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The Second Edition of the National Security Affairs Newstand commenced 1 January 2005. While it will follow a chronological
format for news and analysis, just like the First Edition, it will be easier to follow:
Our news and analysis pieces will now be entered most recent to earliest, instead of the reverse.
We will also be starting staff bylines from time to time.
Opinions expressed in un-bylined articles are those of the Newstand only (and usually will be stated to be such), and
not necessarily officially those of the Association itself, unless explicitly stated to be such.
Opinions expressed in by-lined articles are officially those of the by-lined reporter(s) or editor(s) only, unless expressly
stated to be the opinion of either the Newstand and/or the Association itself.
Only opinions expressly stated to be those of the Association are official opinions or positions of the Association,
as endorsed explicitly by the Association's National Executive Board.
However, opinions expressed by Newstand staff writers or by the Newstand itself are mandated by the Association to reasonably
be reflective of the opinions of at least a majority of the voting membership of the Association, as expressed in e-polling
done by the Association.



National Security Affairs Newstand,
2nd Edition
____________________
21 de julio de 2009
Zelaya – Honduras
Personal del
kiosco de periódicos
Digamos este
claro, ruidosamente y orgulloso: Thomas Jefferson y Benjamin Franklin habló como padres de fundación, en diversas horas
durante su historia de la vida pública, que la noción de una democracia sin una clase de votación educada era sin valor.
Suscribimos a ese punto de vista. La noción “de un hombre, un voto”, si ese los medios que uneducated, illiterate,
saber-nada se forman de la gente se permite para votar sobre quitar derechos humanos fundamentales de la gente en su propio
país, que no es una democracia; ésa es una dictadura de las masas. Es exactamente lo que preguntaban
los Bolsheviks en la revolución de 1917 en Rusia. Nada más y nada menos. El Tribunal Supremo de Honduras sostuvo que
la oferta de presidente Zelaya para tener las masas del voto Honduran del electorado para hacerle a un dictador no es constitucional.
No es constitucional dentro de Honduras. Y no es constitucional en términos de su negación de los derechos humanos y
de los freedoms de los en Honduras que no convengan con las políticas substantivas de Zelaya, sus políticas substantivas nacionalmente
o sus políticas substantivas en términos de políticas extranjeras de Honduras. Hugo Chavez de Venezuela se siente de
otra manera; Fidel Castro de Cuba se siente de otra manera; Adolf Hitler de Alemania sentido de otra manera; nuestra secretaria
del estado dice que ella se siente de otra manera; y presidente Barack Obama se siente al parecer de otra manera. Ningunas
de estas posiciones son qué se puede fundamental llamar.
____________________________________________________
July 21, 2009
North Korea
Newstand Staff
North Korea launched during the week of July 5, 2009, specifically to correspond with our Independence Day
here in the United States, a cyber attack
on the computer infrastructure of the United States Government. This attack featured
an attack on particular identified websites relating to our national defense and our national security in Washington. Other attacks were made at the
same time on that same infrastructure within the Republic Korea. This Newstand
had referred to the fact in the past that the government of Russia and
the Peoples’ Republic of China have created mechanisms to attack this infrastructure inside the United States. This Newstand has stated
explicitly in the past that the creation of this mechanism constituted an act of war against the United
States and needed to be dealt with as such and, of course, that message fell on the deaf ears of the
entirety of the foreign policy bureaucracy of the Obama Administration in Washington. This Newstand has it on the highest authorities within the Intelligence Community
that the technological mechanisms by which North Korea actually engaged
in this attack were provided to the government of North Korea by the government
of the Peoples’ Republic of China and by the government of Russia.
The attack on our National Defense infrastructure by the government of North
Korea clearly constitutes an act of war. The
Obama Administration knows where this originated and has even announced it as such in the media. Yet nothing is done.
We can say this here and we are going to say this very loud and clear,
the attack by the government of North Korea
upon our national security infrastructure was a probe, designed to see what our defense would be and when and how they could
get through, and when and how they could not get through. The importance of this
to the American public is that, unlike Russia and unlike the Peoples’ of Republic of China and unlike North Korea, we
are not a third world nation; we are a nation which, if you take down our national computer infrastructure, you have basically
paralyzed this Nation’s ability to respond in terms of national defense to any major and substantial foreign act of
aggression or act of war. That is what this probe was about. There is not doubt
in our mind, based on the intelligence sources that we have reporting to us, that this is exactly what Russia and China intended with regard to the this particular probe that took place during the week of July
5, 2009.
Let us say this a different way, if we were to take down the computer
infrastructure of the national defense mechanism of either Russia, China, or North Korea, we would not impact on any of those
countries in conducting warfare or in conducting acts of self defense, to the degree that they would impact our ability to
conduct warfare or to conduct acts of national defense if they took down our infrastructure.
That is because they are third world countries and they rely on manpower primarily in their armies, and that means
infantry, to carry out their warfare activities and that those orders can be given to those manpower units in ways which were
very effective prior to the existence of computers or the internet and are still very effective today. What these countries know is that we have become over reliant on computer software and related infrastructures
to be able to carry out commands to our Armed Forces and in carrying out their mission for our national defense or operations.
________________________________________________________________
July 19, 2009
Honduras “Coup d’ Etat”
Americas Newdesk Editor Heather Phillips
For the Newstand and the Association
This Newstand strongly supports the role of the Armed Forces of
Honduras, as protectorsof the Honduran constitution, in outwitting a leftist dictator- type President who was seeking to take
over their country in violation of that constitution by giving himself a life term similar the to the life term powers that
Hugo Chavez had taken over in Venezuela (including only one state-run propaganda TV station, Telesur, currently bombarding Honduras) and similar to the life term powers that Fidel Castro had taken over in
Cuba.
The OAS of today is not your mother’s OAS. The Organization
of American States today is run by leftists. These leftists include people who
want to impose a socialistic dictatorship on the free market within these countries and to destroy the free market of ideas,
speech, and economy throughout the Western Hemisphere.
This is not the idea from the which the OAS was originally created. The
idea from which the original OAS was created sprung from the Monroe Doctrine, that being that no foreign entity or foreign
ideology such as socialism, European style colonialism or European style imperialism should take root here in the Western
Hemisphere, either in North America or in South America. Those were the ideological origins
of the American states and those are the original ideologies of the Organization of American States, that this Newstand stands
for forthrightly today. Those are not the ideologies of most of the so called
“elected” dictators in Latin America that we are presented with as of the date
of this article. Those include the Castro brothers in Cuba,
the President of Chile, the President of Brazil, the president of Bolivia,
the President of Argentina, the President of Ecuador, the former President (Zelaya) of Honduras,
the President of Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega), the President of El Salvador (Manuel Funes), and, outside Latin
America, the President of United States of America. These individuals
have no respect for the political and economic freedoms that were put into the constitutions of these republics in the first
place, words to the contrary by our President in Ghana recently notwithstanding.
Now, let us make this perfectly clear: the governments of Latin America do not have the firm foundations in
constitutionalism or democracy or reasonableness as to how their political machineries work, as does the United States of America.
There is more give and take in politics in these countries historically, more personalismo
in the brief life of all of these countries, since we here in the United States overthrew the yoke of England in 1781, and
since many of these democracies in Latin America overthrew the imperialistic yoke of Spain in the 19th Century,
in many cases, with our help. These are special reasons why in Latin
America the Armed Forces are named in certain of their constitutions as the ultimate protectors of the constitution
of the nation. Those are good reasons.
This Association, and many patriotic Americans who come from Latin American ancestors, applaud the actions of the Armed
Forces of Honduras in throwing out this dictator Zelaya and any and all of his associates, inside or outside of the OAS. Zelaya was and is a dictator who sought to overthrow the constitution of Honduras
and to have himself elected on the backs of the impoverished and uneducated masses of Honduras, to a life time term and, in
the process, to deny rights of freedom, including the right to succeed within the free market, to all the other citizens of
Honduras who did not agree with him. This is exactly what Fidel Castro did in
Cuba and it is exactly what marks him
as a dictator. This is exactly what Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela,
and still is doing do in Venezuela, and is doing today in Honduras by cutting off petroleum exports to the latter (the
oil is not Chavez’s, it belongs to the world) and that is exactly what marks Chavez as a vicious and violent dictator.
It is exactly what the presidents of El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia
seek to do today. The fact that people like them, as heads of Government, constitute
a majority in the current Organization of American States, has no impact or relevancy whatsoever for this Association or its
members, many of whom come from Latin American backgrounds, and respect the history and culture of the Latin American countries
from which their ancestors came.
What we want to know, and this is a question we directly pose to the people who control the OAS, and let us
make this perfectly clear, the people who control the OAS are President Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, what we want to know is this, how dare you condemn and impose restrictions on the Honduran military for
throwing out a dictator in order to establish political and economic freedom within Honduras, and at the same time you keep
your mouths shut about throwing out the dictators that are shooting down people who are speaking out for freedom on the streets
of Tehran, or on the streets of Lhasa, or in Sinjiang
We wish you well, Honduras, and everyone here does, and you
can be assured that we have many citizens of the United States
that wish you well.
Deseamos que usted Honduras
bien y cada una aquí hace y usted puede ser asegurado que tenemos muchos ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos que le desean bien.
_____________________________________________________________
July 1, 2009
NATIONAL PASSENGER RAIL IN THE OBAMA STIMULUS
PACKAGE
Domestic Newstand Editor Kathy Pearson and Newstand Staff
This Newstand, as well as the Association as a whole, vigorously lobbied during the Bush Administration,
contrary to the wishes of the Bush Administration, for enhanced National Passenger Rail throughout the length and breadth
of the United States, including both commuter rail in our major commuter markets such as the Northeast Corridor and the Los
Angles - San Francisco Corridor and the Florida Corridor, as well as enhancing both the amount of money put into track repair
and upkeep, with a priority of National Passenger Rail over the freight trains which in fact which own most of the tracks
in America. All of this lobbying in the
Bush Administration fell on deaf ears.
We are glad to see that President Obama has put in the 2009 Stimulus Package a grand total to date
of $13 billion identified for high speed rail and $100 billion over the next five years for enhancement in National Passenger
Rail (meaning Amtrak) as a long term investment. This is truly an investment. This is not wasteful spending. This is
an investment in the national security of the United States
for the long term. Here is why: we
need National Passenger Rail to transport troops throughout the continental U.S.,
at a minimum, if our enemies attack our ability to transport troops in an emergency on domestic passenger airlines. They have
shown that clear cut capability in the past on 9/11. This is not a fictional
argument. It is a real argument. We
need substantial enhancements to move people throughout the length and breadth of the United States at a moments’ notice on National Passenger Rail, as opposed
to simply relying on commercial airplanes to fill in the gap of military air transport in an emergency.
At the same time, to keep up the ability of the marketplace, including the marketplace of free
people desiring to move with regard to their transportation needs; to keep that market, we need those customers to pay a fee
for the usage of National Passenger Rail. Passenger rail cannot simply be socialized or nationalized or funded merely by the
government. To keep up that marketplace we need to make National Passenger Rail
free from the sources of interference that are currently showing up at our airports with regard to the denial of American
citizens and their right to travel on airplanes. National Passenger Rail needs
to be free for people to be able to move on it, in order for it to be efficient and for it to be profitable in a free market.
The majority of long distance Passenger Rail passengers on Amtrak right now are senior citizens
on vacation in the United States. Commuters who are trying to get to work in our urban hubs, many of them young people
and middle aged people, are the overwhelming majority of those who use commuter rail, which is why commuter rail is probably
the most profitable sector of National Passenger Rail. To change that situation,
this Nation needs to do a couple of things: it needs to change the demographics
of the people who are traveling on long distance national rail (Amtrak) to include many, many other groups other than senior
American citizens; young people need to be encouraged to use that method of travel as opposed to using airplanes; other people
who want to see the beauty of the scenery on board our long term National Passenger Rail, but who now take airplanes, need
to be converted from airplane usage to train usage. That latter requires, many, many more high speed trains while at the same
time keeping the beauty of the land scenery within their eyesight as opposed to what they are shown on an airplane. Long distance passenger rail is not user friendly enough to this market share. That needs to be changed. To change it we need a substantial increase in the number of quantitative tracks
that are laid down in the United States and the quantitative number of
trains traveling long distance in the United States. At the same time that system need to be made user friendly to these American citizens,
so that they are not harassed by the kind of long lines that we see in airports throughout the length and breadth of United
States, as to how and when they are going to get on a particular train.
The same analogy can be carried over to commuter rail. We
need more tracks laid down for commuter rail just as we need to widen our roadways for our cars and automobiles for commuters. We need more trains. For these people,
and above all else, we need to make commuter rail user friendly to the commuter, the American citizen commuters who are using
commuter rail. One of the biggest choke blocks to this system is that CSX or
other private freight companies own the railway tracks. That has got to be ended. Those
tracks have got to be taken over in the interest of national security, which is an argument we made in the first paragraph
of this article, by the federal government of the United States. Our government cannot permit a private company to hold rail track up to us, the citizens,
as a form of blackmail and say, “Well, you can’t use them for passenger rail or passenger rail which would make
more efficient the movement of the United States Armed Forces within the continental United States, unless you have our approval to do so.” That’s got to end and it’s got to end right now, and not after the horse is already out of
the barn with another attack on our civilian aviation system.
Let’s sum up:
we applaud President Obama for putting the amount of money that he did into the Stimulus Package for National Passenger
Rail. It is still far, far, far too less by at least ten times over what should have been put into the Stimulus Package for
National Passenger Rail investment, as opposed to what was put into other wasteful spending items in the Obama 2009 Stimulus
Package. Second, National Passenger Rail will not work unless it is subsidized
by individual passengers who see it as a free market alternative to civilian airplane travel.
To do so, that travel on board our passenger trains must be made free and freer than what is being done, as a matter
or government regulation with regard to our to our civilian domestic airline travel in the United States.
____________________________________________________________
July 1, 2009
MAHMOUD
AHMADINEJAD WINS IRAN
PRESIDENCY AGAIN; HO HUM
Middle
Eastern Newstand Editor Gene Furlow and
Newstand Staff
We are going to say this again on this Newstand for a about the umpteenth time: it is the Council of the Grand Mullahs
that runs Iran. It is not the elected president of Iran or the elected
parliament of Iran that runs Iran. It is the dictatorship of the Mullahs that runs Iran. These people to a man, are dictators,
evil, anti-American; believe that Iran needs to be a dominant force in the world threatening others the way ancient Persia
was a thousand years before the birth of Christ; and that Iran needs to become a nuclear state, meaning a state which has
nuclear weapons. They are also anti-Semitic; hate Jews and believe all Jews, every single Jewish man, woman and child on the
face of this earth, needs to be killed; and fundamentally believe the same thing about Americans and American society.
These people run Iran. No one else.
Contrary to the popular will of the Iranian people, they have declared that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their puppet boy, has been re-elected in a “landslide” victory
over his more moderate rival. So what?
Ho hum!
These people are fundamentally evil, and they will be stopped only when the rest of the
world has the courage to stand up to against them and stop these bottom feeders for what they are.
Contrary to what we have said here, President Obama put one of his White House spokesmen
on national television of the afternoon of June 15, 2009 to say, and we quote,
“The White House will deal with the Iran
we are confronted with as fact, as opposed to
The Iran
we wish we had.”
There is no such thing as a more un-American foreign policy pronouncement than this,
that this Newstand has ever heard from any President of the United States. The mission of United States foreign policy, the calling of United States foreign
policy, is to bring democracy and freedom to the world; to deal with the world we do wish to bring; to bring to the rest of
the world the promise that this Nation holds, the promise that Providence itself intended that this Nation hold for the rest
of the world. Deceptive and sneaky statements to the contrary, in especial regard
to this particular Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government in Iran,
constitute substantial mischief launched at the American people. President Obama’s
statements are in fact a disguise to the possibility that he actually likes President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and likes the fact
that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the Grand Council of the Mullahs, stand for ideals the President may also stand
for: opposition to American "arrogance" in world affairs, and socialism domestically.
There were riots and have been riots in the streets of Iran
by the decent people of Iran who are pro-American, riots this Newstand
predicted, who know that this election in Iran
was a lie orchestrated by the likes of the Grand Council of the Mullahs. They
burned cars; they marched in the street; they rioted against this vicious lie of a government. And they were shot down by
murderers.
There is no law this Newstand knows of which says we have to deal with anti-American
murderers.
Lets see if we get this straight: if you’re foreign thug dictator who shoots down
or imprisons American citizens in your country (North Korea, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran) or who jacks up the price of
gasoline at our pumps in violation of our anti – trust laws (every member of OPEC), or who pirates our music industry’s
productions in violation of our copyright laws (government of the Peoples’ Republic of China), or who hacks into our
governmental computer systems in violation of our laws (governments of Russia and China), or who authorizes the sending of
fraudulent foreign emails asking our citizens for money (government of Nigeria), or
who
authorizes the transhipment of drugs from your country for sale to our children (Hugo Chavez,
Venezuela; Fidel Castro, Cuba; current government of Bolivia),
we, including especially, American law enforcement from the President on down, do NOTHING. But if you are an American citizen
from Texas, accused of an investment Ponzi scheme in which only the citizens of Barbados were hurt, or a rich American who talked trash against
the Obama Administration’s polices for more regulations of Americans, American regulators bring charges against you,
or your family after you’re dead, simply because you’re EASIER TO CATCH. This isn’t justice; this is hypocritical
injustice.
The United States of America should stand,
not with words, with action, with those true and brave hearts in Iran
who were shot down by the mullahs, and not against them. Obama’s current foreign policy is a folly based on fallacies
of thought. We should clear the smote the from the foreigners’ eyes, whatever it takes, before we start taking on our
own people for the same or similar sins. Now that would really be INTERNATIONALISM - one World - “We Are the World.”
____________________________________________________________
June 17, 2009
OBAMA – KHATEMI – AHMADINEJAD
Middle Eastern Newsdesk Editor Gene Furlow and Newstand Staff
What is coming out of Iran tonight on Twitter and on
Facebook on whom this Newstand have identified as the dictators of Iran, the
Grand Council of the Mullahs, including the “Supreme Leader” Khatemi,
is that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran, the real people of Iran, who seek reasonable relations and friendly relations
with the people of the United States, the people of Iran who have nothing against the United States of America and never have
had anything against the United States of America, the anti-Mullah people of Iran, the majority of the people of Iran, as
opposed to the Islamist fanatics who took over Iran in armed revolution against the Shah based on a philosophy of the anti-American
thug Khomeini in 1979, are protesting in the most violent form, and only form that is left open to them, the same violent
form that Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic talked about in our Declaration of Independence,
that the people who are oppressed by a government that denies them their fundamental rights that are given to them by Providence, these fundamental rights which are inalienable by any government, certainly including,
and without limitation, the freedom of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; these people are creating, as our Declaration
of Independence says they have a right to create, a violent expression against these thugs and animals who exist within the
Grand Council of the Mullahs of Iran, and who exist in the Presidency of Iran, meaning that individual President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, to overthrow them and to bring them to the violent justice that they deserve.
We contrast our words here with the words of the President of United States, President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden
this month June, 2009, in his Rose Garden Press Conference with the President of the South Korea, in which he referred to
this subhuman piece of garbage Khatemi who rules Iran as a dictator, as the “Supreme Leader,” of Iran. At the same time, the President said in that Rose Garden news conference that he wanted to cooperate with
the “Supreme Leader.”
We here at the United States Navy Veterans Association and that this Newstand have
a totally different philosophy as to what it means to be an American than President Barack Obama has as to what it means to
be an American. We here at this Newstand and at the United States Navy Veterans
Association have a different philosophy as to what the United States has stood for in the world in the past, a philosophy
different from the current viewpoint of President Obama. We
here at this Newstand and at the United States Navy Veterans Association have a totally differently philosophy than President
Obama as to what humanity stands for. We here at this Newstand and at the United
States Navy Veterans Association have a totally differently philosophy from President Obama as to what the United States of America should stand for in the future as to our foreign policy.
Contrary to President Obama we here at this
Newstand believe that the United States of America was created by Providence to light
the lamp of freedom for all the world to see and that that is our mission and is our calling from Providence. We believe that that was our mission
and calling from Providence in 1774 and in 1776; is our calling
today; and will be our calling from now until the time the cows come home. We
do not compromise, nor do we negotiate with people who are dictators. We overthrow
them and we bring the light of liberty to their people. That is the same lamp
of liberty that brings immigrants to our shores in ever growing numbers, the same lamp that those protestors, those innocent
people in Iran who believe in us, and who do not believe in President Obama, are being shot at for in Tehran tonight. This Association supports them and encourages them and this Association says that
any President of United States of America who does not do the same is not an American.
We have seen this week in international sports, the players for Iran wearing a white ribbon on their wrist which means that they support the moderate position
in Iran, the moderate position which is and seeks to be in an alignment
with the United States of America and
what we have stood for in this particular article. We have seen the people on
Twitter and Facebook demonstrating on the streets of Iran, being shot down in the streets and murdered by the dictators that
rule Iran, including this same bum, called by the President of United States, the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who this same President of United States said he would welcome to come to his Inaugural in Washington. We have seen these same people, the real people of Iran,
on Twitter and on Facebook, referring to these same people in their signs as “Go-to-Hell, Dictator.” “ذهبت إلى
جحيم, دكتاتورة”
Nothing could say it better than that for us, and if you think that Khatemi is the “Supreme Leader” of Iran,
you are the same monster he is. And we have to say that you are nothing more
or less and deserve nothing more or less, than the same words exactly that the people of Iran put to him.
