Know Thine Enemy

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Photo Credit: APOn December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered. These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace. On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, Fort Hood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire. Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.

The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court. This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” (CBS News). Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s pogonophobia raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him. He’s the first judge in the history of American jurisprudence to be kicked off a trial because of a “beard debacle.” The new judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, agreed that Hasan’s beard was a violation of regulations, but “said she won’t hold it against him.”

The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby. Major Hasan fired his lawyers, presumably because they were trying to get him off — on the grounds that he’d had a Twinkie beforehand, or his beard don’t fit so you must acquit, or some such. As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. I know that’s the way your big-time F. Lee Bailey types would play it, but it doesn’t seem to be Major Hasan’s style. On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his. The trial then came to a halt when the standby defense team objected to the judge that Major Hasan’s defense strategy (yes, I did it; gimme a blindfold, cigarette, and tell the virgins here I come) would result in his conviction and execution.

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Read more from this story HERE.

Coal is No Longer our Parents Energy…it is 21st Century Power

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Photo Credit: Irish Central The backbone of our modern civilization is based on relatively cheap and abundant energy. Coal has been the inexpensive and reliable engine of our economy for generations and up until the 70’s, billowing smokestacks were the sign of economic prosperity for the United States and other developed countries.

But we learned that cheap energy from burning coal and other fossil fuels came with a price tag to our environment and the dirty skies over our cities, proved to be hazardous to our health. The very fuel that powered our modern society was poisoning our environment.

In response, governments and the energy industry set about to enact new standards for energy production. Soon the air in big cities started to clear up and you could even swim again in rivers that were once deemed too polluted to set foot in.

Smokestacks that once billowed thick black smoke, become steam stacks. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that air quality in major American cities is better now than at any time in the last two decades.

Human ingenuity is amazing and when pushed, great advances can be achieved. Coal which has been the poster child of demonization by environmentalists on the left has made tremendous advances in clean burning technology. After 40 years of advances, clean coal power is on the cusp of making new strides in providing the planet with relatively clean and massive amounts of energy.

See: Fueling the Future with 21st Century Coal by Gregory H. Boyce

Now is not the time to demonize coal but to nurture and support the new coal technology that can help power humanity out of poverty throughout the world.

Energy is looked upon as a human right; studies show that each tenfold increase in electricity is linked to a 10-year increase in life. The United Nations linked life expectancy, educational attainment, and income with per capita energy use….So why deny the rest of the world the same life expectancy the US and other developed nations enjoy?

The developing world wants to step into the modernity of the 21st century too; they want lights, refrigeration, air conditioning television and modern medicine as well. …..Clean coal power can be their answer.

Coal power lead the greatest mass migration from human poverty into prosperity as China became a manufacturing behemoth. China is building more ultra modern supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal plants than any other nation in the world. China has also said they will decommission their older power plants and adapt modern emissions control to the existing fleet of coal power plants.

Instead of punishing their main source of cheap reliable energy, China is embracing coal to adapt and modernize….to make it a 21st century fuel that will bring clean economic prosperity to their 1.3 billion people.

Next-generation clean coal plants are capable of producing energy at near-zero emissions. With new technology at work to help coal become even cleaner and more efficient…..

Unless “renewable” forms of energy such as wind and solar, achieve significant breakthroughs in technology, they will never be able to compete with clean coal power on a level playing field.

Already countries such as Spain and Germany, which heavily invested in renewables, have started to have second thoughts as the bills come due for years of subsidizing these forms of energy. Germany’s finance minister even declared solar was the path to bankruptcy. See story. Spain under a new government is backing out of commitments it made to renewables and is actually going to make them pay taxes. See story.

From the excellent piece “The Fundamental Limitations of Renewable Energy” posted in the Energy Collective: “It appears unlikely that we will see a large scale market driven displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy in the first half of this century.”

Coal is no longer our parents energy…it is 21st century power.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

NSA Scandal Sparks Hacker Rebellion

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Many of the computer hackers the federal government has relied upon for national cyber-security are now turning away, irate over revelations the National Security Agency has been actively spying on Americans.

