Father Zakaria Boutros

Speaking of Ugly Ugly Truth, here is a man, a hero, who is not afraid to speak it.




Ugly Ugly Truth about Islam


More on Father Boutros here, very interesting reading.

Father Zakaria Boutros

2 Presidents, 20 Years, Compare & Contrast

This week Germans will be celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.  For historical purposes, let's look at how 2 different presidents, seperated by 20 years have responded.  Some events illuminate much more than people think.

1987

2009

Compare and contrast and draw your own conclusions.

Ask an adorable Kitten

From MSNBC:  MSNBC is proud to annouce its newest member to join it's team of special experts, Bitsy, the adorable Kitten.  Bitsy will head up MSNBC's special expert panel on Islamic Terrorism.  Below is a Q&A session with Bitsy on the attack at Fort Hood.

Question:  Bitsy, given the horrorifc attack on Fort Hood on Thursday, many people are troubled by the ties the murderer had  to Radical Islam.  Do you know how the FBI or Homeland Security is investiating these links.

Bitsy:  People were mean to Dr. Hasan and that is what should be investigated.  Imagine!  A poor defenseless Major in the Army is being ridiculed for his beliefs that Suicide Bombers are justified in killing American Soldiers in their war on "terrorism".  This is the real tragedy, see what meanness gets you!  This is a warning for all Americans.

Question:  Bitsy, you really can't be serious are you?  I mean, this man had a history of posting anti-American rants on the internet and claimed he was a Muslim first and an American second.  Shouldn't that be what is investigated?

Bitsy:  Absolutely NOT!  I think the fact that this poor man was going to be forced to fight in our Imperialistic Endeavors in Afghanistan is what the real root of this problem is.  What the real mystery is is why MORE soldiers aren't killing each other over our wrong-headed policies.

Question:  Bitsy, are you saying that this guy was justified in what he was doing?  No one FORCED this guy to join the army and have us pay for his schooling?  This guy was a Major for God's sake, this is not some downtrodden crazy guy, this guy appears to be a terrorist.

Bitsy:  Mean people suck.  I would like some milk now.

Question:  Don't you think it SIGNIFICANT that Hasan was chanting Alah Akbar as he was killing innocent soldiers?  Don't you think it might have some relevance that this guy was seen at various Homeland Security events on Palestine/Israel tensions?  Don't you think the guys activities prior to the murders (giving away Korans, writing Allah on his door, etc) might lead the FBI to consider a terrorist link?

Bitzy:  Meow, do you have any yarn?  I am getting sleepy now.

Question:  Ok, well ladies and gentlemen, Bitsy has dozed off, so we are going to have to cut our interview short.  Thank you for tuning in, and join us next time for another session with "Ask and Adorable Kitten".

Our Daily Krauthammer

The Myth of '08, Demolished


By Charles Krauthammer



WASHINGTON -- Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.



In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.



This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.



Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.



What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.



White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.



The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.



November '08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.



The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.



Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.



Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

The Beginning of the End of Healthcare Reform

Not So Fast: Reid Signals Delay in Health Reform

By Karen Tumulty / Washington Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009

Senate majority leader Harry Reid at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Nov. 3, 2009


Still struggling to line up the 60 votes that are needed to overcome a potential filibuster of health care reform, Senate majority leader Harry Reid sent a strong signal on Tuesday that President Obama is unlikely to be signing his top domestic priority into law this year, as Democrats had hoped. "We're not going to be bound by timelines," Reid told reporters as he emerged from a weekly lunch with Democratic Senators. He vowed to pass a bill "as expeditiously as we can," which is another way of saying it will probably be slow going over the weeks to come.


Reid: Reconciliation Not Needed for Health CareReid's comments were such a departure from the official line that, as soon as reports of them began appearing, his office issued a statement attempting to take the edge off of them. "Our goals remain unchanged. We want to get health insurance reform done this year, and we have unprecedented momentum to achieve that," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. "There is no reason why we can't have a transparent and thorough debate in the Senate and still send a bill to the President by Christmas."



No reason, that is, except for the fact that it is already November.



All year, Democratic strategists on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have made no secret of the fact that they do not view time as their friend on enacting health reform, a goal that has eluded every President since Harry Truman who has attempted it. At one point, Democrats hoped to have the bill passed by both houses over the summer and on Obama's desk in the fall. Instead, the August recess was dominated by cable-television images of near riots at congressional town-hall meetings, and it took a dramatic, game-changing presidential address to a joint session of Congress to get health reform back on track.



But with the turning of a page in the calendar comes a new challenge — Congress will be entering an election year, not normally a time when it likes to take big political risks. Nor are lawmakers generally prone to be quick off the starting blocks when they return to Washington from the holiday recess, which means that the health care debate could drag on through the winter.



Reid's decision to include a public option in the bill that he takes to the floor has also complicated matters. While applauded by the party's liberal base, the idea of adding a government-run alternative plan to the choices for covering the uninsured faces resistance from some of the Senate's more conservative Democrats as well as Olympia Snowe of Maine, the only Republican who has shown any serious interest in supporting the bill. And to get anything over the hurdle of a threatened GOP filibuster, Reid will need to hold together his entire caucus of 60 Democrats. At this point, said a senior Democratic aide, the majority leader is only "cautiously optimistic" that he has the votes to simply bring the bill to the floor — under a normally non-controversial "motion to proceed" — and is still at least several votes short of 60 on the more serious subsequent procedural vote, known as cloture, that would be needed to cut off debate.



There are also more practical hurdles, including the fact that Reid has not yet received an official analysis of his legislation from the Congressional Budget Office, and may not until late next week. Senators will not want to begin debating the legislation until they have the CBO's projection of how much it will cost and how it will affect the deficit. Between next week's Veteran's Day recess and the subsequent Thanksgiving break, that means it may well be December before the bill even gets to the Senate floor.



If that is so, the best-case scenario becomes this: both the House and the Senate pass their versions of the health care bill before leaving at the end of the year, and a conference committee begins its work while they are gone; a conference committee report, while controversial, would likely pass a Democratic Congress. If not, a loss of momentum could dampen the sense of inevitability that, as much as anything else, has brought health care reform to the point of being nearly within reach.

How we got to where we are

Fascinating interview with a former KGB agent from the early 1980s who defected to the United States.  Amazingly predictive of how we ended up with the situation we have now.  The truth not only is very ugly, but it hurts to admit it.  Ignore some of the whacky comments on youtube about this video, and just watch it for what it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBshLCx2elI&feature=PlayList&p=FF4416BEE5D2ED02&index=9&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL

Top Visual Metaphors for the Democrats Performance Tonight