I just returned from Haiti with Hebler. We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side, and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other.
Port of Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Ours was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble. There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnal house. The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money. The ones I ran into were either incompetent or outright anti-American. Most are French or French speakers, worthless every d*mn one of them. While 18oo rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID (another organization full of little Obamites and communists that openly speak against America) These two organizations exemplared their parochialism by:
USAID, when in control of all inbound flights, had food and water flights stacked up all the way to Miami, yet allowed Geraldo Rivera, Anderson Cooper and a host of other left wing news puppies to land.
Pulled all the security off the rescue teams so that Bill Clinton and His wife could have the grand tour, whilst we sat unable to get to people trapped in the rubble.
Stacked enough food and water for the relief over at the side of the airfield then put a guard on it while we dehydrated and wouldn’t release a drop of it to the rescuers.
No shower facilities to decontaminate after digging or moving corpses all day, except for the FEMA teams who brought their own shower and Decon equipment, as well as air-conditioned tents.
by Tom Mullens
Hat tip: Tom Mullens Blog
Saturday, February 27, 2010
If you are going to listen to Washington politicians at all, it is always best to listen to the party that is currently out of power. After each election, it is the job of the losers to try to attack the winners in any way they can. Often, they inadvertently advocate genuine principles of liberty in the process.
During the 8-year nightmare that was the Bush administration, it was the Democrats that stumbled upon these principles in their efforts to regain the throne. It was they who pointed out that the government should not be spying on its own citizens, that the president was assuming un-delegated powers through executive order, and that it was neither morally justified nor prudent to invade a third world nation that had committed no acts of aggression against the United States and lacked any reasonable means to do so. Their hysterical mouthpiece, Keith Olbermann, even went so far as to cite a long-forgotten document, the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, it is now abundantly clear that these arguments were made simply out of expediency. With the Democrats in power, it is now the Republicans’ turn to “fight City Hall,” and they have rolled out their usual rhetoric about small government, free markets, and traditional family values. Moreover, they, too, have rolled out the U.S. Constitution and waived it around in opposition to the Democrats’ plans to “spread the wealth around.”
Let’s take note that the Republicans are now correct in opposing the main tenets of the Democratic agenda, including expansion of government involvement in health care, “Cap and Trade,” and other wealth redistribution schemes. Amidst all of the usual noise coming from Washington and its media pundit class, it is only the Republicans that are making any sense at all.
The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.
The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.
After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.
With this in mind, ‘climategate’ — the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists — looks sinister rather than just unsavory. The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods. Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ’science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal.
You’ve seen “ER” and I’ve seen “ER” and I think we can both agree that if bipartisan health care reform were a patient, Doctor Obama would be dejectedly dropping the paddles, ripping off his mask and asking Nurse Pelosi to call it.
Oh, yeah. It’s finished. Done with. Kaput. Defunct. Deceased. Extinct. Artifacto. Fuggedaboutit. Game over, man. Part of the vast past tense. Washed up. Down the drain. Sleeping with the fishies. Sheer finito. Totally obliterated. See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya. Pushing up daisies. Eaten by the undertoad. Down Goes Frazier! Rests in peace. Bereft of life. Shuffled off its mortal coil. Crossed the distant shore. Run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. Stick a fork in it. It’s history. A memory. In the archives. Way gone. Say bye. Then again… you never know. Reconciliation. Such an innocent word.
With the deftness of Houdini, the president conjured up a seance where Democrats and Republicans sat down together and aired out differences like actual humans, and while the festivities conspicuously lacked any hand-holding choruses of “Kumbaya,” the two sides did refrain from physically throttling each other and nobody staggered out in full view of the cameras cradling a bloody stump. Which, for these guys, is a leap. They did, however, continue to lock out ordinary Americans by talking in a special Congressional code known as Politico-Speak. And I’m here to decipher.
by Ilona Trommler
Guest columnist of The Liberty Voice
Throughout the forty years since immigrating from Communist Hungary I watched many changes take place, political climates shift, as slowly I was beginning to recognize signs of what I knew growing up. Whenever I tried to talk to people about the changes I was noticing, they simply told me it could never happen in America!
As I am getting more politically interested and involved, realizing how we all slept through the decades while politicians took more and more liberties limiting our freedoms, I realized my story was becoming important for people to hear. It tells what is to come unless we take a stand, and force those we send to Washington to lead by that wisely written document, that allowed our country to be the best the world has ever offered. That incredible document that made this land the sanctuary to all people who ran from tyranny, and they found safety and freedom on our shores…… under the protection of the Constitution.
