Douglas Murray with Michael Coren: Islam-Europe is Confused and Lost

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No Islamofascism
Nowhere Nowhere

Douglas Murray’s Views on Multiculturalism

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Douglas Murray On Multiculture

Douglas Murray – Terrorism, Charity, Hamas, Tuition Fees

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Douglas Murray – Jobs, Alcohol, Tuition Fees & Olympics

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Douglas Murray atomises Tariq Ramadan

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Version sous-titrée en français visible ici : http://extremecentre.org/2011/09/15/douglas-murray-atomise-tariq-ramadan/

Voici comment l’écrivain britannique Douglas Murray atomisait Tariq Ramadan, le 28 février dernier, à l’occasion d’un débat sur la construction de mosquées à Athènes, organisé conjointement par le British Council et l’Intelligence Squared Greece (IQ2). Un grand moment à savourer sans modération. Boudiou que c’est bon !

Douglas Murray – Profile at The Henry Jackson Society

Associate Director
douglas.murray[at]henryjacksonsociety.org
+44 (0) 207 340 4520
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Douglas Murray is the Associate Director at the Henry Jackson Society, having joined in April 2011. He previously founded the Centre for Social Cohesion, a think tank studying extremism and terrorism in the UK. A bestselling author and award-winning political commentator, Douglas is a columnist for Standpoint and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Spectator and Wall Street Journal. A prolific debater, Douglas has spoken on a variety of prominent platforms, including at the British and European Parliaments and the White House. He has authored books on neoconservatism, terrorism and national security as well as on freedom of speech. His latest book, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, was published in November 2011.

See all of Douglas Murray’s work

Media Experience: Extensive – across all BBC platforms, including Question Time and Newsnight; Sky News; Al-Jazeera; Fox News

Expertise: Middle East, specifically Israel and Iran; National security and defence; US and UK foreign policy; Northern Ireland; terrorism; domestic radicalisation; multiculturalism

Current Project: Iran; Israel & NATO

Publications and Analysis

• Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections, Henry Jackson Society, July 7, 2011

External Publications

• Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech within Europes Muslim Communities – Centre for Social Cohesion
• Hate on the State: How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism – Centre for Social Cohesion

Selected Articles

• Push off now, Press TV, and take your conspiracy theories with you, Spectator, January 20, 2012
• Ignore European Court and Deport Abu Qatada Now, , January 18, 2012
• Hague’s misplaced optimism, Spectator, January 13, 2012
• After Spring, Winter, Spectator, November 26, 2011
• St. Paul’s Occupied Cathedral, The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2011
• The paucity of the “99 per cent”, Spectator, October 30, 2011
• The End of a Delusion, Spectator, October 22, 2011
• Pro-Israel? Time for a British media Fox hunt, The Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 2011
• Must all conservatives answer for the actions of a psychopath?, Spectator, August 8, 2011
• Phone-hacking debate in the Commons: panel verdict, The Guardian, July 6, 2011
• Britain’s line on Israel is a cover for its impotence, The Jewish Chronicle, June 16, 2011
• Rights of terrorists suspects have now overtaken those of the general public, The Telegraph, February 3, 2011
• A Bonus Bonanza for Enemy Combatants, The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2010

Video on the UN Durban Conference:

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The New York Times has gone all in for Islamic infiltration and the stealth jihad. By now, we have all come to expect an outpouring of hard-left/pro-jihadi/anti-Semitic/anti-Christian propaganda flooding the Anglosphere from not only the New York Times, but also the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, NPR, the CBC in Canada, the BBC and the Guardian in the UK, the ABC in Australia, the AP and Reuters wire services…the list seems endless.

We are so used to it that too few people bother to complain any more as the naked anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic enemy propaganda in the NYT grows ever louder.

Is The NYT’s Agenda to Normalize Islam in the West?

by Phyllis Chesler
Israel National News
January 25, 2012

On a single day, the New York Times has been known to publish anywhere from two to six anti-Israel articles, editorials, op-ed pieces, and letters. Today, I see a new danger arising in their pages.

After spending a year proclaiming the triumph of democracy and the miracle of the Arab Spring and, as PM Netanyahu has just noted, refusing to document the existential danger in which Israel finds herself, the Newspaper of Record has now begun the process of normalizing Islam in North America and Europe. Its pro-Muslim “multicultural” agenda is, paradoxically, another form of racism, but I quibble.

Yesterday, there were at least three articles (3,200 words, four photos, one illustration), devoted to Islam in America and Europe. A 934-word op-ed article titled “How to Integrate Europe’s Muslims” by a Boston College professor is a veritable manifesto of appeasement and racism disguised as a rational call for integration and fairness. Jonathan Laurence suggests that Muslims will be “integrated” into Europe if they are allowed to study Islam at state-sponsored schools, continue their Muslim religious practices, veil women, speak Arabic, Persian, Dari, etc. In his view, this will fend off “fundamentalism” and magically lead to reciprocity in terms of tolerance towards infidels and apostates and to the abolition of Islamic gender and religious apartheid.

According to Canadian professor and author, Dr. Salim Mansur, multiculturalism and the appeasement of tribalism defeats the possibility of citizenship and amounts to a form of “soft bigotry.” As Pascal Bruckner has phrased it: “Multiculturalism is the racism of the anti-racists; it chains people to their roots.” Immigrants are kept confined to their “group” and not encouraged or expected to become “individuals” and “citizens” of a modern democracy.

As we may all recall, the 2011 Goldstone recantation did not make the front page of the NYT; it was buried on page 8. But today, a 1,200 word article, entitled “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims” is on page one. It continues on page 23 with two photos and it takes up 3/4^th of the second page. The article condemns the use of the film, The Third Jihad, as a “training” device for 1,489 police officers. What is so offensive about this film, which is narrated by a (truly) moderate Muslim, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician and former American military officer? First the film has been funded by Orthodox Jews and Zionists (horrors!). Second, it dares suggest that Muslims have launched a war against the West, a “third jihad.” And, there is “ominous” music. Then “Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, children lie covered by sheets…”

Is this reporter unfamiliar with the persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority countries and with the Islamic terrorist attacks against Muslim and infidel civilians and against Western military and civilian targets?

…There is an Islamic/Islamist war that has been declared against the West as well as against both Muslim and infidel civilians, but it is one that the Paper of Record refuses to acknowledge, or to fight or win.
[...]
Why have papers likes the Times become so obsessed with protecting the religious rights of one single minority group at the expense of every other religious group, including members of moderate and anti-Islamist Islam, and at the expense of women, who represent approximately 53% of the world’s population? Are they, too, possibly being funded by leftists and by Arab oil magnates? Or, do they simply hope to be?

Just wondering.

Read it all here.

What about the one network in the US, namely Fox News, that so many rely on to present conservative voices when no other network will? Those days may be gone soon. Last September (see Fox News “Fair and Balanced”? Bzzzzzt, WROOOOONG!), I challenged its undeserved reputation as a “conservative” and/or even-handed news outlet. More recently, Speranza of 2.0: The Blogmocracy also asked, Is Fox News heading left? Indeed, on Fox News, we are hearing fewer and fewer of those voices, and more and more apologists from the left.

I have had no further use for Glenn Beck after he openly began to shill for that amoral and self-serving RINO candidate, Mitt Romney. That said, if George Soros has the power to censor a major television network and cause him to be fired, that is truly dismaying. The audience of Fox News should determine, through their ratings and their patronage of advertisers, whether Glenn Beck continues to be offered a spot in its lineup.

How George Soros Sacked Glenn Beck

by Cliff Kincaid on 19 Oct 2011
A recent interview of Fox News chief Roger Ailes by Howard Kurtz suggested that the channel is becoming less conservative by design. The real question, not addressed in the piece, is whether the relentless attacks on the channel by George Soros-funded groups have anything to do with this change in the direction of the popular channel and the demise of the Glenn Beck program in particular.

On Glenn Beck’s new TV program, carried on the Internet, Beck himself seemed to indicate this was the case. Talking about Orson Wells, his career, vision and his “Citizen Kane” movie, Beck said, “One of the biggest things [he taught me was] he picked a lot of ill-advised fights, sometimes risking his entire career against titans of industry. It did occur to me recently maybe I should have considered that little part of his life a little more before I locked horns with George Soros.”1 The implication is that Beck’s battle with Soros left him without a job on Fox News.

If this is the case, then we have reached a point in the United States when a private individual has obtained the power to prevent the most popular cable news channel in the country from subjecting his financial and political influence to scrutiny. It is important to see how this was done.

In fairness, Fox has covered Soros after the end of the Beck program. But Beck was doing so in a systematic manner by devoting whole shows to the topic. The sheer magnitude of organizations financially supported by the billionaire makes such an analysis necessary. That is what America’s Survival, Inc. we are doing through our Sorosfiles.com project.
[...]
Beck, who had one of the most successful programs on the channel, left Fox News on July 1, 2011, and launched his own Internet TV show, which appears to be a success in terms of paid subscribers. But some are saying that its influence pales in comparison to the perch that Beck had on Fox News. Clearly, the “progressives” who feared Beck were far more concerned about his Fox News Channel program than his Internet venture.

At the recent “Take Back the American Dream Conference,” held October 3-5. 2011, in Washington, D.C., former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones claimed that Beck wasn’t on television any more. He said this in the context of admitting that his exit from the Obama Administration, in response to charges made by blogger Trevor Loudon and Beck and others, had been a traumatic time for him.

In fact, of course, Beck is on television, albeit Internet TV. But the point was that Beck was gone from cable television, which was much more of a powerful position in terms of the resources he was able to bring to bear to expose figures like Jones. It is a sign of Beck’s declining influence that Jones was rehabilitated and emerged at the conference as director of the “Take Back the American Dream” movement.

As Howard Kurtz told the story, there has been a “course correction” at Fox News and that the change was “quietly adopted at Fox over the last year” because of the problem posed by the “inflammatory rhetoric” of Glenn Beck, such as “his ranting about Obama being a racist.” Ailes was quoted as saying that this had become a “a bit of a branding issue for us.”

There was no ranting from Beck on this topic. His comments were based in part on Obama’s own statements on racial issues, such as his attack on the police for arresting a black professor, Henry Louis Gates. Obama called the police “stupid,” without knowing the facts about Gates’ obnoxious behavior.

