As we know, in most states, when a senator leaves office prematurely, such as by death or “abrupt retirement”, it falls upon the governor to appoint his or her replacement.

Those liberals in Massachusettes were okay with that until a few years ago, when they had a Republican governor (Mitt Romney) and they fretted, “What happens if Teddy suddenly kicks the bucket? This governor might replace him with a Republican! We can’t have that!”

Being a lefty state, they figured they’d be safe if they left the replacement of a senator to the voters, so they changed the law.

Now a senator has to be replaced by someone elected by the voters.

Or so the law says.

However, fickle that they are, now that Ted’s gone and they have a Democrat governor at the moment, they feel that, after all, rules are meant to be broken.

Gov. Deval Patrick named former Democratic Party chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. to the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat Thursday and said the rushed, temporary appointment was necessary because the issues before Congress were “too important to Massachusetts for us to be one voice short.”

“too important to Massachusetts for us to be one voice short.”

Of course it is.

Had Romney been governor and the same thing happened, with him appointing a Republican as interim senator, there would have been one hell of an explosion in that state legislature, since in that case a prompt appointment wouldn’t have been all that important, after all

Patrick’s appointment means Kirk will serve in the interim post until voters pick a replacement in a Jan. 19 special election. Kirk said he would not be a candidate in the special election.

This week, lawmakers gave Patrick the appointment power, five years after taking that power away when Republican Mitt Romney was in office. The legislation did not take effect immediately, so Patrick had to sign an emergency letter Thursday to make the appointment right away.

These liberals are so transparently hypocritical and so obviously hold the intelligence of the voting public in profound contempt that one has to wonder how anyone with an iota of said intelligence can take them seriously enough to vote for them.

…and thought I’d share this Wesley Pruden Column that was there, since it’s so spot-on.

Manhattan will be a dangerous place this week for President Obama, where the terminally envious of the world are waiting at the United Nations with envy, arrogance and outstretched begging bowls.

That’s forever the case, isn’t it? Beg us for money, then badmouth us the rest of the time.

The diplomats representing the envious countries, some of them little more than tribes with flags and an embassy in a rooming house on a side street in Washington, have cooked up an interesting week to blunt the skepticism of a growing number of scientists who are finding the courage to say what they believed all along, even as Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and others insist that time is running out to make the sun change its spots, the tides recede and the weather behave itself.

Heh…

The London Guardian reports that the U.N. chief and global-warming negotiators “say that unless they can convert world leaders into committed advocates of radical action it will be hard … to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.”

If true, that’s good news for the rest of us, because “the most devastating consequences” would be enactment of Al Gore’s nightmare vision, to give the bureaucrats of the world all the taxes they can spend while bankrupting the most productive countries of the West.

The ambassador of the European Union to the United States is in particular need of a shot of Midol and a nice lie down until he feels better. Sen. Harry Reid’s disclosure that the U.S. Senate won’t take up cap-and-trade legislation, the centerpiece of “controlling” the effects of global warming, until next year has thrown the Europeans into a royal pout.

The only real urgency involved in the timely enactment of man-made global warming legislation is that they need to get all bills passed quickly, before the world learns that the entire anthropogenic global warming kerfuffle is one big scam.

“Sometimes in this country,” says EU Ambassador John Bruton, the greatest deliberative body in the world acts as though it is the only deliberative body in the world, and we should wait until it gets health care passed. The … world cannot wait on the Senate’s timetable.”

The world damned well better wait on the U.S. Senate! If they don’t like it, let those who feel they can’t wait go panhandle elsewhere.

A new book by an Australian geologist, Ian Plimer, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, argues that scientific fact has overwhelmed the doomsday scenarios of sinking islands, rising temperatures and collapsing ice shelves. He argues that global warming, which has naturally occurred over the billions of years of the Earth’s life, has often been a cycle of wealth and plenty. The Romans grew lemons, limes and oranges as far north as Hadrian’s Wall.

This naturally causes heartburn in certain labs and faculty lounges.

