Sotomayor's Ties to La Raza
by Tom Tancredo
Last week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy spoke out against critics of Sonia Sotomayor as playing “racial politics.” According to Leahy, "You have one leader of the Republican party call her the equivalent of the head of the Ku Klux Klan… That's what comes across. It comes across that if you belong to a group that tries to help Hispanics... somehow you're suspicious.”
Usually confirmation hearings are supposed to be about getting specifics about the nominee. But Leahy chose to make vague accusations against unnamed critics of the nominee while defending an unnamed organization. It was apparent to DC insiders that the “group that tries to help” Hispanics is the National Council for La Raza (The Race) and the “Republican Leader” is me.
It isn’t surprising that he didn’t want to use our names. After all it’s difficult to defend someone belonging to a group called “The Race” by accusing her opponents of playing racial politics. The last thing the Democrats want is for the American people to know about the National Council of La Raza, their radical agenda and Sotomayor’s association with the group.
Sotomayor is a member of La Raza and her comments about “Wise Latinas” being superior to white men appeared in the La Raza Law Journal. The National Council of La Raza bills itself as “the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States” who works through “its network of nearly 300 affiliated community-based organizations.”
Among these affiliates are several chapters of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) who La Raza helps fund. Aztlán is what radical “Mechistas”—as they refer to themselves on La Raza’s website—call the American Southwest, which they claim still belongs to Mexico. Their slogan is "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada" meaning “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.” One chapter says on La Raza’s site that their mission is “empowerment of our gente and the liberation of Aztlán.”
La Raza receives tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to set up charter schools like the Aztlán Academy of Tucson where they fly the Mexican Flag, but not the American Flag and teach students “Aztec Math.”
In 1994, La Raza gave their “Chicano of the Year” Award to Jose Angel Guitierrez who once said, “We have got to eliminate the Gringo, and what I mean by that is that if the worse comes to the worst, we have got to kill him" and that “our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.”
Of special importance when considering a Supreme Court nominee is La Raza’s position on a variety of policy and legal issues. They support driver’s licenses, in state tuition and amnesty for illegal aliens. They say that virtually all enforcement of our immigration laws on the state level is unconstitutional. They filed amicus briefs in favor of racial preferences and in favor of benefits for illegal aliens. They led the legal attack against Hazelton, PA for their official English and anti-illegal alien measures.
At the very least, Sotomayor should explain where she stands on these issues.
While questioning her connections to radical left wing groups is off limits, attacking conservatives for belonging to mainstream organizations like the Federalist Society is fair game for the Democrats.
When Larry Thompson was up for Deputy Attorney General in 2001, Leahy questioned his role with the organization. Sen. Richard Durbin denounced the group as a “far right” group who he implied might want to bring back the Dred Scott decision upholding slavery.
The Federalist Society is nothing but a debating and social organization for conservative and libertarian law students and attorneys. In contrast to La Raza, it takes no position on legal cases or policy.
If membership in the Federalist Society is a problem for the Democrats, imagine how they would react if Samuel Alito or John Roberts belonged to a group called “The National Council of the White Race” who honored a man who once said “We have got to eliminate Latinos, and what I mean by that is that if the worse comes to the worst, we have got to kill him," as “white man of the year.” They wouldn’t pass the bar, much less become Supreme Court justices. But when a Hispanic or Black holds these views, we need to celebrate him for his diversity.
The Democrats support of Sotomayor and La Raza shows us what Obama’s “post racial” America really looks like. Designated minority victim groups are free to promote their anti-white racist agenda, while any whites who fight back are playing “racial politics.”
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Obama Treats Illegals Like They Were Real Citizens
Obamacare for Illegal Aliens
by Michelle Malkin
Big Nanny Democrats want to ration health care for everyone in America -- except those who break our immigration laws. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee defeated an amendment that would have prevented illegal aliens from using the so-called "public health insurance option." Every Democrat on the panel voted against the measure.
Nevada GOP Rep. Dean Heller's measure would have enforced income, eligibility and immigration verification screening on all Obamacare patients. Unlike most everything else stuffed into the House Democrats' plan, the citizenship vetting process would not have required building a new bureaucracy. Heller proposed using existing state and federal databases created years ago to root out entitlement fraud.
If the congressional majority are truly committed to President Obama's quest to wring cost savings from the system, why won't they adopt the same anti-fraud checks imposed on other government health and welfare beneficiaries? Maybe an intrepid reporter could ask the president at his next Obamacare show to explain.
The Democratic leadership denies that an estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants will receive taxpayer-subsidized health insurance coverage. Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., calls the proposition "too politically explosive."
But Obama lit the fuse in February when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. That law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards -- making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama's S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law. Immigration activists see the provisions as first steps toward universal coverage for illegals.
"Explosive"? The applause certainly was. Obama's praise of the weakened immigrant eligibility rules drew the strongest claps and cheers from members of Congress at the S-CHIP signing event.
Immigration analyst James R. Edwards Jr. reported last week in National Review that "no health legislation on the table requires federal, state or local agencies -- or private institutions receiving federal funds -- to check the immigration status of health-program applicants, so some of the money distributed via Medicaid and tax credits inevitably would go to illegal aliens." Moreover, the Senate Finance Committee plan creates a new preference for illegal aliens by exempting them from the mandate to buy insurance.
That's right. Law-abiding, uninsured Americans would be fined if they didn't submit to the Obamacare prescription. Law-breaking border-crossers, visa-overstayers and deportation fugitives would be spared.
The solution is not to give them health insurance, but to turn off the magnets that draw them to enter illegally in the first place.
For years, advocates of uncontrolled immigration have argued that illegal aliens are not getting free health care, and that even if they were, they would not be not draining government budgets. The fiscal crisis in California gives lie to those talking points. In March, the Associated Press reported that Sacramento and Contra Costa counties were slashing staff and closing clinics due to the prohibitive costs of providing non-emergency health services for illegal immigrants.
"The general situation there is being faced by nearly every health department across the country, and if not right now, shortly," Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told the AP. The Texas state comptroller put the price tag for illegal alien hospital care at $1.3 billion in 2006. USA Today reported that from 2001 to 2004, spending for emergency Medicaid for illegal immigrants rose by 28 percent in North Carolina alone. Clinics across the Midwest have also been shuttered under the weight of illegal immigrant care costs.
At a time when Democratic leaders are pushing rationed care in a world of limited resources, Americans might wonder where the call for shared sacrifice is from illegal immigrant patients like those in Los Angeles getting free liver and kidney transplants at UCLA Medical Center. "I'm just mad," illegal alien Jose Lopez told the Los Angeles Times last year after receiving two taxpayer-subsidized liver transplants while impatiently awaiting approval for state health insurance.
Now, multiply that sense of entitlement by 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. Welcome to the open-borders Obamacare nightmare.
by Michelle Malkin
Big Nanny Democrats want to ration health care for everyone in America -- except those who break our immigration laws. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee defeated an amendment that would have prevented illegal aliens from using the so-called "public health insurance option." Every Democrat on the panel voted against the measure.
Nevada GOP Rep. Dean Heller's measure would have enforced income, eligibility and immigration verification screening on all Obamacare patients. Unlike most everything else stuffed into the House Democrats' plan, the citizenship vetting process would not have required building a new bureaucracy. Heller proposed using existing state and federal databases created years ago to root out entitlement fraud.
If the congressional majority are truly committed to President Obama's quest to wring cost savings from the system, why won't they adopt the same anti-fraud checks imposed on other government health and welfare beneficiaries? Maybe an intrepid reporter could ask the president at his next Obamacare show to explain.
The Democratic leadership denies that an estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants will receive taxpayer-subsidized health insurance coverage. Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., calls the proposition "too politically explosive."
But Obama lit the fuse in February when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. That law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards -- making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama's S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law. Immigration activists see the provisions as first steps toward universal coverage for illegals.
"Explosive"? The applause certainly was. Obama's praise of the weakened immigrant eligibility rules drew the strongest claps and cheers from members of Congress at the S-CHIP signing event.
Immigration analyst James R. Edwards Jr. reported last week in National Review that "no health legislation on the table requires federal, state or local agencies -- or private institutions receiving federal funds -- to check the immigration status of health-program applicants, so some of the money distributed via Medicaid and tax credits inevitably would go to illegal aliens." Moreover, the Senate Finance Committee plan creates a new preference for illegal aliens by exempting them from the mandate to buy insurance.
That's right. Law-abiding, uninsured Americans would be fined if they didn't submit to the Obamacare prescription. Law-breaking border-crossers, visa-overstayers and deportation fugitives would be spared.
The solution is not to give them health insurance, but to turn off the magnets that draw them to enter illegally in the first place.
For years, advocates of uncontrolled immigration have argued that illegal aliens are not getting free health care, and that even if they were, they would not be not draining government budgets. The fiscal crisis in California gives lie to those talking points. In March, the Associated Press reported that Sacramento and Contra Costa counties were slashing staff and closing clinics due to the prohibitive costs of providing non-emergency health services for illegal immigrants.
"The general situation there is being faced by nearly every health department across the country, and if not right now, shortly," Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told the AP. The Texas state comptroller put the price tag for illegal alien hospital care at $1.3 billion in 2006. USA Today reported that from 2001 to 2004, spending for emergency Medicaid for illegal immigrants rose by 28 percent in North Carolina alone. Clinics across the Midwest have also been shuttered under the weight of illegal immigrant care costs.
At a time when Democratic leaders are pushing rationed care in a world of limited resources, Americans might wonder where the call for shared sacrifice is from illegal immigrant patients like those in Los Angeles getting free liver and kidney transplants at UCLA Medical Center. "I'm just mad," illegal alien Jose Lopez told the Los Angeles Times last year after receiving two taxpayer-subsidized liver transplants while impatiently awaiting approval for state health insurance.
Now, multiply that sense of entitlement by 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. Welcome to the open-borders Obamacare nightmare.
Science Czar Follows Stalins Mindset
Liberal-Progressive Commissars
Josef Stalin’s sinister and barbaric value judgments are closer to home than you may realize.
See http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/21/obamas-science-czar-considered-forced-abortions-sterilization-population-growth/
Quotes:
President Obama’s “science czar,” Paul Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, “compulsory sterilization,” and the creation of a “Planetary Regime” that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet—controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.
... it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.
The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.
The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: “To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people.”
...Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.
To help achieve those goals, they formulate a “world government scheme” they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world’s resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
Holdren’s office issued a statement to FOXNews.com denying that the ecologist has ever backed any of the measures discussed in his book, and suggested reading more recent works authored solely by Holdren for a view to his beliefs.
“Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth,” the statement said.
Josef Stalin’s sinister and barbaric value judgments are closer to home than you may realize.
