In Memory of those Fallen Heroes who died to keep us Free

The following is from a post at AtlasShrugs.com. I believe it captures the day perfectly. Please pray for our men and women, both living and dead, who have fought (and continue to fight) to keep us free and to free the oppressed.

Our Best & Most Courageous

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” — General George Patton.

How much we owe to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. We cannot do our work unless we know they are doing theirs. We do not have the freedom to live our lives, unless they are there risking their lives to protect that freedom.

In the sloppy terminology so typical of today, it is common to attribute the courage of our soldiers to “self-sacrifice.” But this misses the enormous difference between our soldiers and the malevolent fanatics on the other side, who declare that they want to die because they “love death.” American soldiers do not go into battle because they love death. They go into battle because they love freedom. They love the liberties we enjoy and the prosperous and benevolent society that these liberties make possible. And they realize that someone has to fight to defend all of this.

Our soldiers do not want to die, and they do not expect to die; they know they are far better trained and better armed than their adversaries. But they know that some of them will die, and they believe that freedom is worth that risk. Here is how the family of Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts, the first American soldier to die in Operation Anaconda, expressed it: “He made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that everyone who calls himself or herself an American truly has all the privileges of living in the greatest country in the world.” Robert Tracinski

I know America kicks back, fires up the cue, bangs down the beer and feels good about America. But my heart is always heavy this day. I think of those men and women who laid down their lives for an idea, a principle, a love of freedom and the concept of the individual. I owe them my life.

Yes, we all owe them our gratitude, our respect and our freedom.

Why No Word Of Terror Bust From Obama?

By MICHELLE MALKIN | Posted Friday, May 22, 2009 4:20 PM PT

President Obama’s speech last week on homeland security was 6,072 words long. Curiously, he chose not to spare an “a,” “and” or “uh” on the New York City terror bust that dominated headlines the morning of his Thursday address.

Did the teleprompter run out of room?

After a yearlong investigation launched by the Bush administration, the feds cracked down on a ring of murder-minded black Muslim jailhouse converts preparing to bomb two Bronx synagogues and “eager to bring death to Jews.”

They also planned to attack a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, N.Y., where the suspects lived and worshiped at a local mosque.

Not one word from the president on the jihadists’ intended victims, motives or means. No comfort for the reported targets in the Big Apple, still raw from the Scare Force One rattling that so vainly and recklessly simulated 9/11. No condemnation for the accused plotters.

Why? Because doing so would force Obama to abandon his cottony “extremist ideology” euphemisms and confront the concrete truth. To borrow one of our obtuse president’s favorite cliches, “let me be perfectly clear” about the reality Obama won’t touch:

America faces an ongoing Islamic jihad at home and abroad. Not merely “man-caused.” But Koran-inspired. Yet, Obama refuses to spell out the centuries-old roots of the war that he claims he’ll win faster, better and cleaner than any of his predecessors.

Moreover, his push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons — where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity — will only make the problem worse.

A brief refresher course for the left’s amnesiacs about the festering jihadi virus in our jails and overseas:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=327884471685455

To continue reading click the link above.

An apology: “…the rest of the story”. (Even more scary)

by Pam Geller

I am a student of history.  Professionally, I have written 15 books in six languages, and have studied history all my life.  I think there is something monumentally large  afoot, and I do not believe it is just a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis.  Yes, these exist but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus.

Something of historic proportions is happening.  I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about 10 – 15 years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two.
We demanded and then codified into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people whom we know could never pay back? Why? We learned recently that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has loaned two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the $700B we all argued about so strenuously just this past September.
Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of We the People, who loaned our powers to our elected leaders. Apparently not.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy.  Why?

We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving.  Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate.  Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity.  Why?

We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (now violently in California over a proposition that is so controversial that it wants marriage to remain between one man and one woman.  Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?).  We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic.  To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, Social Security is nearly bankrupt,
as is Medicare and our entire government.  Our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and know precisely what I am talking about.) The list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth.  It is potentially 1929 x 10.  And we are at war with an enemy we cannot name for fear of offending people of the same religion who cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And now we have elected a man no one knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla, Alaska … All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders?  No?  Oh, of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe are more important.)

Mr. Obama’s winning platform can be boiled down to one word: Change. Why?

I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.  This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life.  In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure.  Change is indeed coming.  And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again.

I thought I would never be able to experience what the ordinary, moral German felt in the mid-1930s.  In those times, the savior was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing.  What they did know was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory and promises.  Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker.  And he smiled and waved a lot.  And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his “brown shirts” would bully them into submission.

And then he was duly elected to office, with a full-throttled economic crisis at hand [the Great Depression].  Slowly but surely he seized the controls of government power, department by department, person by person, bureaucracy by bureaucracy.  The kids joined a Youth Movement in his name, where they were taught what to think.  How did he get the people on his side?  He did it promising jobs to the jobless, money to the moneyless, and goodies for the military-industrial complex.  He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe and across the world.