“They say I rape cows, eat babies and that I know nothing about anything,” he says. But the professor is not susceptible to the usual smear that he is a right-wing religious nut. He’s actually a member of the Humanist Society and wrote an earlier book attacking creationism, making him at one with the atheists, infidels and heretics who wear unbelief as scientific credentials.

This naturally causes heartburn in certain labs and faculty lounges.

Particularly those lounges occupied by far left liberals, and those labs run by “scientists” receiving federal grants, who would lose them if they admitted that man was not creating global warming.

My favorite paragraph in the entire OpEd:

American presidents always get grief abroad for looking out for American interests. Life was tough for Gulliver, too. But Lilliputians in every age are merely irritants, like ticks and mosquitos. President Obama should keep that in mind this week in New York.

AMEN to that!

At least I’ll assume (I know, assume makes an “ass” out of UME), to judge by the sense of logic, patriotism and common sense Obama has demonstrated as POTUS to date, that the graduate of the corrupt Chicago machine won’t heed the advice of these former DCIs. After all, the Obama credo is “politics before the people.”

Seven of the 10 living former CIA chiefs Friday urged President Obama to overrule his attorney general and not reopen investigations into CIA employees who may have abused detainees during the George W. Bush administration.

The former directors warned that further investigations would demoralize current CIA officers and might also lead allied intelligence services to suspend or scale back cooperation with the United States because the judicial probes could disclose joint operations and activities.

Why should Obama care about compromising methods and personnel? His good fiends friends at the New York Times certainly didn’t care about that kind of thing during the Bush Administration, when they blared every counter-terrorist program or strategy they could get their teeth into in order to play politics at the peril of the American people, just as Mr. O would likely have no qualms about.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but to judge, as a horse handicapper might say, from Past Performances, it’s a good bet I’m right.

On Aug. 24, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed a federal prosecutor, John Durham, to review cases against CIA officers suspected of exceeding Justice Department guidelines for interrogations of terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The decision to reopen the cases was controversial in part because the Justice Department under the Bush administration had already considered the charges and declined to prosecute the officers.

In a letter released Friday, the former directors of the CIA, who included Democratic and Republican appointees, wrote: “If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions.”

The entire article is here.

While we’re visiting the Washington Times, anyway, I’d like to direct your attention to the picture of Nancy Pelosi in this article.

Doesn’t she look like she uses the same cosmetic surgeon as the late Michael Jackson?

Wolf Here.

Thank you, Congress, for finally getting something right.

It’s about time some common sense prevailed, even though it took some undercover video to make this happen.

House Democrats on Thursday unexpectedly abandoned their longtime ally ACORN, joining Republicans in an overwhelming vote to end all federal funding for the embattled liberal activist group.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) watched its last bastion of support in Washington crumble a week after hidden-camera investigative videos surfaced that showed its workers advising a supposed underage prostitute on how to cheat on taxes and loan applications.

On the Democrats’ part, this was, of course, not a decision based on morality or patriotism, Lord only knows they’ve shown us, over the last couple of years, that with the domination of their party by the far left, that they’ve abandoned such things in favor of politics.

And that’s what it was, pure politics: There was no way they could sleaze around “the facts” like they do when one of their number is caught with his hand in a cookie jar or some other appendage in something of a more biological nature.

The latest setback followed a decision by the Obama administration to cancel plans for ACORN to work on the 2010 census and a Senate vote to block funding for ACORN in the 2010 housing appropriations bill.

The Republican-sponsored measure, dubbed the Defund ACORN Act, passed on a 345-75 procedural vote as part of an unrelated student loan reform bill. Two Democrats voted present.

The final tally was a startling rebuke from congressional Democrats, who in the past steadfastly supported ACORN in the face of conservative criticisms that the organization skirts tax laws, violates election rules and commits other crimes while heavily supporting Democratic candidates and liberal causes.

The group also had strong ties to President Obama, who prior to his political career worked as an organizer for Project Vote, which later became affiliated with ACORN. One of ACORN’s numerous sister organizations was paid to do work for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign last year.