See http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/21/obamas-science-czar-considered-forced-abortions-sterilization-population-growth/
Quotes:
President Obama’s “science czar,” Paul Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, “compulsory sterilization,” and the creation of a “Planetary Regime” that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet—controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.
... it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.
The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.
The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: “To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people.”
...Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.
To help achieve those goals, they formulate a “world government scheme” they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world’s resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
Holdren’s office issued a statement to FOXNews.com denying that the ecologist has ever backed any of the measures discussed in his book, and suggested reading more recent works authored solely by Holdren for a view to his beliefs.
“Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth,” the statement said.
Climate Change Waco's Want Dissenters Jailed or Executed
Global Warming Debate Takes Nasty Turn
Perhaps a more sensible approach to reducing CO2 would be to take all the bailout money — TARP, the stimulus package, the takeover of General Motors — and use these trillions to build 100 new atomic energy plants.
E. Ralph Hostetter
The global warming debate within certain minority groups of the far left has become confrontational. Now circulating is such shocking language as, "At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers? Shouldn't we start punishing them now?" These words came from Talking Point Memo, an agenda-setting website of the far left.
Others have picked up the drumbeat against those whose scientific background and physical observations of the planet accept that the rising changes in temperatures are well within the historical range of natural climate variability. Typical is this email disclosed by Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. The email threatens to destroy the career of climate-skeptic Mario Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Mario: You have been proven wrong…. The entire world has proven you wrong. You are the last guy on earth to get it. Take this warning from me, Mario. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and a charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.” [Signed] Michael T. Eckhart, President, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).
Warm temperatures have been proven to advance agricultural production and add to the economy. Cool temperatures, such as occurred in Europe during the Little Ice Age from the mid-14th Century to the 19th Century, led to shorter seasons, crop failures and in some instances famine and starvation. Disease epidemics of flu and pneumonia claimed the lives of millions across Europe during the Little Ice Age period.
It is understandable why such zealots as former Vice President Al Gore have staked their careers on man-made global warming. They have made millions trading on the fears of the general public. But the fact remains that mass deaths in human populations have not developed during warming periods — not even the warming period of 1000 to 1300 AD, when European temperatures were as warm, possibly warmer, than they are now.
State climatologists, promoters of science-based climate change, have been hit the hardest by the man-made global warming crusade. Most are under the political control of state governors. Of those attacked, perhaps the most renowned climatologist is Pat Michaels, state climatologist for Virginia. Michaels has argued that the climate is becoming warmer and that the consequences will not be as dire as others have predicted. Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine warned Michaels not to speak in public on the issue. Michaels said he resigned as state climatologist "because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist…. It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction."
State climatologists are also, for the most part, professors of climatology in colleges. Reports from colleges and universities across America bring the same message that state climatologists are forced to cease teaching climatology, thus denying their students the benefit of their knowledge.
In London, the UK Daily Express reported that British scientist David Bellamy, a respected botanist, author of 35 books and presenter of some 400 TV programs, has been shunned by the bosses of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). His crime: He doesn't believe in man-made global warming.
The debate on climate change will continue and for the most part is a healthy exercise for those who are inclined to debate. However, today the issue is used in a manner designed to create fear of catastrophic weather and climatic conditions which will threaten life as we know it.
Politicians are quick to seize this opportunity to save you and your family, thereby promoting their own careers and the power of the state. Programs are being developed, supposedly to save the planet:
1. Cap and trade, which will not significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions but will increase energy costs and the costs of many other necessities.
2. Alternative fuels, where your food supply is converted to fuel for your car, thus making foods such as corn more expensive.
3. Sequestering of carbon dioxide.
4. Burying sequestered carbon dioxide in the bottom of the ocean.
All the programs have one thing in common: They will cost trillions of dollars and eventually will cause massive unemployment. If mankind is responsible for global warming, all the efforts in this country to fight it will be of little or no use for this simple reason: developing nations, especially China and India, have either refused or are unable to participate in greenhouse gas reduction.
Perhaps a more sensible approach to reducing CO2 would be to take all the bailout money — TARP, the stimulus package, the takeover of General Motors — and use these trillions to build 100 new atomic energy plants. Millions of real jobs would be created, as would new sources of cheap energy.
America should get on with the job.
E. Ralph Hostetter, a prominent businessman and publisher, also is an award-winning columnist and Vice Chairman of the Free Congress Foundation Board of Directors. He welcomes e-mail comments at eralphhostetter@yahoo.com.
Perhaps a more sensible approach to reducing CO2 would be to take all the bailout money — TARP, the stimulus package, the takeover of General Motors — and use these trillions to build 100 new atomic energy plants.
E. Ralph Hostetter
The global warming debate within certain minority groups of the far left has become confrontational. Now circulating is such shocking language as, "At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers? Shouldn't we start punishing them now?" These words came from Talking Point Memo, an agenda-setting website of the far left.
Others have picked up the drumbeat against those whose scientific background and physical observations of the planet accept that the rising changes in temperatures are well within the historical range of natural climate variability. Typical is this email disclosed by Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. The email threatens to destroy the career of climate-skeptic Mario Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Mario: You have been proven wrong…. The entire world has proven you wrong. You are the last guy on earth to get it. Take this warning from me, Mario. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and a charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.” [Signed] Michael T. Eckhart, President, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).
Warm temperatures have been proven to advance agricultural production and add to the economy. Cool temperatures, such as occurred in Europe during the Little Ice Age from the mid-14th Century to the 19th Century, led to shorter seasons, crop failures and in some instances famine and starvation. Disease epidemics of flu and pneumonia claimed the lives of millions across Europe during the Little Ice Age period.
It is understandable why such zealots as former Vice President Al Gore have staked their careers on man-made global warming. They have made millions trading on the fears of the general public. But the fact remains that mass deaths in human populations have not developed during warming periods — not even the warming period of 1000 to 1300 AD, when European temperatures were as warm, possibly warmer, than they are now.
State climatologists, promoters of science-based climate change, have been hit the hardest by the man-made global warming crusade. Most are under the political control of state governors. Of those attacked, perhaps the most renowned climatologist is Pat Michaels, state climatologist for Virginia. Michaels has argued that the climate is becoming warmer and that the consequences will not be as dire as others have predicted. Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine warned Michaels not to speak in public on the issue. Michaels said he resigned as state climatologist "because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist…. It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction."
State climatologists are also, for the most part, professors of climatology in colleges. Reports from colleges and universities across America bring the same message that state climatologists are forced to cease teaching climatology, thus denying their students the benefit of their knowledge.
In London, the UK Daily Express reported that British scientist David Bellamy, a respected botanist, author of 35 books and presenter of some 400 TV programs, has been shunned by the bosses of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). His crime: He doesn't believe in man-made global warming.
The debate on climate change will continue and for the most part is a healthy exercise for those who are inclined to debate. However, today the issue is used in a manner designed to create fear of catastrophic weather and climatic conditions which will threaten life as we know it.
Politicians are quick to seize this opportunity to save you and your family, thereby promoting their own careers and the power of the state. Programs are being developed, supposedly to save the planet:
1. Cap and trade, which will not significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions but will increase energy costs and the costs of many other necessities.
2. Alternative fuels, where your food supply is converted to fuel for your car, thus making foods such as corn more expensive.
3. Sequestering of carbon dioxide.
4. Burying sequestered carbon dioxide in the bottom of the ocean.
All the programs have one thing in common: They will cost trillions of dollars and eventually will cause massive unemployment. If mankind is responsible for global warming, all the efforts in this country to fight it will be of little or no use for this simple reason: developing nations, especially China and India, have either refused or are unable to participate in greenhouse gas reduction.
Perhaps a more sensible approach to reducing CO2 would be to take all the bailout money — TARP, the stimulus package, the takeover of General Motors — and use these trillions to build 100 new atomic energy plants. Millions of real jobs would be created, as would new sources of cheap energy.
America should get on with the job.
E. Ralph Hostetter, a prominent businessman and publisher, also is an award-winning columnist and Vice Chairman of the Free Congress Foundation Board of Directors. He welcomes e-mail comments at eralphhostetter@yahoo.com.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Muslims want Constitution Removed
Hizb Ut-Tahrir: Shariah Takes Precedence over U.S. Constitution
Imam Promises to Fight "Until Islam Becomes Victorious or We Die in the Attempt"
IPT News
July 20, 2009
http://www.investigativeproject.org/1100/hizb-ut-tahrir-shariah-takes-precedence-over-us
Oak Lawn, Illinois - Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the international movement to re-establish an international Islamic state or Caliphate - kicked off a new campaign to win American recruits Sunday afternoon in this Chicago suburb. Nearly 300 people packed the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel for its Khalifah Conference on "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" to listen to listen to HT ideologues blame capitalism for World War I and World War II; the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown; the current violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; world poverty and malnutrition and inner-city drug use.
A speaker identified as Abu Atallah even blamed capitalism for the late singer Michael Jackson's decision "to shed his black skin."
Hizb ut-Tahrir aims to restore the Caliphate that existed during the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk abolished it in 1924 in an effort to create a secular, Europeanized state.
Security at the conference was very tight. Oak Lawn police maintained a checkpoint outside the Hilton, and local police and HT's own security people had a substantial presence inside the hotel. In the ballroom where the conference took place, men and women were largely segregated, with men in the front and women in the back. This became a significant point of contention between HT supporters and several members of the audience who objected to this arrangement. At one point, an unidentified Hizb ut-Tahrir speaker became flustered over this line of questioning.
"Men and women," he blurted out, must be kept separate "to prevent people from behaving like animals."
A woman in the audience responded: "How does intermingling between men and women make you animals?" HT panelists didn't have a persuasive answer, and soon adjourned that session.
The conference was sometimes poorly organized. There was no list of speakers, forcing reporters to sometimes guess at the spelling of speakers' names. But HT certainly appeared to be serious about working for the larger goals of the conference: abolishing capitalism and imposing Caliphate rule over the world.
According to Hizb ut-Tahrir, the world's social and economic problems will not be fixed until the world is governed by Shariah and the government controls all major industries. Lenders would no longer be able to charge interest, which one speaker decried as a "poisonous concept." Charity, or zakat, was advertised as the way to alleviate "economic inequality."
"Secular capitalism has made me devalue my skin" and "has kept my family in ghettos," said one speaker, an African-American who went on to blame it for the fact that he smoked marijuana and his grandmother played the lottery. Capitalism, he added, is a form of economic "terrorism" and "causes us to be sent to mental hospitals." Barack Obama's presidency, he said, "is only a scheme or con" to trick people into thinking that things will get better under capitalism.