I often wondered why my search for freedom took me so far from my homeland, and not long ago it dawned on me, maybe the history of my country is important knowledge for America’s freedom. Maybe my story needs to be told to open eyes, and make what is happening today feel real, and more believable. Maybe I am here so I can tell what happens when a people sleep, and take their eyes off what their government is doing! I came from where we are heading, and this road was paved by tyrants!
The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.
I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.
How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.
Sen. Margaret Dayton (R-Orem) introduced SB-11, Utah State-Made Firearms Protection Act on January 25th, 2010. By February 16th the legislative debates were over and the bill was passed by both houses and sent to Gov. Gary Herbert for his signature. After 10 days of public debate, with both sides of the issue encouraging action Gov. Herbert signed this fundamental legislation into law.
In a written statement Gov. Herbert explained his reasoning. “There are times when the state needs to push back against continued encroachment from the federal government. Sending the message that we will stand up for a proper balance between the state and federal government is a good thing.” Opponents will spend the next several days declaring their stance and criticizing his decision. At the same time the federal government will realize Utah has joined with Montana and Tennessee as states serious about the need for our federalist republic to be restored.
Our federal government is to be supreme in all matters pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. The improper precedents and usurpations under the federal judicial rulings surrounding Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 (known as the Commerce Clause) are not supreme simply due to the fact they are outside the original meaning. By signing SB-11 Gov. Herbert places Utah in a position of proper authority while pressing the issue of supremacy back into the courts. As more states join this courageous move governing can begin the necessary restoration that will ultimately lead to the protection of people’s rights and responsibility.
The following essay for our Race and the Supreme Court program is by Debo P. Adegbile, the Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Last term in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Holder, he argued in defense of the federal preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court.
Our Constitution, properly understood, calls for a conversation between the branches of our government about the appropriate mechanisms for enforcement of the civil rights of African Americans and other minorities. Indeed, the Reconstruction Amendments explicitly carve out a role for Congress to interpret the Constitution’s equality principles. Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tasks Congress with the duty “to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” This means that the Supreme Court is not the sole branch of government with an affirmative duty to determine what the Constitution means.
Congress’s use of this enforcement authority launched a vital phase of our national struggle to build a more perfect union. By the latter half of the twentieth century, Congressional exercise of its Fourteenth Amendment enforcement powers received the full blessing of a unanimous Court. In Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, a decision upholding Congress’s Fourteenth Amendment power to abrogate the States’ sovereign immunity through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Court summarized its understanding of Congressional enforcement powers as follows: “There can be no doubt that this [Court] has sanctioned intrusions by Congress, acting under the Civil War Amendments, into the judicial, executive, and legislative spheres of autonomy previously reserved to the States.”
A few words of advice for all you anti-Obama conservatives out there. Quit it with the whole teleprompter fixation, would ya? Okay, okay, we get it, you don’t like the president. And you’ll throw the kitchen sink to attack him on everything under the sun; from being responsible for the recent rash of substandard Vermont maple syrup crops to the irksome infestation of grunge rock into country-western music, all the way to wormy pears. Everything he stands for is bad, and everything he’s against is good. Got it.
But in order to avoid major mortification, you’ve got to stop with the “overly dependent on the teleprompter” charge. Please. Really. You need a new argument. And trust me, there’s a veritable plethora of opportunities available. Why don’t you make fun of the way he cocks his head and looks Messianically upward like he’s trying to catch the whisper of God on an errant zephyr? Or you could profess incredulity at the global-cooling shade provided by his overlarge ears or remark on how he’s such a conciliator he probably clogs up the express lane for hours while dithering over the dilemma of “paper or plastic.”
I’m serious here, and only trying to help. You look like idiots. For one thing, Everybody uses a teleprompter. No. No. No. EVERYBODY. I’m talking CEOs, news anchors, dog-catchers, dog-throwers, late night talk-show hosts and every politician on the face of the planet. When Glenn Beck spits contempt at the president’s lame reliance on a teleprompter he’s reading his criticism… off a teleprompter.
A teleprompter is a tool. Like rolling notes. It’s the words that count. You might as well criticize cooks and chefs for their preposterous dependence on pots. What is it with firemen and their hoses? Ski poles are obviously snow crutches and anyone using them at the Olympics should be disqualified. And shot. Or are you just emulating Emerson by eschewing the foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds?
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