Category Archives: Politics

ISIS Camp a Few Miles from Texas, Mexican Authorities Confirm

ISIS Camp a Few Miles from Texas, Mexican Authorities Confirm.

Note: This story is from Judicial Watch and I have no way to check the veracity, but it’s one of those open source reports that surfaces and then the situation in TX last night happens, which makes you think this deserves some deeper investigation. I heard some terrorist expert on CNN today  mention the two gunmen killed as “wanna-be terrorists”, trying to downplay the possible ISIS connection. Now, one could argue that embarking on actually committing a terrorist act makes one, yep, an actual terrorist.

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LB Revisits a Christmas past….

Amazing admissions by Mike Morrell in the Washington Post: “Former CIA official cites agency’s failure to see al-Qaeda’s rebound”

So ridiculous to blame the Arab Spring and rapidly changing events – I’m too disgusted with these way too late admissions to comment a great deal. Any analyst with a brain should have seen the Arab Spring, as a huge destabilization of several governments in rapid succession, with collapsing governments,  through time immemorial creates “POWER VACUUMS” and those who are organized and willing to use force rise to fill them. The American democracy experiment, where thoughtful men met in the aftermath of a revolution to discuss and reach a peaceful consensus on the new government and worried about the rights of individuals, is the exception in history, not the rule. There were some of us who predicted this was the biggest boon to Islamists, who were prepared to seize this opportunity. There was no viable democracy movement in these countries to produce the miracle the Obama administration, the media and starry-eyed analysts waxed on about.

Time for a LB repost from a Christmas past:

December 25, 2012 · 8:12 pm | Edit
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Thoughts on the Arab Spring

Yes, I know it’s Christmas and I’ve already got my Christmas dinner started, so between dashes back to the kitchen to keep dinner moving along I’m going to jot down a few thoughts on why just about everyone in punditry, left, right and in between, gets it wrong on the Arab Spring. The first mistake many people make is what I’ll call cultural relativism, a natural off-shoot of our moral relativism, where we try to replace moral absolutes (i.e. right or wrong) with some ever-shifting sliding scale of excuse-making and finger-pointing of causes.. Once we muddy the water on defining behavior as right or wrong, we quickly get sucked down by underwater currents , akin to swimming in water-filled old quarry holes that abounded where I grew up in rural PA. As years of this muddled thinking spread by that contagion, I’ll refer to as the loons of academia, well, now many people hesitate to take a moral stance on just about any behavior, or they try to rationalize away individual responsibility for bad behavior. That same type of brainwashing on evaluating cultures spread like kudzu took root here in the American South, leading to our present strategic failures. If we start with all cultures are of equal merit and no culture has a superior value system, to better the life of its citizenry, then we end up quickly drowning in this swimming hole of cultural relativism. If we survive, we end up flailing about looking for some sound underpinnings to our understanding of what is going on in the world, what the likely outcomes of unfolding events will be and what these events mean to American interests.

The petals of optimism about the Arab Spring faded quickly, spreading seeds of discontent, disillusion and disconnected reasoning blowing across the strategic plain. Americans like everything fast, not just their cars and food, no, we like fast solutions, even when dealing with conflicts and cultures, dating back two millennia. I’ve read so much about the Arab Spring written by supposed experts on the Middle East, yet sadly most of these pages would serve a more useful purpose lining the bottom of a birdcage to catch the droppings. I’m quickly going to run through a few common fallacies that weave an uneven magic carpet of Arab pipe-dreams. My Christmas ham is happily baking so lets start with Islam (okay, I apologize that wasn’t culturally sensitive). Islam does not mean peace, it means submission to the will of God and obedience to his law. So, in Islam, God’s law is defined by the prophet, Mohammad and every aspect of Islamic culture is defined by this. The concept of separation of church and state falls as an anathema to Islamic teachings. Holding “democratic” elections does not a free, democratic, pluralistic society make. Cultures still steeped in tribal forms can’t jump the arc of historical enlightenment and instantaneously fall at the end, finding Jeffersonian democratic pots of gold. . And a last point is Islam lends itself more easily to autocratic forms of government, because the overwhelming consensus in these countries is that they want sharia law, which sets the stage for a theocracy (hint, that can never be a free, pluralistic society). Even the Puritans who fled persecution in England initially set-up a theocratic form of government and while lots of historians tend to miss this fact, cherry-picking only American themes they like (like how they tried communal living and it failed – strike one against communism in America) , the truth is they weren’t a pluralistic, welcoming group initially. There’s an excellent five-volume set of “The Life of George Washington” written by John Marshall and Volume 1 deals with a very detailed history of America’s founding from the very beginning (long before Washington’s birth). Marshall explains how other Protestants were run out of some Puritan towns, because they didn’t allow free exercise of religion, except for their own. This changed over time, but Catholics faced persecution in other colonies, as did various Protestant sects. So, our religious tolerance wasn’t at the high-water mark at America’s founding. The Marshall series is available for free at amazon.com (here) or volume 1 is at gutenberg.org (here).

