Reprinted from YnetNews.com.

The flurry of international reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden by the American army provides Israel with a great opportunity to demonstrate the double standards applied against it by so many in the Western world and elsewhere. All one has to do is compare the reactions of major institutions and leaders with those after the death of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. This leader of the Hamas terrorist organization was killed by Israel in 2004. He was directly responsible for many lethal attacks on Israeli civilians including suicide bombings.

On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that “the death of Osama bin Laden, announced by President (Barack) Obama last night, is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism.”

Yet after the killing of Sheikh Yassin, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said “I do condemn the targeted assassination of Sheikh Yassin and the others who died with him. Such actions are not only contrary to international law, but they do not do anything to help the search for a peaceful solution.”

The now-defunct UN Commission on Human Rights condemned “the tragic death of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in contravention of the Hague Convention IV of 1907.” At the Security Council, the US had to use its veto power to prevent condemnation of Israel.

After the bin Laden killing, the leaders of the European Council and European Commission stated that his death made the world a safer place and showed that terrorist attacks do not remain unpunished. Following the Yassin killing, then-EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana said, “This type of action does not contribute at all to create the conditions of peace. This is very, very bad news for the peace process. The policy of the European Union has been consistently condemnation of extra-judicial killing.”British Prime Minister David Cameron congratulated President Obama on the success of the bin Laden assassination. Cameron considered it a massive step forward in the fight against extremist terrorism. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair also welcomed bin Laden’s demise.

Among the most preposterous claims being made on MSNBC about the fight over public sector unions in Wisconsin is that Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans are losing “Reagan Democrats” by taking on government employees.

The theory seems to have been concocted by Howard Fineman, editor at The Huffington Post, who said, back in February on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word,” that the “whole idea of a Reagan Democrat” was that union families were voting for Reagan. But today, according to Fineman, they are shifting against Republicans because of Walker’s tough line on government unions. “That’s got to scare Republican strategists nationally,” he said.

Private sector unions are as similar to public sector unions as they are to gay civil unions.

But again on “Hardball,” Fineman said that while Ronald Reagan appealed to union members, their “sons and daughters” were “having second thoughts.”

This could be true — but only if the sons and daughters of construction workers and miners, clinging to their guns and religion, grew up to be public school teachers, clinging to Earth Day and Kwanzaa.

About a month later, The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne was pitching the Reagan-Democrats-Come-Home canard as his own fresh insight in his column and on “The Ed Show,” where he said that the Obama White House was no longer worried about losing the Midwest because “former Reagan Democrats” are saying, “This is not our politics.”

Yes, who can ever forget the way government workers idolized Ronald Reagan?

In his first year in office, Reagan gave striking air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to their jobs or they’d be fired. He hired permanent replacements and left thousands of illegally striking government workers jobless, banned from ever returning to their government jobs — until President Clinton allowed them to be rehired.

(And they’ve done a terrific job since then, haven’t th– HEY! WAKE UP!)

In Reagan’s second year in office, not only he, but his vice president and education secretary all declined invitations to speak at the public school teacher extravaganza, the National Education Association’s 120th annual convention.

In his third year in office, The Washington Post reported that “few members of government employee unions plan to vote next year for Ronald Reagan.”

As Howard Fineman suggests, Republicans must have been scared of how that might play out in the 1984 election. Still somehow, Reagan managed to win the largest electoral landslide in U.S. history, despite government workers being overwhelmingly, implacably opposed to him.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks has joined a Facebook group entitled Kill Lars Vilks in order to engage in discussion with his antagonists as part of his ongoing art project to explore the bounds of free speech.

"I have joined the group Kill Lars Vilks," the artist confirmed.

Vilks' notorious sketch of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog was published in 2007, and since then he has lived in threat for his life. He was recently attacked at a lecture in Uppsala and his home was targeted in an arson attack.

Furthermore a woman sits interred in a US jail for allegedly plotting to kill the previously little known Swedish artist.

In response to recent events a group of ex-Muslims arranged a discussion meeting on Monday and invited Vilks to talk about the defence of freedom of expression and to stand up to extremist Islamist violence.

"It doesn't matter if it is right or wrong to draw Muhammad, but he has a right to do so. Others have as much right to protest, but they have to learn that they can not threaten," Karim Shamihammadi, who represents the secular group, said.

The meeting was arranged to take place at Medborgarhuset in central Stockholm just a few hundred metres from the main city mosque.

Vilks was keen to stress that the incident in Uppsala did not involve people representative of the group often generally referred to as "Muslims".

"It is a question of a small clique who should not be given the opportunity to grow," Vilks said.

Despite calling them "a howling mob" the artist has been seeking contact with his enemies and opponents via Facebook, active in groups such as Kill Lars Vilks (Döda Lars Vilks) and We Who Hate Lars Vilks (Vi som hatar Lars Vilks).

"I have joined all of those groups. Many are intransigent, but there are a couple who are ready to discuss," he told the media after the meeting.