But time and again on Sunday, Hizb ut-Tahrir officials seemed to be playing slippery rhetorical games of their own - particularly when it came to the behavior of despotic Muslim regimes and terrorists. When a few skeptical audience members pressed speakers over the fact that Islamic governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia are despotic, conference speakers claimed those weren't "authentic" Muslim governments and that the CIA (and by implication, the capitalist U.S. government) was to blame for the problems in those countries. In an interview with WBBM-TV in Chicago, HT deputy spokesman Mohammad Malkawi refused to specifically condemn Al Qaida and the Taliban.
Hizb ut-Tahrir has not been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government and it insists it is only interested in instituting radical change by nonviolent means. But HT's alumni include 9/ll mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the late Iraqi terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi and would-be Hamas suicide bombers, and the group's pro-jihadist rhetoric has led critics to label it a "conveyor belt for terrorists."
One Muslim American group issued a statement in advance of the conference condemning Hizb ut-Tahrir's radical ideology and challenging others to follow suit.
"Hizb ut-Tahrir preaches an ideology that calls for the destruction of the principles that America is founded on," said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy. "While their words are protected by our First Amendment, their actions and movement must not be allowed to take hold. The silence of American Islamist organizations like [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] CAIR and [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA in condemning the ideologies of Hizb ut-Tahrir and their agenda of insurgency in America speaks volumes to their own, albeit, more camouflaged Islamist agenda."
HT's efforts to rehabilitate its image won't be helped by the menacing tone on display Sunday. One late-afternoon panelist suggested that modern industrial powers could fall to Muslims the way Mecca fell to Mohammed nearly 1,400 years ago.
A speaker identified by conference organizers as Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek said that if they offer us the sun, or the moon, or a nice raise, or a passport, or a house in the suburbs or even a place to pray at the job, on the condition that we stop calling for Islam as a complete way of life - we should never do that, ever do that - unless and until Islam becomes victorious or we die in the attempt." (To see the clip, click here.)
Later, the following dialogue ensued between the imam and a member of the audience over whether Shariah or the Constitution should be the supreme law of the land in the United States (click here to see the clip):
Audience member: "Would you get rid of the Constitution for Shariah, yes or no?"
Imam: "Over the Muslim world? Yes, it would be gone."
Audience Member: And so if the United States was a Muslim world, the Constitution would be gone?"
Imam: "If the United States was in the Muslim world, the Muslims who are here would be calling and happy to see the Shariah applied, yes we would."
Audience Member: "And the Constitution gone. That's all."
Imam: "Yes, as Muslims they would be long gone."
While Hizb ut-Tahrir's controversial message attracted demonstrators and some media attention, the group at least is open about its ambitions. It not only is determined to destroy capitalism — it would shred the United States Constitution as well in favor of Shariah law.
Imam Promises to Fight "Until Islam Becomes Victorious or We Die in the Attempt"
IPT News
July 20, 2009
http://www.investigativeproject.org/1100/hizb-ut-tahrir-shariah-takes-precedence-over-us
Oak Lawn, Illinois - Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the international movement to re-establish an international Islamic state or Caliphate - kicked off a new campaign to win American recruits Sunday afternoon in this Chicago suburb. Nearly 300 people packed the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel for its Khalifah Conference on "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" to listen to listen to HT ideologues blame capitalism for World War I and World War II; the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown; the current violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; world poverty and malnutrition and inner-city drug use.
A speaker identified as Abu Atallah even blamed capitalism for the late singer Michael Jackson's decision "to shed his black skin."
Hizb ut-Tahrir aims to restore the Caliphate that existed during the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk abolished it in 1924 in an effort to create a secular, Europeanized state.
Security at the conference was very tight. Oak Lawn police maintained a checkpoint outside the Hilton, and local police and HT's own security people had a substantial presence inside the hotel. In the ballroom where the conference took place, men and women were largely segregated, with men in the front and women in the back. This became a significant point of contention between HT supporters and several members of the audience who objected to this arrangement. At one point, an unidentified Hizb ut-Tahrir speaker became flustered over this line of questioning.
"Men and women," he blurted out, must be kept separate "to prevent people from behaving like animals."
A woman in the audience responded: "How does intermingling between men and women make you animals?" HT panelists didn't have a persuasive answer, and soon adjourned that session.
The conference was sometimes poorly organized. There was no list of speakers, forcing reporters to sometimes guess at the spelling of speakers' names. But HT certainly appeared to be serious about working for the larger goals of the conference: abolishing capitalism and imposing Caliphate rule over the world.
According to Hizb ut-Tahrir, the world's social and economic problems will not be fixed until the world is governed by Shariah and the government controls all major industries. Lenders would no longer be able to charge interest, which one speaker decried as a "poisonous concept." Charity, or zakat, was advertised as the way to alleviate "economic inequality."
"Secular capitalism has made me devalue my skin" and "has kept my family in ghettos," said one speaker, an African-American who went on to blame it for the fact that he smoked marijuana and his grandmother played the lottery. Capitalism, he added, is a form of economic "terrorism" and "causes us to be sent to mental hospitals." Barack Obama's presidency, he said, "is only a scheme or con" to trick people into thinking that things will get better under capitalism.
But time and again on Sunday, Hizb ut-Tahrir officials seemed to be playing slippery rhetorical games of their own - particularly when it came to the behavior of despotic Muslim regimes and terrorists. When a few skeptical audience members pressed speakers over the fact that Islamic governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia are despotic, conference speakers claimed those weren't "authentic" Muslim governments and that the CIA (and by implication, the capitalist U.S. government) was to blame for the problems in those countries. In an interview with WBBM-TV in Chicago, HT deputy spokesman Mohammad Malkawi refused to specifically condemn Al Qaida and the Taliban.
Hizb ut-Tahrir has not been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government and it insists it is only interested in instituting radical change by nonviolent means. But HT's alumni include 9/ll mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the late Iraqi terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi and would-be Hamas suicide bombers, and the group's pro-jihadist rhetoric has led critics to label it a "conveyor belt for terrorists."
One Muslim American group issued a statement in advance of the conference condemning Hizb ut-Tahrir's radical ideology and challenging others to follow suit.
"Hizb ut-Tahrir preaches an ideology that calls for the destruction of the principles that America is founded on," said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy. "While their words are protected by our First Amendment, their actions and movement must not be allowed to take hold. The silence of American Islamist organizations like [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] CAIR and [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA in condemning the ideologies of Hizb ut-Tahrir and their agenda of insurgency in America speaks volumes to their own, albeit, more camouflaged Islamist agenda."
HT's efforts to rehabilitate its image won't be helped by the menacing tone on display Sunday. One late-afternoon panelist suggested that modern industrial powers could fall to Muslims the way Mecca fell to Mohammed nearly 1,400 years ago.
A speaker identified by conference organizers as Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek said that if they offer us the sun, or the moon, or a nice raise, or a passport, or a house in the suburbs or even a place to pray at the job, on the condition that we stop calling for Islam as a complete way of life - we should never do that, ever do that - unless and until Islam becomes victorious or we die in the attempt." (To see the clip, click here.)
Later, the following dialogue ensued between the imam and a member of the audience over whether Shariah or the Constitution should be the supreme law of the land in the United States (click here to see the clip):
Audience member: "Would you get rid of the Constitution for Shariah, yes or no?"
Imam: "Over the Muslim world? Yes, it would be gone."
Audience Member: And so if the United States was a Muslim world, the Constitution would be gone?"
Imam: "If the United States was in the Muslim world, the Muslims who are here would be calling and happy to see the Shariah applied, yes we would."
Audience Member: "And the Constitution gone. That's all."
Imam: "Yes, as Muslims they would be long gone."
While Hizb ut-Tahrir's controversial message attracted demonstrators and some media attention, the group at least is open about its ambitions. It not only is determined to destroy capitalism — it would shred the United States Constitution as well in favor of Shariah law.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Free Speech Wins Again
Texas Appellate Court Deals Another Blow to Islamist Lawfare—
Upholds Free Speech Rights of Internet Journalist; Islamic Groups Lose Appeal
On July 16, 2009, seven Texas-area Islamic organizations lost an appeal of the unanimous ruling of the Texas Second Court of Appeals at Forth Worth, which protected the free speech rights of internet journalists and at the same time dealt a blow to the legal jihad being waged by radical Muslim groups throughout the United States. The Islamic groups asked for a reconsideration of the appellate court’s recent decision through what is known as an en banc opinion (appeal to the whole court, not just a panel of the court). The Court ruling, in a per curiam (in the name of the whole court) two page opinion, upheld the dismissal of the libel lawsuit filed against internet reporter Joe Kaufman by the seven Islamic organizations.
The lawsuit against Kaufman was funded by the Muslim Legal Fund for America. The head of that organization, Khalil Meek, admitted on a Muslim talk radio show that lawsuits were being filed against Kaufman and others to set an example. Indeed, for the last several years, Muslim groups in the U.S. have engaged in the tactic of filing meritless lawsuits to silence any public discussion of Islamic terrorist threats. This tactic, referred to by some as Islamist Lawfare uses our laws and legal system to silence critics and promote Islamic rule in America.
The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan provided the lead attorney to represent Kaufman, at no charge. The Law Center attorney, Brandon Bolling, was assisted by Texas attorney Thomas S. Brandon, Jr. who acted as local counsel, and Los Angeles, CA attorneys William Becker, Jr. and Manuel S. Klausner.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “It is gratifying to see our client’s First Amendment rights being upheld by this entire Texas Appeals Court. We do not yet know if these Islamic groups will try another appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, but this ruling is an indication of how strong this First Amendment case is.”
Kaufman, a full-time investigative reporter, has written extensively on Radical Islamic terrorism in America. He was sued because of his September 28, 2007 article titled “Fanatic Muslim Family Day” published by Front Page Magazine, a major online news website. Kaufman’s article exposed the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Islamic Association of Northern Texas (IANT) ties to the radical terrorist group Hamas.
Kaufman’s article called ICNA a radical Muslim organization that has ties to Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Kaufman, ICNA is an umbrella organization for South Asian-oriented mosques and Islamic centers in the United States created as an American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) of Pakistan.
Significantly, neither ICNA nor IANT, which were mentioned in Kaufman’s article, sued Kaufman. It is speculated that ICNA and IANT were afraid of being subjected to pretrial discovery. On the other hand, none of the seven plaintiffs that sued Kaufman were even mentioned in his article. The seven Islamic organizations that sued Kaufman are the Islamic Society of Arlington, Texas, Islamic Center of Irving, DFW Islamic Educational Center, Inc., Dar Elsalam Islamic Center, Al Hedayah Islamic Center, Islamic Association of Tarrant County, and Muslim American Society of Dallas. All are affiliated with CAIR, one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the successful federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation.
