Two Good Questions To Ask (Bumped)

(This post has been bumped because today is the funeral for the guard killed, and the media keep trumpeting about Von Brunn's political views)

The next time somebody tries to smear conservatism by citing James Von Brunn's attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, below is a strategy to use in the discussion: (from this essay by Andrew Breitbart):

[1] "Why was it outrageous 'guilt by association' to connect Barack Obama to a domestic terrorist like Bill Ayers and an anti-Semite like [the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.], but it's perfectly mainstream to associate all conservatives with this nut job?" asked Jonah Goldberg, best-selling author of "Liberal Fascism" and a nationally syndicated columnist.

[2] Or what about the countless terrorist attacks by unaffiliated Muslim groups or individual jihadists that the media explains away as isolated incidents? Somehow the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its media defenders win the day with their collective cry: "Don't rush to judgment!"

Mr. Breitbart concludes his essay with the following paragraph:

Right now, the Democratic-Media Complex is using the single act of a lone lunatic far removed from the political mainstream to split this country on racial grounds in the pursuit of its own political advantage. With the listless Republican Party lacking in any vocal leadership, it will probably succeed.

Don't let the tactics of leftist hypocrisy succeed! Answer back!

Please take time to read Andrew Breitbart's entire essay HERE.

(Hat tip to LA Sunsett for alerting me to the above essay)

Crossposted earlier this week to THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS and Infidel Bloggers Alliance

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The Reality Of The Stimulus Bill

(With a hat tip to Common Cents for the video in this posting)

Please pause the PlayList on the right sidebar before watching:



Some reading is below the fold.

Just as with the Titanic, our leadership is proceeding with full steam ahead toward diasaster.

From this article in the Washington Times:

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing....

Nevertheless, our leadership of the moment is claiming victory and calling the bill "a major milestone on our road to recovery."

What else are President Barack Hussein Obama and his adherents planning? Even more of the same, apparently:

"This historic step won't be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but rather the beginning. The problems that led us into this crisis are deep and widespread, and our response must be equal to the task."

Read the entire article.

More icebergs ahead! And those at the helm are proclaiming "Victory!" even as they are ignoring the realities and the warnings.

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JBS Swift & Company: The Rest Of The Story

You may have heard about what happened last week at the Swift packing plant in Greeley, Colorado:

A complaint by Somali workers earlier this week that they weren’t getting early enough break times to accommodate religious fasting snowballed into worker protests at the JBS Swift & Co. plant Friday.

Employees from both early and late shifts converged in the afternoon in front of the human resources office at the north Greeley plant.

An encouraging bit of anti-dhimmitude, right?

So, what's the rest of the story?

From this posting at Refugee Resettlement Watch and role of Greeley, Colorado in the birth of Al Qaeda:

Sayed Qtub had come for a visit:

Communism had Karl Marx. Al Qaedaism has Sayed Qtub. Who’s he, most people would ask. The ideology that nurtured modern Islamic extremism, and spawned every violent movement from Hezbollah to al Qaeda, was born in 1952 when Qtub, an Egyptian writer, returned from studying American literature at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo.

The tipping point from detached observer to extremist ideologue took place at a church dance in Greeley when, as Qtub recalled in “The America I Saw,” the pastor dimmed the lights and put on the come-hither number “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a hit tune from the MGM movie “Neptune’s Daughter” — a guy, girl and bathing suit lemon — with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban.

“The room,” Qtub wrote “became a confusion of feet and legs; arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together,” That was the scene that turned him off American culture in particular and Western culture in general — and onto Islamic fundamentalism.

Read more here and consider how Greeley could just be an excellent target city in which Shariah might be planted in America. The irony.

And the symbolism!

Read the Wiki entry on Qutb for additional information and numerous external links.

(Crossposted to Infidel Bloggers Alliance)

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Cozying Up

Excerpt from this article in the October 17, 2007 edition of the Washington Times (emphases mine):

Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday warned against a U.S. military strike against Iran and invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make a precedent-setting visit to Moscow — dealing another blow to U.S. hopes of isolating the regime in Tehran.

Mr. Putin issued the invitation on the sidelines of a summit in Tehran of the five nations bordering the Caspian Sea.

His trip to the Iranian capital was the first by a Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin visited there in 1943 to participate in an Allied conference to plan for a postwar world.

In a final declaration, the Caspian nations backed Mr. Putin's call, saying "under no circumstances will they allow [the use of their] territories by third countries to launch aggression or other military action against any of the member states."

The participants also backed the rights of signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty — which includes Iran — to develop peaceful nuclear energy....

