Shortly before the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration decided to reduce the manpower, money, ships and helicopters of the Coast Guard.

Creeping Sharia reports on the proposed cuts:

· U.S. Coast Guard – Cuts 1,100 military positions, in addition to ships, aircraft and safety and security teams

· The FY 2011 President’s Budget requests $9.86 billion for the Coast Guard – which is a 0.24% decrease from the FY 2010 enacted level of $9.88 billion.

* Coast Guard asset cuts include decommissioning 4 of the service’s largest cutters; removing 5 HH-65 helicopters from service; eliminating 5 of 12 Maritime Safety and Security Teams; and reassigning 4 HH-60 helicopters & eliminating their work in drug law enforcement and anti-terrorism response.

U.S. Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL), the Republican leader of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, today said the Obama Administration was on a collision course with disaster by asking the U.S. Coast Guard to do more with less …

At a Congressional hearing today, Mica said it would take a new position of “Second Lieutenant Magician” for the U.S. Coast Guard to comply with the policy that was recommended in the 2011 Obama budget. In that February document, the Coast Guard budget was targeted for cuts of 1,100 uniformed positions, along with ships, aircraft and helicopters. …

In the hearing before the Subcommittee, the Coast Guard testified they were barely meeting their personnel and asset requirements to conduct their first responder and inspection duties on deepwater rigs and vessels in the Gulf.

There is no longer any question of whether an American victory in Afghanistan is possible. It is not.

It becomes plainer every day that what lies ahead is defeat.

The only uncertainty is whether America – aka “the coalition forces” – will manage withdrawal without the appearance of ignominy.

After an initial victory the war has dragged on for eight years. In that time the mightiest military power on earth has been unable to defeat a bunch of primitive, lightly-armed terrorists. Not because it couldn’t, but because it tied its own hands with unrealistic aims, political correctness, and, under Commander-in-Chief Obama, a preference for losing.

At Canada Free Press, Alan Caruba expresses a similar opinion. Here’s part of what he writes:

The war in Afghanistan has been going on for more than eight years as of this writing. Over that period of time I have been against it, for it, against it, for it, and now I return to what my instincts and experience told me all along. It’s over.

That war is lost. Once the Taliban acquired surface-to-air missiles, the primarily advantage our military had was removed. In the past month, the Taliban have shot down two of our helicopters. Any low-flying aircraft will be vulnerable along with all our front-line forces. …

You cannot win a counterinsurgency with local forces if:

you don’t have a significant portion of the population on your side and

those forces do not want to fight.

Afghans don’t like anyone who is not an Afghan and, in many cases, they do not like other Afghans from other tribes. …

The other factor that is a key to the situation is our “ally”, Pakistan. The U.S. has poured billions into Pakistan and they have been supporting the Taliban the whole time; more specifically, the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency [has been doing so]. …

An article in the UK’s Times was picked up by the Washington Post on June 14. The Times article was headlined “Pakistan puppet masters guide the Taliban killers.” It reported that “Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, is said to be represented on the Taliban’s war council, the Quetta shura. Up to seven of the 15-man shura are believed to be ISI agents.”

The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, Amrullah Salah, recently resigned. He concluded that Afghan forces of the government under Hamid Karzai, the US hand-picked president of Afghanistan, would not and could not prevail. Afghanistan has never been a nation by any standard definition. It has always been a nation of tribes.

The Afghanistan conflict has cost the West billions and hundreds of lives. …

When word leaked about Obama’s “rules of engagement” in Afghanistan that essentially put every one of our soldiers and marines at risk, the die was cast.

The combined US-UK force failed to loosen the Taliban’s grip on Marjah, the most recent military engagement. The Afghan forces refused to fight much of the time. The Taliban continue to control the whole of southern Afghanistan.

The Kandahar offensive has been postponed. It was to be waged by American, British, Canadian, and Afghan forces. If that doesn’t tell you that the war in Afghanistan is over, nothing will.

