Bastille Day - (compare to Independece Day)

Long Live the Revolution?

Posted By Adam Graham On July 13, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Culture,France,History,Politics,US News,World News | 11 Comments

July 14 is the day the French people celebrate the storming of the Bastille. This led to the dethroning and beheading of King Louis XVI and the establishment of the first French Republic, which promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity ^[1].”
The rest of the story doesn’t go so well. Out of the French Revolution came the Reign of Terror ^[2], which saw 16,000-40,000 people guillotined. Within fifteen years, the Republic gave way to the French Empire and the Napoleonic Wars and its millions of deaths ^[3].

France is hardly alone in the list of nations with revolutions that failed to live up to their promise. The Bolsheviks in Russia, Chairman Mao ^[4] in China, and Pol Pot ^[5] in Cambodia rose to power through revolution with great promises of equality and a better world and managed to bring mass murder instead.
American movies romanticize and celebrate revolutionaries, both the fictional and real ones. Whether it’s Luke Skywalker challenging the empire, or Rambo fighting on the side of the Taliban-like rebels in Rambo III, a revolutionary cause is always considered righteous.
Not only does American popular culture celebrate revolutionaries, we cite our history as proof revolutions are good. But such naïveté is as dangerous as it was in the 18th century. Thomas Paine went to France in support of the French Revolution and found himself imprisoned by the revolutionaries he’d come to help ^[6].

The truth is that revolutions rarely result in liberty. They often lead to a new tyranny — often, even worse than the old tyranny. The flaws in czarist Russia and nationalist China paled in comparison to the horrors of the governments that followed. In these revolutions and many more, ordinary people supported revolution for the improvement of their lives and their country. In the end, they wound up used by opportunistic men who aggrandized themselves and imposed their own radical ideas that led to less liberty and prosperity.

For American political leadership, Bastille Day should be a reminder of the need for caution. It is popular to present people with a false choice between isolationism and intervening everywhere in the world. “Regime change” is often bandied about with little thought as to what the new regime will look like or what the consequences will be. Before we try to change another regime, we should be careful to know what we’re changing the regime to and what horrors we may unleash.

Bloggers and journalists often see people standing up to repressive governments in Iran and Egypt and feel euphoria. Responsible leaders and activists must temper their enthusiasm with the realization that, however sincere the sentiments of people in the street, the future of any revolution is determined by the people that end up ruling the country and the principles they follow.
Those who seek freedom and opportunity should learn the lessons of history. Every successful revolution draws ambitious and dangerous people whose interests run counter to that of their fellow citizens. Their support for the revolution may be grounded in the idea they can’t become dictator as long as someone else is holding the position. It matters a great deal whether the leaders of a revolution are like Washington, who refused a crown, or Napoleon, who sought an empire.

Today, Marxist and Islamist ideologues take advantage of the legitimate grievances of the people to put forward their own radical agendas. If revolutionaries are unaware of the dangers, they will find that their sacrifices made their country worse rather than better.
Bastille Day teaches us a revolution can be founded on high-sounding rhetoric and good intentions and go horribly wrong.

If we can learn that lesson and become more prudent, perhaps the 21st century will be a little less bloody than the two that preceded it.

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/long-live-the-revolution/

Gunwalker II

Gunwalker: Smoking Gun Email?

Posted By Patrick Richardson On July 13, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized 

PJM’s Bob Owens ^[1] has long speculated that the primary reason for Operation Fast and Furious was to perpetuate the lie that 90 percent of illegal firearms in Mexico were from the United States.
Owens’ assertion was buoyed on Wednesday by internal ATF emails ^{[2] [2]}obtained by Town ^[3]hall ^[3]. ^[3]com ^[3]. One email reads:

Can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same FfL and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks Mark R. Chait Assistant Director Field Operations.

This would seem to be a “smoking gun” for Owens’ assertion that this operation was never about crime and always about an “under ^{[4] [4]}the table” effort to institute the gun control Obama knew he could never push through Congress.

