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A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY: OBAMA SLIMES ARIZONA TO THE U.N., ARIZONA’S ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES SILENT

August 29, 2010 By 29 Comments

Note to : Senator McCain (R) and Senator Kyl (R) and ALL AZ Congressional Representatives (R) and (D) to Congress:

“Arizona Governor Jan Brewer angrily demanded yesterday that the White House withdraw their report to the UN Human Rights Council that singled out Arizona’s law as a cause for concern about the American track record on human rights. Calling such a reference “downright offensive” in her letter to Hillary Clinton, Brewer also called the entire report “internationalism run amuck.”

 (Ed Morrissey: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/08/28/brewer-blasts-obama-over-submission-to-un-specifying-az-immigration-law/)

Every single citizen of Arizona has been smeared as racist, human rights abusers to the United Nations HRC by our current President, Barack Obama (D), through his appointee, Hillary Clinton (D) as Secretary of State. One cannot recall a single instance when a sovereign government has EVER issued a condemnation of its OWN people to the United Nations. The Obama Administration initiated the international smear by instructing the State Department through Hillary Clinton and her deputy to introduce Arizona as a human rights abuser to the Chinese a few months ago, “Brought it up early and often.” Not a peep from our elected representatives then, now Obama jacks this cynical campaign against Arizona to the United Nations.

This also follows a recent obnoxious scene when Nancy Pelosi (D) as Speaker of the House provided Congress as the venue for a pulpit and a tacit stamp of approval for Mexico’s President to spew falsehoods and outrageous complaints against lawful Arizona state governing , and Arizona’s people. Before the entire nation, the Democratic Party literally applauded the whines of a foreigner against American citizens. Before the entire nation, Arizona’s elected representatives have been mute.

Arizona apparently has no representation in the Senate or in the House of Representatives. The silence is inexcusable. Our elected representatives should be in 100% in unison regardless of political party in public, and in unrelenting condemnation, and in demanding accountability on the Senate and House floors to protest the complete abuse of our national governance against the state of Arizona and the American citizens of Arizona they were elected to represent.

It goes far beyond Republican or Democrat, to the national integrity of our country, yet the elected officials Arizona has sent to represent this state in Congress are silent. There is no Congressional mobilization of the Constitutional checks and balances to control this executive branch abuse, thanks to the abandonment by our legislators of their sworn duties to the PEOPLE.

Governor Jan Brewer is a Republican. Where are her fellow Republican elected officials standing with her as she rightly objects to this unheard of act of the government in Washington DC going to an international body to pressure a U.S. State to accept a radical, corrosive and extra-legal domestic political agenda? Senator McCain, where are you? Senator Kyl where are you? Are you (R) busy defending the PEOPLE or (R)INO busy enabling the Democrats by co-drafting amnesty for favored status of foreigners who’ve broken our laws, over lawful citizens?

This is not only a national disgrace, a complete travesty, but a terrible abrogation of national sovereignty. We sure don’t hear any murmurs of concern about this coordinated Democratic Party disgusting action against a fellow Republican elected official who currently represents this state.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has been considered a travesty of its own, usually stocked with the world’s worst human rights offenders on the planet: Cuba, with journalists starving to death in squalid Cuban jails, China which harvests organs from prisoners, Saudi Arabia which beheads religious apostates, amputates people’s hands for crimes like theft, and shelters slavery within its kingdom’s borders, all of which have prisoners who would literally give their right arms to be taken care of by Sheriff Joe Arpaio instead.   

It’s been a bad joke and just got worse. The committee members know very well Arizona is paradise compared to what they and scores of other countries routinely dish out to their citizens. Not a single other country would tolerate for a nanosecond ANY illegals entering their own nations, but many are happy to play along with the Obama Administration’s little political maneuvering stunt and condemn Arizona anyway, so this takes bad theatre down to a lower level of basement decrepitude.

What happens next?  Will Arizonans be  subject to arrest while innocently traveling abroad?  Not likely?  How preposterous is the fact that the “”problem of Arizona” is now on the UNHRC’s agenda?  It’s ridiculous, but there it is, thanks to Obama. By forcing this issue into the United Nations, all sorts of consequences are now possible.  Will the ultimate cynical ploy be realized by a gloating and gleeful White House?  Governor Jan Brewer indicted as Sudan’s Bashir was for “crimes against humanity”?  President  Bashir presided over Darfur atrocities, Brewer presides over …  SB1070, which the Obama Administration evidently is arguing is on some sort of bizarro par with Bashir’s Darfur policies.  Our POTUS is destroying the protections ALL American citizens are entitled to as stated in the Constitution.  Yet, our representatives are AWOL.  Instead of standing up for us all, they are hiding from us.

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, Government, Guest Opinion, Illegal Immigration, Public Relations, State Government

Democrats Reintroduce Slavery: Universal National Service Act – HR 5741

August 3, 2010 By 33 Comments

H.R.5741 — Universal National Service Act (Introduced in House – IH)
HR 5741 IH
111th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. R. 5741
To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
July 15, 2010

Read the bill in its entirety: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.5741:

A brief background: This bill has been introduced twice before. Rep. Charles Rangel (D) introduced it in 2003, expanding the draft to females, with the age parameters set at 18-26. With a Republican Congressional majority, it went nowhere; actually, not nowhere, but back in Rangel’s desk drawer. Rangel, with newly minted Senator Hillary Clinton singing its praises, and Democrats back in control, pulled it out in February 2006, as HR 4752, with a greatly expanded age range of 18-42, to encompass far more of the adult American population. But, the Democratic majority wasn’t quite major enough to pass it. It went back into Rangel’s top desk drawer.

Rangel evidently sees a new opportunity. He reintroduced it a few days ago, as the Universal National Service Act: HR 5741.

With Obama urging a “National Civilian Corps” and the Democrats firmly in control of both the Congress and Senate, and the leadership of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who thinks nothing of hiding the contents of the power-grabbing bills she promotes from the public, “We’ll have to pass it before you find out what’s in it,” Rangel’s HR 5741, in this session, has the best chance ever of being passed and signed into law. It should have had a wooden stake driven through it and burned.

Behind the façade of “National Service,” which sounds okay enough and has a sly suggestive appeal of getting idle youth off the streets, and ‘push-up’ them into a discipline their parents were too lazy to instill in their progeny, and seems to ignore that the National Guard is already tasked with “the furtherance of the national defense and homeland security,” the Democrats are proposing a sweeping and devastating crushing of our individual liberties, of our fundamental unalienable rights as stated in the Constitution of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The military does NOT want a draft. They are on record as opposing one. It’s doing just fine with an all-volunteer military. They like the self-selecting aspect of it; that those who don’t want to be in the military don’t apply, saving the military endless headaches from dealing with sullen and recalcitrant inductees. The military can achieve more with a smaller, but better trained and more motivated force comprised of men and women who have a natural inclination for military work. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But this isn’t about making the military better, but WORSE. Rangel’s motivation was to make military service onerous and unwanted, to discourage American military activity.

   “Ironically, in previous discussion leading up the bill, Rangel’s initiative to restore the draft was described as “an anti-war tactic” … “Rangel opposes war with Iraq and seeks to make the point that many soldiers are volunteers from low-income and minority families. Political leaders, his reasoning goes, would think twice about sending into war the sons and daughters of a more complete cross-section of America.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2535

It’s a toxic inspiration for a truly vile piece of legislation, based on what has been proven to be no more than a phony urban, class warfare legend. The majority of our current all-volunteer military is not derived from poor and minority volunteers, but from the “white,” middle and upper middle class. The bill proposes seizing control of the lives of all males and females 18-42 for one of three demands of government:

1) National Service: ‘uniformed services’ or ‘civilian service’
2) Universal male-female Draft in time of war
3) For other purposes

    “The bill applies to both US citizens and non-citizens, to men and women. There does not appear to be a provision which would exempt women who are pregnant and/or caring for infants/children in a young age… The bill also supports Big Brother. Those who are not sent overseas to the war theater would… be inducted into the civilian homeland defense corps and other civilian duties, including the Citizens Corps, the “Neighborhood Watch Teams” and the “Volunteer Police Service …” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2535

Evidently, these two categories are not quite enough, so the third provision, “for other purposes” is the lock on the shackles. This trifecta would establish a modern form of slavery, engineered by the Democratic Party, the same political party that was responsible for plunging the nation into civil war rather than give up slave labor, and jacks the executive branch power of Commander-in-Chief of the military, to Totalitarian in Chief of all the people. We can expect that Obama, being human, would be warm to this, in a self-promoting way, since he would be the first POTUS in American history to be able to exploit absolute power.

The consequences will be devastating. If anyone between the ages of 18-42, the most productive segment of our society can be yanked out of their professions, training or schooling to perform busywork for the government, then it’s the death of private enterprise in America. The societal hardships will be enormous. The government will be able to redirect work to favored partisan priorities and away from out of favor production and services. The burden on families would be worse than for singles as BOTH parents could be ordered away from their children, punishing marriage and child-raising with uncertainty, disruption and enormous emotional stress, businesses will be in a constant state of artificial disarray, dealing with unexpected employee absences, training staff only to suddenly lose them.

This “Universal National Service Act” isn’t about warfare needs, but about government totally controlling people; no one will be able to predict when they would be called up. And from what money tree is financing supposed to come for this? Taking people away from producing work to forcibly perform non-producing activities destroys personal and national wealth-creation.  People working long hours will suddenly have “volunteering” work or as it is becoming known as: “volun-TOLD,” to add to their work load.

Rangel’s perverse vision for this bill is that it is to undermine our fighting capabilities. With that as its fundamental premise, it will be easy to engineer infuriating and shocking outcomes for maximum public outrage – by cynically sending women to war, while men are sent to clean toilets at public schools.

The decision to assign a draftee to one of the three named services will be made by politically-appointed draft boards, and there the potential for great mischief will manifest itself. Political enemies get sent to military service, or harassed with random forms of “deployment,” political favorites to picking flowers in national parks, or to nice urban offices to drink coffee and roam the hallways or snoop on neighbors, reporting them for “un-patriotic” activities, a system developed by the Communists to control every single person in the society.

The undefined, “any other purpose” leaves citizens totally at the mercy of the whims of political hacks. Bribery will be rampant and blatant as people bargain the price out of hardship. Prison will be the punishment for “National-Service-Dodging.”

Where is the media? They are AWOL. Perhaps they are confident their political connections will allow them exemptions that lesser mortals will not get. Because of their failure to alert the public, most Americans are not aware that this bill even exists, much less that it’s been re-introduced in the House.

It’s hard to conceive of the duplicity of the many minds, all Democrats, which produced and support such a monstrosity, but the PEOPLE of the United States will be made chattel in their own country if this Universal National Slavery Act is allowed to pass.

Contact ALL your elected representatives to oppose this hideous bill, HR 5741, and to make sure it never is seen in any form, again, ever. Do not vote for ANY politician who does not in word and deed reject completely not just this piece of abusive legislation, but also this abusive legislative mindset.

Spread the word, show people the bill. Demand the Democratic Party explain this travesty, it is being sheltered and promoted by Democrats. Our elected officials should be publicizing this outrage to the American People to expose the despicable quality and devious goals of those in the Democratic Party who are misusing their majorities to establish not governance of the People, but lordship over us.

Start in November 2010. If a candidate has DEMOCRAT by his or her name, consider what the Democrats have in store for all of us if they retain any semblance of a majority and consider the corrosive enabling effects of any candidate (I) or (R) who colludes in any way with these exploitative and totalitarian aspirations.

Filed Under: Government, Guest Opinion, Human Condition, Legislation, Military

Defending Arizona: Our AWOL Representatives

August 1, 2010 By 12 Comments

WHERE are our sitting US Senators, McCain and Kyl, all our Arizona Congressmen and Congresswomen, publically and vociferously defending Arizona and Arizona local law enforcement on the floor of the Senate and the House and through every and all media outlet, against the Obama Administration’s cynical and toxic approval of coordinated campaigns to dishonestly smear our police, sheriffs and deputies as racists, agitating street violence by bussing in professional protestors with radios and scanners to harass, interfere with, abuse and exhaust local law enforcement officers?  WHERE are they denouncing all Unconstitutional actions to destroy domestic tranquillity by divisive and damaging boycotts against Arizona and Arizonans?

