Cato Institute Scholars Analyze the 2010 State of the Union Address

Bumper Stickers Seen on Military Bases - from an email

"Except For Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, WAR has Never Solved Anything."

"U.S. Air Force - Travel Agents To Allah"

"Stop Global Whining"

"When In Doubt, Empty The Magazine"

"Naval Corollary: Dead Men Don't Testify.

"The Marine Corps - When It Absolutely, Positively Has To Be Destroyed Overnight"

"Death Smiles At Everyone - Marines Smile Back"

"Marine Sniper - You can run, but you'll just die tired!"

"Marines - Providing Enemies of America an Opportunity To Die For their Country Since 1775"

"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Anyone Who Threatens It"

"Happiness Is A Belt-Fed Weapon"

"It's God's Job to Forgive Bin Laden - It's Our Job To Arrange The Meeting"

"Artillery Brings Dignity to What Would Otherwise Be Just A Vulgar Brawl"

"My Kid Fought In Iraq So Your Kid Can Party In College"

"Machine Gunners - Accuracy By Volume"

"A Dead Enemy Is A Peaceful Enemy - Blessed Be The Peacemakers"

"If You Can Read This, Thank A Teacher. If You Can Read It In English, Thank A Veteran"

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But the U.S. ARMED FORCES don't have that problem." ...Ronald Reagan

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A friend of mine once sent a liberal Democrat a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, 'Wish you were here.'"

Some Dare To Call It Treason

Click on poster to open it large enough to read.

Senator Lindsey Graham Asks Eric Holder Questions About Guantanamo Bay Detainees!

Sen. Lindsey Graham in one of his rare moments of political clarity dresses down AG Eric Holder and the Barry Hussein Soetoro administration for their decision to make “bad history”, according to Graham, by deciding to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) in New York City. Graham essentially told Holder and the Barry Hussein Soetoro administration that they are making up a situation that could have grave and dangerous implications for America.

Nonie Dawish interviews on Olive Tree Ministries

From Jan Markell's radio program, Olive Tree Ministries. Markell regularly interviews many different speakers (mostly from a Christian background, but they are all qualified in their respective fields of involvement).

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November 14, 2009 - Hour 2
The first ten minutes finishes up hour 1. Then Nonie Darwish and Joel Richardson both weigh in on several topics including the Ft. Hood terror attack, rescuing Rifqa Bary, political correctness run amok, "jihad denial syndrome," and more. Nonie Darwish's new organization is "Former Muslims United" along with "Arabs for Israel." Find Joel's blog at www.joelstrumpet.com Nonie's contact: www.formermuslimsunited.com -- www.arabsforisrael.com

February 14, 2009 - Hour 2
Nonie Darwish returns to try to wake up Americans to Islamic threat. She discusses Obama's policies, the futility of appeasing Muslim radicals, how Islam may be looking at America with our new president, and her new book, "Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law." Nonie was one of our "Understanding the Times 2008" speakers. Full sets of CDs and DVDs may be ordered here. -- www.arabsforisrael.com.

September 6, 2008 - Hour 1
Nonie Darwish is called by some "the most hated former Muslim on earth." She talks about her conversion from Islam to Christianity, Campaign 2008 with discussions of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama coming from Nonie's Muslim background, infiltration of Muslims in almost all US college campuses funded by Saudi Arabia, and briefly mentions her new book not yet out, "Cruel and USUAL Punishment" about how Sharia Law treats women. She is one of our "Understanding the Times 2008" conference speakers. See the CONFERENCES category at this Web site. She heads "Arabs for Israel." www.arabsforisrael.com

December 15, 2007 - Hour 1
Nonie Darwish joins Jan to talk about current events. Nonie is called "the most brave woman in the world" as she is a former Muslim, now a Christian, speaking out and against radical Islam. She heads the organization known as Arabs for Israel. www.arabsforisrael.com

January 6, 2007 - Hour 1
Nonie Darwish and Jan talk about her new book, "Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror." As a former Muslim from Egypt and Gaza, Darwish has an inside look at today's primary threat: global Islamic terror. She also founded "Arabs for Israel." Every terror authority calls her one of the bravest women on earth to speak out as she is. www.arabsforisrael.com

January 6, 2007 - Hour 2
John Marion is founder of "Truth for Muslims." The organization is a missionary outreach to Muslims and an educational organization for the church. Like Darwish, he gives insight to radical Islam today and how we as Christians could better react to it while not dismissing radical Islam as one of the world's greatest threats ever. www.truthformuslims.com