Additionally, Obama has just issued an executive ^[5]order ^[5] which requires gun dealers in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to report multiple long gun (rifle or shotgun) purchases to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in order to combat illegal firearms trafficking along the Mexican border.
The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action fired back at President Obama’s order. Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA, said they will be filing a lawsuit against the new order the first time ATF tries to enforce it. He noted that criminals generally don’t fill out forms:

$40 billion transnational criminal enterprises don’t fill out paperwork and are not deterred by paperwork violations. This is a blatant effort by the Obama administration and ATF to divert focus of Congress and the general public from their gross incompetence in the Fast and Furious scandal. This scheme will unjustly burden law-abiding retailers in border states. It will not affect drug cartels and it won’t prevent violence along our borders. ATF and the administration lack the statutory authority to do this and the NRA will file suit as soon as ATF sends the first demand letters.

Obama’s order is awash in hypocrisy per the details of the Gunwalker scandal. It was the ATF which ordered gun dealers to make multiple sales of military-style and .50 caliber sniper rifles to known and suspected straw purchasers in the Operation Fast and Furious debacle, in which more than 2,500 weapons were allowed to walk across the border by the ATF. The dealers were already reporting multiple long gun sales and the ATF told them to make the sales anyway.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who has been investigating the mess form the beginning, said the executive order was about politics:

This political maneuver seems designed to protect the careers of political appointees at the Justice Department and not public safety. It’s disconcerting that Justice Department officials who may have known about or tried to cover-up gunwalking in Operation Fast and Furious are continuing attempts to distract attention from clear wrongdoing. In Operation Fast and Furious, gun dealers didn’t need this regulation as they voluntarily provided ATF agents with information about suspected straw purchasers. In return for this voluntary cooperation, the Justice Department betrayed them by offering false assurances that they would closely monitor sales of weapons that dealers otherwise did not want to make.

Sen. Charles Grassley, (R-IA), ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was equally outraged by the executive order:

We’ve learned from our investigation of Fast and Furious that reporting multiple long gun sales would do nothing to stop the flow of firearms to known straw purchasers because many Federal Firearms Dealers are already voluntarily reporting suspicious transactions. In fact, in just the documents we’ve obtained, we are aware of 150 multiple long gun sales associated with the ATF’s Fast and Furious case, and despite the fact that nearly all of these sales were reported in real time by cooperating gun dealers, the ATF watched the guns be transported from known straw purchasers to third parties and then let the guns walk away, often across the border. This makes it pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements. The administration’s continued overreach with regulations continues, and is a distraction from its reckless policy to allow guns to walk into Mexico.

Two U.S. law enforcement agents are dead because of this operation, and a reported 150 Mexican citizens are as well. Additionally, the guns are now showing up in U.S. ^[6] crimes.

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

Visual of Israel Fact Sheet

Israel: Facts / Stats

The coming of the 12th imam - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad/Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei

The Coming of the 12th Imam

By Erick Stakelbeck
“You’re in range—and within eight years.”

The message was simple, yet starkly effective.

It was February 2011, and I was sitting in a conference room in Jerusalem, meeting with officials from the highest levels of the Israeli government. The topic was Iran’s ongoing push to acquire long-range missiles that could one day hit the United States.
As the hour-long meeting drew to a close, an Israeli official went around to each member of our small group of American journalists and asked where we lived. Whether the answer was ‘Washington, D.C.," "New York City" or "Atlanta," the official’s response was always the same: "You’re in range." Meaning that the East Coast of the United States—and possibly points farther inland—could soon exist under the threat of Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles that will very likely be nuclear-tipped.
The Iranian regime is working feverishly to acquire such a capability, and the Israeli official’s estimate that the mad mullahs were eight years away from doing just that might have been too conservative.

