Monday, April 22, 2013
Newsmax- Bush Attorney General: It was Jihad
Bush Attorney General: It Was Jihad
Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey
Sunday, 21 Apr 2013 09:54 PM
Those who feel the only threat from brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been eliminated now that one is dead and the other is in custody for the rest of his life can rest easy, Mukasey writes in an op-ed piece published in The Wall Street Journal Sunday.
“But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry — a lot.”
One big worry, Mukasey notes, is how the High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG) will even do its job.
The group was formed by the FBI after the so-called “underwear bomber” was Mirandized in 2009. President Barack Obama had disbanded the CIA interrogation program that might have run the interrogation of the bomber. The two programs aren't even remotely similar in their tactics and goals, suggests Mukasey, who served in the Bush administration from 2007 to 2009.
The FBI has “bowdlerized” its training materials at the request of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations (the very controversial CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America, writes Mukasey. They no longer even mention references to militant Islamism.
“Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?” he asks in the op-ed, entitled "Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad."
"Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout 'allahu akhbar' — a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as 'workplace violence'?
"If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program," Mukasey writes.
Mukasey wonders whether the probe will look into the FBI’s own previous questioning of Tamerlan, which was made after questions were raised by a foreign government, presumably Russia, about radical leanings.
“Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI,” Mukasey writes.
Another worry: The Tsarnaevs obviously were conducting a suicide operation, Mukasey says, though not the type in which one blows himself up along with his intended victims. Rather, the brothers went about it “in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory.”
It had been widely accepted that such attacks were unlikely on American soil since organizers would find it hard to find enough spiritual support to keep would-be suicide attackers focused.
“That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car — an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed,” Mukasey writes.
Smaller, less complicated crimes have been attempted since 9/11 because the United States has stepped up its defenses. Mukasey points to the Times Square attempted bomber. These smaller events are still intended to send a message of terror.
But that message may be lost on a president who seems preoccupied with Islamic sensibilities, Mukasey suggests, and not American security.
"There is also cause for concern in the president's reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the 't' word—terrorism—and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad."
For five years there have been claims that Americans need to learn how to change the Muslim world’s perception of the United States. Few have focused on a more important question: why we are hated, Mukasey writes.
The ideology of hatred extends at least to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early part of the 20th century, according to Mukasey.
“The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence.”
Qutb was especially shocked by the freedom that women had at the Colorado college he attended. One of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the last 100 years, his inner circle mainly consisted of influential politicians and intellectuals in Egypt and other countries. Many of his writings were required reading in the curricula of the Arab world's finest universities.
The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, U.S. embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks were all fueled by hatred of American values that has its roots in Qutb's writings, Mukasey writes.
Despite this, no outreach is extended to critical Muslim organizations in the United States, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, that speak out against the totalitarian Islamic ideology, he points out.
"There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, that speak out bravely against that totalitarian ideology. They receive no shout-out at presidential speeches; no outreach is extended to them," he adds.
"One of the Tsarnaev brothers is dead; the other might as well be. But if that is the limit of our concern, there will be others," he concludes.
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
Re: Yesterday's SamKat rant ... Thanks Ron W and Judi C!
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Brass Band ... Thx Clay V!
skegley.blogspot.com
I receive some weird posts, but this has to be the strangest, funniest and most unique. Prepare to be amazed that not only they can perform this act, but the fact they even thought of it.....check the guy's expression. http://www.wimp.com/brassband/
I receive some weird posts, but this has to be the strangest, funniest and most unique. Prepare to be amazed that not only they can perform this act, but the fact they even thought of it.....check the guy's expression. http://www.wimp.com/brassband/
Sunday, April 21, 2013
obama, gun control and first Negro ball players in the majors- Newsmax
3. Gallup: Immigration, Guns Not Major Concerns
Immigration and gun control are two hot topics in Washington these days, but Americans aren’t especially concerned about either issue, a new Gallup poll reveals.
In the survey of more than 1,000 adults, respondents were asked: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”
Only 4 percent cited “immigration/illegal aliens,” and 4 percent said “guns/gun control,” down from 6 percent in February.
Healthcare, another hot topic today, was cited by only 6 percent.
The most-cited problem was “economy in general,” chosen by 24 percent, followed by “unemployment/jobs” (18 percent), “dissatisfaction with government” (16 percent), and “federal budget deficit/federal debt” (11 percent).
Legislation on gun control and immigration reform are both stirring debate in Washington, but “few Americans mention guns or immigration as the most important problems facing the nation today, despite the current attention lawmakers in Washington are giving to these issues,” Gallup observed.
“Instead, Americans focus on economic issues and problems with the government as their top concerns.”
Other problems mentioned by poll respondents include “ethical/moral/family decline” (5 percent), “education” (4 percent), “situation with North Korea” (4 percent), “welfare” (2 percent), “taxes” (2 percent), and “poverty/hunger/homelessness” (2 percent).