Vilks reported that he had been in contact with around a hundred people, even some who had threatened his life.

"There are a surprising number that can be engaged in discussion, they can in some way understand me."...

Good luck with that.

Let me get this straight.  According to the Supreme Court, burning the American flag is protected speech under the First Amendment.  Yet in order to protect the sensibilities of Mexican-American students celebrating the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, a California Bay area school decided that high school students would not be permitted to wear  t-shirts emblazoned with the American flag.

The Mexican-American students were allowed to display the Mexican flag as well as dress in the colors of the Mexican flag, but those naughty kids wearing American flag t-shirts were sent home on Cinco de Mayo after an administrator at the high school complained that the American flag t-shirt was “incendiary.”

Here is what one of the aggrieved Mexican-American students had to say about those “incendiary” trouble-makers daring to display the stars and stripes in a U.S. public school:

I think they should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day. We don’t deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn’t do that on Fourth of July.

Isn’t that nice of them?

Even Bill O’Reilly – in his mission to prove how fair and balanced he is – said last night on “The Factor” that the school administrator was correct in order to prevent a fight from breaking out.  Speaking with Fox News anchor and legal expert Megyn Kelly who understood the First Amendment implications, which seemed to elude O’Reilly, he had the following exchange:

Okay, so the five students show up and they wear these American flag logos on bandanna or the shirt. And they immediately pulled into the principal’s office, because they’re afraid. Rightly so. The principal’s rightly afraid that on Cinco de Mayo, this could cause some problem, correct?

MEGYN KELLY: All except for the rightly part. Yes, they got pulled into the vice principal’s office. It was the vice principal who really had a problem with it. His name is Miguel Rodriguez. And he thought that this was going to cause some sort of a disturbance and claimed that some students had complained.

O’REILLY: Okay, but when you say I’m wrong when I say rightly, if I were the vice principal, Miguel Rodriguez, I would have pulled them in, too, because–

KELLY: Because they wore American flags?

O’REILLY: No, no, not at all. Not because of what they were wearing, but because there could have been a fight. Don’t you understand that there could have been a fight because this issue with the Arizona and everything else.

KELLY: The theoretical notion that there could be a fight is not enough.

O’REILLY: You’ve got to be proactive. You’ve got to be proactive as an educator

KELLY: No, you don’t. Well, you’ve got to be proactive in trampling all over the constitution then, because that’s not allowed.

O’REILLY: Okay, so you’re coming at it from a legal point of view?

So what is O’Reilly saying here?  That the Constitution does not matter when politically incorrect displays of our flag might trigger a violent reaction?  It’s probably a good thing for the kids that O’Reilly is no longer a teacher.

For icing on the cake, here is what President Obama said during a reception to honor Cinco de Mayo:

We gather to mark a day that’s become as celebrated here in the United States as it is in Mexico…the glory of this day is shared by both of our countries…So today reminds us that America’s diversity is America’s strength. That’s why I spoke out against the recently passed law in Arizona.

I am not worried nearly so much about the Arizona police enforcing the law against illegal immigrants, as I am about the diversity police who enforce political correctness.  Oh, and I also worry about a president who cares more about the rights of illegal immigrants than the safety of American citizens and who believes that a Mexican holiday is also a U.S. holiday.

“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 49 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”

That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting – and about long odds. He carries scars from Omaha Beach, The Battle of the Bulge and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles, Lynch and his band of brothers could count on the support of their own chief executive. At the Bay of Pigs, Grayston Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful enemies were not Castro’s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in Santa Clara, Cuba, but the Ivy League’s best and brightest dithering in Washington.

Grayston Lynch put it on the line for the U.S. Constitution unlike many living today. I’d say he’s earned the right to indulge in a little “freedom of speech.”

So when he wrote, “Never have I been so ashamed of my country” about the bloody and shameful events 49 years ago this month at the Bay of Pigs, I’d say we owe him a respectful audience.

In his own words, Lynch helped train, “brave boys, most of whom had never before fired a shot in anger” — college students, farmers, doctors, common laborers, whites, blacks, mulattoes. The Brigada included men from every social strata and race in Cuba — from sugar cane planters to sugar cane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly, this included the folks in between as befits a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.

They were known as La Brigada 2506. An almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. Short on battle experience, yes, but bursting with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in a soldier — morale. No navel-gazing about “why they hate us.” They’d seen the face of Castro/communism point-blank. And that’s all it takes.

They set their jaws and resolved to smash the murderous barbarism that was ravaging their homeland.  They went at it with a vengeance. These “brave boys” fought till the last round, without food or water, and inflicted losses of almost 30-to-1 against their Soviet-led and arm-lavished enemy.

Castro defectors, some the very doctors who attended the casualties, say the invading freedom-fighters inflicted over 3,500 casualties on their Stalinist enemy. Castro and Che were jittery for a while, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the Stalinist leaders assumed they faced at least “20,000 invading mercenaries,” as they called them.

