Thursday, December 31, 2009

Movie Recommendation: AVATAR

I rarely ever recommend movies to anyone. There was a time I knew every movie out, every actor in it, who wrote the music, who designed the costumes and on and on. I used to make my kids sit at the end of the movies and watch all the credits. ALL of them. They still do that and so do I. James Cameron's lastest movie, Avatar, is absolute brilliance. A long movie, 2 hours and 40 minutes, I never once found myself thinking THIS IS A LONG MOVIE! Very strong undergones of Native America down to using the voice of Wes Studi. The rituals, belief system, etc., of the native peoples of Pandora are strongly aligned with our own Native Americans. If you miss this visually stunning masterpiece in the theaters, it will just be a shame.


Official Avatar Movie

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

When Hatred Isn't Hatred...


Unless it is directed toward a liberal.

News Busted, Some Comic Relief

OBAMA SHIELDS FORT HOOD JIHADI, MAJOR MUSLIM HASAN, courtesy Atlas Shrugs

Obama Administration is Stalling on Giving Congress Intelligence About Fort Hood Shooter, Says Hoekstra CNS By Chris Neefus

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, says the Obama administration is stalling in providing information to the leaders of the House and Senate and the congressional intelligence committees on the multiple murders allegedly committed by a radical Muslim Army officer at Fort Hood more than a month ago.

So far, the committee chairman and congressional leaders have received no detailed, substantive briefing on the event and what is known about its perpetrator.

“You know, they’re playing out the string,” Hoekstra said Thursday. “We’re going home next week, (and) they will have effectively made it through three months with giving no substantive briefings on Fort Hood.”

CNSNews.com asked Hoekstra whether it was “a constitutional affront not to have the Gang of 8 briefed on this?”

“Oh yeah, sure, absolutely,” said Hoekstra.

The Gang of 8 is a group of leaders from the House and Senate who by law are supposed to be briefed on U.S. intelligence activities when the matter is too sensitive to share with the full intelligence committees. The group includes the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the majority and minority leaders of each chamber.

Additionally, the law holds that the administration must “ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States.”

When a reporter said he thought the Gang of 8 had been briefed on the intelligence report regarding the attack, Hoekstra said the committees had been given a preliminary briefing a few weeks ago that lacked substantive information.
[..]

Hoekstra, who has been asking for more information on Hasan and the murders at Fort Hood since he wrote a November 9 letter to Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and the heads of each intelligence agency, said the Obama administration was not being transparent.

“It’s now three and a half, four weeks later,” said Hoekstra. “I would assume that in the last four weeks we’ve gathered lots of info that should be shared with theintelligence committees.” There is a “lack of transparency here,” Hoekstra said, and “it is unbelievable the material and the information that they’re withholding from us, from the American people.”

Hoekstra said that a report on the Fort Hood incident had been delivered to President Obama two weeks ago.

“I know that the (Fort Hood) report was delivered to the President on November 30, so I talked to Director Blair last week and said, ‘Hey, I’d just like an update,’ you know? There are a lot—potentially lots—of areas that have ties to foreign intelligence and foreign threats-- international threats. Give us an update,” said Hoekstra.

“I’d like to know who Hasan was in contact with, what happened to his money and these types of things. Who else he might have been talking to in the United States? All of this kind of information. Supposedly we got access to his computers, supposedly we got access to his email, his phone records, financial records, all of these kinds of things,” said Hoekstra.

Hoekstra said Blair has been putting off a meeting. “So I asked for a briefing last week,” said Hoekstra. “Mr. Blair thought he’d be able to give me one. He was told, ‘No,’ and then he said, ‘I’m not going to make a commitment, but I think that we’ll be able to give you one next week,’ which would be this week. Well, he’s out of the country until late tomorrow (Friday).”

“I talked to his (Blair’s) office yesterday (Wednesday), and you know the answer is now, ‘No briefing this week.’ It’s unbelievable,” said Hoekstra.

When Hoekstra was asked if he wanted to be briefed on the President’s report or on the Fort Hood incident in general, he said: “On anything--on any intelligence that they’ve gathered! They are not willing to share it with the intelligence committee. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what his—shouldn’t the intelligence committee know what his relationship was to Aulaqi, what other foreign people he would be talking to? No briefing.”

Hoekstra said the Obama administration was stalling on giving out the information. “You know, they’re playing out the string,” said Hoekstra. “We’re going home next week, (and) they will have effectively made it through three months with giving no substantive briefings on Fort Hood.”

Hoekstra said Democrats had their priorities out of order by focusing on salacious news instead of the incident. “And at the same time, we are subpoenaing the people who crashed the India state dinner,” he said, referring to Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who attended President Obama’s first state dinner without an invitation. “I mean, it is like, there’s something wrong here.

The Tareq Salahis is the Palestinian friend of Obama who "crashed" a state dinner at the White House. The Salahi incident kicked off a series of investigations by Democrats despite the fact that they knew Obama and had been photographed with him previously.

http://intelligence.house.gov

A Special Kind of Christmas Poem

This was a new one to me and I must say, quite powerful. But be sure and get the Kleenex handy and while you are at it, take a moment to thank our troops. God Bless them all!