AZ law enforcement is under siege and our two senators are AWOL; AWOL for Federal enforcement actions, border security and AWOL for addressing local AZ state hardships. Aren’t they sent to Washington by the citizens of this state to advocate and use all their political skills to insure that Federal border responsibilities are met for the protection of Arizonans, and by that, all Americans? Pick a random agitator from one of “32 unions” advertised as rolling into Arizona this past week from out of state, and ask what party they vote for: DEMOCRAT. Pick a random boycotting-voting LA City Council member, what party are they of: DEMOCRAT. A California city mayor decreeing a rupture of city business with Arizona: DEMOCRAT. A random pick of a boycotting non-governmental organization voter from say, La Raza: DEMOCRAT. An Arizona-elected Congressman encouraging a boycott of Arizonans for wanting to enforce the laws of our nation: DEMOCRAT. An Arizona city mayor disparaging the men and women in the police and sheriff’s departments who keep him safe: DEMOCRAT.  Given that partisan behavior, how much credibile action to preserve our domestic tranquillity can we expect from ANY of our representatives who belong to the Democratic Party?   NO respresentative, Democrat or Republican should have anything to do with such corrosive tactics, but evidently the Democrats perceive too much politican gain to listen to reason or to refresh their oaths to preserve the Constitution. 

It’s more than a disgrace that this is falling along partisan political lines when the threat to our domestic tranquility – our local, state and national security – will negatively affect everyone, no matter the political party or ideology. With the Democratic Party loyalties of the overwhelming majority of the agitators, on the streets, in the courts, in the media, and in Congress, and nothing but divisive rhetoric coupled with willingness to act on boycotting from the Democratic Party, we look to the Republican Party to bring this back to reason, rationality and self-preservation of the nation.

So, where are the REPUBLICANS who are DENOUNCING this injustice? Arizona sent not one, but TWO Republican Senators to Washington. Where are the photos of them standing shoulder to shoulder with Governor Jan Brewer, or with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the deputies of Maricopa county, or the police of Nogales and Tucson, or relentlessly on national media insisting that freedom to speak one’s mind politically, and peaceful marches is one thing, but blocking traffic, making physical obstructions so that citizens can’t get to work on time, defacing and damaging public and private property, engineering chaos so that businesses can’t reach their customers, anarchist mobbing and banging at the county jail gates as part of a plan to harass and overwhelm policing,” is quite another thing. So is inexcusable silence from ALL our elected officials as Arizonans are smeared nationally by the Democrats in the administration, the Congress, the national media, and internationally by our State Department, hypocritically employing what they claim they are against,  massive group stereotyping and profiling, as “racists.”

“Hispanic” is a precise term in linguistics, but a very mushy and undefined one in international terms, encompassing people from over a dozen countries – on three continents, with many accents, dialects and cultural differences. Does this “Hispanic” favoritism extend to the Spanish of Spain or the West Africans of the Spanish Western Sahara or is it really code for a specific country, favored even over its own “Hispanic” neighbors? With “brown people” invoked even more frequently by Democrats now than “Hispanic,” then surely the Hispanics of Africa’s Equatorial Guinea are far browner than ANY Central or South American could EVER aspire to be, so by the reasoning, shouldn’t then Equatorial Guineans get to be head of the line for a freebie to definitely prove to everyone that Americans or specifically Arizonans, are not racists?

If the oft-invoked, yet actually undefined “Hispanic” community succeeds in unlawfully forcing capitulation to allow “Hispanic” foreigners of a specified geopolitical zone, to jump the queue of legal applications for US citizenship, before all others, then who’s the NEXT group who will try mob rule to get what they want?  If it works, then it’ll become the “process.”  How many people doing it by the book will throw down their two-three-four-five years of applications, paperwork and fees with a, “The hell with this!” in disgust?

Arizona is already host to organized crime expanding out of its base in Mexico.  That the average Arizonan citizen doesn’t see much of it is a testimony to the effectiveness and diligence of our LOCAL law enforcement in confronting and containing this violent and dangerous foreign-based criminality.  WHERE are our elected officials publically thanking our law enforcement, showing solidarity, and assuring them and the public, in word and in deed, that they back every single man and women in law enforcement in Arizona?

Actions have consequences, long term consequences, sometimes irrevocable consequences. Degeneration and decay take far less energy and effort than advancement and improvement.  A loss of trust is nearly impossible to restore.  A failure to uphold fair application of laws will lead to rampant lawlessness in all levels of society.  An unwillingness to defend, by representatives who were elected by their constituents, who are the PEOPLE of the Constitution of the United States, is a failure and especially in this case, that has long-term local, state and national ramifications, none of them positive.  The People, as voters, have the responsibility to chose their representatives wisely, take personal responsibility to become informed, to be active, and to hold their representatives accountable.

Perhaps Americans have to live through a period of chaos and destruction before they truly comprehend what they had, and squandered … but with little hope then of ever recovering it.

Filed Under: Border, Debates, Government, Guest Opinion, Illegal Immigration, National Security, Public Safety

WARNING: Toxic Spill Spreading: The Attack on Law Enforcement

June 6, 2010 By 20 Comments

There’s more than one environmentally degrading spill being mis-managed by the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party and that’s the corrosive social environment undermining of law enforcement as the Federal government fails to uphold, first our international border enforcement, and now our state and local law enforcement. This is not accidental and it has been part of a consistent bias of oppression and bigotry against law enforcement rather than law breakers. It employs a fraud of an analogy to Southern Civil Rights, promoted disingenuously by the very political party that put oppressive racial constraints on Blacks in the South, the Political Party that has thieved Republican and Christian Martin Luther King’s life struggle against Democratic Party political oppression of Blacks in the South as if he was actually a Democrat. But this goes beyond one party or the other;  if rational thinking and priorities amongst all Americans, regardless of political party, does not re-establish itself, American citizens will no longer be safe in their homes or on the street or at work.

Third World nations have a number of characteristics in common with each other. One major blight of the Third World is corrupt law enforcement. It’s not an accident. Corrupt governments prefer corrupt policing. Police departments are underfunded, sometimes not paid for months, and woefully under-equipped. Police, reduced to hardly more than traffic officers,  survive in that environment by bribery, hitting up the commuter, being paid off by the politicians. It is common in Third World cities to have entire neighborhoods robbed by just one organized lethally-equipped gang, starting at the east and ending in the west, dozens and dozens of homes invaded, not a cop in sight, despite scores of frantic calls for help. The police don’t come, and who can blame them? They don’t have the training or more than one bullet in their guns, why would any rational citizen expect them to confront a gang equipped with numerous rifles, pistols and AK-47s?  Because of this, the other commonality of Third World cities is  security bars on all windows and doors, concertina wire rolled at the top of walls,  broken-glass-topped walls, and a thriving private security  industry for those elites who can afford it. Everyone else buys a solid front door and cowers behind it at night.

The degradation of our southern border Federal law enforcement has been going on for years, full of political meddling, tainted by drug money and loaded with brutality, while  devoid of even common-sense national self-preservation,  and has not been rectified.  On what rational basis does any American expect our Border Patrol to intercept illegals crossing the border when the chances of the Border Patrol Agents being thrown in prison is higher than the illegal they’ve arrested? Even though this current Adminsitration is aware of the situation, it has done nothing to correct this dangerous nonsense.  Dodging action by blaming previous administrations is worthless, even benign neglect becomes  a negative as expanding over-the-boarder drug cartels ramp up murders in growing turf wars. 

Today, the deliberate feeding of hysteria is now spreading aggressively against local law enforcement. The desperate illegal immigration lobby, with immense assistance from politicians and the media, has employed a phony analogy of “Civil Rights” – an emotional but dishonest evoking of  bigoted Southern white cops bullying the defenseless Black citizens which is toxically ramping up the volatility of a confrontation that will put first Arizona law enforcement officers on the front line, then their counterparts across the nation. This is enhanced by the open threats by officials and all manner of public figures of promising any and all manner of legal challenges to any law enforcement officer who has the audacity to actually arrest a law-breaker, and in what would be in any other time and place be considered total insanity, especially a foreign law-breaker. That the worst rhetoric is spewing out of the Democratic Party, from mayors to city councils, from the Homeland Security chief, the US Attorney General, from the White House , even incredibly the U.S. State Department,  the Obama Police Doctrine of,  ”I don’t know the facts, but the cops acted racist,”  is a national disgrace and a short-sighted tactic that will backfire on ALL Americans, regardless of political party, color, creed or religion.  There is no justice when people are falsely accused of doing something they didn’t do, there’s only chaos ahead when police are constantly falsely accused.

It would be useful for residents of Phoenix to have a taste of what it’s like to live in Lagos, Nigeria for a few days, to step out of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport the way travelers step out of Lagos International Airport at midnight, miles ahead to downtown Lagos along a run-down highway route, otherwise known as The Gauntlet. Kidnappings, overtuned vehicles with shoot-outs and high speed car chases as victims flee their pursuers are common. Nigerian armed gangs can throw up road blocks on a two-mile elevated stretch of highway in Lagos itself. It takes about three hours to rob every car trapped there, in broad daylight, no police. The equivalent would be a two mile stretch of I-10 by Sky Harbor jammed with rush-hour cars, people trapped from fleeing, a new brand of urban terror that our diligent law enforcement has never allowed to occur.  But Lagos is far away.  Armed gangs use the exact same modis operandi throughout Mexico, just across the border.  The only reason that  blight has been kept at bay is the diligence of Arizona law enforcement officers : the local police and sheriff departments who must pick up what the beleagered Border Patrol can’t.   That barrier gets breached, and the gangs can be in Phoenix in hours.

It would be a useful lesson, but the problem is, once law enforcement feels the citizens do not have their backs, they have no motivation to put their lives on the line or put up with the abuse and hassles of confronting criminals and criminality. Once that trust is lost, it is almost impossible to restore. Law enforcement officers have a hard job, at times a dangerous job. They must on every single call be prepared for anything from a stray kitten to a homicidal drug dealer. Few people are made for that sort of thing or could tolerate the stress. That we have such people made of the fiber and drive to be law enforcement officers is an incredible gift to the community, the state and the nation. The citizens who depend on city, county and state law enforcement officers to stand between them and brutality must also do their part and defend the earnest men and women of our law enforcement against political demonizing, and rebuke by words and voting out any politician who engages in such demonizing and undermining of the social contract between society and its law enforcement.   It will be a hard day to discover what we had only after we’ve lost it

How about starting with demanding an apology from Mayor Phil Gordon:  http://the-raw-deal.com/?p=2495

Filed Under: Border, City Government, County Government, Crime and Punishment, Guest Opinion, Illegal Immigration, Judicial, National Security, Public Safety, Race Relations, State Government

An “International Offensive of Hypocrisy”

June 4, 2010 By 11 Comments

Identify which state THIS quote is referring to:

“In other words, the activists were like the civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters throughout the South and refused to leave until they were served. Their goal was not really to get breakfast. It was to end segregation.”1

How about THIS state?’

We’re being very methodical, “We’re asking to have this assessed. The fact is, if we chose to ignore what happened in the South in the 60s, we’d still have the kind of discriminatory laws that were being proposed back then. 2

The first quote was aimed at  the state of ISRAEL , the second at the  state of ARIZONA.

Dishonest Hysterical Projection:

BOSTON (AP) – They gather on statehouse steps with signs and bullhorns, risking arrest. They attend workshops on civil disobedience and personal storytelling, and they hold sit-ins and walk out of class in protest. They’re being warned that they could even lose their lives.
Students fighting laws that target illegal immigrants are taking a page from the civil rights era, adopting tactics and gathering praise and momentum from the demonstrators who marched in the streets and sat at segregated lunch counters as they sought to turn the public tide against racial segregation. “Their struggle then is ours now,” said Deivid Ribeiro, 21, an illegal immigrant from Brazil and an aspiring physicist. “Like it was for them, this is about survival for us. We have no choice.”

To paraphrase Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, “With hysterical reporting like that, that’s why the Boston Globe and the Associated Press (AP) are losing all credibility.”

