This is absurd, to say the least, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard about this kind of boneheadedness on the part of the Justice Department…

The Justice Department is co-sponsoring a convention held by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) — an unindicted co-conspirator in an ongoing federal terrorist funding case — a move that is raising concerns among the Justice’s rank and file.

I can just imagine all the jihadis and jihad supporters out there grinning gleefully and wringing their hands at the stupidity of their infidel enemy. I imagine quite a few of them are somewhat confused — I mean, why doesn’t our government simply submit to Islam already, instead of dragging it out?

I can certainly see where they’re coming from, I mean,

According to an e-mail from Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, acting deputy chief of the Voting Rights Division, the sponsorship will involve sending government lawyers to man a booth for the Labor Day weekend event in Illinois.

“This is an important outreach opportunity, and a chance to reach a community that is at once very much discriminated against, and very wary of the national government and its willingness to protect them,” Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Times.

“It would be a great step forward to break through those barriers. And Chicago is lovely this time of year,” Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said.

And Chicago is lovely this time of year.

Indeed, an expensive outing in the Windy City (I still haven’t figured out why they call it that, since I’ve been here we haven’t gone very far beyond gentle breezes) is a fine way to spend the taxpayers’ money, while stroking terrorism sponsoring, murderous, America hating, fanatical Muslim “activists” at the same time.

The Justice Department declined to say how much the sponsorship will cost.

“This is just staggering, it’s outrageous,” the lawyer said. “Lawyers from the Civil Rights Division traveling to Chicago on the federal dime. This will cost thousands of dollars.”

A second lawyer responded to Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere’s e-mail questioning the participation and said it “seems like an odd time for one part of DOJ to lend credence and visible support to ISNA at the same time DOJ prosecutors will be called on to defend their decision to name ISNA as a conspirator.”

There’s a word for that, um, it will come to me…

The convention features book signings, musical entertainment and seminars on family, community service and political activism.

And political activism. Hmmm, I thought they held most Islamic “political activism” classes in mosques and desert compounds in places like Syria, Libya and Iran, as well as Wahhabi mosques all over the western world.

Now they have an official convention, and it’s sponsored by The Justice Department! Can things get more bizarre than that?

But the first lawyer also pointed to a morning session on “the threat and reality of U.S.-sponsored torture” as contrary to the department’s mission. The Justice Department was responsible for signing off on the legality and constitutionality of interrogation techniques.

“The extensive news coverage by the U.S. and international media sources makes it all too clear that the grim abuses in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the sending of detainees to secret prisons around the world that are known to torture during interrogations, are not isolated incidents, but rather constitute policy of the U.S. government,” the schedule of events said.

“This session will describe the nature of U.S.-sponsored torture, the effects of torture on its victims, the efforts of the U.S. religious community, and what you can do to help end U.S.-sponsored torture,” the schedule said.

That must be what they mean by seminars on “family” and “community service”.

And as usual, we’re paying for it with our tax dollars.

Link H/T CNS News

…to ethanol, preferring to wait and see how well the fuel substitute does for itself on a commercial basis and, not being a scientist by any means, have thought that with all the great reviews it gets from what some call those in the know or perhaps the smart money, it might put a damper on both the consumption of Islamic fossil fuels and the doomsday uproar coming from the Man-Made Climate Change hucksters on the left.

Luckily, columnist John Stossel has come along with an article that casts formidable doubts regarding all this ethanol business.

No doubt about it, if there were a Miss Energy Pageant, Miss Ethanol would win hands down. Everyone loves ethanol.

“Ramp up the availability of ethanol,” says Hillary Clinton.

“Ethanol makes a lot of sense,” says John McCain.

“The economics of ethanol make more and more sense,” says Mitt Romney.

“We’ve got to get serious about ethanol,” says Rudolph Giuliani.

And the media love ethanol. “60 Minutes” called it “the solution.”

Clinton, Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards not only believe ethanol is the elixir that will give us cheap energy, end our dependence on Middle East oil sheiks, and reverse global warming, they also want you and me — as taxpayers — to subsidize it.

Hmmmmm, wait a minute…

Better read the entire column.

Ahem.

