This alert from Moving America Forward actually arrived the other day, but I was behind on reading email due to much busy-ness of late.

The author of the alert, Joseph Williams, is a Vietnam vet himself and the father of a United States Marine who died fighting for the continued freedom of the Iraqi people.

Fellow Americans:

I’m so very proud of my son who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He knew the mission was important, and he understood that the war in
Iraq was central to the war on terrorism.

Sadly, my son (Lance Cpl. Michael Jason Williams) lost his life in
combat in this war. My life changed forever when I got a knock at my door,
informing me that Michael had been killed in action. My son is my hero.

As a father, I can’t tell you what a gut-wrenching blow it was, and
still is. Not a day goes by I don’t think about my child. But the
Anti-American, anti-war crowd that pretends to ’support the military, but not
the mission’ are a pack of liars.

Some people, like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, have tried to
exploit the death of Michael and others who lost their lives in Iraq, in
order that they might advance their far left political agenda.

If we don’t stand up to the Cindy Sheehans, Michael Moore’s and the
politicans who are using Michael’s death to further their agenda of
undermining our Commander-in-Chief, then Michael Jason William’s devotion to
this great country will be rendered meaningless.

I know from bitter experience.

I am a Vietnam veteran.

I don’t know what is so hard for the people in today’s anti-war
movement to understand. Radical Islamic Extremists are determined to kill
Americans and destroy our way of life.

In Iraq the terrorist insurgency is led by a fellow named Zarqawi, his
position is the leader of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” yet the anti-war crowd
marches through our streets proclaiming that the war in Iraq has nothing
to do with the war against terrorism.

Well, I’ve had enough of the misguided, anti-military and even
anti-American rhetoric from the anti-war crowd. They seem to be rooting for
our enemies more than our own troops at times.

So I’ve decided to help fight back.

I’ve leant my voice and my story - and the story of my son’s sacrifice
for his nation - to Move America Forward, for them to use in a national
radio ad campaign.

You can hear the ad here:
http://www.moveamericaforward.org/Link/audio/7452

Right now we’re trying to raise enough money to purchase the time on
radio stations around the country to make sure this message is heard.

Please, support this effort by making a contribution to help pay for
the airtime for this radio commercial. I would be honored to have you
help get this message out.

Contribute online here:
http://www.MoveAmericaForward.org/Contribution

Or mail in a contribution to this address:

Move America Forward
ATTN: Pro-Troop Holiday Ad Fund
P.O. Box 1497
Sacramento, CA 95812

Thank you for reading my letter.

Sincerely Yours,

Joseph Williams
Vacaville, California

On Veterans Day and the day after, George Bush and Karl Rove each finally launched a counterattack on the Democrats and their liberal socialist masters, responding to incessant attacks the Bush Administration has been weathering for years, including the disproven accusations that Vice President Dick Cheney coerced the CIA into altering intelligence to indicate there were WMDs in Iraq, in order to create a defensible reason for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam.

This sudden offensive posture on Mr. Bush’s part is quite understandable, given the fact that spineless Republicans we mistakenly voted into or reelected to Congress haven’t been giving the boss any back-up, too busy as they’ve been arse creeping for the Democrat minority or preening for their next reelection campaigns.

We really need to give a lot of thought to these career ruling class do-nothings when next we go to the polls and consider bringing in some newbies who haven’t had the opportunity to become complacent like those now purporting to represent us.

But as I am well known to do, I digress.

Back on track, one of the things I’ve always liked about reading Cal Thomas is that I find his columns are always spot-on.

In a Veterans Day speech in Tobyhanna, Pa., President Bush took on his critics who have said he lied about intelligence to justify deposing Saddam Hussein. While acknowledging it is ”perfectly legitimate” to criticize his conduct of the war, the president said, ”Some Democrats and anti-war critics are claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”
The president said the stakes in the global war on terror are too high ”and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges.” He said too many of his critics are ”deeply irresponsible” and sending the wrong signal to America’s enemy and to U.S. troops.
Democrats reacted immediately, accusing the president of using Veterans Day to politicize the war. What have they been doing the other 364 days of the year, if not trying to undermine the war effort by playing politics and contributing to disunity, thus encouraging the enemy?

And Carl Rove?

