Holder to allow ACORN funding, despite ban

Current law prohibits the community organization ACORN and its associated groups from receiving any federal funds from any federal law currently on the books, (P.L 111-68 Sec. 163). However, the Eric Holder Justice Department has interpreted the law's phraseology in such a way that permits federal agencies to pay ACORN for "binding contractual obligations" the government made before the current prohibition was enacted. This interpretation may go a long way toward effectively neutralizing ACORN's funding prohibition, and it is a questionable interpretation at best.

The actual ban reads as follows: "None of the funds made available from this joint resolution or any other prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations." (Emphasis added.)

The Justice Department has decided that the phrase "provided to" is unclear and "has no established meaning in appropriations law." They cite terms more frequently used, such as "obligate" and "expend," that have widely accepted meaning in spending legislation. They go on to arduously defend their point by exhaustively listing the many definitions of "provide" given in Websters, Oxford and American Heritage dictionaries and even Roget's Thesaurus. Like Bill Clinton, they probably could have found as many definitions for the word "is..."

Read more...

SEALs Capture Notorious Terrorist - SEALs Arrested!

First we had Congressman John Murtha accusing US Marines of atrocities in Haditha, Iraq - a blatant lie based on false information supplied by the enemy. Those Marines had to face an arduous multi-year trial despite the obvious fabrication of evidence, and it is still not over for some. Next we have the Obama administration seeking to soothe Muslim fears about "backlash" after a Muslim Major commits the first successful act of terrorism on our soil since 9/11, while they withhold evidence about the case from Congress and do lmore to suppress than investigate the nature of the attack. Now we have the spectre of seeing three U.S. Navy SEALs arrested because the terrorist they captured claims he was punched!

Who is the enemy here? Four SEALs captured Ahmed Hashim Abed, codenamed "Objective Amber" on September 3rd. Abed was the ringleader of the group who ambushed four security contractors in Fallujah in 2004, and hung their burned bodies on a bridge. One of the four, Scott Helvenston, had been a Navy SEAL himself for twelve years.

But now Abed is claiming he got a bloody lip. Boo hoo! And the Navy is prosecuting! These people are insane! Give the SEALs a medal for a dangerous, thankless job well done, and suggest that Abed get on his knees and thank God he wasn't captured by someone else.

What I want to see is an investigation of the Navy legal team and the chain of command that ordered and condoned this arrest. This aggressive prosecution of battlefield events, where enemy terrorists are treated as "witnesses" to a "crime" has has always looked more like a deliberate strategy to hamstring warriors and thwart battlefield success rather than merely the misguided application of political correctness.

SEALs are not cops, and no military force operating on a battlefield should be forced to adopt law enforcement procedures for capturing terrorists. These are not purse-snatchers! If the military has adopted such mindless guidelines for handling enemy killers, then it is the military's policy that needs to be examined, not the actions of warriors in battle. And if this policy has filtered down from political leadership, as it probably has, then their fitness for office need to be seriously questioned.

At best these should be considered vindictive prosecutions, but I believe something much more malevolent is at work. I believe the person or persons who find cause here seek to sow doubt, demoralization and bring unbearable stress to bear on front line forces. They are covert agents of our enemies, saboteurs working behind the lines to undermine battlefield effectiveness, and should be investigated as such.

When they are uncovered and exposed, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Treason in battle is worthy of execution. But it would be enough to see them stripped of rank and summarily dismissed - perhaps into the tender mercies of Fallujah's Ba'athists. I am sure they would get a warm welcome.

Outrage doesn't begin to describe this travesty.

I'm sure this administration will applaud the Navy's efforts to achieve justice for poor Abed. With their superior global awareness, they will surely want these SEALs given a fair trial in an appropriate setting. To demonstrate their evenhandedness to the terrorists, they'll probably choose GITMO.

This subversive element within our government, this leftist, anti-American cabal destroying our country from within needs to go! Right now!

Questioning Conspiracy

As long as we are facing facts, it is time to confront a long-held, dangerous delusion of the American psyche.