Like Professor Clyde Crashcup used to say to his assistant, Leonardo, “Back to the drawing board”.

Not too long ago, I posted about the coming of the North American Union, an agenda which, much to my chagrin, is being engineered by the man I voted for twice for President and his counterparts in Mexico and Canada.

Some commenters took this either with a grain of salt, some with a degree of alarm, some, I thought, may have humored me with their comments.

As they say, it’s all good. The very concept sounds both farfetched and absurd, like the plot of a Robert Ludlum novel or the fantasies of a serious paranoid.

After all, conspiracy theories abound, right?

I had thought my research on the subject was pretty extensive, in fact, somewhere along the line I was reminded of my ex-wife’s own “ravings”, back in the days of the Carter Administration, when she talked about then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ambitions toward what was called the Trilateral Commission.

In those days I was still kinda’ sorta’ liberal and pretty laid back, and to tell the truth, couldn’t give the proverbial “flying fuck” about such things. Please excuse mah French (spit!)….

In the comments section of my post on the North American Union ambitions of those involved, the forever awesome Always On Watch suggested that I contact a great blog called Sixth Column, who had been following the NAU proceedings for some time. I did.

We resolved to share information on anything our respective research unearthed on the subject. In that quarter, they have thus far kicked my ass, LOL.

An emailed article I recently received provides the entire history, names, methods, intentions, chronology and all, of events leading up to what is now the plan for the North American Union. It is lengthy and will require some time, but I urge you to read it in its entirety.

It should convince you, in alarming detail, of what is to come in the next four years, no matter what else occurs in the political spectrum of the United States of America.

It is here.

As I said last time out, we are indeed in grave trouble, because our very sovereignty is about to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate expediency. While our future Congresses and POTUSes will govern our country, they will be like state legislatures, while extranational congresses determine the details of our economy (a collective with Mexico and Canada), eventually becoming part of a global collective consisting of the EU, the NAU, the SAU, the AU, etc….

We are in big trouble here, a world government awaits just around the corner, and most unfortunately, the politicians who might be able to prevent it are being kept outside the loop.

As I said in my previous post about this, the involved congresses/parliaments, etc involved herein have been kept in the dark about it, as has the media.

I am wondering whether we are going to wake up and deal with this, or whether we’re simply going to drift into it in blissful ignorance, becoming an entirely different country….

ULTRA-MAJOR and MEGA-GRATEFUL hat tip to CUBED!

Sometime yesterday, for no reason I can fathom, I began having a problem posting comments in the thread from my last post, The Democrats And Taxes.

Every time I attempted to reply to a comment, I received a mostly blank error page with the following at the top:

Wrong, wrong, totally wrong. We have no page called (none), and we never did. So http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/archives/2006/10/the_democrats_a.php must have screwed everything up. They deserve an atomic wedgie for that.

This seems to be the sort of error message one gets at mu.nu., LOL. Not being, by any means, a computer wizard, I have no idea what this is about nor how to go about correcting it, though I’m more than positive it has something to do with something I either did or overlooked.

However, I’m hoping that whatever it was, it only applies to that post.

I do intend to get to the bottom of it and in so doing reply to a great comment forthwith. If anybody out there is more technically familiar with the workings of mu.nu and Moveable Type and can shed some light on what could have caused this and how I can correct it, I would greatly appreciate it.

**** I just attempted a test comment on this post and received the same error message. Hmmmmm.

In my last post, I screwed up twice — I didn’t title it, so I cannot now access it to amend anything as I need the title to click on to do so {man vs computer}, and I neglected to put in the link I’d intended to Kat’s site, Cathouse Chat, a good place to go for both reading and espresso.

…. I want to post this highly relevant and telling article. I have to head to the airport in a couple of hours, and this will be the last you hear from me for a couple of days, but this is too important not to post first:

I’ve said this before and I don’t think I can ever say it enough: It truly aggravates me that the majority of my fellow American Jews are Democrats and/or liberals.

The American left is no friend of Israel, they continuously support the Jewish State’s enemies, who just happen to be enemies of the United States and of every aspect of our way of life, and of late the Democrats have taken a critical stance toward Israel’s self defense efforts, as well, ignoring reality altogether in favor of political illusion.