Indeed, U.S. defense officials have warned that Iran could have ICBM’s as early as 2015. And any delivery problems the Iranians encountered would surely be solved with eager assistance by allies like China, Russia and North Korea. Of course, Iran could simply pass off a nuclear device to Hezbollah or Al Qaeda operatives to detonate on U.S. soil, bypassing any delivery hiccups altogether.
Combine the progression of Iran’s long-range missile technology with estimates that the Iranians could have a nuclear warhead as soon as 2012, and you have a truly apocalyptic scenario for the United States—unless the Obama administration first obliterates Iran’s nuclear facilities and begins to aggressively promote regime change in Tehran. Two prospects, of course, which are about as likely as Mahmoud Ahmadenijad hosting a Passover Seder.
The risible lack of urgency on the part of the Obama administration in the face of what is clearly an imminent threat posed by Iran boils down to one simple fact: They utterly fail to grasp the message behind one of the oldest and most fervent rallying cries of radical Islamists worldwide, "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people." Meaning that once the Jews are eradicated, Christians will be next on the jihadi chopping block.
For the Iranian regime, Israel is merely the "Little Satan." America is the "Great Satan" and thus, the ultimate prize. Israel is the proverbial canary in the coalmine and first line of defense for the rest of Western civilization in the struggle against Islamic fascism and terror. If this lone bastion of democracy, freedom and human rights in the heart of a chaotic, hostile Middle East were destroyed by an Iranian nuke, Europe and America would immediately find themselves in the crosshairs. Or as Spain’s former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar—a great friend of Israel—told me during an interview for CBN in 2010, "if Israel goes down, we all go down."
Which brings us to the driving force behind Iran’s quest for weapons that could wipe the entire state of Israel and Western capitals off the map and create a horrific world war: that is, ideology. The Iranian regime is steeped in an apocalyptic belief system that claims the Islamic messiah, also known as the "Mahdi" or the "Twelfth Imam," cannot appear to lead the forces of Islam to victory over non-Muslims and establish his global empire unless certain conditions are present on Earth: namely, chaos, uncertainty and war.
In the current uprisings sweeping across the Middle East, Iran’s leaders see exactly those conditions beginning to develop. They consider them a divine signal from Allah that the Mahdi is near—and they are preparing accordingly.
In March, I obtained a propaganda video produced by the Iranian regime that labeled the revolutions in Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere in the region as End Times indicators that were foretold in Islamic scripture. The video, which was provided to me exclusively by a former member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps who goes by the pseudonym "Reza Kahlili," is called "The Coming is Upon Us." It was made in conjunction with the office of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad and, according to its producers, received the stamp of approval of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The Iranian regime’s intention was to distribute it widely throughout the Middle East in hopes of sparking further uprisings.
The video claims that Iran is destined to rise as a great power in the last days to help defeat America and Israel and usher in the return of the Mahdi—with Ahmadenijad, Khamenei and Hez-bollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—an Iranian proxy—all hailed as pivotal Last Days figures whose rise was predicted in Islamic scriptures. Ahmadenijad is even identified as the man who will conquer Jerusalem and eliminate the Jews as a prerequisite to the Mahdi’s appearance. Once this messiah figure does appear, the Iranians believe, he’ll lead the forces of Islam in their final showdown with America and the West.
Soon after I exposed The Coming+ is Upon Us on CBN News, Iran’s regime, according to Iranian media reports, engaged in infighting and finger pointing. 

The regime never meant for the film to be seen by a Western audience, and was angered that its plans for the immediate future were on full display for all to see.


Ultimately, The Coming is Upon Us showed that Iran’s leaders not only believe in messianic "Twelver" ideology: they are actually shaping policy around it. And that means the "Great Satan" is firmly in the crosshairs whether the Obama administration wants to acknowledge it or not.

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Erick Stakelbeck is host of CBN’s Stakelbeck on Terror show and author of the book, The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You About the Islamist Threat, available May 2nd by Regnery Publishing.

Liberal Media - BMB is an "Adult" in DCD (debt cieling debate)

Raise Taxes or Granny Gets It

The liberal media's idea of a grown-up.

 

By JAMES TARANTO

President Obama is pulling out the big guns and pointing them straight at your grandmother. "Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3" absent an agreement with Congress to raise the debt ceiling, CBS News reports:

"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

At a press conference yesterday, Obama demanded that Republicans not only authorize trillions of dollars in new borrowing,which at this point seems unavoidable, but agree to what he called "massive, job-killing tax increases" effective in 2013--i.e., after what he expects will be his re-election.

 

For this he drew plaudits from what used to be called the mainstream media. "Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse" read the New York Times headline. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza dubbed him "Dad-in-Chief," explaining: "Boil Obama's message down and you get this: Adults sometimes have to do things that they don't want to do. This is one of those times. So, let's get it done."

The kids are acting up, so he threatens to starve Granny to death. That's just how a strong father behaves.
It looks to us as if Obama may once again be overestimating his persuasive powers by relying for feedback on journalists who, for a combination of ideological, partisan and personal reasons, are predisposed to take his side. NewsBusters.org has a useful compilation of what it calls the "softballs" reporters lobbed at yesterday's press conference. Some of them were actually a bit adversarial, but only from the left.

