Friday Afternoon Roundup - Remembering

Remember how Al Jazeera is now a "mainstream" news channel which is not at all terroristic or anti-semitic, illustrating their coverage of Libya with graffiti of Khaddafi as a dog wearing a Star of David.

Maybe someone can bring that up with the director of Al Jazeera at his next TED talk.



TRAVEL BACK IN TIME TO THE YEAR 2009

Obama's big speech angrily called for a miniaturized version of the same stupid wasteful programs that were such a black hole in the early years of his administration. Pie in the sky minus the pie.

More public works projects, been there and done that. Pay for it with spending cuts? Does Obama even understand what "spending cuts" means. If you're cutting one thing to pay for another, then you're not actually cutting anything at all-- you're just moving money around.

More money for the school bureaucracy with 35 billion alone as a payoff to teachers' unions. Can we afford this? Hell no.

Preventing Layoffs of Teachers, Cops and Firefighters: The President is proposing to invest $35 billion to prevent layoffs of up to 280,000 teachers, while supporting the hiring of tens of thousands more and keeping cops and firefighters on the job. These funds would help states and localities avoid and reverse layoffs now, requiring that funds be drawn down quickly. Under the President’s proposal, $30 billion be directed towards educators and $5 billion would support the hiring and retention of public safety and first responder personnel.

I like the balance here. 30 billion to teach English as a Second Language and 5 billion for firefighters and cops. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here but we need firefighters and cops a lot more than we need to put more unemployed philosophy majors to the task of teaching the unteachable so they can join a union and vote Democrat.

The President is proposing a $25 billion investment in school infrastructure that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools – investments that will create jobs, while improving classrooms and upgrading our schools to meet 21st century needs.

Didn't we already do this in 2009?  Yes we did. And here's Obama's speech back then.

“To give our children the chance to live out their dreams in a world that’s never been more competitive, we will equip tens of thousands of schools, community colleges, and public universities with 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries. We’ll provide new computers, new technology, and new training for teachers."

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included a 100 billion dollars for education. This was Zero the Broken Record in 2009. And that worked out so well that we're dumping more money down the same hole.

Funds could be used for a range of emergency repair and renovation projects, greening and energy efficiency upgrades,

So it literally is the same exact proposal except the dollar amounts have changed. Behold the bold.

This is Obama's 2009 speech on the Ruination and Reinfestation Act

To build an economy that can lead this future, we will begin to rebuild America. Yes, we'll put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges, and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects.

This is his bold and visionary 2011 speech

Everyone here knows that we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over this country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. This is inexcusable.

I know a way we can save money, stop writing new speeches and just reuse the old ones.

Expanding Access to High-Speed Wireless in a Fiscally Responsible Way: The President is calling for a deficit reducing plan to deploy high-speed wireless services to at least 98 percent of Americans

Barry we've got to have a talk about your use of the word "deficit". I don't think you know what it means. I'm not too sure you know what any words mean. After reading this sentence I'm not even convinced that you speak English.


Expanding access to high speed wireless. Really? We're doing this when the deficit is sky high and we're in the middle of a recession.

And we did that already too. Here's Zero's 2009 speech.

It means expanding broadband lines across America, so that a small business in a rural town can connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world.

Save money, reuse speeches.

Fun fact, the telecoms gave the O plenty of dough. These programs aren't about expanding access to rural areas, but expanding the pockets of Obama backers. Crony capitalism FTW.


The key difference between 2011 and 2009 is that Obama is just using this as voter bait in Catch 22. If the Republicans don't pass this bill in 5 seconds, the media will keep shrieking that politics is preventing recovery. And if it does get passed, it's a reminder to the unions and the rest of the base that they can keep on scoring tasty goodies if they vote the right way.

Obama isn't doing the Great Speechmaker act anymore, now he's just shouting, "Pass the Bill" over and over again as if he were doing an infomercial for a 400 billion dollar shammy cloth and curtly stating the benefits in a way that's pitched to ADD voters.