The vast majority of people who have read my series on the Cloward Piven Strategy, including Monday’s post, Cloward Piven Government, have taken the lessons to heart and are justifiably alarmed by their conclusions. Yet, despite the exhaustive wealth of evidence, despite overwhelming documentation embedded within these and others’ essays, some people choose to dismiss the frightening conclusions by taking the easy way out and ridicule them as “conspiracy theories.”

To these people, I have to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” The “dismissal by conspiracy theory” argument is the product of a lazy, cowardly mind, unwilling to risk a peek, instead reacting instinctively out of subliminal fear to facts that threaten comforting rationalizations.

The communist method is and always has been conspiracy. Since the Soviet military adopted Sun Tzu’s Art of War as their guiding philosophy, they have almost always utilized the effective tools of slow subversion as a critical component of their overall offensives. One of the foremost experts on Soviet methods even called the Soviet Union the “Counterintelligence State,” based on the idea that the entire society was dedicated in one form or another to “Dezinformatsia.”

The public relations campaign launched against Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s was in fact a full-scale assault led by American communists to discredit the notion of communist conspiracy, which at the time was very widely believed to be occurring. It was an intimidation campaign based on Alinsky’s rule #5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon...”

The effectiveness of this campaign lives with us today as people almost universally shy away from any notion even hinting at that awful word “conspiracy” when it comes to leftists. For example, this manufactured ignorance is so widespread that many people conflate the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigations of the film industry with “McCarthyism” when McCarthy hadn’t even been elected Senator.

McCarthy’s 1950s investigations focused on communist infiltration of the Army, especially the Army facility at Monmouth, New Jersey, where atomic spy Julius Rosenberg had worked. Three years after McCarthy had been railroaded for his efforts, that facility quietly closed because of this internal security threat it. Did you know that? Why not?

As commentator Chuck Morse wrote in 2003:

The substantial power the left wielded over our government and media was on full display in the concerted campaign to stop McCarthy, who, in hindsight, has been vindicated of all charges. Politicians who would henceforth be more circumspect when investigating communist or any other subversive element in government heard the lesson of McCarthy's downfall loud and clear. Average citizens, at least subliminally conscious of the auto da fe McCarthy had been put through, would also learn to curb their criticism of the left as well.

While the left ridicules notions of communist conspiracy and we buy it, at the same time they aggressively promote the notion of “CIA” or “Vast Right-Wing” conspiracy as though it’s a given. We buy that too! But if one is possible, so must be the other. Our illogical reasoning is the result of years of popular culture conditioning, not fact. The difference is, with communists, subversive conspiracy is doctrine. With us, it is an alien notion, born witness by the scorn with which counterintelligence and clandestine activities are treated even within the military establishment.

Fast forward.

Cloward and Piven were not merely two lone sociology professors conspiring on teacher salaries to bring down America. They were prominent socialists and lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest and oldest worldwide socialist organization. Therein lay their strength, both in recruitment and resources. The leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) held seminars for activists on how to use the CPS. Cloward and Piven’s Nation article was reprinted a record 30,000 times.

These folks were not alone. And they only added to the plethora of anti-American strategies being used, building on the already utilized Alinsky method. Also, we have been infiltrated since the 1930s by the KGB and their sister agencies in other communist countries whose goal has not merely been to obtain military secrets, but much more to create a subversive infrastructure in this country. The IPS, mentioned above, is largely a KGB front. All of its principals are American communists, who, by definition, work for the communist international, still run by the KGB despite the alleged "fall" of communism.

All these groups, the think tanks, the DSA, ACORN, ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Communist Party and all their offshoots are led by people who know each other, have worked in the "movement" for years, and share the same goals, often trading places in the various organizations. It is well organized, powerful, and even deadly when necessary. Connections to foreign intelligence agencies like the KGB are well hidden, but very likely much closer than even a lot of people in the movement realize (those, like many prominent Democrats, are the useful idiots).

Finally, it doesn't take much for a conspiracy to work when you give participants a vested interest. That was an overtly stated component of the CPS. Cloward and Piven said:

First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests.