____________________________________________________________
National
Security Affairs Newstand Update
June 12, 2009
OBAMA ANNOUCES POLICIES MIRRORING NEWSTAND RECOMMENDATIONS ON
MPG REQUIREMENTS FOR AMERICAN AUTOMOBILES
Newstand Staff:
President Obama has recently announced administrative orders limiting the average mile per gallon requirements for
US car manufacturers, which mirror the proposals put forth by this Newstand in 2002 in our premier article "Sandstorm,"
to be found on the Homeport page, on how crude oil is running out in the world. His Executive Order actually directs the Secretary
of Transportation to come up with a recommendation for an average mile per gallon requirement of 35.5 mpg for the model year
2016 (light trucks are also included), which means the recommendation must go to Congress (which will likely approve, we predict
here) sometime in 2014 or 2015. We applaud him in this regard because we feel
that these average miles per gallon requirements on US motor vehicles sold in the United States,
as we said way back then, (the Newstand 2002 Update actually called for average mpg requirements of 40 mpg
by 2010, which we said would still not be enough to deal with the petroleum situation) is a matter of national security
for the United States in ending its dependence
upon foreign oil. But mile-per-gallon edicts issued by the Executive Branch to a Cabinet
member can never be a substitute for democratic legislation passed by the peoples' representatives after full consultation
with the people. Nor should we ever forget, in this country, that if the demand of the people, including the demand of our
soccer moms, is for stronger, larger and safer vehicles (which inherently are less fuel efficient) in the interests of protecting
the lives and safety of American children from the chaos and mayhem evident today on many of our highways, streets and
roads, rather than tiny little expensive cars made out of cardboard that the Europeans seem to favor in their quest to get
away from higher gasoline prices (as opposed to standing up to the foreign oil moguls threatening them), then that free demand
should be both honored and respected.
That free demand is neither honored nor respected in the President's proposed "Cap
and Trade" bill currently before the House of Representatives. That bill has a diffferent concept in mind: the imposition
of European style cars, European style energy ideas, European style ideas, period, on the American people, whether they
like it or not (government from the top down, exactly like they do it in all the hoochi-koochi countries, which is exactly
what our people came here in the first place, for the past two hundred years, to get away from), at a much greater expense
to the American people per capita than they should be asked to pay. Instead of the Commander-in-Chief asking our people what
they can pay to accomodate foreigners who are telling us how we are going to model our lives, our society, after them,, he
should be asking those foreigners what they are going to pay when we tell them what to do, to reduce, not increase, our cost
of living here.
At the same time, we also believe that there may be underestimated fossil fuels left under the ground or seas
of countries to sustain consumer demand in the United States for gasoline for motor vehicles for an undetermined amount of
time (chemical engineers only estimate how many degraded dinosaurs fossils (which is where crude oil comes from) are left
underneath the surface of the earth; nobody actually knows), and that under no
circumstances should the United States be held hostage to the blackmail of any foreign government, inside or outside OPEC,
which threatens us, or executes on that threat, to jack up the price of American gasoline at the pump, as a political matter
to teach the United States to bend its knee or to bow to the foreign policy desires of that
government or governments which are, or may be, inimical to the national interests of United States. This Newstand has consistently stood for the proposition that these foreigners, if they were operating
inside the United States as a cartel, would be in felonious violation of the anti-trust laws of the United States, and, if
that were the case, the United States Department of Justice would come down on them extremely hard, including their leadership,
to put them away in prison for a long, long period of time. We see no reason,
other than shear hypocrisy on the part of the Administration in Washington, why Americans who commit white-collar crimes here,
because they are easier to apprehend, are arrested and tried, as the Department of Justice is arguing that this should be
currently, while at the same time that same Government is saying that foreign governments should go free from the full prosecution
of our laws and/or the full military force of the United States of America brought against them, when they are seeking to
harm the United States of America by acts of state-sponsored terror which, if they were committed within our borders by American
citizens, would be prosecuted as severe felonies. If Somali Muslims pirating
our ships in Mid-East waters can be ordered by the Commander-in-Chief to have their heads blown off with .50 caliber machine
guns by U.S. Navy Seals, we see no reason why the “pirates” in OPEC seeking to hijack our economy for their gain
cannot have the same done to them.
We also want to applaud the President of the United States on his recent decision, almost forced
on him by the military establishment of the Department of Defense, not to release photos of these low-life anti-American thugs
who were water-boarded by US Armed Forces and CIA operatives, on the grounds, correctly, that such a release would cause great
violence, and greater deaths, to US Armed Forces members currently serving in the War of Terror abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan. This policy position, however, is a flip flop on the part of the current Commander-in-Chief
from the position he took previously that these pictures should be released, a position advocated by left wing members of
his party, including the Attorney General of United States, Eric Holder, who demanded that these pictures be released in the
interest of what they call “transparency”, but which in fact was in the interest of anti-Americanism. “Transparency”
does not equal Americanism; read our lips: it may equal “Swedism,” where Sweden publishes online everybody’s tax return, but it does not equal, again,
read our lips, Americanism. It is the position of this Newstand that this flip-flop
on the part of President Obama will only be one in a series of further flip-flops on national security and, within a month
or two or less, we will see more flip-flops in favor of substantive positions
which degrade the United States of America, degrade the mission of our Armed Forces abroad in the national interest of the
United States (which President Obama already degraded explicitly in his speech to our troops in Baghdad earlier this year),
and which pull the U.S. down to the position where we are simply one little nation to be squeezed into the general roster
of the United Nations General Assembly somewhere between Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
__________________________________________________________
June 17, 2009
OBAMA'S STIMULUS PACKAGE
For the Newstand:
There is a notion among American liberals that, given what occurred in the 1990’s with the
fraudulent Ponzi scheme that was created within NASDAQ and to a lesser extent, the NY Stock Exchange, with the concurrence
of the Clinton Administration, that with a paper growth in the American economy, and concomitant tax revenues which flow
into the government Treasuries as a result of the that paper growth, that any amount of public debt can be paid off.
That is a false notion. That was then (during the Clinton Administration) and is now an outreach
of the voo-doo economic ideas of the Administration in power. It was voo-doo
economics, 1993-2000, because the entire growth in tax revenue then was based on a bubble economy covered fictitionally
by the White House, which created no real production of new wealth. All it created
was a flow of money into phony companies which weren’t producing anything of real value whatsoever, and especially,
then, those companies in the technology sector. The American economy and the
White House can create phoniness with propaganda, with relationship to “growth” of the American economy, when
in fact it is nothing more than a bubble, and therefore, meaningless, growth in the economy, anytime they want to, from now
until the time the cows come home, but none of this will change the basic economic facts that we just stated.
The last round of spending, including the "TARP" at the tail end of the Bush Administration,
and the current amount of borrowing during the Obama Administration, each one approximately one trillion dollars apiece, is
not to any extent or degree an investment in on-going productive-in-the-free-market assets that is going to pay off later
with regard to the American economy. Somebody later on is going to have to pay
for this false monstrosity of economic thinking. That payment has to either come
out of higher taxes to pay for more debt, or it has got to come out of greater inflation by simply printing more money. Either way the suffering of the American people may not become evident during a given
eight year term of an American President who proposes these things, but at some point thereafter, the economic chickens are
going to have to come home to roost.
The bottom line is this, and this is the bottom line between the writers of this article and the
Obama Admistration: one of the two is a fundamentally mistaken as to the probable
outcome of this "spend our way out of it" philosophy.
The position of this Newsstand is that we cannot spend our way out of a recession or a depression,
with, admittedly, a large number of Americans hurting because of what the recession or depression has done to them personally,
by reason of “borrowing our way out it” which in turn means, paying more taxes to pay for the debt that we are
“borrowing” or by simply printing more money to pay for the spending, which causes inflation. But we have to do one or both to economically repay the spending spree.
What we are left with, however, is a President of the United States who says I can do all
of this and I will let the chips fall where they may after I am out of office. It
can’t be done and the Obama Admistration knows it can’t be done (President Obama is not stupid;
he was President of the Harvard Law Review). This is bad national security policy. Coming from the standpoint of this Newstand, these intelligent people who are activating these policies could not possibly be proposing these polices unless they
themselves were willing to make fundamental economic mistakes for the sake of sheer "borrow and spend," "tax and spend," and
"regulate and spend" idealogism. And just because you personally may be a recipient
of this “largesse,” you should not be grateful, or be deceived.
While we are good at this Newstand of creating analogies, let’s create a new one: Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned. What we have here is a case where Nero created the situation for Rome
to be burning, and then played his fiddle beforehand, realizing that when Rome
burned, it would burn after he was gone from office.
President Obama and his minions have sowed the seeds of the destruction
of our National Security with his so-called stimulus package and, to be fair to the Presidency of George W. Bush, at the tale
end of that President’s tenure in 2008, President Bush did likewise. The
innocent American people, including generations yet unborn, will have to pay the price of reaping that whirlwind.
_____________________________________________
May
4, 2009
THE NEWSTAND’S TAKE ON THE FOREIGN
AND MILITARY POLICIES OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTATION DURING THE FIRST 100 DAYS.
Newstand Staff:
The
Obama Administration and this Newstand both recognize that President Obama is the elected Commander-in-Chief of the United
States, and therefore we present this material and our opinion with the greatest deference
to the Office of the Presidency.
The
policies we discuss here have come fast and furious during the first 100 days of this Administration.
Many
of these policies at this point in time are merely public pronouncements and do not represent actual activities of policy
as opposed to statements of principle, but nevertheless are “policies” this Newstand and an overwhelming majority
of the Association’s membership oppose:
We do not believe that “making nice” as a matter of style or rhetoric with foreigners who hate the United States of America makes any sense as a matter of substantive policy; nor do we believe
that that sort of approach will achieve anything substantive in furthering the goals of the United States or the world as a whole. We
do believe that furthering the goal of the United States in the world is
a patriotic policy, and is a policy in keeping with the national interests of the United States. "Meddling" in the internal
affairs of an anti-American dictatorship is part of our calling from Providence, as President Obama himself speaks to when
he refers to the "universality" of human freedom. That is in fact why we fight wars, and for no other reason, and why
our troops die in combat as they have, consistently, since the time of our Revolution. There is no "national interest" of
the United States which is, or should be, divisible from the universality of human freedom.
If the USG wants, for example, in the upcoming presidential elections in
the Iran run by the dictatorial mullah-crowd which actually runs that nation, in which we predict those same dictators will
rig the election to claim that the anti-American thug Ahmebenijad has once again won, those CIA agents now still living should
be preparing for street riots on the part of the real Iranian people who want an end to theocratic thuggery, hangings of Iranians
because they oppose the regime, and a new and positive relationship with the United States, to begin to hand out signs in
Parsi for those demonstrations saying: " آورد به شاه
"
That will aggravate those mullahs no end once those riots start, as we predict they
will, and will cause the mullah-crowd to overreact. That is advocacy in the cause of universal human freedom, and it
is the kind of thing Ronald Reagan would have done.
The Newstand does not believe that the United
States is simply one little country to be fitted into some sort of larger world order somewhere between
Afghanistan and Zimbabwe
in the roster of the United Nations General Assembly. The Newstand does not believe
in a one world currency. We do not believe that Europe has a leading role to
play in the development of the world, other than that it has a leading role to play as a partner with the United States, providing Europeans recognize that the United States is the world’s only superpower.
The Newstand believes that the United States
is the best country on earth and that no other nation or their philosophy of life or government matches up with our philosophy
as to what government should constitute or what society should constitute or what people should constitute. Unlike the Europeans, we believe that appeasement of our enemies, people who hate us because of who we
are, will only telegraph to those enemies an apparent weakness and therefore have the consequence of them striking violently
at us until they get exactly what they want within our society. We believe that that has already been true with regard to
many European countries that have appeased the jihadist terrorists in the war on terror.
We believe that there is a War on Terror and we believe that that War on Terror is not just a war on jihadist terrorists
but is also a war that Western civilization should carry out globally on all terrorists worldwide. These include the American native born terrorists (Timothy McVeigh et al.) who carried out the bombing
at the Oklahoma City Federal
Building during the Clinton Administration. These terrorists were home grown terrorists. They were right-wing terrorists. But they used the same philosophy of terror that the jihadists use throughout the world. The thing that
makes these people terrorists as opposed to revolutionaries, is that they aim violence at innocent men, women and children,
who are not combatants and do not wear the uniforms of a particular country’s armed forces. They seek to achieve their
own agenda by reason of instilling fear in the heart of a civilian population, and they use murderous violence against that
civilian population to achieve political dominance in a particular country. This
is totally different from what the revolutionaries in the Massachusetts militia did at Concord and Lexington in 1774. Those folks fired on uniformed British soldiers seeking to impose a political will on us from a country
far across the sea in London, by a self appointed King in London who claimed a God given right to rule over them; to deny
their basic human freedoms, including the freedom of privacy in their own houses, the freedom to worship as they saw fit,
the freedom to speak as they saw fit in open and civil society, and the freedom that they should not be taxed or pay homage
to anyone unless they had democratic representation with regard to those taxes. That
made them revolutionaries and not terrorists. Those Massachusetts militiamen
were fundamentally different, as Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel has said of the jihadists, from the “wild eyed
radicals” of the Islamist world who seek to impose their will on us, on Western civilization, on America, on Europe,
by the use of sneaky acts of terror designed to kill ununiformed men, women and children who are clearly not combatants. These people cannot be appeased and should not be appeased. It is they who attacked us, not the other way around. Making
nice with them by reason of rhetoric is not only anti-American; it is the act of an individual who does not understand what
he is doing as a professional with regard to the foreign or military policy of the United States of America.
No
President of the United States or Commander-in-Chief
should bow down to the King of Saudi Arabia, or to any king. Our people, all
of our people, came to this country to get away from the idiocies and slavishness of what was occurring in the old world,
wherever that old world was. We came here to avoid that slavishness, that fawning
belief that the old world held out, that power was the highest form of the state and was the idea and ideal by which people
should be ruled. We came here, all of our people, to get away from that ridiculous
and idiotic nonsense that is still the ruling notion in almost every single country on the face of the globe except the United States of America.
We need to stand up as a people, and the President needs to stand up as a man, for that notion, and not to pander to
anyone, our enemies or our friends, to stand for the notion that those fundamental ideas make us the best country on the face
of the earth. Our ideals are America, and not as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez recently, “yesterday’s news.”
As
soon as the President announced, through his new Department of Defense, that
we were eliminating from the official vocabulary of the United States Government, the words or phrases “global war on
terror”, and the “War on Terror,” and that we were going to
withdraw our Forces from Iraq; and as soon as he made statements, as he did in Bagdad recently that he opposed the previous
mission of our United States Armed Forces in Iraq, but that at the same time appreciated what our United States Armed Forces
had done in Iraq, the level of violence of Al Qaeda in Iraq statistically picked
up substantially and dramatically. Since he has made those announcements, there
have been more bombings, more car bombings, more violence and more death and destruction in Baghdad
and throughout Iraq, primarily directed at innocent Iraqi citizens, than
there were during the period of the Bush surge in Iraq. Those are facts. And that is exactly
what the Association and this Newstand predicted would occur. Those things are
already occurring.
And
in case you don’t understand what’s going on in Iraq, it’s this: Al Qaeda in Iraq is stepping up its attacks
on Iraqis not Americans, to tell the former, "We’re coming" (a message not lost on the fearful Iraqi government), and
at the same time to tell the Obama Administration, “We will, give your troops plenty of time to leave, now that we know
you are leaving.” Regardless of whether the overthrowal of Saddam was or was not a good idea, the United States was
involved in Iraq and has been involved in Iraq in a noble mission to secure Iraq as a democracy in the Middle East and as
a government standing for stability in the Middle East as opposed to the instability that is fostered by Al Qaeda oriented
state governments such as Saddam’s, such as the government of the Sudan, and such as the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
And the Taliban, we point out today, are doing an “end run” around US Forces in Afghanistan
and are now attempting, to close in on the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, to take over there, along with trying to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. This military advance, which could easily be
successful, is a proximate cause of the Obama Administration’s declaration of weakness in Iraq and the Administration’s coddling of anti-American enemies in the third
world, and the refusal to support pro-American governments in those countries (Consider, e.g., the Carter Administration’s
withdraw of support for the Shah of Iran, circa 1978, and the concomitant mess
we have in Iraq today.) These
military actions by the Al Quaedists worldwide are fundamentally why it is totally correct to call the war on terror a global
war on terror and why it is fundamentally false and inaccurate to call it anything else, or to call it different from that.
We
are not sure that President Obama, with regard to increasing U.S. troop strength to a very limited degree in Afghanistan,
is anything other than halfheartedly committed to even in the war in Afghanistan against the Jihadist terror that lurks in
the heart of most of the wild eyed Islamists that inhabit that particular country, and also live in the surrounding Muslim
world. President Obama has ordered his new Defense Department to restructure
their thinking and their vocabulary with regard to the war in Afghanistan to “tone down” US goals in Afghanistan. We have no idea what that means and no reasonable commentator on foreign or military
policy in the United States has any idea
what that means, including anybody currently in the Department of Defense.
The United States of
America does not win wars by “toning down” the goals of our military policy.
We win wars by reason of establishing the goals that Franklin D. Roosevelt established with regard to World War II: the unconditional surrender and/or the unconditional destruction of the enemy. Nobody in the Roosevelt Administration suggested that we should “tone down” or negotiate our
policy with to Adolf Hitler once he attacked us and declared war on us, or once Imperial Japan attacked us and declared war
on us. The policy was unconditional surrender: the destruction of their governmental
entities as they knew it and the reconstruction of their societies to appreciate true democracy as opposed to their libelous,
slanderous and murderous transfiguration of what democracy meant, by which we mean the society and government of Tojo and
the society and government of Adolf Hitler thought they meant by their use of the word “democracy”. Hamas is no democracy. Al Qaeda is no democracy, Hezbollah
is no democracy. Kim Jong Il is no democracy, Ahmebenijad is no democracy. Fidel
Castro is no democracy, he’s a murderer. Daniel Ortega is no democracy. And Hugo Chavez certainly is no democracy. The
reason they are not democracies and never will be is because they advocate the nationalistic right of their people, who substantively
believe in their ideology, to trample on everybody else’s rights in the world.
The reason they are no democracy and can never be a democracy is because they do not afford the human right to every
American in “their” country to have as much freedom of speech, as much freedom of belief, as much freedom of worship,
as much freedom of travel and association, in their country as they espouse that they have the right to demand in the rest
of the world. They hate us because of what we are and who were are and they will not rest until we are put into the peace
of our graves. That is the only peace that they understand. For an American President to play with them; to make nice with them; to think that he can achieve through
rhetoric and style some change in the fundamental substance of what they seek constitutes a grave and imminent danger.
The
foreign policy of the United States needs
to be based on substance and not on style. We might be able to gain a few minutes
here and a few minutes there, maybe a few years here and a few years there on the stage of world history, based on style and
rhetoric. We might be able to gain, and we saw this during the Presidency of
John F. Kennedy, a true American patriot and a true naval hero, a degree of favorable polls with regard to the common people
of the third world, who certainly do live in a degree of poverty unknown in the United States of America, a favorable opinion
toward the United States in terms of those polices. Nevertheless, and we saw
this during President Kennedy’s Presidency, that did not last and it won’t last because the fundamental powers
that be that come out of this sort of chaos in the third world that these inhabitants of the third world basically bring upon
themselves, throw up dictators who
basically preach hatred, and hatred is a very powerful force. To think that one
can deal with that degree of hatred with mere rhetoric and with style and presentation or a handsome or charismatic President
is a fundamental flaw in our foreign policy and it is a serious mistake.
North Korea, with its missile tests, is a dire and immediate threat
to the United States, with missiles which when tipped with nuclear weapons,
which North Korea already has, can already reach Alaska
and Hawaii and, soon with further testing, will be able to reach further into the continent
of the United States. There can be no doubt that the dictator of North Korea is also a madman capable of launching a nuclear
strike on the mainland of the United States just as an act of vengeance for some wrong that he feels has been caused to his
dictatorial viewpoint of the world by the United States. It is a concern for
the United States to allow such a madman to exist at the helm of such weapons
and it is ridiculous for the United States
to permit such a madman to possess such weapons of mass destruction. This Newstand
holds nothing wrong with an American foreign policy of the carrot and the stick. The
carrot can always be held out to people who disagree with us as foreigners. But
there is a time when those same people, after they spit in your face year in and year out, decades in and decades out, that
we come to the understanding that these people hate us because of who and what we are and that they are not going to rest
until we are destroyed, and that they have the capability to do that through modern technology. At that point our American backs are against the wall and we do not have any other options other than the
stick. As Teddy Roosevelt said when he was President, “Speak softly, but
carry a big stick.” There is a time when the stick needs to be used. That time is now with regard to North Korea’s
capability of launching by rocket a nuclear weapon against the United States
of America.
As
Prime Minster Netanyahu of Israel said recently with regard to Iran, Israel will not allow, under his administration, for Iran
to develop a nuclear rocket facility capable of launching a nuclear weapon against Israel
and that Israel will take unilateral action
to prevent that from happening, if nobody will assist them. There is absolutely
nothing wrong with what Netanyahu has said. And it should be the same policy
of the United States, as apposed to appeasement
with total nutcases and low lifes like the Grand Council of the Iranian Mullahs and President Ahmebenijad. These people are clear cut nutcases who blame and brutalize the United States
for everything and it is a nutcase policy for the United States of America
to try to appease them.
