Gotta love Michael Ramirez.... the politiartist!

Of course, how would we know, when everything about Barry seems fake!

GLENN BECK NAILS IT

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

As John (John Hinderacker, Powerline) has noted, America remains unclear about President Obama's religious affiliation. Thus, in a Pew Research survey, 43 percent (a plurality) said they don't know which religion Obama practices.

John has offered some good explanations for this uncertainty, especially the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. But I think it is Glenn Beck who has the best explanation for why so many Americans don't identify Obama as a Christian. Beck told Fox News that, "Obama is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim" and "people aren't recognizing his version of Christianity."

I take Beck to be using the word "recognize" in its ordinary "perceptive" sense (as in, he didn't recognize his long-lost childhood friend). This is to be distinguished from "recognizing" in the sense of formal acknowledgement (as in, the U.S. refused to recognize the new, breakaway Republic in Central Africa).

Obama's problem is that the Christianity of Rev. Wright, whose congregation he attended for 20 years, and of less abrasive liberation theologists as well, just isn't recognizable to a great many Americans as Christianity because it doesn't much resemble the Christianity they are familiar with. If Obama lived in El Salvador, where liberation theology is more common, his Christianity would be less in doubt.

Beck himself, I believe, stands in a slightly different position than most Americans who can't say Obama is a Christian. Beck recognizes Obama's religion as a set of beliefs whose adherents call themselves Christians. But Beck does not acknowledge that this belief set actually is Christian. Accordingly, Beck isn't scratching his head about Obama's religious stance, but many Americans are.

I'll leave to others the debate about whether liberation theology should be considered Christian. But I think Beck has put his finger on the reason why so many Americans don't perceive Obama to be a Christian.

Watch this man... a future Senator from Florida and a national voice...

Where Are the New Jobs?

By John Stossel

"Corporate profits are soaring. Companies are sitting on billions of dollars of cash. And still, they've yet to amp up hiring or make major investments."

So writes The Washington Post about the recession's stubborn refusal to go away. The statisticians at the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the Great Recession over -- but tell that to people who can't find jobs. Today, businesses replace equipment and inventory, but they are reluctant to hire new workers. Investment that does occur aims at replacing the use of labor by adopting advanced technology. In a growing economy, that's a sign of progress. Freed-up workers are then available for new projects. But lately, those new projects aren't being launched.

The two wings of the establishment offer their usual remedies. Government-oriented types want more tax-financed "stimulus" spending, claiming last year's nearly trillion-dollar dose wasn't enough. That's dubious. As economist Mark Skousen writes, "(P)roduction and investment lead the economy into and out of a recession; retail demand is the most stable component of economic activity."

Business-oriented types want tax cuts. I'm sympathetic, but cuts should be accompanied by spending cuts, or the deficit will grow even uglier. There's no free lunch. Deficit spending must be covered by government borrowing, which takes capital that could be used for investment out of the private sector.

Why isn't the economy recovering? After previous recessions, unemployment didn't get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can and does heal itself, as the mistakes of the previous inflationary boom are corrected.

The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama's vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.

In at least three big areas -- health insurance, financial regulation and taxes -- no one can know what will happen.

New intrusive rules for health insurance are yet to be written, and those rules will affect hiring, since most health insurance is provided by employers.

Thanks to the new 2,300 page Dodd-Frank finance regulatory act, The Wall Street Journal reports, there will be "no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies." These as-yet unknown rules will govern lending to business and other key financial activity.

The George W. Bush tax cuts might be allowed to expire. But maybe not. Social Security and Medicare are dangerously shaky. Will Congress raise the payroll tax? A "distinguished" deficit commission is meeting. What will it do? Recommend a value-added tax?

Who knows? But few employers will commit to a big investment with those clouds hanging over our heads.

"As much as I might want to hire new salespeople, engineers and marketing staff in an effort to grow, I would be increasing my company's vulnerability to government," Michael Fleischer, president of Bogen Communications Inc., wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Nothing more effectively freezes business in place than what economist and historian Robert Higgs calls "regime uncertainty."

"(A)ll of these unsettling possibilities and others of substantial significance must give pause to anyone considering a long-term investment, because any one of them has the potential to turn what seems to be a profitable investment into a big loser. In short, investors now face regime uncertainty to an extent that few have experienced in this country -- to find anything comparable, one must go back to the 1930s and 1940s, when the menacing clouds of the New Deal and World War II darkened the economic horizon."

Uncertainty created by Obama's legislative "successes" are comparable to the Depression and World War II? This does not bode well for job growth.

Higgs says: "Unless the government acts soon to resolve the looming uncertainties about the half-dozen greatest threats of policy harm to business, investors will remain for the most part on the sideline ... consuming wealth that might otherwise have been invested."

Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Who is in charge?

Contribution by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

This week we liberated a number of prisoners from a Taliban prison camp.

Why is this story not being pushed and pushed very, very hard?

Where are the pictures of the prisoners in shackles?  

