Your Handy Twittonary

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Cheney Responds To The CIA Witch Hunt

H/T to Dan Riehl at Riehl World View.

Vice President Dick Cheney responded with force to the political hacks at the Second Coming of Christ’s Justice Department.

Via The Weekly Standard:

The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002. The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions. President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

Way to go. I only wish that President Bush would have defended himself or even now would defend himself. He should have unleashed Cheney while he was still in office.

If Cheney ran for president, I’d vote for him in a nanosecond.

Here Come The Internet Speech Police

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

While The Messiah unleashes his diversity goon from the FCC, who happens to be a fan of Hugo Chavez, on His political foes on talk radio, Congress is about to give Him the power to take over and shut down the Internet, another source of criticism of Him and of His policies.

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

This should send chills down  the spine of every libertarian- and freedom-minded person in America. What type of “emergency” would cause this to happen? No one knows.

And to think the very same people who hallucinated that George Bush and Dick Cheney were somehow taking away Americans’ rights on almost a daily basis are silent — cue the chirping crickets — when it’s their Anointed One.

Folks, people like Barack Hussein Obama, a narcissist with a messianic complex, do not like to be opposed. Look at Him telling ordinary Americans opposing His health care plan, known here as ChappaquddiCare — to shut up and get out of His way. Almost like a petulent child but far more malevolent.

They’re emulating Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

The vagueness should frighten anyone. Again, what would qualify as an “emergency”? A terrorist attack? A pandemic, such as swine flu? Or just too doggone much speech goin’ on out there?

You think you had troofer moonbats after 9/11? Wait until there is a terrorist attack followed by Obama and his minions taking over the Internet (the state-run media will already have surrendered control to Him, not that they haven’t already), talk radio and cable news.

Anyone claiming 9/11 was an inside job, a Reichstag fire for the Bush administration, is certifiably insane. But this new scenario would certainly give cause to think about what happened. What really happened? No one would know, because the government would control all the means of communication.

It’s the foot-in-the-door to martial law.

A One-Man Stand

You have to like this guy’s moxy and persistence.

From Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit comes word of a high school football coach who is conducting a one-man campout outside of the office of his congresscritter. And he’s not leaving until the congresscritter holds a public meeting.

A local football coach is sleeping outside Congressman Zack Space’s Zanesville Office and says he won’t leave until Space holds a public meeting.

Dave Daubenmire of Pass The Salt Ministries and coach at Fairfield Christian Academy in Lancaster, says he’s wants Congressman Space to hold a meeting in Licking, Knox or Muskingum County so that his constituents of the 18th district can ask questions about his policies.

“They are putting a burden of debt upon our grandchildren, kids that aren’t even born yet and I think if Zack Space is going to represent the people of the 18th district he ought to have the courage to tell us why they’re doing it, what his policies are and where he stands so we can figure out if he is for us or against us,” says Daubenmire.

Oh, the congresscritter’s office went out of its way to accuse Daubenmire of grandstanding, saying he rejected a one-on-one meeting. Daubenmire wants a public meeting between the congresscritter and his constituents.

Daubenmire says he doesn’t want a one-on-one meeting, it needs to be public.

“A town hall meeting. I don’t want a private meeting. I don’t want to go behind closed doors and have Zack Space say one thing behind closed doors and another thing when we go into public. I want a public town hall meeting where Zack Space can answer the questions of his constituents, but up to this point he has not been willing to do that.”

The nerve of him to actually expect a congresscritter to meet with the people he represents amd who pay his salary.

Gateway Pundit has a picture of Daubenmire with a sign saying “Can Zack come out to play?”

Hilarious.

More Despicable Conduct By The Left

From Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House comes the information that a blogger at the PuffHo has implied that Mary Jo Kopechne is somehow a martyr for Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy’s Senate career.

Still, ignorance doesn’t preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.

Of course, Mary Jo Kopechne was once again unavailable for comment.

Moran writes:

I don’t know about you, but I sure would rather be alive and kicking than being the “catalyst” for the notion that Kennedy could never be president because of my death and this was somehow a good thing because of all the good my killer did during the rest of his life, being forced to abandon his presidential aspirations and serve in the senate.

Mary Jo Kopechne – Martyr to Kennedy’s failed ambition.

Andrew Breitbart reminds us via Twitter of just how classy the Left was on the passing of Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan.

And we can all picture the venom when Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh pass away.

The Reasons Behind The CIA Witchhunt

Andrew McCarthy thinks he knows why all of a sudden Attorney General Eric Holder with a wink-and-a-nod from Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama.

It has nothing to do with any alleged torture — which didn’t happen in any event.

“This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law. And to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it.”

It was springtime in Berlin and Eric Holder, a well-known “rule of law” devotee, was speaking to the German press. He’d been asked if his Justice Department would cooperate with efforts by foreign or international tribunals to prosecute U.S. government officials who carried out the Bush administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policies. The attorney general assured listeners that he was certainly open to being helpful. “Obviously,” he said, “we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it.”