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

99 Balloons

This family was blessed with wisdom, love of each other and faith in God. Many would have aborted little Elliott. Instead, they chose to celebrate each and every moment with their special gift. How AWESOME. Glory be to God!

Ann Coulter on the Terrorist Act at Ft. Hood



Tom Stiglich
Journal Register Newspapers
Nov 10, 2009




Take special note of the commnets made by Keith Olbermann. Despicable.

MSNBC Exclusive: Fort Hood Never Happened!
by Ann Coulter (more by this author)
Posted 11/25/2009 ET
Updated 11/25/2009 ET


It's been weeks since eyewitnesses reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar" before spraying Fort Hood with gunfire, killing 13 people.

Since then we also learned that Hasan gave a medical lecture on beheading infidels and pouring burning oil down their throats (unfortunately not covered under the Senate health care bill). Some wondered if perhaps a pattern was beginning to emerge but were promptly dismissed as racist cranks.

We also found out Hasan had business cards printed up with the jihadist abbreviation "SOA" for "Soldier of Allah." Was that enough to conclude that the shooting was an act of terrorism -- or does somebody around here need to take another cultural sensitivity class?

And we know that Hasan had contacted several jihadist Web sites and that he had been exchanging e-mails with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen. The FBI learned that last December, but the rest of us only found out about it a week ago.

Is it still too soon to come to the conclusion that the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism?

Alas, it is still too early to tell at MSNBC. For Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews -- at least two of whom would be severely punished under Shariah law -- the shooting of George Tiller was an act of terrorism, no question. The death of a census taker in Kentucky was also an act of terrorism. (We learned this week that it was a suicide/insurance scam.) But as to Maj. Hasan, the jury is still out -- and will be out for many, many years.

Actually, according to Keith, the Fort Hood massacre may not have happened at all. He has argued persuasively, on several occasions, that it is impossible, literally impossible, to commit mass murder at a military base.

Like many on the left, Keith loved to sneer at all terrorist plots allegedly foiled by the Bush administration. He was particularly contemptuous of the purported plan of six aspiring jihadists to sneak onto the Fort Dix army base and kill as many soldiers as they could.

On Nov. 11, 2008, he explained why the Fort Dix terrorist plot was a laughable fraud, saying the "morons" apparently didn't realize that "all the soldiers have these big guns."

Keith, the moron, apparently doesn't realize that on military bases on U.S. soil only MPs have guns. (Special authorization is required for soldiers to carry a firearm, which can be granted only in the case of a specific and credible threat against military personnel in that region. Thank you, Bill Clinton.)

Again on May 21 this year, Olbermann ridiculed the Fort Dix terror plot, pointing out that the six alleged terrorists seemed to be "forgetting that every man there was armed."(Curiously, even though ROTC was offered at the ag school Keith attended, he appears not to have investigated it.)

But it was not until Aug. 21 of this year that Olbermann hit upon the true reason for the Bush administration's hyping of this implausible terror plot. According to Keith -- and I'm not kidding -- it was to distract from Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' announcement that her state had been unable to respond adequately to a tornado because Bush had diverted the National Guard to his crazy war in Iraq!

The Bush administration, you see, had revealed the arrest of the Fort Dix conspirators the day after Sebelius' world-reverberating bombshell about Kansas' decimated National Guard! Eureka!

This little theory of Keith's, adorable though it is, has problems apart from his insistence that it would be impossible to kill army personnel on "a closed compound full of trained soldiers with weapons." The other problem is Gov. Sebelius was full of crap.

First, Sebelius wasn't in much of a position to know how well Kansas responded to the tornado, inasmuch as she had been partying at New Orleans' Jazzfest the day after the tornado hit -- while Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts and both local congressmen were on the scene, helping the rescue efforts.

Second, the manager of the actual rescue team soon contradicted Sebelius, saying: "We have all the staff that we need and can manage at this time. If we had more people right now, it would just start being a cluster."

The Kansas National Guard had 352 Humvees, 72 dump trucks and more than 320 other trucks, which would seem to be sufficient for the town hit by the tornado, Greensburg, Kan., population 1,574. That's almost one National Guard truck for every two people. (This is the same tornado that Obama claimed had killed 10,000 people. He was off by 9,988.)

Third, it turned out that Gov. Sebelius had rejected offers of additional help from neighboring National Guard units.

Consequently, the day after her dramatic cri de coeur for more National Guard resources, Sebelius' office completely reversed course, telling The Associated Press that the rescue efforts were going "just fine."

What the governor had meant, her office explained, was that Kansas' National Guard might be stretched thin if, hypothetically, another natural disaster were to strike immediately after the tornado.

Keith, unfortunately, was unaware of Sebelius' humiliating about-face, as it was not carried on Daily Kos.

Last December, five of the Fort Dix plotters were found guilty by a federal jury of conspiring to kill American soldiers. The sixth had already pleaded guilty.

Still, compare the macho posturing of the Bush administration over thwarting the Fort Dix terror plot to the masterful handling of domestic terrorist plots since the angel Obama has taken the helm. Why, the Obama administration managed to capture and arrest Maj. Hasan without violating a single American's civil liberties!