In what should be welcome news to internet journalists, the Appellate Court specifically rejected the Plaintiffs’ contention that Kaufman is not a “media defendant.” The Court held that the Texas statute that gives procedural protections to traditional electronic and print media, including the right to a pretrial appeal, also covers internet journalists. Thus, the Texas Statue entitled Kaufman the right to appeal the lower court’s denial of his motion to dismiss the frivolous libel claim before a time-consuming and expensive trial. Most parties have to wait until after a trial before they can appeal an unfavorable lower court ruling.
The Thomas More Law Center defends and promotes America’s Christian heritage and moral values, including the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. It supports a strong national defense and an independent and sovereign United States of America. The Law Center accomplishes its mission through litigation, education, and related activities. It does not charge for its services. The Law Center is supported by contributions from individuals, corporations and foundations, and is recognized by the IRS as a section 501(c)(3) organization. You may reach the Thomas More Law Center at (734) 827-2001 or visit our website at www.thomasmore.org.
Upholds Free Speech Rights of Internet Journalist; Islamic Groups Lose Appeal
On July 16, 2009, seven Texas-area Islamic organizations lost an appeal of the unanimous ruling of the Texas Second Court of Appeals at Forth Worth, which protected the free speech rights of internet journalists and at the same time dealt a blow to the legal jihad being waged by radical Muslim groups throughout the United States. The Islamic groups asked for a reconsideration of the appellate court’s recent decision through what is known as an en banc opinion (appeal to the whole court, not just a panel of the court). The Court ruling, in a per curiam (in the name of the whole court) two page opinion, upheld the dismissal of the libel lawsuit filed against internet reporter Joe Kaufman by the seven Islamic organizations.
The lawsuit against Kaufman was funded by the Muslim Legal Fund for America. The head of that organization, Khalil Meek, admitted on a Muslim talk radio show that lawsuits were being filed against Kaufman and others to set an example. Indeed, for the last several years, Muslim groups in the U.S. have engaged in the tactic of filing meritless lawsuits to silence any public discussion of Islamic terrorist threats. This tactic, referred to by some as Islamist Lawfare uses our laws and legal system to silence critics and promote Islamic rule in America.
The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan provided the lead attorney to represent Kaufman, at no charge. The Law Center attorney, Brandon Bolling, was assisted by Texas attorney Thomas S. Brandon, Jr. who acted as local counsel, and Los Angeles, CA attorneys William Becker, Jr. and Manuel S. Klausner.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “It is gratifying to see our client’s First Amendment rights being upheld by this entire Texas Appeals Court. We do not yet know if these Islamic groups will try another appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, but this ruling is an indication of how strong this First Amendment case is.”
Kaufman, a full-time investigative reporter, has written extensively on Radical Islamic terrorism in America. He was sued because of his September 28, 2007 article titled “Fanatic Muslim Family Day” published by Front Page Magazine, a major online news website. Kaufman’s article exposed the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Islamic Association of Northern Texas (IANT) ties to the radical terrorist group Hamas.
Kaufman’s article called ICNA a radical Muslim organization that has ties to Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Kaufman, ICNA is an umbrella organization for South Asian-oriented mosques and Islamic centers in the United States created as an American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) of Pakistan.
Significantly, neither ICNA nor IANT, which were mentioned in Kaufman’s article, sued Kaufman. It is speculated that ICNA and IANT were afraid of being subjected to pretrial discovery. On the other hand, none of the seven plaintiffs that sued Kaufman were even mentioned in his article. The seven Islamic organizations that sued Kaufman are the Islamic Society of Arlington, Texas, Islamic Center of Irving, DFW Islamic Educational Center, Inc., Dar Elsalam Islamic Center, Al Hedayah Islamic Center, Islamic Association of Tarrant County, and Muslim American Society of Dallas. All are affiliated with CAIR, one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the successful federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation.
In what should be welcome news to internet journalists, the Appellate Court specifically rejected the Plaintiffs’ contention that Kaufman is not a “media defendant.” The Court held that the Texas statute that gives procedural protections to traditional electronic and print media, including the right to a pretrial appeal, also covers internet journalists. Thus, the Texas Statue entitled Kaufman the right to appeal the lower court’s denial of his motion to dismiss the frivolous libel claim before a time-consuming and expensive trial. Most parties have to wait until after a trial before they can appeal an unfavorable lower court ruling.
The Thomas More Law Center defends and promotes America’s Christian heritage and moral values, including the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. It supports a strong national defense and an independent and sovereign United States of America. The Law Center accomplishes its mission through litigation, education, and related activities. It does not charge for its services. The Law Center is supported by contributions from individuals, corporations and foundations, and is recognized by the IRS as a section 501(c)(3) organization. You may reach the Thomas More Law Center at (734) 827-2001 or visit our website at www.thomasmore.org.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Corruption compliments of Barney Frank
Judicial Watch Shows Congress Ignored Corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
for Years
According to new documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting, risk assessment and executive compensation issues even while liberals in Congress, led by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, continued to block attempts to regulate the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).
Judicial Watch obtained these documents from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted back on December 4,2008. These document requests are part of Judicial Watch's comprehensive investigation of the government's role in the financial crisis, but of particular concern in this case, was the policy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase lending to individuals who were poor credit risks, as well as correspondence and records about contacts between FHFA and Fannie and Freddie.
The following are a few of the most important documents obtained by Judicial Watch:
FHFA letter, dated March 26, 2007, from the Director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), James B. Lockhart, to U.S. Senators Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Hagel, Mel Martinez and John Sununu: This is a very serious issue. Freddie Mac's inadequate systems and controls make it a significant supervisory concern. Furthermore, its lack of timely public disclosures deny market participants the essential financial information made available by all other publicly traded companies so that investors may make informed judgments." The letter also mentions, " ... Fannie Mae still has not filed financial statements for 2005 and 2006 and thus, they are not timely filers either. "
FHFA letter, dated December 3, 2004, to Congressman Barney Frank: "On November 15, 2004 Fannie Mae filed a Form 12b-25 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Fannie Mae indicated that its external auditors could not complete their reviews of its financial statements and noted the possibility of up to a $9 billion loss dating back to 2001. As a result, OHFEO has determined it will not provide a monthly capital classification at this time."
Letter dated June 16, 2006, from OHFEO Director James B. Lockhart to Senator Chuck Hagel: ". . .In January 1999, Chairman and CEO Franklin Raines approved a recommendation made by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) (Tom Howard) and the Controller (Leanne Spencer) to defer recognition of $200 million in amortization expense. His deferral along with other accounting decisions made at that time relating to provisions for loan losses and the recognition of low income housing tax credits, allowed management to meet the EPS threshold for maximum bonuses."
What is important about these documents? They show that Congress was made aware of the massive problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going back at least six years. The documents clearly demonstrate that officials at FHFA were desperately sounding the alarm regarding fraud, abuse and corruption at Fannie and Freddie.
Yet even when faced with the litany of complaints by FHFA against Fannie and Freddie, liberals in Congress, led by Congressman Barney Frank, repeatedly blocked attempts to rein them in.
For instance, during a hearing on September 10, 2003 before the House Committee on Financial Services on a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: "I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury."
"Barney Frank and his liberal allies in Congress have a lot of explaining to do," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ''Any way you slice it, liberals in Congress were reckless when it came to the massive taxpayer liabilities related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they should be held accountable for it." JW
for Years
According to new documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting, risk assessment and executive compensation issues even while liberals in Congress, led by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, continued to block attempts to regulate the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).
Judicial Watch obtained these documents from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted back on December 4,2008. These document requests are part of Judicial Watch's comprehensive investigation of the government's role in the financial crisis, but of particular concern in this case, was the policy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase lending to individuals who were poor credit risks, as well as correspondence and records about contacts between FHFA and Fannie and Freddie.
The following are a few of the most important documents obtained by Judicial Watch:
FHFA letter, dated March 26, 2007, from the Director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), James B. Lockhart, to U.S. Senators Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Hagel, Mel Martinez and John Sununu: This is a very serious issue. Freddie Mac's inadequate systems and controls make it a significant supervisory concern. Furthermore, its lack of timely public disclosures deny market participants the essential financial information made available by all other publicly traded companies so that investors may make informed judgments." The letter also mentions, " ... Fannie Mae still has not filed financial statements for 2005 and 2006 and thus, they are not timely filers either. "
FHFA letter, dated December 3, 2004, to Congressman Barney Frank: "On November 15, 2004 Fannie Mae filed a Form 12b-25 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Fannie Mae indicated that its external auditors could not complete their reviews of its financial statements and noted the possibility of up to a $9 billion loss dating back to 2001. As a result, OHFEO has determined it will not provide a monthly capital classification at this time."
Letter dated June 16, 2006, from OHFEO Director James B. Lockhart to Senator Chuck Hagel: ". . .In January 1999, Chairman and CEO Franklin Raines approved a recommendation made by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) (Tom Howard) and the Controller (Leanne Spencer) to defer recognition of $200 million in amortization expense. His deferral along with other accounting decisions made at that time relating to provisions for loan losses and the recognition of low income housing tax credits, allowed management to meet the EPS threshold for maximum bonuses."
What is important about these documents? They show that Congress was made aware of the massive problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going back at least six years. The documents clearly demonstrate that officials at FHFA were desperately sounding the alarm regarding fraud, abuse and corruption at Fannie and Freddie.
Yet even when faced with the litany of complaints by FHFA against Fannie and Freddie, liberals in Congress, led by Congressman Barney Frank, repeatedly blocked attempts to rein them in.
For instance, during a hearing on September 10, 2003 before the House Committee on Financial Services on a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: "I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury."
"Barney Frank and his liberal allies in Congress have a lot of explaining to do," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ''Any way you slice it, liberals in Congress were reckless when it came to the massive taxpayer liabilities related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they should be held accountable for it." JW
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Obama's Healthcare BS
Obama Can't Be Trusted With Numbers
So why should we trust him with health care?
By KARL ROVE
In February, President Barack Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus bill while making lavish promises about the results. He pledged that "a new wave of innovation, activity and construction will be unleashed all across America." He also said the stimulus would "save or create up to four million jobs." Vice President Joe Biden said the massive federal spending plan would "drop-kick" the economy out of the recession.
But the unemployment rate today is 9.5% -- nearly 20% higher than the Obama White House said it would be with the stimulus in place. Keith Hennessey, who worked at the Bush White House on economic policy, has noted that unemployment is now higher than the administration said it would be if nothing was done to revive the economy. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than Mr. Obama promised.
The economy takes unexpected turns on every president. But what is striking about this president is how quickly he turns away from his promises. He rushed the stimulus through Congress saying we couldn't afford to wait. Now his administration is waiting to spend the money. Of the $279 billion allocated to federal agencies, only $56 billion has been paid out.