“You can add this to the list of very bad things the new Arizona Immigration Law is being compared to: Terrorism. Jesse Jackon appeared on MSNBC today and told Contessa Brewer that the new law, allowing police to require proof of citizenship from anyone they “suspect” of being an illegal immigrant, is the equivalent of ‘terrorism for the innocent…”

Can Arizonians find any worldly equivalent to that toxic combo of sympathetic press and rabblerousing claims?  How about: “Palestinian Genocide – Apartheid Israel starving, killing Asian infants – UK-US-backed Racist Zionist Apartheid Israel kills 7 Palestinian infants DAILY.”

How hard is it to refute that claim? The “Occupied Palestinian Territories” of which Gaza is a big part, “have an estimated 4% population growth rate today, well beyond the United States, far beyond European growth rates, surpassing Israel’s population growth rate. “Even in the absence of such migration, the population in the occupied territories will grow nearly 4 per cent. The occupied territories have one of the highest rates of natural increase in the world, a consequence of a low crude death rate (around 6 deaths per 1,000 persons) and a very high birth rate of about 45 births per 1,000 persons. http://www.un.org/popin/regional/escwa/popbull/bull43/chapter2.htm

The current world experts on genocide are the surviving Jews and Rwandans, having been at the receiving end of the real thing. The U.N., it’s mandate written to “stop genocide,” spent quite a bit of effort twisting itself into pretzels to avoid using the mandate trigger of “genocide” to mobilize UN resources against the Hutu extremists, as 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were massacred – a noticeably abrupt DECLINE in a population, yet makes no objection to the use of the same mandate trigger term to mobilize the UN against Israel, based on the human tragedy of … a robustly growing population of healthy, well-fed people for proof of … “genocide.”

To again paraphrase Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, “With hysterical comments like these, that’s why the U.N. is losing all credibility.”

Boycott Fevah:  We’re going to select some things we think we can do to hurt them, but hold on to what we need from them so our comfort levels aren’t affected.  The ‘match and the thermometer’ sort of  ’fever’.

“TURKEY said on Friday it was considering scaling back its relations with ISRAEL to a minimum… Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc also said Turkey was assessing economic and defense deals with Israel in the clearest sign yet it may significantly reduce its ties with once close ally Israel. “We may plan to reduce our relations with Israel to a minimum, but to assume everything involving another country is stopped in an instant, to say we have crossed you out of our address book, is not the custom of our state …We are serious on this issue. New cooperation will not start and relations with Israel will be reduced,” said Arinc.  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3899043,00.html

“LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL called for the city to “refrain from conducting business with the state of ARIZONA including participating in any conventions or other business that requires city resources, unless SB 1070 is repealed.” The resolution was introduced by council members Reyes and Hahn. LA’s top policy analyst… identified $56 million in Arizona-related investments … recommended that the council suspend travel to Arizona, refrain from entering new contracts and review current contracts.
The city must now decide which of those contracts can be broken without risking a lawsuit.
The city’s proprietary departments — namely, the Water and Power and Harbor departments and Los Angeles World Airports — have another $51.8 million in affected contracts. The city does not have the authority to direct its proprietary departments to terminate those contracts; it can merely request that they do so. “We asked our city to officials to find out what contracts we have right now that we could actually terminate and have a bit of a financial impact,” Hahn said. “It is about $7 million or $8 million. We’re asking them to terminate those contracts, where possible and feasible.”
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/LA-Council-Considers-Arizona-Boycott-93575949.html

How the White House Projects its Annoyance to the entire World:

Arizona Governor Gets Few Results From Meeting With Obama …
Citing scheduling issues, Obama initially declined to meet with Brewer this week while she is in Washington for a Council of Governors meeting. But as criticism grew over Obama’s seeming snub, he made time on his calendar. While Obama is pushing for a multi-layered approach to immigration, Brewer is advocating for a policy that will secure the border first.
On Thursday, neither side backed down from their approach. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/03/arizona-governor-gets-results-meeting-obama/

President Obama snubs Prime Minister Netanyahu …
President Obama snubbed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in several ways during his visit to Washington this week. The Obama administration is miffed by what it sees as Israeli intransigence … The White House denied Netanyahu the red carpet treatment generally afforded to visiting heads of state. The Israeli prime minister and Obama didn’t pose for photos together, and Netanyahu was excluded from dinner with the president Tuesday night.

When Netanyahu wouldn’t agree to concessions, Obama left a meeting with him, though he invited Netanyahu to stay at the White House, talk to Obama advisers and “let me know if there is anything new,” a U.S. congressman who spoke to Netanyahu, told The Times of London.  “It was awful,” the congressman said.
One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages,” conducted in such an adversarial environment that the Israeli delegation eventually left…”

http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/Obama-Snubs-Netanyahu-White-House/2010/03/26/id/353950

While Governor Jan Brewer and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sit on the White House curb, they could commiserate. It seems Arizona isn’t the only state in the world that has illegal immigration problems. Evidently, these two horrid racist states are actually pretty good places to get good paying jobs, even if one is illegal:

“Some 80,000 foreign workers, most of them illegal aliens, live in Tel Aviv, making up about a quarter of the city’s population, the immigration police said yesterday.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/foreign-workers-make-up-a-quarter-of-tel-aviv-s-population-1.90760

The attacks on Israel are cut from the same cloth as those against Arizona. The battle is being waged in the court of public opinion, not in actual courts, where a fair and impartial deliberative process would conclude that Arizona is acting lawfully under federal law, just as Israel acted lawfully under standard international Maritime law. The purpose of the process right now as Arizona and Israel are being pilloried in the national and international media is to influence public opinion, to “sway the jury,” to literally prejudice as much of the public as possible against duly elected state governments upholding laws, while studiously avoiding actual courts with impartial judges.

When, not if, these issues finally go to court, and only AFTER a campaign of hardening public opinion, and a search for “sympathetic courts,” the public will be then be encouraged to pressure the judges, the advocates, the jury if they do not deliver a “correct conclusion.”

The media deliberately selects terms to lead a report, and by that to coach readers. The continued standard media reporting on Arizona’s SB1070 can’t go two sentences without the obligatory “racist” worked in there somewhere. The continued usage of the words, “Israeli commandos assault” rather than the correct terminology of “Israeli naval boarding party” influences the reader to a negative assumption of Israeli aggression, especially when coupled with “humanitarian aid” and “peace activists” instead of the dead give-away: ‘Al Qaeda.’  This reporting also depends on a general audience level of ignorance of maritime life, rules and international protocols.

A Coast Guard or Naval officer or seaman of any country with a navy recognizes the Israeli protocols awere perfectly normal procedure when dealing with a vessel that refuses to cooperate. If anything, our Coast Guard and Navy would fault the Israelis for having been under-armed, naively arriving with paintball riot control gadgets instead of standard boarding armaments. Our Coast Guard absolutely does not board with such ineffectual arms ANY vessel that is not cooperating when told to heave-to. They take NO risks like that or assume anything. Violent pirates, terrorists and vicious drug runners can be packed into the most innocuous sailing, fishing trawler, or top–of the line yacht, as the Israelis just discovered, the hard way - as Arizona ranchers have found, also the hard way, packed into apparently helpless stragglers at their own watering troughs.

The “humanitarian flotilla,” stuffed with picked out of the trash expired medicines as props, Leftist ‘activists’ and Al Qaeda terrorists hot to get a piece, literally, of any Israeli, was a trap.

What law enforcement officer in Arizona isn’t thinking right now about the promises of civil rights challenges and calls for “civil disobedience” to the very first arrest under SB1070 made that reveals an illegal alien, and of what possible pre-meditated entrapments of officers by colluding legals to provide material for lawsuits to undermine the law, actions meant to harass Arizona police and their ability to do their lawfully appointed jobs? They haven’t done anything wrong, yet they’ve been already labeled as ‘racists’ and ‘fascists,’ smeared from not only coast to coast but all the way to China by our very own State Department.

Out of state supporters of ‘doing nothing about illegal immigration,’  muster in Phoenix, throwing bottles at police, screaming and yelling, justifying vandalism and defacement for their “cause.” Governor Jan Brewer, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is depicted on placards as a Hitler, a holocaust-promoter … one of the world’s most cynically cruel twisting of reality, of decency, ever.

Arizona calls for a wall and border troops and is vilified just for the TALK of it. Israel builds a wall to stop suicide bombers and is heaped with scorn and criticism. Meanwhile, next-door Egypt, which is never criticized for building a wall between it and Gaza, is having its own Gaza problems: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8665674.stm

This week though, as a public gesture of solidarity for the “peaceful humanitarians,” ‘a boat-load of Ghandi … with clubs and brass knuckles” as Jonah Goldebrg noticed,  who broke international maritime law by failing to heave-to at a weapons blockade, after days of ignoring Israeli orders to halt, and beat the tar out of a lawful boarding party with a on–record pre-meditated warlike intent to lynch the Israelis, Egypt opened its closed border fence with Gaza … and got what for it immediately in exchange? Gaza Palestinians shot and killed an Egyptian border guard. http://article.wn.com/view/2010/06/03/EGYPTOPT_Gazans_take_advantage_of_open_Egypt_border/

 Where’s the international outrage about the violent comportment of the “Gazans?” Anyone going to sit with the grieving Egyptian family over their loss? Anyone able to explain why an Egyptian soldier is dead?

Israel is one of a number of countries, like India, Cyprus, Morocco, South Korea and critically, Egypt, which have even more aggressively extensive border fences or walls designed to totally control unauthorized human incursions. But only Israel is condemned for containing Gaza, not fellow-container Egypt. Only Arizona is condemned, not California, a state which erected a border fence to control Mexican incursions that forced the majority of the illegal migration away from California and thru Arizona in the first place.

Why does Turkey suddenly care? It’s a weapons blockade, the only reason Turkey would need to run that would be to run arms into Gaza; they can get everything else in without encountering the blockade. So, Turkey’s meddling agenda is not in Israel’s interest at all. Iran has stated a public policy to wipe Israel off the map. Having Iran installed in Gaza, which it is through Hamas, was not prevented by Israel, all they have done so far is contained its spread out of Gaza. Even with a fence, Israel suffers with rocket attacks from Gaza, over 2,000 rockets shot over from Gaza into Israeli towns and cities like Sederot. Meanwhile, as Democrats in cities like San Francisco and Seattle are sheltered by distance from it, Arizona suffers from the drug crime, murders and kidnappings – uncontained Mexican drug cartel criminal activity which continues to move steadily into the state, which can land in any Arizonan’s home or property at any time of the day, any day of the week. Why are California lawmakers interfering with Arizona’s attempts to restore the peace in Arizona? What is their real agenda?

When Mexico’s President Calderon meddles in American affairs and demands Arizona keep its border open and that US National Guard troops are not to stop illegals, “just drug and gun runners,” he wants what benefits Mexico, not what benefits the United States or the state of Arizona. Calderon’s self-serving plan ignores America’s needs and priorities to keep out any criminal gangs and foreign terrorists who search for easy illegal entry into the USA, as they would be blocked trying to enter legally, worse, allows for further advancement of these terrible elements into the United States. Since when should the USA destroy its integrity as a sovereign nation to please another nation? Since when should Israel destroy its integrity to allow for further advancement of terrible elements into it?

In Arizona and across the country to protest Arizona, signs are waved that say, “I didn’t cross the border, it crossed me,” and “Reconquista!” What’s the difference in tone , historical accuracy and purpose between that and the claims that Israel has no right to the land it sits on, even though the prophet Nehemiah rebuked the Geshem the Arab, Tobiah the Jordanian and Sanballat the Gazan 2,500 years ago that “You have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.” (Nehemiah 2:20).

It’s not hard to image the screams of outrage if America publically insisted, say, France to allow Libya to dictate how France patrols its border, or if America told Mexico that Guatemala should dictate Mexican border policing protocols or that Mexico should cede land to El Salvador “for peace.” That would be declared patent nonsense, but the same is dumped on Israel daily and ominously has become part of the standard rhetoric against Arizona.

Arizona and Israel share another commonality: The Obama Administration.