This isn't a jobs bill, and unlike the Reinfestation and Ruination Act, it's only second tier pork. The meat of this is an attack on Republicans in a run up to the election with the media doing the heavy lifting to make Obama look as if he cares about the out of work while the villainous Republicans don't.



DEBATE, SCHMEBATE

I saw enough of the candidates in previous debates that I didn't feel the need to tune in to a debate whose only new attraction would be to see one man debating himself in two incarnations. Stopping by to hear Gingrich kick some ass would have been fun, but you can get that on the best hits clips.

The "official word" is that Bachmann is no longer a serious candidate. Obviously. She has principles and stands for something. And we don't do let unserious people like that get within sight of the big office. Her or Santorum, or heaven help us Palin.  It's fine if they talk the talk, so long as they don't walk the walk.




J-SOROS PROJECT OVERBOARD

J-Street chaos continues with Soros' fake anti-Israel lobby losing more its VP of Policy and Strategy. It wouldn't be that big of a deal if Hadar Susskind hadn't been a lefty with a certain amount of mainstream clout and recognition.

Bringing Susskind aboard was supposed to elevate J Street so that it would be taken more seriously, but the recognition has set it isn't happening.

Hadar Susskind is making a lateral move within the Soros Shadow Party to Tides. Tides is a vehicle of financial influence on the left, and Susskind setting up a Tikkun Olam division there will help draw Jewish donors to fund Soros' projects.

Soros is a business guy and he's quick to cut his losses when something just doesn't work and isn't going to. Susskind's move to Tides suggests the numbers are in for J Street and they aren't good.

The organization itself is going schizo suddenly coming out against the statehood bid, while pathetically showing up to remind politicians that they're still around. Photos from their Pennsylvania rally though show a handful of mostly senior citizens. Two younger girls have been carefully positioned with a banner in front of a number of elderly women to disguise this fact. You can see why Soros and Susskind are moving on.

Jeremy Ben Ami's book, "A New Voice for Israel" has a sales rank of almost a 100,000. The second web result for it is from Progressive Alaska, which is as close to the gulag as you can get. The top review is a crazy bigoted rant from someone who claims to be a J Street contributor and related to Queen Isabella which calls Middle-Eastern Jews "Desert Jews" and accuses them of imperial aspirations.

"I have, along with my many fellow Jews, mailed hundreds of this book to Zionist imperialist Officials in Israel." he says.

I presume that accounts for most of the sales. Stick a fork in the J-Sektsia, it's done. But of course it will return in a different guise with some of the same people and with Soros money behind them.




PALESTINE, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE

Speaking of Soros and Israel, there's already another organization making the rounds and it's just as phony as the rest. But its propaganda did provide me with an opportunity to speak about the mechanics of the Israelophobic smear.

The justification for this is based around a myth that is at the heart of the left’s twisted version of history. The myth is that the Muslims never had a choice whether to engage in violence, terrorism or genocide. That they never initiate, only respond to what the Jews do. Whatever atrocities they commit, it is only because the Jews have done worse to them.

To sustain this myth, the left relies on two techniques. First, the regional context is stripped away and the Muslim-Israeli conflict is reduced to a conflict between Israel and West Bank and Gazan Arabs. Imagine a history of WW2 that only dealt with it as a conflict between Czechoslovakia and Sudeten Germans—that’s what the left has done by treating the pretexts for war as the causes of war.

Then once all the Muslim parties to the conflict have been hidden except for the militias in the West Bank and Gaza, the discrepancy in armaments is exaggerated to show that Israel has all the options, and the terrorists have none. To the left power is also agency, by focusing only on the differences in firepower and not the political options that both sides have, Israel is depicted as all-powerful, controlling not only Gaza and the West Bank—but even Washington D.C.

By ignoring Muslim colonialism and oppression of regional minorities—the left denies the context of the conflict and transforms the proxy armies of Sunni and Shiite regional majorities into the downtrodden and persecuted.

