Showing posts with label Protecting America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Protecting America. Show all posts

Sunday, April 05, 2009

A Tea Party in Pennsylvania


West Chester, Pennsylvania, to be precise. Click any of the photos to visit the underlying albums.






Flopping Aces has the full report and linkage. Sean Carpenter also has an excellent collection of photos from the event.

Attendance, as you can probably tell, was far beyond expectations.

National Tea Party Day is April 15th. To find your local Tea Party, click here.


Friday, March 20, 2009

The Sickness


Consider, if you will, the priorities of Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Democrats:

In Pelosi's world, Illegal Aliens must be granted free health care and voting rights.


Families making up to $100,000 annually are given free health care through the 2009 Obama SCHIP program, even if they have private health care insurance.


But our Wounded Warriors? They should be forced to use private health insurance for their grievous injuries.


The modern Democrat Party, controlled by George Soros, is infected with a sickness.

And they don't -- that's right, I said it -- they don't support the troops. In fact, Democrats hate the troops.

And Barack Obama proved it with his outrageous proposal to charge veterans for their own health care while preparing to offer citizenship and free health care for illegal immigrants. And I don't care if he retracted his demands. It's the thought that counts.


Linked by: Fausta. THanks! Picture credits: Flap's, ZenHabits, Weasel Zippers, respectively.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

David Frum's feeble war against Rush Limbaugh


A March 2nd column at today's hub of conservative thought -- some website I've never heard of called New Majority -- pilloried Rush Limbaugh with inflammatory descriptions and tawdry allusions. The column's author, David Frum (yes, the David Frum... heh), asserts that Limbaugh's cigar-smoking, golfing visage is precisely the image that Republicans should spurn.

Frum describes Limbaugh as the ostensible leader of the GOP burdened with unappealing and stereotypical characteristics:

A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

We get it -- Rush is rich. Filthy rich. He's a swaggering, cocky, overweight, cigar-smoking rich guy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He has his own jet. Tens of millions of listeners. Best-selling books. His website gets more hits in a day than Frum gets in a month.

As for Barack Obama?

On the [other] side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

Discipline? Obama's admitted use of marijuana, cocaine and perhaps other illegal drugs must have slipped Frum's mind. Or, more likely, Frum pegged the needle on the intellectual dishonesty meter. Care for a Nicorette?

Obama has indeed invoked the recession: his unceasing song of crisis, catastrophe and despair have turned a run-of-the-mill recession into an economic debacle of the first order. His ideological policy prescriptions have scorched the world's greatest prediction engine -- the stock market -- and melted trillions in value.

Victims? Obama has, in many respects, created the victims from whole cloth.

Rush, in Frum's view, is a relic, a useless fossil of the Reagan-urassic Era.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

How will conservatives succeed? Surely not through division; whether by appearance, by wealth, by race, by any segmentation strategy imaginable -- as Frum and most Democrats are wont to do.

Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s... ...he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

And Frum is to conservatism what Pee Wee Herman is to the Academy Awards. A pathetic, peripheral figure more concerned with Letterman's opinion and The Daily Show's seven full-time writers than principles or ideals.

And what of principles? Of core values? On that topic, Frum does not confront Limbaugh. Is Obama's New Deal 2.0 constitutional? Who cares? Limbaugh is a filthy rich golfer who looks like -- in Letterman's words -- an eastern European gangster.

To that point, Frum ignores the elephant in the room.

Consider that a more honest version of the mainstream media -- or what passes for the media these days -- could have blown Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign to bits over a single long weekend. A series of network exposes featuring Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Edward Said, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Obama's subprime lawsuits and his lost years at Columbia, for starters, would have de-lubed Obama's well-oiled campaign, resulting in a thrown Axelrod.

Put simply, any of the big media outlets could've put a stake in the heart of Obama's campaign with a single 20-minute segment of John Stossel presents: Barack Obama's Communist Upbringing.

As for who really represents the Republican Party?

Could it be Ann Coulter? Or Mitt Romney? Or Bobby Jindal? Or Michael Steele? Or Sarah Palin?

Appearance, race and gender should matter not; for the principle is the heart of the thing.

The stock market is the ultimate tracking poll of economic confidence. Conservatives can rest comfortably knowing that Ronald Reagan -- put in the same position as Obama -- would have encouraged investors, entrepeneurship and steadied the market.