While Obama intones “I am the president,” and doesn’t “do” boycotts, feigning neutrality, he is found in venue after venue complaining about Arizona’s law, “believing” it to be “flawed.” While he tasks his Attorney General to announce intents of legal challenges, before even reading SB1070, Obama uses media time to praise sports teams for taking a political stand against the law, and he is deliberately silent on his political party’s destabilizing implementation of boycotts which are designed to encourage broader boycotting, and purposely inflict measurable economic harm on a fellow state in the Union.

President Barack Obama has instructed the Justice Department to examine the Arizona law that he said last week threatens to “undermine basic notions of fairness.” He also is pressing anew for national immigration legislation, saying, “If we continue to fail to act at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/eric-holder-federal-gover_n_553978.html

“Misguided” and “undermines basic notions of fairness”? Arizona used Federal law. But then on close inspection, Obama isn’t saying it’s “unconstitutional,” is he? Eric Holder’s comment was “ahh .. ahhh, ” but he expects to challenge SB1070 in court. So, while Obama murmurs general platitudes out of one side of his mouth, his subordinates and his political party in lockstep slam it from all directions, as he then praises all public posturing against it out of the other side of his mouth.

Since Obama is ignoring his Constitutional duty to “preserve domestic tranquility” between the fifty American states, why would anyone believe he is capable of or interested in preserving international tranquility between America and her traditional allies, such as Israel? He claims Israel is an American ally, but then broadcasts a different tone, which isn’t any solidarity.

As for Israel and the flotilla, Obama takes the, “will withhold comment while he’s waiting for the facts, but the Israelis acted stupidly.” That sure charmed the Cambridge Police Department; it’ll go over just as well with the bruised and battered Israelis, it’s just as ‘soothing’ to Arizona law enforcement officers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio who will have the entire force and weight of an Obama Administration bent on finding ‘racism’ on his head the hour SB1070 actually takes effect in July if any deputy or officer so much as  sneezes wrong.

State Department ‘Travel Advisories’ : Israel and Arizona

The Obama and Democratic Party-administered U.S. State Department headed by Hillary Clinton doesn’t inspire much confidence in their sincerity of their support of Israel as an ally, with a former US Ambassador grandstanding as a flotilla participant, and Hillary Clinton herself having once schmoozy-kissed for the international media the wife of since deceased Yasser Arafat, the corrosive architect of the suicide bomber and the Intifada. A quick handshake from the US First Lady at the time would have been too cordial a greeting for a woman who was living high on donated millions, meant for “humanitarian aid” for Palestinians.

What sort of iron stomach does one need to be able to be in the same room as people who have killing Jews and Muslims  as their resume ?  Before Bill Clinton pulled him out of obscurity, resurrecting Arafat’s rancid career against Israel, Arafat had already made himself an unwanted violent government-undermining threat in Jordan, “chased out” and then in Tunisia, but who criticizes those nations?  Only Israel received condemnation and exhortations and immense pressure to accept Arafat as a credible “peace partner” when nothing in his past substantiated any trace of “peaceful” attributes in the man.

Now, Hillary is Secretary of State, and on the news criticizing Israel:
“In an extraordinary interference with the sovereignty of a democratic society and its right of self-defense, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said Wednesday that the United States wants “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation. … We are open to different ways of assuring a credible investigation, including international participation … ” (Anne Bayesky, FORBES).

Hillary’s brand of international diplomacy applied to ARIZONA:
“In an extraordinary interference with the sovereignty of a democratic society and its right of self-defense” …

State Dept. Spokesman P.J. Crowley … disputed the notion that Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner was apologizing to China … But he echoed other top Obama administration officials in describing the law as a gateway to “racial profiling”… Posner told … that the U.S. delegation brought up the Arizona law “early and often,” as an example of a trouble spot Americans need to work on. “It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination…”  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/18/state-department-defends-official-expressed-regret-chinese-arizona-law/

While Chinese officials were picking their dropped jaws off the floor,  Mexico issued a media grandstanding “Travel Advisory” to Mexicans who had any reckless thoughts of entering the Grand Canyon State to ominously warn Mexican citizens about the “heightened risk of being asked for your ID or passport in Arizona,” while Americans traveling to Mexico face robbery, carjacking, kidnapping and murder. Separate out the Mexican drug cartel-generated crime stats like “kidnapping” from Arizona, and one discovers it’s one of the safest, calmest places to be in the world, illegal or legal. Where was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defending Arizonans by telling the Mexican government to “stuff the phony posturing”?

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have so much in common right now, Phoenix and Tel Aviv should be declared sister cities, Prescott and Jerusalem should swap keys as the historical capitals, and declare Arizona and Israel solidarity as fellow “pariah states” in this “International Conspiracy of Hypocrisy.” 3

1: http://www.foundingbloggers.com/wordpress/2010/06/media-matters-equates-isreal-with-old-school-racist-democrats-from-the-segregated-south/
2: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/LA-Council-Considers-Arizona-Boycott-93575949.html

3 “International Conspiracy of Hypocrisy,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Filed Under: Constitutional Law, Debates, Foreign Policy, Government, Guest Opinion, Illegal Immigration, National Security, Public Relations, State Government

Arizona meets the “Obama Doctrine”

May 20, 2010 By 18 Comments

Many presidents have been remembered in history as promoters of doctrines, defined formulations to project their vision of governance, nationally and internationally. We are now living under the new parameters of the “Obama Doctrine.” President of the United States, Barack Obama, graduate of Harvard Law School, once editor of the Harvard Law Review and occasional Law instructor violated every single lawyerly and law court professional code of conduct, and the fundamental pillars of Rule of Law in his first public articulation of the lens through which he evidently views the world: “I don’t know the facts, but the police acted stupidly.”

This concise sentence of the ideology of arbitrary and dangerously malleable “impressions” and “feelings” over facts, actual investigation and the truth, combined with a corrosive foundational distrust of police as an institution and as individual professionals, presuming guilt until proven innocent, has been applied in full force from President Obama on down through myriad United States Departments of the Obama Administration to Arizona for Arizona’s SB 1070.

Cambridge, Massachusetts was the first city to discover Obama’s penchant for pre-judging police comportment with Obama quickly raising what normally would have been a sooner forgotten the better local kerfuffle to a national issue by publically coming down on one side, solely based on race, because Obama admitted he didn’t “know the facts.” He saw “black” and “white cop,” and jumped all over it by his use of  White House bully pulpit – the press conference.

Arizona is the first state to discover the Obama Doctrine as applied to illegal immigration issues:

President Barack Obama: “In Arizona if you don’t have your ID… it’s ‘Adios amigos!”

The Secretary of Homeland Security and former Arizona Governor:

John McCain: “Have you had a chance to review the law?
Janet Napolitano: “I have not reviewed it in detail. I certainly know of it.”
John McCain: So you are not prepared to make a judgment on it.”
Janet Napolitano: “Ahhh … I BELIEVE it’s a bad law …I BELIEVE it mandates and requires…”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/17/napolitano_admits_she_hasnt_read_arizona_law_but_says_she_wouldnt_sign_it.html

United States Attorney General Eric Holder: The nation’s highest law enforcement officer:

Congressman Poe: “Have you read the Arizona law?”
Eric Holder: “Ah … I have not had a chance to … I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it. Um.”
Congressman Poe: “Even though you have not read the law, do you have an opinion whether it’s Constitutional?”
Eric Holder: “Ah …I’ve not really … I’ve not been briefed yet.”
Congressman Poe: “Are you going to read the law?
Eric Holder: “I’m sure I will read the law … in anticipation of that briefing. They will put that in front of me and I will spend a good evening reading that law.”

http://cspan.org/Watch/Media/2010/05/13/HP/R/32846/Holder+we+are+on+the+right+path+against+terrorism.aspx  at 2:45:05

United States Department of State:
Assistance Secretary of State Michael Posner, formerly of the Open Borders- promoting “Human Rights First” organization apologizes to the Chinese for something they hadn’t even mentioned, the Arizona SB l070: “We brought it up early and often.”

State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley in defense of Posner’s surrender style of negotiating with our enemies:  “Have I read the law?  No.”

The Obama Doctrine: Facts are to be ignored. Only the political and ideological goals of the Progressive Left Agenda matter. Police are not trusted, because they harbor bigotry.

Is it any surprise that with the willingness of the President on down through his administration to criticize a state law that they “don’t know the facts” about, that agitators feel they have a green light to harass Arizona?

First San Francisco, now Los Angeles Democratic Party politicians have held publically announced they intend harm to the state of Arizona by punishing Arizona economically first with bans on city employee on city business to Arizona and second trying to widen that to the general public to boycott Arizona. Political pressure has been put on sports franchises to boycott, to change venues, to hurt Arizona and Arizona businesses as much as possible through loss of income.

If successful, a boycott will only serve to force Arizona businesses, already squeezed by the economic slide, like restaurants, shops and hotels to lay off more employees, and by the law of unintended consequences, more illegals will be the first out of work, literally forced more by the economic impact of boycotts than SB1070 to move out of state. That’s the short term effect, the long term effect is more insidious and dangerous to the nation’s integrity.

President Barack Obama, by engaging in this rhetoric, while comforting the President of Mexico that he sympathizes with Mexico’s political position over American citizens is engaging in incredibly divisive leadership. Leadership as a quality is neutral; the results depend on where the people are led, set by the character of the leader – led to greater achievement or led down to the pit.

It is worse than ridiculous that Democrat Party city mayors in California, and now in Ohio, are actively promoting economic damage against another state. If not stopped in its tracks, it’s setting the stage for more comprehensive strife and national disunity. At the same time, this has been a more sustained public poisoning of distrust against police. Arizona police and sheriff departments haven’t done anything, yet their thoughts, their motives, their impartiality has all been publically denigrated – judged by a less than impartial pubic and highly partisan jury, guided by the POTUS himself. Every law enforcement officer in the state of Arizona knows he or she is going to be dragged out as Exhibit A if they make one misstep, say one wrong word, one arrest the day SB 1070 goes into effect that will bring down the legal carpetbaggers like a flock of vultures on their heads.

Police departments have for years been running “sensitivity” classes, revamping their hiring, their training, all to address complaints and concerns about how they conduct their public duties. But when was the last time any of those who’ve complained actually praised the concrete improvements? Americans may not see anything special about the typical American policing, so it’s easy to focus constantly on faults, but if they were to compare the average American police officer against his or her Mexican counterpart, they will be surprised. Compare against the average British officer, the average Russian officer, the average Indonesian police, the average Kenyan police … the list goes on and on. American police are head and shoulders above their international counterparts, but when was the last time anyone gave them credit for their high commitment to professionalism?

The President of the United States has a Constitutional duty to “preserve domestic tranquility.”

Obama is not silent on the deterioration of national dignity; he is encouraging agitation between states and mobilizing Federal offices in a joint punitive approach against Arizona and all its legal citizens, a population of all “colors,” languages, cultures and creeds, more diverse in “American Roots” than most other states. His Constitutional duty is to see FIRST to the needs of the lawful citizens, NOT to pander to a foreign government, which holds national interests different than our own. His duty is not to encourage or ignore destructive squabbling between states, but to provide leadership to prevent that or discourage such negative behaviors.

 Obama did not come out and rebuke California politicians for their provocative rhetoric and abusive administrative actions; he’s encouraged them by criticizing Arizona – for something that hasn’t even as yet been implemented. He is corrosively continuing his public denigration of our police as an institution to whom the important task of providing local domestic security falls, while stoking agitation that will put the police literally in harm’s way. President Obama’s doctrine should be focusing like a laser beam on doing his constitutionally mandated job to “preserve domestic tranquility” as he fulfills his duty to “provide for the common defense” by credibly securing our national borders.

Filed Under: Constitutional Law, Culture, Ethics, Government, Guest Opinion, Illegal Aliens, National Security, Public Safety

Israel, Mexico and all those “Peace Processes”

March 18, 2010 By 8 Comments

This past week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the official representative to foreign nations of the current U.S. Administration in Washington, DC, “warned” the Israelis to get on the “peace process.” Vice President Joe Biden and his wife spent the week in an official diplomatic visit to Israel and growled to their hosts they weren’t doing enough for “peace.” Palestinians, seeing the scolding of the Israeli government by the very apogee of the current American administration, promptly began the stone throwing and lit the Molotov cocktails.  When pressed that this seemed to be a disturbingly undermining way to support an ally, President Obama stated to clarify this awkward situation in his interview with Fox’s Bret Baier that ,“Israel is an ally … but we can have disagreements.”

