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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

A Few Thoughts on the Arab Winter and the Media!

By Rich Kozlovich
The New Republic was and still is a leftist organ originally "founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann through the financial backing of heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and her husband, Willard Straight, who maintained majority ownership.”  All of whom were either communists, Soviet agents or fellow travelers calling themselves ‘liberals’.    
Eventually Straight’s son, Michael, became an editor at the New Republic.  While attending that famous cesspool noted for generating Soviet spies, Cambridge University in England, he met those infamous English Soviet spies, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all communists and all secret Soviet spies, one of which he also became.   
The problem with the left is a lack of consistency.  They demand war today and then condemn that war tomorrow.  The problem with the left’s lack of consistency is the total lack of moral foundation.  Their views are based on shifting sand.  Whatever works that day must be right.  The New Republic is clearly a ‘liberal’ rag that is pushing for ….dare I say it….. war! Note this article:
There are at least three questions to ask about Syria: First, what exactly is happening there; second, what is the United States doing about it; and third, what, if anything, should the United States be doing about it? It is hard to sort out the details of what is happening in Syria; but the outline is pretty clear; and it’s also fairly clear that the U.S. should be doing something consequential if, as reported, the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its people. But it remains unclear what the U.S. is actually doing or planning to do. Let’s take the questions one by one.
What is happening in Syria? Syria’s civil war began in the spring of 2011 with popular demonstrations like those that had toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. But instead of standing aside, the Syrian military shot and killed demonstrators, tortured dissidents and burnt down homes and businesses. When that didn’t stop the opposition, the regime conducted scorched earth sieges and launched air strikes against villages and cities. So far, about 70,000 Syrians have perished—about half have been civilians—and as many as 1.3 million have been driven from their homes. And that’s of a population of only 23 million….To Read More
So what history should we look to for the answer?  Let’s look at Obama’s decision to interfere in Libya and how really good that worked. 
 by Jamie Dettmer Apr 30, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
“Disorder and terror” have gripped Libya following the blast at the French Embassy, and rumors swirl of another attack. Jamie Dettmer reports on the rising tension in the capital.
Diplomatic missions here in the Libyan capital are observing the strictest security procedures following suspicions that the bombers behind last Tuesday’s blast at the French Embassy have rigged a second car with explosives and are hunting for another high-profile Western target.
Embassy protection teams and private security contractors working with foreign businessmen and nongovernmental organizations are on high alert, and the United Nations compound on the outskirts of Tripoli has introduced onerous security measures and placed severe restrictions on the movement of their diplomats.
The French Embassy wasn’t the only target on Tuesday—the second target was, according to diplomatic sources, the British Council, a government-funded educational body under the aegis of the British Foreign Office. That attack was thwarted by security guards; the bombers were foiled as they were preparing to park a rigged vehicle in front of the compound gate, diplomatic sources say.
A British Embassy spokesman said they could neither confirm nor deny that a bombing attempt on the British Council took place. "It would be inappropriate for us to comment while investigations are under way."…….To Read More...   
Now, since it appears they are asking for more of the same in Syria they must believe Libya was a great success.  Thus the leftist brain trust wants more of the same….do I understand that correctly?
By Charles P. Blair, Special to CNN
Syria’s civil war is the first to engulf a country armed with weapons of mass destruction. Understandably, the unfolding cataclysm precipitated by that country’s collapse has prompted new levels of uncertainty and risk. But where exactly does the Obama administration stand on managing the various threats posed by Syria’s chemical weapons?
An April 25 letter from the White House to members of Congress included the Obama administration’s seventh notice threatening unspecified but “significant” action if the al-Assad regime crossed the “red line” on chemical weapons activity. But by remaining mute on what specifically constitutes a chemical weapon in the context of its “red line,” and by characterizing the mounting evidence of chemical weapons use by Syrian military forces as requiring “credible and corroborating facts” validated by the United Nations, the administration clearly wants to avoid (or at least delay as long as possible) substantive action against the regime.
I would love to know what his views were when Bush wanted to attack Afghanistan and Iran….and then asked the Congress and the U.N., and got their blessings.  Who has Obama asked? No one?  Really!  
Whether you agree with Bush, Obama or Joe the Plumber you can’t help but be disgusted by the lack of consistency within the media.  So then, why would anyone want to interfere in this mess?  The Islamists are out of control and there will be no solutions until they wear themselves out and no outside interference will change that.  As for the Arab Spring claptrap.....that is as delusional as anything I have heard since I heard Bush stated that Islam was a religion of peace.  
Does anyone in Washington read history books? 