Yet, it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered 20-to-1, led by the heroic Erneido Oliva. (A black Cuban, by the way, Congressional Black Caucus.) A high percentage of these men had wives and children. But to hear Castro’s echo chamber (the mainstream and academia) Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!

The invaders themselves suffered 100 dead. Four were American pilot “advisers” who defied direct orders to abandon the men they’d trained and befriended. “Nuts!” they barked — but at their own commander in chief. These U.S. volunteers — Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker, and Wade Grey — suited up, gunned the engines, and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of whom America’s enemies really are. Their Cuban brothers were being slaughtered on that heroic beachhead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro’s unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.

All four Americans were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on The Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Miami’s Little Havana and their crosses at Miami’s Cuban Memorial cemetery.

When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: “People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.”

Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.

To quote author Haynes Johnson, “The Bay of Pigs was a battle where heroes were made.” And how! We call them “men,” but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Stalin tanks point blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe. Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his eye. Castro’s troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour, until the Reds finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.

By then the invaders sensed they’d been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two days shooting and reloading without sleep, food, or water was taking its toll. Many were hallucinating. That’s when Castro opened up four batteries’ worth 122 mm Soviet howitzers. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the invaders’ ranks over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one said later.

“Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson. By now the invaders were dazed and delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger; too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their commander had to scream.

“No retreat, Carajo!” Oliva stood and bellowed to his dazed and horribly outnumbered men. “We stand and fight!” And so they did, and wrote as glorious a chapter in military history and the annals of freedom as any you’d care to read.

Right after the deadly shower of Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up. Another boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it repeatedly with his recoil-less rifle. It barely dented it, but so rattled the occupants that they opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on shaking hands with their pubescent captor who, an hour later, was felled by a machine-gun burst to his valiant little heart.

On another front, Lynch, from his command post offshore, was talking with Cmdr. Pepe San Roman. Lynch had just learned how the Knights of Camelot (for dread of name-calling by the Latin-American “Street” as “yankee-bullies!”) had canceled the vital air strikes to knock out Castro’s Air-force, and figured the men were doomed. “If things are really rough,” he told Pepe, “we can come in and evacuate you.”

“We will not be evacuated!” Pepe barked back. “We came here to fight! This ends here!” The communists had almost 50,000 men around the beachhead now. But Oliva had one tank manned by Jorge Alvarez, and two rounds. Jorge aimed — Blam! Reloaded — Blam! — and quickly knocked out two of Castro’s Stalins. But more Stalins and T-34′s kept coming. So Alvarez — outgunned, outnumbered and out of ammo — finally had no choice: He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering whine and charged! He rammed into another Stalin tank. Its driver was stunned, frantic. He couldn’t get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again. And again. And again, finally splitting the Stalin’s barrel and forcing its surrender.

The Brigada’s spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro’s jets were roaming overhead at will. They long ago had sunk the ammo ships; now they concentrated on strafing the helpless men.

“Can’t continue …” Lynch’s radio crackled – it was San Roman again. “Have nothing left to fight with … destroying my equipment …” The radio went dead.

“Tears flooded my eyes,” wrote Grayston Lynch. “For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

The battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. On a visit to Miami during his presidential campaign, John McCain learned that he had shared torturers with his Cuban-American freedom-fighter hosts (Castro had sent several of his regime’s most promising sadists to North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in finer points of their profession.)

During almost two years in Castro’s dungeons, Oliva and his men lived under a daily death sentence.  Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” or go on camera and on record denouncing the U.S. Given these freedom-fighters betrayal, you might think the Castroites had a cakewalk here.

Hah! Neither Oliva nor any of his men signed the document. The freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, and solidly with their commander, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. “We will die with dignity!” snapped Oliva at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite, such an attitude not only enrages but also baffles.

“Wimps,” sneers Michael Moore in his book “Downsize This,” referring to Bay of Pigs veterans  “really just a bunch of wimps. That’s right, wimps– and crybabies too….ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe down their backs.” Knowing that anti-yankee confessions would save them from Che Guevara’s firing squads and torture chambers, these freedom-fighters refused any association with the type of slogans Michael Moore shouts weekly for free publicity.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC unveiled a profoundly dishonest assessment of the ACORN undercover video saga.

On her show she took irrelevant facts and half-truths and then made sweeping generalizations. This describes the Media Matters approach to waging war on “conservative misinformation” to a tee. If a semi-colon is out of place anywhere, you’re a contemptible liar hellbent on the destruction of all that is good in America.

Her argument boiled down is this: conservative activists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles didn’t wear pimp and ho costumes when they visited ACORN offices; and the videos shot showing ACORN’s seedy underbelly were edited — gasp!!!

Maddow is simply following the script that ACORN has provided.

In a fantastically amazing coincidence, ACORN online propagandist Nathan Henderson-James, who is paid by ACORN to protect (what’s left of) the organization and its legacy at all costs, sent out a bulletin a little over a month ago urging the left to fight to control the narrative of ACORN’s demise.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he writes. The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

This argument must be fought, Henderson-James argues, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

Then comes the whining from ACORN’s cyber-warfare chief.

