Lady Liberty's torch arm was displayed in Madison Square Park #NYC from 1876 until 1882 http://t.co/4BkrQ1kQFC pic.twitter.com/j1ZWsKz4oO
— Christopher T George (@CThompsonGeorge) July 8, 2014Hat tip: Papa B.
Lady Liberty's torch arm was displayed in Madison Square Park #NYC from 1876 until 1882 http://t.co/4BkrQ1kQFC pic.twitter.com/j1ZWsKz4oO
— Christopher T George (@CThompsonGeorge) July 8, 2014QOTD: "The attack on Charlie Hebdo in France was not cyber [like the attack on Sony that George Clooney so vociferously protested]. It was more serious. It was the murder of 12 journalists for exercising their freedom of speech. And while millions of people expressed solidarity with the slain journalists, and their right to speak freely, Clooney has been silent. No petition. No newspaper ad. No online petition...
Liberals in show business are afraid of getting killed by Muslims, you see. And apparently they’ll defend–though not to their deaths–the rights of Muslims to kill them." --Warner Todd Huston
Editors of the Paris-based satirical magazine released the cover of their next issue on Monday night, and it shows a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, holding up a sign with the now-famous slogan "Je Suis Charlie."
Mohammed will grace the cover of the next edition of #CharlieHebdo. Kudos, mes amis. Kudos pic.twitter.com/KJ3jGmCqWV
— Josh Zepps (@joshzepps) January 13, 2015
That slogan has become a rallying cry in the wake of the horrific shootings that left 12 dead at the magazine's offices last week.
...The new cover was shared by Liberation, a French newspaper that lent office space to the surviving staff members of Charlie Hebdo... Liberation's news story about the new cover said it was specifically meant to depict Mohammed.
...Many major news organizations, including CNN, have refrained from showing any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that purport to show the prophet. Executives at CNN have cited concerns about the safety of staff members and sensitivity about Muslim audiences.
New Cold War: A revised Russian military doctrine identifies NATO as Moscow's No. 1 threat, as the Obama administration announced it was returning control of 15 bases in Europe back to the host governments.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave President Obama a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking in the form of a revised strategic doctrine.It re-emphasizes that NATO, notwithstanding President Obama's "flexibility" and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "reset" button, is the No. 1 strategic threat facing Russia.
We are reminded of Obama's rebuke of Mitt Romney in the third presidential debate, when the GOP nominee was ridiculed for listing, in response to a question, Russia as our No. 1 strategic geopolitical threat.
"The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because ... the Cold War's been over for 20 years," said the president who promised the Russians more flexibility as he disarmed the United States.
Apparently Putin does not share the view that the frigid era of confrontation is over.
The latest Russian strategic doctrine, the fourth since the end of a Soviet Union whose demise Putin has mourned and whose territories he seeks to reclaim, comes after the 2008 war against the former Soviet republic of Georgia, its annexation of Crimea and its creeping invasion of Ukraine.
Russian strategic doctrine was revised by Boris Yeltsin after the USSR's demise. It was revised again in 2000 under Putin, and again in 2010 by Dmitry Medvedev.
Some would argue the newest incarnation merely gives shape for the first time to Russian neighbors' fears and has a few disturbing new wrinkles that bear watching in light of a staggering Russian military renaissance.
The doctrine announces Russia intends the "lawful use of the armed forces . . . to ensure the protection of its citizens outside the Russian federation."
This was the pretext Moscow used to seize the Crimea and Nazi Germany's excuse to annex Austria and the Sudetenland prior to World War II. This is not good news for the Baltic states NATO is obligated to defend.
Good to see @BenAffleck has a new project #HollywoodDivas @wolfblitzer #CharlieHebdo @cher @MMFlint pic.twitter.com/JlKuafPrN7
— Forbes400 (@Forbes400) January 11, 2015THIS cartoon is brilliant! pic.twitter.com/HNpBr8NGfQ
— Evan Sayet (@EvanSayet) January 13, 2015Legendary cartoonist R. Crumb weighs in on the Charlie Hebdo killings from France, where he's lived for 20 years. pic.twitter.com/awamcPIXj3
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) January 10, 2015QOTD: "In terms of profile, these jihadist murderers fit it perfectly, to an almost comical extent: angry young losers, drug users with criminal records, coming from broken families, known unpleasantly in their community as violent troublemakers. There was even the obligatory aspiring rap artist cliche. These are essentially spree killers seeking an ideology to justify their murderous urges, and in Salafi jihadism they found it: that being the hate-based worldview of choice for many would-be terrorists these days, anywhere. When travel to foreign jihad was added to the Kouachi dossier, the French intelligence services had something to work with, but not enough to keep them off the streets for long. It was inevitable that the security apparatus — which can only track so many targets in “real time” or something close to it, and resources are always finite — placed other, more dangerous-looking jihadists higher on the list to be watched than the Paris killers." --20 Committee
No matter who paid for Chris Christie’s ticket to the Dallas Cowboys vs. Green Bay Packers football game on Sunday, the New Jersey governor ran up the score on taxpayers.
