http://www.liveleak.com/browse?channel_token=498_1344434592 Items in channel 'ALah007' Tue, 21 May 2013 19:13:26 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?channel_token=498_1344434592 Fri, 10 May 2013 17:23:44 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=965_1368220804 ALah007 Today's Democrat Party views the United States military as nothing more than a political tool to further their agenda. And after Benghazi we see that our troops and intelligence operators are expendable if Democrats think sacrificing them is in their best political interests. But don't take it from me; just look at what they do. Instead of preserving the world's most effective combat force, the Democrat Party views the U.S. military as a massive source of funding (defense budget cuts), an opportunity to shore up political support through social engineering (allowing openly gay service members), and a means to further their liberal internationalist agenda (so-called "Responsibility to Protect" operations like Libya). They know that the military community tends to vote strongly Republican, which partly explains their open contempt of the men and women that serve in the Armed Forces - whether falsely labeling them cold-blooded murderers (Rep. John Murtha), comparing them to Nazis, KGB, and the Khmer Rouge (Sen. Dick Durbin), joking about their intelligence (Sec. John Kerry)... the examples of the Democrat Party's distaste for the military could easily fill an entire article. But throughout American history, our troops knew at least if they were wounded, in danger of being overrun, or even killed, our military will do everything in its power to get rescue or recover you. No one gets left behind. At least that's how it used to be. That is, until Benghazi, which has become one of the most dishonorable events in American history. When our consulate was attacked and overran, President Obama left Americans to die. Any rescue attempt was cut off - not by our enemies, but by the Obama administration. Even worse than the tragic and preventable deaths of four Americans, Washington's reaction over the last eight months shows the utter disregard the Democrat Party and media have for not only the fallen, but for all of our troops and operators. I am not saying that each and every Democrat politician wanted those men to die. But can you name any Democrat politician that has said we need to get to the bottom of Benghazi? Has any Democrat even so much as distanced themself from their party's callous disregard for the fallen? Washington can say they support the troops all day, it's time they show us how they support our troops. Since day one, the Democrat Party - primarily the Obama administration - and their media allies have sought to make the story go away. Since that didn't work, they have resorted to distracting the American people and redirecting the focus by claiming Republicans are only making this an issue for political gain. Just imagine if your son or daughter was killed in the attack and politicians reacted by saying that anyone trying to find out answers was only using the tragedy for political leverage. That really says something about our nation when the majority party can shamelessly stoop so low - and get away with it. We need to be asking ourselves: what kind of people are we electing when merely investigating Benghazi somehow becomes politicization of a tragedy? After all, the men left to die in the consulate weren't Democrats or Republicans; they were Americans. In our society, the government serves the people, and therefore owes us answers. But the aspiring tyrants in Washington view everything - which now includes the lives of our troops - in terms of advancing their agenda and narratives to gain political power. Information or events harmful to the party or agenda must be rewritten or covered up, as was the case with Benghazi. With the president only weeks away from a potentially close election, the White House had no options that would serve them politically. A rescue operation could draw attention to the operation in Libya and lead to more questions (such as what were they actually doing in Benghazi) - questions that would likely lead to more problems for the administration. It already doesn't look good when al Qaeda-linked militants strike U.S. soil again on 9/11 when you have already declared the War on Terror over. To the Obama administration, they had nothing but bad choices, so to them, the answer was to let the consulate fall, then handle the problem by managing the story. So, a co-ordinated, heavily armed assault magically becomes protestors angry about an American anti-Islam YouTube video that nobody had actually seen. It is unlikely that anyone in the newsrooms believed that the narrative was anything but outright lies, but they played right along, because their agenda aligns with that of the Democrat Party. The false narrative allowing them to shift the focus as much as possible to keep things in a more manageable and politically palatable light. The administration bet that their fabricated account on Benghazi would hold out until the news cycle moved on, thanks to a complicit media. Anyone looking into the attack is attacked for politicizing the tragedy. Hope the lies stick, and once the story becomes "old" news, they could just dismiss it. Fortunately, the story didn't go away. As of this writing, no one has been held accountable or has admitted responsibility over Benghazi. There has been no real response to discourage our enemies from further attacks on the United States. Sure, there have been meaningless platitudes and grandstanding, but that is only going through the motions; no one believes that Obama will actually do anything because he clearly doesn't take our national security seriously. The Obama administration, the Democrat Party, and their allies in media have indicated by their actions and inactions that they simply don't care about what happened in Libya - they only care about their political agenda. What few reporters that are actually looking into Benghazi are being ostracized by their own organizations. Politicians looking into Benghazi are smeared by Democrats and the media. Commanding officers in the military have been fired. State Department employees coming forward are no doubt doing so at the risk of their careers. Have we, as a nation, fallen to the level that