A bit more detail from this article in the Washington Post (emphases mine):

Putin has said there is no evidence that Iran's nuclear program has a military dimension, but the Kremlin nonetheless has delayed construction of a nuclear power plant in Iran, ostensibly because of a financial dispute. Many analysts here say the Kremlin was angered by Iran's unwillingness to accept a Russian proposal to enrich uranium, on Russian soil, for Iran's needs.

Putin refused to say if the plant could begin operation before he leaves office next year.

"I only gave promises to my mom when I was a small boy," Putin told Iranian reporters. "At the same time, we are not going to renounce our obligations."

Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran have their own agenda. Putin has his as well. Where will this Russia-Iran alliance lead the rest of the world? It seems to me that the world just became a more dangerous place.

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Blinded By The Light

(All emphases by Always On Watch)

We're hearing more and more about the bad driving-skills and the behind-the-wheel antics of illegal immigrants. I predict that sooner or later you or someone you know will be directly and adversely affected by the hordes of illegals on our highways and byways. I hope that your or your friends' encounters will not be as bad as what happened the other day to a group of al fresco diners in the Midwest.From this September 19, 2007 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

A driver whose SUV plowed into a crowd of lunchtime diners outside a restaurant in downtown Clayton on Tuesday told police he had been blinded by a bright light.

Clayton police Capt. Steve Grenier said police cited the driver, who lost control while making a left turn from westbound Maryland Avenue onto southbound Central Avenue just before noon.

The vehicle, a white Ford Expedition, crossed the sidewalk and ended up in a sunken outdoor dining area at Il Vicino, pinning two diners beneath it and injuring a third, said Clayton Fire Chief Mark Thorp.

[...]

The driver, Sergio Lopez, 23, who has a post office address in Collinsville, is an illegal immigrant from Mexico, said Clayton Police Chief Thomas Byrne. Lopez suffered minor injuries in the crash.

Lopez, who spoke little English and did not have a valid U.S. drivers license, told police he was blinded by a bright light as he attempted to turn.

He was cited for operating a vehicle with no license, having no proof of insurance and making an improper turn.

Immigration Customs Enforcement has issued a federal detainment order on Lopez, and he was to be held at the St. Louis County Justice Center upon his release from the hospital.

Lopez owns the SUV...

Check out his vehicle:



As Bob McCarty mentioned at his site, the above is a fine-looking vehicle, complete with that expensive etching or custom decal on the front windshield.

As is the case in so many stories like this one, the driver who lost control of his vehicle is a repeat offender, with more than the above-mentioned incident on his driving record. From this article in the September 20, 2007 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The illegal immigrant whose SUV ran into diners outside a Clayton eatery this week had been involved in a crash in St. Louis less than two months ago.

City police records indicate that the driver, Sergio Lopez, 23, caused a collision July 26 on South Kingshighway near Southwest Avenue while driving the same SUV.

Eleanor Sanford, 80, said Wednesday that an SUV had turned in front of her from a gas station parking lot, hitting her car and sending it spinning. She was shaken but not seriously hurt.

The driver sped off, Sanford said, and police tracked him through a license plate that fell off. "He just hit us and took off," she said.

She said she did not connect her wreck with Tuesday's high-profile Clayton incident until reporters called her about it Wednesday.

[,,,]

Lopez was cited in her case for driving with no driver's license, improper license plates, no insurance and failing to yield to an emergency vehicle.

The report does not indicate any police awareness that Lopez was in the United States improperly....

The police had no awareness of Lopez's immigration status? Isn't it time to give local law enforcement the power to enforce our immigration laws? Instead, the governor of New York has proposed the following:

From this article in the September 22, 2007 edition of the Washington Times:

New York's governor announced yesterday that illegal aliens will soon be able to get state driver's licenses, drawing a strong rebuke from families of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks who said he is opening a window to another attack.

The new rules reverse a 2002 policy designed to correct one of the flaws identified after the terrorist attacks — easy access to driver's licenses, which allowed illegal aliens to blend into society and would-be terrorists to avoid detection. But Gov. Eliot Spitzer said he thinks the state can have both secure driver's licenses and a system that draws illegal aliens into the system rather than punishing them.

The governor expects the plan to reduce insurance costs, and he said the reality is that illegal aliens are already here and that "allowing them the opportunity to obtain driver's licenses in a responsible and secure manner will help increase public safety."...

I don't quite follow that bit about reducing insurance costs. If any reader here can explain how that aspect works I'd appreciate being enlightened. Returning now to the article,

Backers of the new rules said they are designed to make illegal aliens' lives easier while weeding out fraudulent driver's license requests.