Gallup concludes: “All in all, to the degree that Americans would want their elected representatives to focus on the problems they perceive to be the most important of the day, they would prioritize the economy and jobs, efforts to fix problems with the way government functions today, and the deficit.”
Editor's Note:
4. Before Robinson, Bud Fowler Was First Black Baseball Pro
The release of the Jackie Robinson biopic “42” has focused new attention on the man who “broke the color barrier” in Major League baseball.
But in fact, the first African-American known to have played for a white professional baseball team was Bud Fowler, who joined an International Association team way back in 1878.
Fowler played 10 seasons as a pitcher, catcher, and second baseman for integrated teams in the high levels of the minor leagues, and finished second in batting average in the International Association in 1887, the New York Times disclosed.
Last weekend, Fowler was honored in Cooperstown, N.Y., the site of baseball’s Hall of Fame, when a street in the village was named Bud Fowler Way. A biography of Fowler will be published in June.
Robinson wasn’t the first African-American to play baseball for a major league team, either. The first was Moses Fleetwood Walker, who played in 1884 with the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, which was then a major league.
The so-called color barrier wasn’t established until 1887, when team owners agreed to bar blacks from playing on white professional teams. The move followed threats by Fowler’s teammates on the Binghamton Bingos to go on strike if he was allowed to remain on the team.
The barrier fell on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson — number 42 — took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
obama and gun control and unaffordable care Columbus Dispatch 4-21-13
Columbus, Ohio •
Apr 21, 2013
• 47° Partly Cloudy
Jonah Goldberg commentary: Gun issue won't help Obama's cause in 2014
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That’s what President Barack Obama once told a reporter. If the man ever uttered a statement that spoke more to his approach to politics, I haven’t heard it.
Whether it stems from a grandiose overconfidence in his own powers of persuasion, or the lessons he took from his years as a community organizer, or his own messianic conviction that he is on the right side of everything, including history itself, the president has operated under the theory that he can move the American people to his causes. And he can’t. He just can’t.
Yes, he got elected and re-elected, and that’s saying something. But whatever personal popularity the man has doesn’t transfer to domestic policy.
It’s as if the American people are saying, “Mr. President, we’re just not that in to you.”
“What about health-care reform!?” his fans invariably respond.
Well, what about it? Sure, it passed. But the Affordable Care Act didn’t become law because Obama ignited a populist prairie fire in favor of it. He dedicated vast, vast swaths of his time and energy trying to sell the American people on Obamacare. He never made the sale (and still hasn’t ). The misbegotten law’s passage is attributable entirely to the fact that Democrats rammed it through Congress — with a 60-vote majority in the Senate — using the sorts of backroom deals and corporate giveaways the American people despise.
Ironically, the only populist mass movement on domestic policy issues Obama can claim credit for creating is the tea party, which I think we can all agree isn’t what he had in mind.
Indeed, if Obamacare had been popular, the Democrats wouldn’t have been dealt a “shellacking” — Obama’s words — in the 2010 midterm elections. But they were. Democrats suffered a defeat of biblical proportions, despite Obama’s relentless campaigning.
In 2012, after scoring an impressive re-election win, Obama apparently thought he solved the puzzle. He needed more organization, like he had in the election. Obviously everyone loves what he has to say, Obama reasoned, but he needed to translate that love into action. And so he rebranded his presidential campaign into his own personal grass-roots operation, Organizing for Action. Action item No. 1? Gun control.
It’s worth remembering that when Obama took up gun control in his State of the Union address, he set the bar at shin level for himself and for Senate Democrats. He didn’t demand victory, he demanded a mere vote on the issue.
Running through a list of victims he was all too eager to politicize— “The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote,” etc. — he brought the Democrats in the audience to their feet. Many in the press hailed it as one of the most moving moments of his presidency.
With the sort of willingness to politicize tragedy that is always denounced as the vilest cynicism when Republicans do anything of the sort, Obama and his paid Organizing for Action subalterns took to the streets and the airwaves waving the figurative bloody shirt of Newtown for months (with nary a peep of complaint from the same press corps that routinely denounced president Bush for politicizing 9/11).
But when it came time to clear the shin-level hurdle he set for himself and Organizing for Action, they face-planted in the ground well short of the target.
And now, the president is going to run the same play, again. “If this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters,” he said in one of several bitter promises to turn gun control into an issue to win back Congress in 2014.
As Josh Kraushaar of National Journal noted, Obama couldn’t misread the political environment heading into 2014 any worse. Why? Because the places where the Democrats need to win to take back the House — the South and Mountain West — are precisely those areas where even many Democrats disagree with the president on gun control. Making it a central issue in 2014 is a boon to Republicans.
The upshot of this is that we will now endure nearly another two years of Obama haranguing us about how it’s him and “the people” against special interests and other evil forces who don’t care about murdered children. Washington will become more shrill and get even less done, all because Obama’s only play is a populist charade made possible by the fact he still believes his own bull----.
Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online.
jonahscolumn@aol.com
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