September 30, 2006 - Hour 2
Nonie Darwish, an American-Arab, heads "Arabs for Israel" and is one of the commentators on the film "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" to be shown at our fall conference Oct. 6-7 (Sat. Oct. 7, 2 PM). She shares her amazing testimony and how she is making a difference in our war on terror. Her book coming out in November is "Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror." www.arabsforisrael.com

Soldier

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A Place to Ask Questions To Get the Right Answers

The Radio Patriot: American Hero ~ Anita Moncrief

The Radio Patriot: Why are you protecting the wolf at the door?

Honor Their Service *Care Packages For Our Troops*

Mark Talk: It's not Right vs Left, it's Right vs Wrong

Perfect Valor: the fight for control of Fallujah.

You Just Might Want To Read This

You might want to read this . . .

June 15, 2009
Our Historically Challenged President
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a "student of history." But despite Barack Obama's image as an Ivy-League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, both in areas of facts and interpretation.

This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Both are impossible. The Americans didn't free either Nazi death camp. (Regarding Obama's great uncle's war experience, the Obama team later said he'd meant the camp at Buchenwald.)

Much of what Obama said to thousands of Germans during his Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer was also ahistorical. He began, "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — both African-Americans.

In the same speech, Obama seemed to suggest that the world had come together to save Berlin during the Airlift. In fact, it was almost an entirely American and British effort — written off by most observers as hopeless and joined only by a handful of Western allies when the improbable lift looked like it might succeed.

In the recent Cairo speech, Obama's historical allusions were even more suspect. Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today's Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies.

But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism and Nasserism — largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies — did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than the legacy of European colonialism.

Obama also claimed that "Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." While medieval Islamic culture was impressive and ensured the survival of a few classical texts — often through the agency of Arabic-speaking Christians — it had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values. Europeans, Chinese and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation.

Much of the Renaissance, in fact, was more predicated on the centuries-long flight of Greek-speaking Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Western Europe to escape the aggression of Islamic Turks. Many romantic thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to extend freedom to oppressed subjects of Muslim fundamentalist rule in eastern and southern Europe.

Obama also insisted that "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition." Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians, and was governed as a staunchly Christian city.

In reference to Iraq, President Obama promised that "no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other." Is he unaware of how the United States imposed democracies after World War II?

After the defeat of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism, Americans — by force — insisted that these nations adopt democratic governments, for their own sakes and the world's. Indeed, it is hard to think of too many democratic governments that did not emerge from violence — including our own.

Obama also stated: "For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights."

With all due respect to our president, this assertion is again not fully accurate. The only thing that ended slavery in the United States was the Civil War, which saw some 600,000 Americans — the vast majority of them white — lost in a violent struggle to ensure that nearly half the country would not remain a slave-owning society. Also, the massive urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly violent.

This list of distortions could be easily expanded. President Obama, in elegant fashion, may casually invoke the means of politically correct history for the higher ends of contemporary reconciliation. But it is a bad habit. Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama included.

©2009 Tribune Media Services

and this . . .



The Historically-Challenged President By: Bruce S. Thornton
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, June 18, 2009

Barack Obama, as Victor Hanson recently documented, may be our most historically challenged president ever. Some might think that the inaccuracies Hanson identifies are no big deal, but there are several reasons to be troubled by such ignorance.

First there’s the double standard of a mainstream media that for eight years scorned George Bush as a syntactically challenged ignoramus, and now gush over a president touted as an eloquent intellectual. Of course, the media have to ignore the fact that Obama’s eloquence is dependent on the teleprompter, or that he refuses to publicize his college transcripts, not to mention the numerous errors of fact evident both in his campaign and presidential speeches. Their assertions of his brilliance, despite gaffes such as those on display in Cairo, are like their assertions of Bush’s stupidity: wish-fulfilling myths serving partisan ends.

But more important is the danger to our foreign policy that such an ignorance of history represents. Particularly in our fight against radical Islam, history supposedly provides the basis of Muslim grievances against the West, especially the United States. Colonial occupation, imperialist aggression, the Western imposition of Israel on the “Palestinian homeland” in order to atone for the Holocaust––these sins of the West against the House of Islam are constantly put forth as rationalizations and justifications for violence against Western interests.