You may find the entire piece worth reading at Front Page Magazine.

Also I continue following up the Soros funded Think Progress smear against terrorism researchers and the people behind it in Think Progress' Man of Hate

Not only do Ali and his co-authors attack Zuhdi Jasser and Tawfik Hamid, a former radical and current reformer, but Ali also slurred Irshad Manji, a lesbian feminist and reformer as an “info-tainment prostitute” and one of the “paid henchmen” of the “Islam-haters” for questioning the divinity of the Koran.

Does questioning the divinity of the Koran make one a tool of the “Islam-haters”, if so the standards for what qualifies as Islamophobia are defined down to questioning Islamic theology in any significant way.

REMEMBERING

As the anniversary of that terrible day approaches, the rest of the roundup will be devoted to that.

These are some of the articles I have written on past anniversaries.

9/11 Just Another Day

This is the way we're going. And this is the place. The millennium, both of them are past. The era of the Clinton Administration has passed, but its miasma lingers. Most people still have opinions on Impeachment. Touched by an Angel and Who Wants to be a Millionaire are on the air. Everyone knows that the internet is set to change everything, but they aren't sure exactly how. Dot Com businesses are hot and geeks are riding around in Porsches. The Musketeer tops the box office. The Chandra Levy case is in the news. Americans are by large comfortable and relaxed. The Cold War is over. There's nothing left to do but cash in and enjoy life. Build up your CD collection. Buy better furniture. Invest in the right Dot.com. But we are at the corner now. This is where we turn the corner. And around the corner is where the world ends. At least for a little while.

Walk now through streaming curtains of ash, through fragments of charred office memos and human skin, through the snow that came early to September that year, through the rubble in Washington D.C. and the broken aluminum fragments lining the crater in a Pennsylvania field. Pass now along Liberty Street again, turn now past the cafe chairs dusted with ash snow, stopped cars and human chaos. Look up into the sky and watch. Watch it carefully because it is both a beginning and an ending. What is beginning and what is ending? That is up to you, up to all of us to decide.

Learning to Love Little Osama

No Michael has not come to love Big Brother. But then few have. Michael has instead come to love Little Osama. To subsume his fear of terrorism by shouting loudly that the real terrorists are the government. By engaging in a daily two minutes of hate that usually stretches into two hours ranting about the War on Terror. By believing fervently that his enemies are not those who changed the world on September 11, but those who chose to grow up and shoulder the burden of the real world in response to it.

If Big Brother represents totalitarian rule, order and enforcement; then Little Osama like Little Che and all the other leftist icons represent to their Western devotees an anarchic and egotistical freedom. An eternal childhood free from responsibilities and regulations. A pure freedom that murders the father and frees the child to live forever in a utopian vision untroubled by other people and by the practical realities, fears and difficulties.


The Day the Sky Fell  

Tuesday. Another morning in downtown Manhattan. The canyons of the financial district swell with men and women in business suits, briefcases confidently swinging, a cup of coffee or a pastry dangling from one hand. Few of them were bothering to look up at the sky. They owned the sky. Despite the bombing of the World Trade Center that had come in the winter of 1993, or the much earlier, and now ancient bombing by left-wing anarchists on September 16, 1920, confidence was in the air. There had been a Dot Com bubble, but the worst was over.

By subway entrances, hawkers in aprons shilled copies of the Daily News or the New York Post, more rarely Newsday. The news was simple enough. The New York Giants felt unappreciated. Mayor Giuliani vowed to overhaul the city's school system. New York City Opera was beginning its season with a production of The Flying Dutchman. Tom Clancy topped the New York Times paperback bestseller list with The Bear and the Dragon, a novel about the danger from Russia and China. The world as they knew it was coming to an end, but they had no idea. Just a shadow passing high above the sunlit towers. Just a shadow swooping down out of the sky.

Shortly thereafter amid the howling of sirens and crowds streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge and uptown to safety, amid the rain of falling ash and the unbelievable sight behind us-- came the simple revelation. The skies no longer belonged to us.