Because the principles are timeless. The appearances are meaningless. Which is why Frum chooses to focus on the latter.

And by focusing on appearances, Frum simply emphasizes his irrelevance to the fight between conservatism and socialism.



Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Sun and Flag


Contrairimairi sent this one in.

This is a beautiful photo of a giant American flag in Arizona The photo is authentic, UN-Touched and was taken on regular Kodak 35mm film. The person who took the picture couldn't believe the image created by the suns rays.

Nice of them to share it with the world!

Monday, February 23, 2009

Transparency lost: White House demands DOD budget secrecy


I've lost count of the number of tall tales (a lesser man would call them "lies") candidate Obama told during his multi-year campaign for the presidency. Now the Department of Defense budget will be opaque to taxpayers, presumably just another step towards "transparency" and "openness" in the enlightened Obama administration. Defense News reports:

The Obama administration has directed defense officials to sign a pledge stating they will not share 2010 budget data with individuals outside the federal government... In an undated non-disclosure agreement obtained by Defense News, the administration tells defense officials that "strict confidentiality" must be practiced to ensure a "successful" and "proper" 2010 defense budget process.

...The Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget have agreed on a fiscal 2010 defense budget top line figure of $537 billion. That level is nearly $50 billion lower than the $585 billion defense plan created during the final months of the Bush administration...

The pledge covers any data about the 2010 budget, including: "planning, programming and budgeting system documents and databases, and any other information" that concerns the administration's internal discussions about "the nature and amounts of the president's budget for fiscal year 2010, and any supplemental budget request during the current fiscal year..."

I don't know about you, but I've about reached my four-year quota of hope and change.


Hat tips: Atlas and Gary.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Who is "The Great One"?


Mark Levin has the fastest growing talk show in the radio business. Put simply, if Air America had signed up a single Levin, they wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Instead they hired a series of intellectually bankrupt clowns who couldn't have a thoughtful debate if their livelihoods depended on it. Actually, their livelihoods did depend on it -- and they failed.


Who is Levin? He's a former Reagan administration Justice Department official; an expert on the Constitution and an accomplished author. I heard that his career started with some spurious calls to the Hannity show. He was so entertaining that he eventually got a one-hour local slot. Now he's syndicated with an audience approaching six million.

Best of all, Levin's podcasts are free.

For a Levin intro, check out this blog post, which was based upon Levin's January 6, 2009 broadcast.

Listen now. You won't be sorry.


Saturday, February 07, 2009

RED ALERT: Contact the GOP! Not a penny to the turncoats!


Three turncoat Republican Senators intend to vote for the massive Spendulus bill (also known as the 'Bankrupt America Act'). Here's a general email address (info@gop.com), the Chairman's email address (chairman@gop.com), a contact form and a script you can paste in. Call 202.863.8500 or email now.


Here's the story.

The three Republican senators who plan to support the measure are Olympia Snowe of Maine, Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Collins and Specter spoke in favor of the agreement on the Senate floor Friday night.

"The American people want us to work together. They don't want to see us dividing along partisan lines on the most serious crisis confronting our country," Collins said on the floor.

Actually, dimwit, the American people don't want you to bankrupt the country with a thousand-page pork-laden bill that rips off taxpayers and saddles our descendents with massive amounts of debt.

Visit the GOP contact form now and make your voice heard!

Related: Malkin, Hot Air and Fox.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

RED ALERT: A trillion in pork, but Pentagon must cut 11%!


UPDATE 02/02/09 8:40PM ET: ACE OF SPADES REPORTS THAT OBAMA MAY INCREASE THE DEFENSE BUDGET BY 8%.

BUMPED AND UPDATED 01/31/09 04:38PM: SEE RUNNING UPDATES BELOW. MEDIA BLACKOUT: still not a peep out of the mainstream media (other than Fox News).

BREAKING 01/30/09 7:41PM ET
: Fox News Television reports that Barack Obama has issued a demand that the Pentagon reduce its budget by more than 10%
. The dollar figure is $55 billion.

President Obama wants to spend a trillion dollars on welfare, condoms, international STD prevention, 600,000 new government jobs and handouts for illegal immigrants... but negative funding for the very mission his Presidential Oath required.

Americans will die, needlessly, if this man gets his way.

Overreach? He's already pulled his arm out of its socket.