Henderson-James acknowledges that ACORN made mistakes, but claims it was primarily a victim of dirty tricks perpetrated by the political right. “[W]e were all up against a 24-hour propoganda [sic] channel,” he writes, in an apparent reference to the Fox News Channel, one of the few media outlets to closely follow the ACORN saga.

Progressives didn’t fight back hard enough “in a moment of extreme duress, orchestrated by propogand [sic] videos,” he complains.

I’ve communicated with Henderson-James but he has refused to discuss matters related to ACORN on the record. C’est la vie.

I am told by my ACORN-savvy sources that he is a real “true believer” in the ACORN cause so anything he might tell me would be lies anyway. That’s how Alinskyites roll.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Note: For anyone in the South, I’m live on the Greg (Buddell) Show right now talking about ACORN.

Despite the successful (kind of, sort of) passage of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care bill, the debate is far from over, it seems, and the underlying issues will only become more incendiary: the health care fight has served as a proxy for a deeper debate over the ongoing transformation of the United States into a European-style “soft despotism,” to use Tocqueville’s astute description.

Quoted in an article in National Review Online this morning, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) of Wisconsin identified very well the way the health-care debate has exemplified the vast difference between two cultures in the United States today:

Health care is really the issue that speaks to the relationship between the citizen and the government in America. It shapes the fiscal trajectory and the economic trajectory. This whole debate has been a proxy fight about what kind of country America will be—whether we’ll become a cradle-to-grave welfare state or stay a free-market democracy. The Democrats who are being told that the wors[t] is over should know that the battle has not even begun. It’s up to us to now bring the case to the American people—a real moral, philosophical, and economic case— asking about our values, our founding principles, and if we really want to move toward a Western European–style system. . . .

What’s really happening here is the president is saying to the American people that you’re stuck in your current station in life, you’re frozen, and the government is here to help you cope with it. But that’s not who we are. We are a dynamic society where people have the will and incentive to make the most of their lives, to reach their potential. With this bill, that whole mindset, the American idea is upended.

Matt Peterson put it succinctly in an essay in The American Thinker:

In November 2008, Americans elected a socialist as their president. In March 2010, they woke up stunned to find themselves living in a socialist country.

He goes on to explain the enormity of this power-grab:

Health insurers–once private companies–are now organs of the federal government. Every citizen is a ward of the state, which can now compel you to have insurance, punish you if you don’t; determine if your insurance is acceptable, punish you if it isn’t. Thousands of new federal bureaucrats will soon spill from the D.C. Beltway and flood the country, scrutinizing our finances to verify compliance with this new law.

A government that grants itself this kind of power over us can conceivably do anything to us.  For our own good, of course. Such a country is in no meaningful sense “free.”. . .

There’s a reason why Democrats were desperate to ram this through at any cost–once enacted, such things are all but perpetual. Former freedom-loving peoples begin to tell themselves that it’s really not so bad. Sure, government is forcing you to eat state-approved gruel, but hey, at least they hold the spoon, and they even pour a little sugar on top when you’re good.

Tarren Bragdon, president of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, notes that the health care overhaul legislation has energized the opposition to a degree that hasn’t been manifested by non-progressives in many years—perhaps more than a century:

Last night’s vote was an assault on the fundamental American values of freedom, individualism and limited government, but this fight isn’t over.  The unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans to oppose the president’s health care takeover will carry through to the November elections and beyond.  We will not be silenced.  We will continue to fight to protect Maine families from an intrusive, unaccountable, and now, greatly expanded federal government.

This issue indeed lays bare the great divide between two cultures in the contemporary United States: a European-style, “progressive” rule by elites, versus a consumer-oriented, reformist coalition based on the premise of natural rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Like the Tea Party movement, the “unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans” in opposition to Obamacare is evidence of a long-delayed recognition by much of the public that what’s wrong with progressivism is not the particular policies it espouses but its assumption that rule by elites is better than freedom of choice.

The passage of this health care bill is a great triumph of progressivism. Under the spell of progressive ideology, for the last few decades public schools across the country have increasingly refused to educate children in the founding values of the nation and in fact have often openly taught contempt for them. In turn, a public without a strong understanding of what individual freedom really means and the reasons why it is precious has little defense against the ever-increasing encroachments of government—until something as obviously grotesque, wrongheaded, and overweening as this health care bill comes along.

That’s what makes this fundamentally an issue of culture, and it’s why those stubborn souls who persist in believing in individual rights must engage the culture, especially by wresting control of the public schools from the hands of the progressive myrmidons who have debauched it.

Certainly the particulars of the health care bill energized many people, both for and against, insofar as they actually were spelled out and became known to the public. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the real concern was that the option of personal choice was being taken away from individual citizens in this vital area of life. The power to control people’s health care, in addition to the hegemony over the one-sixth of the economy which it represents, conveys to the government an enormous amount of control over individual lives, a level of control surely unprecedented in this nation.