From the Ashes

Last night as I walked home I saw two beams of pure light piercing the sky. Like a dream or vision, after a fiery sunset on the first chilly day of September they shone through the sky across the river and I thought of Ezekiel, I thought of Jeremiah and I thought of ashes.

We have long dredged the bottom of the hole now, a great pit squarely lined with concrete, the ashes hauled away to a Staten Island dumps, it is all neat and sanitized as real graves never are. We have made the place memorial ready like mourners prepared to walk away from the gleaming oaken casket and leave the past behind us.

But let us turn back to the ashes now and what remained after the last of the living and the dead had been recovered from the rubble. What is it that rose from these ashes?

Memorials Don't Matter

On September 11, 3000 Americans were murdered. Some died in shock. Some died in agony. Some died in flames and some died in the rush of air as they fell. They were murdered but they were only the beginning. 9/11 was not a tragedy, it was a war. It is a war we are still fighting. The proper memorial for 9/11 is not in cupped hands holding candles but in the soldiers and pilots of the United States standing on watch and going out on their missions against the enemy knowing why they are fighting and what they are fighting for.

Guantanamo Bay is a better memorial for 9/11 than any construction of stone that will ever rise. A bullet in the head of an Al Queda terrorist is a better commemoration for this terrible day than any act of verbal elocution. A tower rising to the sky, an airplane passing overhead, are a fist clenched high in defiance by the civilized world against the uncivilized, by men against savages and human beings against barbarians.

Fragmented Shapes of an Uncertain Future

August is ending, September is beginning and the cold wind is already here. The sky is overcast yet in places piercing glints of light still shine. By the water along the deserted pier a rock band is playing to an audience of a handful. A middle aged couple, man and wife, stand leaning on each other, swaying back and forth, their hands in each other's jeans pockets. The band begins another sets. They aren't good but they aren't bad either.

Above Seaport and its mall gulls circle the American flag hanging on its roof like vultures. Grey clouds drift closer. A thin trail of smoke pours from the greasy kitchen of a luncheonette. 2001 is ending but it is also beginning and in the air there hangs the sense that all the good times are ending now.


Ending.

Landscapes of Loss

Wander the streets of the city. Walk to 23rd and look up at the Flatiron building. Amble along the river to the gray shadowy bulk of the Intrepid Aircraft carrier like a small town resting on water. Pass on to the spire of the Empire State building, the art deco ascension of the Chrysler Building. Meander through Central Park, follow the ramble and sit on the mushroom besides the Mad Hatter, go to the ocean and watch the tide come in and out marking the sand. Stand besides the lions at the library, explore the treasures of the Metropolitan Museum, walk over Brooklyn Bridge and think of Walt Whitman, watch the sunset come to the arch at Washington Square Park.

Do all these things and more and remember, a terrible enemy waits outside the gates.



REMEMBERING II

There are many reactions and memories of that day, and thoughts of the future. Here are some of them from different bloggers who share their own perspective.

On September 12, 2001 I went back to work along with everyone else who was able to in an open act of defiance against those who murdered so many of my brothers and sisters and who would love nothing more than to see us crumble. We stood up the best way we could, we showed up and in our grief and we fought the good fight in our own small ways. Halfway through the day I found it intolerable not to be able to do more. I called the Red Cross and other relief agencies to see how I could help. I had no money, but I had time and a strong desire to put something positive back into my shattered world.

I found out what was needed by the rescue and recovery workers and the survivors who were still Downtown. They needed fresh bottled water, eye wash, clothes, bandages, and more. They needed shoes, because the people working in the "Pit" had the bottoms of their own shoes melted from the heat of the fires which still burned and would continue to burn for a very long time. I consulted my employer who was still trying to get her mind around the fact that so many people she loved had died, and she gave me permission for what I would do next.

