Jumat, 30 September 2011

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Terrorism Motive that Dare Not Speak Its Name Friday Edition

Posted: 30 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT

The FBI arrested a man named Rezwan Ferdaus on Wednesday who had not only developed detailed plans for a murderous spree in the name of Allah but had also collected most of what he needed to pull it off. He also built detonators that his “accomplices” could use to trigger IEDs in Iraq. When his contacts told him that one of his devices had killed American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, his pleasure evident. In truth, the device never worked because his contacts were FBI agents, and the devices they gave him and his glee at their reported success only added to the case against him.

According to reports, Ferdaus’ plots involved “jihad” and “his desire to carry out the will of Allah”. Nevertheless, this is what the DoJ spokesman had to say about Ferdaus’ motivations:

"I want the public to understand that Mr. Ferdaus's conduct, as alleged in the complaint, is not reflective of a particular culture, community or religion," Ortiz said.

"In addition to protecting our citizens from the threats and violence alleged today, we also have an obligation to protect members of every community, race and religion against violence and other unlawful conduct," he said.

This is an outright lie. Ferdaus’ alleged conduct is reflective of a very particular “culture, community, or religion”. It is the same “culture, community, or religion” that requires honor-killings, female genital mutilation, the murder of innocents celebrated by chants of “Allahu Ackbar”. This “culture, community, or religion” controls several nations and sends it acolytes forth to slaughter in the name of its God. But we can’t say its name, now can we, even when the jihadist under arrest says he sought to kill “enemies of Allah”.

Folks, we need to get straight on this or we’re going to wake up one day to find that quite a few of our fellow Americans didn’t get a chance to wake up thanks to someone like Rezwan Ferdaus. Our Department of Justice has adopted a suicidal level of political correctness for no good reason at all and its hesitancy to call a jihadist a jihadist is going to get some of us killed.

And now, links!

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Obama: America Would Be Great If It Wasn’t So Lazy

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 08:40 PM PDT

Is Barack Obama trying to tank his re-election prospects? I only ask because It’s the most plausible reason I can imagine for why he would go on the campaign trail and talk trash about Americans.

Mr. Obama, in an interview with WESH-TV in Orlando, said his administration has been tough on the country's trading partners and tried to strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

"This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades," Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the country's economic future. "We need to get back on track."

[...]

Despite his concern, Mr. Obama said he wouldn't trade positions with any country on Earth. "We still have the best universities, the best scientists, best workers in the world; the most dynamic economic system in the world," he said. "We just need to bring all those things together."

I could go into an extended rant about how President Obama’s policies over the past three years have done everything to keep all those things from coming together. I could point out that one of the big problems is that his constant meddling has made our economic system a little too dynamic and how that uncertainty has caused business owners to turn turtle until we get a President who knows anything at all about how a business works. I could point out that of his three “bests”, two are largely funded by government and the last broke out the old hoary Socialist “workers” for the rest of us. I could then point out how that practically screams “Yeah, we’d be the best if only we could finish off this whole progressive utopia thing”.

But I won’t. We know Barack Obama is little more than a truckload of tired 60s radicalism stuffed into an expensive suit. We know he knows as much about our economy as he does about flying to the moon. It shouldn’t surprise you that he ran America down because he doesn’t love America. He loves a fantasy America, a land where all his left-wing plans actually worked, all us Americans did everything he demanded of us, and we respond with renewed vigor when he calls us lazy and weak.

Ben Domenech reminded me of a line Steven Hayward wrote about Jimmy Carter’s DNC speech in 2004:

He began his speech recalling his 1976 theme of giving us "a government as good as the people," forgetting that one reason the people decisively rejected him four years later was because he had come around to saying the people were no good.

President Obama is on the verge of a similar decisive rejection that can’t come soon enough. America deserves better than a President who thinks we are “soft”. Next year, we’ll show him just how hard Americans can be.

(via Amanda Carpenter’s Twitter feed)

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg delivers the line of the week:

Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?

RELATED: Would “soft” also describe someone who shops at Target accompanied by paparazzi and a shopping “assistant”?

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Our Problem is Too Much Freedom, Says the Super Smart Guy.

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 01:29 PM PDT

Peter Orszag, the former Director of the Office of Budget and Management in the Obama administration, thinks we have entirely too much democracy. According to him, we need lots of commissions and panels that will just do things for us, without all that messy voting and debating and gridlock.