If there is no will to wage war vigorously to bring about victory, nothing can be done for now. This is not to say we will not have to return at some time, but as long as President Obama is in office, that is not an option.

If ever America needs to go back and hit the Taliban again, it should do so swiftly, briefly, and decisively. Under the command of the present feeble, pro-Muslim, anti-American president, that would not be done.

Just when a discovery of vast mineral wealth provides at last a good reason for America to win the war in Afghanistan – and not just win but conquer , and not just conquer but even better colonize the country, though that of course is a notion that will never even be considered – the lefty establishment so feebly in charge is despairing of winning even a few battles against the barefoot militia of  primitive Taliban terrorists. Of course the magnificent American military could win easily, but not if their commanders don’t give the right orders, and tie the hands of their soldiers with crazy rules of engagement, and force their fighters to act as social workers, and make them uncertain about the worth of the campaign by giving the enemy a date when they’ll be withdrawn.

That’s what Gates and (laugh out loud) Commander-in-Chief Obama are doing to them, and it’s enough to make a good commander, like General Petraeus, faint! (Which he did while declaring that he supported the announced date of withdrawal.)

The Washington Times reports on the subdued despair spreading through the Pentagon:

A series of political and military setbacks in Afghanistan has fed anxiety over the war effort in the past few weeks, shaking supporters of President Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy and confirming the pessimism of those who had doubts about it from the start.

The concerns, fed largely by unease over military operations in southern Afghanistan that are progressing slower than anticipated, spurred lawmakers to schedule last-minute hearings this week to assess progress on the battlefield and within the Afghan government. …

Strong Taliban resistance and lagging Afghan government participation have slowed progress in Marja, a district at the center of the Helmand campaign, creating the image that things have not been going as well as anticipated.

That image was compounded last week when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the military operations in Kandahar would not begin in force until September. …

In public statements last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sought to tamp down expectations that results would be definitive by December.

“We are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said. “I don’t think anyone has any illusions that we’ll be done or that there will be big victories or something like that. ..

Others are [even] more doubtful. “It’s clear the Marja operation did not go as smoothly as expected,” said Frederick Jones, spokesman for Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). Kerry, he added, “is concerned that the Taliban is reestablishing itself there.”

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who has traveled to Afghanistan, said he was “decidedly dubious” of the Obama administration’s war strategy from the start. “I’m trying to see how a year from now we’ll be in any better position than we are today. It’s difficult for me to see a way out here.” …

Even within the military, there are concerns, and “I sense the same division of opinion,” said Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations… “Some folks are very worried that the picture in December is going to look like it’s not worth the price,” said Biddle, a defense expert who was part of a planning group recruited by McChrystal last year to help formulate a new war strategy.

Note to some of our critics: When there is a blue line down the side of indented paragraphs, it means that we are quoting – whether to agree, criticize, or oppose, we state in our own comments.

On the last day of August 1939, Hitler sent Nazi forces in Polish uniforms to attack a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. His intention was to make it seem as if Poland was an aggressor against Germany, so giving him a pretext to invade Poland – which he then did, in collusion with Soviet Russia.

A similar sort of deception is being plotted now by Iran, in collusion with Turkey.

It will send ships to “break the blockade of Gaza”, and force Israel into armed confrontation, according to a DebkaFile report worth reading in full here.

According to our sources, the Iranian convoy will consist of a cargo ship loaded with food and other essentials, medicines and building materials; the second will carry the “volunteer” marines; and the third will be a floating hospital to be anchored permanently in Egyptian Mediterranean territorial waters opposite the divided Gaza-Egyptian town of Rafah. Small boats will ferry patients between Gaza and the hospital ship.

Iran rightly calculates that Israel will not attack a hospital ship  or small boats carrying the sick.

But ships carrying armed men and cargo will certainly be intercepted and forcefully diverted, with shooting if necessary, by the Israeli navy.

Iran expects this to happen, and will use any Israeli action as a pretext for war.