this behavior from Washington is acceptable? Perhaps we have - after all, they have gotten away with it for this long. But what about the individual level; do you find this behavior acceptable? If your answer is no, then are you willing to express your disgust with your elected officials and media sponsors? Hillary Clinton wants you to believe that none of this matters now, but the Democrat Party and the media have done with this tragedy is far worse than what our enemies did to the consulate. They have disgraced our nation. The days of "no man gets left behind" are apparently over. And if we the people choose not to take action against the political and media elites who are driving us "forward" then things will only get worse. http://www.blackfive.net/main/2013/05/expendable.html#more http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=965_1368220804 ALah007 "Expendable" by Crush Army/DemocRats/War on Terror/Benghazi Wed, 01 May 2013 08:17:59 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fe4_1367410488 ALah007 Barack Obama promised Tuesday that he would be taking lessons from the Boston Marathon jihad bombing: "When an event like this happens, we want to review every step that was taken, we want to leave no stone unturned, we want to see if there is in fact additional protocols and procedures that could be put in place that would further improve and enhance our ability to detect a potential attack.'' Sounds great - but ultimately all Obama offered were words. Words that are unlikely to be backed up by real action. The one thing that needs to be done - an official acknowledgement of the reality and magnitude of the global jihad, and the commitment of U.S. intelligence to understanding and combating it - is the one thing that will not be done. After all, the Administration official Obama has charged with ferreting out the lessons of Boston is none other than his director of national intelligence, James " Clueless " Clapper, who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is " largely secular ." Obama explained: "Part of what Director Clapper is doing is to see if we can determine lessons learned from what happened'' in Boston. Yet one of the foremost of those lessons is that people like James Clapper should not be entrusted with the nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus. The Russians had Boston jihad bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev under surveillance, were deeply concerned about his contacts with jihad terrorists, and shared those concerns with the FBI . Yet Obama said that criticism of how the FBI handled that intelligence was "not right, although I am sure it generated some headlines. It's not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother, they concluded that there were no signs he was engaging in extremist activity." Obama concluded from this that "the question then is, is there something that happened that triggered radicalization and an actual decision by the older brother to engage in the tragic attack we actually saw in Boston, and are there additional things that could have been done in the interim that might have prevented it?'' That's not the only conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that the FBI found no signs that Tsarnaev was "engaging in extremist activity." The other is that the FBI had no idea how to tell whether or not Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "engaging in extremist activity," because the "extremist activity" he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama's FBI is forbidden to study Islamic jihad. This is because the Obama Administration in 2011 mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad . It is the terror threat that dare not speak its name. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) deserves some credit for this - they mounted a huge campaign in 2010 to have me dropped as a trainer of FBI agents . Nor was that campaign personal: they mounted similar campaigns against any trainers and training materials that told the truth about Islam and jihad. But CAIR's was not a lonely struggle. Others responsible for the politically correct scrubbing of counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam or jihad include hard-Left pseudo-journalist Spencer Ackerman , who published a series of "exposes" of "Islamophobic" counterterror training; Fatima Khera of Muslim Advocates, who wrote a letter to Obama's then-chief counterterrorism adviser and current CIA director, John Brennan, demanding that this material be removed. Brennan, who readily acquiesced to this demand, also bears responsibility, as does Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who piled on in the mainstream media. They got what they wanted: now FBI agents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Islamic jihad threat, which they largely must pretend does not even exist. Now in Boston, we have begun reaping the fruit of this. Khera's letter to Brennan complained that my books could be found in "the FBI's library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia"; that a reading list accompanying a powerpoint presentation by the FBI's Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad ; and that in July 2010 I "presented a two-hour seminar on 'the belief system of Islamic jihadists' to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia," and "presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney's Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI's Norfolk Field Office." In fact, I gave many such presentations to various government agencies and law enforcement groups. Again, the complaints about me and my work were not singular or personal; they came amid many other complaints about similar material from other writers, and presentations by other counter-jihadists. So now all that material is gone, and the witless and politically correct FBI of today ignored Tamerlan Tsarnaev despite repeated warnings from Russian authorities. And if they did investigate him, they didn't know what to look for or how to understand what they were seeing. The Leftist journalists and Islamic supremacist groups who pressured Obama (as well as Obama and his administration officials themselves) ought to be held accountable for the law enforcement and intelligence failures connected to the Boston jihad bombings. J'accuse . http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/why-leftists-and-islamic-supremacists-bear-the-blame-for-boston/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fe4_1367410488 ALah007 "Who we must blame for Boston" by Robert Spencer Boston/ USA/Failure/Global War On Terror/Islam Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:12:42 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e11_1367244611 ALah007 At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford , which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up. The Pigford case represented everything Breitbart raged against in the American political order - large-scale cronyism, corrosive and cynical identity politics, unrepentant hypocrisy, and the predictable indifference of the mainstream media. A handful of conservative outlets reported on the story at the time - including NR - and a handful of liberal outlets dedicated only as much ink to these stories as it took to dismiss them. But in Breitbart's lifetime, Pigford never cracked into "the conversation"; it never came to be seen as emblematic of a deeper corruption endemic in Big Government. Perhaps that will now change with the publication, by no less an arbiter of "the conversation" than the New York Times , of a deeply reported 5,000-word piece on Pigford and its descendants that, if anything, reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought. Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And "claim" might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford , it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory - and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time. Unsurprisingly, this cash bonanza spawned a cottage industry of mountebanks and small-time frauds, including a few who toured the churches of the rural South recruiting "farmers" to stake their claims in lieu of reparations. And the number of claims exploded. Some claimants were as young as four years old; others had their forms filled out by lawyers just to "keep the line moving." There were many reports of duplicative, even identical forms written in the same hand. In some towns, the number of claimants exceeded the number of farms there operated - by individuals of any race. The Times quotes several USDA employees whose job was to process - and ultimately rubber-stamp - these claims. "You couldn't have designed it worse if you had tried," one says of the process. "You knew it was wrong," says another, "but what could you do? Who is going to listen to you?" "Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers," says a third. But as the Times reports in great depth, instead of closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration did not just acquiesce to, it spearheaded the expansion of , the Pigford con on the taxpayer's dime, and saw to it that not just black Americans, but any woman, Hispanic, or Native American who could so much as gesture at discrimination had access to a billion-dollar pool of easy money. It did this over the objections of career lawyers in the Justice Department. It did this by dubiously tapping a Justice Department fund reserved for court-ordered, not politically dispensed, payouts. And it did this, in most cases, under evidentiary standards even looser than the ones governing the original settlement. The administration claims that it was worth settling the Hispanic and Native American cases to avoid the potential of adverse court rulings. But the Times quotes parties familiar with the litigation who say that the government would have easily prevailed had the trials run their course, rendering the administration's decision inexplicable. In the suits brought by women and Hispanics, courts found the potential pool of legitimate claimants to number 91 in total, a "class" so small that the government could have dealt with them one at a time. The Native American settlement allocated $760 million, of which only $300 million could be awarded to claimants deemed legitimate. The rest will be distributed to Native American "nonprofits" that may or may not exist, and to trial lawyers, who admitted to the Times they were pleasantly surprised by the size of their cut, but "absent a court order" had no intention of returning any of it. None of this sorry, shameful, and outrageous mess approaches the realm of "justice." Pigford and its spawn instead resembles in organization and aim a criminal conspiracy of breathtaking proportions, and one in which the federal government was first complicit and then ultimately responsible. The Times report exposes - as Dan Foster did in his piece for us two years ago - Senator, Candidate, and President Obama's advocacy for the settlements as barely alloyed quid pro quo, in which Pigford profiteers promised to help Obama run up the score against Hillary Clinton in the rural South in exchange for his work on their behalf. Similarly, the Hispanic case was negligently settled at the urging of the polluted Senator Robert Menendez, who threatened to make noise if the Department of Justice did not give Hispanics the same deal the president gave blacks. At a minimum, a congressional investigation is needed, as is congressional intervention in the continued administration of the payouts. Representative Steve King (R., Iowa) has long called for such measures, and it is time his calls are heeded. It is shame, to the tune of billions in taxpayers' dollars, that it has taken this long for the mainstream media and its readers to catch up to the reality of Pigford . But now that they have, perhaps they can be shamed into helping put an end to it. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346810/pigford-forever http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e11_1367244611 ALah007 "Pigford Forever" by The Editors USA/Breitbart/Pigfrod/Scam/Libs Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:10:29 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9a7_1366812441 ALah007 "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana We should study history not just to memorize dates and places but to analyze trends. I see our country once again following a particular disturbing trend at a critical time when we should be more prudent. Now, I will be one of the first to say that we can find savings of taxpayer dollars in the Department of Defense budget. Before I was sworn in as a member of Congress, I stated on Meet the Press in the waning months of 2010 that we could find fraud, waste, and abuse in that budget. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I backed up that assertion in April 2011 when my first piece of legislation, which identified and eliminated funding for several wasteful programs in the DOD budget, made it to the House floor. It passed 393-0, and the savings to the American taxpayer was $35 million per year. However, what I see occurring now is not judicious cost-cutting but the degradation of our military capability. We are once again forgetting that the preeminent responsibility of the federal government is to "provide for the common defense." Some people have confused this with providing welfare and guaranteeing happiness on the notion of limitless rights. Since World War I, we as a nation have viewed any end of major combat operations as an opportunity to achieve fiscal responsibility through cutting the military budget. When World War II ended, we ramped down, and then we had to ramp back up for the Korean War. After the Vietnam War and the Cold War, we once again gutted our military capability. I was commissioned as a second lieutenant on July 31, 1982, and the following year, after graduating from the University of Tennessee, I went on active duty. I witnessed the transformation of the U.S. military in my early years: Humvees, Bradleys, Abrams tanks, Apache attack helicopters, Blackhawk transport helicopters, and Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) artillery, the A-10 close-air support platform - all this new technology and equipment was instrumental in my first combat tour, Operation Desert Shield/Storm. We were highly trained and ready for action thanks to our soldiers' preparation at places like the National Training Center in the California desert. But after the victory came the reduction in forces, and defense cuts became the source of funds for government spending on other programs, such as midnight basketball. In those days, we did not have enough small-arms ammunition for rifle qualification. We had to carefully budget our annual allocation of artillery rounds, so we did more dry-fire operations. The shortage of spare parts and tools made maintenance operations very intense. But the one thing we could not control was that the world was growing yet more dangerous. The enemy pays attention to our weakness, and they have a vote. Now, I am not a fan of nation-building excursions. I have been there and done that. I believe we must move away from a forward-deployed military and toward one that projects power focusing not on occupation-style warfare but rather on strike-operations-oriented warfare. We must use our greatest asset - strategic and operational mobility - to deny the enemy sanctuary, to interdict his flow of men, materiel, and other means of support, to cordon him off, and to win the information-operations aspect of engagement. Those are the premier strategic imperatives on the 21st-century battlefield. Unfortunately, we are ceding regions where the enemy, after exploiting chaotic situations, find themselves in power. I am concerned about the radical Islamic threat that now extends from the Maghreb to the Middle East and into southwest Asia; the rise of Iran's drive for regional hegemony, which now reaches into our hemisphere; the economic juggernaut of China, which enables the belligerence of North Korea, and those two nations' collusion with Iran on nuclear capability. And we must not lose sight of our dear friend Vladimir Putin in Russia. I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but our world is more Machiavellian than Kantian. There are only two ways to end a combat engagement, an armed conflict, or a war: win it, or lose it. By simply stating the date on which you are going to retreat, you only embolden your enemies. When anyone can see that the major focus of our military is social reengineering, the wolves salivate and prepare to feast. These are indeed times that try men's souls, but let us not forget that the president is commander-in-chief, and that our national security is his primary responsibility. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346424/lessons-history http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9a7_1366812441 ALah007 "The lessons of history" by Allen West USA/ global war on terror/conservative/allen west Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:00:23 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=70a_1366480646 ALah007 Now that we know that the Boston Marathon bombers were Muslims from the Russian Caucasus, it is clear the war is here. Boston is a war zone, yet still the media is disarming the American people by refusing to address the blindingly obvious motive: jihad. As we have seen from Beslan to Baghdad, Libya to Lebanon, Indonesia to India, geography is irrelevant in the struggle of ideology. The media is already spinning the revelation of the bombers' identities furiously, confusing the American people with nonsense about "regional conflicts" in the Caucasus. The Associated Press said: "If it turns out that the suspects in the Boston bombings are linked to those insurgencies it would mark the first time the Russian conflict had spawned a major terror attack in the United States." But the objective of the jihadists in Chechnya is to establish an Islamic state in the Caucasus. As Andrew Bostom observes, "Chechnya is the tip of the spear for al-Qaeda." Chechnya is a hotbed of jihad activity . On September 1, 2004, on the first day of school, Muslim terrorists from Chechnya stormed School No. 1 in Beslan , North Ossetia, took everyone hostage, and eventually committed one of the most grotesque and unspeakable crimes (even for jihad) in recent history, murdering 331 hostages, including 186 children . The jihad in Beslan targeted children; the Boston jihadis murdered a child. Beslan was even worse, as the jihadis embarked on a bloody orgy of rape and torture . The conflict in the Caucasus dates back to 644, when Arab Muslims introduced Islam to the region; the region has been a place of violence and unrest ever since. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev allegedly went to school in Dagestan . According to Bostom , "Daghestan was originally Islamized during the 7th and 8th centuries by the Arab Muslim jihad conquests of the Umayyads and Abassids." He notes that Naqshbandi Sufis have been expanding Islam's presence in the Caucasus and waging jihad against the Russians ever since: Presently, a Sufi Naqshbandi leader , Shamil Basayev, who envisions himself to be in the mold of legendary 19th century Naqshbandi North Caucasus jihadists, such as his namesake Imam Shamil, plays a key role in the ongoing Chechen jihad against the post-Soviet Russian government. Basayev, it should be noted, not only appears to have Caliphate dreams , he orchestrated the brutal Beslan massacre of at least 331 schoolchildren in North Ossetia, September 3, 2004. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have deeply imbibed the jihad ideology that permeates Chechnya and the Muslim areas of the Russia Caucasus in general. And even the mainstream media can't entirely ignore this: the New York Times reports : "On Vkontakte, Russia's most popular social media platform, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, describes his worldview as 'Islam' and... lists a verse from the Koran, 'Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.'" Apparently targeting, mutilating, and slaughtering women and children falls under the category of "doing good." And there is much more regarding the brothers' jihadi ties. Tamerlan Tsarnaev said : "I'm very religious." He subscribed to a YouTube channel entitled " Allah is the One http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=70a_1366480646 ALah007 "The jihad comes to Boston" by Pamela Geller USA Boston jihad global war on terror Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:44:06 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=79e_1366321250 ALah007 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WOUNDED OF BOSTON - As a veteran, double amputee, and fellow Massachusetts resident, I'd like to offer my condolences and deepest sympathy to the families of the victims of yesterday's attack. I'd also like to offer words of comfort and support to those whose lives were forever changed yesterday by traumatic loss of limbs. Although it's undeniably tragic , you will recover. And you must have hope that this terrible trauma will in no way stop you from living a full and productive life. In fact, this will be a defining moment in your life. In the coming days, weeks, and months, you will find a strength and resilience you never knew you had. Take solace in the fact that we, in the veteran community are recovering with you. Look to the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have lost limbs for support and inspiration. http://www.blackfive.net/main/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-the-wounded-of-boston-from-wounded-veteran-army-sergeant-peter-damon.html#comments http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=79e_1366321250 ALah007 "AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WOUNDED OF BOSTON" by Wounded Veteran, Army Sergeant, Peter Damon Boston, Vet, open letter, God Bless America Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:33:26 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e21_1365521475 ALah007 President Obama's statement honoring Margaret Thatcher was an example of the chameleon-like nature of liberalism. Rewriting history is a liberal specialty. Just as the anti-Cold War liberals were miraculously transformed into cold warriors after the war had been won, yesterday's anti-Thatcherites are today morphing into something else. The president's statement praises Thatcher as one of the "great champions of freedom and liberty" and goes on to observe that "she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered." So today we all celebrate Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon? This is revisionism of a high order. Of course, she ought to have been a feminist heroine. Thatcher was one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century and the greatest female leader of modern times. A woman of rare brilliance, grit, accomplishment, and determination, she won three national elections, helped to dismantle the Soviet empire, and transformed her nation and the world for the better. But no, the feminists loathed her. During her first campaign for national office in 1979, the more polite noseholders said, "We want women's rights, not a right-wing woman." The less subtle circulated the slogan "Ditch the B****." Following the release of the movie The Iron Lady , a feminist wailed on the Huffington Post that Thatcher was "the embodiment of everything that feminism is not: selfish, rigid, and intolerant." Ah, yes, the tolerant feminists! Thatcher understood them well enough, remarking, "I owe nothing to women's lib." Young women, we were told, required female role models. Thatcher's hero was Winston Churchill. While at Oxford, the grocer's daughter who grew up in a flat without running hot water majored in chemistry, not women's studies (a curriculum that didn't yet exist, but that she would definitely have despised). Her tutor, as it happens, was a female pioneer of X-ray crystallography, who had the effrontery to win a Nobel Prize before the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems of the world had supposedly paved the way. Eschewing the usual female ghettos of health, education, and welfare policy, Thatcher the politician focused on economics and international affairs. At a Conservative-party congress, she responded to a fellow Tory's temporizing about policy by pulling a volume from one of her famous handbags. Thumping her copy of F. A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty on the table, she declared, "This is what we believe." Unlike Hillary Clinton, who rode to power on her husband's coattails, or world leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi, whose powerful fathers blazed the trail, Thatcher was completely self-made. She never once complained, as Clinton has more than once, that she was unfairly treated because she was a woman. Many a male MP tangled with her to his cost. She never asked for a vote in the name of women's empowerment. She had no use for such trivialities. She had a country to save. The magnitude of Thatcher's accomplishments as prime minister cannot be understood without reference to the depths into which Britain had fallen by 1979. Successive Labour (and spineless Tory) governments had delivered an economy close to