Blogs For Victory

According to the latest report, federal officials not only know that the Air Force One double flyover would cause panic, but they threatened local officials with federal sanctions if word ever got out.

Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.

In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD the Federal Aviation Administration’s James Johnston said the agency was aware of “the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes” in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor’s office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.

“To say that it should not be made public knowing that it might scare people it’s just confounding,” Sen. Charles Schumer said. “It’s what gives Washington and government a bad name. It’s sheer stupidity.”

Stupidity is right. That pretty much the describes the Obama administration perfectly.

Human Events learned a little while ago that Arlen Specter was going to announce his intention to switch parties.

Politico has his statement:

I have been a Republican since 1966. I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the state, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

I have decided to run for reelection in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

Specter has been at odds with the Republican enough to make his explanation sound legit, but I think the real reason for his departure was the fact he was polling way behind GOP primary challenger Pat Toomey.

I am not gonna shed any tears over Specter. It is time to get behind Toomey. Follow @ToomeyForSenate and become a fan on Facebook.

UPDATE: Specter said earlier this year he wouldn’t switch to maintain check and balances… just goes to show you he’s doing this for political survival…

Kathy Ireland speaks for the unborn:

It’s no secret that the majority of Hollywood stars are strong advocates for a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants to terminate a pregnancy, however former “Sports Illustrated” supermodel-turned-entrepreneur-turned-author Kathy Ireland has gone against the grain of the glitterati and spoken out against abortion.

“My entire life I was pro-choice — who was I to tell another woman what she could or couldn’t do with her body? But when I was 18, I became a Christian and I dove into the medical books, I dove into science,” Ireland told Tarts while promoting her insightful new book “Real Solutions for Busy Mom: Your Guide to Success and Sanity.”

“What I read was astounding and I learned that at the moment of conception a new life comes into being. The complete genetic blueprint is there, the DNA is determined, the blood type is determined, the sex is determined, the unique set of fingerprints that nobody has had or ever will have is already there.”

However Ireland admitted that she did everything she could to avoid becoming a believer in pro-life.

“I called Planned Parenthood and begged them to give me their best argument and all they could come up with that it is really just a clump of cells and if you get it early enough it doesn’t even look like a baby. Well, we’re all clumps of cells and the unborn does not look like a baby the same way the baby does not look like a teenager, a teenager does not look like a senior citizen. That unborn baby looks exactly the way human beings are supposed to look at that stage of development. It doesn’t suddenly become a human being at a certain point in time,” Ireland argued. “I’ve also asked leading scientists across our country to please show me some shred of evidence that the unborn is not a human being. I didn’t want to be pro-life, but this is not a woman’s rights issue but a human rights issue.”

An honest woman took a good, long look at the issue and came to the only rational conclusion – to be pro-life. I’m pro-life, at bottom, as part of my Christian faith – but one can be the most ardent atheist and if one thinks the matter all the way through, pro-life is the only valid position. And thus my view that people who are “pro-choice” are people who haven’t thought the matter through. A smaller subset of these people are actually, functionally pro-abortion…they’ve thought the matter through, but guilt haunts them and cowardice prevents them from facing the matter squarely.

As I’ve said before, abortion is the enemy of hope; it is a final solution to a temporary condition. Elective abortion is something which has no basis in rationality, no basis in morality and no basis in medicine. That we’ve fallen for this monstrous idea shows how weak we truly are, and why for centuries the wise have instructed us to carefully adhere to received morality…not because they thought themselves smarter than the rest of us, but because they knew that overall human experience is smarter than any one person. We know that the worldview which accepts abortion is a worldview of despair – and as we see in Europe, the world view of slow suicide for nations.

We can turn back – to progress on this issue requires that we turn back. That we go back to a time when we held firmly to the concept that each human life is inherently valuable. If we do that, we will have done the largest and most important part of restoring our sad, tired civilization to decency.

If they actually go ahead with their witch-hunt of Bush Administration officials:

..The administration should tread carefully, since it is about to embark on something nefarious that could tear apart the country…

…Prior to President Obama, Americans did not go in for this sort of thing, because we knew where it led.

Politics and conditions change. What a conservative administration does at a time of national crisis to protect the public may subsequently, in the calm of an eighth consecutive year of safety, seem in retrospect illiberal to a new liberal government.