The travel costs of state police troopers assigned to protect the governor are 18 times higher than when Christie took office, a New Jersey Watchdog investigation found.New Jersey spent nearly $1 million on travel expenses for its state police Executive Protection Unit during Christie’s four years and nine months as governor, according to documents obtained under the Open Public Records Act. Last year, Christie traveled out-of-state on more than 100 days while visiting 36 states, Mexico and Canada, primarily on personal and political trips that were not official state business.
The current average monthly travel costs to protect Christie for a single month are 50 percent more than former Gov. Jon Corzine’s entire final year in office, according to state records. For 2009, EPU’s expenses were only $21,704 – compared to $32,933 per month for the first three quarters of 2014.
Spokesmen for Christie did not respond to New Jersey Watchdog’s requests for comment.
The governor announced he will pay is pay for his own travel and ticket to the game in Green Bay. Last week, Christie acknowledged Cowboys owner Jerry Jones paid for him, his wife and their four children to fly to Dallas on a private charter jet as well as their VIP seats at the Jan. 4 game against the Detroit Lions – an admission that stirred controversy about ethics and gifts to the governor.
The dramatic increase in EPU travel costs coincides with the political rise of an ambitious governor considering a run for the White House in the 2016 election:
Okay, let's see who's been paying attention for the past 66 years: Why doesn't France just give the Muslims their own state?
— Lorrie Goldstein (@sunlorrie) January 10, 2015QOTD: "Can you imagine the media reaction if just one Christian murdered just one person as a reprisal for some offensive joke or provocative cartoon? We’d be ready to ban the entire religion in this country. Progressives are so desperate to prove that Christianity is just as violent as Islam that they frequently cite the murder of abortion doctors as an example. Only, none of those attacks were carried out in the name of Jesus. As far as I’m aware, none of the murderers shouted “Praise be to Christ” when they pulled the trigger. And how many incidents are we even talking about here? I’ll tell you: eight. Eight abortionists and abortion clinic workers have been killed in the U.S. in the past 40 years. It’s happened once in the last decade and a half. Once.
Yet Christians are held to such a high standard that even these extraordinarily rare killings, not even done in the name of the faith, and always condemned by nearly every prominent Christian, are cited in almost every conversation about religious violence. Meanwhile, Muslims just gunned down 12 people over a cartoon this morning, and what do we immediately hear? Islam is a religion of peace.
A White House spokesman came out within hours of the attack and spent about 40 seconds condemning the violence before immediately repeating this same slogan. While another dozen bodies lay dead in the street, we’re told that it all happened at the hands of a “peaceful” religion. (But at least he didn’t repeat Obama’s quote from 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”) This is a sick joke. Islamist militant wreak havoc across the globe, and the best our simpering, kowtowing, politically correct leaders can do is continuously suck up to the religion that produces these travesties like it’s operating some kind of terrorist assembly line. It’s pathetic. It’s shameful." --Matt Walsh
The New York Times reports federal prosecutors are recommending felony charges against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to a civilian author and journalist with whom he allegedly had an affair.
In light of the news, it’s worth looking at the following excerpt from my book: Stonewalled.
Really? Even when they sounded the Muslim prayer? Even when they called their deeds, loud and clear in the streets of Paris, "vengeance for the Prophet"?
Here's what Kristof did not do: condemn the killings. Praise those who had been slaughtered. Express horror at their execution. And admit that men who praise Allah after committing mass murder are, religious profiling or not, probably going to turn out to be Muslim.
It just kind of is that way.
(Interestingly, in listing a number of Islamic terrorist attacks on Western targets, he also failed to mention that Muslims were involved in the attacks of 9/11. Ask yourself why.)