In his speech to the Federalist Society on Nov. 10, Rove gave a brief history of the consequences of judicial activism and how it has violated the separation of powers clause of the Constitution and contributed to disrespect for the courts and the law.
He noted the changes to the courts that were made in Texas when citizens realized their will and constitution were being frustrated because of ”millions of dollars from a handful of wealthy personal injury trial lawyers” that were ”poured into (Texas) Supreme Court races to shift the philosophical direction of the Court.” He noted the court ”earned the reputation as ‘the best court that money could buy.’ ”’

It’s a great column, read the whole thing.

The online Opinion Journal reran an 8 November Op-Ed yesterday by Joel Kotkin that gives thoughtful insight into the poverty that has been attributed as a root cause of the Muslim riots in France(we all know what I think about that), and from my read doesn’t indicate any sort of optimism regarding any economic turn for the better for either French Muslims or for France.

The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural “understanding” of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country’s grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France’s economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The European Dream,” and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.

Since the ’70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.

Read the rest of the Op-Ed here.

The Bush Administration has been assailed, since going into Iraq, by a “Bush lied, people died!” platform on the left, the single strongest point in the entire liberal anti-Bush arsenal of rhetoric.

The so-called “lies” are pretty interesting as they were all supported, vociferously, along with the need to oust Saddam Hussein, by the same portside politicians that now deny having ever uttered the opinion that Saddam had WMD or accusing the Bush Administration of tampering with intelligence that led them to the above opinions.

They are bald-faced, politically motivated liars. Even if Bush or Cheney had managed, for whatever reason, to manipulate the conclusions of the CIA regarding the presence of WMD in Iraq, one would have to say, then, that France, Germany and the other countries that opposed us going into Iraq also altered their intelligence, because their leaders all believed, based upon reports from their own intelligence agencies, that the WMD were there and that Saddam was expanding his NBC warfare inventory on an ongoing basis. And all agreed, until we invaded Iraq, that the weapons posed a threat to the immediate region and to the west, since in the latter case it was believed that Saddam might pass some of the weapons of mass destrucion on to terrorists.

The actual crux of the gripes I have is the fact that the left has totally lost its conscience and any semblance of honesty, and in pursuit of goals not compatible with the objectives of America’s founding concepts, they have no problem where ignoring facts or outright lying, and that includes the news media, which supports them, is concerned.

Dubya did not take us to war in Iraq lightly, he had justifiable reasons that have since manifested their purpose, though the Mainstream Media, out of political bias, does not report any of these positives.

However, Norman Podhoretz puts the entire situation in perspective.

The very idea that the Democrats would turn around and pretend that they never endorsed an invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the denial motivated by the War On Bush, pretty much demonstrates the lack of honesty, truth and soul on the left side of the political spectrum.

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

So read the column.

What are our friends, the Saudis up to these days?

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — A court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes for “mocking religion” after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper reported yesterday.
Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.
He was charged with promoting a “dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer,” the newspaper said.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.
A U.S. State Department report criticized Saudi Arabia last week, saying religious freedoms “are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam.”
The newspaper said Mr. al-Harbi will appeal the verdict.
A similar case was cited in the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2004.
“During the period covered by this report, a schoolteacher was tried for apostasy, and eventually convicted in March of blasphemy; the person was given a prison sentence of 3 years and 300 lashes. The trial received substantial press coverage,” the report said.
A 2003 report by the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, the world’s only government-sanctioned entity to investigate and report religious-freedom violations, named Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest violator of religious liberties.

Oh, okay, SSDD.

And this is a nation that exports its “religious” beliefs via mosques and schools to countries all over the world, where despite their claim that they are friends of ours, they preach hatred and scorn for all but Islam to their young, naming the United States and its citizens as one of their two worst enemies, the other being Israel.

Islam, the Religion of Peace.

Tell it to the French.

In scattered attacks overnight into Monday, vandals rammed a car into a primary school in the southern city of Toulouse before setting the building on fire. In northern France, arsonists set fire to a sports center in the suburb of Faches-Thumesnil and a school in the town of Halluin.

A gas canister exploded inside a burning garbage can in the Alpine city of Grenoble, injuring two police officers, the national police said. Three officers were injured elsewhere.

The rioting, sparked by the accidental electrocution deaths of two teens who thought police were chasing them, began in Paris’ poor suburbs, where immigrants from North and West Africa live with their French-born children in housing projects.