DRUDGE report posed the ominous question: “US Administration seeks regime change in Israel?”  What are we to think,  considering Obama’s stated position in the Iranian election People’s rebellion, while Iranian citizens were bleeding in the streets, that it wasn’t for the USA to “meddle,” yet his administration engaged in heavy-handed American meddling in Honduras’s political business to try to force the Hondurans to reinstall a president they’d determined by their own laws to have been acting illegally. Hillary Clinton was the face of the USA to Hondurans, jetting in to tell them how to read their own Constitution, and Hillary Clinton  about two weeks ago, was the face of the USA telling astounded and then disgusted ally Britain that they should “settle” the Falklands issue with Argentina.

How about we see some of these United States government officials prominently addressing the “peace process” that has been lacking in the growing Mexican Drug War disaster? Can not the same as laid on Israel that “Mexico is an ally … but we can have disagreements?”

How can Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pound the podium,  suddenly “tough” about demanding Israel get “serious” about the “peace process” while US State Department Consular staff are targeted, ambushed and shot in Mexico?
She’s was those people’s boss, until they were murdered.

Where’s the Secretary of State’s strong rhetoric to the Mexican government to get “serious about a peace process” with the drug lords? Where’s her rebuke to the Mexican government to take “concrete steps” about the lawlessness? Where’s the demand to account for the money and equipment the United States has provided the Mexican government expressly for enhancing their capability to fight the drug insurgency?  

America, and especially  border states like Arizona are continuing to be sucked deeper into this increasingly dangerous situation with absorbing fleeing people, unwilling host to well-organized drug gangs which continue to increase their establishment of their destabilizing mayhem into Arizona cities, including the state capital itself, Phoenix, while US Embassy and private American citizens become casualties on Mexican streets. But the US Secretary of State, representing the priorities of the current Obama Administration isn’t at any of our southern border states or pounding the podium in Mexico City. Our Vice President Biden and his wife are not visiting the burning neighborhoods of Mexico to demand something be done. Our Head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, isn’t seriously addressing the integrity of the international boundary between our two nations, despite one of the nations teetering on chaos due to illegal and vicious violence.   It is a fact of chaotic regional strife, from the Congo to the Golden Triangle that disorganized and ineffective  government control is always exploited for cover by other opportunitistic criminals and terrorists.  

Arizona is one of several states which would form literally the front line of a war zone if this deteriorating situation isn’t confronted with credibility and multi-level strategic competency in international diplomatic efforts, national security, regional and local policing and confronting the enabling corruption that degrades Mexican and American  institutions.  Institutions  meant to maintain societal and national integrity for the purpose of maintaining  genuine peace.

The commentator graduated from Thunderbird School of International Management and prior to returning to Arizona, worked  in humanitarian aid and emergency aid in nations in West Africa and East Africa, directly in or in conjunction with Peace Corps, USAID and the United Nations, including disaster relief  in circumstances of  ethnic cleansing, refugees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, Guest Opinion, National Security, Public Safety

The Chilling Effect of the Soviet Lysenko on “Climate Change”

March 5, 2010 By 8 Comments

Big Government had a recent column on ClimateGate, offering that it wasn’t the only Progressive Science scam pushed on the public, and states that “Eugenics” is one major global Progressive-produced catastrophe, but there is another example of Progressive Left political maneuvering that crippled a nation and brought the weight of an oppressive centrally-controlled bureaucracy on the heads of honest and diligence scientists, now known as “Lysenkoism.”

The roots of ClimateGate, with falsifying date, suppressing data that didn’t’ support the theory, and intimidating scientists as “skeptics” or even the more blatant, “unbelievers,” is found in the Soviet Union’s past, their embrace of a junk science called “agro-biology” or as Elof Axel Carlson described it, “a toxic blend of politics and pseudo-science.”

Actor and non-scientist Ed Begley, Jr. had a micro-climate-change of overheating when arguing that the only climate authority was “peer-reviewed” scientific journals. He was quite adamant, repeating “peer-reviewed” as often that it seemed to be a talisman, but about two hours too late to have heard the “thud” of the next shoe to drop from what appears to be a ClimateGate centipede, that the supposedly independent and non-partisan peer-reviewed” journals were under heavy pressure and manipulation of editors and selection of papers to refuse to publish anything that countered in any way the ClimateChange narrative, a total usurpation of the scientific process of open review – the system of checks and balances.

“Peer-reviewed,” the world has just discovered, has been nothing of the sort when it comes to the pseudo-science of “global warming”.  Actor Begley’s position of “peer-reviewed” turned out to not have been spoken from standing on solid rock, but from a tree, a precarious perch on a dead limb that was being sawed off as he spoke. http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bighollywood/2009/11/24/ed-begley-jr-loses-it-on-fox-news/ 

But there is nothing new under the sun, and those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. This combination of politics, science and public policy machinations can be found in the career and wreckage left by one man, Trofim D. Lysenko of the Soviet Union.

T.D. Lysenko (1898-1976) was a half-educated man of science; he didn’t finish his studies and remained defensive through his life towards those with better credentials and experience than he. One might say he learned just enough to be dangerous, developing a new theory, “agro-biology” which mixed known processes of agronomy and plant genetics, with theoretical and unproven evolutionary concepts. His theory appealed to the Soviet “New Man” thinking, upending the old orders, a “political” view applied to agriculture.

The Soviets had a problem; most of Soviet agricultural land was more north than America – of the latitudes of Canada, not the reliable American breadbaskets of warmer Iowa or Illinois. They have a short growing season, with no room for error, therefore much of Soviet agricultural plant research was focused on developing hardier and more productive strains of wheat. Lysenko caught the attention of the Soviet central planners when he proposed a radical method that he claimed would shock wheat into developing new characteristics that appealingly would produce a sort of “revolutionary” wheat fit for the “revolutionary” Soviet Union. And, like Lysenko’s education, “agro-biology” had just enough grounding in proven science to be convincing, especially to people who didn’t know anything about agriculture, agronomy or plant genetics. Soviet scientists who worked in those fields took a look, did some of their own peer testing and began demurring.

Lysenko used his rising political power to enhance his data to promote his theory, reduce criticism, remove scientists from their positions, chase them from the field and in several cases, most notably Lysenko’s chief critic and professional competitor, Nikolai Vavilov, the man arrested, stripped of his position and literally sent to a Soviet prison where he died, a broken, innocent man. The rest of Soviet science took note, and shut up. They had to eat, after all. But there wasn’t much to eat after Soviet Central Planning decreed that the debate was over, “the science settled” and the “consensus” was that Lysenko’s methods were to be applied to all Soviet agriculture. Harvests dropped, the Lysenko-processed wheat didn’t produce the results Lysenko had predicted, had published and had promoted – a national, policy-contrived disaster.

The parallels between the Soviet centralized commitee promotion of Lysenko because his rhetoric fit the Soviet Progressive ideology, and “Climate Change” are ominous – the bullying, the falsification of data and the outright professional, political and bureaucratic smothering of dissenting opinions should be an important lesson to recall when presented with ClimateChange data, claims and computer modeling that fly in the face of observable reality. That the environmental movement has such luminaries as former Soviet President Gorbachev who after losing the free election for Russian president with an abysmal 3% of the vote, morphed into a “green” advocate, after stating that the “environmental movement was the last best hope of communism.”  A strategy of going “Green” that would lead to “Red,” should be a reason to closely examine the claims, the direction and the veracity of anything presented by people who have no backgrounds in science whatsoever. The mountain of emails discussing elimination of dissent, hijacking the peer-review process, collusion and obfuscation, and the exposure of the faulty computer codes written for climate modeling shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it’s welcome and concrete proof that “Global Warming” and “ClimateChange” are politics and power, not science or actual weather. This fraud as it still unravels with almost daily exposure of yet more admissions of hiding data, manipulation to produce desired outcomes, is becoming more and more suspicious as a way to create a basis on which massive taxation and redistribution of wealth was going to be justified, negatively affecting billions of people around the world, arguably the biggest single planned theft in human history.

“In other words, the primary task of the politics of science was to ensure that science served the political end of the people and its government.”     The Lysenko Effect, by Nils Roll-Hansen

Resources:  The Lysenko Effect, by Nils Roll-Hansen;    The Lysenko Affair, by David Joravsky
.

Filed Under: Environment, Government, Guest Opinion, Political Correctness

Nuclear Iran- Part II

February 18, 2010 By 24 Comments

“I am sure Ahmedinejad is thankful.”
Indeed he is. The Progressive Liberal Left is helping wage his war of breaking down of will to stand up against him, garbling debate and employing boilerplate stereotyping tactics to encourage people to ignore the warning signs and berate anyone who raises the alarm – at a time when a number of actions – not necessarily war – are still available to help counter this aggressive and brutal regime. All this running interference for free! Ahmedinejad is not just thankful, he’s delighted.

Ignore, ignore means the Iranian regime can carry on without disruption, and steadily increases the probability of total war, the worst case for everyone. We may be quite unperturbed and complacent here in Arizona, but have we checked the European press lately? They are very very very worried. The UN has three sets of sanctions on the books now which Iran is blatantly ignoring, and with the rising anxiety from the Iranian Regime’s announcement regarding achieving their benchmark objective to enrich uranium to levels required for weapons applications – not even a shock – there is heavy pressuring for more sanctions.  (  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8522910.stm   ). Europe will be in the target zone and they do not have a missile shield. Because of the expense and development required, they’ve been long banking on the USA to provide that – and Obama by his rebuffing of Poland, is sending out a clear message to our allies they cannot count on that, as long as the Democratic Party holds on to power.

Because of its size, even ONE nuclear warhead detonating anywhere in Israel would be far more devastating than two or three in a nation the size of Iran. They’re worried. What good does it do Israel to have “300 warheads” it can rain down on Iran when the one can’t be stopped? Iran will not launch one, they will launch multiple. Only one has to get through. Iran knows it, Israel knows it. It’s an intolerable situation. When Iran announced this week that Israel wanted war by this summer, Israel coolly replied, “No we don’t.” But the inclination of the press is to admonish Israel, not Iran for provocative nuclear talk.(   http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100216/twl-israel-mulling-a-spring-or-summer-wa-3cd7efd.html )

Why focus on just Israel? Iran and Iraq are traditional enemies; Iranian Revolutionary Guards were infiltrating, training and heavily funding the insurgency in Iraq against US troops. Iran could easily choose to drop a nuke on Baghdad as payback for Saddam’s invasion of Iran and the resultant 9 year war during which over a million people were killed, and by that also eliminate an inconvenient democracy on their border. On Iran’s other border, a nuke to destroy Kabul and by that, the Afghan government there would make it easy for Iran to invade and conquer that nation in order to spread Iran’s form of radical Revolutionary Islam.

It doesn’t HAVE to go to war, but the way the Obama Administration is not handling this, aggravated by Obama reaching his hand out to the Anti-American Ahmedinejad, hugging the America-hating Hugo Chavez, in the room with American-murdering Ghaddafi, and nothing extended to the pro-freedom Iranian people has sent a terrible message across the globe. Allies and enemies alike are downgrading their traditional assumptions about America’s reliability for the worse, a weakness that our enemies will exploit, and greatly increasing other nations resorting to war to stop Iran before it can attack them.

America is not helpless. Citizens have every right to expect and insist that our elected leadership represent our national interests of security, which includes our allies. That’s their JOB. These representatives are supposed to be stewards of our military and our foreign policy, maintaining capacities; working at all levels of diplomacy and using all available established mechanisms to make every  reasonable effort to keep the conditions that produce war from not developing.

But the United States Government today, controlled monopolistically by the Democratic Party, is presiding over not national security, but a massive political fete, featuring a pinata of American wealth, loading it up with taxpayer money, and tinsel goodies bought on debt – with entitlement groups swinging blindly to smash the bird while special interest groups fight over the “free money” sweets that spill to the ground.

That is NOT the role of good government. That is NOT the behavior of a responsible citizenry.