The Angst in Foggy Bottom

BY GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON | APRIL 30, 2013
Many in the State Department aren’t happy with the president’s policy on Syria. And they’re speaking out.   Last week, when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, reading from a letter sent from the White House to members of Congress, announced that the U.S. intelligence community believed that the Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons against its own people, the Obama administration wasn't quite ready for the round-the-clock cable-news frenzy that followed.
Back in August, and on multiple occasions since, President Obama laid out his "red line" for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Don't use chemical weapons. But now, reports had been trickling out of Syria for weeks of rebel fighters claiming they had been attacked with mysterious chemical gases. Videos emerged that appeared to show victims foaming at the mouth, in agony. Officials from Britain, France, Israel, and Qatar all said they believed chemical weapons had been used. With Hagel's remarks, the Obama administration seemed to be confirming that the president's red line might indeed have been crossed.
But officials told me that as late as Thursday morning, the White House had yet to assemble talking points for the State Department on the subject, a rarity for a White House famously adept at managing 23rd St.'s messaging from Pennsylvania Ave. Just minutes before Secretary of State John Kerry went to brief members of Congress in a closed-door session on Syria, his team was still scrambling to prepare talking points based on the White House letter….To Read More….

Exiled News: on Kindle and Prof Allen's Talk

Posted by Mary Grabar, April 30, 2013: Exiled: Stories from Conservative and Moderate Professors Who Have Been Ridiculed, Ostracized, Marginalized, Demonized, and Frozen Out is now on Kindle!  Buy it here.
I would like to thank Mary for allowing me to publish her work.  RK
Exiled contributor Malcolm Allen ("The Most Sacred Part of Them: Professors Behaving Badly") spoke recently at the Fox Valley Conservative Forum. He is pictured to the left, with the John Deere sign serving as a nice backdrop.  Dissident Prof is heartened to hear about these forums, here in Georgia and in Wisconsin too!  There still is a remnant in our population interested in issues beyond pop culture (and race, class, and gender)!

His talk is titled, "The Plight of Conservatives in Liberal Academia," and his dispatch is here: 
On 23 April, 2013 I gave a talk on the above topic to the Fox Valley Conservative Forum—and now that I’ve written the date I realise that I forgot to wish my auditors “Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday!” and “Happy St. George’s Day!” With an e-mail list of three hundred or so names, the Forum is a local group recruiting its members from the “Fox Cities,” based around Appleton and Menasha in east-central Wisconsin, and possibly drawing a few from more distant places like Oshkosh and Green Bay. It begins its meetings with prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance and then there is a speaker.
I addressed the group for about thirty minutes, the basis of my presentation being the three most offensive examples of academic liberal loutishness I have encountered to date. Readers of Mary’s Exiled: Stories from Conservative and Moderate Professors Who Have been Ridiculed, Ostracized, Marginalized, Demonized, and Frozen Out will doubtless remember all three from my contribution. I said a little about my introduction to the necessity of line-toeing when I so far forgot myself as to give a talk about English women travellers in the Middle East at the University of West Virginia in the early nineties. Although I was, I think and hope, perfectly respectful to the travellers and to women writers and scholars generally, in my naïveté I did attempt a few mildly amusing stories about an admittedly eccentric group of females. The reaction was outrage, and I learnt exactly what my fellow-contributor to Exiled Martin Slann means when he writes about “eating alone.” Sitting alone and walking alone to and from later conference sessions as well. I said a little about the panel discussion held at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, where I have taught now for nearly twenty-three years, when I and my fellow conservative speaker were heckled, openly mocked, and, in my case, publicly hissed because we had doubts about the aesthetic excellence of The Vagina Monologues and the moral acceptability of alcohol-facilitated child rape and a favourable representation thereof. And I said a little about a speaker from another branch of the UW System I once heard publicly make caddish jokes about Condoleezza Rice’s private life as a single woman and who displayed a picture of her dressed as a dominatrix and whipping Dick Cheney. (This in a talk purportedly about Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.)