Sunday was the 18th straight night of unrest, but the storm of arson attacks and other violence has lost steam since the government declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.

The number of cars burned nightly has steadily decreased — from 502 overnight into Saturday, to 374 overnight into Sunday, to 271 as Monday began. A week earlier, 1,400 cars were incinerated in a single night.

What really irritates me about the way the liberal media has been handling the above events, collectively, is that they all but justify the property destruction, school and car burnings and other violence, including cop killing by focusing on the failure of the French to assimilate these Muslims into their society, citing the high rate of unemployment and poor living conditions in Islamic neighborhoods in France.

The Mainstream Media has actually excused these rioters and reduced, in tacit manner, what they’ve been doing to the status of peaceful protesters demonstrating against a government that has made them feel oppressed.

Right, so there’s no harm in burning a few thousand cars belonging to individuals who more than likely have had no influence in anything having anything at all to do with the Muslims’ situation, burning some schools, go figure — throwing gasoline all over a woman on crutches that burned the skin over a large part of her body — beating up senior citizens and attacking police.

We need to try and understand the poor dears, examine the reasons, the very motivations that created this atmosphere of violence, etc, etc…

Let’s hear it! “Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya…”

So as is always the case, the portside media manages to turn the victims into elements of an evil society{well, it is France} that is unfair to its Muslim citizens, who are merely responding to the unfairness, and voila! the rioters are now the victims.

Leave it to the left to define a situation thusly. If the ACLU had a Paris branch, they would probably be suing the French government for setting curfews and arresting rioters, thereby obstructing their rights to express their hate and anger.

Still, it must be a tough call for the left, since their appointed villains belong largely to the socialist government liberals so look up to.

What the truth boils down to is that gangs of young Muslims have been running amok, commiting violent, destructive felonies and there is nothing they can use as an excuse that will justify their acts. They are, indeed, scum.

If the French courts don’t deal harshly with those arrested in the course of their terrorism — yes, that’s exactly what this is — it will only make them appear weak and vulnerable to these animals, who view leniency as spinelessness and therefore contemptible. This lesson has been learned the hard way by many, not least of whom are the Israelis, but the left still hasn’t picked up on that. They won’t, in fact, until they are living under Sharia law and no longer have the right to criticize the powers that be, and their women are eighth class citizens, chattel who can be beaten bloody by hubby for the slightest infraction.

Dealing leniently with these “people” will only let them know that the threat of future rioting will be accepted as a bargaining chip by the French government. And there will be future rioting as a result.

What western supporters of and apologists for the actions of militant Islamics refuse to accept is that we are dealing with a mindset that is 100% intolerant of any religious beliefs that differ from theirs, believing that they are false and that it is the God given right of Muslims to go to any country they please and attack its customs, religious symbols and heritage in order to force it to comply with their own culture. It is acceptable to lie to infidels(non-believers), even to the point of signing treaties with full intentions of violating them when it is strategically advantageous to do so.

The centerpiece/ mastermind of today’s global Islamic terrorist front is, of course, al Qaeda, and those extremists have become so excessive as to alienate a few Muslim countries and communities through the none-too-bright practice of murdering their own. Witness the beach resort bombings in Egypt not long ago and, the other day, their hotel bombings in Jordan, the latter leading to a declaration of war on them by the king of Jordan himself.

JORDAN’S King Abdullah II vowed to “take the fight” to Iraq-based Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group Jordanian officials say carried out suicide attacks in Amman this week that killed 57 people.

“We are going to crack down and take the fight to Zarqawi,” the king said in an interview with CNN television.

“We have been very successful in taking down his operations in the past … (when) he used Jordanians. Now he has changed tactics, he is using foreigners. That means that our security services have to change tactics too.”

Authorities have arrested 12 people suspected of having had a hand in Wednesday’s bombings and have questioned scores more.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi was released from jail in 1999 as part of general amnesty granted by King Abdullah but was last year sentenced to death by a Jordanian court for the 2002 murder of a US diplomat.

Good, let the SOBs get their own people after them, at least those fellow Muslims of theirs are folks who understand what they’re up against, unlike western governments like our own who simply refuse to realize that we are addressing an enemy whose thought patterns are totally alien to our own, especially in regard to such items as the sanctity of human life or the value of their word when given to any person or political body that exists outside their own faith.