Dwight Eisenhower did not open hearings to pave the way for indictment of federal officials of the Roosevelt administration or California lawyers working for Gov. Earl Warren, who in concert planned and carried out the forced internment of American citizens into camps. Much less did he bring Truman & Co. up on charges of using nuclear weapons to incinerate Japanese civilians.

Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not seek indictment of Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department, which did everything from strengthening segregation to jailing war critics and helping foster the odious vigilantes of the American Protective League. No subsequent administration tried to arrest Lincoln’s Cabinet members for signing off on the suspension of habeas corpus after Fort Sumter — unconstitutional decrees that eventually would mean some 15,000 Americans were held without charges for indeterminate length.

President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations. He would not wish a President Sanford one day to indict those Obama officials who approved the assassination-by-Predator-missile of suspected terrorists and their families in Pakistan — without habeas corpus, Miranda rights, or avenues of appeal. He would not enjoy a future President Giuliani’s bringing indictments of Obama officials over the NSA’s exceeding its allotted e-mail intercepts, or the CIA’s conducting overseas renditions of suspected terrorists without providing them the benefits of U.S. law.

President Obama, presumptively, will also not want to spark off the second American Civil War but at the end of this road is just that. I was watching a bit of O’Reilly and his opinion is that the left is trying to make conservatism odious in order to gain political advantage. There is that, but such a theory leaves out the plain fact that leftists hate, with a white-hot passion, anyone who doesn’t toe the leftwing line. One only has to see the way leftists smear people who become apostates of the left to see that, deep in their being, is a desire to lacerate, to maim, to utterly destroy those who oppose them. Whatever else may be assisting the motivation to prosecute Bush Administration figures, the primary impulse comes from hatred and a desire for revenge.

The left, of course, is a political minority. It has functional control of the United States at the moment because the President and the Speaker are both leftists…but while most Democrats are liberal, they are not of that hard left view which turns people into poor, twisted creatures capable of cruelty on a grand scale. Most liberals are kind of like Joe Lieberman…most leftists are like Jeremiah Wright. The problem with our liberals is that they long ago fell for the nonsense (started by the left) that liberals have no enemies on the left. Leftists use this to co-opt liberals and, when the can, destroy liberalism…but no matter how many times it happens, liberals seem to melt when some neo-Stalinist on the make starts mouthing words about social justice. But will liberals go down this road with the left?

It is to be doubted that Joe Lieberman will go along with such things – heck, just the rank anti-Semitism of the left is enough to turn off someone like Lieberman. But are there enough liberals with the sense and the courage to, in the end, stand fast against this leftwing attempt to destroy conservatism? To stand fast, that is, against what can easily spark an armed civil war in this nation? That will remain to be seen. I hope it ends up like that – with the left over-reaching and then getting smacked down by liberal and conservative patriots who won’t have anything to do with this wickedness.

I also hope that at least some on the left come to realize that however much they hate us, it isn’t worth it to try and criminalize us. It is, to use the leftwing mantra, time to “move on”. Enjoy the power you’ve won leftists. Attempt to implement as much of your leftist agenda as you can. Work diligently to thwart conservatism’s return to power…but don’t try to prosecute the Bush Administration. We really won’t stand for it – not for a moment.

You get boneheaded publicity stunts like this:

A jumbo jet being chased by a F-16 fighter jets buzzed Lower Manhattan this morning, panicking New Yorkers, many of whom were forced to evacuate their office buildings.

It was not a terrorist attack, however, but a photo opportunity for Air Force One, sources told the Post.

President Obama was in Washington at the time, but the low-flying 747 circling the Statue of Liberty was one of the planes used as Air Force One, sources said.

The NYPD and the city were notified of the planned flight, but did not share that information with Mayor Bloomberg and other New Yorkers, many of whom said they were terrified.

From a psychological perspective, this was a cruel and twisted joke. Many New Yorkers still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental disorder whereby sights, sounds and/or smells can re-trigger fight-or-flight responses associated with a past traumatic event.

But remember, ladies and gents, according to the mental giants gnats, i.e., Obama & the rest of the teenagers with credit cards (a/k/a-the democrat-controlled Congress), 9/11 never happened. It’s not even a war on terror anymore. It is a memory to be stuffed and snuffed; so I’m sure that quiz-kid Obama never thought twice about allowing this sophomoric stunt to occur.

There is a White House official who fell on the sword, but you can bet that His Arrogance and Pompancy, Barack Hussein Obama, will never apologize personally for re-traumatizing New Yorkers.

In the words of Bugs Bunny…

What a maroon.

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.