As the Associated Press reported at the time, Holder was “pressed on whether that meant the United States would cooperate with a foreign court prosecuting Bush administration officials.” He skirted the question in a way Americans ought to find alarming. The attorney general indicated that he was speaking only about “evidentiary requests.” Translation: The Obama administration will not make arrests and hand current or former American government officials over for foreign trials, but if the Europeans or U.N. functionaries (at the nudging of, say, the Organization of the Islamic Conference) want Justice’s help gathering evidence in order to build triable cases — count us in.

In other words, while the new administration couldn’t be counted on to actually arrest President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials in the outgoing administration and turn them over to the International Court for war crimes trials, they’d be all too willing to help build the case.

Building on that as a foundation — namely seeing the concept of international law and a foreign kangaroo court being above the U.S. Constitution, McCarthy goes further.

Why would Holder retrace this well-worn ground when intimidating our intelligence-gatherers so obviously damages national security? The political fallout, too, is palpable. Leon Panetta, the outraged CIA director, is reportedly pondering resignation. President Obama, laying low in the tall grass on his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, is having staffers try to put distance between himself and his attorney general. It is unlikely that many will be fooled: Both Obama and Holder promised their antiwar base just this sort of “reckoning” during the 2008 campaign. But the question remains, Why is Holder (or, rather, why are Holder and the White House) instigating this controversy?

I believe the explanation lies in the Obama administration’s fondness for transnationalism, a doctrine of post-sovereign globalism in which America is seen as owing its principal allegiance to the international legal order rather than to our own Constitution and national interests.

Recall that the president chose to install former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as his State Department’s legal adviser. Koh is the country’s leading proponent of transnationalism. He is now a major player in the administration’s deliberations over international law and cooperation. Naturally, membership in the International Criminal Court, which the United States has resisted joining, is high on Koh’s agenda. The ICC claims worldwide jurisdiction, even over nations that do not ratify its enabling treaty, notwithstanding that sovereign consent to jurisdiction is a bedrock principle of international law.

As a result, there have always been serious concerns that the ICC could investigate and try to indict American political, military, and intelligence officials for actions taken in defense of our country.

To this point, as a nation we have rejected the concept of global government and especially the International Criminal Kangaroo Court. We have not signed on to the provision that the U(seless) N(itwits) have demanded that anything seen as cruel or degrading treatment is torture. Sorry, but second-hand smoke and a bare light bulb don’t qualify. Neither does waterboarding.

It has to do with putting the United States under the control of a transnational order.

Once again, to use the Ovid quotation:

Treason doth never prosper, what is the reason? For if it doth prosper, none dare call it treason.

Selling out the U.S. Constitution to the concept of global government is treason. Or damn close to it.

The Death Of The Rule Of Law

Daniel Griswold at The Cato Institute has pronounced the rule of law dead in Massachusetts.

What happened? The Swimmer assumed room temperature.

When the possibility existed that the French-looking Senator, John F-ing Kerry — by the way, did you know John Kerry served in Vietnam? — might be elected president, Democrats in Massachusetts changed existing law to prevent Republican Gov. Mitt Romney from appointing a successor, instead requiring a special election after five months.

Now that Ted Kennedy has taken the Eternal Dirt Nap and a Democrat, Duval Patrick, is now governor and the Democrats desperately need that 60th vote in the Senate, Democrats are moving to change the law back to the pre-2004 state, allowing Patrick to appoint the successor to The Swimmer.

Notes Griswold:

This is a textbook example of how politicians routinely ignore The Rule of Law in pursuit of political aims.

In his book, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek devoted an entire chapter to the importance of the rule of law to a free society. “Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles know as the Rule of Law,” Hayek write. He defined the phrase to mean “that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” and not subject to be changed arbitrarily depending on circumstances.

By the way, if the Republicans tried this in any state, there is no way the state-run media would allow them to get away with it.

The Impact Of Cap-And-Tax On Wisconsin

Frightening figures courtesy of the Heritage Foundation on what passage of the cap-and-trade legislation, essentially a massive carbon tax, would have on Wisconsin.

The bill, also known as Waxman–Markey, includes a number of alarming provisions, chief among them a cap-and-trade program that would attempt to curb global warming by imposing strict upper limits on the emission of six greenhouse gases, with the primary emphasis on carbon dioxide (CO2). The mechanism for capping these emissions requires emitters to acquire federally created permits (or “allowances”) for each ton of greenhouse gas emitted.

Because these allowances carry a price—and because 85 percent of the United States’ energy needs come from carbon-emitting fossil fuels—Waxman–Markey is best described as a significant tax on energy use. Since everything Americans use and produce requires energy, the tax hits U.S. pocketbooks again and again. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis forecasts severe consequences, including skyrocketing energy costs, millions of jobs lost, and falling household income and economic activity—all for negligible changes in the global temperature.[1]

Workers and families in Wisconsin may be wondering how cap-and-trade legislation would affect their income, their jobs, and the cost of energy. Implementing Waxman-Markey would put a chokehold on Wisconsin’s economic potential, reducing gross state product by $8.95 billion in 2035.

Here’s a graphic demonstration of the crippling impact on us here: 

Those figures are breathtaking in the devastating impact on the state’s economy, already reeling from years of tax increases and runaway spending under the leadership of Gov. Doyle and the Democrats.