So, then we reach the conundrum of why do some countries make successful democratic breakthroughs and others don’t and why are there so few successful democratic breakthroughs. There’s no exact recipe for democratic success, but having the basic mix of vital ingredients (free enterprise, democratic institutions within the society, property rights to list a few) helps increase the odds for success. The Mid-East, except for Israel, has none of the ingredients on hand. Trying to wing it with rhetorical substitutions and pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking won’t produce the desired results. I kept noticing this entrenched belief system when that clamor arose about the Palestinians and all the Jimmy Carteresque blather about holding elections, which led not to joyous democracy, instead it led to the posthaste election of Hamas. Even western-style image makeovers can’t turn a sow’s ear (like Arafat) into a silk purse and we end up with the same old dictators and tyrants. Here’s the best analysis of why the road to free, pluralistic, democratic governance has more potholes and road construction signs than highways in PA. It’s a book (sorry the kindle version isn’t free and the formatting is lacking) titled, “America’s Inadvertent Empire” by the late GEN William Odom and Robert Dujarric. GEN Odom’s wisdom will be sadly missed and I greatly admired him, in fact, I long for generals of his stature (alas, we’ve sunk to the GEN Casey/Petraeus/ Clapper politico types) . As a starting point in getting back on rational strategic terrain, this book maps out an excellent route toward understanding the landmarks to look for along the difficult road toward democracy. These are a few of my thoughts on what’s wrong with our American foreign policy in the Arab world. I’m not an expert on much of anything except needlework and homemaking, so I welcome opinions and comments. Time for Christmas dinner. Merry Christmas everyone!

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, History, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism, The Constitution

The end game

I called this executive branch power grab early, but here it is explained in 31 seconds, by none other than Rev. Al Shaprton, here is the goal:

Sharpton Calls for DOJ to ‘Take Over Policing,’ ‘Going to Have to Fight States’ Rights’

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Seeking American leaders

JK, provided this Baltimore Sun link, “Freddie Gray not the first to come out of Baltimore police van with serious injuries”, which is a report on Baltimore’s history of rough rides in the police van

Kevin Williamson at National Review wrote an excellent overall view of Baltimore corruption  under a Democrat-controlled government – to include the police:  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417601/riot-plagued-baltimore-catastrophe-entirely-democratic-partys-own-making-kevin-d

The Washington Post ran a piece yesterday , “Freddie Gray’s life a study in the sad effects of lead paint on poor blacks”, describing the sad life of Freddie Gray, child of a heroin addict, born into abject poverty.  The article states Freddie Gray and his twin sister suffered from lead poisoning in childhood and includes statements Gray made in a 2009 deposition.

FOXnation has a compilation of Gray’s arrest record: “Freddie Gray Arrest Record, Criminal History & Rap Sheet”

I’m sticking to my big picture working theory that Freddie Gray is a diversion for the black activist bigwigs in collusion with the Obama White House.  Al Sharpton gets more face time with the President it appears than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Fomenting these protests and inciting the rioting is part and parcel of their plan.

Monday night got away from them a bit, so now Al Sharpton is in Baltimore trying to stage manage the show.  Elijah Cummings is in the streets trying to make sure things don’t get out of hand.  To demonstrate my point, there was an absurd interview on FOX News last night where Geraldo was talking to self-identified gang members, asking them if they were going to obey the curfew.  They acted like choir boys, so it struck me that on Monday night the police got a stand down order, and last night the gangs got one from their higher ups.