It will be depending on the Islamic states, the United Nations, and Europe to blame Israel, and on America under Obama’s leadership not to defend Israel.

Of course the world will know that Israel is not the aggressor, but will connive at the pretense that it is.

Israel will fight alone, but it will fight. It has to, for its survival.

Our guess is that Iran will only take this risk if it has nuclear weapons ready for use.

Obama and his National Security appointees, Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, deny that Islam is waging jihad on America and the whole of the non-Muslim world. But – block their ears and sing out “la-la-la” as they might – they cannot alter the truth that the jihad is being waged, or fail to hear authoritative voices saying that it is. Obama may want to deny it because he has deep sympathy with Islam, and because he‘s a Left radical by upbringing, training, and conviction. Islam and the Left are allies against the Western ideal of individual freedom. They resemble each other in that they’re both collectivist ideologies. This means they can strive together to destroy freedom, but the one is egalitarian, the other non-egalitarian; the one fosters diversity, the other demands uniformity; the one preaches tolerance, the other is harshly intolerant. Eventually, if they were to win their war against freedom, they would surely turn on each other with intense hatred and fury. If Obama experienced such a conflict within himself, it’s hard to imagine how he’d resolve it.

The alliance between Islam and the Left is the theme of a new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, by Andrew McCarthy, the former Assistant United States Attorney who successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He writes about it at PowerLine. Here’s part of what he says:

What is surprising, and dismaying, is that the book’s message should come as news to anyone, as if there were [any] real question about whether such a grand jihad exists. Though our opinion elites and their media allies remain desperate to suppress the story, the proof of an Islamist conspiracy to destroy the West is stark and undeniable, and the instances of Islamists being aided and abetted by Leftists are too numerous for serious people to deny the alliance – not merger but alliance – between the two.

As demonstrated at the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trials in Texas, internal Muslim Brotherhood memoranda are unabashed in describing Islamists as engaged in a “civilizational” war against the West. In America, the Brothers attest that theirs is a “grand jihad” to destroy the United States – mainly from within, mainly by “sabotage.”

We don’t like the terms “civilizational war” and “Islamists”. The first because we think the war is not between two civilizations but between their barbarism and our civilization; and the second for reasons that McCarthy himself is well aware of:

I use the term Islamist advisedly. In the book’s second chapter, I’ve tried to take on the excruciating question of whether the existential challenge we face is Islam itself. …

The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman. … I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true – if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks – then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none. …

The point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. … He is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt – the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.

Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. …

It is supremacist, totalitarian, and violent… drawn faithfully and logically from scripture – which is why it is endorsed by so many influential clerics and shariah authorities who have spent their lives in Islamic study. …

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see shariah installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate. …

Since the book was published last week, I’ve been asked questions like: “So, are you saying that President Obama wants to implement sharia?” and ” Isn’t it true that if Islamists came to power, the Left would have a lot to fear?” Again, the alliance between Islamists and Leftists … is an alliance, not a merger. Leftists and Islamists have worked together numerous times in history … That they work together is not a hypothesis on my part; this partnership exists, period. And why it exists is simply explained, if we are willing to look at the facts.

While they differ on a number of significant issues, Islamists and Leftists are in harmony on many parts of the big picture. Islamism and today’s Leftism (which, as I note in the book, David Horowitz aptly calls “neocommunism”) are both authoritarian ideologies: they favor a muscular central government, virulently reject capitalism, and are totalitarian in the sense that they want to dictate all aspects human life. They both see the individual as existing to serve the greater community (the state or the umma). Saliently, they have a common enemy: Western culture, American constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty.

When I argue that Islamists and Leftists are working together to sabotage America, this is what I am talking about. Historically, when Islamists and Leftists collaborate against a common enemy (e.g., the Shah in Iran, the monarchy in Egypt), these marriages of convenience break apart when the common enemy has been eliminated. We are a long way from that point in America – and, hopefully, we never reach it. We must expect, though, that Islamists and Leftists will continue their alliance as long as the Western way of life remains an obstacle to their respective utopias.