If history is to provide the foundation of grievance, however, then all of history is on the table, and that history must be factually accurate and judged by consistent standards. If, for example, the enslavement of Africans is an evil for which the West must take responsibility, then all slavery everywhere must be condemned equally. But when do we ever hear about Islamic slavery? In the three-century long heyday of Western slavery, some 10 million slaves crossed the Atlantic. Yet in the 14-century-long existence of Islamic slavery––still going on today in Africa in places such as Sudan––an equal number of black Africans were enslaved by Muslims. We hear all the time about the horrors of the “middle passage” across the Atlantic, but never about the forced marches of Africans across the Sahara desert, where thousands died of disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition. We never hear about the African men who had been castrated to be sold as eunuchs, if they were lucky enough to survive an operation in which not just their testicles, but all their external genitalia were cut off.

And don’t forget that slavery in the West was ended by movements of emancipation backed up by the British navy, movements that have not arisen from within Islam simply because the Koran does not forbid slavery. Don’t forget that included in the toll of those enslaved by Muslims were millions of Europeans taken in raids and sold for the harems, armies, and galleys of Muslim emirs, sultans, and caliphs. Yet have you ever heard a Muslim leader today apologize for slavery? Meanwhile, American leaders continually don the hair-shirt of guilt over slavery despite the fact that only 800,000 of the 10 million slaves that crossed the Atlantic came to the United States, and despite the bloody, destructive civil war that in part was fought to end slavery.

So too with the presumed sins of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” The modern European presence in the Muslim Middle East lasted for less than two centuries. Yet Muslims occupied Spain for over seven centuries, and the Muslim occupation of the Balkans for half a millennium didn’t finally end until World War I. And vast regions of the Middle East––north Africa, Egypt, Turkey, the Holy Land––that were not Muslim but Christian homelands, are still “occupied” by the descendents of imperialistic, colonizing Muslim Arabs and Turks who came as alien invaders and conquered those territories. In fact, if we are to add up historical grievances, the West has a long way to go to catch up with the centuries of attacks, raids, invasions, plunder, murder, and enslavement perpetrated by Muslims against Christians. But do we ever hear any Muslim leader apologize for this record of imperialist aggression and occupation, one triumphantly documented by numerous Muslim historians?

This acceptance by Westerners of a double standard when it comes to historical grievance is nothing other than groveling appeasement. Why do we fret over the status of Jerusalem, a city fixed by archaeology and history as the spiritual and political center of Judaism, when one of Christendom’s most cherished churches, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, remains in the possession of Muslims? Worse yet, we scold the Israelis over Jerusalem even though the Temple Mount remains under Arab control, and the Al Aqsa mosque still sits on the site of the Second Temple! If Israel had Islam’s standards of justice, the mosque would have been razed a new temple built where its two predecessors stood for over a thousand years.

Because of this double standard, we fall all over ourselves accommodating Muslim immigrants in the West, even as Christians are disappearing from the lands they inhabited for seven centuries before Islam even existed. We agonize over the 600,000 “Palestinian” refugees kept in squalid camps by their fellow Muslim Arabs, yet never say a word about the 800,000 Jews kicked out of Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran, places their ancestors inhabited in some cases for two thousand years. We harp on the “two-state” solution and demand a “Palestinian homeland,” yet never ask the Arabs why they didn’t create this homeland when the so-called West Bank was in their possession. We anxiously monitor our media and popular culture for insults against Islam, even as state-run media and universities in Muslim lands indulge anti-Semitic slanders that would make Hitler blush––much of it perpetrated by the same Al Azhar university that our President recently hailed as a “beacon of learning.”

There are many reasons for this double standard, not the least being the fatal self-loathing of Western elites. But this hatred of the West itself depends on an ignorance of history on display in many of Obama’s speeches. And that ignorance in turn reflects the corruption of history over the last forty years, which has seen a once-noble discipline turned from the record of what has happened into a melodrama of grievance used to advance political ideology. The next few years will show us how large a price we will pay for ignoring historical truth, as our acceptance of this skewed history saps our will to resist an enemy passionately convinced of his righteousness.

Bruce Thornton is the author of Greek Ways and Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide (Encounter Books)


So, Republicans, USE this information!!! Man Up. Be Bold. Be Strong. Be Conservative. Defend The Constitution!