This is all a big sham, but due to all of America is watching this spectacle and unlike Ferguson, there aren’t any white power figures to blame, the optics are creating difficulties for them.  I suspect it’s all designed to set the stage for a huge federal power grab, where the executive branch tries to seize control of state and local police forces through a new regulatory scheme.  Of course, I’m open to being proved wrong, in fact, I hope I am wrong.

As to what actually happened to Freddie Gray, I don’t have any real facts.  I don’t know definitively anything about his health before the arrest.  I don’t know the details of the van trip to the police station.  There’s a lot of reporting based on leaked information from the police report, which we have no way of fact-checking. Freddie Gray is the little picture in this and his entire life was one of being dealt a terrible hand from the beginning.  Beyond how he died, we should take a long hard look at his life story – it is truly an American tragedy and more than that it’s an American disgrace that so many children in inner-cities live lives of  hopelessness.

Instead of screaming racism or white supremacy, perhaps in America, the land where shared ideals and a can-do attitude built a great nation, we might be able to talk to one another and find a way to rebuild the American team.  It’s long past time to stake out some desperately needed common ground.  How hard is it to find some leaders with character who can win the hearts and minds of young Americans again?   All the shouting back and forth , the political posturing, the grandstanding , new laws, more federal programs won’t fix this problem.  The fight is for America’s soul – we need to find ways to become ONE nation again.

More federal hand out programs won’t solve this.  We need a massive investment of people willing to actually get their hands dirty and help each other.  Here’s an idea, why not recruit military veterans, especially men, to begin a national volunteer organization to mentor young boys and young men in poor communities and teach them leadership skills and team work.  Instead of that idiot reporter blaming war veterans for police violence, perhaps we could utilize all that leadership talent in a nationwide program to provide much needed guidance and direction for so many fatherless boys.  The answers need to come from concerned citizens

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Hillary and the American Future

Hillary Rodham Clinton must never be elected president. Indeed, she must not even be allowed to run for the office. Because her emails may be in Russian, Chinese, and other hands, she is personally compromised. The future of the country sho….

This is the first article I’ve come across (other than my own) openly stating the obvious, that Hillary’s private emails, from her now destroyed private email server, are safely stored in the hands of several countries hostile to US interests – making her (and the US) vulnerable to bribes and extortion.  Due to her own behavior and lack of concern for national security protocols – she presents a huge national security risk.  In a rational country all people employed in top levels of the executive branch would be required to undergo complete background checks and meet standards for security clearances, plus follow all these protocols in the execution of their duties.  a private server in her home, hardly meets the standard of secure.  No one has asked her what measures did she take to keep her server secure from cyber attacks, oh, and the Secret Service protection hardly answers that.  What a lame red herring that line was!  In addition, with this administration, one can only wonder how many political cronies received waivers.  Now, that would be an interesting fact to know…   Heck, in the interest of fairness, I’d like to know how many top level security background checks were waived under the last 5 or 6 presidents.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Hillary's Email Scandal, Politics, ThatWitch2016

The Obama/Black Grievance Community/Arab money connection?

Another amazing connection!  I posted a comment on the The Diplomad 2.0 blog yesterday:

There’s a large organizational structure that is funding, coordinating, facilitating these racial flashpoints, which sure looks to me much like the Van Jones STORM manifesto, pages 53-54…. “Moving the Resistance to Revolution”. Of course, this will be dismissed as just a wild conspiracy theory, but there’s a strange connection between radical black nationalists like Shabazz, the Black Guerrilla Network, the Nation of Islam, where we have Islam melded with black nationalism/gangs and then the neat and clean mouthpieces like Van Jones and his friends in the White House. The thugs in the streets are the sideshow, while a new federal regulatory scheme for all law enforcement is being stealthily advanced. It’s all about seizing control of all levers of power.

libertybelle

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Click your heels, Dorothy

The Wizard of Oz shows us the new yellow brick road, with the roll-out of his new plan. Later today, hopefully, I’ll compile a list of thoughts and links to understand Phase II of the Obama Fundamental Transformation of America Plan, but until then, here’s an appetizer:

Interim Report of the President’s Task Force On 21st Century Policing

I haven’t had time to read it yet, so if you find the executive branch power grabs from the states, please fill us in.  The racial discord is being deliberately ginned up to set the political climate to ram these changes through with public support and little chance for opposition to organize or resist.

As I type this, an evil witch (thatwitch2016), one never to miss an opportunity to pander using a crisis,  speaks offering her own vision to unite America.

