Never quit:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. – Ronald Reagan

It can all be lost, good people: if we don’t fight for it, right now, then American liberty will become a relic of the past.

Who really thought that KSM and the like would ever show up in a US court?

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee met to question Attorney General Eric Holder about his decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in criminal courts rather than military tribunals. As the father of Todd Beamer, who died on United Airlines Flight 93, I was able to attend that hearing…

…The committee, chaired by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), displayed the division in our country not only visually—the Democrats were seated on the left and the Republicans on the right—but in every aspect of the proceedings. I expected that some members would agree with Mr. Holder and that others would have challenging questions about his decision. What I did not anticipate was the level of partisanship showed by the majority party. It seemed clear to me and other family members of victims that party loyalty is trumping concern for America’s security interests…

…During the proceedings a young lady, dutifully attentive, sat with a stack of paper about 15 inches high on her lap. The papers contained names, single spaced, of some 100,000 people who signed a letter in opposition to this decision. This young woman, Jill Regan, lost her dad, Donald J. Regan, FDNY of the Bronx, who died trying to save others on 9/11. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Al.) asked that those names be entered into the record at the end of the session. It was agreed, but by that time the chairmen and most of the Democrats were already gone. I grieved for her—and for all of us—anew.

Why are we doing this? To placate the left. The kook left has made it clear that they want this because it will, in their mind, allow them to put President Bush and the United States on trial. Normally, such asinine views are shunted aside, but Holder is a kook leftist, himself, and thus found merit in the idea. Meanwhile, the Democrat party simply will not call their own to account – rather than cause a moments discomfort to Obama and his Administration, Democrats go along with the worst decision this Administration has made.

Such have we come to – that the enemies of America will be helped by the American government to attack America.

Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelicals come together to commit to core principles regarding human life, the family and rendering unto God and Caesar:

…We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life

2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife

3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable…

If you are interested in knowing more, and in signing the Declaration, go here.

They’ve just made things worse:

…Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.

Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the president’s budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms…

…Mr. Obama and his advisers say they understand these concerns, but the administration’s policy choices are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. Perhaps the most vivid example of sending the wrong message to international capital markets are the health-care reform bills—one that passed the House earlier this month and another under consideration in the Senate. Whatever their good intentions, they have too many flaws to be defensible.

First and foremost, neither bends the health-cost curve downward. The CBO found that the House bill fails to reduce the pace of health-care spending growth. An audit of the bill by Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that the pace of national health-care spending will increase by 2.1% over 10 years, or by about $750 billion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill grows just as fast as the House version. In this way, the bills betray the basic promise of health-care reform: providing quality care at lower cost.

And where are we, right now? Well, our policy makers are desperately trying to stave off the inevitable:

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports Core deflation in the US continues to gather pace

Core inflation for factory goods in the US fell to minus 0.6pc in October from a year earlier, edging the country closer towards Japanese-style deflation despite massive monetary stimulus.

Janet Yellen, the head of the San Francisco Fed, said emergency measures had prevented the US economy from sliding into a “black hole of deflation”, insisting that it is still far too early to talk of tightening policy.

We’re in a depression and the government is desperately trying to prevent the price and wage deflation necessary as part of the process of getting out of this mess. They want people to maintain their current wage levels (even though unemployment is going through the roof); they want people to maintain their current mortgages (even though housing prices are dropping like a rock); they are printing money like mad in hopes that it will keep prices high. And all of it won’t work – it can’t work. There isn’t in the United States the actual wealth to justify the pre-depression prices of goods, services and labor. The sooner we let the crash finish its business, the sooner we can all get back to work rebuilding our wealth.

All the Democrats are doing is putting off the day of reckoning – and ensuring that when it comes, it will be worse than it had to be.

In the form of hacked e mails and documents:

The UK-based Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, is reported to have {suffered} a security breach which has resulted in many confidential emails and files being uploaded to the internet.

A 61MB zip file containing information stolen from one of the world’s leading climate research {centers}, was posted onto an anonymous FTP server in Russia, accompanied by a note saying:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

In total it is believed that the unknown hacker accessed 1079 emails (some of which are marked as “Highly Confidential”) and over 3800 documents. A spokesman for the Climate Research Unit confirmed the hack to the BBC.

The big news?

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous “hockey-stick” graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline…

The defenders of AGW are saying that the e mails and documents are not representative of all the data; that they are being taken out of context; that they are being misinterpreted…but if you go through the links and read for yourself, I think you’ll conclude – as I have – that the AGW were deliberately lying at least as early as 1999 in the data they presented to buttress their case. Since then, its only gotten worse – they were hiding a decline in the rate of temperature increase in 1999…since then, temps have remained flat or gone down.

Temperatures do appear to have risen in the last third of the 20th century. From what I can gather, it seems that the rise was natural, cyclical and is now receding. The theory of antrhopogenic global warming was cooked up by alarmists to sell books and garner donations and grants – it became so large and entrenched over time that politicians decided to join in rather than oppose, it being easier to make noises about environmentalism and appropriate money than to go through the tedious process of actually finding out what is going on.

It has been the largest and most expensive hoax in human history and every person who was responsible for advancing it should be heavily fined in order to pay back the costs incurred – Al Gore, we’re especially looking at you.