In an 1814 letter to John Taylor, John Adams wrote that "there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." That may read today like an overstatement, but it is certainly true that our democracy finds itself facing a deep challenge: During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Well, yes. That does seem radical. Then again progressivism, which exists to take control of your life from you and give them to super geniuses like Peter Orszag, is radical. In truth, though, Orszag’s proposal isn’t novel. Leftists have proposed schemes like this before, and always for the same reason: government is too important to leave to the masses, who insist on standing in the way of their great ideas and cause “gridlock”. Toss in the old “polarization” canard, and this essay could have just as easily been written in 1978 or 1998.

Here’s the thing, though. Government is not any more polarized now than it’s been at any point in the past. In fact, save for that little contretemps called the Civil War that pretty much defined “polarization”, government now is just as contentious as it has ever been. Actually, that’s probably not a fact. You could make a very good argument that government today is less polarized than it’s been in the past. We no longer have lawmakers caning each other in the Capitol building or calling each other out for a duel on the lawn. Sure, once in a blue moon a Vice President will drop the f-bomb during a photo op, but that’s really not Orszag’s problem.

No, his real problem is that Congress doesn’t rubber-stamp the legislation he likes. See, I happen to know that Peter Orszag didn’t write a hang-wringing editorial about polarization when a Democratic Congress crushed George W. Bush’s Social Security reform plans nor when the risible Alan Grayson stood in the well of the House and told America that Republicans wanted them to die quickly.

And what does Orszag want Congress to pass? Well, let’s look at the most recent squabble over a continuing resolution we were told by Democrats was absolutely necessary else disaster victims would suffer horribly. The vote on the resolution never happened because, as it turned out, FEMA didn’t need any more money. It found that the $114 million it had in its Disaster Relief Fund would suffice and it didn’t really need the $3.6 billion the Senate was ready to give it over the next two years.

Yes, you read that correctly. Congress was fully prepared to give FEMA about ten times the amount of money it really needed. And that’s not the worst of it. Harry Reid (D-Poutyville) wanted to dish out almost $7 billion in aid before Republicans put the brakes on the bill.

And where was the point of contention? Republicans insisted that the resolution also contain $1.6 billion in cuts to two federal loan programs to partially offset the extra spending the Democrats wanted to do including the program that dumped $545 million into SolyndraScam. That seems like such a small thing to you or me, but to Democrats it’s a big deal, because they’re using those programs to pay millions of dollars to campaign contributors and family members in “green jobs” industries.

If we lived in Orszag’s ideal America, where commissions and automatic triggers ruled over us, FEMA would have a few more billion dollars in its coffers, to spend on God along knows what and the Democrats’ corrupt “green jobs” slush fund wouldn’t be an issue at all. I’m sure that’s what he wants, but it; not what the Founders wanted and I’m dead-certain it’s not what any American with a whit of self-reliance wants.

John Adams’ was right to warn about democratic suicide, but Orszag has the weapon of choice entirely wrong. No free country ever died from too much democracy; they all died with the noose of corrupt bloated government around their throats.

 

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Kamis, 29 September 2011

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – Why Fast and Furious is Important Thursday Edition

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT

I could not agree any more with Bob Owens about Operation Fast and Furious. Save for Sharyl Attkisson at CBS News, the MSM has ignored something that would have sunk a Republican administration by now. Let’s be clear about what the operation really did:

I don't wish to understate it: elements of the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, Homeland Security, and Treasury are responsible for supplying an arsenal to narco-terrorists waging a civil war against an American ally. Our federal government may bear responsibility for at least 200 murders committed with "walked" firearms, in what Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales describes as a "betrayal" of her country by the Obama administration.

None of this is in dispute. Every fact is backed up with several pieces of either physical evidence or corroborating witnesses. The only question is how high responsibility for Operation Fast and Furious actually went. We know that White House staffers knew about the program. We know the administration has shuffled around every supervisor involved in the operation, including the head of the BATFE. This all suggests that the real authority for the whole scheme originated at a much higher level than we know at this moment.

We need to find out what happened so we can punish the guilty and make sure it never happens again. People are dead right now and our elected officials put the guns into the hands of the murderers. How anyone can put politics above getting to the truth is beyond me.

And now, links!

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