The implication is that Beck was fired – technically a deal was reached in which Fox News said Beck would “transition off” the channel – because of charges that Beck was a racist. But Beck had accused Obama of racism in the summer of 2009 and lost his show over a year later. Something must have happened in the meantime. That “something” was that Beck picked a different target – billionaire George Soros.

It’s true that Beck had been the subject of an advertiser boycott, organized by a group called “Color of Change,” founded by Van Jones, but he still had the number three show in cable news. Howard Kurtz reported Beck still had “monster ratings.”
[...]
Much, much more here.

Glenn Beck Staff Threatened by Soros Operatives

Private Investigator says Beck Staff Threatened by Soros Operatives; News Corporation Failed to Protect Employees, Forcing Beck’s Ouster
…[Cliff] Kincaid recently learned of a private investigator, Douglas J. Hagmann, with information that the Soros role in Beck’s ouster was deeper and more insidious than previously realized. In order to further the public’s right to know as to how the First Amendment right of freedom of the press is being manipulated and subverted by covert forces in U.S. politics, Kincaid asked Hagmann, who is the CEO of Hagmann Investigative Services, Inc., and director of the Northeast Intelligence Network for permission to pass on this information. He has agreed, as long as the identities of the sources of information are deleted. There are several sources with information about strange goings-on at News Corporation in regard to the Glenn Beck matter, in which the most vulnerable of the news channel staff members have come under pressure not to report certain facts and information about President Obama personally. But Hagmann says the tipping point in the matter of Glenn Beck leaving the channel came when Beck began a series of programs on Soros, labeled by Beck the “Puppet Master” behind Obama and the progressive movement.

Hagmann informed Kincaid of the following:

“One of my sources, beginning in the first part of 2011, told me that the corporate leadership of News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) began to put pressure on Glenn Beck — and especially his support staff — about certain topics that were considered ‘off limits.’ This source stated that Beck was advised not to focus on George Soros, as there were certain fiduciary relationships he was not privy to between Soros and either News Corporation or one or more of their board members/corporate staff.”

Hagmann went on, “I was informed that News Corporation and/or Fox News Channel officers actually had a meeting with Soros representatives, during which company officials were advised to stop subjecting Soros to on-air scrutiny. This pressure eventually forced Beck off the air, as the Fox News Channel personality became concerned about the physical safety and security of his own personnel.”

Hagmann added that his sources stated that it was Beck’s concern over the safety of certain staff members, the most vulnerable and exposed among them, who were being overtly intimidated. He stated that one young woman, who became a primary source after being vetted and determined to be credible, was genuinely afraid, not only for her career but for her life and the life of her child. It was surreal, she told Hagmann, that she could be subjected to intimidation through surveillance and veiled threats because of her position to Glenn Beck. At some point, Hagmann added, it appeared Mr. Beck knew he could protect himself and his family, but not everyone involved in the program. “I strongly suspect, based on my professional experience as an investigator for the last 26 years, that Mr. Beck made a tremendous career sacrifice for the safety of others. That speaks volumes about Mr. Beck’s integrity, character and concern for others,” added Hagmann.

ASI President Cliff Kincaid said that investigator Hagmann’s information, while non-specific at this point because of concerns over revealing the identities of sources, is extremely troubling, as it concerns the ability of the American people to get access to information of a critical nature…

Read it all here.

Also see:

• Manufactured Anger Over Islamo-realistic Film Designed to Whack NYPD Into Dhimmitude
• ‘The Third Jihad’ Producers Reply to New York Times Articles

Massive opposition research file on Romney hits Internet, likely from 2008 McCain campaign

If you think you’ve already heard everything there is to know about Mitt Romney, think again. A 200-page document that appears to be Sen. John McCain’s entire 2008 election-year opposition research file on the former Massachusetts governor hit the Internet with a vengeance Tuesday evening. And it’s an eye-opener.

The file explores everything from the assessed value of Romney’s house (“$3.162 million”) to his views on the Boy Scouts’ ban of homosexuals (“publicly opposed … in 1994 and 2002 campaigns”). It was made public Tuesday on the social media website Buzzfeed, although it appears to have been accessible online for two months.

The document, given the name “The Romney Book,” was viewed less than 100 times on the page where it was originally uploaded by its anonymous leaker on November 11.

Neither McCain nor his former presidential campaign staffers have authenticated the untitled document, and McCain’s recent endorsement of Romney makes that highly unlikely. Still, the file is comprehensive enough — even by Washington, D.C. opposition-research standards — to suggest that it was assembled as a tool to counter a Romney candidacy on a national scale. And the news articles it references stop late in 2007.
[...]
More here.

Link: McCain 2008 Oppo File on Mitt Romney (PDF)

We have hosted a copy of this file on 1389 Blog. Click the above link to view or download.

John Ransom: Romney’s Crony Capitalism Problem

[...]
While the GOP establishment has been busy denouncing Newt as promoting “class warfare” by his attacks on Mitt and Bain, they’ve missed the bigger picture issue that rank and file GOP voters have responded to: Mitt Romney’s experience doesn’t make him the anti-Obama. Rather, Mitt’s Wall Street past, combined with his record as governor of Massachusetts, represent the alliance between government and business that has led to runaway spending no matter which side has been in power.

Sure, Washington is to blame for most of the mess, but Wall Street has been complicit too. Behind every Solyndra loan was a commercial bank- in Solyndra’s case the Federal Financing Bank- that benefited from the risk free- for them- loans. Behind the financing of every budget deficit are more fees for Wall Street.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They operated as a giant Ways and Means committee for Wall Street to off-load America’s housing risk on to the government. To be sure, Wall Street was just maximizing profits, as it’s supposed to. But is Romney the guy who’s going to shut down the Combine between business and government?

This from Scott Rasmussen:

While Romney would hope to position himself as a defender of free market competition, he is potentially vulnerable on the topic because only 35 percent of Americans believe that capitalism and a free market economy are the same thing. Candidate Romney, like many Republicans, tends to use the terms interchangeably. That’s dangerous when 39 percent of voters nationwide believe the country has a system of crony capitalism, while only 34 percent believe free market capitalism is practiced. The rest aren’t sure.

 Interestingly, this is one issue with very little partisan divide. Republican, Democrats and unaffiliated voters hold similarly skeptical views. Seven out of 10 Americans believe that big government and big business work together against the rest of us. Voters don’t mind businesses getting big; they just mind when the government gives them an unfair advantage over others.

Like what happened in Romneycare.

“What motivated Romney to enact RomneyCare, as former Romney/Obama adviser Jonathan Gruber explains here,” writes Cato’s healthcare policy expert Michael Cannon, “was the widespread desire (within Massachusetts) to hang on to $385 million of federal Medicaid money that Massachusetts had secured using one of Medicaid’s notorious and fraudulent “provider tax” scams.  In other words, the whole purpose of RomneyCare was to enable Massachusetts to hold on to $385 million that it received by defrauding and taxing residents of other states.  And of course, Romney/RomneyCare caused the tax burden that Massachusetts effectively imposes on non-Massachusetts residents to grow.”

When Romneycare was crafted there were people sitting around a table talking about healthcare, but they weren’t talking about cancer, or broken bones. They were talking about money. You got it and they want more of it, risk free in the same way they off-loaded risk in the housing sector.

While other parts of the economy are struggling, the healthcare sector is approaching all-time highs as represented by the S&P healthcare Select Sector fund. Romneycare and Obamacare, as seen in the chart below, have created an artificial floor for healthcare investments, protecting investors in a way that investors in the S&P 500, for example, don’t enjoy.

(Chart courtesy Yahoo! Finance)

The sooner we separate Washington from Wall Street, the better. And Romney is the only GOP candidate who forfeits the moral high ground in that argument to Obama. Any other GOP candidate will be able to credibly chastise Obama for the crony capitalism practiced by the left. But not Romney.

GOP voters, thankfully, haven’t been gulled into believing that every investor automatically qualifies as a free market capitalist- see Buffett, Warren and Soros, George. Voters are rightly saying that they are not sure that being a venture capitalist qualifies one, per se, to be president anymore than being a community organizer does; especially when one factors in Mitt’s historic socialization of healthcare in Massachusetts.

For GOP voters you can’t find a bigger attack on free markets or a stronger case of crony capitalism and government than that which Romneycare represents.
[...]
Read it all here.

A minor quibble about the term “crony capitalism”:

As I just finished pointing out, the term “crony capitalism” is nothing more than a euphemism for government pork-barrel corruption. It is not about “capitalism” at all; it’s about buying votes, endorsements, campaign contributions, and other advantages through government spending and regulations that favor well-connected individuals and firms over everyone else. Whether it’s legal or not, it’s bad for America and it’s wrong, and Tea Party conservatives want no part of it.

The “New Class Elite” demographic that Obama relies on for campaign funds are the mortal enemies of America’s middle class and working poor.

This leftist/pro-jihadi/radical-eco elite are the ones perpetrating class warfare, and they consider themselves accountable to no one. As members of this elite see it, their quality of life and, indeed, their continued existence, depend on their use of government power to deny opportunities to the rest of us. They have become America’s Soviet-style nomenklatura.

They are killing the American Dream.

Volokh Conspiracy: The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility

Kenneth Anderson • October 31, 2011 11:27 am
Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay. The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.” [emphasis added]

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google. [emphasis added]

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors. It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined. As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two. As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first – but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy. Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access. [emphasis added]
[...]
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets — leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents — to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified — to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide — access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism. [emphasis added]

“Crony capitalism” is nothing more than a euphemism for government pork-barrel corruption. “Green jobs” were a scam from the get-go. For just one example, see: Big Government: George Soros Helped Craft Stimulus, Then Invested in Companies Benefiting.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
[...]
Read it all here.

Neither the working poor, nor the middle class, are to blame for perpetrating class warfare during the run-up to the 2012 elections. The blame for that belongs to Barack Hussein Obama and his many supporters among the leftist power elite:

Rush: Obama Publicly Writes Off White, Working Class Voters as Advertisement to His Base

December 01, 2011

RUSH: James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal. He’s got a great blog called The Best of the Web Today, and he wrote about this yesterday.

This New York Times story, this column by Thomas Edsall on Monday where the regime, the Obama campaign says to white working class families: We’re not interested in your votes; we don’t care. Now, Taranto’s point yesterday was (summarized): “Okay, fine. If after election strategery, why advertise it? Why talk about it? Why assign one of your minions to go out and write an op-ed about it in the New York Times? Why get people like Limbaugh talking about this?” And, frankly, it’s a great point, and I, El Rushbo, I must admit, I hadn’t considered that angle. I did raise a question: Imagine if the Republicans had done something similar. Imagine if whoever the Republican nominee is, after securing the nomination, says, “You know what? To hell with the Hispanic vote! We don’t care. We’re not interested in it. We’re gonna win this election without them.” Can you imagine the hell that would rain down on the Republican Party and that nominee?

