Interesting – a Democrat, yet a rightwing extremist:

Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters. – Grover Cleveland

The former CIA head Porter Goss lays out the facts:

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets…

…A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

— The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

— We understood what the CIA was doing.

— We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

— We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

— On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have…

Indeed – now its politically expedient to be all in a huff about alleged torture; 7 years ago, it was politically expedient to be in a huff about terrorism. But that was before the Democrats made the cynical calculation that being in favor of defeat would do more for them than helping America to victory. Its not that Democrats wanted so much for America to lose, but the fact that they saw no upside to US victory if the GOP was in charge. Democrat leaders, it must be kept in mind, only care about retaining and increasing their power. If US victory would be credited to Republicans, then what is the point in it?

You just watch – if Obama gets into a jam over Pakistan or Iran or what have you, all of a sudden Democrats will be in favor of strong measures and complete national unity behind the President…because that would work to their advantage. We’re dealing with people, in the Democrat leadership, who are the perfect human ciphers…mere voids who provide nothing useful but who feel entitled to power and wealth. While they are fully in charge the fate of millions might turn on whether or not the Democrat leadership figures it is electorally advantage to do something about it.

Seems that rightwing extremism goes back quite a bit:

By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments. – St. Thomas Aquinas

More news from the most ethical Congress, ever:

Democracy 21 and other good-government groups are expected to ask the House ethics committee next week for an investigation into lawmakers with close ties to defunct lobbying firm PMA Group, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer said on Friday.

The request will seek a probe into whether the millions of dollars in campaign contributions the firm generated for favored Members of Congress influenced the tens of millions of dollars in earmarks those lawmakers secured for PMA clients.

Outside groups are barred from filing complaints with the ethics committee, but the panel can initiate probes on its own and the request is sure to pile political pressure on an already strained House Democratic leadership team.

Democratic leaders have remained in a defensive crouch in the wake of reports that federal investigators are probing the earmark empire of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the defense-spending chief in the House and a close confidant of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

But that position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Since news broke in February that federal agents raided the offices of the PMA Group and the home of its founder, former House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense aide Paul Magliocchetti, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has kept the issue front and center by calling votes on whether to force an ethics probe. His first attempt gathered 17 votes from the majority party, but Democratic defections on subsequent votes have mounted, reaching 27 on his seventh and latest attempt before the spring recess.

Remember back in 2006 how Her Majesty, Nancy I and her Democrats were running against an alleged GOP “culture of corruption”? Well, that wasn’t really the case, now was it? I mean, if we’ve got a Speaker so divorced from morality that she’ll claim to be shocked about interrogation techniques she was briefed about years ago, just where would she draw the line? Certainly not a Murtha’s various scandals.

It is good to keep in mind that one of the things Matt and I discovered about Nancy Pelosi is that she learned very early on that political corruption pays. In the very first campaign she was involved in, she illegally failed to report some printing work by a union as an in-kind donation – the work was worth something like $90,000; the fine for not reporting the work was $7,000. Nancy was $83,000 to the good and she’s never looked back (and you can read all about her in Caucus of Corruption). She got into politics to be a mean, bitter attack-dog against Republicans; she rose in politics via corruption (including the use of illegal PACs to engineer her rise to Minority Leader after the 2002 elections) and she runs the House just as one would expect a corrupt, partisan hack would.

We’ll have to see if anything comes of this – no one thought the House “check kiting” scandal would lead to much. Certainly, the Democrats never did, but it played a large role in their defeat in 1994. Pelosi can’t clean house – she’d have to start with herself. So, look for Democrats to attempt to smear GOPers and just confuse the issue any way they can in hopes of turning people off to politics…make it seem, that is, like both Democrats and Republicans are hip deep in this stuff and hope that independents sit 2010 out in a “pox on both your houses” fit. Our job is to keep it front and center – not because it helps the GOP, but because until Democrats are held to account, we’ll never get politics cleaned up.

The GOP house has been cleaned up – our corrupt members are gone and we’ve learned our lesson, at least for a while. It is time for Democrats to learn theirs.

Complete failure in the MSM. How do we know? Because Obama’s Press Secretary is giving them an “A”:

Robert Gibbs gave White House reporters a “strong A” Friday for their work over the first 100 days of the new administration.

Any MSM worth its salt wouldn’t get so much as a “C” from a White House press office – the MSM is supposed to be an attack dog forever snooping out the slightest bit of incompetence or corruption…our MSM is showing itself to be Obama’s poodle.

To here the MSM tell it, Obama is just doing fabulous in his first 100 days. Often cited in this is Obama’s poll numbers – such as those from Gallup:

Now, 56% say he has done an “excellent” or “good” job as president vs. 20% who rate him as “poor” or “terrible.” An additional 23% say he has done “just OK.”

Hey, 56% is pretty good – but is it really all that good?

Over the past four decades, the average approval rating for presidents in April of their first year in office has been 61 percent — Bush’s now stands at 62 percent. That makes him slightly more popular at this juncture than his father or Bill Clinton were, and slightly less popular than Ronald Reagan at the same point in his presidency.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

Approve 62%

Disapprove 29

Sampling error: +/-3% pts

April approval ratings in first year in office

Bush now 62%

Clinton, 1993 55

Bush, 1989 58

Reagan, 1981 67

Carter, 1977 63

Nixon, 1969 61

Sampling error: +/-3% pts

The poll question here in 2009 seems a bit different than back in 2001, but I think that no matter how you slice it up, Obama is clearly not getting public approval at any greater level than his predecessors, and a strong case can be made that he’s actually coming off worse.