He did it with a compliant media – Did you know that?  And he did this all in the name of justice and .. . .. change.  And the people surely got what they voted for.  (Look it up if you think I am exaggerating.)  Read your history books.  Many people objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and made fun of.  When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker.  He was right, though …

Don’t forget that Germany was the most educated, cultured country in Europe …  It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities.  And in less than six years – a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency – it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors.  All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.

As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong, close my eyes, have another latte and ignore what is transpiring around me.

Some people scoff at me; others laugh or think I am foolish, naive, or both. Perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe – and why I believe it. I pray I am wrong. But, I do not think I am.
                                                        *****
      About the author via Google…

      Pamela “Atlas” Geller began her publishing career at The New York Daily News and subsequently took over operation of The New York Observer as Associate Publisher.  She left The Observer after the birth of her fourth child but remained involved in various projects including American Associates, Ben Gurion University and being Senior Vice-President Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation at The Brandeis School

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Since many of you enjoy senior citizen status or will sometime in the not too distant future, I thought you might be interested in this information.

        IN GOD WE TRUST

                Everybody that is on this mailing list is either a senior citizen, is getting close or knows sombody that is.

                  Most of you know by now that the Senate version (at least) of the “stimulus” bill includes provisions for extensive rationing of health care for senior citizens.  The author of this part of the bill, former senator and tax evader, Tom Daschle was credited  today by Bloomberg with the following statement.

                  Bloomberg: “Daschle says health-care reform will not be pain free. Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.”

                  If this does not sufficiently raise your ire, just remember that Senators and Congressmen have their own health care plan that is first dollar or very low co-pay which they are guaranteed the remainder of their lives and are not subject to this new law if it passes.

                  Please use the power of the internet to get this message out.  Talk it up at the grassroots level.  We have an election coming up in one year and nine months.  We have the ability to address and reverse the dangerous direction the Obama administration and it allies have begun and, in the interim, we can make our voices heard!  Let’s do it!

 

Obama’s Signal to Israel: Submit

By Mona Charen May 12, 2009

In early April, Vice President Biden was asked if the administration was concerned that Israel might strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I don’t believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that,” Mr. Biden replied. “I think he would be ill advised to do that.”

A few weeks later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the administration’s solution to the threat of an Iranian bomb: “For Israel to get the kind of strong support it’s looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts … they go hand in hand.”

And on May 10, National Security Adviser James Jones spelled it out further: “We understand Israel’s preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. … By the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution.”

By what reasoning has the administration decided that pushing Israel to permit a new Palestinian state would — in any way — diminish the threat from Iran? Do they believe that Iran’s (or I should say the Iranian leadership’s) genocidal hostility toward Israel is the result of lack of progress toward an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza? Will the Iranian leadership, which has characterized Israel as a “cancerous tumor,” declared that “Israel must we wiped off the map,” and promised that “Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear” is going to change its mind if Israel enters into negotiations with the Palestinians?

“Obama will be a great friend to Israel.” So said a Jewish Democrat in a pre-election debate with me. I asked her whether she had any hesitations about someone who had been steeped in academic pieties and Hyde Park leftwing intellectual fashions, and who had tamely absorbed the Rev. Wright’s sermons for 20 years? Her response was to mouth some of the platitudes about support for Israel that were to be found on the Obama campaign’s website. I wonder if she is having doubts now.

Does it give her pause that Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state and America’s chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? By including Israel on a list of nations known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them, the Obama administration is introducing a sinister note of moral equivalence to the problem of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. All previous U.S. governments have implicitly accepted that Israel’s nuclear weapons pose a threat to no nation and are maintained only to deter Israel’s enemies from genocidal attacks.

Like other liberals, my debate opponent probably believes that Obama’s apology tour of global capitals was pitch perfect. Of course, it’s one thing for the United States, still the world’s superpower, to delude itself that winning international popularity contests will make us safer (though it’s a dangerous delusion), but Israel, which always sits inches from the precipice of destruction, cannot afford such fantasies at all.

We have recent history to guide us. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area — trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon became the launching pad for Hezbollah’s missile campaign against northern Israel.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000 missiles against southern Israel.

Fatah (which is called moderate because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas would gain control in a heartbeat.

Next week, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50 percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force work.

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” –Sir Karl Popper

Signs Point Toward ‘Cataclysmic’ War in Middle East

A former top American intelligence official agrees with a Messianic pastor that major and possibly calamitous events will unfold in the Middle East in the coming year.

“I think within 12 months something is going to happen, one way or another,” said retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for Intelligence from 2003 to 2007.

His concerns are echoed by best-selling novelist Joel C. Rosenberg, whose works have uncannily foreshadowed real events including 9/11.

“I don’t know how much time we have. I believe a cataclysmic war is coming in the Middle East,” he said.

Messianic pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai ministries in Puyallup, Wash., garnered attention last year with his announcement of the discovery of a rare sequence of lunar and solar eclipses, a “tetrad,” all falling on key feast days on the Jewish calendar over a two-year period.

The last time that happened, the Jews recaptured Jerusalem, Biltz said. “The time before that [was] 1949, 1950, right after they became a nation. But both times it was tied around a major war.

” Additional signs this year and next portend more of the same, according to Biltz.

