Feb 212010
Commentary
By Michelle Malkin
Remember “Not Me”? He was the famous invisible cartoon gremlin in the newspaper comic strip “The Family Circus.” Whenever toys were left on the floor or other school-age disasters struck, the kids in the comic pointed their fingers at “Not Me.” Today, “Tea Party” is the juvenile left’s new “Not Me” – an all-purpose scapegoat for every crime and disaster.
On Thursday morning, a disturbed pilot flew a small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Several workers in the building were injured, and Joseph Andrew Stack, the pilot, was killed in the crash.
Local authorities suspect he set his house on fire — from which his wife and daughter escaped — before taking off on his deadly journey. Investigators found a Web posting, identified as Stack’s “suicide manifesto,” in which he railed against tax laws, inequity, government and crony capitalism. He also targeted “puppet” George W. Bush, murderous health care insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.
The “manifesto” ended:
Read the rest.
Feb 152010
Great news from Afghanistan: “Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander” putting aside for today the fact that the NYT leaked a secret again…something they do quite frequently.
The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.
The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.
I frankly find this news more exciting because Pakistan was in on it than I do that this animal was captured. He’ll be replaced soon enough, but here’s hoping he gets the kind of interrogation accommodations due him based on his resume. And, given it wasn’t US that took him, it’s a safe bet we won’t be seeing him in NY any time soon standing trial.
Link
© 2010 Redstate, Inc.
Feb 102010
We have seen the Twin Towers collapse hundreds of times on TV. The steel and glass skyscrapers exploding like a bag of flour, the dust and smoke pluming out across Manhattan. But never like this, from above.
Nine years after the defining moment of the 21st century, a stunning set of photographs taken by New York Police helicopters forces us to look afresh at a catastrophe we assumed we knew so well.
You know but cannot see the 2,752 men, women and children who died at the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. None is visible here.
Feb 062010
by William Watkins, Jr., The Independent Institute
James Madison once observed that “it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” Fear of foreign perils, Madison realized, can easily persuade a freedom-loving people to voluntarily part with liberties they would otherwise consider indispensable. In Thomas Jefferson’s words, the people are “made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves.”
In making such statements on the forfeiting of precious rights during times of foreign danger, Madison and Jefferson were speaking from experience. In the 1790s, a number of Americans feared that the democratic excesses of the French Revolution would be exported to the U.S.
They believed French agents were plotting to destroy the Constitution and overthrow the federal government. Wild rumors spread that Jefferson, Madison, and other members of their Republican Party planned to offer assistance to a French invasion force supposedly sailing across the Atlantic. To make matters worse, an undeclared naval war soon erupted between the U.S. and France.
This environment of fear and distrust led to the passage of the most illiberal legislation of the early national period: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Enacted by Congress in the summer of 1798, the Acts prohibited criticism of the federal government and gave President John Adams the power to deport any alien he viewed as suspicious. This legislation made a mockery of the First Amendment and deprived aliens of basic due process of law.