My emboldening of a line, there, not that it’s any news: The existence of Acorn is in anything but the best interests of America, and that can also be said for the Obama Administration.

Wolf Out.

Knowing how much I detest liberal interference in what was once among the best systems of education in the world, Seth forwarded the following material to me awhile ago, from Red State.

While we are all focusing on H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care plan, we should at least glance at H.R. 3221, the House Democrats’ plan to kill off higher education access. (PDF)

The legislation is opposed by many major universities including Notre Dame, among others. Basically, the bill would shut down all private providers of student loans, drive up costs for universities, and become a bureaucratic nightmare for institutions of higher learning. The professors may be leftists, but the administrators have to pay attention to the bottom line.

Incredible! It’s bad enough that today’s students are subjected to a course of liberal indoctrination during the span of their educations, now the lefties in Congress have decided that the government should decide, by controlling student loans, who gets, and doesn’t get, a college education?

In the process, putting the government in charge of something like this will create another big bureaucracy, one fraught with the same quagmire of ineptitude and the normal attached smothering taxation we always get from government usurpation of private sector functions. Prime example: The mess to which we’ll be treated if we are victimized by government run healthcare.

The Director of Student Financial Strategies at University of Notre Dame warns in a letter to Congressman Miller, “Any legislation that eliminates choice and competition and mandates that all institutions adopt an all-government run program for the 2010/11 academic year is filled with immense risk and would create massive confusion.”

Get that? The Democrats want an “all-government run program” to provide people access to money to pay for college. And if they do that, then they can force universities to comply with lots of new rules or deny students the right to use federal student loans to go to particular colleges.

But it gets better. Boy does it ever get better.

How!!!?

§ 343 of the plan creates a Green Schools Czar. No kidding. A Green Schools Czar (and committee naturally) would examine the impact of more environmentally friendly universities and find ways to create even more environmentally friendly universities. Oh . . . I have an idea . . . if students need financial assistance and they are forced to go through the feds, the feds can simply tell universities to become compliant or they won’t let students use their student loans to go there.

What is so funny is that §312 of Obama’s stimulus plan also sent money to schools to become more environmentally friendly. That was the carrot. Well, this new law will become the stick.

A green schools czar. Czars and more czars, all the better for the Obama Administration and the Kommie Left to maintain Kontrol.

Recapped today,

If you want an indication of just how radical the Democrats in Congress have become, consider the vote on H.R. 3221. The legislation, which I wrote about yesterday, shuts down all private lenders for higher education student loans, requires that colleges and universities adhere to a new federal bureaucracy, creates a new Green Schools Czar, and hints that any school not complying will see its students denied federal student loans.

The liberals now in firm control of our government will stop at nothing to change America into something entirely different than the great country in which we were born and raised.

We right thinkers had best enjoy it while there’s something left to enjoy.

…at the taxpayer’s expense, wherein the Democrats are misleading the American people (not a bad deal, bullshit people and make them pay for it!) about how the “Stimulus” is working.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy, so Senate Democrats said Wednesday they might as well spend millions putting up signs to highlight where the money is being spent.

The road signs, which let motorists know the paving and construction projects they see are being paid for by the $787 billion economic stimulus program, have popped up across the country. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate decided the signs should stay.

Sure, why not? It’s just the taxpayer’s money, right? “Spend, spend, spend!” as the liberal credo goes.

“Why on earth would you want to hide from the American people the fact that the recovery package we passed is putting people to work?” asked Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, who took the lead in defending the expenditure. She said stimulus spending is beginning to improve the economy and charged that Republicans and Democrats who voted to strip out the funds are angry about that success.

“It’s my sense that there’s a frustration by the people who voted ‘no’ on the economic recovery act, the stimulus bill, there’s a frustration that it’s working. They predicted gloom and doom,” Mrs. Boxer said.