Restraint does not remove the need for war, it intensifies it.

The following was made as a comment by C. Gee on our post below, A lethal terrorist ambush, about the attempt Sunday to break Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza with a flotilla of ships under the auspices of Turkey.

We are moving it to our front page because what it says needs to be said:

Turkey insinuated itself into the ME “peace”. Under that cover it is promoting Muslim/Iranian interests. It is an agent provocateur and will undermine and humiliate Israel wherever it can.

There were no repercussions for Turkey when it refused entry to US troops during the Iraq war. The Turkish bluff at being a NATO ally – or a candidate for Europe – should be called. It is clear Turkey is a paid-up member of the North Korea-Iran axis. It has nuclear ambitions of its own, I have no doubt.

The Israeli government should demand an apology from Turkey – for attempting to break the blockade and for the ambush and attempted kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. If they do not receive such an apology, Israel should regard the incident as an act of war. Certainly Israel should reciprocate any summoning or recall of ambassadors.

If anything should wake Israel up to its peril, it is this incident, coinciding as it does with the US endorsement of the non-proliferation conference statement. Israel is isolated. It can expect no help from Obama. On the contrary, Obama will use this incident as cover for his stand against Israeli “intransigence”. Expect Obama to talk about being slapped in the face by Israel; about how Israel has sabotaged Obama’s peace efforts and sanctions efforts. Expect a cram-down of the two-state solution. Expect more statements concerning Iraqi air-space and the interception of Israeli bombers. ( But above all, expect more statements concerning “the unbreakable bond between America and Israel”. )

The Israelis – boarding the ship with paint-ball rifles and pistols – were ambushed by their own and the West’s liberal moral vanity as much as by the terrorist-supporting “activists”. Over and over again, the Israelis have tied their hands behind their backs, have ceded to their enemies and acceded to their friends. They have fought humanitarian wars – on the ground, rather than from the air – costing Israeli lives to minimize civilian casualties. They have turned back from Lebanon before the job was done. Each time Israel stops short of victory because of “moral” pressure, it escalates the nature of the final reckoning. Thanks to decades of holding back on war, the war that Israel has to fight next must be extremely violent, convincingly lethal. From paint-balls to, no longer unthinkably, nukes.

If Israel does not act decisively against Iran now, it will be unable to, ever. It cannot wait for a regime change in America. Turkey will make sure that the UN sanctions against Iran (feeble as they were ever going to be) will be postponed for the world to decry Israel. But who are we fooling? Sanctions were never going to halt Iran’s nukes. Obama knows that. For all we know, Iran already has a bomb – whole, from North Korea.

With North Korea playing out its own provocations (unmet), testing to make sure the US will do nothing, and Turkey/Iran doing the same in the Middle East, the Obama policy of trying to make America liked will result either in war – or Israel’s surrender. The truly awful realization is that a huge number of people in America, including Jews, will not think the price for being liked is too high.

We are in potentially greater peril now than in the 1930s.

John Brennan, who is Deputy National Security Adviser – Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism[!] –  instructs the  nation that the terrorist enemy should not be described as jihadist because, he says,  jihad” does not mean “holy war” but only “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”, and “there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” He  insists that “those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in ‘religious terms’.”

Even if, like the Fort Hood jihadist for instance, they shout “Allahu Akbar” as they commit their mass murders?  (Enter Fort Hood massacre in our search slot for several posts on this Islamic atrocity.]

Is Brennan an idiot, or does he think everyone else is?

Here is today’s list of murderous terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam. It comes from that excellent, reliable, informative site The Religion of Peace, which publishes such a list every day:

2010.05.28 (Lahore, Pakistan) – Orthodox Sunni terrorists stage a bloody grenade and firearms assault on two mosques belonging to a minority sect. Over eighty worshippers are murdered.

2010.05.28 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – Two children are among three civilians blown to bits by Islamic militia bombers.

2010.05.27 (Mosul, Iraq) – Mujahideen gun down a civilian and mortar a factory, wounding eleven people.

2010.05.27 (Bajur, Pakistan) – A married couple and their son are brutally gunned down in their home by Islamic fundamentalists.

2010.05.26 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – Six people are counted dead following an al-Shabaab militia attack around a city square.

2010.05.26 (Mosul, Iraq) – Three policemen are murdered by Mujahideen.

These are all actions of Muslims pursuing jihad, a duty their religion lays on them.

We wonder what Brennan thinks the Taliban, with whom tens of thousand of American soldiers are engaged in battle, are all about?

Or – expert as he claims to be on counter-terrorism – what he thinks the motive was of the Muslims who carried out the attacks on 9/11?

Much as Brennan and Obama may hate the fact, that was a deeply religious act.

The president of the United States does not like the country he leads. He may sometimes feel the need to say or do something to suggest that he has America’s interests at heart, but the weight of evidence that he does not accumulates and becomes too massive to miss. Not only does he apologize for America abroad, he even has his envoys deplore its laws in talks with foreign regimes, as Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner did recently to the Communist Chinese. And he personally endorsed the criticism of the same laws – Arizona’s new legislation dealing with illegal immigration – made by Mexico’s President Calderon, when the two of them stood side by side on the White House lawn.

And now it emerges that he initiated or at the very least advocated the agreement that Iran made with Brazil and Turkey to have some uranium enriched for it – a ploy that his administration condemns as an effort to stall new UN Security Council sanctions against Iran. The sanctions would be weak, and very unlikely to stop Iran making nuclear bombs, but the administration boasts of getting Russia and China to vote for them.

Obama performed this outrageous, underhand act last month in a letter to President da Silva of Brazil.

The New York Times reports:

Brazilian officials on Wednesday provided a full copy of the three-page letter President Obama sent to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in April, arguing that it laid the groundwork for the agreement they reached in Tehran.

“There continues to be some puzzlement” among Brazilian officials about why American official[s] would reject the deal now, a senior Brazilian official said. “The letter came from the highest authority and was very clear.”

So there was a fourth party to the agreement, which was announced one day before the US presented its draft resolution on Iran sanctions to the Security Council.

As it was the work of all four leaders, Prime Minister Erdogan and Presidents Ahmadinejad, da Silva, and Obama, it should rightly be called the Iran-Brazil-Turkey-US Agreement.

Jonathan Tobin, writing at Commentary-Contentions, points out:

If the mere fact of this new deal wasn’t enough to undermine international support for sanctions, the revelation that Brazil acted with the express written permission of Obama must be seen as a catastrophe for international efforts to restrain Tehran. Why should anyone take American rhetoric about stopping Iran seriously if Obama is now understood to have spent the past few months pushing for sanctions in public while privately encouraging third parties who are trying to appease the Iranians?

“Profiling” is stereotyping. For some reason it’s the preferred synonym.

Let’s for the moment call it stereotyping. We all stereotype all the time. We judge people as soon as we meet them by their appearance, what they say and how they say it, the first impression they make. Later, if we get to know them, we may revise our first judgment. Stereotyping is a very useful short-cut. We may like the idea of suspending judgment until all or many facts are in, but we haven’t the time. We don’t live like that.

Instant judgment may involve liking or disliking this or that “type” of person. Taking an instant dislike to someone is not the same as wishing him to be discriminated against legally or socially. Only collectivists think that way. Individualists, though certainly and necessarily capable of stereotyping, will always be aware that no generalization about  class, race,  gender, style, accent, origins, descent or anything else used to categorize people, however broadly true, can be assumed to characterize any single individual in that group.

When it comes to the adherents of a particular ideology, however, there is a difference. They are identifying themselves with a group. If a member of that group wears a badge, in dress, for instance, or a pin in the lapel, he is asking to be identified with that set of ideas, that movement, those aims.