And our political leaders really don’t seem to have a clue. One piece of supporting evidence for that statement comes from the pressure we are putting on Israel to expedite their capitulation to the Palestinians.

A sharp dispute arose on Monday between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the issue of Hamas participation in Palestinian elections slated for January.

In a Monday morning meeting in Jerusalem, Sharon said that allowing Hamas to take part in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council would be a grave error, and would only weaken Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, rather than strengthening him, as Palestinians have argued.

“We will not interfere with the elections,” Sharon declared, “but neither will we coordinate the elections with [the Palestinians], and will not allow Hamas people to operate and move around differently from what is happening now.”

We are pushing Israel to interact with the Palestinians in the same manner the United States would exercise diplomacy with, say, Norway, Germany or Greece, but the reality they face is alien to that of diplomacy with the average civilized country.

Very real security concerns prevent the Israelis from going with a program that could get innocent civilians killed. As many of us expected when Ariel Sharon ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and evacuated all the Jewish residents, Gaza has been morphing itself into an armed camp from which terrorists of such esteemed murder organizations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad can launch attacks against Israel without even having to travel. They can telecommute by mortar.

Condi, I love you and will vote for you for President in 2008 if you’re our candidate, but please, don’t treat the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians like the relationship between the U.S. and Canada, for Chrissake!

While we argue with the political panjandrums in Ottawa over things like steel manufacture or Mad Cow, the Israelis exist in a completely different reality.

Late Sunday night, tanks lined up outside the northern Gaza border targeted the sources of the attacks.

According to IDF officials, the reprisals would continue into the early hours Monday morning, “because the Palestinians must understand that we will not ignore mortar fire.”

The army began firing at the terror cells after a mortar shell landed near the security fence north of the Karni crossing Sunday night. No one was wounded and no damage was caused in the attack.

“Our response will be exaggerated and disproportional to the [mortar] fire,” a senior IDF official said, according to Army Radio. If the Palestinian cells continue firing mortars, he added, Israel’s response will even intensify.

Israel has gradually escalated its response to the attacks from Gaza since its withdrawal from the strip. During the first half of September, during Operation First Rain, Israel stationed a row of tanks bordering the Gaza Strip to discourage attacks. When Palestinian attacks continued, however, the army was given the go-ahead to respond to fire with fire.

IDF officials explained that the object of the current operation was to drive the terror cells away from the security fence, and thus render the mortar fire ineffective due to the limited range of the shells.

The major worry here is that Hamas, a terrorist organization by any definition, has become an important political party among the Palestinians and if they win any major posts in upcoming elections they will be a terrorist organization with political authority that will undoubtedly be acknowledged by the U.N. and member nations that encompass, among others, western countries, including the United States.

To add to all else, we have ongoing problems with Syria and Iran.

We are at war with radical Islam. We initiated our two main fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and despite the mewlings from the left as to how “Bush lied and people died,” and the down-playing and downright ignoring of our highly positive results in Iraq by the Mainstream Media does more to hurt our country than to help it — they would rather spin, omit and lie than tell the truth, all for a political agenda that’s more important to them than the security of our form of government and the well-being of Americans in America.

Sad.

Since the beginning of Islam, the “faithful” have attempted unsuccessfully to force their beliefs and lifestyles, para-militarily and militarily, on the Judeo-Christian world. They have failed miserably. Today, however, they are taking advantage of advances in technology and travel to pursue their ages-old agenda via terrorism.

We are fighting a global war whose stakes comprise our freedom and the continuity of our very way of life, and it would greatly benefit us all if those Americans on the left side of the aisle went beyond the limitations of partisan politics and stood up for their country and for the freedom these fanatics are fighting tooth-and-nail to take away from us.

Melanie Morgan and Move America Forward need our assistance, at least those of us who believe in America. Liberals{socialists, marxists, etc} need not apply, as they’d just as soon see the United States emulating the U.S.S.R. in their efforts to destroy America.

Fellow Americans,

Wednesday’s terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in three
hotels in Amman, Jordan demonstrates why it is so important for us to step
up the war against terrorism.

We either defeat the terrorists - by killing them overseas and showing
them that the United States will not back down - or else we will face
more terrorist attacks here at home.