Mr. Biden has admitted that the administration "misread" the economy. But he explained that away on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday by saying the administration had used "the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there" to draw up its stimulus plan. That's not true.
The Blue Chip consensus is an average of some four dozen economic forecasts. In January, the consensus estimated that GDP for 2009 would shrink by 1.6% and that unemployment would top out at 8.3%. Team Obama assumed both higher GDP growth (it counted on a contraction of 1.2%) and lower peak unemployment (8.1%) than the consensus.
Instead of relying on the Blue Chip consensus, Mr. Obama outsourced writing the stimulus to House appropriators who stuffed it with every bad spending idea they weren't previously able to push through Congress. Little of it aimed to quickly revive the economy. More stimulus money will be spent in fiscal years 2011 through 2019 than will be spent this fiscal year, which ends in September.
On Sunday, Mr. Biden, backpedaling from his drop-kick comments, said that "no one anticipated, no one expected that the recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of the money."
This fits a pattern. The administration consistently pledges unrealistic results that it later distances itself from. It has gotten away with it because the media haven't asked many pointed questions. That may not last as the debate shifts to health care.
The Obama administration wants a government takeover of health care. To get it, it is promising to wring massive savings out of the health-care industry. And it has already started to make cost-savings promises.
For example, the administration strong-armed health-care providers into promising $2 trillion in health savings. It got pharmaceutical companies to promise to lower drug prices for seniors by $80 billion over 10 years. The administration also trotted out hospital executives to say that they would voluntarily save the government $150 billion over 10 years.
None of this comes near to being true. On the promised $2 trillion, everyone admits that the number isn't built on anything specific -- it's an aspirational goal. On drug prices, a White House spokesman admitted that "These savings have not been identified at the moment." It is speculative that these cuts will actually be made, when they would begin, or whether they would reduce government health-care spending.
None of this will stop the administration from arguing that its "savings" will pay for Mr. Obama's $1.5 trillion health-care plans. By the time the real price tag emerges, it will be too late to do much more than raise taxes and curtail spending on urgent priorities, such as the military.
The stimulus package is a clear example of how Mr. Obama operates. He is attempting to employ the same tactics of bait-and-switch when it comes to health care, only on a much larger scale.
Mr. Obama has already created a river of red ink. His health-care plans will only force that river over its banks. We are at the cusp of a crucial political debate, and Mr. Obama's words on fiscal matters are untrustworthy. His promised savings are a mirage. His proposals to reshape the economy are alarming. And his unwillingness to be forthright with his numbers reveals that he knows his plans would terrify many Americans.
So why should we trust him with health care?
By KARL ROVE
In February, President Barack Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus bill while making lavish promises about the results. He pledged that "a new wave of innovation, activity and construction will be unleashed all across America." He also said the stimulus would "save or create up to four million jobs." Vice President Joe Biden said the massive federal spending plan would "drop-kick" the economy out of the recession.
But the unemployment rate today is 9.5% -- nearly 20% higher than the Obama White House said it would be with the stimulus in place. Keith Hennessey, who worked at the Bush White House on economic policy, has noted that unemployment is now higher than the administration said it would be if nothing was done to revive the economy. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than Mr. Obama promised.
The economy takes unexpected turns on every president. But what is striking about this president is how quickly he turns away from his promises. He rushed the stimulus through Congress saying we couldn't afford to wait. Now his administration is waiting to spend the money. Of the $279 billion allocated to federal agencies, only $56 billion has been paid out.
Mr. Biden has admitted that the administration "misread" the economy. But he explained that away on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday by saying the administration had used "the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there" to draw up its stimulus plan. That's not true.
The Blue Chip consensus is an average of some four dozen economic forecasts. In January, the consensus estimated that GDP for 2009 would shrink by 1.6% and that unemployment would top out at 8.3%. Team Obama assumed both higher GDP growth (it counted on a contraction of 1.2%) and lower peak unemployment (8.1%) than the consensus.
Instead of relying on the Blue Chip consensus, Mr. Obama outsourced writing the stimulus to House appropriators who stuffed it with every bad spending idea they weren't previously able to push through Congress. Little of it aimed to quickly revive the economy. More stimulus money will be spent in fiscal years 2011 through 2019 than will be spent this fiscal year, which ends in September.
On Sunday, Mr. Biden, backpedaling from his drop-kick comments, said that "no one anticipated, no one expected that the recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of the money."
This fits a pattern. The administration consistently pledges unrealistic results that it later distances itself from. It has gotten away with it because the media haven't asked many pointed questions. That may not last as the debate shifts to health care.
The Obama administration wants a government takeover of health care. To get it, it is promising to wring massive savings out of the health-care industry. And it has already started to make cost-savings promises.
For example, the administration strong-armed health-care providers into promising $2 trillion in health savings. It got pharmaceutical companies to promise to lower drug prices for seniors by $80 billion over 10 years. The administration also trotted out hospital executives to say that they would voluntarily save the government $150 billion over 10 years.
None of this comes near to being true. On the promised $2 trillion, everyone admits that the number isn't built on anything specific -- it's an aspirational goal. On drug prices, a White House spokesman admitted that "These savings have not been identified at the moment." It is speculative that these cuts will actually be made, when they would begin, or whether they would reduce government health-care spending.
None of this will stop the administration from arguing that its "savings" will pay for Mr. Obama's $1.5 trillion health-care plans. By the time the real price tag emerges, it will be too late to do much more than raise taxes and curtail spending on urgent priorities, such as the military.
The stimulus package is a clear example of how Mr. Obama operates. He is attempting to employ the same tactics of bait-and-switch when it comes to health care, only on a much larger scale.
Mr. Obama has already created a river of red ink. His health-care plans will only force that river over its banks. We are at the cusp of a crucial political debate, and Mr. Obama's words on fiscal matters are untrustworthy. His promised savings are a mirage. His proposals to reshape the economy are alarming. And his unwillingness to be forthright with his numbers reveals that he knows his plans would terrify many Americans.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Homosexuality - God DID NOT Make You That Way
New Study: Sexual Orientation Can Be Changed
by Gary Schneeberger, CitizenLink editor
Peer-reviewed scientific survey looks at more than a century of research to determine that those with unwanted same-sex attractions can benefit from therapy and should continue to have access to it.
A new report in this month's issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Sexuality finds that sexual orientation can be changed — and that psychological care for individuals with unwanted same-sex attractions is generally beneficial and that research has not found significant risk of harm.
The study, conducted by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), examined more than 100 years of professional and scientific literature from 600-plus studies and reports from clinicians, researchers and former clients principally published in professional and peer-reviewed journals.
"This research is a significant milestone when it comes to the scientific debate over the issue of homosexuality," NARTH President Dr. Julie Hamilton said. "It also confirms what we have seen evidenced in hundreds of individuals who have benefited from the help of NARTH therapists.
"We believe that every person should have the right to independently determine their own course in life, and for many that involves seeking counseling options that affirm their personal beliefs."
The survey, titled What Research Shows: NARTH's Response to the American Psychological Association's Claims on Homosexuality, was assembled over 18 months by three of the leading academics and therapists in the field and under the direction of the NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee. It confirms the results of a 2007 longitudinal study conducted by researchers Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse that found that religiously mediated sexual orientation change is possible for some individuals and does not cause psychological harm on average.
The last finding is important, because it directly refutes unsubstantiated claims made by some factions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and several other professional mental health organizations that it is unethical for therapists to assist patients to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions.
"The APA's own Code of Ethics supports every client's rights to autonomy and self-determination in therapy and mandates that therapists either respect a client's practice of religion and sexual orientation or refer the client to a professional who will offer such respect," NARTH explains in the report. "Clients who are not distressed about their sexual orientation should not be directed to change by mental-health professionals. Conversely, clients who seek sexual reorientation deserve properly informed and competent psychological care from therapists who use interventions that have been scientifically demonstrated as helpful for achieving this goal."
Nicholas Cummings, a past APA president and author of Destructive Trends in Mental Health, concurred.
"This is a basic tenant of psychotherapy, that religion for most people is an anchor," he told CitizenLink. "To pull that out from under them is an egregious thing to do."
In finding that there is substantial evidence that sexual orientation may be changed through therapy, the study also found that treatment success for clients seeking to change unwanted homosexuality and develop their heterosexual potential has been documented in the professional and research literature since the late 19th century.
"We acknowledge that change in sexual orientation may be difficult to attain," NARTH says in the report. "As with other difficult challenges and behavioral patterns — such as low-self-esteem, abuse of alcohol, social phobias, eating disorders, or borderline personality disorder, as well as sexual compulsions and addictions — change through therapy does not come easily. Relapses to old forms of thinking and behaving are — as is the case with most forms of psychotherapy for most psychological conditions — not uncommon."
Nonetheless, the report continues, "we conclude that the documented benefits of reorientation therapy — and the lack of its documented general harmfulness —support its continued availability to clients who exercise their right of therapeutic autonomy and self-determination through ethically informed consent."
A third major finding of the study is that there is significantly greater medical, psychological and relational pathology in the homosexual population than the general population.
"Overall, many of these problematic behaviors and psychological dysfunctions are experienced among homosexuals at about three times the prevalence found in the general population — and sometimes much more," the report states. "Investigators using modern, state-of-the-art research methods have documented that many different pathological traits are more prevalent in homosexual than in heterosexual groups. We believe that no other group of comparable size in society experiences such intense and widespread pathology."
Among the scientific findings cited in the study:
• Despite knowing the AIDS risk, homosexuals repeatedly and pathologically continue to indulge in unsafe sex practices.
• Homosexuals represent the highest number of STD cases.
• Many homosexual sex practices are medically dangerous, with or without "protection."
• More than one-third of homosexual men and women are substance abusers.
• Forty percent of homosexual adolescents report suicidal histories.
• Homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to have mental-health concerns, such as eating disorders, personality disorders, paranoia, depression and anxiety.
• Homosexual relationships are more violent than heterosexual relationships.
• Societal bias and discrimination do not, in and of themselves, contribute to the majority of increased health risks for homosexuals.
Jeff Johnston, gender issue analyst for Focus on the Family, said these findings should have an impact on "those who claim to have the best interests of the gay community at heart."
"True social justice, compassion, concern and intellectual honesty," he explained, "dictate that men and women who want to pursue freedom from homosexuality – whether because of their faith or because of the health risks associated with homosexuality – should be afforded that opportunity by the mental health industry, including its associations and educational institutions."
by Gary Schneeberger, CitizenLink editor
Peer-reviewed scientific survey looks at more than a century of research to determine that those with unwanted same-sex attractions can benefit from therapy and should continue to have access to it.