And if that group, motivated by those ideas and aims, has declared itself your enemy, and has attacked you violently, you would be very foolish not to take particular precautions for your safety whenever a person obviously belonging to that group approaches you. He may have no thought of harming you. But you’d be an idiot not to beware of him.

In connection with these thoughts, here is a fresh look at “racial profiling”.

In an article that we think shows much common sense, Selwyn Duke makes the case for it.

Some extracts:

The critics of Arizona’s new immigration law complain that it will lead to “racial profiling.” In response, the law’s defenders point out that the legislation specifically forbids the practice.

Both groups are wrong.

They accept two false suppositions. The first is that the practice in question is immoral.

The second is that “racial profiling” actually exists.

Generally speaking, it does not — that is, not in the sense of a phenomenon widespread enough to warrant continual media attention. In reality, there are only two kinds of profiling: good profiling and bad profiling. Let’s discuss the difference.

Profiling is simply a method by which law enforcement can determine the probability that an individual has committed a crime or has criminal intent. Now, when making this assessment, many different factors are considered. Some have to do with age, sex, dress, behavior, the car being driven, whether or not a person is “out of place” (e.g., a well-dressed fellow in a BMW cruising a drug-plagued neighborhood), and, yes, some have to do with race. But whatever the criteria, good profiling chooses them in accordance with sound criminological science. And as soon as we subordinate that standard to anything, such as political or social concerns, we have rendered it bad profiling.

We also render it unfair. That is, contrary to the notion that using racial factors in profiling is discriminatory, in the negative sense of the word, it is actually the refusal to consider them that is so.

I’ll explain. I’m a member of one of the most profiled groups in the country: males. Law enforcement views us much more suspiciously than females because we commit an inordinate amount of crime. And we aren’t the only ones, as youths also attract a jaundiced eye for the same reason. Now, if considering race when profiling is “racism,” isn’t considering sex and age “sexism” and “ageism”?

The truth is that none of these things are any kind of ism. And is it just to discriminate among higher-crime-incidence groups — scrutinizing some more closely but not others — based on whether they are in or out of favor politically and socially?

This is where the capital-D discrimination lies. If you’re male or a teen, you’re fair game. But, for instance, when the matter is Muslims, the double standards fly. When seeking to identify terrorists, the people who have no problem placing the probing eye on males warn that Muslims mustn’t receive extra scrutiny. But why? As far as the terrorist threat facing the West goes, “Muslim” is a more consistent part of the terrorist profile than is “male,” as there have been more female suicide bombers than non-Muslim ones.

Some may say we must be especially sensitive with regard to race (yes, I realize “Islamic” isn’t a race), but this is silly for two reasons. First, it is a hang-up; it is suicidal to sacrifice blood on the altar of political correctness. Second, there is no blanket refusal to consider racial factors when profiling. For example, part of the profile for serial killers and methamphetamine dealers is “Caucasian.”

Likewise, given that more than 90 percent of the illegals in Arizona hail from Mexico and Latin America, isn’t “Hispanic” part of the relevant profile here? Mind you, the operative word is “part.” To say “This person appears to be of Mexican descent, so he must be illegal” is no different than assuming that every white person deals meth — it would be bad profiling.

…

As Dr. Walter Williams once wrote:

What about using race or ethnicity as proxies for some unobserved characteristic? Some racial and ethnic groups have a higher incidence of mortality from various diseases than the national average. In 1998, mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases were approximately 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. Cervical cancer rates were almost five times higher among Vietnamese women in the United States than among white women. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest known diabetes rates in the world. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men.

…

After Dr. Williams discusses how the prevalence of certain diseases correlates with race, he asks, “Would one condemn a medical practitioner for advising greater screening and monitoring of black males for cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer, or greater screening and monitoring for cervical cancer among Vietnamese American females, and the same for diabetes among Pima Indians?”

