David Solway, whose insights often impress us, has today done us the honor of linking to one of our posts in a new article of his.

The article is at Front Page, titled Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail? Here’s a part of it (but read it all). The link to our post, Speaking of Secession, [April 7, 2010] comes with the words “parting of ways” in the third paragraph:

The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable. And in the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.

The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?

These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus …,  it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.

Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.

Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government  …

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

Jillian Becker   April 25, 2010

The vulgar, funny, satirical cartoon South Park brought the “prophet” Muhammad  into its 200th episode by having it said that he was hidden in a U-haul truck and then in a bear costume (out of which, however, emerged Santa Claus, according to Jon Stewart below – we didn’t see the episode).

Muslims took offense. At what exactly isn’t clear. A Muslim named Abu Talhah al Amrikee warned Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, by means of a video on the net that they could be punished with death like the film-maker Theo van Gogh.

So Comedy Central, the channel that shows South Park, censored the episode. They bleeped out all mention of Muhammad, and a final statement deploring intimidation.

That’s what Islam’s all about. That’s what Muslims do: take offense, intimidate, and kill people for making films and drawing cartoons of Muhammad, while also bombing, blowing up planes, flying planes into buildings, shooting unarmed soldiers, plotting mass murder in the New York subway, running over their daughters, beheading their wives, sending money to terrorist organizations to pay for suicide-bombing equipment, parking cars full of explosive outside nightclubs, etc.  And Western authorities feel dreadfully ashamed over offending Muslims, and try not to, and apologize, and pretend it’s not Muslims doing the bombing and shooting and all that.

Almost everyone’s scared of Muslims, as Muslims do their best to make us so. Though they pretend that it’s cruel of non-Muslims to fear them, to be what they call “Islamophobic”.

On Islam’s victory over South Park – an everyday story of the contemporary Western world – find excellent comment by Mark Steyn here, and Diana West here.

May 20 will be “Everybody Draw Muhammad” day. We will join in enthusiastically, and urge our readers to do the same.

Here’s Jon Stewart. We’ll overlook his silly remark about atheists.

A reader sent us this. We agree.

The financial regulation bill is another huge threat to America’s painfully diminished prosperity, and so ultimately to Big Business and Big Labor.

But Big Business and Big Labor cannot see that, being chronically short-sighted. Contrary to Obama’s contention, they actually welcome the legislation.

The Heritage Foundation examines the bill which it calls, with good reason, a “Wall Street Bailout Bill” – a permanent TARP. And that, it says, is “what Wall Street wanted all along”.

Speaking to an audience of big business and big labor executives (including Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, Bank of America’s Bruce Thompson and SEIU’s Andy Stern) at New York’s Cooper Union, President Barack Obama noted “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists to shape” the financial regulation bill “to their special interests.” Obama then admitted, “I am sure that many of those lobbyists work for some of you. But I am here today because I want to urge you to join us, instead of fighting us in this effort.” Obama should have saved his breath. Wall Street and big labor lobbyists have already joined forces to make sure the current Senate legislation has become a Wall Street Bailout Bill.

Big labor’s ties to this White House are already well documented. Less known is just how close Obama administration interests align with the big firms that benefit most from the TARP bailout. The Washington Examiner reports that at Goldman Sachs, the nation’s largest investment bank, four of the five in-house lobbyists were Democratic Capitol Hill staffers — the remaining one gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton last election. And USA Today notes that Goldman Sachs alone has given nearly $900,000 since January 2009 to congressional candidates, with 69% of that cash lining Democrat pockets. Finally, then-candidate Obama collected almost $1 million from Goldman executives and employees in 2008, more than the combined Goldman haul of every Republican running for president, Senate and the House.

So what have Wall Street lobbyists bought with their campaign cash and high priced lobbyists? A bill that gives permanent TARP-like authority to Washington regulators, thus enshrining Washington as a permanent bailout machine. Specifically, the bill:

Creates a protected class of too big to fail firms. Section 113 of the bill establishes a “Financial Stability Oversight Council,” charged with identifying firms that would “pose a threat to the financial security of the United States” if they encounter “material financial distress.” While these firms would be subject to enhanced regulation, such a designation would also signal to the marketplace that these firms are too important to be allowed to fail and, perversely, allow them to take on undue risk.

Creates permanent bailout authority. Section 204 of the bill authorizes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to “make available … funds for the orderly liquidation of [a] covered financial institution.” Although no funds could be provided to compensate a firm’s shareholders, the firm’s other creditors would be eligible for a cash bailout. The situation is much like the bailout AIG in 2008, in which the largest beneficiaries were not stockholders but rather other creditors, such as Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

Provides for seizure of private property without meaningful judicial review. The bill, in Section 203(b), authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to order the seizure of any financial firm that he finds is “in danger of default” and whose failure would have “serious adverse effects on financial stability.” This determination would be virtually irreversible in court.