When the favors have run out, the money gone, the taxpayers broken, the hangover begins. The national wealth blown on an out of control binge fueled by greed; frivolous pursuits indulged while national security was neglected. Our irresponsible government will stagger off like the dissipated Belshazzar of Babylon who feasted and partied, squandering the wealth of the people instead of attending to his duty of guarding the city while the king was away, leading the army to defend the nation, drunkenly blinking incomprehensively at the words written before him on the wall that condemned him: Mene Mene Tekil Parsin.

“Because of your arrogant and irresponsible behavior, your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.”

As we consider the many candidates who are lining up for 2010 and 2012, for a chance to be the ones chosen to represent our state, and our nation, as representatives, senators and president, those who understand this grave duty and can stand firm despite political attacks and pressure to capitulate should be the ones selected to move to state and national seats. Citizens have a responsibility to each other to chose wisely, to consider well the character, the experience and the abilities of each candidate. Shallow and uninformed decisions will reward representatives who are unequal to the task of representing and governing.

The Persian leadership is poised to test America as it has never been tested before; they are but one of our enemies, so we need to select men and women who will be able to provide informed and solid leadership, and who will always vote for the best interests of the American People and their rights as derived from the American Constitution.

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, Guest Opinion, National Security, Terrorism

Nuclear Iran

February 11, 2010 By 14 Comments

Iran announces today that they are a nuclear nation.

Total FAIL for the Obama Administration.

Obama spoke on numerous times during the campaign about his goal to REDUCE nuclear weapons. Evidently, he meant only evicerating America’s defenses while Iran is on full speed to OFFENSIVE weapons manufacturing.

Iran has long publicized its intention to wipe Israel off the map. It is now a critical step closer. It has already been launching missles and rockets to gain experience in developing a reliable nuclear weapon delivery system. We only know what they’ve told us, they are certainly NOT telling us everything, but what we know is suffiicent:  they are poised to put it all together for the purpose of exporting mass destruction.

Iran is a well-educated, modern, and oil-prosperous society with a brutal and idealogically-driven regime that is staying in power solely by raw, lethal force against its own people. Today’s internet is full of videos of the Iranian people being beaten today for the crime of demanding freedom from tyranny.  We don’t need even today’s raw footage of the clubbings in Tehran to know the character of the brutal men in charge of the radical Revolutionary Iranian Regime; during the Iraq-Iran War, the mullahs gave children a piece of Koranic scripture, promised them a place in heaven and pushed them across fields ahead of the troops … to clear the landmines.   What worse can we expect if they treat their citizens that way, while they consider us, “The Great Satan?”

So, evidently it isn’t scattered global strikes today, but the achievement of a Revolutionary Iranian Regime military objective that guarantees total WAR, and soon.

Why war?   And why soon? The threat of nuclear destruction is so serious that Iran’s neighbors cannot hold or they will be effectively held hostage or forced to capitulate the moment Iran can deliver a bomb to Cairo, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Amman, Ankara, Kabul, New Delhi, Rome. Any American troops in Iraq would be in harm’s way. America could easily be blackmailed by a threat of nuclear strike to pull out all troops, leaving newly Democratic Iraq at the mercy of their neighbor and arch enemy, Iran.

But not to worry, the Democratic Party has assured us we are ‘post-war’ and no longer require a military capable of defending America, nor do we  require a functioning missile shield. As Rep Kirkpatrick (D) said, representing the Democratic Majority Party Congress and the Democratic Party Controlled Administration’s policy:

“Our military will have to make due with less.”

As if the military’s purpose to provide national security was at the same strategic level of multimillionaire Nancy Pelosi’s U.S. Taxpayer funded jet, which she needs more than our troops need support, the U.S. government owning General Motors, which the White House needs more than reinforcing our troops, nationalizing student college loans which is more important than enhancing our intelligence capabilities – despite the debacle of the Christmas bombing attempt,  TARP bailouts, massage parlors, schools buying iPODs with stimulus funds, all of which trump national security issues as recipients of taxpayer-derived funds.

So, after tripling national debt, into beyond the next generation, then raising the debt ceiling so they can keep spending on everything BUT our military, the Democratic Party in the White House and the Congress insists that Americans will have to make due with LESS SECURITY.

“Belt-tightening,” Obama intones weekly, “Everyone has to sacrifice.”

They need the money for Democratic Party national priorities like buying up $50 million beaches in the Virgin Islands.

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, Guest Opinion, Military, National Security, Terrorism

Public Schools on Steroids: What happens when those setting the prices don’t have to pay.

January 16, 2010 By 6 Comments

Here’s a SMALL SAMPLING of Overseas American Schools 2009-2010 tuition rates, according to the State Department’s Office of Overseas Schools:

American School – Nairobi, Kenya
PK: $5,600
K-5: $14,000
6-8: $16,800
9-10: $17,000
11-12: $17,500
Capital levy fee for all new students: $5,000
Application fee $100

American School – Johannesburg, South Africa
PK: $12,382
K-5: $16,482
6-8: $19,321
9-12: $21,432
Capital fee: RAND 35,000 (about $4,700)

American Embassy School – New Delhi, India
PK: $6,790
K-5: $16,420
6-8: $17,600
9-12: $18,500
Registration fee: $5,750 per student

American International School – Jakarta, Indonesia
Early childhood 1: $6,700
Early childhood 2: $12,600
K-5: $17,930
6-12: $19,930
Annual capital fee for early childhood: $1,000
Annual capital fee for 2-12: $3,500

American International School – Lagos, Nigeria
PK: $8,980
K-5: $13,379
9-11: $20,220
Application fee of $400
Registration fee: $7,000
Annual capital levy fee: $1,600

These are officially independent, but operate under State Department auspices. They are the schools that the US Embassies, US Agency for International Development (USAID), US Information Service (USIS), US Peace Corps (Staff – not the volunteers), US Military associated with the Embassy (Marine Guard), other US Government Agencies and US Consulting companies under contract with the US Embassy or USAID, would send their dependent children to. Private US multinational corporation employees would also normally send their children to such schools at their overseas posts. United Nations staff also enrolls their children at these schools, as do other Embassies and Multinational corporations, space permitting, according to a set priority protocol.

Consider the fees and then consider the USG pay scales for State Department staff. US State Department employees have their base salaries off the USG pay scale, PLUS free housing, free security, free utilities, free medical, R&R and Home Leave travel. They ALSO get 100% of EACH of their children’s tuition paid by the US taxpayer.

Parents with enrolled children are eligible to run for school board positions. The school board develops the budgets and sets tuition rates. And DO they, ever. With their dear children forced to live overseas in strange lands, many parents have a sense of guilt that perhaps their child is missing out on normal American life. But, that parent can make it up to their child by being a part of the school board to make sure that school is top notch. Swimming pools, computer labs, sports fields, bakeries, cafeterias, state of the art libraries, and… well the state of the art library could really use a new entrance that conveyed excellence – a sculpted  forest tree entry. The grounds would look nicer with locally commissioned statues and art … new books and curriculum fill closets and storage to overflow. While it’s true that there are unavoidable additional costs associated with running a school in another country, like travel and lodging for teachers, many of these schools have on-campus apartments so teachers live and work on site. Most of the staff however, are local hires, at local salary rates, supervised by American staff, quite a few are Americans living in that country, married to local nationals, so some costs are offset by savings elsewhere. One would expect these schools to be somewhat more expensive, but not to such a magnitude.

The American schools bill the State Department. Companies like EXXON/MOBIL or CHEVRON pay their employees’ kids tuition bills as part of the compensation package, so the next time people grumble about the price of oil going up, remember, the oil companies pass increases on to the customer, and part of those increases include paying for sky-high tuition, rising faster than the annual inflation rates, at American Schools for their employees’ dependents while posted overseas. This represents thousands and thousands of American dependents being schooled overseas, not even counting the military’s Department of Defense Schools. When the United Nations submits its budget requests, remember that thousands of UN staff worldwide are eligible for a subsidy of 70% of tuition for their children, up to a fixed ceiling, a budget line item that runs into the millions, payment which is paid by donor nations … like the US, and thus the US taxpayer again. Many non-profit organizations also build into their employee compensation packages tuition assistance for their children, based on the price of the American School at the posting, adding a huge additional cost to expatriate contracts.

Many of these schools are in fact affiliated with teacher exchange programs at stateside public schools. For example, the American School in Lagos, Nigeria had been for years linked with Tacoma Washington Public Schools – using Tacoma, Washington Public School curriculum and teachers. A Tacoma, Washington native, when hearing this exclaimed, “Are you kidding? Everyone’s fleeing that school district!”

When the school announced it was adding Klein School District out of Texas to its mix, a parent came back from summer break with a disbelieving, “I was house-hunting in Texas and found a really nice place, but the real estate agent told me, “Trust me, you don’t want that, it’s in Klein school district.”

Now consider that public school education to the tune of $13,379 for 4th grade plus a $7,000 registration fee and the always mysterious annual capital levy fee of $1,600. That makes it $21,979 for the first year for a new 4th grader. For a public school education that no one in the State of Washington wanted. This is for a day student, so don’t forget packing his lunch.

The environment at these schools is solidly Progressive Left, with occasional anomalies in places like Nigeria where corporations like EXXON or CHEVRON had large offices, which would throw in a sometimes entertaining Texas Oil versus East Coast Washington Beltway schism.

The American School in New Delhi built itself a “Hall of Peace” and has a coffeehouse where parents can socialize, sing a little and strum … not kidding, on guitars. The American School Advanced Placement History teacher in New Delhi forced the students to istudy the radical Leftist Howard Zinn’s uber political, “A History of the American People,” even though it wasn’t on the AP course requirements nor on the AP exam. Not actually noteworthy since this is common in American public schools, yet it’s telling to see so many of these schools want to be known as “International Schools” instead of the “American School,” and do not display American flags inside the classrooms, because they aren’t comfortable with “patriotic” expressions.

But what’s stunning is the ease with which these U.S. government employee parents approve gold-plated budgets and tuition levels that they could NEVER afford if they had to pay out of their own pockets. Another factor also forms these budgets – local parents who pay the full tuition, run for school board and then are instrumental in suggesting and approving construction projects to improve the schools … and they just happen to own construction companies. It’s not a coincidence then to discover these schools run to more than just slightly overbuilt edifices.

You and I, and our neighbors foot the bill for these luxury-priced schools through our Federal taxes. How many of our kids have Olympic-sized swimming pools, coffeehouses and enormous libraries with sculpted entrances? The public school systems that many of the overseas schools partner with for their curriculum and teaching staff wouldn’t dream of submitting budget requests to city school boards that tally up to New Delhi American Embassy School’s whopping $22,170 for a 4th grade education. At these prices even the 70% subsidized United Nations personnel balk; thirty percent for the staffer to pay out of pocket is still high and impossible on their UN salaries if they have two or three children. They quickly look elsewhere for education options.

Compare this pricing with the academically excellent Calvert School’s thriving home school division which will ship a year in a box anywhere in the world – textbooks, papers, pencils, glue for 4th grade at the price of $795 or about $1,200 if parents opt for Calvert teacher support and a Calvert-maintained transcript (www.calvertschool.org ). The traditionally-structured, rigorous Calvert School academically outperforms any of the American Schools, K-8 which charge $19,000 to $20,000 MORE than Calvert and deliver LESS in terms of academic achievement.

It’s routine overseas, people with Masters degrees, white collar government employees who like to be called diplomats, who in the overwhelming majority vote Democratic Party, who don’t even blink at the sight of an elementary school bill of $21,979 for ONE child, who make no effort to keep costs down for the sake of the taxpayers who pay for it, and constantly overspend, driving fees upwards – for them, it’s FREE, an entitlement for the “sacrifice” of living overseas in their chosen careers.

There is a very simple solution for at least SOME taxpayer relief. No more 100% free. If USG State Department employees, too habituated to a free ride, had to pay even 10% of the tuition, the downwards pressure on the fees would be HUGE and immediate. Expatriate school boards would suddenly be the epitome of tight wads, suspicious of any proposed increases and be Dr. No on any suggested improvements. The screams of outrage from the other side of the globe would be audible in downtown Show Low, but it’d work to insert a measure of fiscal reality into the hyper-inflated American schools overseas.