Appeasement and surrender is no option. Just look at the streets of
Paris, France, which are lined with burning automobiles by Muslim youth
who feel slighted by the French government. Not only have they shot and
killed a police officer, but they also doused a woman in gasoline as
she attempted to escape the riots. She was on crutches, and thus could
not outrun the attackers. She now suffers burns on over 60% of her
body.

Right now the most prominent frontline in America’s war against
terrorism is Iraq. And we MUST prevail there - even though some people are
determined to get the United States to give up and pull out of Iraq.

Friends, this is EXACTLY why we are running our radio ads across the
nation rallying Americans to support the war in Iraq.

We’ve so far raised a little more than $25,000 for these ads. That’s
simply not enough - especially since the ads will expand to markets
around the country NEXT WEEK. We must be well into the hundreds of
thousands of dollars to truly have an impact and give Americans the “shot in
the arm” to return to the fold and support the mission our military men
and women are serving in.

Let us please pull together and double the $25,000 we’ve raised in the
next 24 hours:

http://www.MoveAmericaForward.org/Contribution

Or help us with a contribution via U.S. Mail:

Move America Forward
ATTN: Pro-Troop Holiday Ad Fund
P.O. Box 1497
Sacramento, CA 95812

Come on people, let’s step up our efforts.

Sincerely,

Melanie Morgan
Chairman, Move America Forward
http://www.MoveAmericaForward.org

Are the French in a bad spot, or what?

Their chickens have come home to roost, as the saying goes.

They have spent generations cultivating the perfect socialist society that combines copious unemployment, massive welfare, anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, high level corruption, national cowardice and general-purpose spinelessness and a come-one-come-all Muslim immigration policy that has structured their population to a ratio of more than five followers of Islam to one hundred multi-generation native Frenchman.

On top of that, they have treated their Muslim population to the same sort of pontification to which they treat all other non-Frenchmen; unfortunately, the Africans take things a little more seriously than most folks and have no respect for the property, lives and rights of others, so there are those tragic riots going down over there… The French weasels should learn from this, but I doubt they will.

The awesome Suzanne Fields has great perspective here regarding the political, military and economic failure known as France.

This is a source of renewal of the long-standing anti-America sentiment in France: How dare the cigar-chomping, loudmouthed vulgar American bore, who knows nothing about fine wine, haute cuisine or couturier fashion, ride to the rescue of the land of 300 cheeses? Unable to accept their own weakness, they turned on us. A taker hates a giver. French polls repeatedly show how little the French think of America. Anti-Americanism is the first refuge of the French scoundrel.

“What we mistakenly see as a craven, anti-Semitic, insecure, hypocritical, hysterically anti-American, selfish, overtaxed, culturally exhausted country, bereft of ideas, fearful of its own capitulation to Islam, headed for a demographic cul de sac, corrupted by lame ideologies, clinging to unusually unsupportable entitlements, crippled by a spirit of multilayered bureaucracy,” writes Denis Boyles in his book, “Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese,” is “actually worse than all that.”

What I see in all this, despite all the media attempts to put a human face on the rioting, is a throng of animals who, having nothing, entertain no respect for anything others have worked for. They are merely scum using shallow excuses to go on a rampage, victimizing, as all Muslim terrorists do, innocent people without the means to defend themselves. They demonstrate blatant cowardice, but that figures as it is compatible with French politics.

Mona Charen also weighs in accurately on France.

Through a combination of socialism at home and appeasement abroad, the French believed they had found a viable alternative to, in former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s phrase, “jungle capitalism,” as practiced by you know who. Jacques Chirac was more direct, condemning “ultra liberal Anglo-Saxon” economic policies, while also famously boasting that France would anchor a European pole in a “multipolar” world, with American influence vastly reduced. With 300 French cities in flames, French pretensions lie singed and shriveled.

Unfortunately, the same Islamic terrorism — sorry, “rioting,” is occurring on smaller scales in Belgium and Germany — two of France’s fellow weasel states — so it seems that there is a pattern: Let Islamics take over a few neighborhoods, open a few mosques, etcetera, and as soon as they feel strong enough, they’ll let you know that while your country has national borders, Islam has no borders, Muslims own the world.

Period.

So we have a choice, from the standpoint of immigration. Do we want to emulate France, or would we prefer to learn from their mistakes?