Our favorite is from Rich Wolf of USA Today: "You keep talking about balance, shared sacrifice, but in the $4 trillion deal that you're talking about roughly, it seems to be now at about 4 to 1 spending to taxes; we're talking about $800 billion in taxes, roughly. That doesn't seem very fair to some Democrats." Mr. President, your massive tax hikes aren't nearly massive enough!

We sometimes forget just how in the tank much of the press is for Obama, especially since they've tended to tone it down a bit now that he is actually president. So we're grateful to Esquire for publishing a piece this morning by one Stephen Marche titled "How Can We Not Love Obama?" You may want to pop a Dramamine before reading this passage, which brings back memories of 2008:

Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama.

Though it's possible this is another one of Esquire's satirical misfires.

Oh, yes he did .... (raise taxws BMB)

President Barack Obama says he didn't raise taxes once.

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In an interview on Super Bowl Sunday, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly asked President Barack Obama to react to a Wall Street Journal editorial that accused Obama of being "a determined man of the left whose goal is to redistribute much larger levels of income across society."

"Do you deny that you are a man who wants to redistribute wealth?" O'Reilly asked.

Obama first noted the conservatism of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, then denied the charge "absolutely."

"I didn't raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years," Obama said.

We wanted to fact-check that statement, and we'll begin by saying Obama boils down an awful lot of complexity about federal tax policy into a short sound bite.

Looking at the whole statement, he's both right and wrong. For clarity's sake, we're going to take Obama's statement in two parts. Here, we'll look at his statement, "I didn't raise taxes once." In a separate report, we'll look at his statement, "I lowered taxes over the last two years."

The idea that Obama did not raise taxes is just plain wrong. He signed legislation raising taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products soon after taking office; that money goes to pay for children's health insurance programs. The law went into effect in 2009. He also signed the health care law, which includes taxes on indoor tanning that went into effect last year. (Regular PolitiFact readers will remember our fact-check of reality TV star Snooki and her complaint about the new tax last year.)

The new health care law also includes a tax on people who decide not to have health insurance, as an incentive for them to get coverage. The tax phases in gradually, starting in 2014. By 2016, the tax would be $695 per uninsured person up to a maximum of three times that amount, or $2,085. The law includes exemptions for people who can't find affordable insurance, and a few other special circumstances.

More significantly, the health care law includes new taxes on the wealthy, starting in 2013. Individuals who make more than $200,000 and couples that make more than $250,000 will see additional Medicare taxes of 0.9 percent. They will also, for the first time, have to pay Medicare taxes on their investment income at a 3.8 percent rate. (Current law is that all workers and employers split a 2.9 percent Medicare tax; the self-employed pay all of it.)

The small percentages may not sound like a lot, but those taxes are expected to generate $210 billion over 10 years, or just over half of all the new revenues the health care law authorizes. Other provisions include new fees on health insurance companies and prescription drug manufacturers, and a new tax on high-cost "Cadillac" health insurance plans.

Before we rule on this item, though, we should note that Obama has not raised income taxes. Thanks to a compromise he brokered with Republicans at the end of 2010, income tax rates are staying the same for people of all incomes. Obama had favored raising taxes on high earners, but he gave up on that as part of the tax deal. In exchange, he gained a a 2 percent reduction in payroll taxes for all workers. When you combine that with small tax cuts that were part of the economic stimulus, most taxpayers have seen reduced rates under Obama's administration.

Obama said, "I didn't raise taxes once." But we've documented numerous instances when he has. He's has signed off on small tax cuts for most taxpayers, but that doesn't change the fact that he's also approved several tax increases. So we rate his statement False.

No Deal !

McConnell Labels the Obama Cuts a Sham

12:20 PM, Jul 12, 2011 • By FRED BARNES

In a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor today, McConnell labeled the Obama cuts a sham. “We all saw how it worked,” he said. “The administration leaked to the media, without any details, the idea that it was willing to go along with trillions in spending cuts.”

In the negotiations between Republicans and the White House, Obama “has presented us with three choices: smoke and mirrors, tax hikes, or default,” McConnell said. “Republicans choose none of the above. I hoped to do good, but I refuse to do harm.”       

   Here’s the full text of McConnell’s speech:

“For more than two years now, Republicans in Washington have stood united in the belief that America would never recover from the economic crisis that struck our nation three years ago, so long as some in Washington persisted in the mistaken belief that government had the cure.