This is not regulation; it is rule. And the public finally realized that the current government does not intend to be gentle in its rule.

The revolt against the Tyranny of the Majority has begun. Whether it will succeed over the long term will be decided in and through the culture.

S. T. Karnick edits the American Culture, http://culture.stkarnick.com, where this article first appeared.

David Shuster has…problems. Not the least of which is his inability to conduct an interview with an ideological adversary with any level of professionalism. And by “professionalism” I mean refraining from engaging in personal feuds and/or accusing the Clintons of “pimping out” their daughter. More recent incidents have included an on-air fight in January with Andrew Breitbart and a “twitter fight” with Breitbart’s associate (and ACORN slayer) James O’Keefe. Oh, the maturity.

It is speculated that after the incident, Shuster’s twitter privileges were revoked by MSNBC. An MSNBC spokesperson told Politico that the comments were inappropriate and that they had talked to Shuster about them. However, the news outlet has issued “no comment” on whether they took action to prohibit him from tweeting. Shuster has not used twitter for nearly four weeks following the dispute except for some rather enigmatic messages last Tuesday.

The tweets look to be direct messages inadvertently disseminated to all his followers and were later deleted. He said:

Thanks shag. I hope to get the green light to twitter again soon. Cheers. d

This was followed by:

– Thankyou. I appreciate it. I’m hoping mgmnt will revisit the twitter issue soon. Thx again 4 your great support.

– Problems with direct text function.

– Yes

Oops! Is it telling when even MSNBC is embarrassed by your unhinged leftist zealotry? When asked about the tweets, MSNBC again said, “no comment.”

For those of you that don’t know, Ryan Sorba is the pompous genius who decided to wreck his big debut at CPAC by getting himself booed off stage. Watch the video below:

What a likeable guy.

“Bring it, I love it, I love it!” It’s pretty ironic that this guy who likes to show off his toughness is making a career out of attacking homosexuals. He even said to gay Republican Alex Knepper (who, in all fairness, didn’t exactly confront him politely—only click the link if you are ready for some crude remarks) that he’d fight him if his girlfriend wasn’t there. If Sorba was smart, he would have seen the future and said ex-girlfriend. If this is how he handles disputes, I can only imagine the horror he’d bring to the life of a spouse.

He goes on to defend his position by saying “civil rights are grounded in natural rights” and homosexuality isn’t natural. If I’m following him correctly, is he saying that homosexuals don’t deserve civil rights?

He ends with saying to a member in the audience—“guess what? You just made an enemy out of me!” Words cannot describe his inflated sense of self-importance. I hadn’t even heard of this guy until now and he’s out threatening people like he’s some big shot.

Perhaps what bothers me most about this incident is that it shows how hideous the political scene can be. He’s condemning CPAC for allowing homosexuals who share their agenda to co-sponsor them. If they weren’t gay, he wouldn’t care, and he feels they should just be shunned. He’ll probably argue that homosexuality is wrong according to the Bible, but if all sinners are in equal need of salvation, why is he singling them out? What makes his sin of being so prideful and judgmental any less of a sin than homosexuality?

In today’s times, it’s amazing to me that the thing that gets him most riled up is people being gay. I don’t know Sorba, but in one of my psychology classes, I did learn about this thing called “projection.” Just sayin…

“I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,” he said.

Mr. Cheney’s appearance was greeted by a standing ovation, with some even getting on top of their chairs.

“Unbelievable! Thank you!” shouted one, while a small group shouted, “Run, Dick, run.”

“A run like that is almost enough to make me want to run for office. But I’m not gonna do it,” Mr. Cheney said.

Read more here.

I admit it sounds good. Who doesn’t want to put an end to childhood obesity? We all have a stake in this fight. Obesity rates tripled in the past 30 years, and as a result American children may face a shorter expected lifespan than their parents. So what is the answer?

Michelle Obama’s answer includes a $400 million a year “Healthy Food Financing Initiative” and another $10 billion over the next decade to “update” the Child Nutrition Act. But the truth is, money can’t solve this problem. Education can’t solve this problem. The only thing that can solve this problem is the sheer will of the American people: a conscious choice to lead a healthy life.

To be sure, it’s harder to do today. Temptations are all around us. Still, obesity is not a complicated issue, as Obama herself points out.

“This isn’t like a disease where we’re still waiting for a cure to be discovered – we know the cure for this,” says Obama. “This isn’t like putting a man on the moon or inventing the Internet. It doesn’t take some stroke of genius or feat of technology.”

Exactly. Parents have all the information they can possibly swallow, which proves that spending more money trying to “educate” Americans — by, for example, requiring family friendly front-of-package labeling that discloses a product’s nutritional value — is futile. Every parent knows Froot Loops and McDonald’s aren’t good for you and fruits and vegetable are.