9/11 The Road To Tyranny

Alec Rawls Writes . . . We Read

Obama’s filing against 9/11 families: so bad it’s good

Bizarre amicus brief totally demolishes the Second Circuit's dismissal of the families' suit, then replaces it with the most mendacious stupidity imaginable. Now the Supreme Court will HAVE to hear the case, just to avoid the implication that it accepted this garbage.



9/11 families were stunned this week to learn that President Obama is asking the Supreme Court NOT to review their effort to recover damages from the government of Saudia Arabia and from several Saudi princes for funding al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America. That the defendants did funnel vast sums of money to al Qaeda was accepted as a given by the appellate court, as was the fact that al Qaeda was known to be dedicated to and engaged in violent attacks against America. So what was the Obama administration’s reason for siding with the Saudis?

Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court had to admit that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its grounds for denying the suit against the Saudi princes. No, the fact that the princes did not actually direct the al Qaeda attack on the United States does not relieve them of liability for attacks that they funded. The precedent on this is clear. As long as the defendant knew “that the brunt of the injury” from his tortious act would be felt in America, then:

... he must ‘reasonably anticipate being haled into court there’ to answer for his actions. [Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 790. Cited on Kagan’s p. 18.]

Nevertheless, said Kagan, she could think of a way around the appellate court’s utter failure to get the heart of the case right. The families’ suit falls under the 1976 FSIA law that establishes exceptions to the principle of sovereign immunity. This law does not allow jury trials. Thus while the appellate court was clearly wrong to say that the suit should not be heard, Kagan suggests that there are snippets in the ruling that can be read as the appellate court acting in its role of trier of fact, and thus ruling against the families for providing insufficient evidence.

In other words, instead of seeing the Second Circuit as rejecting the basis of the suit, we should see them as accepting the suit, and ruling against it on the substance. To make her argument that the appellate court actually did try the facts, she quotes the Second Circuit’s statement that:

Conclusory allegations that [Prince Turki] donated money to charities, without specific factual allegations that he knew they were funneling money to terrorists, do not suffice.

But of course the families DID marshal reasons why Turki could be expected to know that his donations were going to al Qaeda, as indicated by the appellate court’s further statements that there was no personal jurisdiction even if the defendants did “know that their money would be diverted to al Qaeda,” or were “aware of Osama bin Laden’s public announcements of jihad against the United States.” (Cited in the families' reply brief, p.8, and in Kagan’s brief, p. 19, respectively.)

For Kagan to pretend that the Second Circuit acted as a sufficient trier of fact, when it explicitly asserted that the facts don’t matter, is just an attempt to mislead the Court. The evidence that the Saudi Princes knew they were funding al Qaeda has yet to be considered by U.S. courts, even though Kagan herself admits that if they did know, they should be held liable.


The families respond

Of course the families are angry that Obama is blocking their access to the courts, despite their legitimate claims under U.S. law:

The Administration's filing mocks our system of justice and strikes a blow against the public's right to know the facts about who financed and supported the murder of 3,000 innocent people. It undermines our fight against terrorism and suggests a green light to terrorist sympathizers the world over that they can send money to al Qaeda without having to worry that they will be held accountable in the U.S. Courts for the atrocities that result. …

The Administration's filing is all the more troubling in that it expressly acknowledges that the courts below applied incorrect legal standards in dismissing the Saudi defendants, but nonetheless argues that the case -- one that seeks to account for the terrorist attacks against America and the murder of our family members -- does not warrant the Supreme Court's time.

This at the same time as Obama insists that al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay must be granted access to U.S. courts. Concocted rights for terrorists, yes. Following the law for the victims of terrorism, no.


On Saudi state liability, Kagan again misleads to the point of outright dishonesty

Here too, Kagan is forced to start out by noting that the grounds on which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the families’ claims is not valid. The circuit court held that damages for terrorist acts have to be brought under the FSIA law’s special exception for terrorist acts, which requires that the state defendant be designated by the State Department as a terror supporting state. Since Saudi Arabia has not been so designated, suit cannot be brought under this provision, end of case.

Wrong, as Kagan herself explains:

Congress’s concern was not to impose new limits on the domestic tort exception, but instead to expand jurisdiction to cover a narrow class of claims based on conduct abroad. See, e.g., H.R. Rep. No. 702, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. 3, 5 (1994) (explaining that the bill would “expand” jurisdiction to include claims by an American who is grievously mistreated abroad by a foreign government”).