As
the Association has repeatedly said on this website over the past ten years, and these quotations can be found by going no
further back than the public resolutions of the Board of Directors of the National Association contained on the Homepage,
the existence of a substantial deficit in the budget of the United States and the existence of a substantial figure with regard
to the national debt of the United States both, and separately, constitute a grave, serious and immediate threat to the national security of United States. We repeat those positions here.
The counter argument being made on the other side, and it is being made by the Obama Administration, does have some
statistical merit to it. That other argument is that the percentage of national
debt to the gross domestic product of the U.S.,
even with the largest possible estimate of President’s Obama current budgetary proposals, is less than the percentage
of national debt to the gross domestic product which occurred during the World War II years.
That argument has merit. The problem with the argument is that the World
War II years were the only period in time that that statistic can arguably be held true for. In World War II we faced an immediate
foreign threat to our existence from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which we had absolutely no choice as a matter of national
security other than to apply our dollars to spend against. The other difference
is that we applied those dollars and debt (most of the latter being money Americans were loaning their own government) during
that period of time to build up the Armed Forces of the United States to make them the mightiest Armed Forces that the world
had ever seen, and we also applied our dollars at that time to the military within the United States as an investment, which
investment could then be applied, after the war was over, to peace-time applications for all those young men and women who
did return to the United States alive, to begin new lives with new families,
with new demands on our domestic economy, all of which caused the boom that occurred in United States post-1945. What did
not occur with regard to those expenditures during WWII, regardless of whether it did not occur because of design or by fortuitous
circumstance, is that trillions of dollars of borrowed-from-foreigners federal monies were thrown out helter-skelter into
a domestic economy to pay for covering every scheme of domestic waste, fraud and abuse imaginable. What did occur during the Roosevelt Administration during WWII was that the expenditures were focused on
a particular goal which was achieved and which then thereafter had a consequence, expected or otherwise, of creating a boom
in the American economy. This is quite a different approach from the one which
is being taken by President’s Obama’s budgets. We have already analyzed
them above but we will also say this: They are not an investment in anything.
They are merely ameliorative payments being handed out as if they were some form of welfare to numerous classes of people
and numerous categories of people who are, and this Newstand says this sympathetically, hurting by reason by the current recession. They are not investments the way the investment was being made in the American defense
machine by the Roosevelt Administration during WWII. The fact is that the Roosevelt
Administration made great expenditures into the domestic economy wild-eyed during the period 1933 through 1940. The fact is,
statistically, prior to our entry into WWII on December 7, 1941, the economy
of the United States was not, to any substantial
degree, better off then when President Roosevelt took office in March 1933. Today we are seeing the Obama Administration proposing
in its military budgets across the board increases in base pay for our soldiers, sailors, Marines and Air Force personnel,
and it goes without saying that the Association supports those increases in base pay.
But at the same time the Obama Administration is cutting the overall manpower of our United States Armed Forces, and
is also supporting substantial cuts in the Armed Forces’ technological weapons systems, including cuts in our missile
defense system, the very missile defense system, that protects us against rogue states like North
Korea and Iran. Those
cuts do not make sense from a defense standpoint. They do not make sense from a standpoint of protecting the national security
of United States; and they do not make
sense from the standpoint of the federal government’s role in supporting our economy through one of the most vital American
sectors of the economy, the defense industry.
From
the Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2009, and other private intelligence sources relied on by this Newstand, both the Government
of Russia and the Government of the Peoples’ Republic of China have, independent of each other, separately created computer
malware which permits them to instantaneously take down the electrical grid of the United States of America or substantial
portions thereof. This happened on President’s Obama watch while he was
making nice with both these governments. These actions are not the acts of friendly
nations; they are an act of war. The electrical grid of the United States is much more important to the functioning on the United
States of America than the electrical grid of Russia
is to the functioning of Russia, or the electrical grid of China is to the functioning of China. The threat presented by these sometimes amicable, and sometimes hostile, governments
is as serious and as imminent and as dangerous as any nuclear launch capability of North Korea or the nuclear launch capability of the Government of Iran. This is not simply a case of mutual assured destruction; it is a deliberate act of a particular foreign
government directed exclusively at the United States of America. It cannot and should not be tolerated as a matter of American foreign policy.
And
it is part, by example, of a larger problem of the Obama Administration foreign
policy, with regard to appeasing foreign governments and entities which are inherently
hostile to American interests, or to use a different phrase, to let American foreign policy drift into another world where
we just don’t care and where we are then attacked again as we were on September 11, 2001,
in an act of unmitigated murder of more innocent civilians than were ever killed on American soil theretofore, by a foreign
entity which hated, and still hates, the United States.
_____________________________________________________________
May
1, 2009
Vice –President Joe Biden’s Speech in North Carolina on Foreign Policy -
“Dead Wrong”
Newstand
Staff:
Vice President Joe Biden is dead wrong when he says we are in a stronger posture
today during the Obama Administration with regard to facing threats posed to us abroad than in the Bush Administration. It is true, to give Vice-President Biden credit, we were stretching thin in regard
to U.S. Armed Forces’ manpower during the Bush Administration in the wars we were fighting overseas, and that is something
that the Association complained about to Congress and to the Bush Administration continuously during the eight years of the
Bush Administration. But we are not seeing anything in the Obama Administration
other than stretching the manpower and womanpower of the United States Armed Forces even more thinly today. The presentation that the Vice-President made at the Pikeville Pleasant Grove Fire Department with regard
to us having virtually no respect in other parts of the world has nothing to do with the substance of United States
foreign policy. Moreover, Vice President Biden is not talking in terms of policy
about true respect; what he is talking about, instead, is “likeability” based on the style of presentation of
a particular President of the United States,
including, but not limited to, bowing and scraping to self-appointed Muslim kings and “cool” gangster-originated
styles of handshakes with thugs like Hugo Chavez. Those are two totally separate
and distinct concepts. Respect is engendered by the substance of a particular
country’s foreign policy. Likeability of a particular President is an entirely
differently concept. They are not the same.
And they never will be the same. Ronald Reagan responded years ago to
the Vice President’s conceptual analysis best, when he said with regard to other countries in the world and as to how
they perceived the United States of America, that there was a choice for other countries in the world, as to whether they
would love us or whether they would respect us. President Reagan then said that
he would choose respect over love every single time. President Reagan was right
as a conceptual matter relating to our foreign policy and Vice President Biden, to use a phrase coined by him, is “dead
wrong” as to the same concept
.
[Vice-President Biden was interviewed as to
these matters on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”]
______________________________________________________________
April
21, 2009
Obama’s Failure in Europe
| Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, Brazil Delegate |
|
|
| Mayira Tavares, G8 Summit, L'Aquila, Italy, July 9, 2009 |
Newstand
Staff
President Obama attempted to build a new coalition around his new mission for the United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan during his travel to the G20 summit in Europe.
He failed.
After
a very reasonable, and also pandering, speech to the Europeans in Paris, asking them for their support, the Europeans responded
by saying that they would not provide any new substantial forces for the mission of Freedom in Afghanistan, a mission that
both this Newstand and the Association have talked about frequently on both the War on Terror Newsstand and also the National
Security Newstand over the past eight years. President Obama in his speech in
Paris alluded to the actual fact that the Al Quaidists will strike again in a substantial way
against Western Civilization and that they will strike in Europe instead of in the United States. What President Obama did not allude to was why the latter was so. It is not because of the geographical proximity of the forces of Al Qaeda to Europe
versus the geographical proximity of the forces of Al Qaeda to the United States; it is because, instead, Europe has substantively
shown an attitude of appeasement toward Al Qaeda, and that the Al Qaedists therefore feel a sense of weakness on the part
of Europe toward them. Bullies and criminals strike to where they feel your weakest
point is; and they continue to probe that point. Nevertheless, Europe has stubbornly
refused President Obama’s request that they increase their forces in Afghanistan. This is only natural. Europe has seen
this same President hypocritically withdraw our US Armed Forces from Iraq, and Europe senses that as a sign of weakness on
the part of United States, and senses that the current Government of the United States is not going to actively pursue any
further wars in the Middle East, pretty much what President Obama later announced was part of the “Obama Doctrine.” Therefore it would make logical sense for any head of government in Europe
or otherwise not to agree to do otherwise. It is hypocritical and
illogical for someone to say we are ceasing and desisting from the war in Iraq
against the Al Qaeda and at the same time say that we are increasing that war in Afghanistan. And whatever else we
have to say about the Europeans, they certain are logical, most oftentimes to a prissy fault.
The War on Terror is exactly what it is, a War on Terror. It is not simply
a war on jihadists. It is a war on all terrorists worldwide. The readers of this website may remember that the Bush Administration initially coined the term “War
on Terrorism,” whereupon the Association coined the phrase “War on Terror,” whereupon the Bush Administration
adopted that term. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld then originated the
term “Global War on Terror” (GWT), which in fact it is. The Obama Administration has recently banned all those
terms from official USG terminology. Nevertheless this Newstand and this Association
will continue to use those terms because they are factual , and the denial of those terms constitute a material misrepresentation
of fact as to what is going on in the world. One cannot win forth for the cause
of the United States of America by simply changing terminology; by simply
changing semantics; nor can one win forth for the cause of the United States
of America foreign policy by reason of the style of rhetoric alone. Foreign policy requires substance. Not by simply “leading
by example,” as to good works Americorps does in Southside Chicago, but by really leading substantively in the world,
even though that is tough. The enemies of the United States such as the people who hold power in Pyongyang who are doing their
darn best to test missiles which can strike Alaska and Hawaii, and which can be tipped with nuclear weapons, and the people
who hold power in Iran, who just sentenced an innocent U.S. citizen female to eight years on trumped up charges of spying
just because she was a news reporter for America’s National Public Radio, are not stupid, They are not simply going
to agree with American proposals simply because a President of the United States or his State Department “makes nice”
with them in terms of speeches and style. Enemies who hate us because of who
we are and not because of what we do, are not gong to change their policies simply because the President of the United States
or his State Department has been ordered to make nice with them as a matter of style.
President
Obama was entirely correct in his speech in Paris when he said Europe was likely to be attacked
next versus the United States being attacked
next by the Al Qaeda. He did not elaborate why.
We have elaborated why in this article. But we also say to the Europeans,
when the Al Qaedists are done attacking you, they are going to come against us as Americans next, and we say this to them
and also to our fellow Americans: Appeasement gains you no ground with
evil people who are constituted as such to destroy you and your entire lifestyle, and that certainly applies to the leadership
of the North Korean Communist Party, and applies to all of the jihadists and
their brethren in the entirety of the Muslim third world, and applies certainly to the leadership of the current Iranian Republic
and every person who believes in them and everybody who votes for them. These
enemies of everything we Americans call dear, and especially freedom, will rest and seek peace with us only when they have
the peace of the dead, meaning they will seek peace with us or compromise with us only when we are dead and their tyranny
rules throughout the world. There is only one answer to them substantively as a matter of American foreign policy and that is the exact same answer that President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston
Churchill gave to Nazi Germany in World War II: we demand your unconditional
surrender, we demand the unconditional surrender of all your ideologies, and we will go into your countries, as we did in
World War II, and reconstruct your societies in a manner in which you no longer seek tyranny over the freedom of the individual
men, women and children either in your country or in any other country on the face of this globe. And whether you claim to be elected by a democratic majority of true low life and evil people in your country
is totally irrelevant to us, just as it was irrelevant to us, and should be irrelevant to us, that Hitler was in fact elected
democratically by a plurality of the German people in the 1930’s. United States foreign policy should be based on the
substantive principle that Freedom applies throughout the world.
Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The Freedom of one man in one country is
the Freedom of all men and women in every country, and when you take away the Freedom of one man in any place, you are taking
my Freedom away from me.” To rephrase that, if an American cannot have
the exact same rights of freedom in Iran as he or she does in the United States, then he is not free. If Iranians or people who live under the tyranny of the Taliban
or of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, which says people in those countries have got to operate in a certain way to substantively
bring themselves in line with the political party that rules that place, and that Americans or foreigners do not have their
human rights of free speech or of free travel into those places to say and do as they please, then neither the residents of
those places or any American is free. That is the fundamental doctrine behind
our Declaration of Independence; that is the fundamental doctrine behind the Constitution of the United States of America. That is
the doctrine that makes us the greatest country on earth. And that is the substantive doctrine that must go behind all of
our foreign polices. Not style. That’s
substance.
Anything else, regardless of whether it comes from our President or Commander-in-Chief, to the
contrary, including the recently announced “Obama Doctrine,” is not keeping with the traditions of American values
and the American way of life.
____________________________________________________________
3/24/2009
U.S. Pullout From Iraq
For The Newstand
The
Staff of the Newstand believes that if, under President Obama’s plan that all US Troops will be withdrawn from Iraq
by December 31, 2011, that the following will occur:
Iraq will eventually fall to some sort of Al Qaeda organized coalition, or to a dictator in Baghdad, who will then
open up Iraq again, as it was organized during the Bush Administration, to support and succor Islamist fanatics who will use
Iraq as a safe haven to attack the United States of America and Western civilization.
This is what this Newstand predicts will occur.
We cannot predict the timeline as to this, but we predict this
will occur. This plan is bad foreign and military policy for the United
States.
"It is not acceptable to us to simply provide safe
havens for terrorists to plan and plot [against us]."
- President Barack Obama, 3/22/09
Interview on CBS-TV News
60 Minutes
____________________________________________________
11/4/2008
Newstand Staff
Senator Barack Obama (D.-Ill.) won a first
term today as President of the United States, with 52.9% of the popular vote, from a still divided and anxious nation,
his promise of a fresh-start approach to Iraq and the state of the economy trumping John McCain's promise of steady and
strong wartime leadership.
_________________________________________
10/31/2008
Military and Foreign Policy: A Comparison
of the Two Presidential Candidates’ Position
For
the Newstand:
The Newstand has analyzed the foreign policy positions and the military policy positions of both Senator Barack
Obama (D - IL) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and has made certain conclusions with regard to the efficacies of their proposed
military and foreign policy positions at this particular point in time.
Senator Obama’s positions seem to us not to make any sense. They
seem to be rife with contradictions that are reflective of inexperience and lack of fundamental American values toward a mature
and dynamic foreign policy and military policy abroad for the United States. It is nonsensical, for example, to the staff of this Newstand that one could suggest that the war in Iraq needs to be brought to an abrupt halt and at the same time the war in Afghanistan needs to be strengthened with more troops. It’s the same enemy in both places. How
we got into the war in Iraq, and whether it was right or wrong to get into the war in Iraq, are no longer the questions for
Americans or for American foreign policy. What is the question is: what do we do now? The war in Iraq is clearly a war on terror, and is clearly part of the Global War on Terror. The major enemy in Iraq
today is Al-Qaeda. They even call themselves “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” and they are the largest guerrilla movement operating in Iraq today. (See
the Glossary of the insurgent groups on the War on Terror Newstand, Edition 1). The conclusion of the military panel of this Newstand is that a total
or substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq anytime in the immediate future would cause the collapse of the current
Iraqi government, which, while it may not be exactly pro-American, is not either anti-American in the sense that Saddam Hussein
was anti-American. The collapse of that government, which this Newstand Staff
predicts would occur upon a US withdrawal anytime in the near future, would result in the Al-Quaedists in Iraq, in one form
or another, storming into Bagdad with AK-47’s blazing, holding them up in the air, and proclaiming an anti-American
government established by force over the will of the Iraqi people. We further
predict that that would lead to a situation in Iraq in which Iraq will become a geographical breeding ground for anti-American
terrorists to stage their terrorist activities further directed at the United States of America, at Israel, and at Western
civilization.
To
say that the real war in the CentCom theater of operations is exclusively Afghanistan
is both a non sequitur and an oxymoron. The verbal comments to the contrary
of Senator Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), are meaningless statements based solely upon current polls
of the American people, which are hardly a source for how long term foreign policy or military policy of the United States of America should be formulated. Our scientific
polls, with a MOE of + or - 3.1%, of our Forces in the two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, all of them likely voters,
from generals and admirals down to E-1's, show that a whopping 79.2% of them will vote for Senator McCain on Election Day,
because of his support for a more aggressive war on terror in both countries.
Moreover, to say that the objective in the War on Terror is merely to kill Usama Bin Laden is again both
a meaningless statement and an oxymoron. When and if Usama Bin Laden is killed,
and the United States Navy Veterans Association called for that on September 14, 2001 in its written message to the White
House, which is still posted on this website, does not mean that there will be an end on the War on Terror any more than the
killing of Pablo Escobar, in Medellin, Colombia, the head of the major drug cartel in Latin American selling its hard drugs
to American children, meant victory in the War on Drugs in the 1990's. When
Escobar was killed through the cooperation of Colombian military forces with United States intelligence services, droggistas
came out of the woodwork to replace him, people who believed in what he was doing, people who believed that the United States
was the enemy, people who believed that selling drugs to American children was good for them.
They came out of the woodwork in Cali, and after some of them were killed in Cali, more of them came out of the woodwork
as to mini-cartels throughout the length and breadth of Colombia, and these people are still importing cocaine and heroin
into the United States of America at the same level or at a greater level than was done before the death of Escobar. Killing Bin Laden does not mean that there will be an end to the terror war against
the United States and what it stands for. The reason for that is that you have billions of people in the Islamist Third World
who hate the United States for what it is and not for what it does, and who hate Israel and the Jews for who they are and
not for what they do. They will rest only when our society, as they perceive
it to be, is totally and completely destroyed. To declare a phony victory in Iraq
and say that the War is over there, is a mistake in assertion of fact. And that mistake in assertion of fact lies at the heart
of what we sense is being proposed as foreign and military policy for the United
States by Senator Obama and Senator Biden.
Further, to
call for open ended negotiations with Islamists who hate the United States because of what it is, or who hate the State of
Israel because of what it is, is a call for a negotiation with people who are truly and fundamentally evil. These people negotiate with us only in the sense that the North Vietnamese negotiated with us in Paris
in 1973: They negotiate with us only to buy time for themselves to carry out
their ultimate objectives, which are the destruction of the society of the United States as we know it and as the average
American knows it. In Vietnam
they were limited to the destruction of the society as they understood it in South Vietnam,
which the Communists in North Vietnam
did achieve. The Communists in North
Vietnam did not have the resources to carry it out any further. That is totally different in today’s world. The Islamists
of the world, with the spread of weapons of mass destruction which any individual can now manufacture almost at the drop of
a hat, gives them the wherewithal to do exactly what their objectives are. The
only real peace or real negotiations that these people offer up is the peace of the dead.
We find the
current policy proposals on these subjects, accordingly, of Senator Obama to be both irresponsible and dangerous over the
long term, and not really to make any sense. Those policy positions also do not
abide with the majority viewpoint of the membership of the United States Navy Veterans Association which commonly holds, as
a philosophy, that it is more important for the United States, as the prime objective of its foreign policy, to stand up for
the individual interests and the property interests of United States’ citizens both here and abroad, as opposed to standing up for the proposition, as a primary objective, of the interdependence of the United
States with other countries on the face of the globe. The world is interdependent in many ways, but the United States should
not lose sight of the fact that when that interdependence cuts against the unilateral interest of the United States of America
and the unilateral interests of American citizens, that it must be opposed as opposed to being compromised with.
It goes without
saying, however, that the government of Iraq is a sovereign government
and if at any time they ask for a complete and total United States
troop withdrawal from their country, that their request must be acknowledged and agreed to.
In the final analysis, whatever happens in the War on Terror, it is the people of Iraq
who will decide the fate of the people of Iraq
in the first place. It is only after Iraq
pays a price on such a bargain that the United States
must then face the consequences of what will happen next to itself and our other allies throughout the world.
Regardless
of whether Senator McCain does or does not agree with the philosophies and specific policy positions our Staff has staked
out above, we can assure the reading public that he does believe that the U.S. Armed Forces’ surge in Iraq has succeeded,
which it has, and that more needs to be done in Iraq with regard to U.S. troop
manpower to secure Iraq and the Iraqi government as being firmly in the pro-American camp or, at a minimum, not in Al-Qaeda’s
camp, and in that regard Senator McCain’s proposals with regard to military policy in Iraq make more sense than Senator
Obama’s, much more sense. Senator McCain’s position on the war in
Afghanistan, in fact is pretty much the same as Senator Obama’s: that US Armed Forces manpower in Afghanistan needs
to be strengthened to more vigorously prosecute that war there, or we are in doubt of winning that war there and in fact losing
it to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
As to Veteran
Issues domestically, as to issues of strengthening Veterans’ rights and Veterans’ benefits domestically, both
candidates are probably in sync with each other and in sync with the viewpoints of this Newstand’s Staff. Neither candidate is calling for Veterans’ benefits to be made into entitlement programs, as Senator
John Kerry (D - MA) was calling for in 2004. That means in simple English that
as in the status quo, Congress decides on a year to year basis what benefits, given a review of the total economic and financial
situation the United States is in, can be given to and/or expanded to, veterans in the United States. This Newstand does not believe that an Obama administration vs. a McCain administration would cause more
or less more benefits to be extended to veterans domestically in the United
States over the next four years.
___________________________________
10/14/2008
Newstand Staff
A MESSAGE FOR COLUMBUS DAY
At the end of the Fifteenth
Century, a young King Fernando, and a young Queen Isabella, sat on the throne of Spain. Their marriage had united the
old Hispanic houses of Castile and Aragon. But Spain then still
faced a menace, because Moors had overrun the country in the 800’s and penetrated as far north as the Pyrenees.