A new report in this month's issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Sexuality finds that sexual orientation can be changed — and that psychological care for individuals with unwanted same-sex attractions is generally beneficial and that research has not found significant risk of harm.
The study, conducted by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), examined more than 100 years of professional and scientific literature from 600-plus studies and reports from clinicians, researchers and former clients principally published in professional and peer-reviewed journals.
"This research is a significant milestone when it comes to the scientific debate over the issue of homosexuality," NARTH President Dr. Julie Hamilton said. "It also confirms what we have seen evidenced in hundreds of individuals who have benefited from the help of NARTH therapists.
"We believe that every person should have the right to independently determine their own course in life, and for many that involves seeking counseling options that affirm their personal beliefs."
The survey, titled What Research Shows: NARTH's Response to the American Psychological Association's Claims on Homosexuality, was assembled over 18 months by three of the leading academics and therapists in the field and under the direction of the NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee. It confirms the results of a 2007 longitudinal study conducted by researchers Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse that found that religiously mediated sexual orientation change is possible for some individuals and does not cause psychological harm on average.
The last finding is important, because it directly refutes unsubstantiated claims made by some factions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and several other professional mental health organizations that it is unethical for therapists to assist patients to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions.
"The APA's own Code of Ethics supports every client's rights to autonomy and self-determination in therapy and mandates that therapists either respect a client's practice of religion and sexual orientation or refer the client to a professional who will offer such respect," NARTH explains in the report. "Clients who are not distressed about their sexual orientation should not be directed to change by mental-health professionals. Conversely, clients who seek sexual reorientation deserve properly informed and competent psychological care from therapists who use interventions that have been scientifically demonstrated as helpful for achieving this goal."
Nicholas Cummings, a past APA president and author of Destructive Trends in Mental Health, concurred.
"This is a basic tenant of psychotherapy, that religion for most people is an anchor," he told CitizenLink. "To pull that out from under them is an egregious thing to do."
In finding that there is substantial evidence that sexual orientation may be changed through therapy, the study also found that treatment success for clients seeking to change unwanted homosexuality and develop their heterosexual potential has been documented in the professional and research literature since the late 19th century.
"We acknowledge that change in sexual orientation may be difficult to attain," NARTH says in the report. "As with other difficult challenges and behavioral patterns — such as low-self-esteem, abuse of alcohol, social phobias, eating disorders, or borderline personality disorder, as well as sexual compulsions and addictions — change through therapy does not come easily. Relapses to old forms of thinking and behaving are — as is the case with most forms of psychotherapy for most psychological conditions — not uncommon."
Nonetheless, the report continues, "we conclude that the documented benefits of reorientation therapy — and the lack of its documented general harmfulness —support its continued availability to clients who exercise their right of therapeutic autonomy and self-determination through ethically informed consent."
A third major finding of the study is that there is significantly greater medical, psychological and relational pathology in the homosexual population than the general population.
"Overall, many of these problematic behaviors and psychological dysfunctions are experienced among homosexuals at about three times the prevalence found in the general population — and sometimes much more," the report states. "Investigators using modern, state-of-the-art research methods have documented that many different pathological traits are more prevalent in homosexual than in heterosexual groups. We believe that no other group of comparable size in society experiences such intense and widespread pathology."
Among the scientific findings cited in the study:
• Despite knowing the AIDS risk, homosexuals repeatedly and pathologically continue to indulge in unsafe sex practices.
• Homosexuals represent the highest number of STD cases.
• Many homosexual sex practices are medically dangerous, with or without "protection."
• More than one-third of homosexual men and women are substance abusers.
• Forty percent of homosexual adolescents report suicidal histories.
• Homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to have mental-health concerns, such as eating disorders, personality disorders, paranoia, depression and anxiety.
• Homosexual relationships are more violent than heterosexual relationships.
• Societal bias and discrimination do not, in and of themselves, contribute to the majority of increased health risks for homosexuals.
Jeff Johnston, gender issue analyst for Focus on the Family, said these findings should have an impact on "those who claim to have the best interests of the gay community at heart."
"True social justice, compassion, concern and intellectual honesty," he explained, "dictate that men and women who want to pursue freedom from homosexuality – whether because of their faith or because of the health risks associated with homosexuality – should be afforded that opportunity by the mental health industry, including its associations and educational institutions."
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Obama Looking To Establish New Rules For Unlawfull Assembly - None That Oppose His Agenda
Warning: American Gestapo ahead
BY Henry Lamb
Every July 4, we retreat to fireworks, feast and festival in celebration of an independence that is rapidly becoming little more than a memory. Our ancestors declared their independence in 1776 from a tyrannical, overbearing government. The independence claimed by the authors of the U.S. Constitution helped them create a government expressly prohibited from becoming tyrannical and overbearing, by limiting its power to certain enumerated responsibilities. Those limitations have long been ignored, and the current government makes no apology for its overbearing tyranny.
Just as American independence was foreshadowed by a tea party in Boston, America's new independence is foreshadowed by tea parties across the nation. There is more evidence that a new declaration is being drafted. Currently, 36 states have approved or are considering some form of state sovereignty resolution. Several states are following Montana's example, enacting laws that defy federal intervention. More than a dozen states have enacted or are considering legislation that prohibits the federal government from imposing a mandatory National Animal Identification System
. These are symptoms of a society that is dissatisfied with the long train of abuses government continues to inflict upon it.
As the modern-day freedom fighters begin to organize and strategize, the government chooses not to reform, but to entrench and expand its control over the people.
The similarity is remarkable, between the rise of the Democratic Socialist Party now in control of Washington and the rise of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany in the 1930s.
Led by an articulate orator, the German government set out to nationalize health care, transportation, manufacturing and law enforcement. The Obama government has set out to nationalize manufacturing of autos and the finance industry. The Obama-backed "cap and trade" legislation will effectively nationalize the energy and transportation industries. And Obama's nationalized health care program is on the front burner.
Now here's another similarity: nationalization of law enforcement. H.R. 675, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Bob Filner, was introduced to:
Provide police officers, criminal investigators, and game law enforcement officers of the Department of Defense with the authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms. (Emphasis added.)
Why do employees
of the Department of Defense need the authority to execute warrants, make arrests and carry firearms? When the bill was introduced, Filner said: "We need to ensure that federal, state and local law enforcement are able to work together to apprehend criminals and to prevent and solve crimes."
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act explicitly prohibits the Department of Defense from involvement in state and local law enforcement activities. The feds have the FBI to investigate federal crimes and the Justice Department to prosecute federal crimes. Waco and Ruby Ridge are good examples of federal law enforcement. And the land management agencies have gun-totin' enforcement officers to prevent tourists from picking up arrowheads on federal property. Why do we need to authorize the secretary of defense to arm another domestic police force?
Take a clue from the authorities granted by the bill:
• To execute and serve warrants;
• To make arrests without warrants;
• To carry firearms;
• To enforce federal laws enacted to protect persons or property;
• To prevent breaches of the peace and suppress affrays or unlawful assemblies. …
There are other authorities, but let's focus on this last one: "To prevent breaches of the peace and suppress affrays or unlawful assemblies." What is an unlawful assembly? Any assembly that is not authorized by government is unlawful. Should an irate society decide to hold a tea party even if government refused to authorize it, then there must be a reliable federal law enforcement army to "suppress" the unlawful assembly. Local police cannot be trusted to "suppress" an assembly of their neighbors.
In Germany, this police force was called the Gestapo. In Germany, the people who resisted the nationalization of anything were immediately branded as "right-wing extremist" and denounced and ridiculed by government officials and by the press. Watch the government and press response to the April tea parties.
These people who assemble peacefully to protest government policies are described as "Astroturf" pawns of corporate interests by Speaker Pelosi, and as "ignorant rednecks" by Janeane Garofalo. Assemblies such as these were outlawed in 1930s Germany. They can be outlawed, and are being outlawed or otherwise prevented, in this country today.
The July 4 Atlanta tea party scheduled since March was abruptly canceled June 18 when a major donor to the Democratic Socialist Party now in control of Washington exerted sufficient influence to have permission to use the property withdrawn.
Americans can't comprehend the possibility that the federal government could ever become as oppressive as Germany in the 1930s. Think again. How many bills are now floating around that seek to either register guns or outlaw them completely? This was one of the first objectives of the 1930s German government. Once the guns were registered, the Gestapo knew exactly where to go to confiscate them.
Is this why the Democrats in Washington now want to create a federal domestic police force?
Independence and individual freedom are not virtues to Democratic Socialists; but government control is.
BY Henry Lamb
Every July 4, we retreat to fireworks, feast and festival in celebration of an independence that is rapidly becoming little more than a memory. Our ancestors declared their independence in 1776 from a tyrannical, overbearing government. The independence claimed by the authors of the U.S. Constitution helped them create a government expressly prohibited from becoming tyrannical and overbearing, by limiting its power to certain enumerated responsibilities. Those limitations have long been ignored, and the current government makes no apology for its overbearing tyranny.
Just as American independence was foreshadowed by a tea party in Boston, America's new independence is foreshadowed by tea parties across the nation. There is more evidence that a new declaration is being drafted. Currently, 36 states have approved or are considering some form of state sovereignty resolution. Several states are following Montana's example, enacting laws that defy federal intervention. More than a dozen states have enacted or are considering legislation that prohibits the federal government from imposing a mandatory National Animal Identification System
. These are symptoms of a society that is dissatisfied with the long train of abuses government continues to inflict upon it.
As the modern-day freedom fighters begin to organize and strategize, the government chooses not to reform, but to entrench and expand its control over the people.
The similarity is remarkable, between the rise of the Democratic Socialist Party now in control of Washington and the rise of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany in the 1930s.
Led by an articulate orator, the German government set out to nationalize health care, transportation, manufacturing and law enforcement. The Obama government has set out to nationalize manufacturing of autos and the finance industry. The Obama-backed "cap and trade" legislation will effectively nationalize the energy and transportation industries. And Obama's nationalized health care program is on the front burner.
Now here's another similarity: nationalization of law enforcement. H.R. 675, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Bob Filner, was introduced to:
Provide police officers, criminal investigators, and game law enforcement officers of the Department of Defense with the authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms. (Emphasis added.)
Why do employees
of the Department of Defense need the authority to execute warrants, make arrests and carry firearms? When the bill was introduced, Filner said: "We need to ensure that federal, state and local law enforcement are able to work together to apprehend criminals and to prevent and solve crimes."
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act explicitly prohibits the Department of Defense from involvement in state and local law enforcement activities. The feds have the FBI to investigate federal crimes and the Justice Department to prosecute federal crimes. Waco and Ruby Ridge are good examples of federal law enforcement. And the land management agencies have gun-totin' enforcement officers to prevent tourists from picking up arrowheads on federal property. Why do we need to authorize the secretary of defense to arm another domestic police force?