Here you’ve got an assigned editorial, no doubt from the White House or Plouffe or whoever is running the campaign for Obama. They put it in the op-ed page of the New York Times, which guarantees it gets out. It guarantees it gets discussed just like remember that picture of Hillary and Bill dancing on the beach down at the Virgin Islands somewhere in their swimsuits a couple of weeks before the Monica Lewinsky story hit? The picture ran in one paper. It ran on the cover of the LA Times. At the press briefing somebody stands up and asks McCurry, “Wa, wa, what’s the story behind that picture?”

Everybody said, “What picture?”

That’s how they got it out. They wanted that picture out, and it was later discovered that Bill and Hillary were dancing with no music. The whole thing was staged just like the rocks on the beached at Normandy. It was all staged. So here you have this guy Thomas Edsall, he used to write to for the Washington Post, now writes for the Huffing and Puffington Post, and whatever liberal publication will have him. He’s out there saying, “We’re gonna win this election without white working-class voters.” Why advertise it? Why advertise that? Well, the theory to explain it, the theory in answer to the question is that Obama’s in such bad shape with his base that that’s how he’s going to rally them.

He is in such bad shape, they’ve got to roll the dice. In order to secure the base — the takers, the people who aren’t doing diddly-squat, the people who have been made dependent on government for everything — he has to run against the bitter clingers; keeping his coalition of artists and professors and professor assistants, so forth, all that intact (plus the 47% that don’t pay taxes and all the people on welfare to one degree or another). The theory is that it’s so bad you advertise that as a way of getting the minorities that make up your base locked in. It’s another example of division, of course: Promoting hatred, resentment, envy, all of that.

Now, you stop and think of it. Insane? It is. I’ve thought it’s stupid from the get-go. I never did understand why advertise it. That was part of my incredulity. I just never expressed it ’til I saw Taranto wrote about it, but that was the one thing about it that had me curious. Aside from the act itself. I mean, the idea that they really don’t think they can win if they pursue policies that will be supported by white working class voters? Imagine that, just by itself, and then they go out and advertise it.

More here.

Environmentalism has turned out to be not only a scam and a vehicle for corruption and government tyranny, but also one more club that the leftist elite can use to hit the middle class and working poor over the head. After all, they are not the ones who will be freezing in the dark.

Spectator: Environmentalism and the Leisure Class

By William Tucker on 1.20.12 @ 6:08AM
[...]
This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The decision did not win him one new vote but was crucial in protecting his environmental flank. The movie stars and Sierra Club contributors were getting restless and had drawn the line in the sand.

In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer. [emphasis added]

Environmentalism has spent three decades trying to hide this simple truth. How can environmentalists be motivated by self-interest when they are anti-business? Doesn’t that align them with the working classes? Well, not quite. You can be anti-business as a union member trying to claim higher wages but you can also be anti-business as a member of the aristocracy who believes “trade” and “commercialism” are crass and not attuned to the higher things in life. Environmentalism is born from the latter, not the former. It has spent decades trying to pretend it has common cause with the working people. With the defeat of the Keystone Pipeline, this is no longer possible. Too many blue-collar and middle-class jobs have been sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions and global warming.

In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time — born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun’s rays.

My story in Harper’s was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.

Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’ spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Throughout the campaign Scenic Hudson insisted they were not opposed to electricity but only this particular way of generating it…What became obvious, however, was that at bottom they were opposed to everything. Industrial progress itself was the enemy…

What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is justly famous for coining “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste,” there is a lesser-known chapter entitled “Industrial Exemption” that perfectly describes the environmental zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to embrace any further industrial progress… [emphasis added]

My article generated 150 letters, including a response from a member of the Federal Power Commission who said that construction of new power plants wasn’t necessary. I was often criticized, however, for claiming only affluent people are concerned about the environment. The one response I ever got from the press was in the middle of Three Mile Island when National Public Radio called to ask, “What do you say about all those farmers worried about radiation? They’re not aristocrats, are they?”

But that was not the point. It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, “We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine.” [emphasis added]

Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves as purveyors of “green jobs.” But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the “two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In-Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life. [emphasis added]

It’s going to be very difficult to erase that line during the election.

Read it all here.

Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by BattleBornPAC on Mar 18, 2009
Barack Obama: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (January 2008)
http://www.BattleBornPAC.com

Update: Great minds think alike…

• Jeffrey Klein: Obama Preventing Our Catalyst to Exit Recession Now
  (h/t: Noisy Room)

  President Obama’s refusing to permit the Keystone XL Pipeline last week has nothing to do with “environmental concerns” arising from it crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything to do with an even more sinister agenda that could keep the middle class in economic straits for a generation or more.

  First, he wants to keep [fossil fuel] energy prices high, according to Thomas J. Pyle, CEO of the American Energy Alliance, in his January 20, 2012 FOXNews article.

  “The reality at the White House has nothing to do with protecting the environment — it’s about reinforcing a myth of energy scarcity on the United States and driving up the price of energy…

  Read it all here.

• Sultan Knish: Food Fights and Class Warfare
  

  …Conspicuous conservationism has made America a poorer country, destroyed millions of jobs and outsourced them overseas. Now it’s beginning to make America a hungrier country. In a moment of horrifying tone deafness that makes Marie Antoinette seem enlightened, the left is cheering that fewer Americans are eating meat, without seeming to understand that it’s because fewer Americans are able to afford it because of their economic policies.

  What the left’s food police can’t accomplish with nudges and shaming, they can finish off with policies and regulations that end up raising the price of food or by making it too difficult to sell. As the left tries and fails to sell the general public on conservation as a status symbol, it moves in the heavy bureaucratic artillery.

  It isn’t unusual for elites to use the legal system to enforce their own values on the general public, though it was the kind of thing that the universal franchise was supposed to put a leash on, but there is something grim about their growing preoccupation with the habits and mortality of the population. It’s the kind of concern that has a habit of ending in eugenics and the more medicine is universalized, the easier it is to start cutting off access to medical treatment for those who haven’t been nudged far enough in the right direction.

  Social medicine politicizes food consumption and a globalized economy politicizes food production. And the politicized American plate has less on it and at a higher price. While the left obsessively pursues its mission of destroying fast food in the name of lowering social medicine costs and being fairer to farmers, what they are truly accomplishing is to take affordable and filling food off the shelves, as they have done with countless other products that they have targeted.

  By the time the left was done with Russia, it had gone from a wheat producer to a wheat importer and many basic food staples were hard to come by even in a country filled with collective farms. Finding modern day examples of that isn’t hard. We only have to look as far south as Venezuela to see empty store shelves under the weight of government food policies. But one day that may be the local grocery store if the left gets its way.

  Read it all here.

• Angelo M. Codevilla: America’s Ruling Class – and the Perils of Revolution
  

  As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

  When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

  Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

  Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

  Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

  Read it all here.

Pay To Play

Mitt Romney’s organization contributed to GOP candidates in 2010 to buy their endorsements in 2012. That means everyone who ran in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate and then endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 is a sellout, a political prostitute, a turncoat, and a fraud.

And that’s just the beginning.

Not Romney

(h/t: no2liberals)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by shellymic on Jan 17, 2012

***WARNING – SOME FOUL LANGUAGE***
http://nebraskattitude.blogspot.com/2012/01/not-romney-video.html

If you still support Mitt after watching this, you should be stripped of your right to vote.

Conservatives will not vote for this FRAUD. Anyone who thinks that the FRAUD that is Willard “Mitt” Romney is a Conservative, is ignorant. TEA Partiers who ever supported this FRAUD should be embarrassed by their support of him. You are not a TEA Partier if you vote for Mitt.

Mitt should not be president. Ever. No matter how bad he wants to be.

Ann Barnhardt is the gal in the video. She was the driving force behind the making of this video.
Here’s the link to her original video: Barnhardt – Romney Go Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBXe3Kvg-qU (41,175 views as of right now.)
Ann Barnhardt’s YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AnnBarnhardt
Ann’s Blog:
http://barnhardt.biz/
About Ann:
“‘Going Galt’: Hedge Broker Shuts Down Firm With Chilling Letter About The Market”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/going-galt-hedge-broker-shuts-down-firm-with-…
[...]
Get to Know Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzrZX528nQ
PROOF: Mitt Romney Is As Liberal As OBAMA!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1fThdWagJ4
Romney vs. Romney on Campaign Finance Reform
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCyYStcXEfw
Report: Short-Lived Firm Dissolves After $1 Million Pro-Romney Donation
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/08/04/138989269/report-short-liv…
Firm gives $1 million to pro-Romney group, then dissolves
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44011308/#.TxELKm9STux
35 Romney endorsers received contributions first
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/35_romney_endorsers_received_contributions_fi…
2 more fake companies donated millions to Romney
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/05/1003620/-2-more-fake-companies-donat…
2 Utah companies donate $1 million apiece to Romney PAC
http://www.fox13now.com/news/local/kstu-mitt-romney-2-utah-companies-donate-1…
“WhichMitt” YouTube channel
(19 videos of Romney’s flip-flops over the years)
http://www.youtube.com/user/whichmitt
Sarah Palin’s Indianola, IA speech – full transcript:
http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/09/transcript-of-governor-palins-septembe…
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Pg_1i53_Y
Get to Know Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzrZX528nQ
Ultimate Dog Tease
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGeKSiCQkPw
http://www.youtube.com/user/klaatu42
Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals + CZG123
http://www.youtube.com/user/czg123
Tickling Slow Loris
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9f-6jygRJk
The OMG Cat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_S5cXbXe-4
Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2BgjH_CtIA
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/index.html
http://abcnews.go.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

You`re young, you`re drunk, you`re in bed,
you have knives; s**t happens…

When I get logical, and I don’t trust my instincts
– that’s when I get in trouble.
- Angelina Jolie[1]

Well, that’s showbiz, Mrs. Pitt!

January 12, 2012

‘Blood and Honey’ directorial debut a ‘flop’

by Peter Brock
Reprinted with permission

The critics and movie-goers “doth protest too much.”

Make that a silent protest because apparently they have better things to do than say much of anything about Angelina Jolie’s inaugural attempt at writing/directing “In the Land of Blood and Honey.”