Campaigning at the expense of working Americans seems to be an institution that has really gained traction among Democrats of late, but then, it seems that the Obama Administration has set the stage for a new kind of government — kind of like one that can bill us for their spam and junk mail, a “we will like it!”

But Sen. Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who tried to excise the funds, called his amendment a no-brainer. He said it’s common sense to get rid of tens of millions of dollars in spending.

“These are self-congratulatory signs; they’re political signs. They’re so that lawmakers can pat themselves on the back,” he said. “But these signs cost money. Actually, when you add them all up, they cost a lot of money.”

Some localities have objected to the signs, arguing that they would rather spend the money on more projects. But Mr. Gregg said one community in New Hampshire was told no sign, no money for their original project.

Emphasis mine.

In the states’ rights department,

Also Wednesday, senators voted against allowing states to determine their own transportation funding priorities, such as repairing deficient bridges. A day earlier, the Senate voted against an effort by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to drop all of the pork-barrel earmark projects from the $67.7 billion transportation and housing spending bill and use the $1.7 billion slated for earmarks to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system instead.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, thanks largely to the liberals on the Hill, this country has come full circle, back to the same state of affairs good men died kicking out of here back in the 1770s.

Bummer.

Mr. Gregg acknowledged that this effort was as much a message as a cost-saving move. His amendment to the annual transportation spending bill would have banned putting up physical signs to tout stimulus transportation projects.

Five Democrats — Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Charles E. Schumer of New York — voted with all 40 Republicans to try to strip the money, but their support was not enough.

With typical dumbass, idiotic, mares-eat-oats, shallowbrained, downright stupid, aimed-at-the-gullible liberal reasoning,

Mrs. Boxer called the effort “anti-jobs” and said the signs are an example of government transparency.

Methinks this is time, once again, to recall a quote by a commenter at a blog I used to visit about 6 years ago: “Arguing with a liberal is like standing in a bucket and trying to pick yourself up by the handle.”

Well, lookee here!

The Obama administration has asked Congress to extend three contentious provisions of the USA Patriot Act - a bill once described by President Obama as “shoddy” - and urged an appeals court to deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan.

Can’t get enough
of that “shoddy” stuff…

Civil liberties groups immediately criticized both moves, which would extend Bush-era terrorism policies that have long been unpopular with Democrats.

In a letter made public Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asking Congress to reauthorize three portions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Well, we might say that now that he’s in the hot seat himself, maybe B. Hussein Obama realizes that perhaps there were some good reasons for some of the Bush anti-tango policies.

Then, on the other hand,

The three portions permit roving wiretaps, the seizure of certain business records and the monitoring of suspected “lone wolf” terrorists. Mr. Weich said the administration is willing to consider modifications that provide additional privacy protections provided they do not undermine the effectiveness of the provisions.

roving wiretaps and the seizure of “certain business records” somehow go hand in hand with the kind of communistic government the Obama and Pelosi seem hell bent on delivering.

If Bush could use these provisions to protect us from terrorism, why can’t Obama use them to keep a weather eye on us in the event that there are conservative “subversives” afoot?

While we’re on the subject,

…deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan…

Hey! Is that you, O?

Tell me it ain’t so!

…given the obvious intentions of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid dynasty to ignore the will of the American people in order to bring their own vision of a socialist country to fruition, whether or not the Tea Party’s culminating march on Washington, D.C. will ultimately effect anything.

I say this as someone who, in the past, has done at least some of my share of conservative activism, because in the past, we’ve had a government led by people who, at least minimally, remembered that their employers were the citizens of these here United States.

Now, however, we have the Obama Administration combined with a liberal-run, Democrat majority in the House and Senate who couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the people want.

After all, they reason, they know better than we do what’s good for us, and obviously that means that a socialist country is far better, in their estimation, than the free country to which we have been accustomed since our forefathers bled and died to earn us that freedom.

So a humongous number of Americans from all over gathered in D.C. on Saturday to convey to the Obama machine what it is that Americans want from their (our) leaders.