Beware, just click your heels, Dorothy, and repeat after me, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”  ….

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A digital dot to connect

A digital trail: “Social media analysis suggests links between Baltimore and Ferguson violence”. from Catherine Herridge, FOX News

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Building trust: The high road for America

Once again in the news there’s another “peaceful protest” organized by various black activist organizations that’s turned violent.  This time it’s Baltimore, MD.  The Last Refuge blog extensively chronicles what they term the “black grievance industry” and noted the alarming ISIS hand signs being flashed by some protestors at the latest rally.  To really understand the spreading mayhem, I recommend reading:  STORM Handbook: “Reclaiming The Revolution (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement)”  – Published in Spring 2004.   Van Jones, one time Obama nominee to be the Special Advisor on green jobs and avowed Marxist, was one of the key architects of this STORM movement.    Valerie Jarrett, sitting right in the White House, has been a long-time Van Jones supporter.

With escalating racial tensions and ramped up attacks against the police and white people in general, don’t believe that the protests are in reaction to specific incidents.  In my opinion, what’s going on is black activist organizations, quite effectively, are using the STORM playbook to fundamentally transform America.  Along the road, many less radical groups and Americans will be duped into believing the rhetoric, but these will be just more useful idiots, who will be discarded when the “resistance” boils over to the “revolution” stage .  The press will be fed a diet of misinformation to keep them in line too.

To me, the most heartbreaking sight in this ongoing attempt to overthrow the system was seeing a photo of a little girl holding a sign: “Police, Public Enemy #1”  Rest assured, fomenting distrust and racial hatred are, part and parcel, at the heart of the Van Jones and his Marxist friends’ plan.  Most of America will be on the sidelines, because they are deliberately instigating their revolution within America’s failed inner-cities. This general plan of destroying America by creating a race war isn’t anything new, it’s been around decades and used by both white supremacist groups and black activists, using the same old divide and conquer strategy, that’s been around for millennia.  Spreading hate and distrust is the name of the game.  Sadly, we don’t see many Americans trying to bridge the racial divides by doing what it takes to defeat hate.  You’ve got to reach out a hand, refuse to hate and talk to each other.   Yep, we need leaders who will rise above the political posturing and work to build trust between all Americans.

I suggest reading the entire STORM handbook, but here’s where I think they’re at in their plan (pages 53-54):

Moving from Resistance to Revolution

Our commitment to communist politics didn’t give us any easy answers
about what we should be doing to advance a revolutionary movement
in this country. Other organizations with a Marxist analysis seemed to lack a practical program for building the kind of power needed to win
our people’s liberation.

Several of these communist groups emphasized the immediate building of the revolutionary vanguard party. They thought the party should
prepare to seize power when the people “spontaneously” rise up
during imperialism’s inevitable crises. We believed that these groups
had badly misassessed the real state of imperialism and of social
movements. They prematurely anticipated a peoples’ uprising (which
we didn’t see on the immediate horizon) while underestimating the
importance and difficulty of building power in oppressed communities
to lay the groundwork for future uprisings.

Other communist organizations – and many individual activists – were
questioning the possibility of a revolutionary movement ever succeed
-ing. They emphasized immersion in unions and mass struggles to the
exclusion of intentional work to develop a revolutionary movement.

We wanted an approach that resolved the contradiction between the
need for building immediate (and inevitably reform-based) power in
disorganized oppressed communities on the one hand and the need to
lay the ground work for the long-term development of a revolutionary
movement on the other.

To resolve this tension, STORM developed an innovative analysis about
the role of revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary historical period. We
called it “Moving from Resistance to Revolution.”

We concluded that the current period is one of “resistance,” not one
of “revolution.” We thought that the main work of revolutionaries at
such times should be to build resistance fights. These fights would build
power and consciousness in oppressed communities. But revolutionar
-ies must design and craft this “resistance work” so as to help lay the
foundation for the long-term development of a revolutionary move
-ment. As “conscious forces,” we thought that revolutionaries should
work intentionally to help the resistance movement mature into a
revolutionary one.