Filed Under: Education, Federal Budget, Guest Opinion, Taxation

Man-Made Disaster Season

January 3, 2010 By 2 Comments

Man Made Disaster Season

Filed Under: Arts, Blogs, National Security, Terrorism

Arizona’s Deepest Canyon

January 1, 2010 By 3 Comments

Wanumba - A Red River Runs Through It

Filed Under: Arts, State Budget

Planes, Trains and Automobiles to a Free Delivery

December 14, 2009 By 8 Comments

About seven years ago, we sat in on a parents’ meeting at the Lycee Francais Albert Camus in Conakry, Guinea, a country in West Africa. It was more out of curiosity than need, to observe how the French run these things, and the French parents were very nice and inclusive, so who could say no? There was just one item on the agenda that day, the discussion of a scholarship for a student, a Guinean girl. The scholarship had been stalled at the French Embassy for approval; the Embassy questioned whether the family qualified.

The father was there to plead his case. He had a right to French tuition assistance for his daughter because he held a dual French-Guinea citizenship. The head of the Parents Association, a French woman, noted that he’d received a loan from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to start a theatre business in a city a few hours from the capital. The man said he hadn’t been able to pay back the loan as the business had failed – too many videos and DVDs available. We listened as they went on to note his current income and so forth. The father argued very persuasively that he qualified.

They then noted that they found it hard to believe he didn’t have means because he’d written down his youngest son had born recently in the USA and was listed on the application forms as a US citizen. It was quite common to meet families in those places with kids born in various countries, a different passport for each kid, so that wasn’t surprising. But the French ladies persisted with their coup de grace, if he didn’t have the means, how did he afford paying airfare and US medical bills for his wife’s delivery in the USA, in an expensive US hospital?

The man sat up and exclaimed, “It didn’t cost us ANYTHING in America for the delivery. It’s FREE!” He spread his hands and absolutely beamed with genuine, delighted awe, “It was wonderful! Beautiful hospital, nurses, doctors, clean, and it was all free! American hospitals are superb and they are all so nice to you!”

To say the flabbergasted looks on the two French women were priceless is an understatement. Rendered speechless, their deer in the headlights eyes met ours … the American in the room … and it took nearly superhuman effort to not burst out laughing at them, lean across the table, high-five and shake the man’s hand, so awesome was this demolishing of the totality of the French conceit of their stereotyped opinions of American health care. It was a good thing though we restrained ourselves, because we would have clasped his hand with delight the one second, and then punched him the next moment.

We have six children, and they were all born in the USA. They weren’t “free.” We pay insurance and co-pay and the hospitals billed us, and quite creatively. We learned early on that 50-cent hospital pacifier was about $10, the “complimentary bag” of mostly manufacturers’ samples was about $100 and so forth. But the bottom line was, the hospital billed us and by extension our insurance company, not just for our children’s births, but for this Guinean man’s son’s birth, too. He scraped the money for an almost two-thousand dollar round-trip air ticket; his wife waddled into a US hospital emergency room and gave birth on our dime. At least we hope she waddled in on her own steam, and didn’t call 911 so the EMTs bought her in … at additional unreimbursed taxpayer expense.

Their son also got a crisp state of the art blue US passport as a US citizen. Mom and baby US citizen flew back to Guinea where he has been raised as a Guinean Susu-Francophone bi-lingual African who doesn’t speak English. But if any emergency which requires the United States Embassy to have to evacuate all US citizens out of Guinea, this boy is on the evacuation list, and would of course, while he’s young, require a family member accompany him. All paid for by the US taxpayer. There are more than hundreds of thousands of US citizens growing up in other countries who were born in the USA, but have no language or cultural ties or affinity for it, they are their families’ emergency exit tickets. International flights have women sitting awkwardly in tight airline seats, late in their third trimesters, claiming they aren’t, headed for the USA every day to give birth.

Frankly, who can blame them? Guinea’s per capita GNP is abysmal – under $500 per year – parking it squarely in the World Bank’s Low Income nations grouping, the world’s poorest nations. Compare that to Mexico’s Middle Income status at about $6,000 per year, and Mexico is what many Americans think of when they think “underdeveloped.” Guinea’s infant mortality runs in the 140 per 1000 live births range while America’s infant mortality runs closer to 5 per 1000 live births – which include the incredibly delicate premature babies. So, if we were Guinean, we’d beg, borrow and steal the air ticket money together and fly to the USA, for the world’s best health care for free, too.

It’s legal, but it isn’t free to provide. Hospitals buy supplies, buy medicines, pay nurses, technicians, janitors, pay electricity, water, heating, cooling, invest in state of the art scanners, x-rays, labs … the costs are numerous. Our bills went up with each child. But the hospitals were scrambling to cover mounting expenses they’d incurred by treating zero-pay walk-ins. No one wants to turn away anyone in need, but when more money goes out than in, hospitals go bankrupt and close, and everyone suffers, so ignoring this is not viable.

This is exactly the sort of problem that Americans expect to be fixed with any “health-care reform,” but there is nothing that addresses this untenable situation, in fact it stands to get worse, a strained and ultimately abusive give-away for foreigners, at the expense of nationals.

Congress is quite capable of crafting a logical and sensible guest-worker program for foreigners who want to work in the USA, which includes a simple requirement for any guest worker to buy and provide proof of a basic healthcare insurance coverage while in the USA. This would provide a huge relief for hospitals with large Mexican and Central American walk-in patient demands, and private insurers would have plenty of new clients to compete for instead of paying out for. Under this, any children born of foreigners in the USA would not be automatically citizens, but have a certificate of birth that requires them to have a set number of years of residency requirement by age 18 before being eligible for permanent US citizenship. Likewise, foreign nationals who make the effort to fly to the USA should be required to have insurance coverage that will pay for any medical costs incurred in the USA during their proposed sojourn. If a Third World woman is on an airplane, chances are she’s got some reasonable means to pay a short-term insurance policy, at a minimum. The poorest people of these nations never get on the plane in the first place, so this current arrangement enables a subsidy to the Middle and Upper Class of the home nations who have simply availed themselves of a golden opportunity on the backs of Americans who buy their own private coverage and take care of their own bills responsibly.

Filed Under: Guest Opinion, Health Care

The “Melt” of Kilimanjaro or the “Trick” of Tropical Ice

December 6, 2009 By 4 Comments

Who could have predicted that Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” would be a victim of “Global Warming” decades after its publication? Al Gore, searching the planet for visual examples which would best warn the public about the deteriorations provoked by rising global temperatures, found one in the apparently shrinking ice cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro. How ironic, the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting from global warming, something that surely would render Hemingway’s book …well, sort of a relic of cooler days gone by.  But Al Gore and the “Global Warming” proponents are banking on the general public not knowing a thing about Kilimanjaro the actual mountain, or anything about the novel apart from the catchy title. Yet, fiction is not what we want to discuss, but fact. And the “fact” of anything “melting” at the top of Kilimanjaro is a “fact” that is totally dependent on an un-informed public not challenging it.

Mt. Kilimanjaro, a volcano rising just over 19,000 feet from sea level, located in the East African nation of Tanzania, is somewhat unique – a mountain on the equator with a glacier at its summit, rising above the hot savannah, a grassland game park with lions, elephants, zebras, and wildebeest, nibbling about under acacia and crimson-blossomed flame tree shade – with red-wrapped and colorful bead-adorned traditional Masai warriors strolling about, visiting, tending their cattle, minding the homesteads and families amidst the flora and fauna. There are glaciers on mountains near the tropical equator elsewhere in the world, so it’s not truly unique. What does make it more uniquely interesting is information that Al Gore didn’t offer when he claimed that “global warming” was melting the ice on Kilimanjaro. That would be an inconvenient fact – Kilimanjaro’s sister peak, Mt. Kenya.

Mt. Kenya, situated in the East African nation of Kenya, next door to Tanzania, is a volcano like Kilimanjaro, also just over 19,000 feet and is close by on the other side of the equator; the mountains are the two most distant points on the earth which can be seen from each other. And, what are the odds? … Mt. Kenya also has a glacier at its summit. But unlike Mt. Kilimanjaro, and despite the nearly identical circumstances, Mt. Kenya’s glacier doesn’t lend itself so well to photographic “evidence” of any sort of …“melting,” so it’s never mentioned. Logically, if “global warming” is melting the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro, then it must be melting the glacier on Mt. Kenya at a very similar rate.
Because the two mountains sit at the equator, their summit temperatures remain in a relatively constant range; days at the equator do not shift the way they do as in latitudes approaching the poles. Instead, they have a steady twelve hours of daylight, twelve hours of night with very little variation, 365 days a year. Literally, there can be more than a 100 degree decline in temperature as one ascends from the sultry bases to the frigid summits of both mountains. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier doesn’t look like a flowing sort of glacier found in seasonally-affected mountains, it’s a big block of ice sitting at the rim, and temperatures there at 19,000 feet lurk at negative 3 degrees F and lower. That would be 35 degrees below freezing point. There is very little atmosphere at 19,000 feet, the air is very thin and has a very low capacity to hold any sort of heat or water vapor, so it’s extremely dry and cold, much too cold to “melt” anything.

But Al Gore showed photos of a once bigger ice cap than today. There are at least two factors. One, the snowfall has been measurably less as the region has been in a drought for over decade. There just hasn’t been any significant rainfall, and so, little snowpack added up top. But nearby Mt. Kenya has had closer to average rainfall, and its glacier isn’t showing much change in size, so the drought is a localized problem. Rains in that region resemble very much Arizonan rain patterns – produced by cells rather than comprehensive cloud cover. Two, at the summit, a different process is at work. In extremely cold, dry conditions, the ice/solid to water/liquid to water vapor/gas transformation skips a step. Under the right conditions, ice can “sublimate” or evaporate into the air without any melting. In the bitter cold and extremely dry environment of the summit at over 19,000 feet, it is simply too cold for melting. “Sublimation” is not a function of “warming” but of chilling.

 The snows of Kilimanjaro have not been “melting” from “global warming.” At 19,000 feet, the thin atmosphere will never be dense enough at that altitude to hold heat even with any potential rise in global temperatures at lower altitudes. The “fact” of the “melting” is not a fact, but a fraud or in today’s debate, a “trick” to hide the truth. 32 degrees F has a meaning and a significance that too many people today do not apply to real life.

Time to refresh ourselves of that old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

An excellent article regarding extensive background and research into the conditions for sublimation, solar radiation and recorded temperatures is found in The American Scientist, Vol. 95, 2007 Sigma Xi, “The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro.” Authors: Philip W. Mote and Georg Kaser http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/relatedcontent/2007/June/rc_parentID34106_thisID34110.pdf

Filed Under: Environment, Guest Opinion

Why is Manmohan Singh in Washington?

November 25, 2009 By 3 Comments

The MSM reporting on this week’s heralded “President Obama’s First State Dinner” is heavy on arugula, sustainable magnolia and curry than political meat. 

While YAHOO! News chatters about First Lady Michelle Obama’s “breaking with tradition dress,” Bloomberg reporters Kate Andersen Brower and Nicholas Johnston pen a detailed description:
“They will join a group of American and Indian executives, diplomats, public officials and celebrities who will be honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh under heated tents on the White House South Lawn.
Guests will dine on potato and eggplant salad with arugula from the White House garden; roasted potato dumplings with tomato chutney, chickpeas and okra, or an alternate choice of green curry prawns served with caramelized salsify, smoked collard greens and coconut aged basmati. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aQ_tY1EpS4FE

Between the coconut aged basmati rice and the chickpeas, what should Americans know that occupies the mind of the Indian Prime Minister? After all, it’s a long way to go for dinner, for Singh, it’s literally half way around the globe, so discussions must be involved.
Howard LaFranchi of the Christian Science Monitor relates, “Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrives at the White House Tuesday wondering if his country remains the US priority under President Obama that it became under President Bush.
The Obama administration thought it had answered that question months ago when it announced that Mr. Singh’s day of meetings would constitute the first state visit of Mr. Obama’s presidency – a distinction meant to convey the importance of the occasion.
But Obama’s week-long trip to Asia that ended last Thursday has India questioning anew the value of a US partnership. In particular, the tenor of Obama’s three days in China was heard by Indians as American acquiescence to rising Chinese power across Asia.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1123/p02s01-usfp.html

Americans did not get much sense from the MSM that much transpired apart from Obama’s bowing gaffs, and zero sense that other nations watch every move a US president makes like hawks, and parse every word, and at least one major ally didn’t like what they heard.   CNN’s 44th President webpage page, under POLITICS, has this astute political insight:
“The dinner, in a tent set up on the White House South Lawn with a view of the Washington Monument, featured round tables for 10 set in resplendent colors — apple green, ruby, gold — with floral arrangements of roses, hydrangeas and sweet peas in plum, purple and fuchsia.  Place settings in fine china from three previous administrations — Eisenhower, Clinton and George W. Bush — were flanked by five pieces of silverware and crystal glasses. Place cards were in script — “The President” and “Mrs. Obama” read two.