In 1492 these Moorish fanatics, the
same kind of people who today still hate the United States and all it stands for, who still today hate all Western civilization
and all it stands for, still hung on to their territory in Sevilla, at the southern tip of Spain.
That same year, a young
Genoan approached the monarchy. He told a story he believed, that the world was round, not flat, as conventional wisdom had
it, that the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Spain circled the globe, that the ocean was not inhabited by dragons, and that
by sailing westward into it, he would reach the fabled land of Cathay, where Spain could achieve a commercial and historic
empire.
His name was Cristoforo
Columbo. Fernando was skeptical, said it couldn’t be done, and refused his help. Isabella, less skeptical, dipped into
her private purse to finance Columbo’s requested expedition. She insisted that any new lands be claimed in the name
of Spain, and of Providence.
Columbus,
as we call Columbo today, did not reach Cathay. Although native North Americans were living
here at the time, and other European voyagers had reached America briefly before him, Columbus discovered the Americas for
modern European civilization, and for Spain, and in short order, his discovery brought English, Spanish and French explorers
here, and colonists and both voluntary and involuntary immigrants from the Old World who gave us many of our traditions
of individual freedom, most of our culture, and our laws.
We honor him today, on
Columbus Day, for all those reasons, as we should.
En el final del décimo quinto siglo,
un rey joven Fernando, y una reina joven Isabella, se sentaron en el trono de España. Su unión había unido las viejas casas
hispánicas del Castile y de Aragon. Pero España entonces todavía hizo frente a una amenaza, porque amarra había sobrado el
país en el 800's y había penetrado como lejos al norte como los Pyrenees.
En 1492 estos fanáticos Moorish todavía colgaron encendido a su territorio en Sevilla, en la extremidad meridional de España.
Que el mismo año, un Genoan joven acercó a la monarquía. Él contó una historia que él creyó, de que el mundo estaba alrededor,
no plano, pues la sabiduría convencional la tenía, que el océano atlántico a al oeste de España circundó el globo, que el
océano no fue habitado por los dragones, y que navegando hacia el oeste en ella, él alcanzarían fabled la tierra del Cathay,
en donde España podría alcanzar un imperio comercial e histórico.
Su nombre era Cristoforo Columbo. Fernando era escéptico, dicho no podría ser hecho, y rechazó su ayuda. Isabella, menos escéptico,
sumergido en su monedero privado para financiar a la expedición solicitada de Columbo. Ella insistió que cualquier tierra
nueva esté demandada en nombre de España, y del Providence.
Columbus, pues llamamos Columbo hoy, no alcanzó Cathay. Aunque vivían los norteamericanos nativos aquí en ese entonces, y
otros voyagers europeos habían alcanzado América brevemente antes de él, Columbus descubrió las Américas para la civilización
europea moderna, y para España, y en fin orden, su descubrimiento trajo a exploradores ingleses , españoles y franceses aquí,
y a colonos que nos dieron nuestras tradiciones de la libertad individual, nuestra cultura y nuestros leyes.
Lo honramos hoy, el el día de Columbus, por todas esas razones, como debemos.
__________________________________________________________
1/31/2008:
IRAQ WAR: WHERE WE ARE NOW
Gene Furlow
WOT Newstand Middle Eastern Newsdesk
Congress approved the President's budget for the Iraq war in late May 2007 without any concrete timetable for
ending the war. In exchange, President Bush has to ensure that Iraq's government and military are making progress and will
eventually be able to function with a smaller US military presence and less US aid. And, due to increasing political pressure
from Democrats, Republicans and the public, President Bush announced in his 2008 State of the Union Address this month that
20,000 Marines in Iraq will be returning home later this year (read, approximately December, 2008), and will not be replaced.
Meanwhile US Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the current frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination, continues to call for
an increased US military presence in Iraq, a position also taken by the Association.
__________________________________
1/30/2008:
IRAQ WAR BY THE NUMBERS
Gene Furlow
WOT Newstand Middle Eastern Newsdesk
10,045: Number of schools Coalition forces still plan to build in Iraq. Coalition forces
are also building hospitals, fire stations, post offices and railway stations. Iraq's first new hospital since 1998 will open
in 2008.
20%: The percentage of U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq who have filed claims for some
form of psychological stress or disorder upon return.
$950 billion to $1.2 trillion: The Association's current estimate of what the
war could end up costing, including military pay and veterans' benefits.
$22 billion: The amount of US provided funds to rebuild Iraq, to date.
3,600: The number of US troop KIA's to date.
66,000: The estimated number of Iraqi civilian casualties to date.
55%: The percentage of Americans who thought the Iraqi war was worth the effort, as
of September 2003, six months after the US invasion.
61%: The percentage of Americans today who believe we should have stayed out of Iraq.
2%: The percentage of Americans who believe today that the war is going very well.
31%: President Bush's current job approval rating, the lowest in polling history for
any American President, as of January 22.
18%: The Democratic controlled Congress' job approval rating, the lowest in history
for any US Congress, as of January 22.
__________________________________
4/21/2007:
"THIS WAR IS LOST"
For the Association
"This war is lost," US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
pronounced on April 19.
This incendiary "finding of fact" as a matter of making policy is not
fit to be expressed by an honorable office-holder.
The American, offensive, active war against fundamentalist Islamic terror
throughout the Islamic third world cannot be lost, will not be lost, is not lost and, if it has setbacks on a given battlefield
due to Senator Reid's and his cohorts' usurpations of the constitutional powers of the Commander-in-Chief, usurpations caused
by their pandering to temporary polls, then, if Iraq becomes "lost, " thanks to Senator Reid's policies, we will just have
to fight "Iraq" again on a different battlefield, just as, when legislative policies in Congress caused us to "lose" Vietnam
in 1975, and almost to "lose" Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980's, we had no choice but to fight the Cold War against
international, anti-American Communism, on a different, and larger, scale.
Senator Reid's expression, to his knowledge, feeds directly into the
murderous and false propaganda of the same people who attacked us on 9/11, Al Quaida. His statement lends support
and succor to their ultimate mission, which is the destruction of the United States as we know it, and is disastrous to the
morale of our troops, and stabs them in the back for the sake of political opportunism.
_____________________________________________
1/12/2007:
TROOP SURGE IN IRAQ;
CHAVEZ GETS SIX MORE YEARS
For the Newstand
President Bush has ordered 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq. The first ones will arrive Monday. Their purpose is to stabilize
the situation in Baghdad by quartering off neighborhoods and then doing house-to-house sweeps for terrorists, something the
Iraqi forces clearly do not have the capability of doing by themselves. As we understand it, the Mahdi Army of Al-Sadr will
not be immune from the sweeps.
Democrats in Congress have vowed to vote no funds for these troops. Others in Congress have vowed to vote no funds for
any troops, period. Polls are showing only 40% approval for the President's surge.
American KIAs in Iraq recently topped 3,100 since the invasion in the spring of 2003, almost four years ago. At the height
of the Vietnam War, by comparison, we were losing approximately 5,200 troops killed in a year.
The President's surge is probably too little, too late.
The Army's Chief of Staff originally thought, in 2003, that we would need at least 300,000 troops in Iraq to fight a
successful counterinsurgency campaign. We were unsuccessful in such a campaign in Vietnam, a country roughly equal in population
size to Iraq at the time, with 500,000 troops on the ground.
Nevertheless, this Newstand supports the surge. We cannot afford to leave behind in Iraq a greater mess than what it
was under Saddam, which is what would occur if we left at this point. Bush's new plan is nothing more than the execution of
Senator John Kerry's statement during the 2004 Presidential Debates that "I will hunt down the terrorists and kill them."
That should be our policy, both in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. That is the "political" solution, and there isn't
any other. People who say otherwise are speaking political palaver and gobbleygook.
It is something akin to treason to cut off funds for our young servicemen and women after a Commander-in-Chief has
already committed them to combat. Such policy turns the Commander-in-Chief clause of the Constitution on its head and makes
Congress the dominant and pre-eminent branch of American government.
Meanwhile, the anti-American thug Hugo Chavez was just sworn in as Venezuelan president until 2013, taking an oath to
"Christ, socialism or death." This newly self-appointed expert on Christianity then immediately announced he would
submit a demand to his rubber stamp legislature, where his thugs control both chambers, for him to be able to rule by presidential
decree. He's also making plans to run again in 2013. His playbook is straight out of Adolf Hitler's in 1934 Germany, and not
out of anything we could find in the Bible.
He is also the head of a coalition of leftist Latin American leaders whose goal is to destroy the United States. They
include the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia at a minimum, with others leaning toward them in Brazil, Chile
and Argentina. We have no real foreign policy to deal with this threat, other than to ignore them and try to cajole the
ones we think, maybe, who may be cajolable. The last time we had an effective anti-Communist policy in Latin America was when
Ronald Reagan effectively provided support to the Contras' insurgency against the very thug who now is President of Nicaragua,
support Reagan provided despite a Congress which voted to leave the poor anti-American Communists alone.
We have big trouble brewing south of the border. And it's a lot bigger now than anything we faced from the Sandinistas
or in El Salvador in the '70's and '80's. And it's getting bigger every day.
____________________________________________
| Saddam seconds before his execution |
|
|
| His last words: "Down with the Americans, death to the Jews, Palestine is Arab." |
!2/30/2006:
SADDAM HANGED;
ETHIOPIANS TAKE MOGADISHU
For the Newstand
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad before dawn this morning, after being found guilty by an Iraqi
court for crimes against humanity. Saddam was a corrupt, anti-American, anti-Semitic, Islamist tyrant who consorted with
terrorists and used weapons of mass destruction, mustard gas specifically, against innocent Iraqi women and children, his
own people, who opposed him. The world has not seen the likes of him since Adolf Hitler, one of his self-proclaimed
heroes, but we are seeing the likes of him again today, in places like North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. Saddam needed
killing, and he got what he deserved. Sic Semper Tyrannis.
We invaded Iraq in 2003, despite all the nonsense to the contrary, to teach Islamists like Saddam, in the aftermath of
9/11, a lesson they would never forget. This was a lesson most simple, but typically paradoxically American in its combination
of both pacifism and nationalism, a message which can still be read today on the t-shirts of millions of Texans: "Don't
mess with us." We have not made that case sucessfully to date, and, also to date, we are losing that struggle,
not just in Iraq, but throughout the Islamic world. That cause specifically (and concomitantly, but of much lesser
importance, the cause of bringing democracy to people who may not want it,) remains, a noble, and a patriotic, struggle
in our own self-defense, and a struggle that, one way or another, must be won, a struggle that we Americans will rue
the day if we lose.
On a separate but related national security affairs front, a front backburned to insignificance by the anti-American
media worldwide, Ethiopian troops, attached to Somali government forces, the government recognized by the United Nations,
took Mogadishu , the capital of Somalia, away from the pro-Al Quaida Islamist Court fanatics who had held it, forcing the
latter into a minimalist stronghold in southeastern Somalia. The Ethiopians, a Christian nation, had been supported with advisors
and materiel from the Bush Administration, because of the quite accurate belief that if the Islamic Court was permitted to
remain in power they would have turned Somalia into a base for Al Quaida to strike at the U.S., a la the Taliban
did in Afghanistan. The ousting of the Islamic courts from Mogadishu, and the
acquisition of a new-found ally in the horn of Africa, Ethiopia, an ally with a powerful army, constitutes another success
in the Bush Administration's neo-realpolitik in the Arab world, right up there with the forcing of Muammar Gaddafi
to give up his weapons of mass destruction. It will be a success the anti-American media takes little note of, but this Newstand
certainly is, and, for the umpteenth time, we hope it holds.
12/15/2006:
RUMSFELD ADDRESSES THE NATION
ON THE WAR ON TERROR
For the Association:
In his outgoing speech on both the War on Terror and the War in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made
the following remarks today in Washington:
"... Last weekend, I was in Iraq. I wanted to personally express my heartfelt appreciation to the
troops for their service and for their sacrifice. I wanted to leave them a sense of what they have given me -- pride
in mission, and an abiding confidence in our country. It has been the highest honor of my life to serve with them --
these makers of history.
Mr. President, over the past six years, at your request, as you pointed out, this department has been determined to
create a new framework to better defend against the irregular threats of this new era. These folks have had to depart
from the conventional, and, the familiar, to wrestle with the new and the unfamiliar. And
they do it with no guidebook, no roadmap -- and they do it in full view of the Congress, and the press and the world
– with generous scrutiny from all sides. Today, I’ll break
with convention one more time, and, instead of the traditional farewell remarks on past achievements, I will focus
squarely on the future. I say this with the perspective of one, as the
President indicated, who has had the opportunity to lead this department in two different eras, in two different
world conflicts, for two different presidents, and, yes it’s true, in two different centuries. When
I last departed this post in 1977, I left cautioning that “weakness is provocative.” That weakness inevitably
entices aggressors into acts they otherwise would avoid. Then, our country was engaged in a “long struggle,”
a struggle of uncertain duration, against what seemed, at the time, as an ascendant ideology and clearly an expanding
empire. Few would have believed that, 15 years later, the Soviet
Union would cease to exist. Or that the dissidents then trapped behind an Iron Curtain would lead people out of the
dustbin of history and into the family of free nations. Which they did. That
history did not happen by accident. And it most assuredly was not made by people sitting safely on the sidelines.
It occurred only because America and our allies withstood the tough times, the bitter disagreements, and they
stayed at the task with conviction that our security was linked to the defense and the advance of human
freedom. This is what history asks of us today. And as I leave the
Pentagon for the second, and, I suspect, the odds are the last time, I do feel a sense of urgency about the very
real challenges ahead. As the President noted seven years ago,
he said, we are living in an era of “barbarism emboldened by technology.” We live at a time when our
enemies mix an extremist ideology with modern weaponry and have the ability to kill thousands -- indeed even hundreds
of thousands -- of our people in a single, swift, deadly stroke. We forget that at our peril. A
number of us here came in 2001, with that mission and mandate: to prepare this defense establishment, to protect
the American people, from the unconventional, and the irregular threats. That
mission was given powerful impetus that bright September morning, when that mighty building, just a few yards away
-- shook, burned, and smoked. And 125 members of our Pentagon team did not come home. The
attacks of September 11th awakened Americans to the global extremist movement -- a movement with networks in nations
all around the world. Even our own. A movement with tens of thousands of adherents who believe it is their calling
to kill Americans and other free people. Ours is a world of unstable dictators,
weapons proliferators and rogue regimes. And each of these enemies seeks out our vulnerabilities. And as
free people, we have vulnerabilities. Ours is also a world of many friends
and allies, but sadly, realistically, friends and allies with declining defense investment and declining capabilities,
and, I would add, as a result, with increasing vulnerabilities. All
of which requires that the United States of America invest more. Today
it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative, but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative
as well. A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions
that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power. This
is a time of great consequence. Our task is to make the right decisions today, so that future generations will not have
to make much harder decisions tomorrow. It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies
and indeed the ugliness of combat. But the enemy thinks differently. Under
the President’s leadership, this country made a decision to confront the extremist ideology of hatred that
spawned a worldwide movement, and to take the fight to the enemy. The alternative was inaction and defense -- a
pattern that history has shown only emboldens the enemy. Our country has
taken on a bracing and difficult task -- but let there be no doubt, it is neither hopeless nor without purpose.
Leadership is not about doing what is easy. It is about doing what is right, even when it’s hard -- especially
when it’s hard. President Lincoln once said, “determine that the thing can
and shall be done, and then we shall find the way” – to do it. That remains true today. We’re
in what will be a long struggle. It’s new, it’s complex and, even after five years, it’s still somewhat unfamiliar.
That we have been successful – I would add -- fortunate to have suffered not one single attack here at home,
since September 11th, 2001, has contributed to a misperception in some quarters that the threat is gone. It is not! As
I leave, I do feel urgency, but I also feel optimism. I know that the American people can summon that same grit
that helped our founders forge from a wilderness, a new frontier. I know it because I have seen it over my own
lifetime. It’s the same steel that sent our fathers and grandfathers across oceans to defend free nations from
tyrants. That same grit that gave Americans the will to endure 40 years of the Cold War under the specter of nuclear
annihilation. So it is with confidence that I say that America’s enemies
should not confuse the American people’s distaste of war -- which is real and which is understandable
-- with a reluctance to defend our way of life. Enemy after enemy in our history have made that mistake -- to their
regret. To those in uniform -- here and abroad -- who proudly serve,
always remember that America’s example is a message of hope for hundreds of millions of people all across
the globe. America is not what’s wrong with this world. Ours is a message that
was heard and fought for in places like Berlin, Prague, Riga, Tokyo, Seoul, San Salvador, Vilnius, and Warsaw.
And that message is even now being whispered in the coffee houses and streets of Damascus, Tehran, and Pyongyang. The
great sweep of human history is for freedom -- and America is on freedom’s side. As
I end my time here, some ask what I will remember. Well, I
will remember all those courageous folks that I have met deployed in the field, and those in military hospitals
that we visit. And I will remember the fallen. And I
will particularly remember their families, from whom I have drawn inspiration.
And, I will remember how fortunate I have been to know you, to work with you, to have been inspired by your courage
and your love of country. You will be in my thoughts and prayers.
God bless you all."
As to either subject, the War on Terror or the War in Iraq, we could not have said it better ourselves. And as usual
during his tenure, the Donald, in his outgoing remarks, sounded as if he was quoting directly off this website. True
grit indeed.
This Association, and some of its Newstands, disagreed vociferously with Secretary Rumsfeld over the years
on his policies. For example, although we found great merit in his argument that large American armies of occupation long
term in the Muslim world would only feed anti-American insurgents and terrorists, we nevertheless argued that these people
needed to be taught a swift and effective lesson based on American power: that we will come into your countries fast, kill
everyone who raises his or her voice against the United States, and turn your deserts into glass, and then leave for you to
sort out the mess you, not we, created. And if you install another anti-American government which threatens us or our allies
with mass destruction weapons, we'll do it all over again, regardless of the cost or how long, or how many times, it
takes. Likewise, we opposed Rumsfeld's initial emphasis on technological weapons accompanied by decreases in manpower;
we called for, and call for instead today, in addition to technological superiority, for more more, many more, boots
on the ground infantry capability, even if it takes conscription to achieve that, especailly when it comes to special
and silent warfare, covert action, politically destabilizing our enemies, political warfare, the co-optation politically of
our enemies before they become our enemies (especially in the Arab and Muslim worlds, even if the co-optees are only third-rate
politicians), increases in CIA manpower and a melding of greatly expanded CIA covert action officers with the
military.
And we feel we have hundreds of millions in the Third World who hate the United States, not tens of thousands.
In the insights of his accurate world-view of both the Soviet threat (during his first tenure) and of the nature
of the Islamist threat to the United States (during his second tenure), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may turn
out to be one of the greatest Secretaries of Defense, and perhaps the greatest Secretary of Defense, to span the Cold
War-post-Cold War-Islamist terror threat period.
This Association, and its members, wish him the best.
12/5/2006:
GATES CONFIRMED AS
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT SUGGESTS
U.S. TROOP WITHDRAWAL BY 2008
NSA Newstand Staff
The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to confirm Robert Gates
as Defense Secretary, with Democrats and Republicans portraying him as the man who will help overhaul President Bush's Iraq
policies.
At the same time, Congress' Iraq Study Group concluded, based primarily on the personal opinions of its co-chairs, former Secretary of State James Baker (a realpolitiker
from the George H. W. Bush Administration) and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, that President Bush's war policies
have failed in almost every regard, and warned of dwindling chances to change course before crisis turns to chaos.
The Newstand believes the Report is both superficial, contradictory and
inaccurate. A fivefold increase in U.S. trainers for Iraqi forces would be acceptable, but goes in the opposite
direction from the Report's statement that all U.S. combat forces "could be" out of Iraq by early 2008, "barring unforseen
circumstances." The latter statement, which apparently is the key "recommendation" of the Report, is blatantly political
gobblygook. U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) immediately criticized this recommendation, saying if U.S. troops come out,
"we lose." He's right, of course: if U.S. troops come out, the situation only gets worse; the only thing that gets better
is that we don't have to look at our own casualty figures each week.
The other major recommendation of the Report, calling for the USG to beg for Iranian and Syrian assistance in solving
the Iraq situation, itself begs the question of how do we deal with Islamist terrorist states which have as their ultimate
and irrevocable objective the destruction of the United States. By appeasing them, apparently. Simple as that. Lickety-split,
Jimmy Crack Corn. Then they'll do what we want.
The Report said almost nothing of importance, in the opinion of the
Newstand staff, and gave no concrete proposals for improvement in the war in Iraq.
The proper place for the planning of USG foreign and military policies lies within the White House, assisted by
advice from CIA, State Department and DoD staff members, because that is what they are elected and paid by the American
people to do, and not with private outside groups appointed for poltical purposes, in the opinion of the Newstand.
Almost every option for changed tactics in Iraq has already been gamed by the U.S. military, and presented to the
President.
11/8/2006:
SHIFT OF POWER IN WASHINGTON
For the Association
As of 4 p.m. Eastern time today, the Democratic Party has picked up 33 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in
yesterday's mid-term elections, a sizable majority, and is poised to seize control of the U.S. Senate by one vote depending
on the outcome in one remaining state, Virginia, where a recount is expected.
The Democrats actually had 48 Senators elected as of that time, but two independents, a Socialist from Vermont, and a
former Democratic Senator, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, are expected to vote with the Democratic caucus in the Senate.