The first month’s box office take will likely not even amount to a .01-percent trickle of the $13 million blown on this celluloid cliché that promoters had tried to hype as a Romeo and Juliet tragedy set against the recent Bosnian war. By late January, the three-week mini-run that soaked $90,000 in ticket sales from gullible movie-goers is sputtering.

Only a handful of Balkan war critics had been stirring themselves up at this latest revisionist bid by Hollywood to rile the conscience of the world—while making a few bucks for their trouble. They and diaspora Serbs had grudgingly read the pre-screening synopses which borrowed from two decades worth of lurid headlines about contrived tales of genocide, tens of thousands of fictitious rapes, hyped “concentration camps” and the like.

But after all the buildup, the long-awaited flick rolled in only seven New York and Los Angeles theaters, beginning two days before Christmas in “limited distribution” by FilmDistrict that, as a matter of fact, was quickly getting more limited by the minute. One theater in New York lost no time in yanking it off the marquee.

Worth mentioning is that it didn’t take a second sniff for “Serbian tycoon and media magnate Željko Mitrović” who was earlier asked if Jolie could use his sound stages and studio sets.

“‘I’ve held great affection and admiration for Angelina Jolie both as a person and as an artist, but unfortunately she’s full of prejudice against the Serbs. I do not wish to be part of something that for the umpteenth time presents the Serbs as eternal bad guys.’” It was about the nicest thing anyone would say of the whole project, start to finish.

Story goes that Jolie had originally received a near-epiphany over coffee with unnamed journalists in Budapest when she became inspired to direct the film. A decisive “séance” also occurred with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour whose own words, echoed later by Jolie, were tediously familiar as the former’s signature commentary in wartime “scoops” from Bosnian muslim presidents, prime ministers, United Nations’ goons, bloodthirsty NATO brass and U.S. State Department shills during the ‘90s:

“This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe …What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?” parrots Jolie.

Amanpour introduced Jolie and the film at its New York Premiere last December 5.

The glitzy premiere after-party was held on The Standard Hotel’s rooftop Hudson River overlook and was co-sponsored by the foreign policy think-tank Council on Foreign Relations of which Jolie, having studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, somehow earned membership. General Wesley Clark, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Bosnian War and oversaw 78 straight days of indiscriminate bombing of Serb cities in 1999, also attended the fete and called the film “incredible.”

At first, reviewers grit their teeth while trying to be nice to Jolie—half of the Brad Pitt/Jolie cinematic power couple—in her La-La-Land netherworld romance between a Muslim painter and her fated Serbian lover and guard at one of those sinister “camps”:

“…where rape and brutality against women is business as usual by most Serbian soldiers… Jolie’s phony plotting and graphic depictions of sexual assault and murder are transparent attempts to bluntly convey the war’s atrocities. …Images of men mowed down on the streets, groups of innocents executed in front of mass graves and women raped in the company of their fellow captives all prove Jolie’s admirable commitment to directly addressing the Serbians’ heinous actions. …Her dialogue-heavy sequences are aesthetically inert, further muting the momentum of a tale that, in narrative terms, winds up being a series of clichés piled on top of general preposterousness. …(T)his wannabe-serious film comes off as not just unenlightening, but borderline-interminable.” – boxofficemagazine.com

But, it was as plain as the worrisome wrinkle above one of her eyebrows that Jolie’s film had “flopped and appears to be on its way out of theaters”, said thewrap.com after only two holiday weekends.

“…(N)ot even art-house audiences were clamoring for a subtitled drama about the Bosnian war over the Christmas holiday. …Featuring a cast of no-name performers and the brutal setting of the Bosnian war, the film is an almost impossible sell for audiences of any stripe”, said LATimes.com/entertainment bloggers.

Wrote The New York Times Manohla Dargis on the eve of the showing, touting Jolie’s gratuitous title as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees:

“…(T)here’s a somewhat awkward instructional, at times almost proselytizing aspect to the story that seems of a piece with her laudable humanitarian work. That’s especially true in the scenes in which Ms. Jolie switches into full-on expository mode, putting dry, plodding words into the characters’ mouths that would work better in the kind of on-screen textual explanations, with their snippets of history and politics, that open and close the movie.”

That’s Dargis’ long definition of “propaganda.”

Reviewers wasted no time getting into step:

“Is it a bad sign when you want a movie to end almost as much as the war it’s about?” asked Sam Adams in the LA Times. [2]

“A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins,” said Mick LaSalle nearly simultaneously in the San Francisco Chronicle.[3]

Variety’s Justin Chang penned a pre-release review of the movie, branding it a “dramatically misguided attempt to renew public awareness of the 1992-95 Balkan conflict” that “springs less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse … “(I)ts scenario tilting into tarted-up banality.”[4]

Likewise, The Village Voice’s Karina Longworth characterized it as a coin-toss “between predictable tragedy and ludicrous redemption …a United Nations extra-credit project about the Bosnian War” and sniped at Jolie for “producing a sanctimonious vanity commercial for her own good intentions.”[5]

Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club panned it as “a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.”[6] He noted that “Serbian groups have justifiably complained about Jolie’s glib stereotyping of Serbs as racist heavies” and that she “once again succeeded in attracting international attention to international atrocities and it’s possible, if not particularly likely, that someday she will get around to dramatizing atrocities compellingly as well.”

Maybe even by both/all sides?

Intuiting yowls of protest from the star of “Catwoman”, her litter of “industry” cronies rushed to salve her ruffled fur in early December when the Producers Guild of America announced that the film would receive its 2012 Stanley Kramer Award[7], followed by more institutional feel-good and a nomination in the Best Foreign Language category for the 69th Golden Globe Awards.[8]

Truth be told, Hollywood doesn’t do well with movies about “those” Balkan wars of the 1990’s. Some would like to think that fans got wise to all the political manipulations and simplistic propaganda by American media about Serbs wearing black hats and everyone else as chaste as Snow White in a burka. But Angie, who signed that pre-nup with Brad in 2007 worth $220 million, isn’t getting hurt.[9]

A roll-call of some Balkan war films shows only one money-maker:

• “Behind Enemy Lines” with Gene Hackman from 2001, budgeted at $40 million, earnings worldwide of $92 million. But not a bonanza. (Rotten Tomatoes based on reviews from 129 critics, dubbed it “Rotten”)
• “Welcome to Sarajevo” in 1997 with Woody Harrelson, budgeted at $9 million, no earnings appear visible. No surprise.
• “Savior” and Dennis Quaid in 1998, $10 million budget. Ditto.
• “No Man’s Land,” in 2002, only worth mentioning because it got the Oscar for best foreign film. It cost $14 million; earned $5 million.
• “The Hunting Party”, in 2007 with Richard Gere spent $40 million and made less than a million in the U.S., but $7 million overseas. Kindest words were from New York Times’ Dargis, who called it a “huge disappointment …A misfired, misguided would-be satire.”

Surprisingly, Roger Ebert blinked in lieu of candor—and he probably had a free ticket. What, a quiz?:

“Although the United States and the United Nations had troops involved, I have a feeling that a good many Americans never worked up much interest in the Bosnian war. There were too many complexities for a soundbite. Was it Serbs against Croatians? Christians against Muslims? A free for all? Wasn’t it all once Yugoslavia? Which side were we on? Or did we simply want all of them to stop fighting?

“I hope I don’t sound snarky. The indifference of many moviegoers to world events affects the box office for any movie about such conflicts. It took a long struggle to get audiences worked up over, and even then, the key words were ‘bomb disposal’ and not ‘Iraq.’ Although we’ve spent a fortune in blood and resources in the Middle East, Hollywood has found audience indifference to events there. Even more so in the former Yugoslavia. When I mention Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, how many nations have I named? Are they in fact nations? Here’s a curveball: Where are the Balkans?…[10]

Too touchy for ol’ Rog and all his politically-correct pals who sit together in the balconies?

But, among the biggest head-scratchers for “In the Land of Blood and Honey”? Why the obscure title? From an obscure poet? Or, more likely because Jolie had to hurry because bad pre-premiere publicity was going around that the film celebrated rape, and production had to be shortened before the “Mothers of Srebrenica” came stomping over the castle moat—with torches and pitchforks!

She told insidemovies.ew.com last May that coming up with the title was “driving me crazy. I have lists and lists of titles all over. She cited the subject matter of the film, which is set against the backdrop of the Bonsian Civil War in the 1990s, as the primary reason she was having such a hard time.

“‘It’s a heavy film,’ she added. ‘You want to find that title that really helps the audience know what they’re walking into.’”

Or, not walking into, as it turns out.

“…In making the announcement, Jolie said: ‘The film is specific to the Bosnian War, but it’s also universal. I wanted to tell a story of how human relationships and behavior are deeply affected by living inside a war.’”

Huh? Which “universe” does she live in?

[1] brainyquote.com
[2] Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2012.
[3] San Francisco Chronicle, January 5, 2012.
[4] Variety, December 16, 2011.
[5] The Village Voice, December 21, 2011.
[6] The A.V. Club, December 22, 2011.
[7] MSNBC. December 13, 2011.
[8] The Telegraph. December 15, 2011.
[9] Celebrity-Gossip.net, July 13, 2007
[10] January 4, 2012. n

Also see:

• Review of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a movie by Angelina Jolie
• Gray Falcon: A Dreary Slog
• Gray Falcon: War Porn

The Tides Foundation is another George Soros front organization.
Vivian Krause has the story:

$US 10 Million for 43 Organizations in a “TAR SANDS” Campaign. Paid for by Tides USA (2009/2010)

(h/t: Alberta Oil Peon)

Acting in concert, environmental organizations are campaigning against the Alberta oilsands, and more broadly, against the export of Canadian oil. Banning oil tanker traffic on the strategic, north coast of British Columbia, as environmental organizations are demanding, would block exports of Canadian oil to China and other Asian countries. No oil tankers means no oil exports.

In both the U.S. and Canada, a large number of these environmental organizations are all funded by a single American foundation: The Tides Foundation (“Tides USA”).

According to U.S. tax returns for 2009 and 2010, Tides USA has paid a total of $10.2 Million to 44 organizations that campaign against Canadian oil. The top recipient was Corporate Ethics International which runs RETHINK ALBERTA, a campaign to pressure the Alberta government by depicting Alberta in a negative light.

In 2010 alone, the Sierra Club was paid $420,000, Environmental Defense Canada Inc. was paid $250,000 and Greenpeace Canada was paid $200,000 for participation in the “Tar Sands Campaign,” according to 2010 tax returns for Tides USA.