Unfortunately, when the matter is the social disease of crime, we not only condemn such a practice, we fire the good diagnosticians. For example, in an older article about former attorney general John Ashcroft’s investigation of 13 cities for “racial profiling” (thank you, George Bush), ABC reports on efforts to eradicate the practice and writes, “police officials who defended profiling have been removed from their posts.” Translation: Our security has been placed in the hands of PC lackeys.

…

Whether the crime is violating borders, bodies or buildings, whether it’s committed in Arizona or Anytown USA, good profiling is not just part of law enforcement.

It’s the heart of law enforcement.

What do you think the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” is? What should the police be suspicious of? Only males, teens, and whites in certain situations?

The bigots are not those who support good profiling, which scrutinizes all groups in accordance with sound criminological science. It is the Times Square bombing-analyst hopers (such as Contessa Brewer) who play pin the tale on the honkey …

America, we need to end our hang-up with race — before it ends us.

Obama delivered a commencement speech at the US Military Academy at West Point which was studded with ironies.

From the Washington Post:

Obama pledged to shape a new “international order” based on diplomacy and engagement.

His presidency has been notable for diplomatic failures and not a single success. As for “engagement”, his obstinate persistence in trying to “engage” Iran has given it all the time it needed to develop nuclear bombs and build the ballistic missiles to deliver them. But a record of failure does not prompt Obama to reconsider his policy.

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation,” he said. “We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice — so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Just where has he “steered currents in the direction of liberty and justice”? Where has he got nations that do not “meet their responsibilities” to “face consequences”? Russia invaded Georgia, took and occupied two of its provinces, and Obama has not done a thing about it. What international cooperation has there been to make Russia withdraw?

“The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times,” he said in prepared remarks. “Countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing its wounds.”

He may be seeking such an international order, but he’s done nothing to bring it about. Far from “countering violent extremism and insurgency” he refuses even to name the perpetrators of it (Muslims) and the cause they serve (Islam). If he hoped his audience would assume he meant Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be remembered that he was always against the war in Iraq, has shown reluctance to win decisive victory in Afghanistan, and has told the enemy the dates when he’ll withdraw American troops from both battlefields regardless of whether anything that could be called victory has by then been achieved.

On “securing nuclear materials” he held a useless international conference, when Canada and one or two other non-belligerent states promised not to give fissile material to terrorists, but no real danger was eliminated.

And then he comes on to the tired and stupid mantra “combating climate change”. Combating climate? It’s a primitive and ignorant notion. Call in the rainmakers, or cool makers, or warm makers, and let them start their chants!

“Sustaining global growth”? How he feeds the buzz-words (such as “sustaining”) to his far left constituency and at the same time tries to give the impression that he is on the side of prosperity (“global growth”). But his flowery phrasing cannot conceal his lack of understanding.

In Iraq, he said, the United States is “poised” to end its combat operations this summer, leaving behind “an Iraq that provides no safe haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.”

Since Obama came to office, there has been far less reporting of terrorist activity in Iraq by the anti-Bush and pro-Obama media. But in fact terrorism in that arrondissement of hell has not stopped. Lately it has intensified. The chances of Iraq becoming stable, “giving no haven to terrorists”, and evolving in this century into a truly democratic state are not worth betting on.

To address the military at all must, he knew, offend the far left constituency to which he long ago sold his soul. Much of his message was aimed at propitiating that radical left rather than reinforcing the morale of American soldiers.

Civilians, he added, must answer the call of service as well, by securing America’s economic future, educating its children and confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change.

His far left critics would understand that when he spoke of “securing America’s economic future” and “confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change” he meant with “green jobs” and redistribution. As for the education of children, they will take it to mean indoctrinating hapless kids with leftist ideology – a cause Obama served actively years ago in Chicago.

Here’s a dry summary of the speech by Arthur Herman in the National Review Online:

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech … which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests — including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

He’s still dreaming the dreams of his father.