“The NSA and other intelligence agencies had made major inroads in recent years, in hiring some of the best and brightest,” reported Reuters’ Joseph Menn from a pair of hacker conventions held in Las Vegas last week. “Much of that goodwill has been erased after the NSA’s classified programs to monitor phone records and Internet activity were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.”

Glyn Moody of the technology news website Techdirt further noted tensions over what he called “the increasing demonization of hackers (not to be confused with crackers that break into systems for criminal purposes), for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other crimes if they were done ‘on a computer.’”

The result, Menn notes, is that U.S. efforts to recruit hackers may have taken a substantial blow, and Moody suggests it may now be much harder to “keep up the pace of technological development within the spying program.”

“We’ve gone backwards about 10 years in the relations between the good guys and the U.S. government,” said Alex Stamos, a veteran security researcher who was speaking at one of the Vegas conventions.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama to the Vineyard: America Is Monarchy in All but Name

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Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie go to Kennebunkport, Maine, on his summer vacation? You know he would like to. You can tell by the way he thumps his foot when Jeb Bush scratches his neck.

Obama goes directly to Camelot’s spa on The Cape. “Camelot” is what we unabashedly called the place when Jack Kennedy was the first king of America, because it reminded Jackie Kennedy of King Arthur. Really.

Frankly, I did not think my aunties were ready for democracy; even the televised “Wheel of Fortune” type we play in our time, pretending we are still a republic. They’d only been one generation from the Old Sod and nothing there in their previous 900 years in the rainy moss prepared them for Jeffersonian principles. The only thing that prepared them for America was hunger.

Possibly Obama goes to the Cape so that his little doggie can bond with its ancestors over at the Camelot compound. Does Barbara Bush have an extra doggie she might want to pass on to Christie to make him feel at home in Kennebunkport? Make him feel part of the family?

Trouble is, he is not; not now, not ever will Christie ever be a Bush. He should realize right away that he is a front for the Bush/Kissinger legacy and their policy dictators, now at risk of losing their jobs at The Washington Post, thank you, Jesus. Trouble is, he does. So his dilemma is personal, existential. He needs to ask himself, what kind of a man am I, and skulk off for a month of long solitary walks on the beach, but not in Maine.

It is what we have come to in America at least since the early ‘90s. I felt the first chill when a prominent Democratic fundraiser and diplomat said of Bill Clinton and the missus: “I guess this is the closest thing we will ever have to a king and a queen.” Wow.

My guess, no. The closest thing we will ever have to a king is King George; not the Kennebunkport serial mediocrities, but the one born last month. They have a plan, you see, called The Commonwealth, and a model, that booming wilderness and responsible banking wunderkind above us. I asked a well-known Canadian scholar what Canada would do if America fell apart. Canada was and is the plan, he said — just joking — but you know what Freud said.

Visualize this: That which circles around and above us like a large intestine, from Australia to Gibraltar finding its center in Ottawa by the time the wee one is old enough to serve in battle like his ancestors, real monarchs. And ask our fledgling monarchs — Obama, Christie, Bush, the Clintons — did you serve? Do you know what percentage has served in New Jersey and Massachusetts?

But will Kennedy, Bush, Obama, Christie, basically the monarchist families of Massachusetts (plus the Clintons), satisfy once they stop blasting that tedious crap from the ’60s and ’70s in grocery stores? I can’t imagine.

Consider George Kennan’s plan. The great ambassador of late felt we had come pretty much to the end of it and proposed devolving much federal law to more manageable regional circles and advancing likewise compatible state law to the same dozen circles and bringing in a Council of Elders — say a “supercommittee of governors” — to modulate. That’s food for thought for Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Nancy Mace and the rising generation.

Start again with Jefferson, but not in Massachusetts.