A seasonal menu reflecting both American and Indian flavors started with a potato and eggplant salad made with White House-grown arugula and accompanied by an onion seed vinaigrette, according to the White House.”
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/24/obama.state.dinner/index.html?section=cnn_latest

One is left wondering if the place cards for the Prime Minister and his wife were in Hindi script or the potentially insensitive, “English script.” Inquiring minds might want to know, if they were not more concerned about nations, conflicts, terror and war.

Mian Ridge writes about what’s on Indians’ minds in the Christian Science Monitor, “But while talks between Mr. Singh and Mr. Obama scheduled for Tuesday are likely to focus on such matters as Afghanistan, climate change, and cooperation on nuclear energy, pundits in India are more interested in the question of where the US’s new friendship with China, as well as its relationship with Pakistan, leaves India.
“We may aspire to a seat at the high table of world power but China is already sitting at the head of the table along with the United States,” wrote journalist Gautam Adhikari in the Times of India Monday. “It has enough IOUs in its pocket to stop anyone from pushing it around. We also are a billion-strong nation, a democracy to boot and growing economically at a still impressive rate given the global conditions. But, realistically speaking, we are a second or perhaps third tier force in the eyes of the United States.

A recent joint statement from Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, which included a line of support for better Indo-Pakistan relations, was regarded in New Delhi as an expression of unwanted interference in a sensitive matter. For some, it raises the worrying specter of Chinese involvement in South Asian diplomacy – and at a time when India’s long running border row with China is especially tense.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1123/p06s01-wosc.html

A bit testy. It gets even more interesting though with the Times of India:
“… Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday threw down the gauntlet to Washington, Islamabad and perhaps even Beijing and other world capitals that India would not be budged from pursuing its interests in Afghanistan — primarily of preventing the country from turning toxic under Pakistan’s malignant influence and American uncertainty.

“The road to peace on Afghanistan will be long and hard. But given the high stakes involved, the commitment of the international community must be sustained by firm resolve and unity of purpose.” Singh told Washington’s top policy wonks gathered to hear him at the Center for Foreign Relations, amid a continuing review by President Obama about U.S options in Afghanistan.

The remarks were clearly meant for the US President and his principals who have been bashing heads for several weeks now over next steps in Afghanistan amid charges of dithering on the crucial issue. Singh’s advice ahead of his meeting with Obama on Tuesday — Stay the course; we are going to be there.” http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Stay-the-course-in-Afghanistan-PM-Manmohan-Singh-urges-US/articleshow/5262957.cms

So, India, which has been invaded by neighbor Pakistan and neighbor China, at great losses of Indian lives and loss of Indian territory, is not comfortable with the Obama Administration’s “reaching-out” to China, and is extremely concerned that any U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan will have a dangerously negative impact on India’s security.

What does CNN’s political reporting reveal on this important diplomatic and geopolitical issue, which reflects an overdue and dragging Obama Administration decision on an Afghan military strategy?
“The event planned by first lady Michelle Obama emphasized eco-friendly themes such as White House-grown herbs and lettuce served to guests and sustainably harvested magnolia branches — from species native to both India and the United States — in arrangements adorning the tent where more than 300 guests wearing tuxedos and gowns were wined, dined and entertained.”
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/24/obama.state.dinner/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Despite the arugula and traditional Thanksgiving pie and various organically grown vegetables from Michelle Obama’s White House Very Hardy November garden, the special sauces may not have been enough to stave off some serious indigestion that began developing just last week, as reported by the Christian Science Monitor:

“But what has set the Indians on edge now is the wording of a communiqué issued last week by Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao at the end of their Beijing talks. The two leaders said their countries “are ready to strengthen … cooperation in issues related to South Asia.” They specifically pledged to “support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan.”
That set off an uproar in New Delhi, where even members of Singh’s own party questioned whether a declining superpower was bowing to the “core interests” of another country. Indian officials repeated that India needs no outside involvement in its relationship with Pakistan.
US officials say that the communiqué was not intended to signal a recognition of a supposed Chinese sphere of influence. The State Department’s undersecretary of State for political affairs, William Burns, responded by saying there is “too much reading into statements.”
But Neena Shenai, an adjunct scholar for South Asian issues at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the statement was “certainly not the way to roll out the red carpet for Prime Minister Singh.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1123/p02s01-usfp.html

But, how many Americans are aware of that? Has our media, which is meant to inform the U.S. public, been diligent in alerting Americans to the dismay and most importantly, the CONCERNS of our allies? Bloomberg’s reporters enlighten us:
“The menu is intended to reflect American cuisine with a taste of India and will include lettuce and herbs culled from the White House garden. The guest chef is Marcus Samuelsson of Manhattan’s Aquavit restaurant …First lady Michelle Obama told a group of girls from the White House Leadership and Mentoring Program at the White House today that state dinners “are critical to what we do internationally.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aQ_tY1EpS4FE

Really? “Critical to what we do internationally?” Dear Girls, state dinners are luxuries, and can be dispensed with, or can be much more modest for the taxpayer’s pockets than enormous heated tent mega-events with glitzy pop stars to croon along with the fifth course. American soldiers stand at the top of the world, facing the Afghan winter, a bleak, cold, ancient cross-roads of invading armies and rival civilizations, huddled over portable heaters, their rifles slung over their shoulders, stirring boiled water into the plastic pouches of their MREs to bring their desiccated beef stews to some consistency of normal, with one eye and ear always on the alert for the warning movements, cracks of gunfire or shriek of incoming mortar fire – soldiers waiting for reinforcements and a steeling of resolve from the wining and dining civilian leadership in Washington, DC - for these soldiers have seen the enemy up close and know what’s at stake. In the same number of weeks it took to present a sumptuous state dinner for 300 rich and connected guests, a complicatedly elaborate planning as one staffer remarked, critical resources could have been allocated to our soldiers, and much already have been sent on its way.

But despite thousands of words and plenty of video recorded devoted to this week’s state dinner, few syllables in the American media have been devoted to the issue that America waits on, that will have serious and profound implications for many nations, including for the fate of the nation of the man ostensibly honored at that dinner, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but who rated fewer mentions than the food, the entertainment, and the other guests. The American media, focused on “Eco-friendly,” “White House garden” and a Who’s Who list of Hollywood and Chicago politics, is more aflutter at astoundingly empty reporting of the excruciatingly nothing discovery that: “Place cards were in script — “The President” and “Mrs. Obama” read two.”

Time to repeat what had to be found in the Indian media at the Times of India newspaper, as the nation of India prepares to mourn her murdered people at a grim anniversary:
“On the eve of the first anniversary of the Mumbai carnage …“Singh offered similar advice in an earlier address to US and Indian business leaders that the international community needs to remain engaged in Afghanistan and any “premature talk of exit will only embolden the terrorists.”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Stay-the-course-in-Afghanistan-PM-Manmohan-Singh-urges-US/articleshow/5262957.cms

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, Military, National Security, Terrorism

Why Afghanistan is Important

November 24, 2009 By 21 Comments

Afghanistan is a geographically and geopolitically strategic nation in central Asia. Six countries share its borders: Pakistan, China, Iran and three former Soviet Republics, now independent but heavily Russian-influenced Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. From Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul, the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, is only 235 miles away, via the famous Khyber Pass. The capital of Delhi, India is just 624 miles away, closer to Kabul, Afghanistan than Dallas, Texas is to New York City. Pakistan’s road network reaches from Islamabad, along the Indus River Valley, and connects with the ancient Silk Road. China is just a few hours away, bordering both Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Karakorum Mountain Range. Along many of these same roads however, Pakistan’s central government controls just the roadway itself, the areas to the right and left of the tarmac have never been controlled, they have and remain the domain of local Tribal governance.

Afghanistan’s recent history has been one of terrible war and strife. In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan to prop up the crumbling Soviet puppet-government. American President Carter reacted by boycotting the Soviets through the Olympics and US grain contracts, but President Reagan armed the Afghans to drive the Soviets out. The Soviet Union withdrew, its economy collapsing under the last straw of an expensive and brutal war. The Afghan warlords, seeing a central government power vacuum began a bloody civil war in 1989 vying for dominance. One faction, Islamofascists called the Taliban, by 1992 began asserting dominance with the help of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden who’d been searching for a safe haven and base since being booted from his home country of Saudi Arabia and then from Sudan.

Secure in his new home and envisioning the rebirth of the Islamic Caliphate from Spain to China, Bin Laden perceived America as the most serious military threat to his vision, and gave material and planning support to terrorist attacks against America and Americans, such as the Khobar Towers and the USS Cole bombings before the 9/11 attacks. To Bin Laden’s eternal surprise and dismay, America arrived in Afghanistan to fortify the last remnants of the Afghan free resistance, the Northern Alliance, just weeks after 9/11 and Al-Qaeda’s September 9, 2001 brutal assassination of the Northern Resistance’s general, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, a killing meant to be the coup de grace against the Northern Alliance’s military capabilities. Backed by the US military, the revitalized Northern Alliance was able to break the Taliban front lines and sent the Taliban into a running retreat, and Afghanistan into a national celebration of victory from years of Taliban despotism.

Today, Afghanistan is sheltered under US military protection as it rebuilds its shattered and eviscerated nation. Deforestation, degraded agriculture, opium trade and a ruined infrastructure hold back a nation that didn’t have much freedom to develop its cities and towns or exploit any of its natural resources over the past forty years. Worse, the remnant Taliban continues to disrupt progress, to wage low level war against the Afghan people and the Afghan government, hoping to destabilize it, hoping to demoralize Americans into quitting. Because of this, no Afghan government for the near future has the means to protect Afghanistan from any foreign aggression.

If the United States leaves, Afghanistan will be completely vulnerable to any one of several dangerous scenarios of invasion: by the Islamofascist Taliban, or an expansionistic communist China, or a radicalized Pakistan or even Russia via the former Soviet states, for Afghanistan has strategic placement for oil pipelines originating in Iran.

But, Iran must be examined closer as the long-recognized source of destabilizing Islamic Revolutionary radicalism in the region. For the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran was bottled up, with American troops in Iraq and American troops in Afghanistan; effectively keeping Iranian mischief-makers trapped at home. Iraq, with more modern and less degraded infrastructure, combined with a well-educated population with a tradition of engineering stretching back to ancient Babylon, is better equipped to take over much of its security, but Afghanistan has never achieved the development of Iraq ,so it gravely lacks in basic self-sufficiency, especially after decades of war and strife. With the presence of US combat troops, both Iraq and Afghanistan have been protected from Iranian invasion. If the US leaves Afghanistan, Iran could easily pour over the border and take control, positioning itself to overthrow the moderate and shaky Pakistan government for their Revolutionary brand of radical regime, which would be an enormously dangerous situation for India. Nuclear war would not be unthinkable if India perceives it is under threat.

The new Caliphate, as understood by wary Hindus in India, would stretch from Iran through Afghanistan, through Pakistan, through India’s northern Kashmir State, run eastwards along the Himalayan Mountain Range to the former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh –to the Muslim regions of China. Whoever holds Afghanistan holds the key to the entire region, to the east and to the west. To have that in hand only to throw it away, would waste years of hard-earned gains and would deprive the Afghans of any hope at a future of self-determination. Worse, it hands America’s enemies strategic positioning which can be used against America and her allies.

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, History, Military, National Security
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