Take a clue from the authorities granted by the bill:
• To execute and serve warrants;
• To make arrests without warrants;
• To carry firearms;
• To enforce federal laws enacted to protect persons or property;
• To prevent breaches of the peace and suppress affrays or unlawful assemblies. …
There are other authorities, but let's focus on this last one: "To prevent breaches of the peace and suppress affrays or unlawful assemblies." What is an unlawful assembly? Any assembly that is not authorized by government is unlawful. Should an irate society decide to hold a tea party even if government refused to authorize it, then there must be a reliable federal law enforcement army to "suppress" the unlawful assembly. Local police cannot be trusted to "suppress" an assembly of their neighbors.
In Germany, this police force was called the Gestapo. In Germany, the people who resisted the nationalization of anything were immediately branded as "right-wing extremist" and denounced and ridiculed by government officials and by the press. Watch the government and press response to the April tea parties.
These people who assemble peacefully to protest government policies are described as "Astroturf" pawns of corporate interests by Speaker Pelosi, and as "ignorant rednecks" by Janeane Garofalo. Assemblies such as these were outlawed in 1930s Germany. They can be outlawed, and are being outlawed or otherwise prevented, in this country today.
The July 4 Atlanta tea party scheduled since March was abruptly canceled June 18 when a major donor to the Democratic Socialist Party now in control of Washington exerted sufficient influence to have permission to use the property withdrawn.
Americans can't comprehend the possibility that the federal government could ever become as oppressive as Germany in the 1930s. Think again. How many bills are now floating around that seek to either register guns or outlaw them completely? This was one of the first objectives of the 1930s German government. Once the guns were registered, the Gestapo knew exactly where to go to confiscate them.
Is this why the Democrats in Washington now want to create a federal domestic police force?
Independence and individual freedom are not virtues to Democratic Socialists; but government control is.
S909 Violates Isaiah 5:20
Liberal Lawmakers Love Their Sex Freaks and Hate Christian Ministers
by Doug Giles
f you’re a twisted adult who gets pleasure from having sex with 5-year-old boys (like Duke University’s Frank Lombard), or you like to shop for dates at the Metro Zoo, or enjoy smearing your body with feces and/or dabbin’ a little urine on your earlobes as you prep for sexy time with the corpse you dressed up like Bette Davis in your basement, then more than likely you are thanking Dionysus and your unclean demon that Liberals are running DC.
Yep, with the Liberals in the house your deviant behavior—along with over 500 additional unmentionables—could potentially be legitimized and federally protected against anyone who says you’re a crazy bastard who should undergo chemical castration and have your frontal lobe scraped for your aberrant bents.
In the Ted Kennedy spawned wording of S.909, The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, it appears that the public verbalization that one thinks an individual is a bubble off level if engaging in the anomalous and illegal aspects of the bumping of uglies could, in the not too distant future, get the verbalizer in a legal pickle of mammoth portions. If S.909 gets through, the goobers who like to do odd and often criminal stuff with the gibbering monkey in their pants will be insulated from legitimate insults and criticisms, no matter how true the critique because that’s “hate,” which could, as we’re being told, lead to a crime.
As stated, this bill does not just protect Brad and Chad from the supposed “hate speech” of a Rev. John MacArthur, Jr. exposition of Romans 1:18-32. Oh, no. It also pretty much defends all “sexual orientation(s),” “gender,” and “gender identity” flakiness as federally-protected classes—up to 547 types of sexually-twisted behaviors, in all—including: • Incest – sex with one’s offspring (a crime, of course)
• Necrophilia – sexual relations with a corpse, also a crime
• Pedophilia – sex with an underage child, another crime
• Zoophilia – bestiality, a crime in numerous states
• Voyeurism – a criminal offense in most states
• Frotteurism – rubbing against an unknown person’s body in public
• Coprophilia – sexual arousal from feces
• Urophilia – sexual arousal from urine
Yes, in the politically correct climate of Obamaland, they don’t want us to—cough—“freak” when Chester passes by sportin’ a pink tutu, unlaced black hiking boots, milk jugs duct-taped to his head, and his left hand spot-welded to his crotch, Wacko Jacko style. I’m sorry. I meant Saint Michael Jackson style.
If S.909 gets the green light, any public denunciation of a perv boy’s penchants, particularly if it stems from Christians quoting God on the topic, will be verboten verbiage if said legislation blows through with senatorial support.
This means that just as the governments of Norway, Sweden and Canada have criminalized certain parts of the Bible, the Amerikan Liberals too want to duct tape the few American pastors who read particular parts of the Verbum Dei which state that checking Jedediah’s oil is a sin, and so is having sex with children and goats. Because, you see, a caring pastor’s denunciation of such sexually-warped actions could be linked to some loser’s criminal misbehavior against those that practice such things and could make the goodly parson, because he called a spade a spade, complicit in the hate crime. What nonsense.
For more info and to let your senator know you think this bill, which will eradicate common sense, our religious liberties, and the Christians’ freedom of speech, is BS log on to http://www.capwiz.com/gopusa/issues/bills/?bill=13297951 to do something about it.
by Doug Giles
f you’re a twisted adult who gets pleasure from having sex with 5-year-old boys (like Duke University’s Frank Lombard), or you like to shop for dates at the Metro Zoo, or enjoy smearing your body with feces and/or dabbin’ a little urine on your earlobes as you prep for sexy time with the corpse you dressed up like Bette Davis in your basement, then more than likely you are thanking Dionysus and your unclean demon that Liberals are running DC.
Yep, with the Liberals in the house your deviant behavior—along with over 500 additional unmentionables—could potentially be legitimized and federally protected against anyone who says you’re a crazy bastard who should undergo chemical castration and have your frontal lobe scraped for your aberrant bents.
In the Ted Kennedy spawned wording of S.909, The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, it appears that the public verbalization that one thinks an individual is a bubble off level if engaging in the anomalous and illegal aspects of the bumping of uglies could, in the not too distant future, get the verbalizer in a legal pickle of mammoth portions. If S.909 gets through, the goobers who like to do odd and often criminal stuff with the gibbering monkey in their pants will be insulated from legitimate insults and criticisms, no matter how true the critique because that’s “hate,” which could, as we’re being told, lead to a crime.
As stated, this bill does not just protect Brad and Chad from the supposed “hate speech” of a Rev. John MacArthur, Jr. exposition of Romans 1:18-32. Oh, no. It also pretty much defends all “sexual orientation(s),” “gender,” and “gender identity” flakiness as federally-protected classes—up to 547 types of sexually-twisted behaviors, in all—including: • Incest – sex with one’s offspring (a crime, of course)
• Necrophilia – sexual relations with a corpse, also a crime
• Pedophilia – sex with an underage child, another crime
• Zoophilia – bestiality, a crime in numerous states
• Voyeurism – a criminal offense in most states
• Frotteurism – rubbing against an unknown person’s body in public
• Coprophilia – sexual arousal from feces
• Urophilia – sexual arousal from urine
Yes, in the politically correct climate of Obamaland, they don’t want us to—cough—“freak” when Chester passes by sportin’ a pink tutu, unlaced black hiking boots, milk jugs duct-taped to his head, and his left hand spot-welded to his crotch, Wacko Jacko style. I’m sorry. I meant Saint Michael Jackson style.
If S.909 gets the green light, any public denunciation of a perv boy’s penchants, particularly if it stems from Christians quoting God on the topic, will be verboten verbiage if said legislation blows through with senatorial support.
This means that just as the governments of Norway, Sweden and Canada have criminalized certain parts of the Bible, the Amerikan Liberals too want to duct tape the few American pastors who read particular parts of the Verbum Dei which state that checking Jedediah’s oil is a sin, and so is having sex with children and goats. Because, you see, a caring pastor’s denunciation of such sexually-warped actions could be linked to some loser’s criminal misbehavior against those that practice such things and could make the goodly parson, because he called a spade a spade, complicit in the hate crime. What nonsense.
For more info and to let your senator know you think this bill, which will eradicate common sense, our religious liberties, and the Christians’ freedom of speech, is BS log on to http://www.capwiz.com/gopusa/issues/bills/?bill=13297951 to do something about it.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
The Left Supresses The Truth About "Climate Change". No Surprise Here
The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.
Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.
Ken Fallin
Alan Carlin, 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran
So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."
Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.
Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.
The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)
Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.
The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she's yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn't ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.
The Bush administration's great sin, for the record, was daring to issue reports that laid out the administration's official position on global warming. That the reports did not contain the most doomsday predictions led to howls that the Bush politicals were suppressing and ignoring career scientists.
The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where's Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?
Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.
Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.
Ken Fallin
Alan Carlin, 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran
So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."
Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.
Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.
The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)
Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.
The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she's yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn't ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.
The Bush administration's great sin, for the record, was daring to issue reports that laid out the administration's official position on global warming. That the reports did not contain the most doomsday predictions led to howls that the Bush politicals were suppressing and ignoring career scientists.
The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where's Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?
Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition.
A View From Thomas Brewton
A New 4th of July Declaration of Independence
The 1776 Declaration was a resolution to throw off the tyranny of big government.
Borrowing from the 1776 document, the history of the present political administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute socialist tyranny over these states. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce us under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for our future security.
Democrat/Socialists have made judges dependent upon their ideological will alone. They have erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out our substance. To support socialist labor unions they have threatened to cut off our trade with all parts of the world. They have altered fundamentally the forms of our government. They propose, for specious, scientistic purposes, to destroy major mining and manufacturing industries.
A political party of foreign ideology such as the Democrat/Socialists, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
The Democrat/Socialist welfare-nanny-state is imposing burdensome new taxes, strangling regulations governing our every-day lives, takeovers of private businesses, and the highest levels of deficit spending and public debt ever imagined in human history. From this will flow either, or both, ravaging inflation and economic stagnation.
If we do not revolt and stop this ideological madness, the United States will not survive. We shall become, like present-day California and New York City in 1975, the ward of outside creditors. China, Japan, and other creditor nations will not forever finance our heedless, self-indulgent profligacy. The wages of socialism is economic death.
Read Big Government and the 4th of July and A Declaration of Independence from Big Government.
The Declaration of Independence, signed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Declaration was the heavy and intrusive hand of big government.
The 1776 Declaration was a resolution to throw off the tyranny of big government.
Borrowing from the 1776 document, the history of the present political administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute socialist tyranny over these states. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce us under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for our future security.
Democrat/Socialists have made judges dependent upon their ideological will alone. They have erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out our substance. To support socialist labor unions they have threatened to cut off our trade with all parts of the world. They have altered fundamentally the forms of our government. They propose, for specious, scientistic purposes, to destroy major mining and manufacturing industries.