As reported in The Financial Post, in 2009 the U.S. Tides Foundation and Tides Canada funded a total of 36 organizations that campaign against the development of the Alberta oilsands. Of these, 26 organizations were funded by the Tides USA.  The total granted to these organizations by Tides USA was $3.6 Million for 2009, according to U.S. tax returns.

In 2009, Tides Canada Foundation paid at least $7 million to 20 organizations that campaign against Canadian oil, according to analysis of Tides Canada’s U.S. tax returns. In 2009, fully half of Tides Canada’s grants went towards projects on a small but very strategic part of the Canadian coastline: the north coast of B.C., right smack where oil tankers export bound for Asia would need to travel.
[...]
Detailed breakdown of Tides Foundation anti-oil contributions here.

Also see:

• Ethical Oil
• Our Decision: Canada’s Northern Gateway Pipeline
• Kathryn Marshall: The Northern Gateway Pipeline is a Canadian Decision
• Discover the Networks: Tides Foundation and Tides Center
• 36 Organizations Against Alberta Oil Paid by TIDES USA & TIDES CANADA (2009 only)

By William Dorich

I preface this review by admitting that I am not a film critic—however, I have written six books on Balkan history and as a journalist, many of my articles have been published dealing with the Balkans, that have been reproduced in the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times among others and published in the Serbian press for two decades.

Regarding In the Land of Blood and Honey, I wish to correct what I observed, especially the distortion of historic facts. I will leave the artistic side to those who are more qualified. Sex, violence and fabrication appear alive and well in Hollywood as cinematic tricks are used to distract and “entertain” us.

Angelina Jolie wrote, directed and produced Blood and Honey. Jolie has unfortunately diverted our attention away from the facts regarding the Bosnian Civil War that she used as the backdrop for her exaggerated melodrama. She seems clueless that she plagiarized Shakespeare.

When Jolie went into this film production, she was fully aware of the emotional scars and personal losses of many Bosnian families, especially those of mixed marriages who will view this film. Pretending that her film is just make-believe but based on actual events, is a cop-out lacking responsibility—the kind of responsibility Jolie demands when human rights are violated.

Jolie arrogantly brushes aside the real Romeo & Juliet of Bosnia killed by a sniper on May 19, 1993. He was Bosko Brkic, a Bosnian Serb, and she was Admira Ismic, a Bosnian Muslim—they were assassinated as they tried to escape the Muslim side of Sarajevo by crossing the Vrbanja Bridge for safety on the Serbian side of the city. In their dying embrace they remained on that bridge for several days. The media, like vultures, manipulated their deaths and the ugly visual image for the benefit of their front page stories and nightly news.

But Jolie’s newest Romeo, Danijel, played by Serbian actor, Goran Kostic, and Juliet, Ajla, played by Muslim actress Zana Marjanovic, weaves a different story using sex, aggression and murder that perverts audiences’ senses into believing that violence, mistreatment and enslavement are supposed to represent a romance in the midst of an ethnic war. Granted, this is the prerequisite for a successful film today in Hollywood, and I acknowledge that the film was not intended to be a documentary, but, then again, propaganda always starts from this position.

The beginning of the film shows Ajla getting dressed for a date with a Serbian policeman. The following scene is of them dancing in a Sarajevo nightclub, meant to show a multi-ethnic city being shattered by a bomb blast, obviously launched by the Serbs. The next scene erupts with women being dragged onto a bus headed for what else? A Serb Rape Camp! Little footage is wasted before these women are taken from the bus, and moments later, a Serbian policeman throws one of them over the hood of a vehicle, pulls down her pants and rapes her. Next, the policeman grabs Ajla and proceeds to rape her when Danijel, her Serb love interest, prevents the rape and tells his fellow officer that she is not to be touched. Ajla survives the story locked in a room and only sleeps with Danijel. Why a young man would spend a war defending a woman with whom he only had one date, rings hollow in this plot. Turning that into another “Romeo & Juliet of Bosnia” comes off as rather naïve.

Jolie uses this Serbian bombing as the beginning of her film, ignoring the real start of the Bosnian Civil War when Muslim terrorists crashed into a Christian Serbian church during a wedding in Sarajevo, telling the guests that “Serbs were no longer allowed to display their centuries-old flag because Bosnia was now a Muslim country.” The thugs then shot and killed the father of the groom and seriously wounded the Serbian Orthodox priest and a dozen of the wedding guests.

Jolie omits any reference to the more than 2,000 Muslim terrorists who came to Sarajevo from Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and who tortured and executed a dozen Serbian soldiers by roasting them on spits like animals and decapitating dozens more. Then carried their severed heads around Sarajevo as trophies. My files contain several of those hideous photographs.

Jolie also cleverly omits the fact that thousands of Serbs were fired from their jobs including my friend who worked for Sarajevo Television for over 25 years. Muslims went throughout Sarajevo’s apartment buildings evicting Serb tenants who lived in those units for decades. After tossing Serb families out they threw their possessions out of the windows into the street. Jolie never touches on the fact that 250,000 Serbs were cleansed from Sarajevo and were forbidden to return to cast their ballots in the first Bosnian election in which Alija Izetbegovic won the presidency by only 44,000 votes. Any rationale for the Serbian retaliation including self-defense in this film was obviously left on Jolie’s cutting-room floor.

The Croats who fought the Bosnian Muslims for 4 years escaped notice and were made invisible in this film. The Bosnian Muslims were portrayed as innocent victims brutalized by overpowering Serb forces.

As I sat through this film, I was reminded of Peter Brock’s outstanding book, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting—Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia, in which one chapter is entitled, “Only Muslim Victims, Only Serb Perpetrators.” This movie, much like the contemptible record of the partisan press that covered this Civil War, keeps reinforcing the lie that “300,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed.” Like Goebbels during the Holocaust who preached “Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth,” the lie of 300,000 deaths and 60,000 rapes was repeated by the media for seven years, and the world was made to believe it.

Through reputable human rights organizations we now know that less than 97,000 victims were killed on all sides in these Balkan Civil Wars, hardly enough victims on any side to be considered “genocide.” We also know that Jolie was fully aware of the 800,000 victims hacked to death in Rwanda two years earlier that Jolie managed to ignore. However, it appears she embraced any Bosnian propaganda that fit into her melodrama. Blood and Honey was nominated in the foreign film category, but I do not think many in Hollywood expect much from her film-directing debut.

The dialogue does briefly acknowledge Serb victims at The Battle of Kosovo in 1389, an historical event that will escape 99% of any audience viewing this film. Also, the casual mention of the Croatian Ustashe Nazi forces in WWII who liquidated 1.4 million Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 78,000 Roma Gypsies is connected with a “Chetnik” remark (Chetniks were the Serbs who fought the Nazis) that will escape her audience as well.

While the Serbian Orthodox church received its share of blame in the media and in this film, no connection is made to the late Serbian Patriarch Pavle who led over a million Serbs in protest marches that were the largest and longest in decades against the Milosevich government. During an interview with the Swiss Federal Parliament on December 10, 1992, the Patriarch told officials: “800 Serb women were documented as repeated rape victims in 20 camps operated by Muslims and Croats.” The patriarch also cited the Yugoslav State Commission for War Crimes on August 2, 1992—the same day Newsday’s “death camp” stories went on American newsstands that identified locations at Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bugojno, Bihac and Slavonski Brod where Serb women were confined, raped and murdered by Croat and Muslim soldiers.

The Romeo & Juliet “love story” wears thin before the film finally puts the audience out of its misery when Danijel shoots his Muslim lover Ajla in the head at point blank range. The last scene of the film provides a final opportunity for Jolie to demonize the Serbian people as Danijel crawls to his knees before UN police and claims several times: “I am a War Criminal, I am a War Criminal,” a remark designed to remain in the minds of the audience as they leave the theater.

The film, however, does not embrace an audience; it stuns and bludgeons them with the rape issue. Jolie does not waste a good opportunity for full-blown propaganda by ending her film credits with various war-related statistics. In bold type one reads: “50,000 Bosnian rape victims,” a number that has long been discredited numerous times over the past dozen years. If this film is being presented as fiction, these statistical records were totally out of place and were used for political reasons.

The fabrications, partisan journalism and crude propaganda of the Bosnian Civil War by the international media can be summed up by one lone account from French journalist Jerome Bony, who described in a February 4, 1993 broadcast about his trek to Tuzla, which gained notoriety as the most prominent Bosnian town for finding Muslim rape victims:

“When I was fifty kilometers from Tuzla I was told to ‘go to the Tuzla gymnasium (high school) there are 4,000 raped women.’ At twenty kilometers, this figure dropped to 400. At ten kilometers, only forty were left. Once at the site, I found only four women willing to testify.”

The Land of Blood and Honey hemorrhages vulgarity with no “honey” to sweeten the pain of multi-ethnic violence in which all sides were responsible for war crimes in a three-sided civil War.

Like the kangaroo court in The Hague, Angelina Jolie’s film continues the process of condemning the Serbian people with collective guilt—denying them equal rights and equal justice as international political leaders continue to amputate portions of Serbian territory against her will and in violation of the UN Charter in which Serbia was a founding member; the Geneva Conventions, the Helsinki Final Act, and the NATO Treaty including violating UN Resolution #1244 that guaranteed Kosovo as sovereign Serbian territory as part of the peace agreement arranged by Richard Holbrooke. Surely, Jolie cannot be this ignorant?

Actor Jon Voight, Angelina Jolie’s father, attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, a school built in the 1950s and named after the Croatian Roman Catholic priest who was convicted by the allies of war crimes in WWII. He spent ten years in prison for his crimes against Serbs and Jews in Croatia, perhaps a clue to Jolie’s obvious anti-Serb bias.

If this film was meant to portray Ms. Jolie’s impressions of the recent civil war, sadly she did not take advantage of her public persona to give the wounded and divided people of Bosnia a reason to heal. As a Serb, I left the screening appalled that once again the word “Serb” has been made synonymous with evil—It appears then that Blood and Honey is Angelina Jolie’s attempt at cinematic genocide.

__________________

William Dorich is the author of 6 books on Balkan history including his 1991 book, Serbian Genocide 1941-45 and his 1992 book, Kosovo. He is the recipient of the Order of St. Sava, the highest recognition given to a layperson by the Holy Synod of Serbian Orthodox Bishops; an Award of Merit from the Serbian Bar Association of America and a Freedom Award by RAS—The International Serbian Organization.