Thus the Republicans would have to carry the Virginia Senate seat to achieve a 50-50 tie, with Republican Vice-President and
President of the Senate Dick Cheney being the tie breaker.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, blamed by many within the Republican Party for its defeat because of his losing
strategy in Iraq, immediately resigned. President Bush will nominate former CIA Director Robert Gates to replace Rumsfeld.
Some in U.S. conservative and neo-conservative political circles expect that Democratic Party strategists will try
to take the foreign and national security policies of the United States more in a direction of accomodation of American allies
who seek more accomodation with the forces of Islamism.
Neither the Association nor any of its Newstands endorses, supports or opposes any American political candidate for office.
11/9/2006:
UPDATE
Newstand Staff
Incumbent U.S. Senator George Allen from Virginia graciously conceded his race today, giving
the Democratic party control of both houses of Congress.
Immediately, Democratic Senate leadership announced they would oppose and defeat the re-nomination
this week by President Bush of John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., boding a straightforward and animose contest for
the next two years as to whether the Republican White House or the Democratic Congress will control USG foreign and national
security policies.
This Newstand also has a few words to say on the departure of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense:
This Newstand, and our Association, opposed many of the policies of Rumsfeld's Department, especially as they related to not
increasing the numbers, quality and types of forces and equipment in the US Armed Forces, especially as to the applicability
of those increased forces in Iraq.
This Assocation did so as to its warrant under US law to lobby for legislation in the interests of
the United States.
Having said that, Rumsfeld fought and won an initial war in Afghanistan that American leftists said
(and say today) cannot be won, against all odds, by the minimum insertion of US boots on the ground, by an alliance with minimalist
indigenous political and military forces. That war, yet today, remains to be won, but Rumsfeld showed chutzpah, and
that chutpah carried the day for the US in 2001. There is nothing wrong with that bravado, nothing at all. Rumsfeld
and the current Administration applied that same chutzpah to Iraq. It did not, and has not , worked there.
It was a good try, and history suggested that if it worked in Afghanistan, it would work in Iraq. It is time for a change
in strategy in Iraq.
But is a not a time for cut and run. We are in Iraq, for better or worse. If we hand victory
in Iraq over to the anti-American Islamists there, Al Quaida, or the Sunnis, or the people who agree with them, we encourage
those people, or any group within them, to develop an Islamic nuclear weapon or Islamic weapons of mass destruction,
and to use those weapons against the American people, our people, here in the United States, which is exactly what they will
do.
Iraq is unlike Vietnam. We will regret, as a people, much, much more than we regretted defeat in
Vietnam, defeat in Iraq.
*************************************
11/7/2006:
ORTEGA ELECTED IN NICARAQUA; ANOTHER BAD
ELECTION MIGHT FOR THE U.S
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandistas, was declared the elction victor of the presidential race in Nicaraqua this night.
Ortega is a violent, dictatorial anti-American thug who led a communistic terrorist group against the freedom forces
of the Contras President Ronald Reagan supported in the 1980s. Ortega's election represents another victory for Latin American
left wing forces spearheaded by the anti-American thug president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, and a reverslal of recent
pro-American electoral presidential results in Mexico, Colombia and Peru, as well as the American victory this week within
the Security Council of the United Nations which saw Panama, as opposed to Venezuela, elected to the Latin American non-veto
seat on the Security Council.
Ortega's victory also represents a defeat for the policies of the Bush Administration both in Latin America and in Nicaraqua.
Anti-American leftists now control the presidencies of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba and, with the
powers inherent in their respective offices, are restructuring and hijacking the educational cultures of all those
countries, as we speak, with regard to their children, to reflect inherently anti-American values. Ortega's electoral
victory is also the result of an unfortunate and mistaken weakening and pullback of the usage of the American intelligence
services in influencing elections in our backyard, a pullback implicitly pushed by current Congressional policies in the U.S.
************************************
11/5/2006:
SADDAM SENTENCED TO DEATH
Gene Furlow, NSA Newstand Middle Eastern Newsdesk
Saddam Hussein, former dictator of Iraq for 24 years, was
sentenced today to death by hanging (pictures later to be posted here on this Newstand) by a special
Iraqi court for crimes against the Iraqi people, specifically mass murder. He appeared somewhat shaken as the verdict
and sentence were read.
President Bush congratulated the Iraqi government on the proceedings of the court.
On a separate but related issue, this Newstand has learned from high level sources within the Bush Administration
that the White House is quietly beginning to plan for the possibility of Iraq being divided into three states: Kurdistan,
Sunnistan and Shiastan, an idea first floated on the Association's Newstands in 2004.
The Kurds in the north are pro-American and have a large supply of crude petroleum around Kirkuk. However, they are hated
by the Sunnis to the southwest, the Turks to the north and the Iranians to the east. They also have no access to the sea for
oil shipments, other than through the Shiite south. The Shia, who have their own source of oil around Basra, would not give
them that access unless they got some of the oil revenue from the Kurds, an idea the White House is working on.
Sunnistan, in southwest Iraq, where the people think that they are smarter than everyone else in Iraq, and where
there is no oil, would be left to drift into a vast wasteland.
The United States of America, despite having the best intelligence services in the world, both civilian and miltary,
cannot prevent what we cannot predict. All the intelligence services in the world combined cannot predict the exact future
in any country, although many people expect them to do so, and although they do their best, which is what they are charged
to do.
Bottom line: don't expect any immediate changes in the situation in Iraq. But changes are coming.
************************************
10/12/2006:
NORTH KOREA TESTS
NUCLEAR WEAPON;
BUSH POLICY IN TATTERS
Don Keough, NSA Newstand East Asia Newsdesk
The North Korean Communist, anti-American government of Kim Jong-Il has tested a one kiloton or less nuclear weapon underground
in northeastern North Korea, in North Hamgyong province, Newstand sources within the international intelligence community confirm.
North Korea has let it be known both that more tests are coming and that it will use nuclear weapons against perceived
enemies if the regime feels it is being threatened by internationals pressures.
The policies of both the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations to prevent Kim, an unhinged dictator with personal
perversions, from "going nuclear" have resulted in total failure, a failure not lost on the command and soldiers of the North
Korean Army.
For reasons why the use of an American military solution to the growing North Korean nuclear threat will probably not
be used, reasons first brought to you over three years ago by this Newstand, see the NSA Newstand 1st Edition's classic analysis piece dated 7/24/2003. We are no longer hearing any noise out of the current White House, as we did during the time of the initial invasion of
Iraq, about how we were first going to take out the likes of Saddam, and then, after we were finished with him, go after Kim
Jong-Il. With or without nuclear weapons, Kim should have been eliminated a long time ago.
The Association's Executive Board has not commented directly on the North Korean nuclear situation. But they have issued a
public resolution over two years ago, appearing on the Association's Homepage, on the issue of modern-day nuclear proliferation in general. Here is what they had to say:
"There is a Non-Proliferation Treaty in the U.N. In simple English, states
which voluntarily have signed it which don't have nuclear weapons, pledge not to develop them.
In simple English, some of those states have violated that Treaty.
What is more important is the spirit of the Treaty, and that spirit,
regardless whether a given country state is a signatory or not, is that if the world has a bunch of small states with half-crazed
governments turning out nuclear weapons, the world itself is in clear and present danger.
There are nine nations today with known nuclear weapons: North Korea,
China, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. Most of them understand nuclear deterrence
in a responsible sense, but that is saying nothing, for even one nuclear weapon, including dirty radioactive bombs, in the
hands of one irresponsible man or woman, is one nuclear weapon too many. Nevertheless in the 1960's there were predictions
that at this time at least 30 nations would have nuclear weapons. So nuclear proliferation is a containable problem, and international
cooperation on this issue should be requested.
But if requests for international cooperation are not successful, and
the national security of the United States is at stake, then we as a people should be resolved, despite the loss of lives,
to act in our own self defense without asking anybody's permission first, or listening to their Monday morning quarterbacking
after the fact.
The United States, as the world's only superpower, in the age of terror
in which we live, has a moral obligation to step in in such a case, as necessary, to see that the spirit of Non-Proliferation
which President Kennedy spoke so eloquently about at Georgetown University in 1963, is enforced."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
2/12/2004
"The globalization of nuclear weapons is everybody's problem"
- Mohammed al-Baradeh
Chairman, IEAA, United Nations
10/14/2006:
BUSH GETS WHAT HE WANTS
FROM U.N. ON NORTH KOREA
Don Keough, NSA Newstand East Asia Newsdesk
The U.N. Security Council today unanimously passed a resolution (Resolution 1718) on North Korea,
calling for it to eliminate all its nuclear weapons, and imposing an embargo on all nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons material, as well as tanks, warships, combat aircraft and missiles, as well as luxury goods, coming in or out
of the country. The resolution did not address the stoppage of humanitarian aid, which in large measure keeps the
Kim family regime afloat. It did rule out direct military action against North Korea, but the embargo also contained
the USG requested concept, managed by the more-than-able, as a compromiser and negotiator, USG Ambassador to the U.N. John
Bolton, that any member state would be permitted to board or seize any ship coming in or out of North Korean waters,
in or out of international waters, without warning or probable cause, to search for the embargoed weapons. North Korea had
been a provider of these weapons and their technologies to other rogue states and terrorist groups in the past.
The North Korean delgate invited as a guest to observe the passage of the resolution, almost immediately
walked out of the session, calling the resolution "gangsterism". He should know.
The embargo is a quarantine, the kind of quarantine President Frankilin D. Roosevelt first
called for in 1940 against the likes of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. A quarantine does not work unless somebody actually
enforces the quarantine. Communist China, one of the Secuity Council permanent members, immediately after the passage of the
resolution, announced it would not be boarding any ships, and China (North Korea's major trading partner), unlike Japan,
will not be cutting back on any economic trade with the Kim regime. If anybody does any boarding, it will have to be the United
States Navy.
They should, starting tomorrow.
| Accused of perversions in his past, Kim Jong Il |
|
|
| is believed by many to be an unhinged freak. |
*********************************
8/29/2006:
AMERICA'S RECENT WARS:
IS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC A BUNCH OF 'FAIR
WEATHER FRIENDS'?
For the Newstand:
The following graph, presented by the New York Times, and which is a combination of polling done during the Vietnam war by the Gallup organization, and polling done during the
Iraq War by the Times, the CBS-TV News Division and the Pew Organization, tracks the support of Americans during the respective wars, for the wars:
Our spin on this polling data for these two most recent American "wars" differs in some measure from the spin
of the Times in its news article which accompanied the graph in the newspaper.
When a foreign war is first announced by the President, with lofty American goals enunciated, and accompanied by the
insertion of large numbers, or relatively large numbers, of U.S. Forces, support for the war effort on the home front is,
across the spectrum, big. When the war drags on, without the palpable feeling of a clear-cut achievement of those initial
goals, with the perception that the war is going badly, a point reached in the Vietnam War and, it is fair to say, a point
reached recently also in the Iraq War, the steam goes out of our modern-day populace, and turns into a "let's get out"
attitude.
If this is not the defintion of 'fair weather friends,' this Newstand does not know what is.
But is also fact.
As the Times article also points out, however, the major statistical inconsistency between American attitudes
during the two wars is that, during Vietnam, when that perception of the war going badly set in, both Republicans and Democrats
lost heart and turned against the war. According to the Times data, even though it is fair to say we as a people have
reached that same perception of the Iraq War, Republicans still continue, as of this point in time, to back the war.
********************************
7/9/2006:
U.S. FRIENDLY CANDIDATE WINS MEXICAN
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION BY SLIMMEST OF MARGINS
LEFT WING RIVAL PROMISES TO OVERTURN
BALLOT RESULTS
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
Right wing PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon
has won Mexico’s
presidential election, beating socialistic candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador by the slimmest of margins.
Calderon won Mexico's presidential election not because of who he is, but because of who he
isn't. After peacefully ushering out a one-party state only six years ago, many Mexicans were not ready to shake up the status
quo and flip the country on its head with a leftist leader who promised to put its nearly 50 million poor first.
In the end, those who voted for Calderon
opted to play it safe. Many worried that his main rival, Obrador, would have sent Mexico
down the path of other Latin American countries like Venezuela,
where President Hugo Chavez's socialist policies have driven away foreign investment and caused capital flight.
Obrador had promised new welfare programs
for the poor which might have carried a price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars, without saying where the money would
come from to pay for the programs. Half of the Mexican population is believed to survive on $5.00 a day. While clearly an anti-free trade socialist demagogue in the Chavez mold, Obrador at the same time maintained
he was not anti-American, and correctly strategized that he could win only by cosmetically distancing himself from Chavez
during the campaign, a tactic obviously disbelieved by vast numbers of middle-class Mexican voters.
President Bush congratulated Calderon on
his victory even before the Mexican electoral tribunal, a judicial body, had declared him the official winner, a
subtle indication whom the White House favored. The tribunal has until early September to officially announce the results.
Obrador has announced he will appeal the count issued by the election commission, a separate body, and ask that
the tribunal declare him the winner because of alleged vote fraud. The commision's count has Calderon beating Obrador
by 240,000 votes out of over 41 million ballots cast.
As president, Obrador would have constituted a clear danger to the United States, just as Chavez does.
Whoever Mexico’s president is, however, regardless of whether he comes from a right
wing or left wing party, eventually runs into problems with the United States over illegal immigration
and, more often than not, drug smuggling, problems which continue to plague our border with Mexico.
Mexico's presidency carries a six
year term, and the new president will be sworn in on December 1.
*****************************
6/4/2006:
PRO-AMERICAN CANDIDATE BEATS ANTI-AMERICAN
CANDIDATE IN PERU'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:
DOS POR DOS EN LATINOAMERICA
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
| Chavez (left) and the defeated Humala (right) |
|
|
| They even look alike. |
Former President Alan Garcia, a pro-American centrist and a believer in free enterprise, whose 1985-90 government
left Peru mired in guerrilla violence and economic chaos, defeated communistic anti-American ex-army officer Ollanta
Humala Sunday in Peru's presidential runoff, according to exit polls and a sampling of ballots.
Humala had been strongly endorsed by Venezuela's anti-American President Hugo Chavez, who all but stumped Peru calling
for Humala's election, the overthrowal of American imperialism in Latin America permanently, and the preparation of mass graves
for
U.S. soldiers in Peru on military assistance missions.
Peru's oucome is viewed accurately as a rejection of the scare tactics and radicalism of Chavez and company by even poor
Peruvians, and the accurate perception of the Peruvian voter, regardless of the oil revenue bribes offered them by Chavez, that
more is to be gained economically by a free enterprise system in co-operation with the United States than by waving
Kalashnikovs in the air screaming "death to America," killing all the wealthy entrepreneurs in the country and turning
one's own armed forces into a chapter of the Communist Party.
Chavez spent today in Caracas, knowing he had been defeated politically again, as he was in Colombia last month, opening
a new Venezuelan movie studio replete with beautiful Venezuelan starlets on board, a studio lavishly financed by Chavez with
oil revenue provided him by Americans at our pumps paying this creep almost $3.00 per gallon. Chavez announced that he was
opening the studio because of Hollywood's "imperialistic" stranglehold on the world movie industry. Michael Moore, are you
listening?
The Apoyo polling firm said that a statistical projection based on a sampling of Peruvian ballots nationwide gave Garcia
52.9 percent of the vote compared to 47.1 percent for Humala. The sampling had a margin of error of about 1 percentage point.
As usual, self-appointed critic of the fairness of foreign elections, Jimmy Carter, had nothing whatsoever to say about
Chavez' blatant interference in the domestic affairs and electoral politics of another country. But, what the hay, it's only
Latin America, and that sort of stuff goes down there all the time and, on top of all that, it's one of Jimmy's friends doing
it.
Next up: Mexico's presidential election in July, same story all over again. The bad news is, even though America's side
has won the last two Latin American presidential elections back-to-back, Chavez' side won the previous six, also
back-to-back: his own, Argentina's, Brazil's, Uruguay's, Chile's and Bolivia's.
It remains to be seen whether these six will go down in history as rogue elections, or whether they represent a wave of
the future in Latin America which is leftist, anti-American and against the economic integration of the Western Hemisphere.
Another leftist anti-American dictator still holds power in Havana.
The right of every individual to determine his or her own future on this planet is given to that individual by
nature, and by natures' God. It is not the government's to take away, or to alienate. Nor is it the wealthy person's
to take away from the person born poor. If the revolution of America and the revolutions sponsored by Simon Bolivar stood
for anything, they stand for that. Socialism and Communism are ideologies out of the heart of central Europe, and out of
the heart of militaristic and evil empires built on those ideologies, most of them having failed miserably already. These
ideologies have, and should have, no place in our Americas.
So said President Monroe.
So said President John F. Kennedy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So we should say, too.
God Bless America, and God Bless Our New World.
****************************
5/28/2006:
STAUNCH PRO-AMERICAN WINS
RE-ELECTION AS
PRESIDENT OF COLOMBIA
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
Staunchly pro-American, staunchly right-wing, pro-Bush Administration President Alvaro Uribe, 53, has won re-election
to an unprecedented second term as President of Colombia with 66% of the popular vote. This is a huge victory for the forces
of pro-Americanism in Latin America, cutting against recent electoral victories for anti-American leftists in a number of
Latin American nations. It shows that the impoverished people of at least one Latin American country know the difference between
right and wrong in world and domestic affairs, and are rightfully concerned about left-wing demagogues who promise the world
and bring in their wake moral devastation.
Uribe has stepped up police and army attacks on the country's left-wing guerillas, primarily FARC, who are funded
by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' oil revenues (Venezuela borders Colombia), as well as by the cocaine they grow and sell.
In the past two years, the left-wing guerillas have killed 250,000 people. Uribe promised to make all out war on them.
The threat Chavez and FARC pose to Colombia remains real, however, as does the threat Chavez and company pose to
Latin America at large.
**************************************
5/15/2006:
U.S. TO RENEW DIPLOMATIC TIES
WITH LIBYA
GEORGE GEDDA, Associated Press
The Bush administration said Monday it is restoring normal diplomatic relations with Libya for the first time in over a
quarter century after removing Moammar Gadhafi's regime from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.
"We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism," Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. She said Tripoli's cooperation in combating international terrorism has been
"excellent."
The United States has not had formal diplomat relations with Libya since 1980, although a thaw in long-standing hostility
enabled Washington to open a diplomatic office in Libya in 2004.
The move announced Monday culminates a process that began three years ago, when Gadhafi surprised the world by agreeing
to dismantle his country's weapons of mass destruction programs.
"As a direct result of those decisions we have witnessed the beginning of that country's re-emergence into the mainstream
of the international community. Today marks the opening of a new era in U.S.-Libya relations that will benefit Americans and
Libyans alike," Rice said.
Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said, "This is not a decision that we arrived at without carefully monitoring
and assessing Libya's behavior."
Libyan Foreign Minister Abdurrahman Shalgham told The Associated Press the move was not a surprise.
"It was a result of contacts and negotiations. It is not unilateral. It is a result of mutual interests, agreements and
understandings," he said.
"In politics there is no such thing as a reward but there are interests," Shalgham said when asked if the restoration of
ties was an incentive to Libya to further cooperate with the United States.
Libya was held responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, which claimed 270 lives, most of them American.
"Today's announcement demonstrates that when countries make a decision top adhere to the norms of international behavior
they will reap the benefits," Welch said.
Removing Libya from the list of countries the United States considers to be state sponsors of terrorism means a 45-day
public comment period will begin on Monday, after which Libya would be removed from the list.
The U.S. decision comes as the Bush administration looks for ways to persuade Iran to drop disputed nuclear development
that the West fears could lead to weapons production. The United States has no diplomatic and few economic ties with Iran.
While the United States has not offered to normalize relations with Iran in return for compliance on the nuclear issue, Welch
said the Libya example is not lost on Iran.
A spokesman for the Libyan opposition in exile denounced the move as "unfortunate."
"This doesn't help the Libyan people who are looking for international assistance to achieve their human rights," said
Fayez Jibril of the Libyan National Congress.
"Col. Gadhafi will most certainly use this to tighten his hold on the Libyans who aspire for such simple things such as
freedom of expression and freedom to have a constitution," Jibril said from his exile in neighboring Egypt.
The establishment of normal relations may have come sooner were it not for allegations that Gadhafi's regime was behind
an attempt on the life of Saudi's Arabia's King Adbullah when he was crown prince several years ago.
Hints that a U.S. move was afoot were evident when the State Department decided to summon family members of the victims
of the Pan Am 103 to Washington for a briefing next week on "U.S.-Libyan relations."
The administration's decision also comes at a time when it is attempting to shore up relations with major oil producers
because of high prices and a shortage of supplies. Libya has substantial oil reserves.
Gadhafi was once known here as perhaps the most dangerous man in the Middle East. President Reagan ordered air attacks
against Libya in 1981 and 1986, the latter because of suspected Libyan sponsorship of a terrorist attack at a West Berlin
disco frequented by American soldiers. Two Americans died there.
Since 2003, however, Libya has been held up as a model by the administration for the way aspiring nuclear weapons powers
should behave.
The American attack on Iraq made Gadhafi wonder whether he would be next. In December 2003, he agreed to surrender his
weapons of mass destruction facilities and agreed to allow them to be shipped for storage in the United States.
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, said the administration's
decisions were fully warranted.
"Libya has thoroughly altered its behavior by abolishing its program to develop weapons of mass destruction and ending
its support for terrorism," Lantos said.
___
Associated Press Diplomatic Writer Anne Gearan contributed to
this story.