The overwhelming number of Democrats on the Hill vote continuously in favor of those seeking to destroy Israel, and American Jews support these folks.

To coin a phrase, “What’s up with that?”

The linked article is a must-read, go for it!

A major hat tip, here, along with a generous helping of gratitude for sharing, to Civil Truth.

Another o’ them dang forwarded emails that make one think about things….

About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior. “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.

During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage ”

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election.

Population of counties won by:

Gore: 127 million

Bush: 143 million

Square miles of land won by:

Gore: 580,000;

Bush: 2,427,000

States won by

Gore 19;

Bush: 29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by

Gore: 13.2

Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off government welfare…”

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some 40 percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase. Our European friends have over 70 percent of the population in most European countries reaching the “governmental dependency” phase due to opening their immigration to allow poor immigrants into their countries.

The United States originally opened their immigration policy to people that had a required skill or profession. Somewhere along the timeline, probably in the 1970’s, that policy slipped to allow anyone into the United States. It didn’t matter if a person had a skill or profession.

Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

PS: If the Senate grants Amnesty and citizenship to 20 million criminal invaders called illegal’s and they vote, then goodbye USA in less than 5 years.

H/T Brenda

**** UPDATE

Reader Arthur Stone has introduced information that casts some degree of doubt on the actual origins of the theory expressed in the email published in this article, so I began looking into it. I had intended to catch up on some long overdue sleep, but on hitting the rack, I found that I kept thinking about Arthur’s link to Snopes on the subject and got back up — two mega-strong pots of Cafe Bustelo later, I have found references to both the content and the work itself, apparently an essay or an excerpt from an essay, going back several decades and being attributed not only to Tyler — actual name Tytler, but to several other historical reknowns including former British PM Disraeli.

Snopes claims that the quoted material does not appear in the work it is attributed to, based apparently on a keyword search of Tytler’s Universal History, from the Creation of the World to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century, by Alexander Fraser Tytler, but others claim that book as the source.

So, I’ve “put my money where my mouth is”, so to speak, and just spent nearly $60.00 express ordering a copy of the book. When I receive it, I’ll go through it cover to cover in search of the essay and report my findings here.

– Seth

So the bulk of our members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, would love nothing better than to sneak an amnesty around us for millions of criminal aliens. Many are members of violent gangs that traffic in narcotics. Many more would love nothing better than to be in a position to avail themselves of tax financed entitlement programs. Most of those who work illegally here send the bulk of their earnings home, effectively taking combined millions out of our economy. In short, such an amnesty would be worse than bad, worse than terrible, worse than horrible, even, for the United States.

But that’s what our political ruling class desires.

Why, then, is this guy having such a hard time getting a green card!!!?

Have we reached a point where someone who would be an asset to this country in every way need not apply, but a giant parasitic influx of the fruits of Mexico’s economic failure is more than welcome?

Go figure….

In the Convolution Department, I have long wondered why the bulk of “the black vote” seems eternally bequeathed to the political party that has been black Americans’ {no, I won’t be PC and use the term “African Americans”, because despite the left’s attempts to create ethnic divides and feel-good solidarity with Kunta Kinte, black Americans are Americans, period. Not only those who were born here, but the ones who immigrated in recent years and of their own free will, from Africa}. I have friends from Senegal and Borkina Faso who now consider themselves “Americans, period” who apparently don’t see any need in being “African Americans” like millions of black Americans do who have never been within thousands of miles of Africa . “African” Americans, like “Asian” Americans and “Mexican” Americans, bearing ethnic titles that distinguish them from “other” Americans is calculated to make them “different”. You have to make somebody officially “different” in order to single them out as targets of “bigotry”.

Wait! Something’s wrong here!

The same Democrats who have rendered it illegal to ask any questions of job applicants that might be used to discriminate against them via age, race, gender, religious preference or political point of view, to the point of not even inquiring on a job application the years someone attended a school, college, whatever because it could be used to calculate age, suddenly champion the cause of defining just which “kinds” {flavors, brands?} of Americans they are by affixing a label to them. Ain’t that grand! Luckily this is the left we’re talking about here — had Republicans first advanced this idea, we would have been immediately assailed as “racists!” The fine folks over there on the left could never be called that, because they are…. they are…. over there on the left, where racism has somehow been established as impossible to exist.