America’s Soviet-Style Police State

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Photo Credit: katesheetsHow is it that the government can charge Edward Snowden with espionage for telling a journalist that the feds have been spying on all Americans and many of our allies, but the NSA itself, in a public relations campaign intended to win support for its lawlessness, can reveal secrets and do so with impunity? That question goes to the heart of the rule of law in a free society.

Since Snowden’s June 6 revelations about massive NSA spying, we have learned that all Americans who communicate via telephone or the Internet (who doesn’t?) have had all of their communications swept up by the federal government for two-plus years. The government initially claimed that the NSA has gathered only telephone numbers and billing data. Now we know that the NSA has captured and stored the content of trillions of telephone conversations, texts and emails, and can access that content at the press of a few computer keys. All of this happened in the dark, with the permission of President Obama, with the knowledge and consent of fewer than 20 members of Congress who were forbidden from doing anything about it by the laws they themselves had written, and based on secret legal arguments accepted by a secret court that keeps its records secret even from the judges who sit on the court.

This massive spying – metadata gathering, as the NSA calls it – was also done notwithstanding statements NSA officials made in public under oath and in secret classified briefings to Congress, which effectively denied it. The denials were in one case admitted to – “least untruthful,” as the director of national intelligence later called his own testimony. Then, when even members of Congress who usually support a muscular national security apparatus realized that they, too, had been lied to by the NSA, the NSA responded with its own leaks.

It has leaked, for example, that as a consequence of its spying it has prevented at least 50 foreign-originated plots from harming Americans. It eventually backed off that number and declined to reveal with specificity what it independently learned and how that knowledge foiled the plots. But we do know that its colleagues in the FBI were participants in many of those plots, which means they weren’t real plots at all – just government stings going after dopes and dupes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare’s Dishonor System

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Photo Credit: National Review Perhaps you’ve heard the radio or TV commercials sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services urging seniors to report instances of Medicare fraud. There’s a number to call, along with cheerful suggestions.

The intent here seems benign enough — saving taxpayer money by catching the dishonest. One might even be tempted to praise it, were it not for what the Obama administration is doing with the other hand — issuing an engraved invitation to commit fraud when signing up for the health-care exchanges.

Obamacare is proving too unwieldy even for the greediest of big-government centralizers in the Obama administration. With only months to go before their Frankenstein was set to get its jolt of electricity in January 2014, they’ve announced a series of delays. The employer mandate, whereby businesses with 50 or more employees must certify that they are providing insurance that meets government requirements, will be delayed by a year.

When you design a Rube Goldberg health-care system with a thousand moving parts — subsidies, mandates, exchanges, reporting requirements, sliding scales, and varying eligibility for Medicaid, expanded Medicaid, and so forth — it doesn’t take much to bring the whole contraption to a halt. By delaying the employer mandate, the Obama administration undercut its own complex system for calculating people’s eligibility for health exchanges. In theory, it was supposed to be based on family income, family size, the lack of employer-provided insurance, eligibility for other government programs, and more. (For further edification, consult the 600-page rule HHS issued on July 5.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Political System Offers Choice Between Lesser of Two Evils, Results In Evil of Two Lessers

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Photo Credit: Irish Central As the country lurches from scandal to scandal, an unending budget impasse, a new norm of part time jobs and unemployment of over 7% …Many of us ask how did we get here?

The political forces in this country serve us up “choices” on the ballot for candidates that many of us feel are distasteful and unqualified. Yet we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils in order to cast a vote. Or worse, it estranges millions of voters from the system, who stay home and don’t vote at all.

Because of this, notoriously inept candidates can tell the voters to hold their nose and vote for them, because their opponent is even worse.

Some candidates don’t have to excel or have accomplished anything of note besides being slick talking politicians, or community organizers groomed for political office. They can bypass executive skills or real life accomplishments that should qualify a candidate for the office.

When was the last time a majority of American citizens enthusiastically went to the ballot box and voted for a presidential candidate of their choice? The last time was when Ronald Reagan swept 48 states to win in a landslide for his 2nd term.