But I was able to discuss some less dramatic examples of what it is like to live in Occupied Territory, apologizing in advance for the Eng. Lit. discipline-specific nature of some of them. I mentioned a decent, likeable, eighteen-year-old male student, doubtless a future good husband, father, employee, and citizen, who, in an otherwise perfectly acceptable essay about Beowulf, suddenly introduced the phrase “the objectification of women.” There are no women in this epic poem about beefy warriors and the necessity of hanging in there, I said, not entirely accurately but still. I mentioned another indoctrinated male student, again a good and likeable guy, who lamented the lack of “diversity” in David Copperfield! All those white-bread characters like David and Steerforth and Dan’l Peggotty! (Perhaps it is a sign of prejudice in the last named that he did not hang out with the Lascar sailors—is that word useable now?—who undoubtedly then formed a large proportion of the downtrodden sea-faring population in Yarmouth.) I mentioned the student who, in Composition II, presented me with a paper to the effect that the USA is an institutionally racist country. Her one and only source? A textbook she was using in another class. And I mentioned what happened to me when I once said what has to be said about Rigoberta Menchù—namely, that she is a fraud and a fabulist (I got angrily and protractedly glared at by someone who had previously liked me, not that worse things haven’t happened, as I have already pointed out). Widening our horizons a little, I observed that there are literally hundreds of scholarly journals that will never accept anything from my word-processor, and I quoted the rejection letters I would get were I so foolish as to submit to them (“fails to take into account issues of race, class, and gender”).
I had the unusual experience at this meeting of finding that I was popular and that nearly everybody agreed with me (one or two minor exceptions) and liked me for saying what I said. “Hey!” I thought to myself. “This must be what it’s like for liberals in the academy and the media all the time!" 

Malcolm Allen

Dumped! by Google

By Tienlon Ho April 22, 2013
One recent Thursday morning, I logged into my email and made an alarming discovery. Instead of opening my inbox, Google directed me to a notice:.....Account has been disabled . . . . In most cases, accounts are disabled if we believe you have violated either the Google Terms of Service, product-specific Terms of Service . . . . or product-specific policies . . . . it might be possible to regain access to your account…. There were no numbers to call, no tickets to request help……What exactly had I done wrong? …..My calls to Mountain View HQ landed me in a labyrinth of recorded messages that inevitably led to one of a man, sounding only slightly less exasperated than I felt, shutting me down with a “Thankyougoodbye.”…… In reality, I discovered, Google assumes no responsibility over user data nor is it required by law to do so. In the same notice informing me that it had disabled my account, Google told me for the first time that it reserves the right to “terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.”……Google not only reserves the right to take away or vaporize our data for any reason, but it also reserves the right to discontinue services, the means to access it, whenever it wants. It does this more often than you probably realize and most recently with Google Reader, which disappears on July 1….To Read More…..

Benghazi whistleblowers report threats from Obama Administration officials

By: John Hayward  4/30/2013
 “There are more Benghazi hearings coming.  I think they’re going to be explosive,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) of the House Oversight Committee told Fox News on Sunday.  He hinted that we might finally be hearing from survivors of the terrorist attack that killed our mysteriously unprotected ambassador to Libya.
It’s odd that we haven’t heard anything from these survivors before, isn’t it?  One possible reason for this silence was revealed in a Fox News report on Monday, in which we learned that “at least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress.”  We don’t know if any of these officials were on the ground in Benghazi, but we do know they’re retaining legal counsel to protect themselves against threats of reprisal from the Obama Administration:…To Read More…..

The Virtue of Lucidity: Yuri Glazov and the Fate of Communism

April 30, 2013 By Vladimir Tismaneanu Comments (3)
To order Yuri Glazov’s The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death, click here.
In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, “contradictions”), but very few anticipated the regime’s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously…… Both thinkers understood that, once the ideological zeal was extinct, the system was doomed. The degradation of faith was a decisive catalyst for the demise of the whole system. From the original Marxist-Leninist utopia nothing remained but cynicism, confusion, and disgust with broken promises. For Glazov, the indication of the revolutionary breakdown was the fact that even party bureaucrats were treating the official mythologies as empty, soporific phrases. Nothing captures better the nature of that system than a joke quoted by Yuri Glazov– Radio Yerevan asks : “What is Marxism-Leninism, a science or an art? The answer: “It is probably an art. If it were a science it would have been tried out first on animals.”...To Read More....
My Take - This is one of the more profound articles I have posted over the years since it clearly outlines why leftism fails.  One of my favorite phrases is; “It’s all about the basics!” Socialism in all its permutations such as fascism, communism, and environmentalism are a doomed because they are based on ideological zeal that has no sound moral, logical or factual foundation to support the gigantic structural programs of social engineering they create.  When we give in to the greenies we are merely enablers to concepts that are failures in fact, failures in logic, failures in morality and failures in application.  At some point we reach the "inevitability factor when reality reaches its zenith", which is when the world can clearly see the lack of rational structure because of the totality of their failure. 
Leftism has failed everywhere at every point in history because it despises the individual and adores the collective.  That creates a system that is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.  It has no sound stable moral foundation.  How else can you explain the horrible abuses the left has heaped on humanity?  The socialist monsters of the 20th century like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pot Pol have been responsible for the deliberate murder of over 100 million people, many of them deliberately starved to death by these leftist madmen.  The environment movement, through their policies and programs has been responsible for at least that many deaths and they aren’t done yet. 
Environmentalism is a true scion of the left.  Currently it is the spear point of the world wide socialist movement, sharing the morally defective views of the left, their claims about concern for human health and conditions are nothing more than the same propaganda that the left has spouted for over 100 years.....and it is no less a lie now that it was when Marx spouted it in his life and the madmen of the French Revolution spouted it during The Terror. 
We should recognize their cries about “it’s for the children” as nothing more than an emotional smoke screen to hide their real objectives because we have more than enough historical foundation to know what their schemes do “to the children”!
What we need is clarity of thought and definition.  That leads to understanding.  Understanding leads to solutions.  Give me the history and I will give you the answer.   