“The sun and the moon were God’s signals to us,” he said. “When they fall on his divine appointments, He’s trying to tell us that we need to look to him and hear what he’s saying.

” While Biltz and other messianic believers watch the heavens, “others are watching the headlines and getting the same message,” station KMPH in Fresno, Calif., reported.

Gen. Boykin told a station reporter at a conference in San Diego that he foresees “something” happening in the coming year and added: “I’m watching the Iranian nuclear program very carefully. No one really knows how long, I don’t even think the Iranian themselves know how long it will take them to have a deliverable nuclear weapon, but they’re moving there rapidly.”

Author Rosenberg, who was an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, foresees a cataclysm in the near future, and he has been remarkably prescient in his books.

For instance, his New York Times best-seller “The Last Jihad” describes the hijacking of a jet by radical Islamic terrorists who use it to launch a kamikaze attack on an American city. That leads to a war with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein over terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

“I wrote those chapters nine months before September 11, 2001,” Rosenberg told KMPH at the conference.

His book “The Last Days” begins with a U.S. diplomatic convoy driving into Gaza on a peacekeeping mission. The convoy is attacked by terrorists. Six days before the book went on sale in October 2003, an American diplomatic convoy driving into Gaza was attacked by terrorists.

The book also foreshadowed a civil war among Palestinians similar to the hostilities that later erupted between Hamas and Fatah.

Against All Enemies Foreign and Domestic?

The Law: When a U.S. attorney general helps a foreign judge hunt down U.S. officials for carrying out America’s defense policies, it threatens our very sovereignty. Eric Holder should read the Constitution.

U.S. government officials swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The enemies of our form of government, going back even to before the ratification of the Constitution, have never been limited to invading armies.

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22 warned that “one of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.”

His solution was that treaties with foreign powers must submit “to one supreme tribunal.” (Hamilton’s own emphasis in the text.)

“Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation,” Hamilton noted.

Obviously, Hamilton did not envision that Supreme Court being located in Holland or Switzerland. It was to be an American court administering laws passed by the duly-elected representatives of the American people.

Attorney General Holder obviously needs reminding of the oath he took to support and defend the core governing document of our land. Last week, he suggested the U.S. government might cooperate with a Spanish judge’s probe of U.S. federal officials involved in enhanced interrogation methods used against terrorist detainees.

“Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it,” Holder said.

“This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law, and to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it.”

But the rule of law that applies when foreign judicial entities try to go fishing in the internal affairs of the White House can be found in the text of the Constitution itself: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America . . . . The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States . . . .”

The president’s paramount duty under the Constitution is to “provide for the common defense,” and whatever one thinks his shortcomings in other areas of policy may be, George W. Bush performed that duty above and beyond all expectations.

As noted on this pages many times, keeping the nation safe for more than seven years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was not achieved by luck or through a national security policy of coasting.

It was the very aggressive, innovative steps President Bush took — at great political, even legal, risk to himself — like the CIA’s foreign interrogation program and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) terrorist surveillance program — that foiled numerous plots and saved hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives.

For this, Bush and those who helped him protect us deserve our gratitude, not censure.

The Constitution gives the president broad powers to defend the country against foreign military threats, which today take new and deadly forms.

Will a U.S. attorney general now help a foreign power conduct an anti-American witch hunt against those who served a previous president — those whose “crime” was to keep the American homeland safe?

If he does, it will be an attack on the very heart of our highest man-made law.

Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut

Clifford S. Asness Managing and Founding Principal AQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter”, was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm that offers hedge funds as well as public mutual funds and unhedged traditional investments. My company is not involved in the Chrysler situation, but I am still aghast at the President’s comments (of course these are my own views not those of my company). Furthermore, for some reason I was not born with the common sense to keep it to myself, though my title should more accurately be called “Not Afraid Enough” as I am indeed fearful writing this… It’s really a bad idea to speak out. Angering the President is a mistake and, my views will annoy half my clients. I hope my clients will understand that I’m entitled to my voice and to speak it loudly, just as they are in this great country. I hope they will also like that I do not think I have the right to intentionally “sacrifice” their money without their permission.

Here’s a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process. Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders’ contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.

The above is how it works in America, or how it’s supposed to work. The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go through this process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing. Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not. The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.

Let’s quickly review a few side issues:

The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to “sacrifice” some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.

Let’s also mention only in passing the irony of this same President begging hedge funds to borrow more to purchase other troubled securities. That he expects them to do so when he has already shown what happens if they ask for their money to be repaid fairly would be amusing if not so dangerous. That hedge funds might not participate in these programs because of fear of getting sucked into some toxic demagoguery that ends in arbitrary punishment for trying to work with the Treasury is distressing. Some useful programs, like those designed to help finance consumer loans, won’t work because of this irresponsible hectoring.

Last but not least, the President screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large. Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out. Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one. In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying. The TARP recipients had no choice but to go along. The hedge funds were singled out only because they are unpopular, not because they behaved any differently from any other ethical manager of other people’s money. The President’s comments here are backwards and libelous. Yet, somehow I don’t think the hedge funds will be following ACORN’s lead and trucking in a bunch of paid professional protestors soon. Hedge funds really need a community organizer.

This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.