UPDATE: Bishop Hill has a list running of the e mails and what they contain. Sample:

Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!

Do pay attention:

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. – Theodore Roosevelt

He was 100% correct and as for nigh on century we have done just that, we see our nation nearly wrecked. Only if we pull back, now, and become hard working, brave, dedicated and prudent will we survive. If we don’t get our act together, good people, then our story is told.

Detailed over at Commentary:

Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah recently announced that he could hit any and every place in Israel with long-range missiles. That would mean that, unlike in 2006, Hezbollah could strike not only the northern cities of Kiryat Shmona and Haifa but also Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion International Airport, and the Dimona nuclear-power plant.

I dismissed his claim as a wild boast last week, but Israeli army commander Major General Gabi Ashkenazi confirmed it this week. So while we’ve all been worried about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been quietly arming his chief terrorist proxy with more advanced conventional weapons.

If Israel is completely under the gun of Hezbollah, then the response by Israel to an attack may be what one expects when existence is at stake – overwhelming.

People forget – due to Israel’s power and success – how tiny Israel is. Less than 8,000 square miles (as opposed to the US 3,000,000 square miles), 263 miles from north to south (you can drive the length of it in about 5 hours), and 9 to 71 miles wide (ie, 15 minutes to an hour from east to west). This is not a place where you can hide from an enemy if he has missiles with a range of just a couple hundred miles – and if you want to be safe from such missiles, you have to push them back 200 miles or more from the border. This puts most of Lebanon and Syria in the theater of operations in a Third Lebanese war.

With Obama showing the white flag to Islamism and Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons, the risk of a Lebanese war rises steadily and it can break out at any time – especially as Iran nears completion of its nuclear program and wants to tie down Israeli forces which may be used to strike at Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel and the Middle East could be in for some hard, bloody times – and all of it entirely preventable if we would just show some teeth to the Islamists.

So, now they’ll have that vote:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has secured the vital 60th vote he needs to advance healthcare reform legislation with the announcement by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) that she will vote with her party Saturday evening.

“I have concluded that it is more important to begin this debate rather than just simply drop the issue and walk away,” Lincoln said on the Senate floor. “I’m not afraid of that debate.”

Indeed, no one is afraid of that debate – the trouble is that the debate doesn’t matter. To Reid and his like, the only key is to get the thing passed, in one form or another. Then they will let the conference committee put together the necessary, please-the-left-so-I-can-raise-$25 million screw America bill to be passed by 50 Senators plus Biden in the final vote (this way dear Blanche can vote against the final product and go back home and try to sucker Arkansans in to believing she isn’t responsible for the dog of a bill which finally emerges).

They think they have us cornered – that there’s nothing we can do. Oh, sure, they expect to lose some seats in the House and Senate next year, but they expect to emerge still in the Congressional majority. Reid thinks his $25 million will buy him re-election in Nevada; Pelosi figures the 25-30 she’ll lose are mostly blue dogs with their tiresome pro-life votes; Obama believes he can finesse things by 2012 to make it seem like he’s done a good job…

Well, they are wrong, and we’re going to prove it, next year.

I think we’ve all pretty much written off Obama’s asinine efforts to prevent Iranian nukes:

The West is “disappointed” over Iran’s failure to respond positively to a UN-brokered nuclear deal, diplomats said in a statement Friday following a meeting of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany. However, no new sanctions were discussed during the meeting, according to an EU source.

“We urge Iran to reconsider the opportunity offered by this agreement … and to engage seriously with us in dialogue and negotiations,” the statement said, noting that Teheran had not responded positively to the proposal of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Why should Iran re-consider? They are getting everything they want and there isn’t the slightest threat of action should Iran build and deploy nuclear weapons. Only Israel shows any willingness to fight Iran – and Israel is under intense US pressure to back down and back off.

So, Iran will get its nukes and become largely invulnerable to US pressure – and thus free to sponsor a new and stronger wave of terrorists attacks against Israel, the US and our other allies. With, of course, the continuing possibility that the lunatics in Tehran will launch a nuclear attack on Israel in a fit of messianic Islam-fascism.

Glad we got a cool, internationalist liberal in charge – imagine how much worse it would be if that cowboy Bush were still in office…

Why do people feel this way? Because trying war criminal terrorists in regular courts is plain and simple stupid:

Just 35% of New York State voters agree with Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and five other suspected terrorists in a civilian court in New York City rather than before a military tribunal.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds that 55% are opposed to that decision, which is part of the Obama administration’s effort to close the terrorist prison camp at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.

The only people who were ever for closing Gitmo are the leftists who think that George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals – in other words, only idiots and/or those seeking to score political points. Holding the terrorists in Gitmo is an act of mercy on our part – given the nature of this war and the manner in which our enemies fight, we are fully justified in shooting captured terrorists out of hand. They have no rights – irregular forces which are not clearly identifiable as part of a national military force are outside the bounds of civilized warfare. We go the extra mile – because we’re good and decent people – and the left chooses to accuse us of being criminals for so doing.

Idiocy. Sheer idiocy.

And now this sort of thinking is in charge of our Justice Department. Its going to be a rough few years for us until we can get rid of Obama and his clowns.