Kill another 30,000 jobs? Check. Make each family pay another $500 in energy costs? Check. Drain another $5 billion out of the state revenue? Check. Another $2 billion in personal income? Check.

Consumers would be hit hard. Between 2012 (when the restrictions first apply) and 2035 (the last year of this analysis), the prices of electricity and gasoline will rise sharply when compared to prices in a world without cap and trade. By 2035, Americans living in the state of Wisconsin will see their electricity prices rise by $943.29 and their gasoline prices rise by $1.39 per gallon solely because of Waxman-Markey.

Another $1.39 per gallon in gas prices from this bill alone. The station closest to my house has gas at $2.55 per gallon. That increase would make it back near $4 per gallon and that’s not figuring in other factors that would cause prices to rise. No wonder experts say gas prices would triple or even quadruple over what they are currently under cap-and-tax.

And for what? To fight a hoax, a fraud known as global warming?

Here’s another eye-opener. Look at the long-term economic damage as well as the massive job losses from this atrocity:

This will ruin the state’s economy and workforce with absolutely no benefit and for absolutely no reason other than to return the United States to the agrarian society it was in the 18th and antebellum 19th century.

For those of you who graduated from Racine Unified, antebellum means “before the Civil War,” which was fought between 1861 and 1865. Thought I’d add that, since surveys indicated an increasing number of products of gummint-run skoolz can’t even identify what century in which the Civil War was fought, let alone when it actually took place.

Here’s a graphic representation of the skyrocketing energy costs from passage of cap-and-tax:

Frightening. $5 a gallon gasoline without any other factors being included as a result of this legislation. Another $1,000 per year per household in energy costs.

Their answer? Wind and solar. And mass transit.

Once again, it’s all about control. Just like the health care takeover plan isn’t about getting health care to those in need of it, it’s about control. Government control. Of you. Of me. Of all of us.

Go here to check the impact of this bill in every state.

How The War On Terror Will Be Lost

We are setting on a path toward losing the war on terror, er, the overseas contingency operation, by turning it over to the lawyers, much as we did during the Clinton era.

In fact, Daniel Henninger has already pronounced it over. And we lost. In light of the decision to release the Lockerbie terrorist and Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to assign a special prosecutor to investigate jihadist treatment at Club Gitmo, the war is indeed over.

[I]t’s a death sentence for an effective war on terror. It makes what’s left of the war—telephone wiretaps or monitoring money transfers—vulnerable to a steady stream of congressional and legal objection. That lets the Obama administration evade political responsibility by letting others wind down the war on terror.

The message of Scotland’s release and the Holder decision is that the will born in the wake of 9/11 is waning. The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West’s caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back. The second war on terror is in the future.

Read the whole thing. Henninger quotes Shakespeare: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Wish we could, because in this case, the lawyers may very well wind up killing us.

Weakness Is Provacative

The image of weakness being projected by Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama around the world, from His worldwide apology tours to His willingness to meet with His fellow totalitarian thugs without any preconditions to His “Blame America First” approach to foreign policy does nothing but encourage our enemies.

Writing at Human Events, Byron Del Monte uses the recent release of one of the Lockerbie terrorists, an event that exploded in the face of the British government, to connect the dots of the appeasement approach being practiced in Washington:

Obama has been espousing a similar argument of respecting terrorist “rights” since his first days in office. Instead of focusing on winning the war in Afghanistan (something the President campaigned on), the President has been all but consumed with ensuring the rights of terrorists are respected and prosecuting former Bush Administration officials. President Obama, remarking on Guantanamo in May of this year, said, “We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and keeps us safe.” Placing the rights of terrorists above protection of the American people is only one facet of the new “Obama Doctrine,” where we coddle insolent dictators, terrorists, and bullies.

Read the rest of it. Del Monte details how The Anointed One has done nothing but appease our enemies and send signals that we are now an international weakling.

Weakness is more than the lack of power. No one would question America’s military power; it did not stop the 9/11 hijackers from killing thousands of our people in the broad light of day. Weakness is also not having the will to carry out the acts that protect your citizens. Whether it is the release of a prisoner so he can go home to his family or the distaste for counter terrorism policies that are effective but politically bitter, these acts reinforce for enemies a key lesson — they can attack us and suffer little to no consequence.

If I now look at the United States, from the outside, based on this new weak foreign policy, I would conclude with the exception of Pakistan and Afghanistan the United States will take no direct action against terrorists. I would conclude that the U.S. would move swiftly to extract itself from Iraq. I would conclude the U.S. is deeply confused about how to govern international affairs and sends mixed messages to countries. I would conclude that for President Obama, political expediency is more important than any set of core values. Finally, given Al Megrahi’s release, and the inability of the U.S. to preclude it, I would conclude that the western coalition is all but imploding.

In short, I would conclude that the global environment is one of weakness, and — as Donald Rumsfeld said — weakness is provocative.

Weak. As in the days of Jimmy Carter. Or perhaps even worse. Calling the War on Terror an “overseas contingency operation” and relabeling terrorism as a “man-made disaster” just reinforces that image of weakness.