The bottom line here is that Obama won about 53% of the vote in November and he’s hovering right around that level of support among the American public right now. The good news for Obama is that his support is still ok – the bad news is that it hasn’t gotten any stronger than it was when he was the fresh, new face of hope and change for an overdrawn and worried America. Outside the kook left, with its servile devotion to Obama, the people seem willing to give Obama his chance, but they aren’t holding him up as some sort of mythical hero come to save the world.

Clearly, the MSM is doing all it can to keep the myth of Obama alive – they own “Obama the Great” and if Obama proves something less than “Great”, it will reflect poorly on an MSM already losing out in the popularity stakes.

Gee, who knew that he was a rightwing extremist?

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency. – Pope John Paul II

Our screwball, Latin American leftist neighbors have made a statement:

1. Capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction. What we are experiencing is a global economic crisis of a systemic and structural nature, not another cyclic crisis. Those who think that with a taxpayer money injection and some regulatory measures this crisis will end are wrong. The financial system is in crisis because it trades bonds with six times the real value of the assets and services produced and rendered in the world, this is not a “system regulation failure”, but a integrating part of the capitalist system that speculates with all assets and values with a view to obtain the maximum profit possible. Until now, the economic crisis has generated over 100 million additional hungry persons and has slashed over 50 million jobs, and these figures show an upward trend.

2. Capitalism has caused the environmental crisis, by submitting the necessary conditions for life in the planet, to the predominance of market and profit. Each year we consume one third more of what the planet is able to regenerate. With this squandering binge of the capitalist system, we are going to need two planets Earth by the year 2030.

3. The global economic crisis, climate change, the food crisis and the energy crisis are the result of the decay of capitalism, which threatens to end life and the planet. To avert this outcome, it is necessary to develop and model an alternative to the capitalist system…

…13. Developed countries have spent at least USD 8 billion to rescue a collapsing financial structure. They are the same that fail to allocate the small sums of money to attain the Millennium Goals or 0.7% of the GDP for the Official Development Assistance. Never before the hypocrisy of the wording of rich countries had been so apparent. Cooperation should be established without conditions and fit in the agendas of recipient countries by making arrangements easier; providing access to the resources, and prioritizing social inclusion issues.

Translation from the socialese: “You suck. Give us your money.” Chesterton long ago pointed out that the fundamental flaw of the socialists is that they propose to be the successors of the capitalists – they propose a world changed from where a few business titans control the means of production to a world where a few government titans control the means of production. I can’t see the upside here – though I do note the rank hypocrisy of failed socialist States demanding of capitalist States that they hand over the swag, no strings attached (heck, you can’t even plow a field in Cuba without a permit…and we’re not supposed to even ask what they want to do with our money, should we give it to them?).

These socialists will wow the liberals of the United States with their declaration and I’m sure that if Obama is appraised of it he’ll say “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message”. But the problem we have in the world isn’t economic and it isn’t environmental – it is spiritual. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that the problem of the 20th century is that we forgot about God – it remains the problem of the 21st century. If all we’re worrying about is per-capita GDP or how to lessen carbon emissions, then we’re just spinning our wheels as we hurtle towards destruction. We need to get God back to the center of our lives and start to build a society of justice, mercy, reason and, most importantly, love…love of our neighbors as we love ourselves, and loving God with all our heart and soul. With love, to be poor is no bane; to be rich is no boon if there is not love.

It’s going to get rather bad over the next few years – but, in the end, Love will triumph over hate, even hate wrapped up in a pretty, pink blanket called “socialism”.

I’ve written about the Demcortas’ war on science before, it seems they are still at it. House Democrats apparently refused to allow a global warming skeptic to appear alongside Al Gore during a congressional hearing yesterday.

UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

“The House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.” 

This is rather sad. If they are confident that evidence supports their position on global warming, then they shouldn’t have any fear. Still, in the interest of facts, we should be willing to hear evidence from both sides and make an objective conclusion from that evidence. I know that facts and debate aren’t exactly the Democrats’ strong points, but when they are trying to push disastrous legislation through the politics of fear over global warming, then we need to  stand up against this.

Apparently, this whole charade has less to do with science about climate change, and more to do with a coordinated fundraising pitch for the DCCC.

Gore’s influence is felt in large and small ways — from providing his thoughts and strategic guidance to President Obama, House SpeakerNancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) to aiding his friend Al Franken in the ongoing Minnesota Senate race to fundraising for the party campaign committees.

Witness a fundraising email for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee signed by Gore set to be sent out today in coordination with Earth Day.

“I can tell you that President Obama has signaled in the strongest possible terms that he intends to take bold steps and harness innovative resources to solve the climate crisis,” writes Gore. “Not only that, but Speaker Pelosi has said she will personally shepherd climate legislation through.”

This has everything to do to more tax revenue and more campaign cash for the Democrats, and nothing to do with science…

And up and coming rightwing extremist:

As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language. – Bobby Jindal