The new policy will apply only to those with a valid foreign passport, which officials hope will cut down on fraud. Machine-readable passports can be scanned at the Department of Motor Vehicles once the policy goes into effect, but non-readable passports will be sent to a central processing office to be checked.

Applicants will also have to show other documents, though the state is not yet releasing a full list of the 14 documents that will be accepted. A combination of documents will be required to prove identity.

And just how accurate will the vetting of these identities be? Record-keeping in a lot of countries, including those south of our border, isn't terribly accurate. Doesn't matter, I suppose, because

New York first will invite more than 150,000 people to reapply who used to have licenses but had to give them up because they no longer qualified under the 2002 policy. Months later, other New Yorkers who never had a license and don't qualify under the current rules will be allowed to apply.

Toward the end of the article in the Washington Times, a retired INS official makes the case as to how difficult the New York proposal is going to be in practical application:

...Michael W. Cutler, a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, said it opens a loophole for fraud and that it's tough enough to verify U.S.-issued birth certificates, much less foreign documents.

Over at his blog and on the telephone with me on the air on the radio, Beak has mentioned the difficulty in dealing with paperwork from a foreign country. Maybe the governor of New York should do some research on the web.

The problem with issuing licenses to illegals goes further:

[Cutler] also said a driver's license is the key to being able to live undetected in the U.S. and that Mr. Spitzer's new rules will aid illegal aliens trying to do that.

"It's almost a de facto sanctuary," Mr. Cutler said. "Driver's licenses enable people to do more than drive. They establish people's identity when they write a check, do banking, get on airplanes."

As I see it, licensing illegals threatens both our personal safety and our national security. Doesn't the governor of New York understand the can of worms he proposes to open?

Now, I admit that I may have a personal stake in my position. I myself was rear-ended by an immigrant driver behind the wheel and, as a result, have suffered a permanent disability, albeit a minor one compared to other disabilities out there. Was that driver who ran up my tail pipe an illegal? Possibly, because he got his driver's license before 9/11, before the state of Virginia cracked down on illegals' ability to get driver's licenses. He also behaved peculiarly at the scene of the accident. I can't provide more details because the law suit and any possible settlement are pending.

In part because of what happened to me and in part because of stories such as those in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other similar stories I hear on the nightly news, I have to wonder if any group is keeping statistics on the damage which illegal immigrants behind the wheel are doing to citizens and to those who are legally present in our nation. I'm guessing that those statistics would be revealing as to another cost tied to illegal immigration.

[Hat-tip to Bob McCarty Writes, where I found the articles from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

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The Decline Of CAIR?

(All emphases by Always On Watch)

From this article in the June 12, 2007 Washington Times:

Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90 percent since the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to tax documents obtained by The Washington Times.

The number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to fewer than 1,700 in 2006. As a result, the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues dropped from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.

The organization instead is relying on about two dozen donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year.

[...]

CAIR listed contributors in its Form 990 filings with the Internal Revenue Service, but the IRS redacted all the names before releasing the documents.

In 2001, 26 contributors gave more than $1.6 million; in 2002, 26 gave more than $2.6 million; in 2003, 24 gave more than $2 million; in 2004, 20 gave more than $1.4 million; in 2005, 19 contributed $1.3 million.

One has to wonder who those deep-pocketed donors are and if those donors have anything to do with the following:

In 2004, a federal grand jury returned a 42-count indictment against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and seven officers for raising money for Hamas, money laundering and falsifying tax returns. The Holy Land trial begins July 16 in Dallas, and CAIR is listed among 300 new co-conspirators filed May 29 [2007] in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

According to the government's trial brief, filed May 29, CAIR is an entity "who are, and or were, members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee and/or its organization."

Mousa Abu Marzook, a former CAIR official, "has been since 1995, a specially designated terrorist and Hamas leader," the brief said.

Predictably, CAIR is complaining:

Mr. Ahmed called the Justice Department's brief "a McCarthyite political move that allows the government to smear major American Muslim groups, including hundreds of mosques representing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Muslims nationwide, without any evidence being offered in a court of law and without legal recourse for those defamed."

"It is unfortunate that the Justice Department apparently violated its own guidelines, which indicate that such lists are to remain sealed to prevent unfair and un-American labeling of those who are not facing any criminal charges," Mr. Ahmed said.