*******************************
5/10/2006:
BLAIR SHAKES UP HIS GOVERNMENT
TO A MORE PRO-U.S. STANCE
Jamie Sigmund, NSA Newstand Europe Newsdesk
British Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair has shaken up his cabinet.
Demoted, primarily, is Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who was kicked out of that position. Straw had privately
expressed reservations about the war in Iraq (Blair has none) and publicly said that war with Iran was unthinkable, whereas
it is not to Blair. Blair is the most pro-U.S. British Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher. He thinks and acts like an
American. He is loved by his own Labour Party for bringing it into long term power after years of wandering in a Fabian socialist
philosophical wilderness, and is hated, at the same time, by his own Party members, because he is too pro-USA. Many Labourites
would like to see Blair resign right now, to be replaced by his main rival, a more dogmatic, more anti-U.S. man, Gordon Brown.
This writer predicts Blair probably has no intention of doing that any time short of when his term expires in 2010, unless
he is faced with a caucus vote in the meantime he knows he cannot win.
Blair's cabinet shakeup was precipitated by stunning Labour losses in domestic local elections, primarily to the Conservative
Party, who are actually more pro- U.S. than Blair, but are lying very low, very low, as to that issue.
*******************************
5/5/2006:
SOCIALIST PRODI CONFIRMED AS ITALY'S NEXT
PRIME MINISTER
Jamie Sigmund, NSA Newstand Europe Newsdesk
Socialist Romano Prodi was confirmed by the Italian Supreme Court on April 26, as Italy's next Prime Minister, after
a vote count dispute.
Prodi was called a "front man" for the Comunist Party by the man he defeated during the campaign, incumbent conservative
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Prodi claims he is not anti-America or anti-American.
********************************
5/3/2006:
AL-MALIKI APPOINTED
AS NEW IRAQI PRIME MINISTER
Gene Furlow, NSA Newstand Middle Eastern Newsdesk
Jawad al-Maliki, a hard-line Shiite leader with bad things to say about the United States in the past, has been chosen
to replace outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaaferi, after months of wranging over the position in the Iraqi
parliament.
Al-Maliki was endorsed by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalah Talabani, as well as other key Sunni Arab and Kurdish leders.
*********************************
5/3/2006:
CHINA ADDS MORE WEBSITES TO ITS "BANNED"
LIST
Newstand Editorial Staff
On the very day President Hu of the Peoples' Republic of China was being welcomed in the Rose Garden by the President
of the United States, the Politboro of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party added 2,000 more U.S. based
websites to its "Banned in China" list, a list enforced not just by the Communist Party, but also by the American companies
Microsoft and Google (which calls itself GuGe in China). Over 70,000 websites are now on this list, among them
this one, the official website of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, as well as the official websites of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, the Library of Congress, Wikipedia,
the Union Baptist Church,
the United Farm Workers of America,
the University of Virginia, the University of Idaho,
the States of Mississippi and New Mexico,
Only a small proportion of the banned sites contain pornographic material, as reported by this Newstand's intrepid freelance
reporters inside China, who risk imprisonment just for filing these reports.
This issue of the human rights of freedom of speech and association for Chinese nationals accessing online information
far overshadows, in our opinion, the issue of copyright violations inside China, the latter being an issue the
USG has frequently brought to the attention of the Communist leadership of China. The greatest distinction
between these two infractions of law is that the denial of these basic freedoms of access to internet association and information
is being carried out by the Chinese Communist Party itself, whereas copyright violations are being carried out by mere street
vendors in China.
The United States needs to make it clear to any government, any person, on the face of the earth, which restricts the
freedom of man that we are no friend of theirs.
Not now. Not ever.
It's that simple. That's all we ask.
*********************************
5/1/2006:
BOLIVIA SEIZES
PRIVATELY OWNED GAS FIELDS
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
The anti-American leftist President of Bolivia
Evo Morales has seized all natural gas assets of foreign companies operating in Bolivia, and threatened today to likewise
seize all crude oil assets.
The seizure of all U.S. owned assets in Cuba was one of the first public policy acts of the Communist government of Fidel
Castro in Cuba in 1959.
This Newstand has chided the Bush Administration for not doing enough to prevent the rise to power of anti-American
Latin American majoritarian
quasi-dictators like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela,
Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay, Lula da Silva in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Morales and , next up on July 2, 2006, Andres
Lopez Obrador in Mexico.
There is a powerful anti-American storm brewing south of our border, with the election of these Jimmy Carter-commission
seal of approval Castro-lite clones, a storm the next U.S. President is going to have to deal with.
*************************
2/21/2006:
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES TO TAKE OVER
PORTS
ON EAST COAST
Kathy Pearson, NSA Newstand Domestic Newsdesk
The Bush Administration has approved administratively a proposal for an Arab company, Dubai World Ports, owned by
the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to take over mangement of six commercial ports on the East Coast of the United
States, centered on New York City, Miami and New Orleans.
This is a bad idea, and needs to be reversed.
While the UAE has been a current supporter of the Global War on Terror, they were also previously one of only a
few goverments in the world to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which fostered Usama Bin Laden.
There are plenty of American firms which could manage these ports, even if the UAE company bid the deal at a lower
price.
All state controlled corporations, U.S. or foreign, should have questions raised about them in the mind of
any decent citizen of the world. No state controlled corporation, all of which are based on the political perceptions
of the governments which are behind them, instead of being merey based on the profit motive, is a good idea.
American companies operating outside our borders have a practice of hiring foreign staff, based on anti-American and
nationalsitic host country laws, practices and policies. Foreign companies operating inside our borders have the
exact opposite practice. Every Mexican company licensed to do business here has ten Mexicans employed here for every
American. Every Arab company licensed to do busines in the United States has ten Arabs working for them in the United States for
every American they have working for them here. And, on average, every Chinese and Japanese company licensed to do business
here has 100 of their nationals employed here to every American. There's something wrong with that picture. That's
not what is going on in their countries. That is neither free trade, nor is it fair trade. If their citizens have the right
to incorporate here without any red tape, why don't our citizens have the right to incorporate there without any red tape,
including our small businesses? If their citizens get a free ride to work here for a foreign corporation, why don't our citizens
get a free ride in their countries to work for American corporations? The current situation is neither free trade, nor
is it fair trade, and it about time somebody said so. There can be nothing that is free about international commerce
unless all non-violent persons and all ideas are permitted to cross all borders to trade, to work, to speak, and
to be given opportunity to flourish as non-violent ideas, without restrictions.
While this Newstand opposes the Bush plan for Dubai World Ports, based on the same analysis, this Newstand supports the
Administration's plan for Mexican guest workers.
What is written here about what is wrong with private companies, also applies to the practices of U.S. and foreign embassies.
Likewise, there is something wrong with that picture too.
It is a bad idea to have Arabs, any Arabs, in charge of our infrastrucure.
This deal needs to be reversed, and it is the prediction of our Newstand this date that it will be.
Now that we have added our voice.
3/31/2006:
UPDATE
For the Newstand
The Newstand wants to redact, and not retract, some of our opinion statements in the above article.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been a strong supporter of the War on Terror in the Middle
East, since 9/11. Over 600 visits of the US Navy have been made to Dubai ports since that time in support of that mission,
more than to any other country in the Middle East. There can be no doubt about the commitment of the current UAE government
to the War on Terror.
The UAE is divesting itself of its subsidiary to commercially manage the US ports cited, to
US interests, as we promised would happen in the above article, and that is sufficient to satisfy the position of this
Newstand. The Newstand stands by its initial position that no Arab or Persian government controlled company should
commercially control any port in the United States, given what occured on 9/11, for the immediate future.
***********************************
1/27/2006
|
|
|
CANADIANS ELECT CONSERVATIVE
MINORITY GOVERNMENT
Heather Phillips
NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
Canadians have elected a minority
Conservative government, but have put pro-American Steven Harper and his MP's on a short leash.
Harper was vilified during the election campaign
by the antagonistic-to-the-U.S. Liberals as a puppet of George Bush. Many insiders believe that that vilification backfired
among Canadians who had had enough of it, and led to the election of the first Conservative government since 1992. Harper
began the campaign far behind in the polls and promised better relations with Washington
The
Conservatives won 124 seats, forging gains in Ontario and Quebec
but failing to make significant inroads in Toronto. The Liberals
won 103 seats, losing badly in Quebec and Ontario.
The Bloc Quebecois won 51 seats and the NDP boosted their total seat count to 29. There is one independent.
Prime Minister Paul Martin,
who headed the center-left Liberal campaign, has indicated he will step down as Liberal leader and will not lead the party
in the next election.
The
Conservative minority is made more tenuous by the fact they won fewer seats than Paul Martin's Liberals did in 2004.
The narrow Conservative
win raises the specter of a fractious Parliament, where compromise will be the watchword and deals with the opposition parties
will have to be negotiated on an ad hoc basis. The Conservatives will need the support of either the Bloc Quebecois or the
Liberals to pass key pieces of legislation.
Analysts suggest the
Conservatives should find support in the House for their accountability measures and law-and-order platform. But other key
planks of the Conservative election platform may have to be watered down or traded off for other measures that are acceptable
to the opposition to gain passage.
The Conservatives first
Budget will be a key test. All three opposition parties campaigned against the Conservative plan to lower the GST sales tax
from 7 per cent from 6, and may demand changes in other areas in return for their support. It may boil down to the Conservatives
challenging the opposition to vote against a tax cut that all Canadians will see and feel almost immediately.
Other key economic and
tax policies might also have to be sidelined or modified. The NDP is unlikely to support any measures perceived to favor high-income
earners or big business, while the Conservative child care proposal may also face stiff opposition.
All parties will have
to walk a fine line, knowing that voters are not likely to be interested in another election any time soon, but Harper will
have to show what he can do. |
|
***************************
1/27/2006
ANTI-AMERICAN ELECTED AS PRESIDENT OF
CHILE
Heather Phillips
NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
A Socialist, the pro-Allende anti-American medical doctor Michelle Bachelet, has been elected as president of Chile,
defeating a pro-American conservative, marking a continuing shift leftward in Latin American politics.
Bachelet is a self-described "victim of American hate." She is very glib in both English and Spanisah, with a tendency
to say very little out loud in either language. Dr. Bachelet portrays herself as sort of a cross between Jimmy Carter and
Mother Theresa.
"Chile will promote human rights throughout the world," she says.
"In the U.S. (in 1973) nobody knows (sic) anything about Chile," is another of her quotations, along with "the Cold War
doctrine failed." She says that by the latter she means that the U.S. attempted to divide the world between the Communists
and the non-Communists, and failed.
This reporter believes she is mistaken. America got rid of her idol the communistic Chilean president Salvador Allende
in 1973 when we said no to any more Castros in the Western Hemisphere, threw the Sandinistas out of Nicaraguan power in the
1980's, successfully encouraged the Eastern Europeans to overthrow communism, and caused the flag of Communism and Soviet
imperialism to be finally pulled down from its world bastion of power, the Kremlin, on December 31, 1991. This is hardly a
laundry list of failures.
******************************
1/25/2006:
NEW ORLEANS MAYOR TELLS ALL ABOUT THE
WAR IN IRAQ, HURRICANES, AND REBUILDING PLANS
Kathy Pearson
NSA Newstand Domestic Newsdesk
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pronounced last week that Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans "to punish the U.S. for the
war in Iraq," ... and that New Orleans had to be rebuilt as a "chocolate city." The Mayor said his latter comment was not
meant to offend any particular racial group.
My opinion is that this guy's been drinking a little too much Courvoisier in his cocoa (or coca, maybe) at the bar he's
been frequenting in the new, rebuilt, chocolate French Quarter, of which he obviously wants to become the delicious nut at
the center.
UPDATE ON MAYOR NAGIN, 5/20/2006:
For the Newstand:
Mayor Nagin was re-elected this evening as Mayor of New Orleans. In his victory speech, he said:
" We are ready to take off. We have citizens around the country who want to come back to the city of
New Orleans, and we're going to get them all back," he said. "It's time for us to stop the bickering. It's time for us to
stop measuring things in black and white and yellow and Asian. It's time for us to be one New Orleans."
With all 442 precincts reporting, Nagin had 52.3 percent, or 59,460 votes, to his opponent's 47.7
percent, or 54,131 votes.
This Newstand wants to make clear we wish all government officials in our country well as they
carry out the work of the people, America's ONE people, in every city, every township, every county, and throughout the
land.
As our Newstand reporter implied in the story immediately below dated 4/12/2006, this Newstand
believes it is a national security tragedy that we, the Nation, have not rebuilt New Orleans by now. We think the President,
every U.S. Senator, every U.S. House of Representatives member, the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana,
and all members of the Louisiana State Legislature, should call for, now, the immediate cessation of every dollar of USG foreign
aid, and all our dues and assistance to the U.N. for the next year, and every year thereafter, and the allocation of
those total dollar figures instead, dollar for dollar, to re-building New Orleans, and any U.S. city or county devastated
by the major sort of hurricane damage as was caused by Katrina, until that reconstruction is accomplished.
Charity begins, and should begin, at home.
UPDATE 4/12/2006:
Comments on the Rebuilding of New Orleans
Kathy Pearson
NSA Domestic Newsdesk
Within 10 days after the fires of the great earthquake of 1906 had ended in San Francisco, the San
Francisco streetcars were back up and running.
Today in New Orleans, it's harder than ever to even find a bus.
In the earthquake and fires of San Francisco in 1906, 28,000 housing or office units were destroyed.
Within 3 years, 20,000 new units had been rebuilt to replace them. New Orleans has not even made a dent in its respective figures
to date.
In San Francisco in 1906, the US Postal Service accepted all mail, into and out of San Francisco,
without postage, and even without envelopes. Where was a like USPS program in New Orleans? Nowheres to be
found. It's still needed today, in my opinion.
Men were recruited by the USG from around the country, immediately after the fires in San Francisco
in 1906, to rebuild the city, with or without contractors' licenses. Where was this national program in New Orleans? Nowheres.
We are Americans, and we know not failure.
Let's roll, America, and let's roll now.
This is not about politics.
We need to rebuild New Orleans, and we need to rebuild New Orleans now. This is a federal matter.
The world is watching. If we can't even take care of our own New Orleans, what right do we have trying
to take care of Iraq?
************************
1/20/2006:
ELECTION RESULTS FROM IRAQ:
SHIITES WILL HAVE TO FORM COALITION GOVERNMENT
WITH EITHER KURDS OR SUNNIS TO FORM
A MAJORITY GOVERNMENT
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An alliance of Shiite religious parties won
the most seats in Iraq's new parliament but not enough to rule without coalition partners, the election commission
said Friday. Sunni Arabs gained seats over previous balloting.
A top Sunni politician, meanwhile, appealed for the release of American journalist
Jill Carroll and urged U.S. and Iraqi
forces to stop arresting Iraqi women, as a deadline set by kidnappers was set to expire.
The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance captured 128 of the 275 seats in the Dec. 15
election, down from the 146 it won in January 2005 balloting, said commission official Safwat Rasheed. It needed 138 to rule
without partners.
A Sunni ticket, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats. Another Sunni coalition
headed by Saleh al-Mutlaq finished with 11 seats, Rasheed said. A few other Sunnis won seats on other tickets.
That will give the Sunni Arabs a bigger voice in the legislature than they had
in the outgoing assembly, which included only 17 from the community forming the backbone of the insurgency. Many Sunnis had
boycotted the January vote.
Kurds saw their seat total reduced. An alliance of the two major Kurdish parties
won 53 seats, down from the 75 they took in the January 2005 vote.
A rival Kurdish ticket, the Kurdish Islamic Group, won five seats, a gain of
three from the outgoing parliament.
A ticket headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, won 25
seats, down from 40 in the outgoing assembly. The United States
installed Allawi as interim prime minister in 2004 and applauded both his tough stand against insurgents and his secular approach
to politics.
This time, however, American diplomats in Baghdad
appeared resigned to the fact that Iraqis would generally vote along sectarian lines and that secular candidates would not
fare well.
U.S. officials here had said privately they hoped only that religious
Shiites would win fewer seats to curb their power somewhat, and that more-moderate Sunnis candidates like Adnan al-Dulaimi
would fare better than hard-liners — which was the case.
Sunnis fared better — and Kurds poorer — because of a change in the
election law between the two national elections last year. In the Jan. 2005 balloting, seats were allocated based on the percentage
of votes that tickets won nationwide.
In the December vote, candidates competed for seats by district. This meant that
Sunnis were all but guaranteed seats from predominantly Sunni areas.
Politicians have four days to contest the results, which were largely in line
with preliminary returns following the balloting. Officials then will have 10 days to study any complaints before they certify
the results and parliament convenes to appoint a new government.
U.S. officials hope that a greater Sunni voice in the new parliament
and government will help defuse the insurgency so American and other international troops can begin withdrawing.
The results were announced a day after an international review group said the
election was flawed but generally fair considering Iraq's
security crisis. Sunni politicians had demanded the review after raising allegations of fraud. Al-Mutlaq had called for a
new election.
The decision to have the election reviewed by outside experts was an attempt
to mollify Sunni complaints and encourage them to join the political process.
Sunni Arabs dominated political life in Iraq for generations but are believed to comprise about 20 percent of the country's
estimated 27 million people. Shiites form about 60 percent and Kurds 15-20 percent.
Many Sunnis contest those figures and assumed
they would win more seats since the voting in Iraq's
three ballots after the 2003 fall of
Saddam Hussein has been along sectarian lines.
Al-Dulaimi appealed to the kidnappers of Carroll to release the 28-year-old freelance
journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. The kidnappers had threatened to kill her unless all female detainees were freed
by Friday. No hour was specified, and there was no indication Friday that any prisoners had been released.
In a statement aired Friday by two major Arab television stations, Carroll's
father, Jim, described his daughter as "an innocent woman" and appealed to her captors to spare her life, saying it would
"serve your cause more than her death."
A U.S. Embassy official said he was unaware of any contacts between a high-level
hostage release team and the kidnappers. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
case, said U.S. authorities were meeting
with various figures including political leaders, particularly from the Sunni Arab community, who may have links to the kidnappers.
Carroll was abducted Jan. 7 near al-Dulaimi's office after she went there to
interview him. Her translator was killed. On Friday, al-Dulaimi promised to work for the release of all female prisoners but
warned that failure to set Carroll free would "undermine and hamper my efforts."
***********************************
1/19/2006
CHIRAC WARNS IRAN
Jamie Sigmund
NSA Newstand Europe Newsdesk
Surprisingly out of character, in a postive way, French President Jacques Chirac today issued a stern nuclear threat
against state-sponsored terrorism, while speaking at the L'Ile-Longue nuclear submarine base in the western region of Brittany.
He said, "Leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, just like anyone who would envisage using arms
of mass destruction, must understand that they would expose themselves to a firm and fitting response from us. This response
could be conventional. It could also be of another nature."
France's nuclear arsenal, which consists primarily of a small number of nuclear warheads atop missiles on France's
four nuclear submarines, unlike the United States', is considered to be purely deterrent in nature, as opposed to being intended
for regular and sustained combat.
French leaders later today said that Chirac was not "specifically" talking about Iran.
**************************************
1/11/2006
SHARON GRAVELY ILL;
ISRAELI ELECTION RESULTS IN DOUBT
NSA Newstand Staff
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is gravely ill, having suffered two recent strokes and massive brain hemorraging.
It is now certain he will not be able to resume his official duties.
Israeli parliamentary eleections, now scheduled for March, will see a three way split between Sharon's new party, Kadima,
whose only platform will be to continue Sharon's policies toward the Palestinians (and which will be headed by either old-timer
Shimon Peres, Sharon's Deputy Prime Minister or the former mayor of Jerusalem), the hawkish Likud party, headed by
Benjamin Netanyahu, and the socialistic Labor Party, which seems to be emphasizing domestic, rather than foreign policy, issues.
This Newstand previously referred to Sharon as "brave," for his policies withdrawing Israeli forces from the Gaza, and
removing Israeli settlements both there and on the West Bank, even though our Editorial Staff disagreed with those policies,
and still continues to disagree with them today. Just as it took a President Nixon to open the door of American foreign policy
to China, so it also took the hawk Sharon to do more for the existence of a Palestinian state than any other Israeli prime
minister. Despite this fact, NBC -TV affiliate reporters doing man-in-the street interviews among Palestinians routinely drew
comments from them to the effect that they all wished Sharon dead, good riddance, and the same to all his kind.
On 1/5/2006, the President of Iran was quoted as having said the same thing. He previously said all the Jews should be
killed if they didn't agree to move back to Europe.
It is our opinion these fanatics are evil, evil to the core, evil the day were born, and that the day the ideolgy
of thes people is driven off the face of this earth will be a day of justice. Not until that day, and that day alone,
will we be able to mark the end of the War of Terror on America by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists. As George W. Bush said
during the 2004 campaign, we are not sure that that is doable. But it should be.
And it should be our unalterable goal.
3/28/2006:
UPDATE
Kadima today won a plurality of votes in elections to the Knesset, 32 seats out
of a total of 120, permitting it to form a majority government with the help of either the left-wing Labor party,
which won 22 seats, placing second, or other minor parties, thus ensuring the Sharon approach of Israeli disengagement
from the Palestinian territories and the continued offer of an olive branch to the Hamas government of Palestine for a final
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Stay tuned here for the latest hot news and analysis on this subject.
7/17/2006:
UPDATE
This Newstand, along with our sister WOT Newstand, have long held that offering an olive branch to
terrorists is the same as negotiating with blackmailers: it only emboldens them to demand more, and causes them to view those
offering peace as weak.