Support Drilling, Fracking, Keystone and Exports

Written by Paul Driessen
Published on Monday, 29 April 2013
My thanks to Paul for allowing me to publish his work. RK
We don’t need to restrict oil or gas exports. We need to open more lands to leasing and drilling.
The interminable war on drilling, fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline has taken some bizarre turns. Now it’s getting worse, as opponents grow more desperate, and the moon again grows full.
Deepwater drilling, 3-dimension and 4-D seismic (the ability to visualize 3-D over many years), deep horizon horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and other technological marvels have obliterated environmentalist claims that the United States and world are running out of oil and gas – and therefore we need to switch to subsidized, land-hungry, job-killing wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels.
Thanks to free enterprise innovation on state and public lands – and no thanks to President Obama, who has made nearly the entire federal onshore and offshore estate off limits to leasing and drilling – US oil and natural gas production has set an all-time record. The world is on the verge of doing so, as well.
Long-running geopolitics have been turned upside down, as OPEC, Russia and other oil superpowers wonder what hit them. Plastic and chemical manufacturers, steel makers, bus and fleet vehicle operators, and now long-haul truckers are already cashing in on the natural gas bonanza. So are electric utilities, especially with EPA continuing its war on coal, with more unnecessary heavy-handed air and water rules.
Global warming / climate change hysteria is also foundering on the rocks of reality. Average global temperatures haven’t risen in 16 years, seas aren’t rising any faster than 100 years ago, and storms, floods and droughts are no more frequent or severe than over multi-decade trends during the past century.
Evidence and reality simply are not cooperating with IPCC and Mann-made climate models. “Trust the computer models!” the alarmists plead. “If reality doesn’t comport with our predictions, reality is wrong.”
The US State Department has (yet again) said the Keystone XL pipeline poses few environmental problems and should be approved, to bring Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries – creating thousands of construction and permanent jobs, and billions in economic growth and government revenue.
Unacceptable! rants the Environmental Protection Agency. “State underestimated KXL’s potential impact on global warming and needs to do its studies all over again,” says EPA. Never mind that oil sands production would add a minuscule 0.06% to US greenhouse gas emissions and an undetectable 0.00001 degrees C per year to computer-modeled global warming, according to the Congressional Research Service. Do it over, until you get the answers we want, demand EPA and environmentalist ideologues.
Some 70% of Americans and 60% of Canadians support Keystone – and energy security (and jobs) outrank greenhouse gas reduction as a national priority by a 2-1 margin among Americans – says Canadian pollster Nik Nanos.
However, haters of hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty are not ready to surrender. They’ve launched a blitzkrieg flanking attack. This time they are outraged that some Keystone oil could be refined into diesel and other products and exported! to Europe or Asia – while some frack-based natural gas might be converted to LNG and likewise exported! around the globe.
Well, yes. When US refiners transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, asphalt, waxes and petrochemicals, they ship some of these products overseas. Since Americans use less diesel than refineries manufacture (some parts of each barrel of crude can be converted only into diesel), refiners also export their excess diesel to Europe, which uses more diesel than gasoline, and Europeans ship their surplus gasoline to the USA, mostly to East Coast consumers. It’s a win-win arrangement that will be buttressed and safeguarded by Keystone pipeline transport of Canadian oil.
And yes, Cheniere Energy and other companies want to ship liquefied natural gas to foreign markets. It’s hardly surprising that anti-fracking activists would seize on this as yet another excuse for opposing this game-changing technology. It is hardly remarkable that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) and other far-Left legislators would sponsor bills to block LNG exports.
What is shocking is that Dow and Huntsman Chemical, Alcoa Aluminum, Nucor Steel and other companies are joining the no-export campaign. They have convinced themselves that such exports will hurt their own selfish economic interests – and for PR reasons have packaged that notion into assertions that exporting any US natural gas is against America’s and the public’s economic interests. Nonsense.
America has barely begun to tap its vast shale gas and conventional natural gas deposits. It has not yet touched its methane hydrates. Together, these deposits will likely last a century or more. In addition, other countries are racing to develop their own conventional, shale and hydrate deposits – while still others will eventually recognize the folly of keeping their own deposits off limits. All this will gradually reduce demand for US natural gas exports, slow and prolong extraction, and keep gas prices low.
This interplay will also help ensure that more factories and power plants in more countries burn natural gas, thereby replacing coal and providing the economic wherewithal to enable China, India and other nations to install modern pollution abatement technologies on their now dirty power plants. That will greatly improve air quality and human health in countless cities, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing consternation among steadily dwindling numbers of climate alarmists.
American oil and gas development – and exports – will also provide an opportunity for our nation to “give back” to the world community for all the petroleum that our anti-leasing, anti-drilling policies have caused us to take from the world’s petroleum supplies for decades. All this activity will also spur further innovation in technologies to unlock still more energy. It will spur job creation, economic growth and government tax and royalty revenue collection here in the United States … and abroad.
Some 23 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed; 128 million are dependent on various government programs, including 47 million on food stamps; and the United States is more than $16 trillion in debt. Unemployment in the construction trades is 14.7 percent. Black unemployment was 12.7% when President Bush left office; it soared to 16.7% by September 2011 under President Obama, and remains stuck at 14% today for black adults – and an astronomical 43% for black teenagers!
Drilling, fracking and exports can reverse these horrendous, intolerable, unnecessary statistics.
Misguided industrialists should stop railing against exports. They would do themselves and our nation far more good by putting their lobbyists and public relations staffs to work demanding an end to leasing, drilling and fracking bans that continue to dominate eco-liberal thinking, US energy policy (especially under the current administration).
Of 1.8 billion acres on our nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, only 36-43 million are under lease. That’s barely 2% of the OCS. Offshore territory equal to 78% of the entire US landmass (Alaska plus the Lower 48) is off limits! Even the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill cannot justify that.
Onshore, it’s just as bad. As of 1994, over 410 million federally controlled acres were effectively off limits to exploration and development. That’s 62% of the nation’s public lands – an area nearly equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation has gotten progressively worse, with millions more acres – and vast energy, mineral and economic bounties – locked up in wilderness, park, preserve, wildlife refuge, wilderness study, Antiquities Act and other restrictive land use designations, or simply made unavailable by bureaucratic fiat or foot-dragging.
Drilling opponents claim to be protecting the environment. In reality, they simply detest hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty. Commonsense policies will rejuvenate our economy, put Americans back to work, and help fund government programs that Messrs. Obama and Reid profess to care so much about – while safeguarding ecological values we all cherish.