Establishes a $50 billion fund to pay for bailouts. Funding for bailouts is to come from a $50 billion “Orderly Resolution Fund” created within the U.S. Treasury in Section 210(n)(1), funded by taxes on financial firms. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the ultimate cost of bank taxes will fall on the customers, employees and investors of each firm.

Opens a “line of credit” to the Treasury for additional government funding. Under Section 210(n)(9), the FDIC is effectively granted a line of credit to the Treasury Department that is secured by the value of failing firms in its control, providing another taxpayer financial support.

Authorizes regulators to guarantee the debt of solvent banks. Bailout authority is not limited to debt of failing institutions. Under Section 1155, the FDIC is authorized to guarantee the debt of “solvent depository institutions” if regulators declare that a liquidity crisis (“event”) exists.

Imposes one-size-fits-all reform in derivative markets. … The Senate bill would require virtually all derivative contracts to be settled through a clearinghouse rather than directly between the parties. Applying such ill-designed blanket regulation would make financial derivatives more costly, more difficult to customize, and, consequently, less widely used—which would increase overall risk in the economy.

According to Rasmussen Reports, 64% of Americans are not confident that policymakers in Washington know what they’re doing with regards to Wall Street. They have every reason to be concerned. … The bill Obama is pushing would empower Secretary Geithner to repeat the AIG bailout ad infinitum. No need to ever go back to Congress for a new TARP. The Senate bill is a permanent TARP. Which is exactly what Goldman Sachs and the rest of their Wall Street lobbyists wanted all along.

Investor’s Business Daily explains how the Democrats are moving steadily towards single-payer total government control of health care:

Are the Democrats who want to place price controls on premiums trying to destroy the health insurance business? If we didn’t know better, we’d say yes. And we do know better — don’t we?

It was just a month ago that the Democrats passed and signed a radical overhaul of the country’s health care sector. But 3,000 pages of new law apparently are not enough for lawmakers who don’t read the bills they vote on.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, says there’s “an enormous loophole” in her party’s reform effort that must be closed. So she’s introduced a bill that would give the secretary of health and human services the authority to review health plan premiums and block “any rate increase found to be unreasonable.”

This, after the public was told many times over that the Democrats’ health care legislation would bring down costs and rein in those troublesome health insurance companies that are making so much money.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to see where the Democrats are going with this. Their regulators will establish price controls, which will drive health plan providers out of business as the restrictions make it impossible or unreasonable for them to make profits.

To deal with the shortage of health plans, Democrats will then complete the government takeover of medicine by placing Washington in the position of being the sole provider of health care.

Good news. CAIR had these ads on Miami buses removed. Now they’re to be put back. Here’s a report on how justice prevailed.

The SIOA [Stop the Islamization of America] legal complaint against Miami-Dade Transit has been settled. Not only will our FDI [Freedom Defense Initiative] and SIOA religious liberty bus ads be going back up, but another twenty will be added and will soon be on the streets of Miami.

This is a major victory for the freedom of speech and a disastrous defeat for the thuggish Islamic supremacists of CAIR. It is also a major victory for SIOA. …

The bus ad, which appears above, began running on Tuesday, April 13th. Just two days later, on Thursday, after pressure from CAIR, the bus ads had already been pulled down …

CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations], as it typically does, issued nationwide press releases and blasted emails to tens of thousands of outlets on Friday crowing over its “victory” of suppressing free speech on the grounds that the ads promoted “bigotry”. Newspaper and other media stories in the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, Fox Business News, and NBC ran blindly with the CAIR-generated story on Friday with headlines like: “Miami-Dade Transit Throws Islamic Ad Under the Bus.”

Ironically, CAIR, which has been named by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI as a Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front group and unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror fund raising trial – a trial which culminated in guilty verdicts for all of the Muslim Brotherhood defendants – claims it is “the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.” …

The Center for Security Policy, a leading Washington D.C. national security think tank run by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, has documented that CAIR is an illegal, unregistered foreign agent of the OIC [Organisation of the Islamic Conference], receiving millions of dollars from Islamic countries in order to pursue their political goals in the U.S. …

The day after the bus ads had been pulled … a teleconference was arranged …  with the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s office, which took place [the following] Monday afternoon… The county attorneys conceded the ads should not have been pulled. By Tuesday [it was agreed that ] not only would the original 10 king-sized ads go back up on the Transit Authority buses, but CBS would run an additional 20 king-sized bus ads for no additional charge.

The new agreement was inked and signed by Wednesday, April 21. The ads are expected to go back up by early next week.

Congratulations to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugged and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch who caused this to happen.