Sarah Bond’s outrage over massive deficit spending and debt is not a partisan matter for her. And it was enough to motivate her to travel from San Diego to Washington to let politicians know what she thinks.

“I’m here out of sheer frustration of spending from both parties, and this started with TARP,” Bond said, referring to the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, pushed by President George W. Bush and supported mostly by congressional Democrats.

Bond was part of a large crowd marching on Washington on Saturday. Adam Brandon, spokesman for Freedom Works Foundation, one of the main sponsors of the event, estimated the crowd at 150,000. But on Sunday, the group’s Web site estimated that hundreds of thousands of people turned out.

What do the politicians think of that?

Regardless of precise number, Bond told CNSNews.com that members of Congress “are just confused and panicking because they never had to deal with this many fiscal conservatives before.”

Well, shouldn’t that tell them something?

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) also thought the gathering represented a fundamental realignment of politics in America.

“Anybody that doesn’t recognize this is mainstream America is going to miss the boat. I hope my party, the Republicans, realize that this is not a right-wing group,” DeMint told CNSNews.com. “This is moms and dads and grandpas and grandmas. This is Democrats and independents. They just are alarmed at growth of government and debt and takeovers and the health care was just a tipping point.”

The problem, Mr. DeMint, is that while the Republicans have long been a problem where our fiscal spending is concerned, they are not in the majority on the Hill, and since the Democrats took over that majority, even moreso since Obama lied, hand on Bible, when he vowed to “protect and defend the Constitution” and assumed the Presidency, the Republicans have been continually beaten down by the folks on the left side of the aisle.

The real problem, here, is the Democrats, who are the ass boys & ass gals for the far left. Most of the Democrats on the Hill belong to those lefties, they are no longer their own people. They are the shit the far left scrapes off the bottoms of their shoes when they don’t need them for anything. Once honorable Democrat politicians now follow the corrupt, anti-America beat of the liberal drum, with only a handful of blue-dog exceptions.

Barack Hussein, Pelosi and Reid call the shots, their only ambition being to drag this country so far to port as quickly as they can that there’ll be no turning back. No matter what lies they tell us about their respect for the Constitution, the truth is that they hold that great document in profound contempt and want to grind it underneath the heel of socialism.

Which comes back to why I am not entirely convinced that the whole Tea Party thing is really going to do any good. If no one in the position to do anything about anything gives a damn what the people want, well…

George Skypeck, a Vietnam Army veteran from Accokeek, Md., said Americans are rising up as they did in the 1960s, only this time it is not the radicals who are speaking up. “The 60s radicals are now in office,” he said. “I didn’t like them then, and I don’t like them now.”

Good observation, George.

Some of the signs read, “Prosecute ACORN, Not the CIA,” “Stop Spending and Start Cutting,” “Obomunism,” “Not with My Money,” and “Adams-Madison-Jefferson: The Original Right Wing Extremists.”

Tom Hill of West Haven, Conn., held a sign reading, “Today’s State Controlled Media,” calling ABC News the “All Barack Channel,” CNN the “Counterfeit News Network,” NBC News “Nothing But Crap” and CBS News “Controlled By State.”

BRAVO!!!!

Now let’s hope I’m wrong, or just one of those yees of little faith, and the sheer numbers of conservatives who participated have made some kind of difference.

…on some of the content of my 9/11 post, there was an interesting article in U.S.A. Today* the other day regarding the differences of opinion as to how strong a threat the terrorist organization actually is, or remains to be.

In the eight years since the 9/11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has spent nearly the entire time focused on one enemy: al-Qaeda.

Thousands of terrorist operatives have been killed or captured. Terrorist safe havens and training grounds in Afghanistan where operatives were trained have been destroyed. Military forces largely have shattered al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who once closely managed al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations, have been driven into seclusion.

Now, Mueller and counterterrorism analysts are tracking the emergence of a new threat. Al-Qaeda has morphed into a fractured network of small terrorist franchises strewn across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Yemen, according to Senate testimony by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, a “jihadist battleground” is rising amid growing political upheaval and poverty. Blair says there are concerns that al-Qaeda could establish a “regional base of operations” in Yemen to train operatives and plot new attacks against the West.