In the aftermath of the disasterous wave of hurricanes we were recently slammed by, acts of nature that turned thousands of U.S. citizens into “refugees” of a kind as they flooded cities and destroyed homes, there is still much recrimination from both sides of the political spectrum as to who was to blame for what has been termed an “inadequate response.”

Face it, no matter how much a government plans for natural disasters, until one comes down on us with a vengeance as Katrina and her siblings did, we really cannot know whether those untested rescue and relief measures we have planned are going to be adequate to the task.

Now our response system has indeed been tested and found wanting, and we know more — ain’t hindsight wonderful — about how bad things can get and what we need in the event of another “worst case scenario.”

So what happens now? Do a bunch of politicians sit around and do what they do best, which is jaw the subject around for a few months{before and after the coming congressional recess — boy, I’ll bet a lot of working Americans wish they could enjoy the lengthy holiday vacation Members of Congress are entitled to} — and then produce some wordy page of legalese only an attorney can understand, full of doubletalk, pontification and little else?

Or will they look here?

So, you want to see what these old girls will be able to do? Here’s a list of only a few things we can provide during a Coastal State disaster (such as flooding or a hurricane)

—-Service a disaster area of up to 10,000 square miles (up to 100 miles inland) with minimal (if any) outside support

—-Provide complete berthing facilities for up to 400 emergency responders “on scene” at a disaster site

—-Fully integrated communications system serving all local, state, and federal agencies, as well as cell phone coverage and military band frequencies–allowing for seamless communications between all disaster scene personnel, no matter what radio frequency or cell phone is being used.

—-Daily provide 110 tons of bagged and palletized ice to the disaster region

—-Daily generate, bottle, and palletize up to 50,000 gallons of fresh water

—-Provide refueling station and loading platform for helicopters operating in the disaster area

—-Carry over 7,000 tons of food and supplies for a disaster area

—-Store (and provide delivery of) 700,000 gallons of diesel, gasoline, and aviation fuel for use in the disaster area on emergency vehicles and critical needs generators (hospitals, emergency operation centers, etc)

We now have the opportunity to add a couple of these eminently mega-useful ships to our disaster response effort, but in order for this to take place, Congress must give it a thumbs up. Congress will only be available for another two weeks before their next session opens in 2006.

So there is a rush on this, and all of us can be instrumental, with a simple email or telephone call, in making it happen.

Below are those to contact:

Senator Cochran, (R-MS) (Chairman of Appropriations)
Phone: (202) 224-5054
Internet Contact Form

Senator DeWine, (R-OH)
Phone: (202) 224-2315
Fax: (202) 224-6519
Becky Watts has the legislation for his office
Internet Contact Form

Senator Shelby, (R-AL)
Phone: (202) 224-5744
Fax: (202) 224-3416
Ryan Welch has the legislation for his office
senator@shelby.senate.gov

Senator Sessions, (R-AL)
Phone: (202) 224-4124
Fax: (202) 224-3149
Stephen Boyd has the legislation for his office
Internet Contact Form

For further information and links to other sites posting on this, please visit Phin’s Blog.

Despite the apparent naivety of the “liberal in the street,” the one who soaks up and believes all the dramatic nonsense preached by the likes of Howard Dean, John Kerry, Al Franken, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Dick Durbin and the rest of that dubious crowd who claim to be Americans of some sort, there are some pretty sharp thinkers lurking in the background over there on the left who know how to orchestrate situations that enable their political and media lackeys to blare accusations and innuendo at the GOP and the eeevil corporations in an attempt to draw votes to the left side of the aisle.

I don’t believe these strategists are creating any of their own strategies, but they are simply following guidelines set down by leftists of decades past.

Before I go on, I must once again say this: I was raised in what would today be called a Conservative Democrat family. Back then, the Democrats were a viable party that stood for real ideals, stood behind the concept of America and could be respected for their political beliefs, if not agreed with. They, like the Republicans, were true patriots.

Somewhere along the line, however, they were hijacked by far left liberals – the folks who nowadays prefer to be called “progressives,” and since then they’ve been allowing these liberals to do their talking for them. As a result, we have the privilege of listening to grown men, senators and reps, no less, comparing our Armed Forces members with Nazis(JFK would neither have condoned nor kept silent over something like that, but he was a genuine war hero and a true patriot), calling the president a liar and a fascist, comparing Camp Delta, the detention center where we store captured terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, with the “killing fields of the Pol Pot regime” – my favorite Durbin idiocy – and a ration of other innuendo that only a total moron would listen to and then vote to reelect the politician who said it.