Billy Budd, by Herman Melville, is the story of an innocent, good young man, an illegitimate orphan, who is impressed into the Royal Navy when England is at war with France in 1797. The Captain of the ship on which he serves loves him, and so do all the crew except for one man, John Claggart, the Master-at-Arms. Motivated by malice, hate, and envy, Claggart falsely accuses Billy of planning mutiny. An astounded and disbelieving Captain Vere has to confront Billy with his accuser. Billy cannot answer the charge. Not only is he bewildered by the accusation which he only understands as a blatant lie, and has no idea how to convey his denial having never been taught to express himself, but in addition he is hampered by a speech impediment. In his frustrated and  desperate need to defend himself, he strikes out at Claggart and accidentally kills him. Captain Vere has no choice now but to have Billy court-martialled. As the only witness to the event, he defends Billy, sincerely believing in his profound innocence. But then, deeply paining his own feelings, he himself actually persuades the court-martial panel to sentence Billy to death, because although it is unjust, it is what the law prescribes. If an enlisted man kills an officer in a time of war, even accidentally, the law says he must be executed. So Billy Budd, a personification of human goodness, is hanged as a criminal.

What has recalled Billy Budd to our minds is the case of three Navy Seals in Iraq. One of them, Petty Officer First Class Julio Huertas is being tried today in Baghdad on charges relating to the hitting of  an enemy captive. The accusation has been brought by the captive himself, Ahmed Hashim Abed.

The US Marines had been searching for him as the leader of a murderous attack on four Blackwater contractors. Abed and his fellow Islamic savages killed the Americans, dragged their mutilated and burnt bodies through the streets of Falluja, and hung two of them on a bridge.

In what seemed like a triumph for justice, three brave Seals captured Abed, for which they should be commended and rewarded.

They handcuffed and blindfolded him, and proceeded to interrogate him. Later the prisoner was to complain that one of them had struck him. If so, the Seal was surely being all too merciful, considering that servicemen are paid not merely to strike but to kill the enemy. Astoundingly, however, all three of the Seals are to be court-martialled.

The other two are Petty Officer 2nd. Class Matthew McCabe  and Petty Officer 2nd. Class Jonathan Keefe.

Huertas and Keefe – who is also to be tried in Iraq – are charged with dereliction of duty, not taking more tender care of their captive.

McCabe is the one accused of hitting the terrorist murderer. He’ll be tried next month in Virginia.

Who, we’d like to know,  made the decision to try these three men, and why? Are they torn in their consciences like Captain Vere? Or are they merely small bureaucratic minds, long gone blind to justice as they scurry about in the purlieus of legal minutiae, intent on obeying the letter but not the spirit of the law?

Jillian Becker  April 21, 2010

Update April 22, 2010: Petty Officer First Class Julio Huertas has been cleared of all charges.

This warning is in today’s Investor’s Business Daily:

An unclassified Defense Department report says an Iranian missile could strike the U.S. by 2015. If only we were working as hard to defend ourselves as they are to destroy us.

In any discussion of the Iranian nuclear threat, the assumption is always that Tehran’s target is Israel. Iran’s quite mad president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has pledged to wipe Israel off the map as part of his grand scheme to usher in the age of the 12th Imam. Tehran may have a bigger fish that it wants to fry, namely us.

“With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015,” said the 12-page Defense Department report, released Monday, on the “Military Power of Iran” …

There is no shortage of such assistance. A recent report by the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center said production of medium-range missiles remains one of Tehran’s “highest priorities” and that China, North Korea and Russia are all helping Iran produce such missiles.

Iran has long worked with North Korea, particularly on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran’s cooperation with North Korea began in the 1980s, when Tehran financed Pyongyang’s production of Soviet-designed Scud missiles and received 100 of them. Later, North Korea shipped engines for Rodong midrange missiles to Iran. Pyongyang has also helped Tehran set up missile production facilities, and North Koreans are regular visitors to these plants. Iran’s Shahab-3, which can reach all of Israel, is simply the Islamic country’s enhanced version of the North Korean Nodong. Confirmed reports place Iranian scientists and engineers inside North Korea in 1993, when the Nodong-class missile was first tested and unveiled.

Iran is working hard to improve its missile capabilities. It has successfully test-fired the Sajjil-2, a solid-fuel, high-speed missile with a range of 1,250 miles. In February 2009, Iran demonstrated its global reach with the launching of its Omid satellite. Iran’s multistage Safir-Omid space launch vehicle owes much to North Korea’s Taepodong missile.

A country capable of orbiting a satellite is capable of putting a warhead anywhere on this planet. We forget that such a missile wouldn’t have to be accurate. A single nuclear warhead detonated over the American heartland would emit an electromagnetic pulse that would fry our technological infrastructure and catapult America and its economy back to the 18th century.

