Sunday, January 18, 2009

Waging Jihad just got easier!



Image: Maksim of The People's Cube. Hat tip: Larwyn.

The unsung hero of US Air Flight 1549's water landing


Image by: Lazlo Kovacs.

An open letter to Paul Krugman (in comic book form)


Dear Mr. Krugman,

It was with great interest that I read your column of 15 January 2009 ("Forgive and Forget?") in which you advocate the prosecution of George W. Bush and Richard M. Cheney in order to "hold those who violate the Constitution accountable."

It's not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies... Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

While your background as a constitutional lawyer is unquestioned, Mr. Krugman, perhaps we can take a moment to review your charges.

Consider Guantanamo Bay. The reason President Bush opened Guantanamo Bay is because of a Supreme Court decision in 1950. This decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, was handed down by a Supreme Court dominated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's selections. It barred federal civilian courts from hearing habeas petitions filed by German citizen combatants convicted of war crimes and imprisoned overseas by the U.S. military. That's what the Supreme Court said; a court that was truly of FDR's making.

That's why the President opened Guantanamo. Because he understood, as FDR and Truman understood, the importance of keeping activist lawyers and activist judges away from the war effort. This isn't about criminality. This is about war and national security.

We've heard so much about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA law could not -- and did not -- anticipate nanosecond communications mechanisms such as email, cell phones, satellite phones and the like.

It was a law written in the seventies. And the Bush Justice Department was extremely careful about intercepting international communications, carefully screening to whom and from whom.

To this day we have no examples of violations of civil liberties regarding either FISA or Guantanamo Bay. None!

So what does the Left do? They lie, they change the language. Suddenly, waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding: from which we gleaned information that saved American soldiers and protected American citizens. Because it's been described as torture.

Waterboarding was used by American troops in the Spanish-American War. It has been used by our troops, on our troops, in survival school for decades. It wasn't invented by this administration. But under this president, it became an issue.

George Bush never rounded up 110,000 people of a certain ethnicity, as FDR did during World War II.

FDR rounded up over one hundred thousand innocent Japanese-American citizens who had violated no laws, had committed no crimes.

After 9/11, the Attorney General looked at a list of expired visas, which he has every right to do. He called in those aliens whose visas had expired in violation of U.S. law to determine the reason for the expirations.

He did this because some of the 9/11 hijackers held visas that had expired.

But he didn't round up 110,000 Muslims -- or, to be roughly equivalent to that era -- 250,000 Muslims and put them in internment camps in the interior of the country like the great FDR did.

Yet Bush is said to be the greatest violator of civil liberties by you, Mr. Krugman, and the rest of the Leftist, anti-war mob.

As for Iraq? If Iraq was truly a "war of choice" -- as George Will stipulates -- how is that any different than other wars of choice America has waged that were absolutely in our national security interest?

Ever hear the phrase "Manifest Destiny"? This was the doctrine used in the first half of the nineteenth century under which we acquired most of the west and southwest portions of the country. Little states, you might have heard of them, like California and Texas. Over a third of the continental U.S. territory was captured and attached through U.S. military force. This doctrine was crucial to the preservation and improvement of this society.

That was a "War of Choice". And there have been others, all in our best interests, national security and otherwise.

Mr. Krugman, you've done an admirable job of reciting the ACLU's talking points:

• That our country was involved in widespread torture? A flat-out lie.
• Or that our country violated the civil liberties of its citizens? Name one. It's a flat-out lie.

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are humble, strong, decent men who understood what 9/11 meant for this country.

You, sir, are a hypocritical buffoon who should seek immediate treatment for Bush Derangement Syndrome, along with thousands of your similarly afflicted sycophants.

Sincerely, Doug Ross


Update: Say hello to my little friend, Mr. Krugman: WSJ

Based upon: The brilliant Mark Levin, 1/14/2009.