There is more than one way to solve this problem. If your worldview is more in line with progressives like Oprah, who repeatedly says on her program “When people know better, they do better,” you’ll do what her friend Michelle Obama suggests and pump more money trying to educate people. Like Oprah, Obama believes parents don’t know any better and that if America didn’t have so much crap available, they’d do fine. “[Parents] are bombarded by contradictory information at every turn, and they don’t know who to believe,” she says.

While it’s fine to improve school lunches and foster an all-around healthier environment, at the heart of the obesity problem is not a lack of education. It’s about something much greater: the demise of the traditional family. As I wrote in 7 Myths of Working Mothers (published in 2004), “Teaching children how to eat is an enormous task. If you want to do it right, you have to spend several hours a day in the kitchen. There is no shortcut.”

In the past, moms cooked. Modern mothers don’t cook. Either their baby boomer mothers didn’t teach them how (they were too busy making sure their daughters stayed out of the kitchen) or they’re too busy working.

“Cutting, chopping, dragging out the pans, sauteing, boiling, and broiling are not pleasures during the week. Besides, you have to change your clothes so you don’t get the suit messed up — but if you’re late getting home then you don’t have time to change and if you’re eating fast to run to parents’ night at school, then you barely have time to eat anyway,” writes Katherine Wyse Goldman in Working Mothers 101.

With fewer moms in the kitchen and fewer parents physically present to keep their children on a healthy routine (and off the television and computer), children’s health suffers. Even Obama concedes this point. In a moment of glaring honesty, she says,

“Before coming to the White House, the president and I lived like most families: two working parents — too busy, not enough time, and I found myself unable to cook a good meal for my kids. Going to fast food more than I’d like, ordering pizza, and I started to see the effects on my family, particularly my kids.”

Of course there are other factors to consider: the eradication of recess at public schools, for example. But the truth is, even if schools offered great lunches, even if recess was put back in our schools, even if restaurants stopped making super-sized portions and candy ceased to be available at Sports Authority (a big pet peeve of mine), children still have to be taught how to eat. And the only people who can do this are parents. “We have everything we need, right now, to help our kids lead healthy lives,” says Obama.

Indeed we do. Americans have never been better educated about their health than they are today. Yet we’ve never been fatter. So what’s the lesson? That Oprah’s wrong. When people know better, they do not do better. It is human nature to do things the easy way. You can throw all kinds of money at this problem, but in the end the only way to solve it is for parents to slow the heck down — and crack open a good cookbook.

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Suzanne Venker is an author, blogger, and former teacher. You can read more of her work at No Bull Mom and Right Pundits.

In a previous post I discussed the confrontation between Fox News President Roger Ailes and Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington on last Sunday’s This Week on ABC.  Let me repeat the relevant portion of the transcript from the video embedded in that post.

HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it’s not a question of picking a fight. And aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree…

AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I’m a little….

HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration [Emphasis added].

AILES: I don’t — I think he speaks English. I don’t know, but I mean, I don’t misinterpret any of his words.

When I wrote the last post it was unclear to what Ms. Huffington was referring. Since then, she has clarified what she was talking about when she said Beck was accusing the Obama administration of leading people to slaughter. Ms. Huffington offered this explanation on the Huffington Post, “Glenn Beck Goes After Me, But Forgets His Show Is on Video and Lies About Things He “Never, Never” Said”.  Please note that the video to which she is referring is embedded in Ms. Huffington’s post.

Here is Glenn Beck’s reply on his Fox News Channel program today:

First, I apologize that I was unable to find the clip Arianna Huffington was talking about on This Week for my previous post, but I had no idea that she was digging through the vaults of Beck’s show to find quotes out of context. Clearly, Glenn Beck was talking about the economy being slaughtered by the Obama Administration policies in the video Ms. Huffington cites, and she was trying to conflate a dated clip with Mr. Beck’s recent documentary about actual slaughter by ruthless socialist and communist dictators while it  was still fresh in people’s minds.

The Left is so used to considering infotainment like Jon Stewart as legitimate news sources that it should come as no surprise that they would take a clip completely out of context, and conflate it with more recent programs to make a point that cannot be substantiated.

The Huffington Post is not exactly considered a bastion of journalistic integrity but it would be nice if they, and in particular Arianna Huffington, would at least make some effort to be accurate.

After the three day spat between Arianna Huffington and Glenn Beck let me just say – set and match, Glenn Beck.

Somali Islamist rebel group al-Shabab has confirmed for the first time that its fighters are aligned with al-Qaeda's global militant campaign.

The group said in a statement that the "jihad of Horn of Africa must be combined with the international jihad led by the al-Qaeda network".

Meanwhile, several people have died in fighting in Mogadishu after government troops shelled militant positions.

Islamist insurgents control much of southern and central Somalia.

The government, which is backed by the UN and African Union, holds sway only in a small part of Mogadishu.

Despite repeated accusations by the US that al-Shabab is linked to al-Qaeda, the group denied the connection in a recent interview with the BBC.

The BBC Somali service's Mohamed Mohamed says it is the first time the group has officially confirmed its fight is linked to al-Qaeda.