Just ask Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or any opportunistic white Democrat that arse creeps the black community for votes. They’ll tell you. “Nope, no racism on our side of the aisle. Want racism, go across there to the Republicans. We’re the Democrats here (heavenly music in background, perhaps the Hallelujah Chorus), we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘racist’, except that it only applies to Republicans.”

This is, as any informed American (informed, as one who has long ago abandoned the mainstream media as a credible source of news, sought out and found more accurate alternative sources of information) can tell you, a crock filled with the scrapings from the bottoms of numerous ill-guided shoes.

To white Democrats, black Americans are little more than pieces of meat that vote and are susceptible to an eternal con job. If you actually examine the benefits blacks enjoy when they help elect white Democrats, you’ll find that there are none — in the 50 years or so that the left has enjoyed the “support” of the black community, they haven’t gotten much of a return. The only blacks that have gotten ahead have been those who busted their touchases to do so, same as before the white Democrats took them under their dubious wing.

A fellow Republican blogger and friend who has run for state office here in North Carolina has told me of a conversation he had with a black man during a campaign, in which the black man praised his candidacy and his platform, but said he would still vote Democrat, because “I’m black.”

This is ludicrous.

A column by Jeff Jacoby is as definitive as you can get as to why.

Of course the Republican Party’s record on race is not without its blemishes. For example, at a 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond in 2002, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi praised the former Dixiecrat’s segregationist 1948 campaign for president. Republicans were scandalized and forced Lott to resign as Senate majority leader.

Democrats, by contrast, have never moved to purge Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who wrote in 1947 that he would never agree to fight “with a Negro by my side” and would “rather . . . die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.” Byrd filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and is the only senator to have voted against both of the black justices named to the Supreme Court — the liberal Thurgood Marshall and the conservative Clarence Thomas. While Byrd has said his racism is a thing of the past, that didn’t stop him from using the N-word twice in an interview on national TV in 2001. Remarkably, none of this has harmed Byrd’s standing within the Democratic Party, nor the party’s standing among black voters.

To Truncate a bit,

After all, it was the Democratic Party that vehemently defended slavery, the Democratic Party that supported the Dred Scott decision, and the Democratic Party that opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. It was Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats who repeatedly blocked anti-lynching bills, and Democrats who enacted Jim Crow segregation across the South.

Everyone knows that it was a 19th-century Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But how many know that it was a 20th-century Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal government, appointed unabashed racists to his Cabinet, and endorsed “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s celluloid celebration of the Klan?

Speaking for myself, as a Jewish white guy from Queens, N.Y., who has been around the block a few times, I see absolutely no difference between the status of blacks as human beings and the status of whites as same. As a matter of fact, the most formidable opponent I ever had when I was playing chess at my best was a black man from San Jose, and all the black folks I know who have thrown off the idiotic “oppressed by white Republicans, can’t achieve without Democrats” syndrome and taken their lives away from the left and into their own hands are now doing extremely well in life. They are living the American lifestyle without “help” from the left.

It’s sad to see so many blacks forming their opinions via the propaganda they get from the liberal mainstream media and as a result, continuing to deny themselves the positive representation they would receive from right thinking America.

I won’t even go into all the so-called “Blaxploitation” films of the early 1970s released by liberal Hollywood that influenced black youth to believe drug dealers and pimps were “cool” (personally, I’m partial to Pam Grier, ahem, no pimping or drug dealing there), or into the Rap music/videos of today that glorify “gangstas”, “bling bling” bought with drug profits and womens’ pumping up their derriers with silicone.

The left is forever making asses and dumbjohns out of our largest minority, and said minority simply follows along as though they were a lot less intelligent than they truly are.

Bummer.

Long and short? The bigotry actually resides on the left.

Read Jacoby’s as usual on-point column in its entirety here.

At this rate, Saddam’s trial will still be an ongoing issue long after most of us are gone.