Apparently, CAIR represents few American Muslims, despite the organization's being quite prominent on news interviews and as advocates for Muslim rights in certain cases (i.e., that of the six praying imams). The above-cited article also contains information indicating that CAIR is full of taqiyya, although the Washington Times doesn't use the term:

CAIR constantly notes in its press releases that it cooperates with federal law-enforcement activities and claims to conduct sensitivity training for Homeland Security officials. A February press release from CAIR's Chicago office says it met with Homeland Security immigration officials and made an agreement to "conduct sensitivity training to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers and possibly prison personnel."

Homeland Security officials deny such claims and a check of the Office of Management and Budget Watch database of government contracts since 2000 shows CAIR has never been awarded a grant or a government contract.
"The department does not have a formalized relationship with that particular organization," said one Homeland Security official speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Might a not-formalized relationship be an informal one? After all, government officials and representatives from federal law-enforcement sometimes attend CAIR banquets and other events at which CAIR provides sensitivity training. Also, consider this, from May 7, 2007, as listed on CAIR's web site:

CAIR-CT TRAINS FBI AGENTS ON ISLAM

(NEW LONDON, CT, 5/7/07) - Representatives of the Connecticut chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CT) recently offered diversity and sensitivity training on Islam and Muslims to officials at the New Haven office of the FBI.

The hour-long training included information on basic Islamic beliefs and practices.

The above is just one example. Here are some more, with links for CAIR chapter involvements (According to CAIR a partial listing including Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Arizona, California, Kentucky, St. Louis, and San Antonio) and the following bulleted list:

• Recently received a letter from the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement highlighting the positive working relationship between the department and CAIR-FL
• Conducted sensitivity trainings for the FBI in Orlando and Jacksonville
• Held a joint press conference with the FBI and several other law enforcement agencies seeking information on a person wanted for questioning
• Participated in an 8-week Police Community Relations Leadership Program with the Miami Dade Police Department
• In collaboration with the FBI, FDLE, BSO and several other law enforcement agencies, coordinated a forum with state Islamic leaders
• Participated in several town hall meetings with FBI, FDLE, and U.S. Attorney's office discussing the issues of security and liberty

Uncontracted relationships, I suppose. Then, again, the information comes from CAIR's web site, which isn't exactly the epitome of veracity.

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CAIR's Membership Down

Excerpt from a little tidbit in the June 11, 2007 Washington Times:

Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90 percent since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

[...]

The organization...is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year.

Tomorrow the Washington Times is supposed to release additional details.

[Hat-tip to Raven]

[END OF THIS POSTING]

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Putin's Threat

From this article in the June 4, 2007 Washington Times:

President Vladimir Putin sent a chilling message to world leaders on the eve of the Group of Eight summit with a threat to aim Russian nuclear missiles at European cities for the first time since the Cold War.

[...]

...[T]he Russian president sent out a clear signal that he preferred combat to compromise....

And this from Ahmadinejad of Iran:

In a defiant speech yesterday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: "Even if all the world powers are slitting their own throats, the Iranian people are invincible and will remain invincible.

"Iran is not trying to make aggression against other countries. It only wants that its right be accepted and will not accept the injustice of the great powers," he said....

Read the rest of the article here.

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Dissonance In The Senate (Updated With Information From Ogre)

Looks as if some Senators are worried about backlash from their constituents. Excerpt from this May 21, 2007 article in the Washington Times:

...Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this weekend said he will insist that the bill's guest-worker provision be slashed from 400,000 per year down to 100,000 per year.

"I don't want a program that is a funnel for cheap labor," Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, said, according to the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal. Mr. Reid said the 400,000 number "will not remain in the bill."...

According to the article, fewer than twenty Senators will be supporting the bill when it hits the Senate floor today because

the deal was written in secret by a dozen senators and the Bush administration [and] wasn't even finalized until yesterday and still hasn't reached many Senate offices.

One wonders if some of the reticence found in the recent survey is the result of voters' having flooded Capitol Hill with objections to the bill.

Read the entire article from the Washington Times. The grapevine here says that the voters' communiques the past several days have been running overwhelmingly against the bill.

According to Ogre's analysis of the bill, which he dubs "the Kennedy-StupidMorons Immigration Bill":

...I've heard lots about what's in the bill. I've heard nothing good at ALL about the bill. But I decided to try and do what the Senators won't -- I wanted to read the entire bill. So if you don't want to read the whole 790 pages, I'll attempt to provide the cliff notes version here....

[...]

If this bill passes, and I'm not just blowing smoke here, say goodbye to America -- at least as a free country and a representative republic.

If this passes, you will be able to tell your grandchildren that you were able to witness the fall of America. We had a good run, but I guess this is it.

Ogre's analysis is a long read, but worth your time.

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