That said, my topic here is more an economics related commentary than anything else.

It must be understood that liberals, whether it occurs to them or not, support a socialist or, in as many cases, a purely communist itinerary for the United States. Everything they stand for literally screams this.

America is a capitalist republic. We were founded on the concept of limited government , which means that the Fed’s responsibility is to protect and govern the country on a “big picture” level and leave social and “detail” issues to the individual states. Where local disputes as to law arose, the Supreme Court ruled based on the Constitution. This policy served us well for a long time. We became the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet, the world’s manufacturing dynamo and a nation whose benevolence has helped numerous poor countries develop independent means of economic survival, even to the point of lending them megabucks we have never even collected interest payments on.

Enter the left:

The left believes that as many jobs as possible should be unionized, even unskilled positions, so as to milk companies for as much of their profits as possible. I am in favor of unions for skilled personnel in jobs that present physical risks that might shorten their career spans, such as carpenters, roofers and so forth{my best friend was a carpenter for nearly three decades, and before turning 48 his knees were shot – if it weren’t for the union, he, his wife and four children would be screwed – his disability retirement is due exclusively to the union as his condition, which included internal replacement surgery, was the result of many years’ high impact work rather than a single incident that could be cited at a hearing}. I am not in favor of someone who has no skills and performs a function anyone could do being compensated according to a union scale that is well beyond his value to the marketplace. That is absurd.

The left believes differently, and they back the unions 100%.
The left believes that the government must micromanage business, whenever possible saddling corporations with costly regulations and taxing them mercilessly.
The left believes in “going after” companies that have become industry leaders, because success means independence to a certain degree, and independence brings any entity farther away from government control – who needs any kind of subsidy funds or tax considerations when they are worth a ten digit figure?
The left believes in bribing people not to work, so that the continued bribery(welfare, anyone?) will get them votes.
The left believes that their every whim should be a federal case, ignoring states’ rights, that the federal government is mom and dad.
The left believes that those who bust their touchases, gamble, sacrifice and achieve financial success should divide their profits with the lazy, who have contributed nothing and have no intention of contributing anything, ever.

We go to the company in which the unskilled people are “earning” $35,000.00 per year plus an impressive package of benefits and perks, all paid by the employer due to the union. On top of everything else, for those who don’t know, an employer has to match the Social Security tax paid by an employee, including the overly compensated employee.

The liberals and their labor unions, all for the sake of gaining votes, make this unskilled labor too expensive for the firms involved, and in order to make it affordable, the victimized companies seek out foreign labor, lay off employees , and suddenly the guy making over twenty bucks an hour in a nine dollar job has no job at all.

Here in California, where liberals rule the roost, financially smothering regulations and high corporate taxes run many businesses out of the state and into more business friendly states. They often leave behind four digit newly unemployed figures.

The sad part is that they really don’t give a damn, and I mean they have no feelings one way or the other, for those families and individuals who go through financial hell as a result of their actions. To the liberals, more unemployment and more misery, despite the fact that they caused it by design, are completely insignificant. They just don’t give a damn about the victims of their political plays, and that’s exactly what they are: To liberals, unemployment and/or poverty they’ve caused is perfectly acceptable as long as they can blame it on the Republicans and those eeevil corporations I mentioned earlier.

My whole point here is that the socialist left has acquired the recipe for sabotaging big business and then blaming it for its survival-oriented responses, all in the name of sleazing out a few additional votes. It is both pitiful and tragic that the Democrats, under the control of their Marxist liberal associates, feel no shame when they manipulate people out of jobs in order to blame the political opposition and attract votes to their side of the aisle.

The goal is financial chaos, anything they can do to be able to blame or attack{at present} the Bush Administration or (at any time) the Republican party, capitalism or any vestige of American business tradition they can label negatively in order to gain popularity for their cause.

Their cause is obvious to anyone who really pays attention to the left’s activities: The end of the American way of life and the beginning of the sort of collectivism we see under the heading of socialism…. Or worse.

If only those mindless twits that support “liberalism” were smart enough to understand exactly what they are trying to drag this great and free country into….