More mergers and acquisitions:

'Financer of terrorism'

The group's statement also announced that its militants had joined forces with a smaller insurgent group called Kamboni.

The group, based in the southern town of Ras Kamboni, was previously allied to Hizbul-Islam - another militant group fighting the government.

Kamboni is led by Hassan Turki, a militant the US accuses of being a "financer of terrorism".

Al-Shabab said it was trying to unite all Islamist forces to create a Muslim state under its hard-line interpretation of Sharia law. [...]

AFP quoted an unnamed police official accusing the rebels of hiding in civilian areas and using "human shields"....

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.

The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year’s then unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap. The deficit would remain above $1 trillion in 2011 although the president proposed to institute a three-year budget freeze on a variety of programs outside of the military and homeland security as well as increasing taxes on energy producers and families making more than $250,000.

Echoing the pledge in his State of the Union address to make job creation his top priority, Obama put forward a budget that included a $100 billion jobs measure that would provide tax breaks to encourage businesses to boost hiring as well as increased government spending on infrastructure and energy projects. He called for fast congressional action to speed relief to millions left unemployed in the worst recession since the 1930s.

After a protracted battle on health care dominated his first year in office and led to a string of Democratic election defeats, the administration hopes its new budget will convince Americans the president is focused on fixing the economy.

via Obama unveils $3.83T budget with massive deficits – Yahoo! News.

Lori Ziganto’s latest article at iowntheworld

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Actually, Andrew Breitbart has way more than just one under his belt, but I’m only referring to the throw-down on MSNBC today. Okay, I suppose it can’t really be called a throw-down, as it isn’t a fair fight when one of the participants is, you know, intellectually-challenged, to say the least. David Shuster isn’t the brightest eco-friendly bulb on the shelf, nor is he the most honest, as he proved once again by lying to get Breitbart to appear on MSNBC. Screen shots of emails and twitter feed can be found at Big Journalism. An excerpt:

As you see, Shuster is attempting to lure me into this story based upon the false premise of his objective neutrality.  Notice he says, “As I said, I don’t have a horse in this race.”  A simple Google search of David Shuster and James O’Keefe immediately finds that Shuster went into a Twitter frenzy to tar and feather James O’Keefe and propagated what are now provably false lies about the Landrieu case.

Andrew Breitbart, one of my Thinkies Porn ™ staples, could viscerate Shuster with words with one lip tied behind his head (he’d still look totally swoony, to boot). That’s not the main issue; the issue is why on earth is David Schuster still being held up by MSNBC as an objective journalist? As Allahpundit pointed out , look who Shuster had on immediately following Breitbart — after Breitbart was off air and had no chance to respond — Eric Boehlert, of Media Matters:

Right after Breitbart was cut off and this segment ended, Shuster brought in Eric Boehlert of Media Matters to play a few minutes of softball about what a shady guy Breitbart is. If you follow AB’s Twitter feed, you know that he regularly taunts Media Matters — and Boehlert particularly — for propagandizing for the left. I’m sure having him on here and giving Breitbart no chance to respond to him was pure coincidence.

Shuster is allegedly one of MSNBC’s “reporters”. He’s not billed as a commentator on an opinion show. His twitter feed and his oft-repeated partisan actions (for instance, here and here) on MSNBC prove otherwise. Breitbart himself sums it up best:

Read the full article at iowntheworld

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Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld and Right Wing News.

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3. Cons4Palin Challenges Andrew Breitbart

The enemy will never submit to anything other than Islam or to our deadly force. It’s not surprising that General McChrystal was hand picked by Obama, a man who isn’t comfortable with the word “victory.”  We haven’t even begun to fight against Jihad and this “soldier” doesn’t have any more fight left in him. What a disgrace.

Related posts:

1. I’ve Been Fed Too Much From The Islam Is Peace Menu – Enough, Already!
2. Obama: Raising the White Flag to America’s Terrorists
3. Peter Beinart: The War on Terror Isn’t a War

The Massachusetts massacre has obviously rattled President Obama more than he cares to admit. Judging by his Ohio speech, the loss of the “Kennedy seat” has spun him around so hard, its thrown him backwards into campaign mode, which seems to be amusing even his faithful servant, Chris Matthews.

The host of MSNBC’s Hardball remarked little about the speech, other than pointing out that the president used the word fight, or a variation thereof 14 times. In a montage clip that looked like it could have been put together for the Glenn Beck show, Matthews highlights Obama vowing to fight.

“I won’t stop fighting for an economy where hard work is rewarded.”

“I’m not going to stop fighting until we have jobs.”

“I won’t stop fighting to open up government.”

“I won’t stop fighting for you.”

 While Matthews considered it “telling” I wondered, just who is he actually fighting? Then it hit me.

Watch the clip here.

It’s those pesky voters. You know, the ones that showed up for town hall meetings and then went out into the winter weather to cast their votes. Somehow, I don’t think that’s exactly what he was trying to portray. Nonetheless, once again his words doesn’t really match his actions.