This was necessary because the domestic tort exception only applies to injuries that occur on U.S. territory. Specifically, the domestic exception allows suit when:

1605(a)(5) - money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death, or damage to or loss of property, occurring in the United States and caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state.

In the wake of the Iranian hostage taking in Tehran, Congress wanted designated terror-supporting states to be liable for harms that they inflict on Americans even on their own territory, but this in no way was supposed to limit suit over harms that occur within the United States, such as the 9/11 murders.

Confronted with this obviously wrong ruling by the Second Circuit, Kagan again tries to cobble together an alternative grounds for granting Saudi immunity. To fullfill this improbable command from above, she decides to flat-out lie about precedent, big bald astounding lies.


Torturing "tortious"

Notice that the language of the domestic tort exception is perfectly clear that what has to occur inside the United States is the personal injury or death, not the decision that leads to the personal injury or death. Suppose that the home office of a state owned shipping company decides to scrimp on safety equipment for its cargo vessels, leading to loss of American lives when cargo is offloaded in an American port. This is exactly the kind of thing that FSIA was intended to cover, but Kagan pretends otherwise, arguing that not only the tort (the harm), but also the “tortious act or omission” that creates the harm, have to take place inside the United States.

In many cases there is no separation between the harm and the act that creates it. They both occupy the same time and place. Neither does the language of torts typically distinguish between the tort and the tortious act. Instead, the tortious act is seen as being realized when the tort (the harm) actually occurs. Kagan's ploy is to try to make a distinction between the tort and the "tortious act" that leads to it, and she is able to come up with some out-of-context references to make it sound as if precedent demands that both the harm and the decision-making that leads to the harm have to occur here in America.

She claims, for instance, that:

In Amerada Hess, the Court considered and rejected the argument that domestic effects of a foreign state’s conduct abroad satisfy the exception. 488 U.S. at 441.

Applied to the current case, she is clearly suggesting that the “domestic effect” corresponds to the 9/11 attacks, and that the “conduct abroad” corresponds to the statutorily required “tortuous act or omission” that in both cases took place outside of U.S. territory. A look at the actual Supreme Court ruling, however, shows this to be a gross misrepresentation of Ameranda Hess.

Looking up Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. and turning to p. 441 we find what the case was actually about:

In this case, the injury to respondents' ship occurred on the high seas some 5,000 miles off the nearest shores of the United States. Despite these telling facts, respondents nonetheless claim that the tortious attack on the Hercules occurred "in the United States."

In other words, it was the harm itself that in this case did not occur within U.S. territory. Contrary to Kagan’s representation, the Court was NOT making a distinction between the harm and decision that led to it and claiming that both had to occur within the United States.

This kind of blatant misrepresentation of precedent is lawlessness! Is this how the Obama administration treats precedent? As fodder for utterly dishonest word games? YES.


To preserve its own reputation, SCOTUS will have to hear the families’ case

The Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to submit this brief. It cannot be ignored. If SCOTUS accepts guidance from this contemptuous document, then it is implicated in the Obama administration’s contempt for the law.

If the sheer perversity of Kagan’s filing does force the Court to hear the families’ case, that would be a great outcome, but the downside risk is equally amplified. If the Court DOES accept Kagan’s guidance, it is a black black day for America.

Meretricious cites and arguments dominate every paragraph of Kagan’s brief, except in two place: where she shoots down the Second Circuit’s patently errant grounds for dismissal. It almost seems like she started with a brief in support of the families’ suit before getting the order from Obama to side with the Saudis. Apparently she decided that it was fruitless to try to support the Second Circuit’s reasoning, so she let the demolition of the Second Circuit’s ruling stand, then supplied her own just as bad case for Saudi immunity.

However it came about, Kagan’s destruction of the Second Circuit ruling is so competent, and her substitute arguments for immunity so incompetent, that the whole almost seems designed to force a Supreme Court hearing. Could she have intentionally sabotaged her own brief? Doubtful, given that the Obama DOJ just overruled its own career lawyers in order to drop an already won case against three New Black Panthers who were caught on tape using weapons to intimidate voters. Apparently the Obama administration just really is this stupid and malicious.