Here are the phone numbers for every U.S. Senator. Call now and demand -- with as much polite-itude as you can muster -- that they speak out against both the Porkulus package and this outrageous attempt to weaken America.

Update: Connie B. noted that the requested budget cut is just "a start"!

Update II: First mainstream media outlet to report appears to be InsideDefense (subscription) (hat tip: Ace): "'Substantial' Cut to FY-10 Budget Plan; Pentagon to Appeal"

Update III: Tommy emails: "We're all dead men walking."

Update IV: Iran. Nukes. Operation Starfish.

Update V: Via Reuters, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) says that long-range U.S. antiballistic missile system should be scaled down as part of a belt-tightening.

Update VI: Inside Defense: "[T]he Obama administration has directed Pentagon officials to pare back its original FY-10 topline proposal."

Update VII: Fox News headline (1/30/09 23:30): "Defense Official: Obama Calling for Defense Budget Cuts":

The Obama administration has asked the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon's budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent -- about $55 billion -- a senior U.S. defense official tells FOX News.

Last year's defense budget was $512 billion. Service chiefs and planners will be spending the weekend "burning the midnight oil" looking at ways to cut the budget -- looking especially at weapons programs, the defense official said.

Some overall budget figures are expected to be announced Monday.

Obama met Friday at the White House with a small group of military advisers, including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman, and Gen. Jim Jones, National Security Council chairman.

Update VIII: Let's do the math. The Porkulus package includes:

$314 BILLION IN PAYOFFS TO DEMOCRAT CONSTITUENCIES

• $83 billion in welfare payments (the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax)
• $81 billion for Medicaid
• $66 billion on "education", more than the entire Department of Education required just ten years ago
• $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
• $20 billion for food stamps
• $8 billion on "renewable energy" projects, which have a low or negative return
• $7 billion for "modernizing federal buildings and facilities"
• $6 billion on urban transit systems, dominated by unions and which, almost universally, lose money
• $2.4 billion for "carbon-capture demonstration projects"
• $2 billion for child-care subsidies
• $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that's run in the red for 40 years
• $650 million for "digital TV conversion coupons" (on top of billions already spent)
• $600 million on new cars for government (added to the $3 billion already spent each year)
• $400 million for "global-warming research"
• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

BUT NOT A PENNY FOR DEFENSE

Update IX: Cold Fury, Environmental Republican, Gateway Pundit, Hot Air, Jawa, Jerome Corsi at WND, Just Barking Mad, SondraK, STACLU, TAB, Tammy Bruce, Texas Scribbler, One Big Dog, American Elephant ("Obama Slashes Defense to Pay-Off Unions and ACORN"), Riggword ("How 'bout stimulating the military?"), Blackshards, United Conservatives and Wizbang have updates.

Update X: As of 10:02AM, no mainstream media outlets -- other than Fox News -- are reporting on this debacle. Although the wheezing New York Times ("Obama Cultivates Military") and the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Army announces rise in suicide rates for 2008") found time to report on more important issues this morning.

Update XI: As of 10:26AM, an AP (via Yahoo News) headline reads "Under Obama, `war on terror' catchphrase fading."

Update XII: At 11:01AM, Reliapundit noted: "LOOK AT IT THIS WAY: EVERYTHING IN THE BUDGET IS GETTING A 35% RAISE - EXCEPT DEFENSE, WHICH IS BEING CUT --- WHILE WE'RE AT WAR!"


Thursday, January 29, 2009

Doolittle's Raiders: seldom seen photos


Papa B sent this one in.

Doolittle's Raid, 18 April 1942, was the first air raid by the United States to strike a Japanese home island (Honshū) during World War II. It demonstrated that Japan itself was vulnerable to Allied air attack and provided an expedient means for U.S. retaliation for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941. The raid was planned and led by Lieutenant Colonel James "Jimmy" Doolittle. Doolittle would later recount in his autobiography that the raid was intended to cause the Japanese to doubt their leadership and to raise American morale:

The Japanese had been told they were invulnerable. An attack on the Japanese homeland would cause confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders... There was a second, equally important, psychological reason for this attack...Americans badly needed a morale boost.

16 B-25B Mitchell bombers were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet deep within enemy waters. The plan called for them to hit military targets in Japan, and land in China. All 16 aircraft were lost and 11 crewmen were either killed or captured. The crews of 14 aircraft, including one interned in the Soviet Union for more than a year, returned safely to the United States.