The advantage that the American public has today, verses the campaign, was that his record is in full sight. It’s hard to construct an image of centrist, when you continue to govern from the hard left.  

If there was an ounce of truth in what he is saying, if in fact he were really fighting someone for the things he claims he is, like an open government (rather than cutting deals behind closed doors) or an economy where hard work is rewarded (not taxed out of existence) then he’s fighting his own party.

In this new campaign persona he has donned, he’s going for the forceful, tough-guy look, don’t you think? It’s not doing it for him.

He reminds me of the old saying, “Weak point?Pound pulpit!”

Related posts:

1. MSNBC To Talent: Stop Fighting With Each Other
2. Obama's Broken Promises
3. “Stop Making our Troops Suffer in Order to Make our Generals Happy.” Meltdown with Keith Olbermann Part 18

Wasting more Infidel time and money with more Courtroom Jihad. "Hate preacher Abu Hamza launches legal fight to keep British passport," from the Daily Mail, January 19 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):

Hate preacher Abu Hamza last night began yet another expensive legal fight against the taxpayer - this time to retain his British passport.

His appeal against a Home Office decision to remove his UK citizenship is expected to cost tens of thousands of pounds.

This is in addition to the estimated £3.5million the fanatic has already cost the public purse, including £1.1million in legal aid.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson says Hamza, who has joint UK and Egyptian nationality, is unfit to keep his British passport.

But 51-year-old Hamza claims this is unfair.

He is currently in a high security jail fighting attempts to extradite him to the U.S. on terror charges.

That case will come before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg later this year....

Despite the best and bravest efforts of our magnificent United States Military in the Iraq Front, the Sunni-Shiite Muslim volcano is still active and heading for eruption yet again.  The cover-story for the re-opening of Islam’s eternal steaming fissure is a governmental purge of as many as five-hundred candidates with alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party from participation in the upcoming March 7 elections.  But this magma-filled crater is a lot deeper than that story reveals.

The Iraq surge operation that was supposed to give the Iraqis time to stanch the Sunni vs. Shiite lava-flow was engineered by U.S. Army General David Petraeus. Our troops performed brilliantly and temporarily suppressed the bloody post-Saddam Sunni-led revolt.  But there will neither be enough American troops and nor sufficient time for the Iraqi government to plug the ever-steaming Sunni-Shiite schism.   It is time to bring American troops home and go back to the battle-plan drawing board.  The fight for our survival is not over.  It has just begun.  We must not give up, ever.  But let the Iraqis run their own show now.  We’ve done all we should do for them, and more.  Building nations in Muslim states is a losing proposition.  Getting rid of the Sharia that has flowed by Stealth onto our own shores is much more important.

From Hannah Allam and Sahar Issa in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer comes the scoop:

“BAGHDAD – Iraqi electoral officials met late into the night yesterday to decide how many of the hundreds of potential candidates tied by a government panel last week to the outlawed Baath Party of Saddam Hussein should be barred from running in the March 7 elections.

Many on the list are Iraq’s minority Sunni Muslims, once favored by Hussein, and the decision last week by the Justice and Accountability Commission, which handles Iraq’s de-Baathification efforts, outraged Sunnis.

They called the proposed ban an effort to disenfranchise Sunnis and warned that could lead to a return to support for insurgents…

…The last general elections, in 2005, dealt a blow to ordinary Sunnis, whose main political blocs boycotted rather than participate in elections that were conducted while the country was under a U.S.-led occupation…

There has been an uptick in violence in some Sunni areas in recent months. ..”

What a surprise.

A little studying of Islamic history, which our political leaders and upper level military honchos are obstinately unwilling to do, would reveal an endless war between Sunnis and Shiites that has killed innumerable Muslims. And that volcano began its eruption following the death of Muhammad in 632 A.D.  The issue was, and is, over who should have succeeded to assume the lawful leadership of the World of Islam.  Twelve or thirteen Centuries is a long time, folks.  And they’re still going at it.

To believe that an Invading Infidel Army, however brave its soldiers, is capable of quenching the roiling lava within this ancient conflict is pure delusion.   Our troops cannot re-seal the simmering Islamic sectarian volcano that exploded many hundreds of years ago.  Saddam Hussein is gone.  The Iraqis have a government.  We gave them a chance at freedom and they voted to install Sharia in their new Constitution.  They’ve had nearly seven years to get it together.  Let’s get out, now, before the next  Sunni uprising begins.  Bring the troops home and re-vamp our entire strategy for killing the jihad, because the fight for our survival has barely begun.

And while you’re at it, click here to see Diana West’s take on how the equally delusional Obama-McChrystal Afghanistan Surge Version 2.0 is going.

Related posts:

1. More Evidence That The Iraq Surge Did Not Work – Trouble Ahead?
2. Obama and Petraeus Play Whac-a-Mole – Part 2
3. Obama Tries To Play Yemen Whac-a-Mole – Without A Mallet – Part 3