Okay.

Al-Qaeda’s transformation raises an unsettling question: Does its splintering help make the USA and its Western allies safer, or does it complicate efforts to guard against terrorism?

“Yes, they retain the capability of striking overseas,” Mueller says in an interview, declining to specify whether the USA is vulnerable to such an attack. “They are still lethal.”

Although al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 command structure no longer exists, its smaller terror cells are freer to conceive and direct their own operations, making them increasingly unpredictable. Several analysts worried about a terror resurgence cite evidence that pieces of al-Qaeda are gathering strength in Yemen and Somalia. Yemen’s stability is especially crucial to U.S. interests because of its strategic location on the Arabian Peninsula, its access to critical shipping lanes and its vast border with the world’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia.

There is “growing concern that al-Qaeda will begin providing social and civil services to the people of Yemen on a scale that could challenge the Yemen government for allegiance,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst based at Princeton University.

This is not at all unheard of where sizeable Islamofascist guerilla organizations are concerned. As a prime example, look how Hamas perpetuated and strengthened its influence by becoming a political party among the “Palestinians”, and Hezbollah has done the same thing in Lebanon, ostensibly providing services and other positive social products that are either not delivered or are not delivered as well by official government.

If al-Qaeda and its affiliates expand in Yemen and other weakened states, he says, the “danger to the U.S. is quite great.”

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who oversaw the bureau’s Baghdad operations, says that “in one sense, you are safer because al-Qaeda no longer has that (pre-9/11) chain of command. On the other hand, al-Qaeda has become so decentralized, it can be harder to stop. … It’s like a dormant volcano.”

This is true — fragmented, without a central chain of command, al-Qaeda leaves no single chain to follow to any one nucleus of command. As I said in the 9/11 post, what we see now are what amount to a number of franchises. Basically autonymous franchises.

Other terrorism analysts, however, say government officials refuse to admit the threat al-Qaeda once posed largely has passed.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and prominent al-Qaeda analyst, citing his own analysis, which suggests that al-Qaeda’s capability to strike targets in the West is declining. “There is not much left of al-Qaeda except in the minds of those inside the (Washington) Beltway.”

Sure, and pigs might fly.

We still see the hand of al-Qaeda active in places like Indonesia (Jemaah Islamiyah, for example, led by a demon-on-earth called Noordin Mohammed Top) in which terrorist attacks, because of their remoteness on the globe in terms of “relevant” political hotspots, don’t get nearly the fanfare in the media that the same events taking place, say, in Britain, Spain or France would.

And of course when terrorists strike in Israel, the world media, the U.N. and the E.U. tend not to notice that anything’s amiss until the Israelis retaliate or otherwise defend themselves. But that’s another story entirely.

At any rate, these now splintered off, independent franchises merely make it harder for the good guys to focus on a single, tangible enemy entity.

Mueller says much of the danger now comes from a “genre” of hybrid groups spawned by the destruction of al-Qaeda safe havens. Separate groups, which share al-Qaeda’s philosophy of eliminating Western influence from Muslim areas, have been inspired by al-Qaeda.

Among those groups, Mueller says, is the Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which he says is responsible for last November’s attack in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen claimed responsibility for two strikes against the U.S. Embassy in Sana last year. One was a coordinated assault last September that killed 17 people, including the six attackers.

Remember, having not evolved along with the rest of mankind over the centuries, Islam still resides in the age when Mohammed cursed the earth with his satanic presence.

Fundamentalist Muslims live with a mindset totally alien to our own, one that countenances mass, cold blooded murder of men, women and children in the name of their so-called god (allah) and the martyrdom of their youth (never, of course, of the so-called “holy men” who preach martyrdom and/or send these naive fools out to die) in the performance of butchery of the innocent.

“These guys think in terms of decades and centuries,” says Phil Mudd, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch. “The challenge is whether you can keep the pressure on.