18 Apr 1942






















Sunday, January 25, 2009

Hannity's interview with Thomas Jefferson


Tonight on Hannity -- a world-exclusive, the first televised interview with Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States.

Hannity: Sir, thank you so much for meeting with us. It's a unique honor and privilege.

Jefferson: You're welcome, young man. Your industrious society has created many marvels worthy of the American people.

Hannity: Mr. President, President Obama enters office with a huge amount of "hoopla" and an almost messianic belief that he can "heal the environment", fix the economy, and solve problems like global terrorism. Is some sort of reckoning certain?

Jefferson: No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

Hannity: His immense, trillion-dollar "stimulus" package puts control of the people's money in the hands of a few central planners. What is your reaction to that strategy?

Jefferson: Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories... I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Hannity: So you are generally opposed to a top-down stimulus package and prefer that the spending decisions reside with the people who pay taxes?

Jefferson: I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

Hannity: What about Democrats' tendency to grow the size of government and intrude in every aspect of our lives... from the New Deal's entitlement programs, transportation, energy, health care, etc.?

Jefferson: My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Hannity: And increasing taxes on the highest earners -- the "progressive" income tax?

Jefferson: A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.

Hannity: How troubling is it that the amount of debt that the Federal Government is undertaking -- combined with entitlement programs that are massively underfunded -- means that we are passing huge amounts of debt to our children and grandchildren.

Jefferson: It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world... Never spend your money before you have earned it.

Hannity: What would you like to say to the those of our current leaders who are operating under ethical clouds: from Rangel, to Dodd, Murtha, Frank, Mollohan, Clinton, Geithner, Holder and Reid.

Jefferson: Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Hannity: You've seen one of my "man-in-the-street" interviews, where we ask random people simple questions about current events, like 'who is the Vice President'? We found during the Obama campaign that many of those voting for him were completely uninformed and various surveys confirm that general ignorance about the man and his motives. Is that troubling?

Jefferson: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Hannity: Mr. President, what are your thoughts about President Obama basically ignoring Republican requests for a bi-partisanship approach to the stimulus package, stating "I won" and to get over themselves?

Jefferson: Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Hannity: The concept of welfare, where the state redistributes wealth to the poor even though many could easily work, has been statistically shown to increase single-parent families, a culture of dependency and crime. What are your thoughts on welfare?

Jefferson: Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

Hannity: Moving to the First Amendment: this concept of blogging, where anyone can be a well-read author or pundit, is a new innovation for politics. Do you believe that blogging is a useful tool to promote Democracy?

Jefferson: Information is the currency of democracy... Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Hannity: Interestingly enough, the whole newspaper business has suffered mightily with the rise of the Internet. Your reaction?

Jefferson: I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Hannity: Regarding the Second Amendment, Barack Obama has historically opposed private ownership and possession of firearms. In fact, his home city of Chicago has onerous regulations that effectively prohibit guns altogether, yet the city has the highest number of murders per year of any state in the Union. Your thoughts?

Jefferson: No man shall be debarred the use of arms... Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

Hannity: How do you respond to Democrats who have made a variety of moves to revive the ill-named "Fairness Doctrine", which threatens conservative free speech and which was already ruled unconstitutional once in our history?

Jefferson: I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man... It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Hannity: Final question, sir. What about the Democrats' massive dependency programs, entitlement programs, and efforts to censor free speech such as the "Fairness Doctrine"? Doesn't this violate the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

Jefferson: Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Hannity: Thank you so much for your valuable time, Mr. President.

Next on Hannity, breaking news on the Caylee Anthony case from Greta Van Sustern!


Note: Every Jefferson response is verbatim as reported by BrainyQuote. If statements were made at separate times, they are separated by an ellipsis when combined into a single response.
Fox News Ticker: Hijacked from from the brilliant People's Cube.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Holy mother of... inside the Secret Service's GMC Yukons


WWTDD has the video... and the following are the key screen-caps.

Nadia sent in this link showing what’s inside the Secret Service Yukon XL that follows the presidential limo. Namely, the Dillon M134D Gatling Gun, a six barreled, electrically driven machine gun chambered in 7.62mm, capable of firing 4,000 rounds per minute. And get this, the bullets are laced with poison. And the poison is high in calories. These guys aren’t f***in around.











Hat tip: Bernie.