In any case, it seems unlikely that Kagan’s shenanigans will get past the justices. Antonin Scalia is unlikely to forget the FISA case opinion he wrote in 1992, addressing the very question of harms resulting in the United States from decisions made by foreign entities in their home countries. His conclusion? In a breach of contract case where the only tie to the United States was the option of receiving payment in dollars in New York City, the Court denied immunity. Only the harm itself had to take place on U.S. territory, not the decisions that led to the harm, and the opinion was unanimous.


Obama’s imperial presidency: he does not want to be bound by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, and says so

The family group states directly that:

The filing was political in nature and stands as a betrayal of everyone who lost a loved one or was injured on September 11, 2001.

Indeed, the entire first section of Kagan’s brief is replete with claims that exceptions to sovereign immunity should be determined politically.

That is the way it used to be, before Congress passed the FSIA act specifically in order to take these determinations out of the political realm. The United States only started granting any exceptions to the legal tradition of sovereign immunity in the 1950's, after some nation-states started getting heavily involved in commerce. If state enterprises could not be held liable in U.S. courts, they would have a competitive advantage over private industry. Not smart policy during the cold-war contest between capitalism and communism.

Exceptions were at first made on a case by case basis by the executive, but such arbitrariness does not suit the needs of commerce, so Congress made an explicit decision to take this power away from the executive. Even so, Kagan’s brief hints over and over (p. 4-10) that executive prerogative should still hold sway, but without ever making an explicit case that FSIA intrudes on the inherent powers of the presidency, and without ever stating what the president would want to do with those powers in the present case if the court were to recognize them as pre-eminent.

The reason Kagan doesn’t make these things explicit is because they are damning. Obama knows that the Saudi’s are liable under U.S. law, but for his own political reasons he does not want them to be held liable, but neither does want the nation to understand that he considers currying favor with the people who attacked us on 9/11 to be more important than justice for his own murdered countrymen.

The president does indeed have some inherent power here, just as President Bush had inherent power to wiretap conversations with al Qaeda operatives both at home and abroad, regardless of what Congress put in the FISA wiretapping law. Bush did abide by FISA, but he didn’t have to.*

Obama is going further. He does not want to abide by FSIA, but is unwilling to make the case that the particular exemption from FSIA that he is asking for is a legitimate exercise of his inherent powers, or even assert what he would do with that power. He just wants the courts to do his dirty work for him, asking them to grant immunity to the Saudis based on bogus claims about FSIA law and precedent.

Conservative justices might be tempted to recognize the president’s inherent powers in the area of foreign policy, but they should not let him exercise this power on false pretenses. If he wants to claim that he has the inherent power to grant immunity to the Saudis and that this is how he wants to exercise that power, he can do it publicly, but he should not be allowed to overrule Congress on the pretense that he is doing the will of Congress.

To allow this subterfuge would destroy fundamental FSIA precedents while failing to attain the virtue of the pre-FSIA regime, where the president had to stand or fall by his explicitly political decision-making. If Obama wants to invoke the inherent power of the presidency here, he at the very least has to be willing to admit it.


* FISA court precedent on inherent powers

The powers of Congress to regulate in an area where the president has his own inherent authority was addressed by the FISA court in September 2002:

The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

The contrast to the present case is instructive. Bush’s Solicitor General Ted Olson did not hide the fact that President Bush wanted the court to recognize his inherent authority to conduct signals intelligence. With that power duly recognized, Bush still went the last mile to conform to the law as enacted by Congress. That is what it means to “uphold our fundamental principles and values,” while Obama, who keeps accusing President Bush of failing to uphold our values, engages in legal subterfuge, showing as much contempt for the law as for our 9/11 families.


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Our Bravest and Finest Who Fight the Wars

What Liberals Do Not Comprehend about the Military.

The men behind Barack Obama

Video here!

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American Indians Have Something To Say About The Election

Hizbollah Wants Obama to Win to Make American Weaker

How does one say "oops" in Arabic?

Go here to see the video.

When Will Sharia Law Becomes The Law Of The Land?

As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness:

Nation % Muslim
United States 1.0%
Australia 1.5%
Italy 1.5%
Norway 1.8%
Canada 1.9%
China 2.0%

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs:

Nation % Muslim
Denmark 2.0%
United Kingdom 2.7%
Germany 3.7%
Spain 4.0%
Thailand 4.6%

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply. (United States).

Nation % Muslim
Switzerland 4.3%
Philippines 5.0%
Sweden 5.0%
The Netherlands 5.5%
Trinida and Tabago 5.8%
France 8.0%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world. When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions (Paris –car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats (Amsterdam - Mohammed cartoons).