So they were able to mobilize armies of poor people simply because those people saw a paycheck in the form of welfare benefits. ACORN attracted homebuyers in droves by showing them how to get 5% or even zero down payment mortgages, with the implicit promise -- borne out later in some cases -- that they wouldn’t have to pay anything. Countrywide Financial, the "Friends of Angelo" bank, had a direct working relationship with ACORN and by 2006 were holding $600 billion in high risk mortgage investments.

Most communist conspiracies work because, as Whittaker Chambers explained, most people aren't communist and don't even know they are promoting communist causes. They merely work in their own interest, whether that be to obtain a mortgage, get welfare income, or save a tree.

On the precipice - healthcare disaster looming

This Congress is beneath contempt. What they are poised to pass today – yes I know this is just a procedural vote, but everything turns on it – is an abomination. Since Lincoln and Landrieu have been bought off it is now sure to pass. Landrieu cost the taxpayer $100 million. I wonder what we paid Lincoln to betray us. This bill will not merely ruin our healthcare system; it will impose economy crushing taxes, pushing our already tottering economy ever closer to the abyss.

Read on...

No political purge

There has been a story flying around the internet in recent days that the Obama administration intends to purge Republicans from the bureaucracy by using a new federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rule requiring that all applicants for career civil service jobs who held political jobs "within the past five years" be approved by OPM. The assertion is that “past five years” can only refer to Bush appointees, and that OPM’s memo authorizes the agency to ferret out Republican civil service hires and find some bureaucratic pretext to kick them out.

A close reading of the OPM memo and statements by Elaine Kaplan, OPM General Counsel, provide reassurance that, however the Obama administration plans to handle Republicans working in the bureaucracy, this OPM rule is not intended to affect them.

Read more...

Hasan Participated in Presidential Transition Task force on Homeland Security

Nidal Hasan, the Muslim U.S. Army Major accused of the mass killings at Fort Hood, is listed as participant in the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute's (HSPI) Presidential Transition Task Force Report. While this is not entirely surprising, given Hasan's former position in the Army, it raises significant questions about White House reluctance to release relevant records allegedly in its possession.

The HSPI is not a governmental organization, and was not directly tied to the Obama administration's transition team. Rather, in its own words, it is a "nonpartisan 'think and do' tank whose mission is to build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach..." HSPI has already issued a statement on Hasan's participation in the task force as follows:

Read more...

Gay Pro-Bush Blog Outs Bush's Trip to Ft. Hood

Bet you didn't know George W. and Laura Bush paid a secret visit to the wounded and aggrieved families at Fort Hood, did you? They did. The day after it happened. And stayed for hours. Fox News reported this briefly. AP covered it with this cursory report:

The Bushes made their private visit to Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center on Friday night. Bush spokesman David Sherzer said in an e-mail that the couple thanked Fort Hood's military leaders and hospital staff for the "amazing care
they are providing."

No one else did... almost no one. Hillbuzz, a Chicago-based gay political site set up last year to support the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, wrote a "Thank You" to former President George W. Bush and his wife for their visit to the troops. It is inspiring - the kind of thing we should see much more often, frankly. I recommend you read it. Unlike the contempt and dismissive hatred from the leftist sages of the hypocritical Fourth Estate.

It was all the more amazing considering the legacy of this group....

Read more...

Lou Dobbs Calls it Quits

Jim Simpson

CNN newsman Lou Dobbs, an increasingly strident voice against the epidemic of illegal immigration had his last show on CNN last night. Although this has apparently been in the works for a while, he tendered his resignation suddenly, only telling his staff that afternoon. Watch his excellent resignation announcement here.

MSNBC, quoted Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/U.S. as saying “Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere.” That's funny. CNN never heard of "advocacy journalism" before? What is it that they do?

Dobbs added that he wanted:

to contribute positively to the understanding of the great issues of our day ... in the most honest and direct language possible.

Good!

Go here to read more.

Lou Dobbs Photo: AP File