This “Moving from Resistance to Revolution” framework was STORM’s
attempt to negotiate the contradiction between reformism and ultra-

STORM’s Points of Unity
STORM’s primary unity was around the need for the “liberation and
solidarity for all oppressed people.” For us, this meant that our vision
had to draw on different progressive and revolutionary traditions in
order to address the different forms of oppression facing our people.
As we crafted our second Points of Unity document, six ideas formed
the core of a new, more robust political unity in the group:

  • Revolutionary Democracy:
    the belief that our movement
    will have to replace the falsely-democratic capitalist state with
    a truly democratic people’s government.
  • Revolutionary Feminism:
    the belief that women’s oppression is fundamental to this society and that we have to place
    “Sisters at the Center” of our struggle.
  • Revolutionary Internationalism:
    “the belief that white supremacy is a critical force impacting world politics, and tha
    Third World communities – inside and outside of the United
    States – along with white anti-racist allies need to work in
    solidarity build the power we need to overthrow the global
    system of white supremacy.
  • Central Role of the Working Class:
    the belief that, in order to defeat capitalism and other forms of oppression, the
    working class will have to play the central role in the revolutionary struggle.
  • Urban Marxism:
    the belief that the urban space was now
    the central site of revolutionary struggle, just as the factory
    and the point of production were in the days of Karl Marx.
  • Third World Communism:drawing on the revolutionary communist traditions from Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the recognition of the need for a disciplined revolutionary party rooted among oppressed people.

STORM believed that there were three main strategic tasks facing
revolutionaries in this non-revolutionary period: building an advance-
guard organization, promoting revolutionary ideas and building revolutionary people’s power.

We believed that we needed to help lay the groundwork for an
advance-guard organization to emerge as a future, more powerful form
of revolutionary political organization. Such an organization could help
promising militants to develop as revolutionaries. It could help mass
organizations develop practically and ideologically. And it could develop
and promote lessons and theories from the movement’s experience.

We also believed that it was the task of revolutionaries to promote
revolutionary ideas among oppressed and exploited people. As we did
this, we thought four methods of work would provide the best results:
“observation and participation” (gleaned from our study of the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense); “the mass line” (as described by Mao
Tse-tung); structured “political education”; and consistent “criticism/
self criticism” to help us constructively evaluate our individual and
group work (this we drew from both Mao and Amilcar Cabral).

Finally, we believed that revolutionaries had to build revolutionary people’s
power. We saw “mass organizations” – fighting organizations made
up of members of the oppressed and exploited sectors of society – as
the key to building this power. We believed that these organizations
would be the main instruments of change in the survival struggles of
this reform period. And, if revolutionaries could successfully use and
develop a revolutionary organizing model, these organizations would
become the main engines of the revolutionary peoples’ struggle.

We believed that these three areas of work would lay the foundation
for a transition from the current reform period into a more intense
stage of the revolutionary struggle

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To snark or not to snark?

Advice, advice, well, here’s a National Review piece by Larry Kudlow:

“Snarking Hillary Is Not the Way to the White House”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417482/snarking-hillary-not-way-white-house-larry-kudlow

I guess it’s safe to say, I am not on the way to the White House, rofl.  Larry Kudlow warns GOP candidates:
“Snarking your way to the presidency is not likely to happen. And if you go that route, slamming Hillary at every turn, you’re going to lose female voters, minority voters, and young voters — constituencies that the GOP desperately needs to win. It might even help Hillary.”

Of course, Kudlow goes on to warn GOP candidates to present a positive message with details of plans to promote economic growth and positive foreign relations, which sounds good, but in the meantime the Clinton machine will work to caricature all the GOP candidates – using all the snarky attacks they can muster.  Admittedly, it’s a tricky one-way street for male candidates to travel when competing against a female opponent, where the most innocuous gesture can be turned into shrill cries of “sexism”or “ageism”, neatly allowing the smartest woman in the world (who utters more “ums” than any meaningful policy ideas) to opine she’s a “victim” of that omnipresent vast right-wing conspiracy….. again.    Perhaps, Kudlow is right, but for the rest of us not running for President, why pass up on snarking, after all, look how quickly a full-throated snark attack turned Sarah Palin into a synonym for “bimbo”….  Ahhh yes, you’ve got to love the enlightened political left and how they rise above anything as low as outright “sexism”…..

For the rest of us, not in the race, Twitter and blogs most assuredly will snark away, as one good snark inspires another:

Guy Benson
‏@guypbenson

Queen Pro Quo #ReadyForHillary

I like that better than having to call her Broomstick One.

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