A political party of foreign ideology such as the Democrat/Socialists, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
The Democrat/Socialist welfare-nanny-state is imposing burdensome new taxes, strangling regulations governing our every-day lives, takeovers of private businesses, and the highest levels of deficit spending and public debt ever imagined in human history. From this will flow either, or both, ravaging inflation and economic stagnation.
If we do not revolt and stop this ideological madness, the United States will not survive. We shall become, like present-day California and New York City in 1975, the ward of outside creditors. China, Japan, and other creditor nations will not forever finance our heedless, self-indulgent profligacy. The wages of socialism is economic death.
Read Big Government and the 4th of July and A Declaration of Independence from Big Government.
The Declaration of Independence, signed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Declaration was the heavy and intrusive hand of big government.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Scientists 'Discover' No Human Evolution
Among Many Peoples, Little Genomic Variety
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 22, 2009
There is a simplicity and all-inclusiveness to the number three -- the triangle, the Holy Trinity, three peas in a pod. So it's perhaps not surprising that the Family of Man is divided that way, too.
All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made -- the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens.
One group is the African. It contains the descendants of the original humans who emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. The second is the Eurasian, encompassing the natives of Europe, the Middle East and Southwest Asia (east to about Pakistan). The third is the East Asian, the inhabitants of Asia, Japan and Southeast Asia, and -- thanks to the Bering Land Bridge and island-hopping in the South Pacific -- of the Americas and Oceania as well.
The existence of this ancient divergence has long been known.
What is new is a subtle but important insight into what happened on a genomic level as the human species spilled across the landscape, eventually occupying every habitable part of the planet.
People adapted to what they encountered the way all living organisms do: through natural selection. A small fraction of the mutations constantly creeping into our genes happened by chance to prove beneficial in the new circumstances outside the African homeland. Those included differences in climate, altitude, latitude, food availability, parasites, infectious diseases and lots of other things.
A person who carried, by chance, a helpful mutation was more likely to survive and procreate than someone without it. The person's offspring would then probably be endowed with the same beneficial mutation. Over thousands of generations, the new variant (what geneticists call the "derived allele") could go from being rare to being common as its carriers fared better than their brethren and contributed more descendants to the population.
Scientists have long known that regardless of ancestral home or ethnic group, everyone's genes are pretty much alike. We're all Homo sapiens. Everything else is pretty much details.
Recent research has produced a surprise, however. Population geneticists expected to find dramatic differences as they got a look at the full genomes -- about 25,000 genes -- of people of widely varying ethnic and geographic backgrounds. Specifically, they expected to find that many ethnic groups would have derived alleles that their members shared but that were uncommon or nonexistent in other groups. Each regional, ethnic group or latitude was thought to have a genomic "signature" -- the record of its recent evolution through natural selection.
But as analyses of genomes from dozens of distinct populations have rolled in -- French, Bantu, Palestinian, Yakut, Japanese -- that's not what scientists have found. Dramatic genome variation among populations turns out to be extremely rare.
Instead, it is "random genetic drift" that appears to be more important in sculpting our genes. Drift describes the chance loss of genetic variation that occurred not only in the out-of-Africa migration, but through all of human history as famine, climate change or war caused populations to crash and then recover.
Despite those calamities, it appears that all contemporary populations ended up largely the same, or only crudely distinguishable from one another, on the genome level.
Of course, small variations can result in dramatic differences. Skin color is perhaps the most obvious.
Vitamin D is made in the skin through a chemical reaction requiring ultraviolet light. Mutations in genes that lighten skin pigment -- at least a half-dozen have been found -- swept through populations as they moved away from the Equator and had less-constant sunlight.
Among West Africans, a chance mutation in the blood protein hemoglobin turned out to partially protect against malaria. It rapidly became common in places where malaria was a huge threat to survival. Similarly, a mutation allowing adults to digest milk became valuable when Middle Easterners and Europeans domesticated cattle. About 90 percent of Scandinavians now carry it.
Such clear ethnic distinctions are the exception, however, defying the expectations of many researchers. That may have been a product of the way scientists have studied genes over the last century.
Bacteria, fruit flies and other rapidly reproducing organisms were (and still are) the workhorses of genetic research.
When experimenters subject populations of them to extreme conditions, mutant genes can become pervasive in just a few generations.
Not so for people, it appears.
"When it comes to the question, 'What is the main process by which adaptation is happening?', the answers may be very different for humans and flies," said Jonathan K. Pritchard, a computational biologist at the University of Chicago. He is the senior author of a paper on the subject this month in the online journal PLoS Genetics.
In human beings, natural selection appears to work most of the time on dozens of genes in small and hard-to-detect ways. In contrast to fruit flies in the lab, useful traits involving body size, immunity, metabolism and behavior do not come about because one or two genes become ascendant.
The short stature of rain-forest dwellers such as the pygmies of central Africa, for example, appears not to be the product of a single derived allele for shortness carried by virtually everyone in the population. Instead, dozens of gene variants that slightly decrease height have each become slightly more common, and it is their total effect that results in the group's dramatically shorter stature.
"Adaptations to the environment absolutely do occur," said Joseph K. Pickrell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who, with Graham Coop of the University of California at Davis, co-authored the recent study. "But they don't occur according to this simple model that we and others have been looking for."
Which brings us back to the tripartite Family of Man.
When a small number of people left Africa 70,000 years ago, they carried with them only a sample of the genetic diversity that had evolved on that continent in the preceding 130,000 years.
When the descendants of those migrants in turn divided into two groups 40,000 years ago, the westward-turning Eurasians and the eastward-turning East Asians each took by chance only some of the genetic diversity of their forebears.
As a result, African populations today have greater genetic diversity -- more variants in more genes -- than Eurasians or East Asians, and Eurasians somewhat more than East Asians.
But each had more than enough diversity for the trip.
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 22, 2009
There is a simplicity and all-inclusiveness to the number three -- the triangle, the Holy Trinity, three peas in a pod. So it's perhaps not surprising that the Family of Man is divided that way, too.
All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made -- the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens.
One group is the African. It contains the descendants of the original humans who emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. The second is the Eurasian, encompassing the natives of Europe, the Middle East and Southwest Asia (east to about Pakistan). The third is the East Asian, the inhabitants of Asia, Japan and Southeast Asia, and -- thanks to the Bering Land Bridge and island-hopping in the South Pacific -- of the Americas and Oceania as well.
The existence of this ancient divergence has long been known.
What is new is a subtle but important insight into what happened on a genomic level as the human species spilled across the landscape, eventually occupying every habitable part of the planet.
People adapted to what they encountered the way all living organisms do: through natural selection. A small fraction of the mutations constantly creeping into our genes happened by chance to prove beneficial in the new circumstances outside the African homeland. Those included differences in climate, altitude, latitude, food availability, parasites, infectious diseases and lots of other things.
A person who carried, by chance, a helpful mutation was more likely to survive and procreate than someone without it. The person's offspring would then probably be endowed with the same beneficial mutation. Over thousands of generations, the new variant (what geneticists call the "derived allele") could go from being rare to being common as its carriers fared better than their brethren and contributed more descendants to the population.
Scientists have long known that regardless of ancestral home or ethnic group, everyone's genes are pretty much alike. We're all Homo sapiens. Everything else is pretty much details.
Recent research has produced a surprise, however. Population geneticists expected to find dramatic differences as they got a look at the full genomes -- about 25,000 genes -- of people of widely varying ethnic and geographic backgrounds. Specifically, they expected to find that many ethnic groups would have derived alleles that their members shared but that were uncommon or nonexistent in other groups. Each regional, ethnic group or latitude was thought to have a genomic "signature" -- the record of its recent evolution through natural selection.
But as analyses of genomes from dozens of distinct populations have rolled in -- French, Bantu, Palestinian, Yakut, Japanese -- that's not what scientists have found. Dramatic genome variation among populations turns out to be extremely rare.
Instead, it is "random genetic drift" that appears to be more important in sculpting our genes. Drift describes the chance loss of genetic variation that occurred not only in the out-of-Africa migration, but through all of human history as famine, climate change or war caused populations to crash and then recover.
Despite those calamities, it appears that all contemporary populations ended up largely the same, or only crudely distinguishable from one another, on the genome level.
Of course, small variations can result in dramatic differences. Skin color is perhaps the most obvious.
Vitamin D is made in the skin through a chemical reaction requiring ultraviolet light. Mutations in genes that lighten skin pigment -- at least a half-dozen have been found -- swept through populations as they moved away from the Equator and had less-constant sunlight.
Among West Africans, a chance mutation in the blood protein hemoglobin turned out to partially protect against malaria. It rapidly became common in places where malaria was a huge threat to survival. Similarly, a mutation allowing adults to digest milk became valuable when Middle Easterners and Europeans domesticated cattle. About 90 percent of Scandinavians now carry it.
Such clear ethnic distinctions are the exception, however, defying the expectations of many researchers. That may have been a product of the way scientists have studied genes over the last century.
Bacteria, fruit flies and other rapidly reproducing organisms were (and still are) the workhorses of genetic research.
When experimenters subject populations of them to extreme conditions, mutant genes can become pervasive in just a few generations.
Not so for people, it appears.
"When it comes to the question, 'What is the main process by which adaptation is happening?', the answers may be very different for humans and flies," said Jonathan K. Pritchard, a computational biologist at the University of Chicago. He is the senior author of a paper on the subject this month in the online journal PLoS Genetics.
In human beings, natural selection appears to work most of the time on dozens of genes in small and hard-to-detect ways. In contrast to fruit flies in the lab, useful traits involving body size, immunity, metabolism and behavior do not come about because one or two genes become ascendant.
The short stature of rain-forest dwellers such as the pygmies of central Africa, for example, appears not to be the product of a single derived allele for shortness carried by virtually everyone in the population. Instead, dozens of gene variants that slightly decrease height have each become slightly more common, and it is their total effect that results in the group's dramatically shorter stature.
"Adaptations to the environment absolutely do occur," said Joseph K. Pickrell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who, with Graham Coop of the University of California at Davis, co-authored the recent study. "But they don't occur according to this simple model that we and others have been looking for."
Which brings us back to the tripartite Family of Man.
When a small number of people left Africa 70,000 years ago, they carried with them only a sample of the genetic diversity that had evolved on that continent in the preceding 130,000 years.
When the descendants of those migrants in turn divided into two groups 40,000 years ago, the westward-turning Eurasians and the eastward-turning East Asians each took by chance only some of the genetic diversity of their forebears.
As a result, African populations today have greater genetic diversity -- more variants in more genes -- than Eurasians or East Asians, and Eurasians somewhat more than East Asians.
But each had more than enough diversity for the trip.
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