Iran has long been testing the in-flight detonation of its Shahab series over the Caspian Sea. Such tests would make no sense unless the Iranians were planning for the day when an Iranian missile with a nuke would detonate high over an Iowa cornfield and devastate the American nation.

Obama knows this. He  is doing nothing effective to defend America against it. He is actively taking steps to weaken America’s defenses.

Why?

Could the answer be that Obama wants Iran to be nuclear armed?

And here is another warning from the same source:

Now that the uptrend in homegrown terror is obvious, the FBI warns that American jihadists pose as big a threat as al-Qaida terrorists. And these bad guys may be living next door.

In a major switch from past rhetoric, authorities see an alarming rise in jihadist activity across the country. Radicalization is not confined to Europe, and it’s far more prevalent here than officials have been willing to admit.

Four years ago, FBI headquarters pooh-poohed concerns expressed by this paper that we had an internal security problem tantamount to Britain, which has far fewer Muslims. Following a PC script, the agency argued that our Muslim population is better assimilated and less extreme. That only lulled the American public deeper into a false sense of security about the homegrown threat.

“I don’t think al-Qaida is largely represented in the United States, or people that espouse violent extremism,” FBI Director Robert Mueller assured the public in 2006.

Now the nation’s top cop is singing a different tune.

Not only does al-Qaida still aim to strike inside the U.S., but “homegrown and lone-wolf extremists pose an equally serious threat,” Mueller warned lawmakers last week, citing the Fort Hood shootings. Many U.S.-born jihadists, such as Bombay attack planner David Headley of Chicago, are plotting terror overseas.

Mueller also pointed to the plot to bomb New York subways, hatched by three high school buddies from Queens. In the most serious terror plot in America since 9/11, the Muslim men planned to strap on explosives and hit the Grand Central and Times Square stations during rush hour.

From New York to the Denver suburbs, Americans have been shocked to find their own neighbors plotting or committing violence against them. In 2009 alone, 41 Muslim-Americans were involved in terror, accounting for almost a third of all the homegrown terror suspects since 9/11 (excluding terror-finance cases).

Even Muslim clergy are increasingly dangerous. U.S.-born imam Anwar Awlaki — who ministered to the 9/11 hijackers, inspired the Fort Hood terrorist and allegedly directed the Christmas crotch bomber — recently claimed jihad is “becoming as American as apple pie.” …

Another popular American-Muslim cleric — Detroit imam Luqman Abdullah — preached violent overthrow of the government before dying last fall in a shootout with FBI agents. He called cops “kaffir dogs” and exhorted his flock to shoot them in the head.

“America must fall,” he said, and be replaced by Saudi-style theocracy. “The worst Muslim is better than the best kaffir,” or infidel. Hardly fringe, Abdullah was embraced by the Muslim community. …

This is a powder keg ready to explode. Yet this administration remains focused on “right wing” militia groups and “anti-government extremists” as the top threats. It has even banned agencies from talking about “jihad” or “Islamic extremism,” as if that will defuse it.

Why?

Is it possible that Obama wants Islam to triumph?

This article discusses the revelation made by Dick Morris that Bill Clinton himself, not his attorney general Janet Reno, was primarily responsible for the Waco massacre:

It looks like somebody is going to have to update the Waco Siege page on Wikipedia. Apparently the whitewashed history that former President Bill Clinton would like us to believe regarding the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is missing important details regarding his own personal involvement.

In response to Bill Clinton’s highly publicized linking of the Tea Party movement to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris disclosed on Monday that it was Clinton himself, and not Attorney General Janet Reno, as Americans have been led to believe for the past 17 years, who called the shots during the 1993 botched invasion that led to the death of seventy-six people.

Speaking on the Hannity program on the Fox News Network, Morris criticized Clinton for his Oklahoma City comments: “Let’s understand what was Timothy McVeigh’s motivation …he himself had said that it was the reaction to the Waco takeover. Bill Clinton orchestrated that takeover.”

Morris went on to say, “Clinton in fact was so ashamed about what he did in Waco that he was not going to appoint Janet Reno to a second four-year term. She told him in a meeting right before the inauguration day … ‘If you don’t appoint me I’m going to tell the truth about Waco.’ And that forced Clinton’s hand … It’s never been said (publicly) before.”

For years, Clinton has been criticized for his leadership of the federal government during the Waco crisis, but he has managed to escape personal responsibility for the tragedy. With Morris’s statements, it appears this may no longer be possible. It would seem that Clinton was far more intimately involved with the government response at Waco than previously reported. …

For Clinton to associate such a horrible act of violence with freedom loving [Tea Party] Americans, especially given the fact that he must be fully aware that it was his decisions that led to the Waco catastrophe which in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh, is remarkably shameless.