Nation % Muslim
Guyana 10.0%
India 13.4%
Israel 16.0%
Kenya 10.0%
Russia 15.0%

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning:

Nation % Muslim
Ethiopia 32.8%

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare:

Nation % Muslim
Bosnia 40.0%
Chad 50.1%
Lebanon 59.7%

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels:

Nation % Muslim
Albania 70.0%
Malaysia 60.4%
Qatar 77.5%
Sudan 70.0%

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide:

Nation % Muslim
Bangladesh 83.0%
Egypt 90.0%
Gaza 98.7%
Indonesia 86.1%
Iran 98.0%
Iraq 97.0%
Jordan 92.0%
Morocco 98.7%
Pakistan 97.0%
Syria 90.0%
Tajikistan 90.0%
Turkey 99.8%
United Arab Emirates 96.0%

100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ — the Islamic House of Peace — there’s supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim: Nation % Muslim
Yemen 99.9%
Afghanistan 100.0%
Saudi Arabia 100.0%
Somalia 100.0%

Of course, that’s not the case. To satisfy their blood lust, Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons.

Special Thanks to FReeper Pablo64

An American Carol -- the Movie

Hollywood Takes on the Left
David Zucker, the director who brought us 'Airplane!' and 'The Naked Gun,' turns his sights on anti-Americanism.
by Stephen F. Hayes
08/11/2008, Weekly Standard, Volume 013, Issue 45

An American Carol is based loosely--very loosely--on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

[David] Zucker's latest movie, An American Carol, is unlike anything that has ever come out of Hollywood. It is a frontal attack on the excesses of the American left from several prominent members of a growing class of Hollywood conservatives. Until now, conservatives in Hollywood have always been too few and too worried about a backlash to do anything serious to challenge the left-wing status quo.

The holiday in An American Carol is not Christmas and the antagonist is not Ebenezer Scrooge. Instead, the film follows the exploits of a slovenly, anti-American filmmaker named Michael Malone, who has joined with a left-wing activist group (Moovealong.org) to ban the Fourth of July. Along the way, Malone is visited by the ghosts of three American heroes--George Washington, George S. Patton, and John F. Kennedy--who try to convince him he's got it all wrong. When terrorists from Afghanistan realize that they need to recruit more operatives to make up for the ever-diminishing supply of suicide bombers, they begin a search for just the right person to help produce a new propaganda video. "This will not be hard to find in Hollywood," says one. "They all hate America." When they settle on Malone, who is in need of work after his last film (Die You American Pigs) bombed at the box office, he unwittingly helps them with their plans to launch another attack on American soil.

The entire film is an extended rebuttal to the vacuous antiwar slogan that "War Is Not the Answer." Zucker's response, in effect: "It Depends on the Question."

A True Definition of PATRIOTISM

When is a "ceasefire" not a cease-fire? When it's a "tahadiya" -- read and learn

In Ceasefires in Islam: Not Always What They Seem to Be by Frank Salvato he writes in part:

To say that we in the West are engaged in a clash of civilizations with the fundamentalist Islamic culture would be a fair statement. Hundreds if not thousands of radical jihadist groups are mounting a violent global offensive against Western Civilization in a third attempt at establishing a global Caliphate. This contention is validated by history and we need only be good students of events passed to understand it.

While many hold the common misconception that the conflict with radical Islam started with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the reality is that radical Islam’s current confrontation with the West started in 1983 with Hezbollah’s bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Lesser understood is that this conflict is but the third bloody expedition in the quest for a global Caliphate; the first coming in the aftermath of Muhammad’s death in the 7th Century and the second occurring in the 11th Century, spanning the years 1071 to 1683 AD – an aggression that lasted 612 years, almost three times as long as the United States has been a country.

Three aspects of this conflict which we in the West are delinquent in understanding – and there are many others – are in defining the enemy, understanding the culture in which they are generated and familiarizing ourselves with their tools and tactics.

America’s War on Words, Mark Silverberg, Featured Writer states:

The Bush administration has launched a new “outreach” policy reflecting it’s reluctance to discuss jihadism in public. This time, it has targeted language. We are no longer at war with “jihadism”. Rather, we are engaged in a war against “extremism”.