For more information about the Balkans and books offered by this writer visit:
http://www.gmbooks.com

Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting – Peter Brock
http://www.gmbooks.com/product/MediaGM.html

Jasenovac Then & Now—A Conspiracy of Silence – Wm. Dorich
http://www.gmbooks.com/product/JasenovGM.html

Kosovo is Serbia – Dr. Vojin Joksimovich
http://www.gmbooks.com/product/Kosovo-GM.html

Hilandar Octocentenary – Wm. Dorich
http://www.gmbooks.com/product/HilandarGM.html

Liar’s Poker – Michel Collon
http://www.gmbooks.com/product/PokerGM.html

Looks like this “religion” isn’t going away any time soon, unfortunately. People are already talking about another global financial collapse. How is this going to work out? It can’t be good.

Andrew Bolt:The Durban Bible: you pay so they may pray

This is freaky – and it sure isn’t science. The planet savers at the IPCC summit in Durban – attended by Climate Change Minister Greg Combet – are working on a document that reads in part like the Bible of a new green faith:

Rights of mother earth
74. Ensure respect for the intrinsic laws of nature.
75. The recognition and defence of the rights of Mother Earth to ensure harmony
between humanity and nature, and that their will be no commodification of the functions of
nature, therefore no carbon market will be developed with that purpose.

Who is “Mother Earth”? What are the “intrinsic laws of nature” and who passed them? Why do they need “respect”? What is the “harmony” between “humanity and nature”? Discuss using, say, smallpox as an example. Define “commodification of the functions of nature”. Explain using the example of dams and farms.

And tell us who wrote this garbage and how they go through the door.

Lord Christopher Monckton reads through the rest.

Here’s his summary, in an important article that should be read in full:

The contents of this document, turgidly drafted with all the UN’s skill at what the former head of its documentation center used to call “transparent impenetrability”, are not just off the wall – they are lunatic.

Main points:

Ø A new International Climate Court will have the power to compel Western nations to pay ever-larger sums to third-world countries in the name of making reparation for supposed “climate debt”. The Court will have no power over third-world countries. Here and throughout the draft, the West is the sole target. “The process” is now irredeemably anti-Western.

Ø “Rights of Mother Earth”: The draft, which seems to have been written by feeble-minded green activists and environmental extremists…

Ø “Right to survive”: The draft childishly asserts that “The rights of some Parties to survive are threatened by the adverse impacts of climate change, including sea level rise.” At 2 inches per century, according to eight years’ data from the Envisat satellite? Oh, come off it! The Jason 2 satellite, the new kid on the block, shows that sea-level has actually dropped over the past three years.

Ø War and the maintenance of defence forces and equipment are to cease – just like that – because they contribute to climate change…

Ø A new global temperature target will aim, Canute-like, to limit “global warming” to as little as 1 C° above pre-industrial levels. Since temperature is already 3 C° above those levels, what is in effect being proposed is a 2 C° cut in today’s temperatures. This would take us halfway back towards the last Ice Age, and would kill hundreds of millions. Colder is far more dangerous than warmer.

Ø The new CO2 emissions target, for Western countries only, will be a reduction of up to 50% in emissions over the next eight years and of “more than 100%” [these words actually appear in the text] by 2050. So, no motor cars, no coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, no aircraft, no trains. Back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in your caves. Windmills, solar panels and other “renewables” are the only alternatives suggested in the draft. There is no mention of the immediate and rapid expansion of nuclear power worldwide to prevent near-total economic destruction.

Ø The new CO2 concentration target could be as low as 300 ppmv CO2 equivalent (i.e., including all other greenhouse gases as well as CO2 itself). That is a cut of almost half compared with the 560 ppmv CO2 equivalent today. It implies just 210 ppmv of CO2 itself, with 90 ppmv CO2 equivalent from other greenhouse gases. But at 210 ppmv, plants and trees begin to die. CO2 is plant food. They need a lot more of it than 210 ppmv…

Ø The West will pay for everything, because of its “historical responsibility” for causing “global warming”. Third-world countries will not be obliged to pay anything. But it is the UN, not the third-world countries, that will get the money from the West, taking nearly all of it for itself as usual. There is no provision anywhere in the draft for the UN to publish accounts of how it has spent the $100 billion a year the draft demands that the West should stump up from now on.

This – seriously – is the manifesto being worked on by your government and dozens of ones similarly maddened by global warming fervor and green mysticism. The next time someone tells you global warming alarmism is just about “the science”, wave this manifesto in their face.

Cross-posted at Act for Australia

PJ Tatler/Richard Pollock: Occupy DC Cost Local Taxpayers $1 Million

The OccupyDC protest has cost Washington DC taxpayers $1 million over the last two months.  The cost has been calculated to be about $22,000 per day.  The city has paid for sanitation costs which have exceeded $6,000.

More than twenty local police officers are stationed around the clock at the site. That doesn’t include a three-hour standoff last Saturday night in which 13 protesters were arrested. Nor does the $1 million cover a U.S. Park Police sweep of the protest tents following a White House shooting by a disgruntled 21-year old from Idaho.

Finally, the tab also doesn’t count the destruction of the sod at McPherson Square where the protesters have encamped. Earlier this year $437,000 in federal stimulus money was spent to re-sod and “restore” the park which is part of the National Park Service. That money, it seems, was another stimulus project that went to waste.

Affected municipal officials should do a similar cost analysis of every Occupy encampment; some of them are larger, dirtier, and more costly than #OccupyDC. It’s equally important to account for the costs to local businesses who have suffered vandalism and loss of business, and to the employees that have suffered reduced wages or layoffs.

Who should foot the bill? There’s quite a rogues’ gallery of persons and groups who have lent their support to #Occupy: George Soros (via the Tides Foundation and MoveOn.org), the SEIU and other labor unions, Frances Fox Piven, Adbusters, the Muslim Brotherhood, the CPUSA, the American Nazi Party, and the Democratic National Committee itself (not that any Democrat mayor would hold his own party accountable for damage done to his city).

And then there’s Obama’s favorite vehicle of “community organization”: Acorn.

But you thought Acorn was dead and gone. Oh, wait…

Was the Bank of America ‘Occupation’ a Coordinated, ACORN-Affiliated Attack?

Did an ACORN front group plan and execute last week’s bizarre “Occupation” of a San Francisco Bank of America branch?

As you’ll recall, nearly 100 people were arrested after storming into the bank, chanting slogans and attempting to setup camp indoors. Now, following this incident, some are wondering if an ACORN front group may have been behind the organized chaos.

We already know that the staged protest was organized, in part, by ReFund California, a group that describes itself as, “a state-wide coalition of homeowners, community members, faith leaders and students working to make Wall Street banks pay for destroying jobs and neighborhoods with their greedy, irresponsible and predatory business practices.” This is the same group that also organized a protest at Cal State University last week.

But who is behind ReFund California? Among the coalition’s “partners,” which includes unions and like-minded groups, is the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). This group, which is likely unknown to most, was covered in-depth in JudicialWatch’s “The Re-branding of ACORN,” a report that focuses upon covert, ACORN front-groups. Here’s what the report had to say about ACCE:

ACORN CA has become the Alliance of Californians for Community

Empowerment (ACCE), incorporated on December 8, 2010. ACCE maintains seven offices in California. According to Secretary of State records, the registered agent of ACCE is Amy Schur, who is also the organization’s executive director.

Schur was formerly the lead organizer for ACORN CA and was a member of ACORN’s management council. She reportedly knew of the embezzlement of ACORN funds by Dan Rathke, but chose to inform neither the ACORN board of directors nor law enforcement about the crime.

Lead organizer in the San Diego office is David Lagstein, former lead organizer for ACORN in Michigan. ACCE board member Edgar Hilbert was also formerly with ACORN CA member. ACCE took over the office space previously occupied by ACORN CA at 3655 So. Grand Avenue, Suite 250, Los Angeles, CA 90007.

Much more here.

Left to themselves, municipal governments will most likely absorb the costs of #Occupy and try to recoup it from their already beleaguered local taxpayers. The fact that the cities allowed the Occupiers to set up camp in the first place without demanding any recompense, would weaken their case if the cities were to sue the sponsoring organizations to recoup their costs.

That’s why it’s time for us to demand that our city governments clear out the #Occupy camps without further delay, to require parade permits and fees for any further protests (under the same terms that Tea Party groups were required to observe), and to begin billing the sponsoring organizations for policing, cleanup, and other costs that #Occupy has foisted on the rest of us.

What local businesses can do

There’s nothing to stop local businesses harmed by #Occupy from getting together and suing both the city government that allowed this public nuisance to continue, and the organizations sponsoring #Occupy in their area. Set up a neighborhood chamber of commerce, or get together with your local Tea Party group, and make it happen!

With the help of the MSM and the GOP Establishment

In her recent column, excerpted below, Ann Coulter “connects the dots” between David Axelrod, the Daley Machine, and former US Senator from Illinois Barack Hussein Obama – and the recent smear campaign against Herman Cain. Then as now, David Axelrod worked to eliminate Obama’s rivals by leaking allegations about sexual misconduct. Then as now, the leftist media and the GOP establishment (a/k/a RINOs) used the opportunity to attack a Republican whose policies were too conservative for their liking.

Were it not for David Axelrod’s unethical (and illegal) activities in accessing and leaking confidential information, Obama could never have been elected to the US Senate, and his political career would most likely have ended in 2004.

The difference is that, today, we have the Tea Party, as well as the blogosphere and various social media. The “race card” went overdrawn sometime in 2010, and the “sex card” has just now done the same. Now we can expose these dirty tricks and trace them back to their origin. Our opponents on the left, namely the Democrats and the RINOs, can no longer deny us the right to vote for conservative candidates.

Ann Coulter: DAVID AXELROD’S PATTERN OF SEXUAL MISBEHAVIOR

(h/t: waldensianspirit)

November 9, 2011

Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country — Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. — but never in Chicago.

So it’s curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.

Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O’Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain’s personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain’s short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he’s alleged to have been a sexual predator.

After O’Grady’s name surfaced in connection with the miraculous appearance of Cain’s personnel files from the NRA, she issued a Clintonesque denial of any involvement in producing them — by vigorously denying that she knew Cain when he was at the NRA. (Duh.)
[…]
Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod’s very building? Right again: Cain’s latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.
[…]
Within 24 hours of Bialek’s press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she’s a “gold-digger,” that she was constantly in financial trouble — having filed for personal bankruptcy twice — and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod’s apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama’s “hired muscle.”
[…]
The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them. [emphasis added]

John Brooks, Chicago’s former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn’t resign. He resigned — and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.

Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,” the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator — allowing him to run for president — is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama’s Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama’s Republican opponent.

Read the rest!

Back in the Bad Old Days

We still lived in Chicago during the 2004 Illinois US Senate election. During the primary, Barack Obama was still considered a political “outsider”; the Democrat machine in Cook County opposed him. But because of disunity among the Democrat heavyweights at that time, party support was split among several other contenders, including Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, businessman M. Blair Hull, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, and school board president Gery Chico.

Political consultant and speechwriter David Axelrod had already joined forces with Barack Obama. Then as now, Axelrod targeted his attacks on the frontrunner, leaking confidential information to damage Blair Hull in the Democrat primary, and Republican Jack Ryan in the general election.

We noticed that Obama was getting a great deal of support from somewhere. That was an anomaly in Chicago, given that none of it was coming from the Daley machine. As expected, the ultra-liberal Hyde Park/University of Chicago community turned out for him in force. Obama also had a campaign office in a black neighborhood in Chicago’s West Side, where a large and expensive fleet of white vans bedecked with Obama logos stood ready to shuttle voters to and from the polls. We figured that out-of-state money was involved. The infamous hard-left billionaire George Soros was backing Obama; in fact, Soros had hosted a fundraiser for Obama at his home in New York.

But it takes more than money for a truly bad candidate to win. Someone has to eliminate the competition so that no viable choices remain. It is no accident that we voters repeatedly must choose between “the lesser of two evils”.

Ann Coulter writes:

…Axelrod’s courthouse moles obtained the “sealed” [child custody case] records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially “unseal” them — over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.

Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!

A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).

With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama’s Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin…

What this means

I agree that those idiot Republicans who threw Jack Ryan under the bus deserve to be tracked down and shot. Their craven capitulation to Axelrod’s smear campaign led first to Obama gaining the US Senate seat, and then to the Obama presidency and our current dire predicament. They should have done some detective work, exposed Axelrod and Obama, and hung them both out to dry.

Thus we see how a few moments of cowardice on the part of a handful of people can bring a cascading avalanche of disasters upon the entire world. Let that be an object lesson to us all.

David Axelrod is of the same moral caliber as Gloria Allred and, for that matter, George Soros. They all belong in prison, or worse, though no one thus far has mustered the political will to put them there. By now, most of the American public has come to recognize that any client of Gloria Allred is a moral leper who deserves no credibility whatsoever. We must also recognize that any politician who accepts advice from David Axelrod, or money from George Soros, is also a moral leper who is unfit for any role in public life.

Lech Walesa rejects OWS

Some of the #Occupy movement signs and slogans seem to resonate with many onlookers. Maybe it’s because they’ve stolen a few talking points (but very little else) from the Tea Party. Maybe it’s because the sympathetic mainstream media carefully edits out what they don’t want you to see.

Let’s take a closer look.

Is this you?

Are you frustrated and angry about unemployment, inflation, the decreasing economic opportunities, the burden of debt, and the declining standard of living in North America, much of Europe, and elsewhere? Are you worried about the sovereign debt problems that bedevil the international financial system?

So am I.

Do you empathize with those struggling to make ends meet in low-paid, part-time jobs? Do you consider bailouts to be unconstitutional, politically and economically unwise, and morally wrong? Do you believe that the Federal Reserve system puts too much power into the hands of too few people who are not accountable to the voters and taxpayers?

So do I.

The Occupy movement blames our predicament on “billionaires”, “rich corporations”, and “Wall Street bankers”. They offer no basis for their accusations, but merely pander to the temptations of envy, sloth, and greed to which all of us are prone.

I agree with Herman Cain in placing most of the blame on Barack Obama and his failed policies. I also blame other public officials in the US and elsewhere whose policies brought about our financial downfall.

Whose side are they on?

Let’s see…the Occubaggers have got the commies, the socialists, the anarchists, the American Nazi Party, the George Soros front groups including the Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, and MoveOn.org, along with Code Pink and Michael Moore, the Muslim Brotherhood and its front group CAIR (more about CAIR and its connections here and here), the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the leftist establishment media including the New York Times and the Washington Post, Frances Fox Piven, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khamenei, Hugo Chavez, David Duke, and, of course, that architect of failure and scapegoater-in-chief, Barack Hussein Obama himself.

Along for the ride are the aging drugged-out hippies reliving Woodstock, the young drugged-out prep school and college kids looking for a place to fornicate al fresco, the paid shills, the student loan debtors with useless degrees, the trust-fund babies, the anti-Semites, the LGBT nudists, the race-card players, the outdoor urinators and defecators, the pro-abort feminazis, the tree-huggers, the vegans, and the mentally ill. (Many of these categories overlap.) Rounding out the rogue’s gallery are various drug dealers, crackheads, junkies, thieves, rapists, street bums and other lumpenproletariat, and felons hiding out from the law.

None of them speak for me.

Nor do they speak for Lech Walesa.

Former Polish President Won’t Attend #OccupyWallStreet After Citizen Journalists Expose Its Radical Roots

Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, champion in the fight against communism, and winner of the Liberty Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989, has decided to not make a trip to New York in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Last week the AP reported that Walesa was backing the Occupy “movement” and considered traveling to New York in support of the growing nationwide mob activity that currently plagues the United States. However, when former Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski, (For the Good of Illinois) found out about this, he quickly reached out to his contacts in Poland to alert the former president to the truth behind this radical movement.

“We made the point that the political themes of Occupy Wall Street may have started out with some of the principles that we share, but OWS themes were rapidly being morphed into anti-freedom and anti-liberty messages. At the core is the want for a big, powerful central government to dominate the lives of individual citizens.” -Andrzejewski

In his write-up last night at BigGovernment.com, Andrzejewski stated that with the help of BigGoverment and other sources, he was able to convey an accurate picture of the Occupy movement, particularly that it is “…organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests.” After reviewing this information about the true nature of the demonstrations, Walesa and his team withdrew their support and will not be attending any Occupy protests.

We were overjoyed to learn that recent Rebel Pundit investigative reports and footage were able to play an an important role in Walesa’s decision. According to Andrzejewski:

“They appreciated the inside info- they weren’t getting that in Poland from the European media.”

Much more here.

Also see:

• Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Citizens At #OccupyWallStreet
• ‘Dirty Jobs’ Host Mike Rowe Not Impressed By Obama’s Class Warfare
• Occupy Wall Street Is No Friend to Small Business
• Tea Partier Forced To Break Down Flag Pole, Occupy Protesters Left Alone
• New Yorkers Fed Up With Defecating #OccupyWallStreet Protesters
• What Jesus Would Not Do

So…does the #Occupy movement speak for you? Unless you truly are a leftist, with all that this implies, the answer is no.

Simon Deng tells it like it is.

With thanks to Hudson New York

Like you, I came to this conference, The Perils of Global Intolerance to protest this third Durban conference which is an effort based on a set of lies, and organized by nations who are themselves are guilty of the worst kinds of oppression.

Durban III will not help the victims of racism. It will only isolate and target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel. The UN has lost its way. Its obsession with the Jewish obvious: . For over 50 years, 82% of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about condemning one state – Israel. Hitler could not have been made happier.

Given all the good Israel does in the world, given its democracy and its striving to follow the highest standards of human rights, even in the face of the most brutal, the most fanatic enemies, the Durban Conference is an outrage. All decent people know that.

But friends, I come here today to make a different case. I come with what you might at first think is a radical proposition: I come to tell you that there are peoples who suffer from the UN’s anti-Israelism even more than the Israelis. I belong to one of those people.

By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale.

For over fifty years the indigenous black African population of Sudan — Christians and Muslims alike — have been the victims of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.

In South Sudan, my homeland, Sudan, about four million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed, and they became the largest refugee group since World War II.

Everybody at the United Nations is concerned about the so-called Palestinian refugees. They dedicated a separate agency to provide for them; this agency, UNWRA, treats them with a special privilege.

Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and enslaved, are relatively ignored. The UN even resisted using the word “slavery” to describe the enslavement of tens of thousands of my people. Why? Because slavery is a crime against humanity, apparently no one committing it wanted to end up before an international court. When Khartoum insisted that the term “abducted people” be substituted for the word “slaves,” the UN, caved to Arab pressure and agreed. Try that in America. Try calling Frederick Douglas an “abducted person.” It is outrageous.

The UN refuses to tell the world the truth about the root causes of Sudan’s conflicts. Take Darfur, for example. Who knows really what is happening in Darfur? It is not a “tribal conflict.” It is a conflict rooted in Arab colonialism, as it has typically been practiced in Africa. In Darfur, a region in the Western Sudan everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim because the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the indigenous people to Islam In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum, the Darfuris are not Muslim enough. And they also do not want to be Arabized. They like their own African languages and dress and customs. They resist Arabization. The Arab response is genocide. But nobody tells the truth about Darfur.

In the Nuba Mountains, another region of Sudan, genocide is taking place as I speak. The regime is targeting the black Africans — Muslims and Christians. This happened to the Nuba people before. In the 1990′s hundreds of thousands were murdered; a large number of women were raped; children were abducted and forcibly converted to Islam. Nobody at the UN told the truth about the Nuba Mountains.

Do you see a massive amount of outrage and reports and protests about this coming out of the UN or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International? Do you hear them condemn Arab anti-black racism?

Look at the pages of the New York Times, or the record of the UN condemnations, What you will find is “Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering. My people have been driven off the front pages by the exaggerations of Palestinian suffering. Why? Because what Israel does is portrayed as a Western sin that we are all supposed to address.

The truth is that the West commits a real sin when it abandons us: the actual victims of non-Westerns. Our suffering has become almost taboo.

Let me return to the topic of slavery: while there are issues that divide public opinion, we can all agree that for one man to own another is a sin, and it should be stopped. The Americans tore themselves apart over the issue of slavery.

Chattel slavery, a centuries-long practice in Sudan, was revived as a tool of war in the early ’90s. The Islamist regime in Khartoum declared jihad, or holy war, and thereby legitimized taking slaves as war booty. Arab militias were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged to take African women and children as slaves. We believe that up to 200,000 were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.

I am a living proof of this crime against humanity.

I do not like talking about my experience as a slave, but I do it because it is important for the world to know that slavery exists even today.