collapse. During the "winter of discontent" in 1978-79, strikes by public employees had crippled public services. Pickets blocked the entrances to hospitals, and only those suffering emergencies were permitted entry. Railway workers and truck drivers disrupted transportation. Trash accumulated on the streets as sanitation workers walked off the job. Bodies accumulated in morgues as gravediggers joined the strikes, prompting officials to discuss burial at sea for the mounting piles of corpses. Thatcher's victory ushered in a period of difficult but necessary free-market reforms. As in the U.S. under Reagan, Britain endured a tough recession as Thatcher wrestled inflation down. But the economy then rebounded and grew dramatically. She privatized state-owned industries, cut taxes on investments, radically reduced the power of trade unions, and reduced government spending. "The trouble with socialism," she said, "is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Britain's economy grew, confidence was restored, and the Labour party was forced to abandon its soft Marxism and become "New Labour" under Tony Blair. Contra President Obama, perhaps the least interesting fact about Margaret Thatcher is that she was a woman. Far more important were her dedication to liberty (economic, as well as political), her fierce opposition to tyranny of all sorts, her indomitable spirit, and this above all - that she was proven right. As she said, "The facts of life are conservative." http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344993/least-interesting-fact-about-margaret-thatcher-mona-charen http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e21_1365521475 ALah007 "The least interesting fact about Margaret Thatcher" by Mona Charen. Margaret Thatcher R.I.P. /Uk/ Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:18:35 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fec_1364998600 ALah007 "Islam is a religion of tolerance, peace and acceptance, but that doesn't mean it should be stepped on." This is the kind of law that the foes of the freedom of speech, of which there are many, are trying to bring to the West. "Kuwait Parliament Approves Death Penalty for Insulting God," by Fiona MacDonald and Dahlia Kholaif for Bloomberg , April 3 (thanks to Paul): Kuwait's parliament approved a law imposing the death penalty on any Muslim who insults God, his prophets, messengers, Prophet Mohammad's wives or the Koran, in any form of expression, if they don't repent. The bill, which adds articles to Kuwait's penal code, was passed today by 40 lawmakers, including all Cabinet ministers present, and rejected by five Shiite Muslims as well as one liberal lawmaker. "Islam is a religion of tolerance, peace and acceptance, but that doesn't mean it should be stepped on," lawmaker Ali al-Deqbasi told the house before the vote. AbdulHamid Dashti, who voted against the bill, said the law "should be broadened to criminalize those who insult all beliefs and faiths." According to the law, judges must give defendants the option of repenting, which, if taken, reduces the sentence to at least five years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dinars ($36,000). Non-Muslims will be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted of violating the law, which will take effect after signed by the emir and then published in the Official Gazette within a month of parliamentary approval. http://www.jihadwatch.org/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fec_1364998600 ALah007 "Parliament in Kuwait approves death penatlty for insulting allah" by Jihad Watch Kuwait/sharia/islam Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:51:02 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a53_1364824088 ALah007 As the immigration reform Gang of Eight inside the Beltway prepares to announce a deal later this week, claiming border security will come before a path to citizenship for millions of illegals, Border Patrol agents have seen illegal border crossings double and warn the cutting of agent work hours will only result in less border security, not more. "We've seen the number of illegal aliens double, maybe even triple since amnesty talk started happening," an agent told Townhall , who asked to remain unnamed due to fears of retaliation within Customs and Border Protection , something he said is common. "A lot of these people, although not the majority, are criminals or aggravated felons. This is a direct danger to our communities." Data obtained by Townhall and reported within CBP from February 5 through March 1, 2013 shows 504 illegal aliens were spotted exploiting the Tucson/Nogales area, 189 were caught on CBP intelligence cameras. Of those 504, only 174 were apprehended and 32 of the 189 on camera were carrying large drug load packs for Mexican cartels. Some were armed with AK-47 style weapons. Below are selected photos obtained by Townhall from CBP intelligence cameras in Southern Arizona near the border with Mexico. Sensitive information has been redacted in order to protect the security and identity of the camera locations. Last week, Fox News reported sections of the border will soon become unpatrolled as hours for on-the-ground agents are cut. Townhall has learned Border Patrol agents working the border have been fully funded, yet internal political battles within CBP may be causing funds to be funneled to managers, rather than those getting their boots dirty on patrols. "Customs and Border Protection has been given enough money to fully staff the border but has chosen to use the money elsewhere, we believe it is to fund the salaries of Supervisory CBP Officers. The money they are diverting was to go to AUO (Administratively Uncontrollable Overtime) which is actually straight pay and is used to pay Border Patrol Agents for anything past eight hours. Being that we have to maintain staffing 24/7 this is a huge part of border security. The criminals and drugs don't stop coming so we have to make sure we have people out there. Cutting AUO will be a 30% pay cut for our agents but more importantly a minimum 20% loss of staffing out in the field," Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council Shawn Moran tells Townhall . "It is internal politics within CBP and also with immigration reform. There are still battles between legacy Customs, INS, and Border Patrol managers as to the direction CBP takes and how the funds are being used. Meanwhile both parties claim no immigration reform until the border is secured, well this surely will not secure the border." As sequestration goes into full effect April 7 and a deal in Washington on immigration reform gets locked in, illegal crossings are expected to get worse. "We have seen increased crossings and smuggling since word of staffing cuts began circulating. The illegals have even told us that is why they tried crossing. The border is safer but by no means secure," Moran says. Another agent expressed the same sentiment, saying when apprehended, some illegal aliens ask where they can go to find amnesty. Despite border security being put further at risk through bad policy, the push for immigration reform well before full border security is ongoing. The AFL-CIO reached a deal with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on a guest worker program late last Friday. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the Gang of Eight has reached a deal on immigration reform on CNN's State of the Union over the weekend, but Republican Senator Marco Rubio has said reports of a deal are pre-mature. http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/04/01/exclusive-illegal-border-crossings-double-as-beltway-gets-close-to-deal-on-immigration-reform-n1554148 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a53_1364824088 ALah007 "Illegal border crossings double, border becomes less secure as beltway gets close to deal on immigration reform" by Katie Pavlich As Amnesty Looms, Illegal Immigration Picks Up Speed in Arizona Sun, 31 Mar 2013 09:35:22 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=325_1364736755 ALah007 Tina Fey has the mainstream press eating out of her manicured hand no matter what project she tackles. Fey's Sarah Palin imitation, which news outlets used to paint the Alaska Governor as unfit for the Vice Presidency, earned her an endless stream of huzzahs whenever she makes the promotional rounds. That hardly helped Admission , Fey's latest comedy which scored a weak $6 million during its opening weekend. Fey's liberal views are well known to the public, and it could be impacting her box office results. Consider Sean Penn, an avowed leftist whose rambunctious turn in Gangster Squad seemed like the kind of part audiences would gobble up. The big-budget gangster film ended up making just $45 million during its theatrical run despite heavy promotion and limited competition. Jim Carrey isn't the star of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone , but his gonzo character is the key comic subplot, one meant to evoke the Mask star's rubbery highlight reel. Once more, audiences stayed away in droves as Wonderstone will be lucky to crack the box office top 10 in its third week of release. Carrey regularly uses his Twitter account to attack those who don't agree with his points of view, culminating in this week's attack on the late Charlon Heston over at Funny or Die. Does anyone think Carrey's anti-gun music video, Cold Dead Hand, will help him put fannies in the seats for his future films? Box office analyzing is an inexact science, but it can't help actors when their political posturing polarizes the movie-going public. Today's audiences have more options than ever when it comes to their entertainment dollar, and when stars either insult or alienate a large swath of the country it does their future prospects little good. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/03/26/liberal-actors-crash-burn-box-office http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=325_1364736755 ALah007 "Liberal actors crash and burn at box office" by Christian Toto Libs/box office/ Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:17:33 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f41_1364141680 ALah007 The most telling line in President Barack Obama's speech Thursday to students in Jerusalem was his plea for Palestinian statehood on the basis of "fairness": "It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own," he said. Sixty-five years ago, the Jews and Arabs of Palestine had an equal opportunity to achieve statehood. The Jews took that opportunity, and declared Israel's independence. The Arabs chose not to take that opportunity, and attacked Israel instead. After the 1948 war, Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, but Arab states refused to integrate Palestinian refugees. In the decades that followed, the Arab states and Palestinian leadership refused to seize opportunities for peace, waging war instead. So the reason a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own--whether Palestine, or the state in which her grandparents settled--is entirely due to the decisions made by Palestinian leaders. Today, many Palestinian children are being raised to hate, so that they can repeat the same terrible mistakes. Is that "fair"? Yes--unless the only thing "fairness" measures is what people have today, not how they earned it. Obama is wedded to the false ideal of "equality of outcomes." No matter how many wonderful things he says about Israel--whether acknowledging the religious and historic connections of Jews to the land, or the Zionist achievement in building a new society long before the Holocaust--that false idea is his undoing. The fact that his remarks were applauded by an audience of Israeli students merely confirms that many Israelis also share the same bad idea. Israeli politics may be dominated by conservative parties, and the Israeli economy may enjoy a vibrant entrepreneurial culture, but Israeli society is markedly socialist. In 2011, the country was seized by "social justice" protests that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. The left--in the U.S. and in Israel, too--rejects equality of opportunity for equality of outcomes, refusing to hold people responsible for their choices. As a result, people who make bad choices are reinforced in their bad behavior. The fact that Palestinians are rewarded lavishly with money and goodwill, time and again, for rejecting of peace with Israel (and statehood for themselves) merely encourages their leaders to keep saying "no." The mainstream media are treating President Obama's remark as if it were a profound statement of wisdom and insight, a message that had to go over the heads of Israel's leaders