Instead, he begged his readers not to judge. He repeated the clichéd platitudes about the "majority of Muslims" having nothing to do with Islamic extremism, and praised, not the editors and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, but non-Muslims who rose to the aid of Muslims who feared reprisals after the recent (Muslim-led) hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia.
What he might have done, but didn't, was take a lesson or two from the New Yorker's George Packer, a man who actually knows a thing or two about Islamic extremism, and about the courage of journalists confronting it: he was one of them. At around the same time Kristof seems to have been penning his column, Packer wrote:
QOTD: "Since 1939, France has had the kind of “Common Sense Gun Control Laws” that groups financed by Mike Bloomberg claim to favor (although the laws don’t go far enough, in their view, because they still permit a small number of private citizens to own firearms.) The editorialists at the Washington Post are baffled why France’s strict gun laws failed to prevent the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
A genuinely troubling question: Why didn’t France’s gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims? ... There is no right to bear arms for the French, and to own a gun, you need a hunting or sporting license which needs to be repeatedly renewed and requires a psychological evaluation.
You mean the Mohammedan terrorists refused to apply for gun permits or sit for psychological valuations, but decided to get guns anyway? Jamais dans la vie!
Even a dumb hick from flyover country could explain why gun control laws fail; because criminals and terrorists don’t obey gun laws. But the leftists at the Washington Post clearly are too educated to understand that." --Gay Patriot
They didn’t fess up willingly. But after we applied the appropriate pressure, government officials responsible for operating the Washington D.C. Obamacare “Small Business Exchange” have finally admitted that Congress is taking advantage of health benefits its members and staff are not entitled to claim.
At least 12,359 members of Congress, congressional staffers, and their spouses and dependents currently purchase health insurance in D.C.’s Small Business Exchange even though Congress far exceeds D.C. law’s 50-employee limit for participating in the exchange. That’s why we filed a lawsuit in October on behalf of Kirby Vining, a D.C. taxpayer, against the D.C. Health Exchange Authority. In a court filing, the D.C. government conceded that, under D.C. law, the U.S. Congress is not permitted to obtain insurance through the District’s Small Business Exchange. But members of the political class, true to form, do not believe the rules apply to them. How do we know?Our lawsuit cites applications filed by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate with the D.C. Exchange Authority. The applications, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, show that the House and Senate claimed to have only 45 employees each. They also show that the House and Senate attested to having “50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees.” Congress employs upwards of 20,000 people. D.C. law limits participation in the exchange to small businesses having fewer than 50 full-time employees. The applications also falsely state that the House and Senate are “local/state governments.” The “electronic signature” section of the application includes the following language:
Oligarchy is defined as a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.
The oligarchy is composed of the Democrat and Republican establishments, the media and the financiers, who every four years hire a President.The political system they operate is known as "totalitarian democracy", one in which lawfully elected representatives rule a nation state whose citizens, although granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of government.
The main policy of the American oligarchy is malfeasance, the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law.
Or as Ambrose Bierce, a 19th century political satirist, described Washington D.C. as a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles and the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
How did, for example, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) manage to grow his net worth to $10 million while raising a large family, on a public official's salary, and incurring the expenses associated with maintaining two residences on opposite sides of the country?
According to Peter Schweizer ("Throw them all out: how politicians and their friends get rich off insider stock tips, land deals, and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison"):
Security: In the wake of the Islamist terrorist attack in Paris, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani argues to reinstate a policy cancelled by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has arguably left the city as exposed as it was on Sept. 10, 2001.
Although the Paris terrorist attack by Islamists has not been linked to any mosque, the historical record is dotted with similar attacks that have such links, including the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the Army base in Killeen, Texas, by Maj. Nidal Hasan that killed 13 and wounded 31 as the self-proclaimed "Soldier of Allah" shouted "Allahu Akhbar" (God is great) in a manner similar to the Paris attackers.Hasan's nearly two dozen messages to al-Qaida terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Hasan worshipped, put Hasan on the radar of authorities who, tragically, did not heed the warning signs.
Thinking of mosques as potential hotbeds of the Islamist fanaticism that can fuel terrorist attacks isn't politically correct, yet it's happened.
As we have noted, the Saudi Embassy-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-owned Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Northern Virginia, where Hasan worshipped and al-Awlaki preached, was also where the 9/11 hijackers who led the Pentagon attack got help with housing and IDs.
It was in part that link between the 9/11 terrorists and a mosque that prompted the creation of the NYPD anti-terrorism unit known as the Demographics Unit or Zone Assessment Unit.