Here is a RightMarch alert on H.R. 4128, the proposed “Private Property Rights Protection Act” that will deny any federal funding to cities or states that exploit SCOTUS’ notorious Eminent Domain ruling{Kelo vs. City of New London} by taking away a citizen’s home, place of business or other property for the purpose of commercial development:

ALERT: As you know, the Supreme Court has decided to allow city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another. In “Kelo vs. City of New London”, five Justices (led by David Souter) ruled that “eminent domain” allows any local government to TAKE anyone’s private property if the government will generate greater tax revenue — or any other economic benefits — when the land is developed by the new owner.

Thank goodness, someone in Congress has moved quickly to counter this dictatorial and ANTI-constitutional decision by the Supreme Court — but WE have to make sure this effort passes!

Last week (on October 27), the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation responding to the Kelo ruling: H.R. 3135, the “Private Property Rights Protection Act” was approved 27-3, and prohibits the use of federal funds by state and local governments that use eminent domain for the purposes of commercial development. House Judiciary Chairman Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI) was the bill’s sponsor; House Resources Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) also held a parallel hearing on HR 3405, the “Strengthening the Ownership of Private Property” (STOPP) Act.

Both of these bills would be GREAT, but the BEST news is that the two bills have now merged into H.R. 4128, the “Private Property Rights Protection Act.” Prior to the merge, both bills had strong bipartisan support — H.R. 3135 with 136 cosponsors and H.R. 3405 with 112. This means we have a GOOD chance of getting this bill through!

Rep. Sensenbrenner’s bill reads, “No State or political subdivision of a State shall exercise its power of eminent domain, or allow the exercise of such power by any person or entity to which such power has been delegated, over property to be used for economic development or over property that is subsequently used for economic development, if that State or political subdivision receives Federal economic development funds during any fiscal year in which it does so.” In other words, if they take away your property, the Feds will take away their funding.

Wow — a single bill that makes common sense, that seeks to counteract an out-of-control judiciary. This is a RARE opportunity.

We’ve got to move this legislation QUICKLY — greedy local governments have already started taking advantage of this court decision, in order to pad their own pockets at the expense of the citizens. For example, John Fund reports that “Officials in the beachfront town of Freeport, Texas, announced they would move forward with plans to commandeer property owned by two seafood companies in order to allow the construction of a 900-slip private marina.”

We need to FLOOD Congress NOW with messages of support for this legislation, so that it can move to the President’s desk right away!

TAKE ACTION: What the Supreme Court has just implemented in America is FASCISM. The actual definition of “fascism” is “state control over the individual and the economy using regimentation and regulation… fascism prefers state control over ostensibly private property rather than nationalization.”

Do you get it? Once again, the judiciary is tyrannical and OUT OF CONTROL. We’ve GOT to take action to stop them –It is CRITICAL that you ACT TODAY! If we can FLOOD the offices of all our Congressmen and Senators with TENS OF THOUSANDS of messages, telling them to QUICKLY pass this legislation, we CAN stop this dangerous Supreme Court ruling dead in its tracks. But we need YOUR help. Click below to send a FREE message to your U.S. Representative and BOTH of your Senators, urging them to SUPPORT H.R. 4128, the “Private Property Rights Protection Act”:

http://capwiz.com/sicminc/issues/alert/?alertid=8191521&type=CO

NOTE: Be sure to send this Alert to EVERYONE you know who wants to help RESTORE the private property rights that the Supreme Court took away! Thank you!

Sincerely,

William Greene, President
RightMarch.com

If you’ll recall, the oppressive Supreme Court ruling was the work of left leaning justices while those of the conservative persuation dissented.

This didn’t come as a surprise to me, it was just another example of ways the left is endeavoring to give the government more control over our lives, in this case surrendering our property rights to the whims of opportunistic, corrupt, unctuous, seedy, sleazy, kickback-taking local politicians like those in New London, Connecticut.

As Bill Greene pointed out in the above alert, the decision enables a condition that amounts to fascism, the very label the left is constantly placing on conservatism. It’s amusing that while those misguided souls call us Republicans fascists, their actions speak loud enough to let us know whom the real fascists are.

Please call, email or fax your senators and representatives, make some noise to let them know that their constituents are most aggressively behind the passage of H.R. 4128.