Prosecutor to abortionist: Are you human?

Michael Carl
PHILADELPHIA – In an emotional moment in closing arguments by Prosecutor Ed Cameron in the abortion murder case against practitioner Kermit Gosnell, he suggested the jury must decide if the longtime abortionist even was “human.”
“Pennsylvania law requires that once a baby leaves the mother, he be treated with dignity and respect like a human being,” Cameron said today as closing arguments wrapped up. “But the question we need to ask that man sitting over at the table. Are you human? To med these women up and to cut these babies’ necks is not human!”….To Read More….

Abortion Doc Who OK’d Infanticide Backtracks, Calls Pro-Lifers “Terrorists”

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/29/13
A Washington, D.C.-based abortion practitioner caught on video promoting infanticide has given an interview in which he backtracks from doing so and lashes out at pro-life advocates.  As LifeNews reported today, the videos show there are other abortion clinics, abortion practitioners and staff who, like Kermit Gosnell, would leave babies to die after failed abortions.
 “Hopefully we’ll get this pregnancy out intact, but it doesn’t always happen that way,” Washington, D.C. abortion doctor Cesare Santangelo tells an undercover Live Action investigator who is 24 weeks pregnant.  “I try and sever the umbilical cord first, and we wait for that to stop pulsing, and this way the fetus is expired first.”
When asked by the undercover investigator what would happen if the baby were to survive the abortion, Doctor Santangelo responds:
“Technically – you know, legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive.  But, you know, it probably wouldn’t.  It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.  Let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know?  Then we would do things – we would – we would not help it.  We wouldn’t intubate.  It would be, you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, let’s say, that had cancer, you know?  You wouldn’t do any extra procedures to help that person survive.  Like ‘do not resuscitate’ orders.  We would do the same things here.”