I was only nine years old when I was made a slave. An Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat destined to Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word “no.” All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”

The United Nations knew about the brutal enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs from the early days of the conflict. Human Right Watch issued extensive reports about the issue. These reports gathered dust on UN shelves. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening.

As soon as the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, the UN agency backtracked, and proceeded to criticize the Non-Governmental Organizations that worked to liberate Sudanese slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery, resigned in protest of the UN’s actions.

My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still serve their masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It would offend the OIC and the Arab League. So much for “human rights for everybody”.

As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism, allow me to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely absurd and immoral.

I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees. Let me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab racism, hoping to find shelter in Egypt. They were wrong. In 2005, the refugees camped outside the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Cairo looking for mercy. Instead, the United Nations closed its doors and left the helpless women and children at the mercy of the ruthless Egyptian security forces who brutally slaughtered at least 26 of them.

After this event the Sudanese realized that Arab racism is the same, whether it is in Khartoum or in Cairo. So they continued looking for a shelter and they found it in Israel. Dodging the bullets of the Egyptian border patrols and walking for punishingly long distances, the refugees’ only hope was to reach Israel’s side of the fence, where they knew they would be safe.

The fact that even Darfuris, who are Muslims, chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim states of the area, speaks volumes.. Israel is racist? Israel is against the Muslim world? Ask the thousands of black Muslim Darfuris who found shelter inside the Jewish state.

When I asked the refugees about the treatment they receive in Israel, their response is absolutely the opposite of what the United Nations alleges. They were welcomed and treated like human beings. Compared to the situation in Egypt, they described their lives in Israel as “heaven.” No-one called them “abid” – an Arabic word for slaves often used in Sudan, Egypt and other Arab nations.

Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the answer is absolutely not. It is a state of people of the colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with beautiful black Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Israel is a state that has taken my own black people in, rescued them, and helped them.

So, yes … my claim may be a radical claim: I claim that the victims who suffer most from the UN’s anti-Israel policy are not just the Israelis but all those people who have to be ignored in order for the UN to tell its big lie against Israel: all those victims of non Western abuse, especially all those victims of Arab and Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab and Muslim world. These are the biggest victims of UN Israel hatred.

So far, the Israelis have only been cursed by the UN. But look at the situation of the Copts, the Christians in Iraq, and Nigeria, and Iran, the Hindus and Bahais and Sikhs who suffer from Islamic oppression. We all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned so that the big lie against the Jews can go forward.

Before I conclude let me tell you a story that reflects a special connection that the people of South Sudan feel toward Israel. In 2005, I visited one of the refugee camps in South Sudan. I met a twelve year old girl who told me about her dream. In a dream she wanted to go to school to become a doctor, and then, she wanted to visit Israel. I was shocked and numb. How could this refugee girl who spent most of her life in the North know about Israel? When I asked why she wanted to visit Israel, she said: “This is our people.” I was never able to find an answer to my question.

On July 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent state. We achieved freedom despite the opposition from the Arab world and despite the United Nations, whose General Secretary, Bi Ki Moon, lobbied for the unity of Sudan. For the South Sudanese, that would mean continuation of oppression, brutalization, demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement.

In a similar manner, the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for sovereignty in their homeland; and the Durban III conference continues denying Israel’s legitimacy.

As a friend of Israel, I salute the President of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, who had the courage to state publicly that South Sudan embassy in Israel will be built— not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.

I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its people, will oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose it by simply telling the truth.

This originally appeared in a a slightly different form as an address at a conference titled “The Perils of Global Intolerance”, in New York City, September 22, 2011.

Learn more about the new nation of South Sudan at Pickle92′s Blog.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Comment by Jim Campbell:

Another Obama illegal war?

Question: Has the United States ever sent in Special Forces as advisers when it wasn’t a prelim for war?  I didn’t think so. Congress must get off it’s collective ass and regain control of their positions of authority, honor their oath to protect and defend the Constitution from two foreign enemies or step aside.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’m J.C and I approve this message.

Obama’s billionaire friend has interests in African country’s oil.

Personification of EVIL!

After President Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he would be sending American troops into Uganda, WND uncovered billionaire activist George Soros’ ties both to the political pressure behind the decision and to the African nation’s fledgling oil industry.

Soros sits on the executive board of an influential “crisis management organization” that recently recommended the U.S. deploy a special advisory military team to Uganda to help with operations and run an intelligence platform, a recommendation Obama’s action seems to fulfill.

The president emeritus of that organization, the International Crisis Group, is also the principal author of “Responsibility to Protect,” the military doctrine used by Obama to justify the U.S.-led NATO campaign in Libya.

Soros’ own Open Society Institute is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine that has been cited many times by activists urging intervention in Uganda.

Authors and advisers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, including a center founded and led by Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, also helped to found the International Criminal Court.

Several of the doctrine’s main founders also sit on boards with Soros, who is a major proponent of the doctrine.

Soros also maintains close ties to oil interests in Uganda. His organizations have been leading efforts purportedly to facilitate more transparency in Uganda’s oil industry, which is being tightly controlled by the country’s leadership.

Soros’ hand in Ugandan oil industry

Oil exploration began in Uganda’s northwestern Lake Albert basin nearly a decade ago, with initial strikes being made in 2006.

Uganda’s Energy Ministry estimates the country has over 2 billion barrels of oil, with some estimates going as high as 6 billion barrels. Production is set to begin in 2015, delayed from 2013 in part because the country has not put in place a regulatory framework for the oil industry.

A 2008 national oil and gas policy, proposed with aid from a Soros-funded group, was supposed to be a general road map for the handling and use of the oil. However, the policy’s recommendations have been largely ignored, with critics accusing Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni of corruption and of tightening his grip on the African country’s emerging oil sector.

Soros himself has been closely tied to oil and other interests in Uganda.

In 2008, the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute brought together stakeholders from Uganda and other East African countries to discuss critical governance issues, including the formation of what became Uganda’s national oil and gas policy.

Also in 2008, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a grantee of the Soros-funded Revenue Watch, helped established the Publish What You Pay Coalition of Uganda, or PWYP, which was purportedly launched to coordinate and streamline the efforts of the government in promoting transparency and accountability in the oil sector.

Also, a steering committee was formed for PWYP Uganda to develop an agenda for implementing the oil advocacy initiatives and a constitution to guide PWYP’s oil work.

PWYP has since 2006 hosted a number of training workshops in Uganda purportedly to promote contract transparency in Uganda’s oil sector.

PWYP is directly funded by Soros’ Open Society as well as the the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute. PWYP international is actually hosted by the Open Society Foundation in London.

The billionaire’s Open Society Institute, meanwhile, runs numerous offices in Uganda. It maintains a country manager in Uganda, as well as the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, which supports work in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Open Society Institute runs a Ugandan Youth Action Fund, which states its mission is to “identify, inspire, and support small groups of dedicated young people who can mobilize and influence large numbers of their peers to promote open society ideals.”

U.S. troops to Uganda

Obama yesterday notified House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that he plans to send about 100 military personnel, mostly Special Operations Forces, to central Africa. The first troops reportedly arrived in Uganda on Wednesday.

The U.S. mission will be to advise forces seeking to kill or capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. Kony is accused of major human rights atrocities. He is on the U.S. terrorist list and is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

In a letter on Friday, Obama announced the initial team of U.S. military personnel “with appropriate combat equipment” deployed to Uganda on Wednesday. Other forces deploying include “a second combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications and logistics personnel.”

“Our forces will provide information, advice and assistance to select partner nation forces,” he said.

Both conservatives and liberals have raised questions about whether military involvement in Uganda advances U.S. interests.

Writing in The Atlantic yesterday, Max Fisher noted the Obama administration last year approved special forces bases and operations across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia.

“But those operations, large and small, target terrorist groups and rogue states that threaten the U.S. – something the Lord’s Resistance Army could not possibly do,” he wrote.

“It’s difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord’s Resistance Army’s campaign of violence,” continued Fisher. “It’s possible that there’s some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can’t obviously see.”

Bill Roggio, the managing editor of The Long War Journal, referred to the Obama administration’s stated rationale for sending troops “puzzling,” claiming the LRA does not present a national security threat to the U.S. – “despite what President Obama said.”

Tea-party-backed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann also questioned the wisdom of Obama’s move to send U.S. troops to Uganda.

“When it comes to sending our brave men and women into foreign nations, we have to first demonstrate a vital American national interest before we send our troops in,” she said at a campaign stop yesterday in Iowa.

Soros group: Send military advisors to Uganda

In April 2010 Soros’ International Crisis Group, or ICG, released a report sent to the White House and key lawmakers advising the U.S. military run special operations in Uganda to seek Kony’s capture.

The report states, “To the U.S. government: Deploy a team to the theatre of operations to run an intelligence platform that centralizes all operational information from the Ugandan and other armies, as well as the U.N. and civilian networks, and provides analysis to the Ugandans to better target military operations.”

Since 2008 the U.S. has been providing financial aid in the form of military equipment to Uganda and the other regional countries to fight Kony’s LRA, but Obama’s new deployment escalates the direct U.S. involvement.

Soros sits in the ICG’s executive board along with Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor; George J. Mitchell, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader who served as a Mideast envoy to both Obama and President Bush; and Javier Solana, a socialist activist who is NATO’s former secretary-general as well as the former foreign affairs minister of Spain.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is the ICG’s senior advisor.

The ICG’s president emeritus is Gareth Evans, who, together with activist Ramesh Thakur, is the original founder of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, with the duo even coining the term “responsibility to protect.”

Both Evans and Thakur serve as advisory board members of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, the main group pushing the doctrine.

As WND first exposed, Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect.

Soros’ Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.

Samantha Power, Arafat deputy

Meanwhile, a closer look at the Soros-funded Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect is telling. Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.

WND was also first to report the committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

Also, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that originally founded Responsibility to Protect. The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term “responsibility to protect” while defining its guidelines.

The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, was Carr’s founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.

With Power’s center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Power reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya, widely regarded as test of Responsibility to Protect in action.

In his address to the nation in April explaining the NATO campaign in Libya, Obama cited the doctrine as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya.

Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of “war crimes,” “genocide,” “crimes against humanity” or “ethnic cleansing.”

The term “war crimes” has at times been indiscriminately used by various United Nations-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops who commit alleged “war crimes” overseas.

Soros: Right to ‘penetrate nation-states’…

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