I took a big empty box and put it in front of my kiosk with a sign asking for donations of things our Heroes needed. By the end of the day the box was full, and I took it to the nearest drop off point where they would be shipping supplies to Manhattan from. I told the local radio station and newspaper what we were doing and they informed the public how they could help. I was listed among the other groups who were collecting needed items to send down to the city. I left an empty box for the next shift to collect after I went home.

The next morning that box was full and another was halfway full. Older people came silently with tears in their eyes and dropped supplies in the box. Younger people came with shoes and clothes in all kinds of sizes with the tags still on them. They purchased these items themselves with their minimum wage paychecks.

Cases and cases of fresh bottled water appeared before me, and the boxes continued to pile up. I filled my truck completely at the end of the day with supplies and there was still more. Two and three trips a day I would make and I still needed others to move the donations to the drop off points!

Please read the rest of MJ Stevenson's account here


At Rule of Reason, Edward Cline offers a ten year retrospective on what might have been

The new World Trade Center towers, now six years old, rise in a silvery shimmer over lower Manhattan, both fifteen stories taller than the originals, commanding a plaza and an assortment of lower towers. In the daytime, only the plaza, chock full of figures hurrying purposefully on their numerous errands, gives evidence of the unseen commerce that occurs inside the fully occupied towers. IRT and PATH trains rumble through the lower levels of the plaza. Taxis rarely idle for long in the three designated cab stands that border the plaza as they skitter in and out of what seems like yellow conveyor belts of business, dropping off and picking up passengers. Bands, orchestras, and soloists usually occupy the small, sunken amphitheater; the plaza is rarely without music. Vendors serve hot dogs, knishes and ice cream from kiosks and wheeled carts. Dozens of stores, restaurants and fast food shops populate the plaza’s lower levels, even a movie theater and a bookstore.

One unkind critic of the sleek new twin towers wrote in The New York Times, before they were completed, that together they looked like a giant tuning fork. But another critic, writing for The New York Post, said they were reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s “V” for victory sign. If the original towers collapsed because of the heat of an inferno, what replaced them was an inferno of controversy that resulted in the resignation of a governor, the dissolution of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation racked by scandal, corruption, and favoritism, and the relinquishment of the property by the Port Authority to a syndicate of private developers dedicated to building a new World Trade Center “as tall or taller.”

...

Hiding in an Afghan village in the Swat Valley, bin Laden for two months maintained radio contact with his sympathizers and enablers in the Pakistani government and in Kabul. On November 4th, when our intelligence had confirmed his location and that of his enablers and protectors in Pakistan, the village was vaporized with a battlefield nuclear projectile mounted on a drone fired from a nuclear submarine patrolling the Indian Ocean, the Patrick Henry.

A great hole was dug in the middle of Karachi when three more of the missiles, launched consecutively by the submarine, were targeted on the Pakistani intelligence headquarters. Stealth bombers also reduced to glass Pakistan’s nuclear fuel processing plants and much of its nuclear weapons arsenal. Pakistan subsequently descended into an anarchy which continues to this day. India’s military has turned back hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis looking for refuge in India, often having to fire on crazed mobs. It is thought that all of bin Laden’s lieutenants, including the hierarchy of the Taliban, perished in the Afghan blast, because nothing has been heard from bin Laden, Al Qaeda or the Taliban since then.

On the same day, Kabul, capital of Afghanistan and held by the Taliban, was similarly razed.

On September 22nd, in response to Prince Talal’s statement about the Palestinians, Bush ordered all U.S. subsidies terminated to Gaza and the West Bank. Al Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority immediately and jointly attacked Israeli settlements with rockets and suicide bombers. Israel’s IDF responded by reducing Gaza and the West Bank to rubble with coordinated counter-attacks. Palestinian forces and their terrorist allies were decimated. Palestinians by the tens of thousands streamed for safety to Egypt, Syria and Jordan and established impromptu refugee camps. Gaza is now fully Israeli (it has since become the Israeli “Silicon Valley”), as is the West Bank. Israel has enjoyed ten years of unprecedented peace, and has become a major economic force in the Mideast. 

