the prospect of Limbaugh’s ownership:

We're all held to a high standard here and divisive comments are not what the NFL's all about…I would not want to see those kind of comments from people who are in a responsible position in the NFL...

That is standing foursquare for high standards in this time of expedient compromise!

There is unresolved dispute about whether Limbaugh did or didn’t make certain statements attributed to him praising aspects of slavery or wishing that the assassin of Martin Luther King be awarded a Medal of Honor. No one seems to be able to substantiate the quotes but neither has Limbaugh been able prove he didn’t say them! However, there is no doubt about other despicable Limbaugh statements and show antics such as Barack the Magic Negro, pro football players looking like the Crips and Bloods, white kids being beaten by black kids in Obama’s America or Limbaugh giving his own mother a can opener as a gift so she can eat dog food! There are many more that made Limbaugh worthy of being sacked by the NFL!

Yet, Hollywood is about to pay an artistic tribute to a man just as horrid as Limbaugh!

The man Hollywood is about to posthumously honor is Jonathan Swift, the author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. A movie of that title is to be released late in 2010, based on Swift’s novel! While that piece of literature may be an entertaining read, it does not absolve Swift for other things he has written. Making a movie of his work will only serve to legitimize his other works!

In 1729, the bigoted, sexist and infanticide advocating Swift produced a horrible piece of work entitled A Modest Proposal. In it, Swift proposed that rather than let Catholic Irish infants starve or grow up into poverty and crime, they should be fattened up, sold as a commodity suited for the tables of the well-to-do and eaten!!! Here are some quotes and none are in dispute!

Swift on eating infants:

… a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked…

…instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish…they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.

… may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table.

…butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

Swift the misogynist and enemy of woman’s rights wrote:

… another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions…

Swift the anti-Catholic bigot wrote:

Infant's flesh will be…more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told…that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season…because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom…it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us.

There is much more where that came from but those are sufficient to establish the flavor!

The moral imperative involved here is of the utmost importance, but it is not without merit to consider the political and practical if in doing so we deprive the immoral haters of ammunition! Those on the right, most certainly including Limbaugh, will try to use this movie to embarrass and smear President Obama by association! They will connect Swift to those in the movie who are known Obama supporters to establish some kind of linkage in the public mind! Actor Jack Black, who plays Gulliver, performed with his band at an Obama benefit during the campaign! Cast member Jason Segel has publicly stated that he would like a “man date” with the President and actor James Corden was quoted saying about Obama:

I love him! I almost get aroused when I’m watching him!

While on its face such an attempt at linkage may seem absurd, for the intellectually challenged targets such connections will be taken as proof of something more substantial and sinister!

This movie, based on the work of a truly vile person, should not be made or released lest it honor him! Swift’s words, like Limbaugh’s must be taken seriously and dealt with accordingly!