Where is the video tour of the prison compound?

Where are the first-hand accounts of life in prison under the Taliban?

We have suffered greatly as a result of Abu Ghraib.  I know this first hand because 3d CAG was given the job of repairing the relationship with the Iraqi people who lived in and around Abu Ghraib as well as the Iraqis waiting outside the wire to visit the internees.  

We were told to clean up someone else's mess.  So be it. The Marines went in and did a great job but as the old saying goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Abu Ghraib has always been played as the "true face" of how the "infidel crusaders" treat Muslims.  It has hurt us badly.  Now we have been given a great tool to undermine this propaganda.  Let us show once again the "true face" of the Taliban and al Qaeda.  This is the "ounce of prevention" for winning hearts and minds sitting in our lap.

Is anyone in the chain of command going to exploit this?

Has the USG/DoD/DoS put together a package on this that average Americans can see on the internet?  

At the very least, it should be documented and presented to the troops going over to Afghanistan so they can see the real face of the enemy and have one more reason packed in their seabags as to why our mission is both right and just.

Every time we fail to do the right thing in these cases, we undermine our cause both home and abroad.   We won in Iraq by being smarter and better than al Qaeda in Iraq et al.  This is a real opportunity to be smarter and better than the Taliban.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Sobering thoughts of what could be... from Mike Walker. This is like a train wreck... every event is obvious, predictable... 

The Really Bad Scenario: Israeli-Iranian Nuclear War

I should not read certain articles in the Atlantic but can’t help myself so these dark musings are a consequence of that folly.  Nuclear warfareis the ultimate "dismal science.” I never had the stomach for it so it was the Marine Corps (not USAF SAC) for me.  But here goes anyway.

Post-Shah Iranian leaders have long professed that their strategic goal is to destroy Israel and Jews in general as they see them as a disease that plagues humanity. You can't make this stuff up.  This a return to the darkest days of Naziism.  Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the Nazis held that Arabs were Semites thus only one cut above the Jews.  The Iranians, on the other hand, were an Aryan people and therefore had much to be admired. 

By the late 1930's Nazi Germany was one of Iran's closest international friends and trading partners.  Since then there has always been a small Iranian elite who have reciprocated that feeling of admiration for Hitler and the Nazi movement.  Today's rulers in Tehran share that perverse ideological legacy.

Iran's leaders are giving us a replay of the famous Hitler-Stalin comparison:  Both killed millions upon millions of innocent people but Stalin lied about everything and everyone believed him while Hitler told everyone the truth and no one believed him.  The Iranian leadership is telling everyone the truth about their ultimate aims but no one believes them.  As a result they will get nuclear weapons and they will use them to try to wipe Israel off the map, their words.  

So how will it play out after Iran has nuclear weapons?

Either Israel will launch a much-too-late preemptive conventional attack to eliminate Iran's nuclear strike capability and will have to weather the counterstrike with what remains in Iran’s arsenal or they will feel the full force of a first strike.  In either case, Israel will be able to launch a nuclear counterstrike against Iran no matter the effectiveness of a nuclear attack ordered by the Mullahs in Tehran.  This is based on three factors.

First, how many weapons can Iran launch?  Will they be enough to take out both Israeli civilian centers as well as hardened military targets?  The answer to latter queston will likely be no.

Second, will Israeli defenses knock out a significant portion of the incoming missiles and/or aircraft?  Israel has the most modern version of the Patriot missiles which do well against MRBM's.  If a missile were intercepted then there would still be a lethal pile of burning radioactive junk landing somewhere but a nuclear detonation would be avoided. 

Third, it is believed that Israel has nuclear-armed cruise missiles on board its submarine fleet including submarines on station in or near thePersian Gulf.  They also have strip-alert nuclear-armed aircraft.  When Iran goes nuclear Israel may go to airborne nuclear-armed aircraft on station like the United States did during the height of the Cold War. 

These factors ensure that Israel will be able to launch a nuclear counterstrike against Iran and that means the two countries are back to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) with the distinction that one side’s leaders (the radicals in Tehran) may view this as an acceptable course of action.

Iran's goal will be to kill off several million Israeli civilians.  At that point Israel will be in an existential war of annihilation that Iran hopes to win by sheer numbers.  However, the majority of Iran's population lives in about 14 urban centers.  Israel has the capacity to destroy all of them.  Iran would cease to exist as a cohesive nation within hours.  It is also safe to assume that the United States would launch a conventional attack against Iran’s military to eliminate whatever war-making capacity that remains.

The next question is what will possible regional supporters of Tehran's Mullahs do?  

If Hezbollah attacks Israel after an Iranian nuclear strike in order to finish Israel off then the only viable option for Israel would be a nuclear strike against the pro-Hezbollah Shi'a populations in Lebanon.  These won’t be the tit-for-tat conventional attacks as in 2006.  After a million or more of your civilian population has been killed or are dying there is no such thing as a non-combatant, there is only survival.   By day's end, the Shi’a will be reduced to an ineffective rump minority in Lebanon.  This could be a similar outcome for Gaza where two nuclear weapons would decimate the population if Hamas or some of the more radical splinter groups were to attack Israel in support of Iran.