Larwyn's Link Kerplosion: "Wish him failure"


Obama's ethics problems: Wizbang
The Flimflam of the Fallacious Fairness Doctrine: Age of Pericles
Our permanent state of routine emergency: Mark Steyn

The New President of Lego-Land: Jammie Wearing Fool
Bush already being vindicated: Washington Post (Charles Krauthammer)
Obama's dangerous BlackBerry obsession: Clark County Politics

Health Care Reform Survey Proves a Point: Emergency Physician's Monthly
NYC Schools "Educating" Kids to Protest for Hamas: Evil Conservative Radio
BBC Breaking News: Are We Lumberjacks?

Making Work, Destroying Wealth: Cato @ Liberty
McClatchy placed on bankruptcy watch: McClatch Watch
Chedder gets chedda: Country Store

Angry Mom crashes Hamas Pity Party: Vicious Babushka
Another blow against Internet anonymity?: Philosecurity
CIA-Trained Geese Bring Down Plane in New York: People's Cube

American Democracy, R.I.P.: Mitchell Langbert
Zimbabwe is dying: Prairie Pundit
Our future: Socialist utopia of Zimbabwe introduces 100-trillion dollar note: Daily Nation (Kenya)

Obama's own personal FEMA? Okay, this is getting creepy.: Campaign Spot (Jim Geraghty)
Global warming: it don't add up!: Planet Gore (Marlo Lewis)
Single Mothers and Coulter's 'Venomous Tone': American Thinker (Ben-Peter Terpstra)

If Leon Panetta Were A Republican’s Pick To Head The CIA, And This Was His Daughter...: Pat Dollard
To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over — and they won. Now let's finally move forward: Youssef Ibrahim
The warmaholics' fantasy: The Australian:

THE warmaholics are fond of using the phrase "official records going back to 1850", but the simple facts are that prior to the 1970s, surface-based temperatures from a few indiscriminate, mostly backyard locations in Europe and the US are fatally corrupted and not in any sense a real record... They are then further doctored by a secret algorithm to account for heat-island effects. Reconstructions such as the infamously fraudulent "hockey stick" are similarly unreliable.

The only precise and reliable temperature recording started with satellite measurements in the 1970s. They show minuscule warming, all in the northern hemisphere, which not only stopped in 2000 but had completely reversed by 2008...

Linked by: Fausta and Soccer Dad. Thanks!

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Photo effects




















Hat tip: Dave W.

Foreclosure Heat Map


The 2008 foreclosure heat map (click to zoom).


HotPads has all of the real-estate maps you'll ever need.

Hypocrisy: Pro-Choice Females to turn over Control of their Bodies to 'Federal Health Board' Bureaucrats


Democrats want control over you. That used to mean control over your material wealth, your labor, through oppressive taxation and regulation.


Now it means they will decide your fate. The fate of your body.

All of you pro-choicers out there: where are you?

I assume you're going to stand up against national health care?

The issue of abortion notwithstanding, what about our bodies? What about this "Federal Health Board"?


This is the mechanism that Tom Daschle and Barack Obama intend to set up, as Daschle's book spells out in excruciating detail.


Such a board would decide what kind of medical treatment will be provided in this nation.


What kind of medical treatment you and I will get.

How can a few, a board of hack central planners, know what kind of medical benefits your children need when they're rationing who gets what?

They can't. You're about to turn these decisions over to a handful of bureaucrats, who will be called "experts."


A board of bureaucrats -- not you -- will decide the healthcare fate of your children. You won't. They will.

Let me ask you: will they make a better decision than you? No, of course not.


As for affordability, they'll take care of that too. There will be less new technology, fewer breakthrough drugs, less hospitals, less doctors and less nurses. It will become much more affordable, because you will be waiting in line. And who will pay the price? You will... through lower-quality healthcare and treatments approved by a central planner, a bureaucrat.

How do we know this? Because we have examples in the UK and Canada, where waits for MRI scans can be six months long and many children never see a dentist.


Welcome to Socialism! Welcome to Barack Obama's America!

Linked by: Instapundit, Free Canuckistan, Too old to work and Evil Conservative Radio. Thanks! Based upon: The brilliant Mark Levin, 1/12/2009.