Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy by Ian Douglas
Ian Douglas is one of the many pen names of William Keith, Jr. He has multiple best selling series under multiple pen names. He cut his teeth on SciFi back in the late 1970s, along with his late brother Andrew, working on the classic SciFi RPG, Traveller.
One week ago today, a low flying 747, being followed by an Air Force F-16, buzzed lower Manhattan.
Residents of New York City remember all too well the results of low flying passenger jets from the morning of September 11, 2001. That is a date burning into the memory of most Americans.
Most, not all. There are those, who unlike the majority of Americans, live in a 9/10/2001 world. People who think there is no real terrorist threat and that a strong military will incite America’s enemies to violence.
Let’s get back to that low flying jumbo jet being followed by an Air Force F-16 over lower Manhattan. It wasn’t another terrorist attack. It was one of the 747 aircraft used by the US Air Force to transport the President. Why was it flying low, unannounced over lower Manhattan? Well, an idiot by the name of Louis Caldera, hired by our Dear Leader decided that some new publicity photos of Air Force One were needed. Caldera, the current head of the White House Military Office, is a finance guy with a history of overseeing companies currently under investigation for fraud.
How did the residents of New York City respond to a low flying jumbo jet buzzing the site of the 9/11/02 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers? Predictably, there was panic and buildings were evacuated. NYC Mayor Bloomberg, who was not notified of the event, had the following to say about it:
“First thing is I’m annoyed – furious is a better word – that I wasn’t told. “Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo op right around the site of the World Trade Center catastrophe defies imagination. Poor judgment would be a nice ways to phrase.”
“Had I known about it I would have called them right away and asked them not to. The good news is it was nothing more than an ill considered, badly conceived, insensitive photo op – with the taxpayers’ money.”
Wait! It gets better! The White House Military Office decided that it would better if nobody knew about this! When the FAA contacted the NYPD and other city officials, they were specifically warned not to tell anyone about the planned buzzing of Ground Zero.
The list of people not to be told apparently included White House Clown, official title: Press Secretary, Gibbs.
Let’s get the heart of the matter here. Team Lightbringer clearly lives in a 9/10/2001 world. No sane American would have authorized a large passenger jet to buzz Ground Zero after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The only people who have live in a fantasy world that believes what Michael Moore tells them.
We have team running the executive branch of the United States government who deny the reality of serious threat not only to the United States of America, but western civilization as well. The Islamofascist terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11/01 (and many other attacks around the world prior to and after that date) are not just protesting US policy in the Middle East, they are attacking us because of our other policies as well. These are our policies of not stoning homosexuals to death, for not beating women who wear clothes that show more than their eyes in public, and our policy of not committing genocide against Jews worldwide.
Having people in such serious denial over reality in charge of our nation’s foreign policy and our military could have dire effects. Remember that next time you go to vote.
Update: It’s estimated that it cost the taxpayers $328,835 to terrorize the resident of New York City and now Team Lightbringer isn’t going to release the photographs.
You remember the photographs, that was the reason Obama appointee Louis Caldera had a large passenger jet fly low over Ground Zero unannounced.
Don Surber points out that our Dear Leader won’t release photographs of his administration terrorizing Americans, but it will release photographs of “alleged abuse by US personnel of war on terror detainees during the Bush administration…” So remember kids, no matter how badly BHO screws up, the democrats will try to spin it as “Bush’s fault!”
Ask any leftist and odds are that they think that Fox News is “far right wing” and just repeats what the RNC tells them.
If you ask a few more questions, you’ll find out that these same people think CBS/ABC/MSNBC/CNN & the New York Times are “centrist” and not pushing any agenda.
Then they will tell you that they get most of their “news” from Jon Steward, that Olbermann really is continuing in the footsteps of Morrow, and that Michael Moore makes documentaries.
They passionately believe all of this,even though none of it has any basis in reality.
…Fox News showed more structural bias toward Democratic candidate John Kerry than any other network, and that its bias was stronger than that on other networks. This was true contrary to criticism cited by Fico in which former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite labels Fox News as a “far-rightwing organization.”
That means Kerry and his supporters received more air time on Fox and were more likely to receive primary placement in stories. The four determinants of structural bias were the number of supporters quoted or given a chance to speak, the candidate whose supporters spoke first, the time they spent speaking, and whether there were visuals of both candidates or only of one. Neither the tone of the quotes used nor talk and commentary were analyzed, but only packaged news stories and segments.
Not quite what you would expect from a “far right wing” news organization.
Let us look at another example. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University had this to say on bias and coverage of the News media.
“…Fox News Channel’s evening news show provided more balanced coverage than its counterparts on the broadcast networks.”
Wow! Balanced coverage from Fox News? Point this simple and verifiable fact out to a leftist and it’s a safe bet that they will deny it.
The CMPA goes on:
Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly – 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates – 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.
On the three broadcast networks, opinion on Democratic candidates split 47% positive vs. 53% negative, while evaluations of Republicans were more negative – 40% positive vs. 60% negative. For both parties combined, network evaluations were almost 3 to 2 negative in tone, i.e. 41% positive vs. 59% negative.
If the leftists are getting a simple and basic fact about media bias wrong, it begs a couple of questions. One, are they seeing MSNBC, the self proclaimed “Obama network”, as “centrist” because they are personally skewed to the Far Left? Two, what other simple and basic facts are they getting wrong?
The far hard left extremist barking moonbats who supported our Dear Leader are not going to be happy with him. They wanted Camp X-Ray at Gitmo shut down and the terrorists released.
Well, once in the Oval Office, the leftist barking moonbat rhetoric ran straight into the brick wall of reality. First, BHO stopped calling the terrorists “enemy combatants”, so in the left’s “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” world, there were no more “enemy combatants” at Camp X-Ray.
Now, our Dear Leader is planning on continuing the military courts to try the terrorists. A policy of GWB that drove the leftist extremist moonbats out of their trees
Obama has embraced many of the same positions that liberals and Obama himself criticized. For example:
* Obama and members of his administration have embraced the use of rendition. Many of Obama’s most ardent defenders blasted progressives who criticized Obama on rendition as jumping the gun. Today, their arguments look even more problematic than in the past.
* Obama has invoked the maligned “state secrets” defense as a complete bar to lawsuits challenging potential human rights and constitutional law violations.
* Obama has argued that detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan do not qualify for habeas corpus rights, even though many of the detainees at the facility were not captured in the war or in Afghanistan.
* Even though it no longer uses the phrase “enemy combatants,” the Obama administration has taken the position that the government can indefinitely detain individuals, whether or not they engaged in torture and whether or not they fought the United States on the “battlefield.” This logic combined with the denial of habeas to detainees in Afghanistan could make Bagram the functional equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.
If the New York Times article is accurate, then the use of military tribunals issue will join the list of policies that Obama has endorsed, despite the loud liberal criticism that Bush received when he did the same things.
Yup, that smell in the air is left hypocrisy. As one commenter accurately put it, “What you are really saying is that the Democrats used National Security as a political weapon strictly for gaining power.”
The late Brandon Lee and Powers Booth in a good old fashioned action movie. Bad guys, good guys, gun fu, and Kung Fu. Fire up the popcorn for this one.
Just to check the pulse of America and see how things are trending, let’s take a look at what Americans are reading.
Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark Levin is currently holds the #1 position in sales ranking for all books at Amazon.com.
The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World is a very respectable #19 in the Amazon sales ranking.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning comes out in Paperback in June. I’m expecting a jump in sales then.
Kristin Tant is a single mom and a small business owner.
She has a few things to say to our Dear Leader.
It’s worth the read.
In state well know for out of control government spending, corruption, and general inefficiency, our completely out of touch reality and massively democrat majority legislature has decided to raise the sales tax from 5% to 6.25%.
Even our clueless “Cadillac of Governors” has figured out that this is a bad idea and threated to veto it. So his democrat allies in the State House responded by passing the bill with a veto proof majority.
Let us go back to 2001. Squishy lefty RINO Arlen Spector condemned Vermont Senator Jim Jefford’s cowardly move to the democrat party. According the the LA Times:
Specter said then- Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords’ decision to become an independent was disruptive to the functioning of Congress. He proposed a rule forbidding party switches that had the effect of vaulting the minority to majority status in the middle of a congressional session.
“If somebody wants to change parties, they can do that,” Specter said at the time. “But that kind of instability is not good for governance of the country and the Senate.”
Let us also look at Arlen Spector’s own word from earlier this month:
“A vote for Specter is a vote for denying Harry Reid and the Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate.”
The bottom line is that Spector looked at the polls for the Republican Primary in Pennsylvania and saw that he was going to loose big time. Given that Pennsylvania went for our Dear Leader in 2008, and that most of those votes came out of Spector’s base of Philadelphia, he decided that he had a better change of re-election as a democrat in the general election.
Arlen Spector’s party switch isn’t about Republican or democrat policies. It’s all about Arlen Spector.
Update: Spector’s switch isn’t being praised by everybody on the left. Rachel Maddow is now calling him a DINO.
Bloody fornicating brilliant. I’m betting she wrote this herself.