The problem is that all this could happen within a day or two.  Once begun it would be impossible to stop until the nuclear arsenals were depleted.   And we should expect these bombs to be dirty.  Millions of men, women, and children, (overwhelming innocent victims) would be dead or dying.  Some serious folks in Iran need to dust off all those medical studies related to Hiroshima and read them carefully.

Who would be the big losers?  

          Iran  

          Israel  

          Any regional power/group that joined in with Iran

          The World, especially those in the path of the atomic fallout  

          The United Nations.  An outbreak of a nuclear war will do to the UN what           WWII did to the League of Nations  

          The United States 

          The global economy 

          Everyone who was making a buck off Iran and buying their oil

Who would be winners?  

          The Arabs, if they play their cards right (and the wind blows the right way).  If they side with Iran then they will be big losers as well afterMecca and Medina are vaporized to include the Kaaba and the Grand Mosque.  The Dome of the Rock (w/rock) in Jerusalem will similarly be relegated to memory.  Islam would never be the same.

          Al Qaeda?  It could certainly be a big boost to al Qaeda and its followers (if the Arab States stay out of it).  The war would be seen as the hand of God who smote down the hated Zionists and the apostate Shi'a theocracy in one fell swoop.  There could be no greater proof to demonstrate that God is on the side of al Qaeda and against their enemies.  As they defeated the godless Soviet Russian superpower and now have lived to see both Israel and Iran laid waste, how much longer before God strikes down the United States?

Tragically, this will not be a replay of the Cold War.  This is a likely outcome of a nuclear armed Iran.  

This could be our future.

But think happy thoughts.

Who gets first consideration? The first to mount the walls when anyone disagrees with admin.

Obama getting head-faked by Iran again?

AUGUST 6, 2010 BY ED MORRISSEY, HotAir 

Eighteen months into his term as President, Barack Obama still hasn’t quite figured out that Iran wants to build a nuke and not a friendship with the US.  David Ignatius at the Washington Post reports that Obama has once again decided to offer the “open hand” approach that has worked so well since Obama took office that Iran has felt free to brutally oppress its opposition and subvert NATO ally Turkey:

President Obama put the issue of negotiating with Iranfirmly back on the table Wednesday in an unusual White House session with journalists. His message was that even as U.N. sanctions squeeze Tehran, he is leaving open a “pathway” for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue.

“It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons,” Obama said, adding: “They should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.” As in the past, he left open the possibility that the United States would accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides “confidence-building measures” to verify that it is not building a bomb.

The renewed opening to Iran also included a proposal for talks on Afghanistan. Obama said he favored a “separate track” for discussion of this issue, in which the two sides have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban. He urged that, as part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s push for “reintegration” with the Taliban, Iran should be included in regional talks about stability. “Iran should be a part of that and could be a constructive partner,” he said.

Ignatius thinks that the time is ripe for another such effort, because sanctions are now “beginning to bite” Tehran.  Even the administration doesn’t really believe that, as Ignatius concedes.  They have never seen sanctions as a way to get Iran to end its nuclear program, but merely part of a “cost-benefit analysis.”

That makes sense only if one believes that the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons has a rational basis.  It doesn’t; the Iranians want it for non-rational, messianic-belief reasons.  The contemporaneous economic cost only matters to them if it destabilizes the regime to the extent it will collapse, but otherwise nothing will deflect Iran from its purpose in gaining nuclear weapons.

In fact, this is well known to almost everyone but the White House.  Even the Associated Press gets it:

As Iran and world powers prepare for new nuclear talks, letters by Tehran’s envoys to top international officials and shared with The Associated Press suggest major progress is unlikely, with Tehran combative and unlikely to offer any concessions.

Two letters, both written late last month, reflect Iran’s apparent determination to continue the nuclear activities that have led to new rounds of U.N., EU, and U.S. sanctions in recent weeks over fears that Tehran might be seeking to develop nuclear arms. …

Iran insists it want to enrich uranium only to make fuel for a planned reactor network and denies accusations that it will use the program to make fissile warhead material.

But international suspicions are strong. Tehran hid its enrichment program until it was revealed from the outside. And it acknowledged constructing a secret nuclear facility last year to the International Atomic Energy Agency last year only days before its existence was publicly revealed by the U.S. and Britain.

According to the documents, Iran has enriched much more uranium than previously thought, and to a higher degree as well.  Transferring the amount proposed last year will still leave Iran with more than enough enriched uranium to produce at least one nuclear weapon and maybe more.  Clearly, time is running out on stopping the mullahs from their doomsday pursuit, and open hands to the regime have hardly been effective over the last several years, including the last eighteen months.  Either we need to get serious about other options or concede that we’re not serious at all.