In a document titled: "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication” released in March 2008, Federal agencies including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center will now be issued instructions on how not to describe "jihadists”, or the "mujahedeen", or to use any references relating to Islam, Islamic theology or Muslims in the context of our current war. Nor are these the only words to be struck from the government’s political lexicon. Words and phrases like “al Qaeda movement”, “Salafi”, “Wahhabist”, “Sufi”, “ummah” (the Muslim world), “Islamic terrorist”, “Islamist”, “holy warrior” and even “caliphate” are also to be removed from diplomatic discourse.

And ends by stating this fact:

An Administration that continues to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority and billions of petro-dollars to our enemies should be more concerned with legitimizing jihadists by funding them than they are about nomenclature.

In an article on Terrorism, Basic Projects writes:

Many counterterrorism experts, including former CIA Director James Woolsey and founding member of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Dr. Bruce Tefft, agree, it is not a question of “if” there will be another attack on American soil, it is a question of “when.” The only questions left unanswered about this future attack are how lethal it will be, where it will take place and whether we will have had enough foresight to have acquired the information needed to literally help save our own lives.

The issue of terrorism is a deadly serious one. It directly affects every American – as well as every freedom loving citizen of the world, yet accurate, fact-based, first-source information on the threat of terrorism is not readily accessible. Adequate information about the threat we face is not forthcoming from our government nor are we served by an agenda-driven media. Websites that offer accurate information on the threat of terrorism are routinely removed from private sector Internet search engine indexes for mentioning radical Islam’s use of terrorism in jihad, while those who do attempt to educate the public on the origins and activities of terror groups in the United States are either ignored by the mainstream media or smeared by biased special interest groups.

Contact your Congressional Representatives in the Senate and the House. Contact Senator John Sydney McCain, Senator Ronald Ernest Paul, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Senator Barack Hussein Obama. Do not allow Islam in any of its faces to create its Twelfth Caliphate in the USofA. This is no joke and it's not funny. The borders must be closed to unlawful entry by anyone from any nation. Immigrants must undergo a physical and a background check. Remember what occurred on 09/11/01. It would not have happened if we still used Ellis Island for all immigrant entry into the USofA.

Geert Wilders' video "Fitna" is Powerful

AKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian Internet companies blocked access to YouTube and MySpace on Tuesday, heeding a government order aimed at stopping people from watching an anti-Islam film by a Dutch lawmaker.

Anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders posted the 15-minute film on the Internet on March 27. It has since been widely available on blogs and file-sharing sites.

Geert Wilders' video is not for the faint of heart. Nor should you allow impressionable children (or adults) to watch it. It's harrowing. It only tells the truth about Islam, quoting the Koran (Quran) Sura before introducing video of that Sura being carried to its fruition.

FITNA is the face of Islam. Not just fundamental, jihadist Islam, but Islam if every word in the Koran is taken at face value. Fortunately, there are some Modern Muslims who are capable of saying "that was then, this is now." Their problem is that if they speak out too loudly, a fatwa will be placed on their heads, as was on Salman Rushdie (who went into hiding and is still alive) and Theo van Gogh (whose arrogance was his demise).

The video is on YouTube in a number of versions, posted by a lot of people (just read their youtube monikers to get a drift of what angle they're coming from). I'm not going to post it here because I know some of my grandkids read my blog and what's there is not suitable for them.

In the video, a three and a half year old girl is being tutored in the Koran. She says "Jews are apes and pigs" and when asked who says so, she states "Koran."

Here in the USofA on a given Sunday, in any given Christian Sunday School, you'll find three and a half year old boys and girls singing "Jesus loves me" and memorizing "For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting."

And on any given Saturday, in Synagogues and Temples, little Jewish children are learning Moses' words in the Pentateuch "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength. And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart: And thou shalt tell them to thy children, and thou shalt meditate upon them sitting in thy house, and walking on thy journey, sleeping and rising. And thou shalt bind them as a sign on thy hand, and they shall be and shall move between thy eyes. And thou shalt write them in the entry, and on the doors of thy house."

So you tell me . . . why is it not considered child abuse to teach a child Islamic hate-speech (hate speech being something that isn't true to incite hatred in another person)? (Now some are going to say that "the Bible is full of hate speech, too." Not quite. The Bible states that a certain action or deed is sinful, but does not tell the Jew or Christian to go out and behead anyone or kill anyone who defames God's Name. There in lies one of the vast differences between the two ideologies.)

Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad. Marantha!