“It’s a shark’s mouth,” he says of al-Qaeda’s resiliency. “You have to keep taking the teeth out again and again. You can’t allow the teeth to rotate to the front.”

Well said!

Read the entire U.S.A. Today article here.

* U.S.A. Today does have its “moments”, and this is one of them.

…and the eighth anniversary of the heinous attack on our nation by the evil forces of the death cult known as Islam.

Normally, “anniversary” denotes something positive, the date of something wonderful, a first meeting, a marriage, something pleasantly or lovingly memorable.

This anniversary does not.

Eight years.

Americans are almost 3,000 days removed from the Sept. 11 terror attacks that toppled the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people — nearly the same amount of time it took al Qaeda plotters to regroup from their failed bid to take down the Twin Towers in 1993.

While former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of Sept. 11, for most Americans, that crisp, sunny morning of horror seems a lifetime ago, and, frankly, something they’d rather forget.

We must not forget, for the threat of repetition, perhaps not via the same method as the last time, not only still exists, but the satanic beast spawned by Islam that perpetrated that horror has grown exponentially, its tentacles multiplying, franchise-style, each with its own autonymous license to commit mass murder in the name of Allah.

Despite counter-terrorism successes and the absence of a major and dramatic attack in the West, the security threat posed by radical Islamists remains real and dynamic, as al-Qaeda mutates into an increasingly unstructured but no less dangerous entity, according to experts monitoring the organization.

As Americans and others around the world mark the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders continue to elude security forces and intelligence services.

But the threat facing the U.S. and its allies goes far beyond the Saudi fugitive and his coterie, to extremists embracing al-Qaeda’s ideology but largely operationally independent, a situation that complicates efforts to anticipate and disrupt plots.

Over the year since the last 9/11 anniversary, such terrorists have killed hundreds of people in attacks including those targeting the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, and luxury hotels in Jakarta.

“Today, the primary terrorist threat to our country’s interests – persons aligned with al-Qaeda – has evolved from different but related groups into a more coherent movement under a common ideology,” Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess said Thursday.

“Top leaders simply announce their priorities, which the group’s members and allies may interpret and execute against targets of their own choice,” he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Burgess said these methods enable “a span of terrorist violence across the world that is unprecedented in its unity of vision, regardless of the degree to which the overall command and control is splintered.”

“Hundreds of attacks every year are committed by militants sanctioned by or under the name of al-Qaeda,” he said.

As the Muslim population continues to grow here in the United States, I believe that so does the possibility — hell, probability, of further attacks.

Look at all the other places in the world where the Muslim percentages of the overall populations are high, outside, of course, those countries ruled by Islamic governments.

Almost all of them are hotbeds of terrorist activity, for the Muslims therein realize that their numbers are strong enough to afford them the chance, through their historically bloody methodology, to impose their fascistic brand of religion, politics and social order on the unwilling that constitute the majorities of these places. To force them to submit, which is what Islam means.

The United States has only been spared further attacks due to the diligence of the Bush Administration in preventing them, the efforts of the FBI, our various intelligence agencies and our brave military personnel overseas who fight Islamofascism tooth and nail.

President Obama has vowed the United States “will not falter” in the pursuit of al-Qaida.

Obama has distanced himself from many of the anti-terror policies of former President George W. Bush, but his remarks recalled Bush’s speech to Congress in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: “We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

Right. Barack Hussein Obama has promised all sorts of things he has made transparently plain he has no intention of delivering on, while insisting that he will. We, the People, he believes, are very stupid, indeed.

Let’s just hope that on this one issue, he keeps his word so that we do not have another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and that he is able to “rally the world” to the cause of destroying Islamic terrorism, root and branch, everywhere in the world it rears its head.

That said, my prayers go out to all those who died on 11 September 2001 as victims and as those who sacrificed their lives in the course of their brave, selfless efforts to save others.

My condolences and prayers, also, to the families and friends of those lost on that terrible day in Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania.