Brutally Honest

Taking credit for that which with he had nothing to do

It takes a special amount of greasiness to do what this President is doing:

President Obama praised the growth of the U.S. energy sector during a visit to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Il., on Friday, crediting his administration’s “all of the above” energy policy for increased oil and gas production.

“We produce more oil than we have in 15 years.  We import less oil than we have in 20 years,” he said. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever have before — with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it.”

Those numbers are true. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2012, total U.S. oil production rose by about 1.1 million barrels per day over fiscal year 2007, and natural gas production rose 20 percent from 2007 to 2012.

What the president failed to mention is that the growth he is so proud of has taken place in spite of his administration’s energy policy, not because of it.

A recent study by the Congressional Research Service found that all of the increased production from fiscal years 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.

At the same time, the average daily production of natural gas on federal lands decreased by 19 percent between fiscal years 2011 and 2012, and by 33 percent between fiscal years 2008 and 2012.

An oily man attempting to rid America of the oil industry and the many jobs contained therein.

It smacks of a special kind of slickness.

"This isn't the first time that observers or artists have massively embellished the alleged evilness of the modern Catholic Church."

An atheist comes to the defense of the Catholic Church:

The publication last week of the Irish government's McAleese Report on the Magdalene laundries has proved kind of awkward for Catholic-bashers. For if McAleese's thorough, 1,000-page study is to be believed, then it would appear that those laundries were not as evil and foul as they had been depicted over the past decade.

Specifically the image of the laundries promoted by the popular, much-lauded film The Magdalene Sisters – which showed them as places where women were stripped, slapped, sexually abused and more – has been called into question by McAleese. This has led even The Irish Times, which never turns down an opportunity to wring its hands over Catholic wickedness, to say: "There is no escaping the fact that the [McAleese] report jars with popular perceptions."

In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one.

Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched." The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns".

And yet, despite the fact that the McAleese Report has utterly exploded the popular view of these laundries, some are wondering out loud if it was nonetheless legitimate and good to have produced so many embellished stories about evil nuns in recent years, as a way of highlighting the broader culture of abuse in the Catholic Church. As The Irish Times ponders: "Are factual inaccuracies in movies justified by role in highlighting issues?" The Times cites campaigners for justice who believe that "the role such [movies and books] played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment".

A playwright told the paper that even if these portrayals of laundry life were exaggerated, they "served an important function at the time" – that is, to raise awareness about the problem of abuse in Catholic life more broadly.

This sounds dangerously like a Noble Lie defence – the idea that it is okay to make things up, to spread fibs, if one is doing it in the service of some greater good. The idea of the "good lie", the lie which helps open people's eyes to the existence of wickedness, should be anathema to anyone who cares about getting history right and establishing the truth. Yet there seem to be many in Ireland who believe that telling "good lies" about the extent of abuse in Catholic institutions is an okay thing to do since it might prove cathartic for a nation allegedly in denial about its dark past.

This isn't the first time that observers or artists have massively embellished the alleged evilness of the modern Catholic Church. In September 2010, The Independentcasually reported that in America "over 10,000 children have come forward to say they were raped [by Catholic priests]". This wasn't true. For the period 1950 to 2002, 10,667 Americans have made allegations of sexual abuse against priests but the majority do not concern rape – they include other foul things, from verbal abuse through to fondling.

When the Irish government published its Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2009, newspaper headlines declared "Thousands were raped in Irish reform schools" or "Thousands raped in Ireland's Christian Brothers schools". But actually, the commission heard allegations of 68 rapes, not thousands. That is a horrific number as it is; why embellish it?

God bless Brendan O'Neill who has more to say at the link.

One wonders what percentage of folks who hate the Church or othewise have problems with her base those thoughts and feelings on lies they've been told about her.

“We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something”

The Speaker of the House said a naughty word:

A salty Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Tuesday told members of the Senate to “get off their ass” and pass a bill to replace the $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts that will kick in on March 1.

“We have moved a bill in the House twice. We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something,” Boehner told reporters in a press conference, repeating a message he had just delivered in a closed-door meeting of the House Republican conference.

The House in 2012 approved measures twice to replace the cuts known as sequestration, but because a new Congress began in January, those bills are now inoperative. Still, Boehner has been adamant that the Senate move first in 2013 if Democrats want to stave off the cuts to military and domestic programs.

“It’s time for the Senate to act,” Boehner said. “It’s not about the House. We’ve acted.”

How do you think this'll be played in Peoria?  Is Boehner playing into Obama's hands?  What would you do if you were Boehner?

Inquiring minds want to know.

In the meantime, the President is doing what the President is skilled at doing.  Lying to the American people while the press covers for him:

President Obama will visit a Virginia shipyard Tuesday to warn of the negative consequences from automatic spending cuts set to take effect later this week, in a bid to pressure congressional Republicans to accept a deal to replace the sequester that includes a mix of revenues and reductions.

The visit to Newport News Shipbuilding, the largest manufacturing employer in Virginia, is the latest in a series of public calls by the Obama administration to rally support behind what it has framed as a "balanced" approach to averting the $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts.

Balanced?

Seriously?

The last time the President negotiated a “balanced” package was January’s fiscal cliff deal. He said that only “the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans” would pay higher taxes. Yet, mid-January, with the arrival of the first paychecks of the year, we learned what “wealthy” really means: everyone. The payroll tax increase hit every worker, and the average American earning $41,000 received $32 less in his biweekly paycheck, which will add up to almost $1,000 a year.

The fiscal cliff deal showed that President Obama’s idea of “balance” is tax increases ($618 billion plus the increase in the payroll tax) and NO spending cuts. In fact, the fiscal cliff deal had a net increase in spending.

Now the President is talking “balance” again. He wants tax increases (only on “the rich,” of course) to replace spending cuts in sequestration.

Watch out, America! We have seen that “deal” before.

Yes, we have.  And I'm thinking we're about to see it again.  

But hey, at least now, Boehner's cussing about it.

“The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

Bob Woodward has joined the chorus of those of us who have for quite some time called this President an extraordinarily deceitful man:

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”

In other words, yes.

We are less than a week away from invoking that which no one thought we would.  And there will be many paying the price for the inability of this President and this Congress to do that for which they were elected.

Only in today's America will the people suffer when the political elites fail to do their jobs.

"So can we stop with the crap about Hitler's Pope already?"

That and this from RC2 at Wheat&Weeds should, but won't, put an end to Catholic bashing during WWII:

This is fascinating. At the start of WWII, the Vatican transferred much of its assets out of Nazi-held countries into the U.S. a new study reveals. 

The documents show that at the beginning of World War II, the Vatican lost no time in transferring its bonds and gold reserves from areas that were faced with the threat of Nazi occupation to the United States. The U.S. became the financial base from where the universal Church was sustained and administered, with another ten million dollars being invested in the American economy.

But that's not all: 

As Nogara’s Washington contacts confirm, as of 1939, the Vatican invested enormous sums of money in US Treasury Bills, in important manufacturing and technological companies, in companies such as Rolls Royce, the United Steel Corporation, Dow Chemical, Westinghouse Electric, Union Carbide and General Electric. Patricia McGoldrick even speaks of a flow of money from the Vatican, being used to fund the U.S. war industry which helped in defeating the Nazis.

That Pius XII was personally responsible for the rescue of more than 860,000 Jews is now a matter of record -- and now it turns out the Vatican was helping the war effort directly.

Were you aware?

Or was this what you had heard?

Hitler's Pope is a book published in 1999 by the British journalist and author John Cornwell that examines the actions of Eugenio Pacelli/Pope Pius XII before and during the Nazi era, and explores the charge that he assisted in the legitimization of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany, through the pursuit of a Reichskonkordat in 1933. The book is critical of Pius' conduct during the Second World War, criticizing him for not doing enough, or speaking out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and pope was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argued that Pius was antisemitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.^[1]

The author has been praised for attempting to bring into the open the debate on the Catholic Church's relationship with the Nazis, but also accused of making unsubstantiated claims and ignoring positive evidence. Some commentators have challenged the book's leading ideas.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} In 2004, the author stated that Pius XII "had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany. ... But even if his prevarications and silences were performed with the best of intentions, he had an obligation in the postwar period to explain those actions"^[7][8] He similarly stated in 2008 that Pius XII's "scope for action was severely limited", but that "[n]evertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did."^[9] In 2009 he described Pacelli as effectively a "fellow traveler" of the Nazis.^[10]

That same Wikipedia piece goes on:

A major response to Hitler's Pope came from University of Mississippi law professor Ronald J. Rychlak in his 2000 book on the subject, Hitler, the War, and the Pope.^[16] Rychlak was acknowledged by the Vatican to have been given special access to their closed archives for his research.^{[citation needed]}

Rychlak disagreed with Cornwell's claim of having found a "time bomb letter", arguing that the letter in question had actually been written not by Pacelli but by his assistant, and moreover had been fully published and discussed in a 1992 book by Emma Fattorini (a highly respected docent at the University of Rome).^[17] With respect to Cornwell's allegations of antisemitism, Rychlak stated that "When Pius XII died in 1958, there were tributes from virtually every Jewish group around the world".^[18][19]

Rychlak also alleged that Cornwell manipulated the photograph on the front cover of the American edition of the book, and incorrectly dated the photo as having been taken in March 1939, the month that Pacelli was made Pope. Rychlak charged that this had been deliberately in order to give the impression that Pius had just visited Hitler when, in fact, the photo had been taken in 1927 as Pius was leaving a reception held for German President Paul von Hindenburg.^[20] Robert Royal has also repeated this allegation.^[21]

In his 2005 book The Myth of Hitler's Pope, the historian and rabbi David G. Dalin countered Cornwell.^[22] Dalin suggested that Yad Vashem should honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous Gentile," concluding that "[t]he anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell...of ex-priests like James Carroll, and or other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today."^[23] Dalin called the book's conclusions "unverified" and "strongly anti-religious".^[24] Eugene Fisher, who has a PhD in Hebrew culture and education, said it was a "sad commentary on the secular media that this anti-Catholic screed was ever published".^[24]

In his book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Philip Jenkins said that Hitler's Pope could not be understood except as a series of "very low blows against the modern Catholic Church, and specifically the papacy of John Paul II."^[25]

Ken Woodward, writing in Newsweek, stated that Hitler's Pope has "errors of fact and ignorance of context [that] appear on almost every page."^[26]

More times than not, criticism of the Church has to be taken with a grain of salt.

To repeat then the wise question asked by RC2:

"So can we stop with the crap about Hitler's Pope already?"

'If you mention the word “sin”, be prepared for petulant or condescending scorn'

Tom Graffagnino is speaking truth boldly, bluntly... some might even say brutally:

We live in a time when the spiritual underpinnings of western civilization are being methodically removed and Biblical principles undermined. Biblical Christianity is held up to ridicule, often scoffed at and mocked. Mention words like holiness, repentance, atonement and redemption to someone…practically anyone… these days, and you will most likely receive either a vacant, puzzled stare or a dismissive rolling of the eyes. If you mention the word “sin”, be prepared for petulant or condescending scorn. If you mention moral truth, expect open hostility. Today, ideas such as these register like malignant alien intruders in this progressive, “All-You-Need-Is-Love-(baby)” age.

These unsafe and foreign ideas, like metastasizing cancer cells (one must imagine), must be corralled and quarantined at all costs. Traditional, orthodox Biblical concepts are being flagged and marked as culturally taboo. In some quarters, they are considered quite dangerous. In the name of public safety and…(ahem)… “tolerance”, the open expression of these traditional…(but now backward and ill-conceived)… “Bible- ideas” from God’s Word, are being purposefully marginalized and bullied into submission. Increasingly, centuries-old traditional Christian morals, views and values are judged to be intolerant, unfit, unwelcome and unworthy of consideration in post-modern public discourse. Today, only the Secular-Progressive, pop-cultural worldview… the guiding light of stylish and fashionable New Age Self-Esteem and Sensation-ism… may be presented, pushed and promoted, and it must be done so appropriately…that is to say, unopposed and unchallenged.

Actor Christopher Reeve expressed the ’enlightened’ sentiment well: "When matters of public policy are debated, no religions should have a place at the table."

Translation: Only the religion of Secular Humanism allowed. When “Superman” speaks, God is silenced. In other words, if you must be ‘religious’, keep it to yourself in private isolation. Keep silent….. Say nothing.

The intimidating, seductive and cunningly deceptive spirit of Jezebel is alive and well.

There's more at the link.

Out of curiousity, I'd like to see some comments from those who disagree with Tom, who by the way is a regular reader and may in fact be willing to engage should those comments appear.

Have at it.

"Are you [bleeping] kidding me? Are you [bleeping] kidding me?"

That's the reaction from Mollie Hemingway at GetReligion to The New York Times coverage of this past weekend's March for Life in DC:

The story that has outraged so many folks is the primary story on the march that ran in a more prominent position than the straight story. In fact, it ran above the fold of the national news section, headlined “In Fight Over Life, a New Call by Catholics.”

The lede:

The March for Life in Washington on Friday renewed the annual impassioned call to end legalized abortion, 40 years after the Roe v. Wade decision. But this year, some Roman Catholic leaders and theologians are asking why so many of those who call themselves “pro-life” have been silent, or even opposed, when it comes to controlling the guns that have been used to kill and injure millions of Americans.

More than 60 Catholic priests, nuns, scholars and two former ambassadors to theVatican sent a letter this week saying that if marchers and politicians truly want to defend life they should support “common-sense reforms to address the epidemic of gun violence in our nation.”

A caption for the piece read:

Anti-abortion protesters flooded the National Mall in Washington on Friday for the annual March for Life. Many Catholic leaders and theologians are asking why many of those who call themselves ‘pro-life’ have been silent when it comes to gun control.

You’ll notice that marchers are only called “pro-life” in a scare-quotey sense to cast skepticism on their claims. You might also wonder if the Times broke precedent to cover the massive march so as to be able to criticize it with this more prominent story, but we can’t really know the answer to that question.

We’re a family site here so I’m going to be careful here:

Are you [bleeping] kidding me? Are you [bleeping] kidding me?

What? This is the religion angle for the massive, hundreds-thousands-strong March for Life that marks the murder of 55 million unborn children over the last 40 years? We’re going to turn it into something nebulous (no specific gun controls are even discussed) related to the media’s current political cause du jour?

And it gets worse.

Believe it or not, this is basically just a press release from the same savvy, highly funded PR firm that has been rolling reporters for the last year. One is beginning to think they enjoy the ride.

The group that put out the letter is … drum roll please …

… Faith in Public Life. Yes, that Faith in Public Life! They’re the ones who came up with the highly successful “Nuns on the Bus” tour that got embarrassingly uncritical coverage for an anti-Paul Ryan campaign featuring not one, not two, but as many asthree to four nuns. We’re talking front-page coverage in major media outlets, gushy broadcasts, the works.

You couldn’t pay for coverage this nice. Except, I guess, that George Soros and his fellow donors do pay for this coverage. But you know what I mean.

Well yes, thinking people know what you mean Mollie.

It means that the media continues to be in our faces as to being in the tank for progressives and their agenda but particularly so when that agenda entails issues of faith.

Mollie actually has an additional story that's more of the same.

And so the culture wars continue, waiting for those on the sidelines to choose a side.

Have you chosen?

"DNI James Clapper was responsible for editing and merging information and constructing a report to the president"

Steve Schippert is mincing no words as to who he believes redacted the CIA talking points used by the administration to foment lies about the Benghazi murders:

Someone re-wrote the CIA report(s). CIA reports that came not from some faceless analyst in a cubicle, but from the desk of the then-Director of Central Intelligence, David Petraeus. And this was part of a vague “inter-agency process.”

Let me explain what “inter-agency process” means in this instance.

We want our various intelligence agencies to compare data and analysis, presumably to make sure we don’t miss signs of an impending attack like September 11, 2001. That’s why, after 9/11, the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created in the first place. The effectiveness of such a move/position has been debatable since “DNI” was still but a vague concept. Well, whatever the debate points, the DNI does exist.  And, in a techno-bureaucratic sense, the Director of National Intelligence is a position superior and/or supervisory over the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). On paper.  In the Obama administration, the DNI is James Clapper.

The Director of National Intelligence, while in charge on paper, is primarily a facilitator – a bureaucrat. He runs no agency directly. In fact, it is generally understood that the office of the DNI generally keeps its nose out of the specific working matters of the CIA, DIA, NSA, etc. He’s a coordinator. And, he is an editor. He gathers the various intelligence reports and – as is the position’s responsibility and purpose – compares the data and presents to the President of the United States a (presumably) fuller picture of information and events.

DNI James Clapper was responsible for editing and merging information and constructing a report to the president. That’s his job. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is, by the very definition of his job description, “inter-agency process.” He serves at the pleasure of the President of the United States.

You know James Clapper… The guy who said he learned of Petraeus’ affair only on election night. Thought it so calamitous that he advised Petraeus to resign. But not calamitous enough to inform the White House until the next day, Wednesday - if you believe his public line of  reasoning (and the Easter Bunny). And not calamitous enough to tell the President of the United States until yet another day, Thursday.

Does anyone, regardless of politics, think that neither the DNI nor the President of the United States were aware of a months-long FBI investigation of the Director of Central Intelligence Agency until election Tuesday for one and the following Thursday for the other?

That explanation floated to the public is and always was a bunch of hooey. DNI Clapper was crafting a tale protecting his boss. Just as he took the intelligence from David Petraeus and the CIA on al-Qaeda involvement in the September 11 attack in Benghazi and crafted talking points that reflected views desired or preferred by his boss, President Obama.

Inter-agency process IS the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and it’s not at Langley. It’s at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Any questions?

Wouldn't it be nice if some enterprising journalist confronted any administration official with this?

Wouldn't it be in the best interest of the country to do so?

Or isn't it more accurately put that it's in the best interest of this President not to?

Romney Did Not Lose

Guest posted, by CitizenScribe

Over the last few days I have watched as political "analysts" and assorted pundits alternately lamented and rejoiced and "analyzed" the results of the recent election.

I have watched and listened as self-important, self-appointed authorities opined and pontificated on the "reasons" for Romney's loss.

And, as I removed myself from the emotional turmoil that surrounds this event, and as I examined the actual data, I arrived at a conclusion at odds with all these "experts" and purveyors of "correct" viewpoint: Romney didn’t lose.

Oh, the election boards and Secretaries of State and other officials have "deemed" that Obama won the election, but the truth is rather otherwise.

What Obama won was the vote count. Remember the maxim from Josef Stalin:  "It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes."

I predicted that the only way Romney would lose was through vote fraud. As the election returns are now being finalized, we discover that in several districts the final counts added up to more than 100% of the actual registered voters in those areas. The "traditional" Press is, of course, entirely uninterested and incurious about these results, as we would expect from a Fourth-Estate-as-Fifth-Column media community.

Okay, fine, we now know that the election results are fraudulent, and we likewise know that the authorities and media will never acknowledge that possibility. What we now have is an "election" outcome that's "official" but not legal, "official" but not true, "official" but for which the actual evidence will be destroyed, or already has been.

There is, however, a truth that will only be buried if we allow it to be. Romney didn't lose. Romney won the support of a significant majority of Americans. The pretender in the White House knows this, his aides know this, and the people who mechanized this outcome know this. Oh, and the Press either knows it or suspects it, and is now deep enough into it that exposing it would mean revealing their own collusion and perfidy.

The reality, though, remains: the real, true majority of Americans did not ask for this outcome, did not support this result, and actually desire something very different from the plans they know this false president has for the nation.

Here is how it's supposed to work: you know that you voted for Romney (or against Obama), but now you're supposed to believe that "everybody else" wanted Obama. The "overwhelming majority" of people want Obama, want his policies, and want you to suffer. That's what the Press will tell you, that's what the authorities will tell you, that’s what the "official" version will be.

You are now supposed to "accept" your fate. You are now supposed to sit down and shut up. You are now supposed to "accept" the so-called "will of the people." That’s what you’re supposed to do.

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GIVE UP. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SUCCUMB. You're SUPPOSED to stop fighting, stop resisting, stop speaking out.

Well?

Yeah, okay, I can't prove any of that. I don't have any evidence that supports it. What I DO have is an analytic mind and a series of observations that inform me that the "result" we got is not supported by the events leading up to it.

So what I know and what I can prove are at odds. But there are times when you have to act on what you know, even when you’re being falsely told that what you know is wrong.

I'm still formulating how I need to proceed in light of this new understanding, but what I know, and what I need to factor into my future calculations is the fact that we — the people who love our country and favor fiscal sanity and subscribe to the ideals of the Founders — are not outnumbered. We remain in the majority.

I can't remember ever having been here. I grew up in the '60s, but served in the military rather than in Haight-Ashbury. I raised my family to be responsible and self-sufficient, just as my parents did. I guess you could say I was more or less aligned with the "establishment" of the day, even though I have for years disagreed with the trend toward more socialism and fascism.

Today, the Establishment has crossed a line. They have arrayed themselves against the majority of the American people.

I won't be joining them. I won’t be agreeing with them. I won't be accepting their "truth." I will, instead, stand for my truth. And I suspect I am not alone.

The usurpers (for I can't reasonably refer to them otherwise) are now the "establishment" even though they are really in the minority.

So … that makes us … what?

Well, what do you call someone who stands against the Establishment?

Feels kinda odd to be in those shoes, doesn’t it?

Welcome to the Resistance.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive

Guest posted by tim, The Godless Heathen

Fox News -

A series of internal State Department emails obtained by Fox News shows that officials reported within hours of last month's deadly consulate attack in Libya that Al Qaeda-tied group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.

The emails provide some of the most detailed information yet about what officials knew in the initial hours after the attack. And it again raises questions about why U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, apparently based on intelligence assessments, would claim five days after the attack that it was a "spontaneous" reaction to protests over an anti-Islam film.

Ansar al-Sharia has been declared by the State Department to be an Al Qaeda-affiliated group. A member of the group suspected of participating in the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi has been arrested and is being held in Tunisia.

The emails obtained by Fox News were sent by the State Department to a variety of national security platforms, whose addresses have been redacted, including the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon, the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence.

Fox News was told that an estimated 300 to 400 national security figures received these emails in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding. People who received these emails work directly under the nation’s top national security, military and diplomatic officials, Fox News was told.

The timestamps on the emails are all Eastern Time and often include the subheading SBU, which is shorthand for “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

The third email came at 6:07 p.m. ET and was sent to a different email list but still includes the White House Situation Room address and a subject line of “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack (SBU).”
“Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli," the email reads.

Read more the rest of the damning evidence here.