and directly to the country's youth in order to create the change that is needed. In fact, he revealed his own foolishness, and his ideological rigidity. In 2008, Obama told ABC News' Charlie Gibson that he would raise capital gains taxes even if doing so brought less revenue to the federal government "for purposes of fairness." Hence his refusal, over the past four-plus years, to take budget deficits seriously as he pursued tax hikes that have damaged the U.S. economy. His remarks in Jerusalem apply the same illogic to international affairs. Obama wants Israel to make deep concessions to the Palestinians, even if those concessions might make matters worse (see the Oslo peace process), because doing so would be "fair." The students in the audience cheered. Many of them will grow out of such notions after they graduate. Not so President Barack Obama, for whom "fairness" has become a governing philosophy. America and Israel--and the Palestinians, too--are poorer for it. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/03/22/What-the-Left-Doesn-t-Get-About-Israel--or-America http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f41_1364141680 ALah007 "Is it 'Fair' that palestinians don't have a state?" by Joel B. Pollak. Israel/palestine/Obama Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:30:38 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=73e_1363897633 ALah007 Ten years ago this week, the United States led an invasion of Iraq with the explicit purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The preceding months had been filled with vehement protests against the impending war, expressed in editorials , in advertisements , and in rallies so vast that some of them made it into the Guinness Book of World Records . With so many people against the invasion, who supported it? Well, if you were like the great majority of Americans - you did. In February and March 2003, Newsweek's polls showed 70 percent of the public in favor of military action against Iraq; Gallup and Pew Research Center surveys showed the same thing. Congress had authorized the invasion a few months earlier with strong bipartisan majorities; among the many Democrats voting for the war were Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Though the Iraq War later became a favorite Democratic club for bashing George W. Bush, Republicans and Democrats alike had long understood that Saddam was a deadly menace who had to be forcibly eradicated. In 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act , making Saddam's removal from power a matter of US policy. "If the history of the last six years has taught us anything," Kerry had said two years earlier, "it is that Saddam Hussein does not understand diplomacy, he only understands power." But bipartisan harmony was an early casualty of the war. Once it became clear that Saddam didn't have the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that were a major justification for the invasion, unity gave way to recrimination. It didn't matter that virtually everyone - Republicans and Democrats, CIA analysts and the UN Security Council, even Saddam's own military officers - had been sure the WMD would be found. Nor did it matter that Saddam had previously used WMD to exterminate thousands of men, women, and children. The temptation to spin an intelligence failure as a deliberate "lie" was politically irresistible. When the relatively quick toppling of Saddam was followed by a long and bloody insurgency, opposition to the war intensified. For many it became an intractable article of faith that victory was not an option . The war to remove Saddam was not merely "Bush's folly ," but - as Senate majority leader Harry Reid called it in 2007 -- "the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country." But then came Bush's "surge," and the course of the war shifted dramatically for the better. By the time Bush left office, the insurgency was crippled, violence was down 90 percent , and Iraqis were being governed by politicians they had voted for. It was far from perfect, but "something that looks an awful lot like democracy is beginning to take hold in Iraq," reported Newsweek in early 2010 . On its cover the magazine proclaimed: "Victory at Last." And so it might have been, if America's new commander-in-chief hadn't been so insistent on pulling the plug. In October 2011, President Obama - overriding his military commanders, who had recommended keeping 18,000 troops on the ground - announced that all remaining US servicemen would be out of Iraq by the end of the year. Politically, it was a popular decision; most Americans were understandably weary of Iraq. But abandoning Iraqis and their frail, fledgling democracy was reckless. "It freed Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to be more of a Shiite sectarian than he could have been with the US looking over his shoulder," military historian Max Boot observed this week. And with Maliki moving against his Sunni opponents, some of them "are making common cause once again with Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has recovered from its near-death experience" during the surge. It is cold comfort that so many urgently warned of just such an outcome in 2011. So was the Iraq war worth it? On that, Americans are a long way from a consensus. It is never clear in the immediate aftermath of any war what history's judgment will be. Two decades ago, the 1991 Gulf War was regarded as a triumph. In retrospect, the decision to leave Saddam in power - and to let him murderously crush an uprising we had encouraged - looks like a tragic blunder . But this much we do know: The invasion of Iraq 10 years ago ended the reign of a genocidal tyrant, and ensured that his monstrous sons could never succeed him. It struck a shaft of fear into other dictators, leading Libya's Moammar Qaddafi, for example, to relinquish his WMD. It let Iraqis find out how much better their lives could be under democratic self-government. Like all wars, even wars of liberation, it took an awful toll. The status quo ante was worse. http://townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/2013/03/21/on-balance-was-the-iraq-war-worth-it-n1544317/page/full/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=73e_1363897633 ALah007 "On balance, was the Iraq war worth it?' by Jeff Jacoby USA/Global War on Terror/Iraq