Since that time we have been faced with a choice between carefully scripted, flawed candidates, who never live up to their glossy campaign brochures…And our country is suffering as a result.

From presidential candidates on down to the mayoral races, the scenario is repeated…..Really, in a city of 8.3 million the current crop of mayoral choices are the best and brightest New York can come up with?

Perhaps it’s time to grab hold of an idea that can completely change the political landscape in our country. An idea that would turn millions of apathetic voters into enthusiastic voters willing to get involved in the system again and force the political system give us candidates that we WANT to vote for, for a change.

It’s time to put a new choice on all of the ballots in America. This choice would be the 500 lb gorilla in the living room. The choice is called “NONE OF THE ABOVE”

With just the threat of “none of the above” hanging over their heads, political parties would have to be very careful about who they put on the ballot, because we have a new option: A morning after pill for the American voter.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Rand Paul: Hold Obama Accountable for Benghazi Cover-up

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Photo Credit: NewsmaxDid Hillary Clinton tell the truth? She appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January and testified that she had no knowledge of a CIA gun-running operation in Benghazi.

Clinton’s exact words were, “You’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex,” and then she claimed that she did not know whether a gun-running operation was taking place.

In March, The New York Times reported that the CIA has been involved with secret shipments of weapons to Syria for over a year: “The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi, and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.”

CNN now reports that at least 35 American agents were in Benghazi and the CIA is doing everything possible to prevent them from testifying to Congress.

Did Clinton lie because the CIA program was classified? Is it OK to lie to Congress about classified programs?

Read more:from this story HERE.

The Dependably Unfaithful Colin Powell

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerIn 2008 and then again in 2012, after retired four-star General Colin Powell endorsed and then voted for Barack Obama, the former Secretary of State’s sanity was already in question. At least now, after having his email account hacked by [a] high-level security-breacher Guccifer, Colin Powell’s besmirching of the Republican Party’s “shift to the right” and “identity crisis” finally makes sense.

It seems that for years the mannerly and always professional Colin Powell has been cyber-comporting with a 46-year-old Romanian European Parliament member, Social Democrat, and past spokesperson for Romanian president Ion Iliescu named Corina Creţu. So it’s safe to say that Colin Powell was probably the one in the throes of an “identity crisis.”

As vice chair of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, Corina Creţu, who once called Powell the “love of her life,” had, on occasion, spoken out against cruelty to women worldwide. Yet thanks to her progressive mindset, seducing in hopes of ‘sharing’ someone else’s husband must not be a problem for her.

Photo Credit: American Thinker

The fact that Colin Powell would associate with a communist sympathizer, never mind carry on titillating banter with a woman 30 years his junior, indicates risky and immature behavior just a notch above Weinergate. Either way, the revelations do put into context Powell’s ability to support progressive socialist Barack Obama. General Powell lowered standards within his marriage, which apparently translated into lower standards politically.

Not for nothing, but it is kind of ironic that Colin Powell, whom many believed voted for Barack Obama simply because he’s black, cyber-cheated on his African-American wife Alma with a blonde Marxist from Romania.

Read more from this story HERE.

Whatever Happened to All Those Promises Obama Made During the State of the Union?

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All that applause. All that adoration. The president’s state of the union address was considered brilliant by much of the press.

So what happened to all the promises?

The president’s laundry list of goals for his second term have either been defeated or not even brought out for a vote by either House. The sole exception is immigration reform and most of that “comprehensive” measure is going nowhere in the House.

The Hill:

The White House’s problem is perhaps best epitomized by the battle over gun control. The crescendo of February’s speech was the president’s emotional call for a vote on new regulations, noting the presence of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) — who was shot by a would-be assassin — in the audience.

But the president’s push for new gun controls flamed out in the Senate, where Democrats were unable to corral enough votes even for a background check expansion favored by two-thirds of all Americans…

Rich Baehr thinks that the public is finally starting to tune out Obama. I don’t see how you can come to any other conclusion when you realize just how impotent Obama has become.

Read more from this story HERE.