Live Babies Drowned in Toxic Fluid

WND
New, horrific discoveries in New York, Washington, D.C.- A Pennsylvania jury will soon render a verdict on whether abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell murdered four babies who survived abortions as well as a woman who was one of his patients, but a new series of videos from Live Action suggest that Gosnell’s actions are not out of the mainstream.
Live Action President Lila Rose told WND her group has already released two videos showing abortion providers in New York City and Washington, D.C., explaining how they would do nothing to help a baby who survived an abortion to survive.
The 10-year Planned Parenthood adviser tells an undercover Live Action investigator that if she were to deliver her baby alive while at home between the stages in her two-day abortion, that she should just “flush it.” The female official also said that the woman definitely should not call a hospital because it wouldn’t help her since the abortion had already started. She further asserted that any surviving baby would die once it was submerged in a toxic solution inside a jar…..To Read More….

Gosnell nightmare: What if there are more? Media whisper about abortion-industry violence, death

The whispering has started: What if Gosnell isn’t the only one?  The closing arguments in the Philadelphia trial for late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell today mean that the jury soon will deliberate on whether he broke the law by removing babies from their mothers’ wombs and snipping their spinal cords, calling it an “abortion.”  The establishment media largely has ignored the horrors of the Gosnell case – the babies big enough to “walk” the doctor to the bus stop, the infants’ feet kept in jars, the remains kept in freezers. Some did report on the murder charges against Gosnell when the pressure mounted.
But the case has been portrayed by abortion supporters as a one-of-a-kind case by a rogue who didn’t operate the way the rest of the abortion industry does – with care, tact and an emphasis on women’s safety and health.  But over the weekend, LiveAction.org, which has conducted a series of undercover investigations of the abortion industry, released recordings showing Gosnell is not the only abortionist to advocate letting a child born after an abortion attempt die or killing it.  It was enough to prompt a media reaction……To Read More…..

Hero Of The American Left, Professor Noam Chomsky Denounces Obama Administration

April 30, 2013 by Sam Rolley 
Notable left-wing polemicist Professor Noam Chomsky has made a career of writing and speaking out against government abuses of civil liberties in the United States and abroad. In the 2008 Presidential election, the professor endorsed Barack Obama but contended that the youthful Presidential candidate would have little positive or negative impact on civil liberty.  Chomsky now says he is surprised and disgusted by the current President’s inexplicable “attack” on civil liberties, which he said goes beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
In an interview, Chomsky told the liberal blog Alternet ..To Read More…
My Take Amazing! Is it possible for anyone to be more clueless than Chomsky? He is one of the biggest proponents of leftist philosophy, and yet in every country, all through history, every leftist who came to power did all that he is whining about now and worse.

Why would he think this time would be different? As a reminder; fascism and communism are different sides of the same coin, but they are both leftist philosophies, and they both dismiss the individual in favor of the collective. The man is clueless, and worse yet, he must be insane. To do the same things over and over again and expect different outcomes is, according to Einstein, a form of insanity. Leftists must be insane since everything they promote has failed miserably all through history, and worse yet they never suffer the consequences for the error their leftist schemes. The penalty is always paid for by society. They are really only good at two things. Overthrowing governments and killing millions of innocent people, and they are especially good at starving them to death. So how many times in history does this pattern have to play out before even someone as brain dead as Chomsky reaches the inevitability of reality

Oh...wait....I forgot....leftists have no moral foundation so there is no such thing as truth...other than promoting the needs of the moment based on the philosophical flavor of the day.

Watch Out, Gun Owners: Congress Isn’t Done

April 30, 2013 by Ben Bullard 
Just because Federal gun control failed in the Senate earlier this month doesn’t mean it won’t come up again in the 113th Congress. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one half of the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey duo responsible for a piece of “compromise” gun control legislation that went down in flames April 17, is already making the media rounds with a second gun grab attempt on his mind.
Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday” that he intends to offer another, simpler version of the bill to the Senate — one that he plans to float before opponents with the aim of building the consensus he wasn’t able to find earlier this month.
Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who co-sponsored the dead bill with Manchin, publicly washed his hands of any further efforts at gun control last week, telling reporters: “The Senate had its vote. We’ve seen the outcome of that vote. I am not aware of any reason to believe that, if we had the vote again, that we’d have a different outcome.”
But Sunday, Manchin said Toomey is willing to give the gun grab another go — after the bill has undergone a cleanup that evidently is supposed to make it easier to understand for those Senate opponents who voted against it the first time….To Read More….

Polls Show More Americans Value Freedom Over Safety

April 30, 2013 by Ben Bullard 
The spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted assertion that “[t]hose who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” may be enjoying more currency among Americans in 2013 than it has since the days of Sept. 11 and the Patriot Act……..A FOX News poll conducted the day after the Boston bombings asked 619 people some of the same questions about the balance between liberty and security that a similar poll had asked immediately following the World Trade Center bombings; the results were very different this time around.
Back in 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, 71 percent of Americans polled by FOX News responded that they’d be willing to trade some freedom if it would help the U.S. government “reduce the threat of terrorism.” The poll was also repeated following terrorist incidents, both domestic and foreign, in 2002, 2005 and 2006, with the number only slightly declining as respondents’ vivid memories of the most spectacular incident, Sept. 11, slowly receded.
But after Boston, the same poll showed only 43 percent of respondents held that view. That’s the lowest number since before the 2001 attacks, when a May 2001 iteration of the poll turned up only 33 percent of respondents who thought it appropriate to hand over their liberties for the sake of protection….To Read More……

Brian Williams, Scott Pelley And Diane Sawyer: The Three Stooges

April 30, 2013 by Jon Rappoport 
I think, at the very least, YouTube should censor Brian Williams, Scott Pelley and Diane Sawyer. Well, wait a minute. Not censor, but put up a notice on all their videos: “It’s come to our attention that these three characters are as annoying as a bad case of fleas. Caution: Watch and listen at your own risk.”  The three stooges. Three schmucks in the fountain. Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here.
If people are beginning to get the idea I’m waging a war against against elite media, they’re right. At the same time, I’m fascinated. How do these anchors do it? How do they lie so consistently and with such aplomb, day in and day out, without going up in a puff of smoke and vanishing?
The Big Three anchors are a miracle in the sense that they need a whole construction company to build the walls that permanently separate them from the truth, so they can sit in a television studio in New York and believe they’re in the wheelhouse of real news.  When you see the Big Three are discussing their own footage, but you find visual clues as big as the moon that their analysis is 180 degrees away from actual fact (as has been happening from Aurora to Sandy Hook to Boston) and the Stooges just sit there and drone on, well, that’s a “CSI” or a “Law & Order” you just can’t get, even if you pay the best scriptwriters in the world to come up with it……“The bomb was a pressure cooker.”….To Read More….

The Politics Of Everything

April 30, 2013 by  
Thursday was a tough day for the people of West, Texas. They gathered to bid a final farewell to their friends and family, 15 of whom died in the catastrophic explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer Co. storage and distribution center.  As a resident of Savannah, Ga., I have a sense of just how far a tragedy at a major local employer can reach. In February 2008, an explosion at the Imperial Sugar Refinery in nearby Port Wentworth reverberated far beyond the harrowing damage at the scene. Nearly everyone in the area was connected by blood or friendship to an employee at the plant.

To the best of my recollection, the various Imperial Sugar memorials evoked tears at best and indifference at worst. If someone tried to exploit the nightmare to press some twisted liberal ideological button, I neither heard nor read about it. While the usual Democratic vultures found their familiar roosts soon enough, the memorials themselves were treated with at least respectful silence.  Pity the same can’t be said for the folks in West. As they grieved together, Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman published this macabre substitute for humor:....To Read More....

The Dogs Of Liberalism

April 30, 2013 by Ben Crystal 
I’ve never really understood the idea of changing a sports mascot to spare the delicate feelings of some self-victimized group of people. What the professional victim types who shriek about supposed insensitivity in sports mascots are missing is the fact that no one selects someone or something they don’t like and respect as a mascot. That’s why they’re the Washington Redskins instead of the Washington Personal Injury Lawyers. It’s the same reason they’re the Cleveland Indians instead of the Cleveland Democrats. Moreover, it’s sports — not something really important, like Obamacare.
As stupid as these sports-mascot debates have been over the past 25 or so years, they may have reached a new level of brainlessness last week. Meet Carolyn Luby, a woman who describes herself as a “feminist” and currently haunts the halls of the University of Connecticut as a senior. And she is outraged — outraged, I say! — at the makeover UConn recently gave its mascot and logo: the vaunted Husky. In a recent open letter to UConn President Susan Herbst, Luby complained that the new Husky is visual code for rape. While you consider that lunacy, imagine how proud her parents must feel to learn exactly what the $38,616 they spend annually for their little darling to major in something called “Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies” is going toward…..To Read More…..

Fisker: Free to Make Flashy Cars in Finland

With nearly a year’s worth of exclusive reporting on Obama’s green-energy crony-corruption scandal, you might think we’ve covered them all—but the hits just keep on coming. This week Fisker is in the news due to its failure to meet a Monday payment on their Department of Energy (DOE) loan, with $10 million due, and Wednesday’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing: “Green Energy Oversight: Examining the Department of Energy’s Bad Bet on Fisker Automotive.”
Along with researcher Christine Lakatos, who writes The Green Corruption Files, I’ve addressed Fisker before. In last week’s column, I harkened back to an October 2012 report we did on 2009 stimulus-funded projects that were in trouble. We highlighted two companies on that list: Suntech and SoloPower. Suntech was recently put into bankruptcy and, about SoloPower, we said: “SoloPower’s power is waning.” On April 22, the Oregonian’s headline read: “SoloPower moves to power down Portland factory, gut remaining workforce.”
Fisker, the stimulus-funded company making $100,000+ electric cars in Finland, was also on that October 2012 list.  At the time, I wrote: “Though the company has balked at  Solyndra comparisons, Fisker may well be on ‘death’s door.……To Read More…..

Gang Of 8’s Euphemism For National ID System: “Identity Authentication Mechanism”

by David Bier on April 29, 2013 · 0 comments
Our new euphemism for a national identification system is “identity authentication mechanism.” The Gang of 8, the leaders of which are biometric national ID card proponents, included a provision in the electronic employment verification portion of the immigration bill that calls for such a “mechanism” to identify every American at the click of a mouse.
E-Verify, the verification system used voluntarily by about 7.5 percent of employers, is currently national ID-lite. Right now, E-Verify only compares identifiers, such as your name and Social Security number, to the Department of Homeland Security database. This means the system cannot know whether the person submitting the identifiers (SSN, name, etc.) is the individual those identifiers refer to, which would be true identification.
True identification, as the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper explains in his book, “Identity Crisis,” must compare biometric identifying information — pictures, fingerprints, retina scans, DNA, etc. — to the actual individual. The Gang of 8 bill does this. It allocates $250 million to DHS to include all passport, DMV, and state ID photos and ID numbers into the system. Employers would then compare the database picture to the new hire….To Read More…. 

Monday, April 29, 2013

Defense Attorney: Prosecution of Gosnell is 'Elitist, Racist'

April 29, 2013 By Elizabeth Harrington
 (Warning: Some of the photos in this story are graphic.)
(CNSNews.com) – Defense lawyer Jack McMahon delivered his closing argument on behalf of abortionist Kermit Gosnell on Monday, accusing  prosecutors of “manipulating” the case to engage in an essentially “racist” prosecution of the man charged with four counts of first-degree murder, killing babies born alive during abortions by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors…..To Read More….

Club For the Galacticly Stupid

EPA fights human testing FOIA request: Demands exorbitant fees for recent, easily accessible docs

The agency continues to obstruct independent investigation of its illegal human testing activities.
We heard through the grapevine that our spotlight on EPA’s illegal human testing program has caused some problems between the agency and the contractor that operates the lab where sick and elderly humans are exposed to high concentrations of diesel exhaust and other “toxic” air pollutants.
When we asked through the Freedom of Information Act for recent communications between EPA and the contractor, the EPA responded:
Mr. Milloy:
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request EPA-HQ-2013-003804, whereby you requested:
“… copies of all correspondence and documents (electronic and paper) between EPA and TRC Environmental Corporation pertaining to the TRC’s operation and maintenance of the NHEERL in support of EPA’s research on the effects of air pollution on human health since Jan 1, 2010.
The estimated fee for processing your request is $7,120.00. Estimated costs include research ($41/hour x 131 hrs = $5400); photocopying ($.15 = $900); and reviews. Current estimated cost of managerial reviews is approximately $820, depending on the number and levels of review. Other administrative charges may also apply and may add to your cost.
Prepayment is not requested at this time. You are required to furnish written assurance of your willingness to pay the United States Government the full amount for costs incurred as a result of your request by replying to all names associated with this email correspondence within 20 work days of the date on this email correspondence.
Further processing of your request is suspended pending receipt of your written assurance of payment.
You may wish to modify your request to reduce your potential fee obligation. Otherwise, non-response from you will result in the expiration of your request.
131 man-hours to retrieve recent documents (less than 3 years old) that ought to either be in a single place, either physical or electronic? $7,120 for a FOIA request of recent docs?