After Kadima made more concessions to Hamas in Gaza and on the West Bank, Hamas, in concert with
the Lebanese based terror group Hezbollah, this month made clear their true intentions, by attacking Israeli Defense Forces
within Israel proper and by reigning intermediate Iranian and Syrian manufactured missiles on Israeli cities. It strikes this
Newstand's Editorial Board as sheer insanity that anyone would propose negotiating with these people, and we include the governments
of Syria and Iran in that latter phrase. As with all terrorists who hate their enemies because of who they are, rather than
what they do, the only answer they understand, and will ever understand, is the military answer. And, by the military
answer, let us make clear, we mean the utter obliteration of their enemies, or their utter obliteration. The only "peace"
they want is the peace of the grave, and that is exactly what they should get.
*********************************
12/28/2005:
ANTI-AMERICAN DROGISTA ELECTED AS PRESIDENT
OF BOLIVIA
Heather Phillips, NSA Newstand Americas Newsdesk
|
|
| MAS Demonstration in Favor of Cocaine |
Evo Morales, a 46-year old Indian, has been elected as president of Bolivia.
Morales openly espouses the farming of coca and its mass export to the United States as refined cocaine. He supports
this agenda because of the money it will bring to Bolivia's impoverished rural Indian population, and because he knows cocaine
has the power to become highly destructive of both America's society as well as its economy.
Morales is openly anti-American, calling himself 'the worst enemy the United States ever had in Latin America.' His Indian
party, MAS, while seemingly lacking any well defined idealogy, is basically communistic on social issues, other than their
open espousal of cocaine exports to make money.
Morales' election vicory was openly welcomed by Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez. Anti-American leftists have now been
elected to the highest offices in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia. Another anti-American thug presides
as dictator of Cuba.
It is fine for the Bush Administration to promote democracy universally. But we should remember that Hitler's first government
was technically democratically elected, and Hitler's first government was the only one he ever needed. Pro-Americanism should
be the first priority in our support of foreign governments, not the support of alleged democracies which espouse
terror directed either abroad or at segments of their own population. And if the export of terror, by defintion, does not
include the export of cocaine, heroin and other drugs designed to destroy the fabric of American society, and the lives of
our children, nothing does.
********************************
11/3/2005:
GREENSPAN DENOUNCES
U.S. DEFICIT SPENDING
For the Association:
Outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said today that the U.S. could face serious and on-going economic disruptions
if federal budget deficits were not brought under control. This year's budget deficit stands at $319 billion.
Greenspan's position has been the stated position of the Association, as a matter of national security, since beforethe
Clinton Administration, and is contained in an explanation of our Mission Statement found on the Mission Statement Page. Unlike other veterans' organizations, we apply the principle of this inherent threat of deficit spending over to ALL
welfare programs of the USG, the immediate programs which create the threat ( because welfare spending constitutes the bulk
of deficit spending), including, without exception, increased federal budgets without thoughtful analyses as to how the money
is to be spent, or on whom, in the areas of corporate welfare, foreign aid, SSA as well as SSI benefits, Medicare, Medicaid,
Food Stamps and, as well, VA benefits. It's all "welfare."
We are not for the elimination of these programs. We are in favor of stricter defintions as to qualifications for many
of them, qualifications which should substantially reduce the overall spending as to many of these programs.
This has historically been the position of this Association. We have not changed our minds.
We cannot destroy the city in order to save it.
**********************************
11/3/2005:
MILITANT ISLAMIC RIOTS EXPAND
IN PARIS SUBURBS
Jamie Sigmund, NSA Newstand
Europe Newsdesk
French President Jacques Chirac called for the French nation to remain calm as militant Islamic youths expanded their
rioting, burning, and looting throughout Paris' poorest northeastern suburbs.
These suburbs are 15 minutes from downtown Paris.
Roughly 2 million anti-Western radical Muslims (out of a total Muslim immigrant population of 5 million) have been
admitted to France as immigrants. France, totally, has a population of only 60 million.
| Commericial store set on fire by Islamic immigrant |
|
|
| youths in a Paris suburb |
In an article on 11/17/2004, almost exactly a year ago, this Newstand chided Chirac for lecturing the U.S. for not "cooperating"
with radical Islamic anti-American terror. We warned him in that same article that he needed to look to his own back, that
the chickens might indeed come home to roost in France's backyard because of his government's policies of leniency toward
Muslim immigration into France and the coddling of anti-Western Muslim radicals within France. Most of the rioters live in
government housing projects which, compared to U.S. welfare projects, look like a 4-star hotels.
He didn't listen. He's not listening now. Frenchmen march to the tune of their own drummer, even as they're marching
over a cliff to their own destruction.
And more bad news looms: Chirac's current hand-picked candidate for the French Presidential election of 2007, to run
as the "center-right" candidate, no less, is current Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a notorious anti-American.
Villepin preaches that the West must accomodate Muslim terrorists who are, after all, in his opinion, only expressing
a natural frustration with the disadvantages Western civilization has forcibly imposed on them.
| French riot police advance on rioting youths, |
|
|
| mostly impoverished, mostly Muslim, mostly African |
UPDATE 11/7/2005:
NSA Newstand Staff
350 people have been arrested, and 10 French police officers shot as of today, as Muslim riots have
now spread to over 300 French towns, and to the old Jewish quarter in Paris. 12,000 buildings have been set ablaze as
of date, the 10th straight day of riots.
French Interior Minister* Nicolas Sarkozy, also certainly a "center-right"
presidential candidate in 2007, has called the Islamic rioters "scum."
The mainstream international and U.S. media continue to inaccurately downplay these riots, and continue
to mistakenly portray the rioters as 'mere' poor youths seeking a few more job opportunities for themselves in France. The
real problem is much more deep, much more political, much more cultural, and much more ideological.
* France's Interior Ministry is sort of a combination of our Justice Department, the
FBI, and a little bit of secret police, all thrown together into one pot.
11/11/2005:
EDITORIAL UPDATE
NSA Newstand Staff
The position of the French government, as we understand it, is that they want a totally integrated
society, one France, and that, since they have decreed that to be the truth, it is the truth.
It is not the truth, and simply declaring something to be true does not make it true. When a government
invites many diverse heterogeneous groups, with militant 'We hate everybody who isn't like us' attitudes into a previously
homogeneous society and then tries to integrate them into that society, one is, to put it mildly, getting involved in an exercise
which, while it may be noble in its objectives, is also going to turn out to be a permanent work-in-progress and a very tough
slog.
In our wording in the previous paragraph we're trying to be nice to the French , in case you didn't
notice. The example of the United States, the analogy of what has happened, and is happening, here, is obvious to all, yet
the average Frenchman would commit suicide before he would take any lesson from the United States.*
The French have officially rejected multiculturism. The Canadians have officially embraced it. The
USG has never officially spoken to the subject.
But all this analysis, all of it above, while accurate on its face, misses the really appropriate
point about the French riots, now subsiding because, as Jay Leno, more than a little bit correctly, said last night,
'...there are no more cars left to burn in the Muslim neighborhoods:' All sovereign states have the right to determine their
own immigration policies and, when a class of immigrants starts to kill people, terrorize them, burn cars and structures,
the fault lies, truly, as Sarkozy has implied, with them as individuals, and not with what has been up to that point a just
and fair state with a sovereign right to preserve its own historical culture, or cultures.
* After all, as many an 'ugly American' tourist to France has been lectured by one or more Frenchmen:"Your
culture goes back to 1776. Ours goes back 5,000 years." Or maybe 4,000.
Well, at least 2,000.
************************************
10/26/2005:
QUOTES OF THE DAY
ON NATIONAL SECURITY MATTERS
Gene Furlow, NSA Newstand
Middle Eastern Newsdesk
The hard line, newly elected President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said today that "Israel should be wiped off the
face of the map."
U.S. Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) also said today that, after the Iraqi parliamentary elections currently scheduled
for this December, the U.S. should withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq within 12 - 18 months.
11/3/2005:
UPDATE ON IRAN
NSA Newstand Staff
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today that Iran should be expelled from the U.N. This Newstand
agrees. Iran should also have its WTO membership rejected.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed in 1937 that aggressor states should be quarantined by the
world community: "The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to...those ignorings of human instincts
which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation
or neutrality."
We assume that when FDR said "quarantined," he meant quarantined. He also said: "There must
be recognition of the fact that national morality is as vital as private morality."
It was good idea then.
It's still a good idea today.
*********************************
10/21/2005:
MORE TROUBLE LOOMING:
CHAVEZ SAYS HE WANTS VENEZUELA TO BE A
NUCLEAR POWER
NSA Newstand Staff
Anti-American pro-Fidelista Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, president of the fifth-largest oil-exporting country in
the world, has had his government announce that Venezuela needs to develop nuclear power.
**********************************
10/17/2005:
IRAQIS APPROVING NEW CONSTITUTION BY WIDE
MARGIN
MEANS SOMETHING,
BUT DOESN'T MEAN MUCH
NSA Newstand Staff
There is good news from Iraq. Iraqis have turned out in very large numbers, about 61% of those eligible to vote, to
approve the new Iraqi Constitution. This is a large vote of the Iraqi people, the silent majority, for democracy and against
the terrorists, in the face of opposition from the Al Quaidists and, from within Iraq, their terrorist Shiite allies and die-hard
Sunni supporters of Saddam.
Everyone was allowed to vote, even Saddam himself.
That is the good news.
The bad news is that the new Constitution, designed for approval by a deadline set by the Bush Administration, doesn't
say much specifically about how the country should be run or, to put it a different way, tries to be all things to all people.
How the country is actually going to be run remains to be seen, and determined, by the Iraqi parliament, and by the Iraqi
people. This Constitution uses very vague language and contains many concepts and phrases subject to multiple and contradictory
interpretations. If one were to rate, for example, on a scale of 1 to 10, constitutions as to their specificity as to how
a country should be run, with 10 being the highest rating, if we were to give the U.S. constitution, for all its vaguenesses
as to certain modern day issues, for the sake of argument, a 9, then we would have to rate this Iraqi Constitution, by the
same standard, a 2+, maybe a 3.
So really nothing has changed on the ground with regard to the terrorists in Iraq, and their war.
But the size of the turnout, much larger than expected, and which compares favorably with the turnout for the Iraqi interim
parliamentary election earlier this year, and the overwhelming support of the Shiite and Kurd elemnts of the population for
the forward movement toward democracy (and not an anti-American democracy), are big psychological victories for both the Bush
Administration and the cause of freedom in Iraq. Those two things, the size of the vote and the outcome, prove the Iraqi
people are on the right side of history, just as the South Vietnamese anti-Communists were on the right side of history.
But all that does not mean that the wrong people, the bad guys, cannot or will not win. In Iraq or elsewhere.
As history has shown.
**************************************
10/2/2005:
ELIAN GONZALEZ INTERVIEW
ON 60 MINUTES
Heather Phillips
National Security Affairs Newstand
Americas Newsdesk
In an interview on CBS-TV News Division's 60 Minutes this evening, Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy seized
in Miami in the year 2000 by armed agents of the Clinton Administration, the DOJ and the INS, and delivered by them into the
arms of the Communist Party of Cuba, said that Fidel was "his friend" and that his relatives in Miami were "wrong" to try
to keep him, but that he "would like to visit with them again someday."
If Elian had been raised in a land of freedom for the past five years, as any decent White House would have permitted,
he would be saying that Fidel Castro is not his friend, that his relatives in Miami were right, and that he would like to
visit with his Fidelista relatives in Cuba again someday. What a difference it makes what country you're brought up in. It's
too bad the current anti-American producers of 60 Minutes don't have the guts or objective accuracy to admit the
simple truths of this past paragraph.
Culture is a great tool. It defines our lives, forevermore, from the time we are children.
God Bless the USA.
| Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi |
|
|
************************************
9/29/2005:
KOIZUMI WINS ELECTION LANDSLIDE
IN JAPAN
Don Keough, National Security Affairs Newstand
East Asia Newsdesk
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Center-Right party, the Liberal Democrats, won a landslide supermajority
in the Japanese Diet in snap elections he had called for September 11. Their victory was largely based on Koizumi's personality
and charisma as a modernist favoring a slightly more agressive posture on Japanese nationalism. Koizumi central campaign platform
focused, however, on cutting back on Japanese social and welfare services as an economic necessity for a society facing an
ever-growing number of seniors and retirees.
Koizumi is viewed as a friend of the U.S. and favorably inclined to the foreign policies of the Bush Administration,
including USG war goals in Iraq. He has not, however, provided any substantial number of Japanese troops to the conflict in
that country.
**************************************
9/1/2005:
| New Orleans Submerged |
|
|
| August 31, 2005 |
| New Orleans Firefighters Rescue Operation |
|
|
| August 31, 2005 |
HURRICANE KATRINA
THE STORM THAT WAS;
THE STORM THAT IS TO COME
For the Association:
The eye of Hurricane Katrina, America's deadliest hurricane in 100 years, made landfall in Plaquemines Parish,
Louisiana at 7:10 a.m. on August 29, 2005, and began to head northeastward. Over ten thousand people are currently
believed dead as a result of this storm, and economic damage to the area hit by the storm is currently estimated to be
in the tens of billions of dollars, not counting the costs of rebuilding.
But the City of New Orleans, and the surrounding areas of our Gulf Coast, in Mississippi and Alabama, have survived.
And all of the good and true people in those areas affected, most of whom have not been mentioned by the mainstream media,
almost as though they've been relegated to non-person status by the anti-American broadcasts we've been watching every night
on TV, all those good and true people, we are confident, will raise their fists in the air and say, simply, We Are
Americans. We Will Surivive. We Will Begin Rebuilding, in no time flat. You cannot knock us down. You cannot stop us. We Are
Americans.
In 1936, a famous movie was made of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which occurred almost exactly a hundred years
ago, and which, with the fires that followed, for all practical purposes, levelled that city. The Hollywood film
starred Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. At the end of the movie, Jeanette appears, her gown in tatters, in the
middle of the devastation, in the broad daylight which always dawns after Nature's tragedies, and sings, in a voice
booming with hope and defiance,"San Francisco, open your golden gates...." Jeanette's movie, Clark's movie, in its glorious
portrayal of America's resilience, should be shown, we think, by every single American television news division,
after every single news report on Hurricane Katrina. We know they won't do that, of course, because they always emphasize
the negative. We choose, however, in this piece, to do things differently, and to do things our way, not theirs.
Why do bad things happen to good people? In the final analysis, we don't know the exact answer to that question, and
no living person ever will, because the actions of Providence are often mysterious.
But of one thing we do remain certain: While the sky may temporarily look dark today, America, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama, New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport all will rebuild from this hurricane and its devastation, and from anything
else Nature can throw at us because, simply, we are Americans. If there are tests thrown at us, like the tests thrown at Job
and Abraham in the Old Testament, we will come out of those tests even stronger than we were before, and even more secure
in our faith in our Country, its mission, its foundation, and its future.
The rebuilding of New Orleans will take a lot of money and a lot of time, perhaps 20 to 30 years, but it must
be done. New Orleans is a national treasure. The money it will take to rebuild, on the federal level, for example, could
easily come simply by walking back $100 billion or so across the board of the $282 billion of projects in the 2005
pork barrel bill passed by the U.S. Congress just days before the storm hit.
We should all know, though, as Americans, that no matter how we rebuild this great city, with floodwalls
around historic neighborhoods, with elevations of homes, offices and highways, with concretized levees 100 feet high,
with the reconstruction of the barrier islands, and with the restoration of its wetlands, New Orleans will still
remain a below-sea-level city hemmed in by 300 square miles of Lake Ponchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River
to the south and west. New Orleans will continue to lie in the path of hurricanes, which are in a cycle of increasing frequency.
And we will never be able to guarantee that history won't repeat itself.
In the days to come, for our partisan politicians, there will be more than enough blame to go around because of Katrina
and her effects. But for now, for real Americans, the important thing is to rebuild this treasure, this living monument of
New Orleans, which is the centerpiece of our Gulf Coast's economic vibrancy and life, and to assist the American victims of
this storm throughout that region. We do all this as Americans, and should do it, not out of pity for one racial group or
economic class, but because we are all Americans, Americans are in need, and because the present and future physical and economic
security of our Gulf Coast is an inseparable part of America's national security. Especially for those of you who
know the Association as previous donors, if you wish to assist through the United States Navy Veterans
Association, with U.S. Navy ships, U.S. Navy SEALS and Seabees currently active in the relief and reconstruction effort, we have expanded and rededicated our September
11 Fund for this purpose, to assist needy veterans and active duty families hardest hit in the areas negatively impacted by
Katrina. Checks can be earmarked on the check's memo line "September 11 Fund" or, simply, "Katrina." Of course, anything is appreciated. All of the net Internet-based funds we receive, after general
costs of the Association in the administration of those funds, go to the stated activity and to no other, and no individual
is paid to work on the administration of those funds. Underlying charitable purpose dedication of all funds received
at the Association's "Attention: Internet" address in 2004, the last full year for which statistics are available, was 79%. Charities which say that they can do, or
do, substantially better than that percentage, should be rigorously asked whether they are misreporting or misanalyzing their
own figures.
FEMA also runs a list of charities which are accepting donations for Hurrican Katrina victims in general. Regardless
of what you may have heard, FEMA does not vouch for any of the charities on this list. The list, which includes contact information
for each organization, is available at FEMA.
| We Will Rebuild: USS Harry Truman is on its way |
|
|
| to New Orleans, August 31,2005 |
UPDATE 9/24/2005:
For the Association
It's amazing, America. after Hurricane Rita hit Texas, all
of a sudden, the mainstream media started talking about America's "resilience" (ABC-TV News Division's Nightline,
September 24) and started featuring both black and white folk on their screens who talked simply, straightforwardly, about
going back and rebuilding.
And President Bush himself, in his nationally televised Address to the Nation on
September 15, mentioned the "life of the Nation" resilient, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
What a difference a little lecture from some good guys, with
no political ax to grind, makes.
The Association doesn't brag about the number of our "hits"
on this website. We do, however, brag about where those hits come from.
UPDATE 9/2/2005:
For the Newstand
By Newstand Staff
Both anti-American German socialist Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and anti-American proto-Communist
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, yesterday offered to send help to America for Katrina's victims.
Both Schroeder, speaking in German, and Chavez, speaking in Spanish, continents apart, but almost
simultaneously, adopted the exact same patronizing posture in their respective public announcements: 'Poor little America,
humbled by the righteous powers of peoples' justice, you need the help of Germany and Venezuela! And we will come there with
our people to rescue you.'
Well, Schroeder should have thought of that when we asked for his assistance in Iraq. And, as for
Chavez, maybe Pat Robertson was right after all.
| German commuters ride past Angela Merkel's picture |
|
|
| in Berlin on September 29 |
| Outgoing German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder |
|
|
UPDATE 9/29/2005:
SCHROEDER LOSES GERMAN ELECTION
Jamie Sigmund, National Security Affairs Newstand
Europe Newsdesk
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Socialist party (SPD) lost the September 18 German parliamentary
election, coming in second behind the vote for Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat (CDP)/Christian Social Union (CSU) coalition.
Merkel had run on a platform of better relations with the United States, while Schroeder chose not to emphasize his anti-American
stances on the war in Iraq, as he had done in the German elections of 2002.
Neither grouping secured a majority in the Bundestag. Merkel's results were also disappointing for
her, as the pre-election polls showed her coaltion receiving over 40% of the vote, a figure they did not get close to.
A grand coalition of both these party groups may be necessary in order to secure a functioning German government.
Such a coalition will be marked by backbiting and jockeying for position in another election which inevitably must come in
order to resolve this indecisive result.
In the meantime, no one can predict exactly where Germany's relations with Washington will go.
Infighting has already begun within the CPD and the SPD to come up with more attractive candidates
who might be better campaigners as party leaders in that next parliamentary election.
UPDATES 9/8/2005:
For the NSA Newstand
By Newstand Staff
Something strange has been going on with Katrina relief efforts in New Orleans, and something
strange has been going on in the City of New Orleans for years, and this Newstand believes the two are related. Armed gangs,
all of them from the pubic housing projects of the city, were shooting with automatic weapons at Army helicopters trying to
land on hospital roofs to provide food and medical supplies the day after Katrina hit; others shot at cops; others shot at
firefighters trying to rescue people; others shot at Army Corps of Engineers personnel trying to pump water out of the
city on September 4; while still others others shot at rescue convoys of trucks and busses as they were trying to leave
the city filled with sick and injured New Orleanians, heading toward Florida. These stories received negligible,
and we mean, negligible, coverage by the mainstream news media.
Mainstream TV news station after news station, however, did go on air with comments justifying the
actions of looters and shooters in New Orleans. ABC-TV News Division's Nightline went so far, on Setember 2,
to quote people saying, accurately, that New Orleans was 66% black and then saying, outrageously, that the USG, meaning the
White House, did not provide immediate relief, in their opinion, to New Orleans, because the Government was trying to kill black people.
A famous East German Communist biologist once said , on the basis of his experiments, that if
you put enough rats in a cage, and keep adding to the pressure on them through natural and deleterious inputs, they would
eventually turn on themselves. Some of these statements we've heard on TV shows like that Nightline show are
coming out of rats just like those.
For years now, in city administration after city adminstration, including the current one run by
Mayor Ray Nagin, New Orleans, long known as the 'big easy,' a city which is 2/3rds African- American, has had armed gangs
running wild, committing mayhem and drug crimes, and has been a city with violent crime rates higher than New York, Chicago,
Washington or Miami, a city where three out of four accused murderers either never get caught or get off scot free. A lot
of the people we're seeing on television demanding to know why the President was not there personally when the storm came
ashore undoubtedly come from that 75%.