Read the entire chronology at Rule of Reason


"Make no mistake, it's not revenge he's after. It's a reckonin'."

It was against that background of works and days that the doors of history swung open and we all walked through them forgetting to ask, "What fresh hell is this?"

We were soon to know the nature of the new hell and we were all thrust into it without repeal. The days turned to months and the months turned to years and now we have turned around and a decade is gone. What might have been ours, for good or ill, in that decade was forever stolen from us. Stolen from us not -- never doubt this -- by one man alone, but by a host of savages and throwbacks spread around the world and here among us and dedicated to our destruction. A host that will use any means necessary to destroy this nation while this nation "serves justice" up in spoonfuls and creates "Rules of Engagement" with which to hamper those who would defend it with their very lives.

What the nation has become, through death by fire, bravado, war, forgetfulness, treason, and blunt stupidity could not have been foretold on September 10, but here we are -- a lurching ship of state captained by a malicious hater of the American soil. That same captain, maddened by his own stunted heritage, will today disgrace the soil of Ground Zero. It is a difficult reality that has been dealt by the hands of fate; one that is still being played out.

Cliffs of Insanity compares America to Flight 93

What if we're all just passengers on Flight 93?  The Constitution of the United States clearly enumerates the rights of the governed and the restrictions of the government. And that's where I rest. Our freedom is God-given and it is unchanging. So long as free men remain in the Constitution, then any conflict between man and the government is the fault of the government alone.

Front Page Magazine offers a pamphlet on 9/11 ten years later discussing how Obama has made us less safe

Theissen shows how the capture and “enhanced interrogation” of high value targets such as Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed kept us safe for a decade by patiently developing information and putting it together with other intelligence gathered in the field to kill or capture terror leaders working to repeat 9/11 on an even more spectacular scale. According to senior intelligence officials who talked with Theissen, a former colleague, well over half of the information our government learned about al-Qaeda after 9/11 — how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks — came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.

Edgar compares the responses to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor

Conversely, if the response to 9/11 had been similar to the actual response to Pearl Harbour then the US would have declared war on Islamic fundamentalism and would not have stopped until it was totally eradicated throughout the world as a supremisist belief. The first targets would have been Iran and Saudi Arabia. The war would only have finished with a prolonged programme of 'de-Islamification' (the de-Nazification  programme for Germany took many years to work even though the people had only been indoctrinated for 10 years. Islamists have been indoctrinating Muslims for 1300 years).


Caroline Glick analyzes why the War on Terror isn't working

But 10 years on, the fact that Islamic terrorism directed against the US remains a salient threat to US national security shows that the War on Terror is far from won.

And this makes sense. Despite its significant successes, the War on Terror suffers from three inherent problems that make it impossible for the US to win.

The first problem is that the US has unevenly applied its tactic of denying terrorists free rein in territory of their choosing.

...

The second problem is that since September 11, 2001, the US has steadfastly refused to admit the identity of the enemy it seeks to defeat.

US leaders have called that enemy al-Qaida, they have called it extremism or extremists, fringe elements of Islam and radicals. But of course the enemy is jihadist Islam which seeks global leadership and the destruction of Western civilization. Al-Qaida is simply an organization that fights on the enemy's side.

...

The last problem intrinsic to the US's War on Terror is the persistent and powerful strain of appeasement that guides so much of US policy towards the Muslim world.

This appeasement is multifaceted and pervades nearly every aspect of the US's relations with the Islamic world.

The urge to appeasement caused the US to divorce the Islamic jihad against the US from the Islamic jihad against Israel from the outset.

I have only excerpted sections of it, but the entire piece is well worth reading


Plans for the SIOA rally include welcoming clergy and first responders

CAIR conducts its own Forget 9/11 campaign

Allen West to be one of the few congressmen to remember the day properly

Pax Americana We Hardly Knew Ye

But above all else... remember.