We print all these facts here for two purposes; (1) to bring some perspective to the monopoly
media constantly harping about the "good" people of New Orleans , and (2) to show how difficult it was actually for effective
rescue work to be carried out by the First Responders, with home grown New Orleans terrorists taking organized
rifle shots at them. Two New Orleans police officers reportedly committed suicide in response to what they were seeing their
own people doing to terrorize rescuers.
As one Gulfport, Mississippi storm victim, Richard Gibbs, whose house was flooded up to the second
story, told Emily Pettus of the Associated Press on September 3, "I say burn the bridges and let them all rot there [in New
Orleans.] We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other."
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, like others we have already referred to, tried to shift the blame for the storm's aftermath directly and
personally on President Bush. Nagin said on television that the lack of sufficient relief for New Orleans by the federal government was,
in his opinion, "the biggest god-damn crisis in the history of this country."
This Newstand believes Mayor Nagin was exaggerating. The Editors of this Newstand would be happy
to provide Mayor Nagin with a long list of bigger crises, if he would like to contact us, starting with the
American Civil War, a war which almost separated the country into two, a war in which more Americans died than in all of our
other wars put together, and a war fought primarily, many scholars agree, to end black slavery in the South.
The current Governor of Louisiana, while we are on the subject of what the real crisis was, as well
as Mayor Nagin, were warned numerous times that New Orleans was below sea level, bordered on one side by Lake Ponchartrain
and, on two other sides, by the Mississippi River. They were told it was built that way in 1718. They were told that if a
major hurricane hit, the levees would not hold. The 'levees,' we point out, are not levees at all: they were, and are, mere
dirt birms, although a few did have concrete reinforcing, and they did not hold. These two officeholders, Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who could have ordered the Louisiana National Guard into New Orleans as of 7:11 a.m. on August 29, or even before, and
Mayor Nagin, did nothing in response to those warnings. They did not lift one finger to correct this problem in advance. Now
these same people are complaining about why the entire 82nd Airborne Division did not land instantly when Katrina hit, to
rescue every single person who ignored Mayor Nagin's orders to evacuate the city. This is outrageous stuff. It's about time
somebody said so. This Newstand is saying so.
If some things should have been done in advance about the dangers of hurricanes hitting New Orleans,
those things, primarily, should have been done by the Governor of the State of Louisiana, the Louisiana State Legislature,
the Mayor of the New Orleans, and the New Orleans City Council. Before Katrina, engineers told city officials that it only
would have taken $1 billion to build floodgates at the mouth of Lake Ponchartrain and to raise the levees high enough to protect
the city against a Category 5 hurricane, the Tampa Tribune reported on September 4. City officials have known about
this problem since 1718! They can't say they didn't have plenty of time to act. But they didn't act.
Gwen Ifill, moderator of PBS-TV's Washington Week, on that show's September 2 broadcast,
referred to Bush's "chaotic" response to Katrina. We don't know what she's talking about. A lot of Americans don't know
what she's talking about. And we're scratching our heads as to her biases. What is it, exactly, that Gwen and her "expert
panel" would propose the USG do to protect us against natural disasters? We haven't heard a single exact answer, on all the
left-wing media shows we've monitored, to that question, including Gwen Ifill's.
It is insanity, sheer insanity, sheer evil, for a political analyst to say that a natural disaster
which unexpectedly hits a U.S. city should be blamed personally on the sitting President of the United States. The people
saying those things, making those comments and implications, have other agendas, and those agendas are purely political,
and have nothing to do with their concern for the victims of that disaster.
President Teddy Roosevelt's opposition did not take the occasion of the great San Francisco earthquake
of 1906 to blame him personally for either the disaster or the lack of immediate federal relief for the city's inhabitants,
3,000 of whom died in the quake and subsequent fires which raged unabated for weeks. The city at the time had a population
of 400,000, 250,000 of whom became homeless as a result of the diasaster.
Woodrow Wilson's opponents did not take the occasion of the influenza pandemic of 1918, in the middle
of our effort in World War I, to blame him personally for this "plague" on America, as it was then called, or the lack of
an immediate or, for that matter, almost any, response by the federal government. It is estimated over 675,000 Americans died
during this bronchitis epidemic, many of them U.S. troops in training or on their way to the front in France. Most Americans
who died were white, most of them between the ages of 8 and 34. The flu virus was bird originated. Why didn't the
federal government stop it in advance? Why didn't the President immediately evacuate children to non-infected areas,
kill the pigeons, and issue facial masks to everyone, and throw in $2,000 apiece to buy prescriptions? Wasn't Woodrow Wilson
responsible? Maybe he was trying to kill white people, or just our soldiers, because he was a progressive Democrat with
pacifistic leanings.
Times have changed, obviously, in this country, since 1906 and 1918. Today, for example, any barely
literate college graduate with a left-wing axe to grind can be hired as a reporter for the New York Times , or is automatically qualified to be a guest lecturer on the NBC-TV Nightly News, or on the Gwen Ifill Show, on the subject of the President's personal responsibility for your leaky bathroom, or to become one of the leaders
of his Congressional caucus. Especially if he has family members who deal drugs, is a pacifist or, even better, is otherwise
a capable enabler for violent and hate-filled criminals.
Our opinion is that there already have been too many politicized complaints from too many individuals
who, at least in substantial part, along with simply blaming an act of Nature, should take more personal responsibility
for their own misfortune.
"Nobody promised us that life was going to be fair," President John F. Kennedy is reported to have
said, shortly before his assassination in 1963 at the age of 46.
The road America's life has taken, and will take in the future, involves many turns. It is not
right to blame temporary downturns in our fortune where that blame does not belong. But never fear. America has persevered
through all the natural disasters, all the catastrophes this Newstand, unlike our brethren in the current mainstream media,
have detailed by way of perspective in this article. America always emerged still standing, resilient and stronger than ever
before. Each and every time.
We will again.
UPDATE 10/21/2005:
DISAGREEMENTS
AS TO WHERE FAULT LIES
NSA Newstand Staff
Former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown testified before Congress in September that his analysis agreed
with this Newstand's, that primary responsibility for storm preventative measures rests with state and local officials, not
the federal government, and that those measures in Louisiana were lacking. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
testified before Congress on Wednesday that he disagreed with Brown, and that local officials in Louisiana were responsive.
We stand by our original analysis in the Update immediately above, based on the overview of events we presented.

|
| San Francisco devastated, April, 1906 |
UPDATE 9/9/2005:
RESULTS OF POLL ON
BUSH KATRINA EFFORTS
AT WIDE VARIANCE
WITH NEWSTAND OPINION
For the Newstand
by Newstand Staff
A poll by the widely repected Pew Organization released today shows American public opinion differing
substantially with many of the opinions of this Newstand expressed in the 9/8/2005 piece immediately above.
The poll showed President Bush's approval rating was at 40%, with his disapproval rating at 52%.
Only 48% rated him as a "strong leader." These are very bad figures for President Bush.
77% of whites polled said race made no difference in Government relief efforts for Katrina victims.
66% of blacks said it did.
67% said the President personally could have done more to get the relief efforts going.
44% of those polled said they were "embarassed" by the Government's efforts in preparing for Hurricane
Katrina, and in aiding the victims.
This Newstand's opinion of the lessons to be learned by any policymaker from the results of this
poll are that, in any catastrophe, you must appear to 'grab the problem by its throat' immediately, the most important thing,
for the results of American polls, unfortunately, being appearances, not reality.
This Newstand sticks with its original expressed opinions, which views were strongly supported by
polls within the current membership of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association taken in the time frame September 1 -September 7,
2005.
UPDATE 9/9/2005:
MANY NEW ORLEANS LANDMARKS
STILL STANDING
Kathy Pearson, National Security Affairs Newstand
Domestic Newsdesk
Some New Orleans famous spots escaped with liitle damage from Hurricane Katrina. Here's the current list:
- The French Quarter: This historic district is a playground for adults. It escaped much of the flooding.
- Bourbon Street: This hedonistic strip in the French Quarter escaped the flooding but remains closed.
- Cafe du Monde: This famous old coffehouse on Decatur Street built in 1862 is still standing.
- Galatoire's: One of the most famous restaurants in the city is still standing.
- Acme Oyster House: Another famous restaurant escaping much of the flooding.
- U.S. Mint Building: This building housed Confederate soldiers during the Civil War and made money
for the U.S. Government until 1909. It's still standing.
- St. Louis Cathedral: Located in Jackson Square, and consecrated in 1794, many say it is the oldest
continuously active cathedral in the United States. Still standing.
UPDATE 9/10/2005:
THE MIRACLE OF PASS CHRISTIAN
For the Association
The town of Pass Christian, Louisiana, aptly named, as we will see, lies about 50 miles east
of New Orleans, with Interstate 10 on its northern side, and the Gulf of Mexico on its southern side. On the morning
of August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed directly overhead the little town.
Blocks along Scenic Drive, where the nouveau riche from New Orleans built mansions in the mid-1800's,
are now hills of brick and driftwood. The waterfront MacDonald's was blown away. The huge marble monument for the victims
of Hurricane Camille, which hit here in 1969, was toppled into the dirt.
St. Paul's Catholic Church had holes in it big enough to drive an 18-wheeler through. Rebar
hung in the church's front entrance. Its carpet was stripped away. The hurricane-proof building looked like a park
pavilion.
But there, in the wasted church, suspended in the air looking out over blocks upon blocks of devastation
in every direction, hangs by the merest of two ceiling wires the untouched statue of Christ upon the cross.
Not believing what she was hearing, Chantal Deshommes, a skin therapist who grew up in the town, walked
inside the gutted little church and looked up at Jesus.
She was heard to utter spontaneously what many others now have, upon seeing the Christ, which
seems to be beckoning with the hope He offered when He preached in Judea and the Galilee some 2,000 years ago, and which
many say He still offers today. As her hand came up to her mouth out of instinct, Chantal simply said:
"God help me."

UPDATE 9/13/2005:
BUSH TAKES PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR
FAILURES
Newstand Staff
President Bush
said today that "I take responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster
raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.
FEMA Director Michael Brown resigned yesterday.
UPDATE 9/28/2005:
POLICE LOOTING IN NEW ORLEANS
NSA Newstand Staff
New Orleans Acting Superintendant of Police Warren Riley said today that the "...[Looting of New
Orleans stores for food by New Orleans police officers] is acceptable."
As long as there is a single public official in this country who does not stand up and publicly proclaim
that this man should lose his job for that statement, this country will never be safe from its domestic, or from its foreign
enemies.
Maybe as many as 250 NOPD officers out of a force of 1,450 deserted their posts and disobeyed
specific orders to report for duty at the time of Katrina 'to be with their families.' 12 are suspected of looting,
and authorities are looking into allegations that some NOPD officers stole nearly 200 cars from a Cadillac dealership during
the storm. See the Association's lead piece above reference New Orleans as the 'Big Easy' and for the city's pre-Katrina crime
statistics.
How about a rule for our Armed Forces that if a really big, big bomb goes off near them in Baghdad,
it's 'acceptable' for them to take off 'to be with their families' or to check on how their dog is doing back in base camp?
How 'bout it, Chief? Not relevant to your situation? We think it is.
INCONSISTENCIES
There is a need now, today, more than ever, for a logical consistency in American national security
policy.
If America befriends Chinese and North Vietnamese Communists we previously condemned as enemies of
freedom, that is not consistent.
If America befriends Fidel Castro, whom we previously condemned as an enemy of freedom, that would
not be consistent.
If America befriends Muammar Kaddafi, whom we previously condemned as an enemy of freedom, that is
not consistent.
If America befriends North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, whom we previoulsy condemned as an enemy
of freedom, that is not consistent.
Too many of these inconsistencies have built up recently. When that happens, our domestic society
begins to find out about it. When that happens, as it inevitably will, by media osmosis, society begins to question the
government: Do you not stand for anything at all? If not, why should I stand for anything at all, in my individual life as
an American, or as a sworn officer of the law?
Our national security policies inherently impact our domestic society, its values, and our domestic
policies. Our policymakers in Washington, especially those who tend to the 'Realpolitik' School, should keep that mind.
Otherwise, it may not just be the world outside the United States which is becoming ungovernable.
It may be the United States itself.
************************************
8/8/2005:
NEW HIGH FOR CRUDE OIL
Newstand Staff
Crude oil hit an all-time high price today of $63.99 a barrel.
It would have hit $64 a barrel, but the new Saudi king is our friend, so we got a discount.
*************************************
8/1/2005:
BUSH APPOINTS BOLTON AS
U.N. AMBASSADOR
For the Association
President Bush today appointed John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as a 'recess' appointee, because
a handful of U.S. Senators blocked his confirmation in the Senate because they disagreed with Bolton's historical perspectives
on problems with the U.N.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who himself has been accused of personal corruption by some U.S. Senators, immediately
and arrogantly warned the United States and Bolton that 'he was only one among 190 others,' a provocative and anti-American
statement if ever one was made publicly at the U.N. If people like Kofi Annan want to provoke a debate in the United States
on the reolution of 'Little America,' one amongst many,' this Association says;"Bring It On." When this Association says the
United States is the greatest country on earth, as Clinton Administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called
us on the Lehrer Report, this Association is saying exactly what we mean, and we mean exactly what
we are saying.
U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) also this date called Bolton's appointment a "devious maneuver." The only thing
devious about the Bolton Affair, Senator, is the attempt of a minority of U.S. senators to deny a popularly elected Commander-in-Chief
his own foreign policy appointees, the point being equally applicable to both Republican and Democratic presidents.
The recess appointment means Bolton can serve until January, 2007, and can be reappointed again during the first
Senate recess of 2007 (probably around Memorial Day) to serve out the last term of the Bush Administration.
The White House is to be congratulated for defiantly, and correctly as a constitutional matter, insisting that a sitting
President should have the right to his own key foreign policy appointees, and for appointing someone who has shown a tremendous
amount of insight on both the role of the U.S. in the U.N., as well as the current problems within that body.
In its bureaucracy, the U.N. is, today, a financially corrupt, and morally corrupt (as to how its bureaucrats are appointed)
organization - across the board.
In the voting arenas of both the General Assembly and the Security Council, the U.N. is full of morally corrupt
governments, many of them third world anti-American dictatorships, which base almost all their votes on simply their
jealousy of the United States, its power, and its wealth.
The only kind of U.N. ambassador we need is someone who realizes these facts. Both Patrick Moynihan, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick,
when they were U.N. Ambassadors, realized these facts.
John Bolton does also.
UPDATE 8/2/2005:
For the Association
Upon his official arrival at the U.N. this date, Bolton actually shook hands with Kofi Annan. While
this Association would have advised our Ambassador to shake an extended hand, in Annan's case, we also would hace advised
him to wipe his hand on his sleeve afterwards because of the germs.
Annan is no friend of the United States; many have said that he is financially corrupt himself;
obtained his position through nefarious behind-the-scenes lobbying; supports financial and moral corruption within the U.N.
bureaucracy, including nepotism within his own immediate family; and arrogantly denies any and all of the above. This country
does not need a U.N. or a U.N. Secretary General which seeks to tax us as a people, or determine what our policies as a nation
will or will not be. All that is up exclusively for our Congress, our government, our people, to decide.
Not the U.N. Security Council. Not the U.N. General Assembly.
And certainly not Kofi Annan.
Early on in the Bush Administration, before 9/11, West Wing insiders were referring to Kofi Annan,,
anointed in his position in part by the Clinton Administration, as "Kofi A Nuisance."
As this piece makes clear, it's gone beyond that now.
Far beyond it.
UPDATE 12/4/2006:
BOLTON RESIGNS
For the Association:
In the aftermath of the recent U.S. Congressional elections which resulted in the Democratic Party
capturing a majority of seats in both Houses of Congress, John Bolton resigned today as USG Ambassador to the U.N. Bolton
represented the USG effectively and professionally during his tenure and was, and is, an honorable man. His new, required confirmation
by Congress would have been defeated and Bolton, like SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, knew that resignation coupled with a fresh face
in the job, might mean an easier time for the White House with the new Congress, though many analysts dispute the latter proposition.
The entire Association wishes John Bolton well. His past views as to the U.N. reflect the current
views of the overwhelming majority of the membership of the Association as to that body and what goes on there.
********************************
7/19/2005:
62.5 MILLION NEW PASSPORTS ISSUED IN NINE
YEARS
Carol Johns, National Security Affairs Newstand
Legal Affairs Newsdesk
62.5 million U.S. passports were issued in the period 1996 through 2004, (a nine year period) the U.S. Passport
Office itself announced. Since almost all U.S. passports are good for 10 years, very few of these had to be duplicates issued
to the same person.
The entire U.S. population, using the most liberal estimates including illegal aliens, stands at 300 million today. Extrapolating
from the Passport Office's figures, and assuming the rate of applications for passports over that nine year period held up, this
would mean that in approximately 40 more years every man, woman and child in this country, including those here illegally,
would have applied for, and received, a U.S. passport.
We knew foreign travel was popular, but not that popular.
At the same time the Passport Office was issuing all these passports, it was also saying that it was doing everything
possible to prevent the fraudulent issuance of U.S. passports.
The issuance of U.S. passports should be a matter of national security. The size of these numbers make it, instead, a
national joke.
***********************************
7/8/2005:
KYOTO PROTOCOLS TO BE RE-PUSHED ON BUSH
AT SCOTLAND G-8
by: Kathy Pearson and Carol Johns,
National Security Affairs Newstand
Domestic and Legal Affairs Newsdesks
President Bush will be re-pushed at the Scotland G-8 meeting this week for a pledge of adherence to the Kyoto Protocols,
or something like them.
There is nothing wrong with the theory of global warming and greenhouse gases.
What is wrong with the U.N. sponsored, Clinton Administration sponsored, Kyoto Protocols is that, as an approach, they
would cost the U.S. $400 billion a year in GDP, and 4.9 million jobs.
These anti-American concocted proposals should be denounced for what they are, that is, anti-American. When India and
the dictators who rule China agree to give up like amounts of their national GDP and jobs, then we might be able
to reach a global warming treaty on a level playing field.
The President has said that under no circumstances would he re-sign Kyoto, or anything remotely resembling Kyoto. He
is doing a good job for American national security in sticking to that policy.
*********************************
7/3/2005:
WORLD CRUDE PRICES HIT NEW HIGH
by: Carol Johns, National Security Affairs Newstand
Legal Affairs Newsdesk
Spot crude oil prices hit an all-time high of $60 per barrel last week, causing the Dow Jones Index to plummet.
Gasoline prices everywhere in the U.S. will be much greater than $2.00 per gallon this July 4th weekend, with the
highest metropolitan area gas prices hitting $2.56 in Santa Barbara, Santa Maria and Lompoc, California.
Gasoline prices in the U.S. rose 17% in the past twelve months, a figure made even worse in some states, like Washington,
which are actually increasing state gasoline taxes.
High crude prices are caused by (a) OPEC's decisions not to pump as much oil as they could; (b) discriminatory political
pricing by certain OPEC countries, e.g., as in refined oil sold internally in their own countries versus the price they charge
to foreigners, and deals like the pro-Communist ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, gives to fellow anti-Americans like
Fidel Castro versus the price he charges to Americans; and (c) ever-growing demand for unrefined oil, with ever-growing amounts
of U.S. dollars funded largely by USG assistance, to pay for that demand, by countries like China and India.
OPEC is an anti-American monopoly on oil. If OPEC were organized under the laws of the United States, its current leaders
would be indicted in a New York minute as felons in violation of our anti-trust statutes. (Why is it that there is one law
of morality that applies to foreigners under U.S. foreign policy, and an entirely different law that applies to U.S. citizens
domestically, on the very same subject? It's a good question, and not one which is asked facetiously.)
As a matter of American foreign policy, OPEC needs to be broken up, to be destroyed, permanently.The Reagan Administration
almost acheived that result in the 1980's.
********************************
6/22/2005:
IRANIAN ELECTIONS
by: Gene Furlow, National Security Affairs Newstand Contributing
Editor
These presidential and parliamentary elections are a farce. Iran is no more a democracy than Hitler's Germany, Stalin's
Russia or Pol Pot's Cambodia were. The Supreme Mullahs pick who can run and who cannot. Nobody openly challenging the
spiritual and political authority of the mullahs' self appointed grand council can run, or will ever be permitted to run.
Iranian students protesting those facts with placards and refusing to vote had their demonstrations broken up by mullah-hired
thugs on June 18 throughout Iran.
Anybody who thinks Iran is a democracy, or that they are having free and fair elections, is nuts.
Jimmy Carter included.
UPDATE 7/5/2005:
The hard-line Tehran mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vicious anti-American , won the sham Iranian presidential
election. Although not a mullah himself, this guy, who some say was one of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who held 52 Americans
hostage in Tehran during the Carter Administration, has political beliefs which combine the philosophies of the Ayatollah
Khomeini with Venezuelan proto-Communist Hugo Chavez. If the Iranian president had any real power in Iran, which the
office doesn't, Ahmadinejad would truly be a dangerous figure.
As a result of these elections, the Iranian ayatollahs now firmly control all branches of the
Iranian government. The real ruler of Iran is the ayatollahs' Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
**********************************
6/21/2005:
BOLTON AGAIN BLOCKED IN
U.S. SENATE
John Bolton's nomination to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the U.N was blocked again by 37 Democratic, and
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