Supporting Honduras

Why I Came to Honduras
By Dennis Prager
"Why have you come to Honduras?"

That is the question posed to me by Hondurans, surprised that anyone from the outside world, let alone from the media, cares enough to now visit their small country (population 8 million), a country that they themselves consider relatively insignificant.


The question is a valid one. The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert (through July 29) warning Americans against coming here. There are very few outsiders here now. The plane from Houston to San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second largest city, was almost empty, and the few passengers were nearly all Hondurans. The hotels are largely empty.

It is all eerily reminiscent of Jerusalem during the height of the Intifada terror. I went there then for the same reason I have come to Honduras now -- to broadcast my show and thereby show solidarity with an unfairly isolated country, and to encourage, by example, people to visit Israel then and Honduras now.

Honduras has joined Israel as a pariah nation. The United Nations has condemned Honduras by a vote of acclamation, and the Organization of American States has suspended it.

The way in which nearly all the world's media portray the legal, Supreme Court-ordered ouster of President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is one major reason for the universal opprobrium. Because military men took part in the deportation of the sitting president, it has been portrayed as a classic Latin American "military coup," and who can support a military coup?

The lack of context in which this ouster took place has prevented the vast majority of the world's news watchers and readers from understanding what has happened.

I wonder how many people who bother to read the news -- as opposed to only listen to or watch news reports -- know:

-- Zelaya was plotting a long-term, possibly lifetime, takeover of the Honduran government through illegally changing the Honduran Constitution.

-- Zelaya had personally led a mob attack on a military facility to steal phony "referendum" ballots that had been printed by the Venezuelan government.

-- Weeks earlier, in an attempt to intimidate the Honduran attorney general -- as reported by The Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady, one of the only journalists in the world who regularly reports the whole story about Honduras -- "some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general's office. 'We have come to defend this country's second founding,' the group's leader reportedly said. 'If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection.'"

-- No member of the military has assumed a position of power as a result of the "military coup."

-- Zelaya's own party, the Liberal Party, supported his removal from office and deportation from Honduras.

-- The Liberal Party still governs Honduras.

The United States is threatening to suspend all aid to one of the three poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere in order to force that country -- against its own laws and with the inevitable violence it would entail -- to allow Zelaya back as president.

Yet, no Honduran I talked to said he or she wanted Honduras to cave in to the American financial threat. "We will tighten our belts," one man struggling to make a living told me. Indeed, what is happening is that Hondurans are coming to realize that American aid -- even purely humanitarian aid -- comes with strings.

In our increasingly morally confused -- i.e., left-wing influenced -- world, even America is having a harder and harder time distinguishing between right and wrong as it comes to value realpolitik and a desire to be loved, from Iran to Venezuela to Honduras, more than it values liberty. To the extent that Americans will be loved, it will be thanks to supporting liberty and thanks to the work of American charities such as Cure International, with its pediatric orthopedic hospital here and in other impoverished places (www.cureinternational.org).

Let there be no ambiguity here. Little Honduras was supposed to be the next country to lose its liberties as it joined the anti-American, pro-Iranian Latin American left. But Little Honduras decided to fight back. And this has infuriated Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who will surely attempt to foment violence in Honduras.

Therefore, if you love liberty, you will do whatever you can do help Honduras resist Chavez and his allies, which include the United Nations and Organization of American States.

There are many ways to do that. Buy Honduran goods. Write your representatives in Washington to back the present, law-based Honduran government. And, yes, even visit this friendly beleaguered place. When the world's governments isolate a country, with few exceptions, that's all you need to know about who the good guys are.

Can you believe it, Cheney and CIA wanted to kill Al Qaeda

Hope and Change

The left and all the usual suspects which unfortunately claims many of the Democrats are outraged that secret spying was going on and plans were being made to kill the people who were killing us.

The brutal unfairness of it all.

It is inconceivable that we would want to win a war in such a way and not even tell all 465 of the most reliable and trustworthy secret keepers on the planet about it.

That Cheney.
That Bush.
Bush-Cheney.

Well Eric Foxtrot Holden, Nancy Foxtrot Pelosi and Mike Foxtrotter Barrack Hussein are going to fix it so that nothing like this happens again. By the way, have I shown you this clip lately?



Maybe we ought to be building an aircraft carrier or a new missile and call it the Dick Cheney for having the sense and the stones to do what a man had to do when he had to do it.

Oh the "foxtrot"'s and the "mike foxtrot" thingy, I'm just trying to get us back our library card.

Have a Nice Day or Foxtrot Yankee which ever applies.

"honestly, I won't say a word."

Diversity in the Navy

"You can put your mind at ease.."

The Naval Academy’s Double Standard
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Patrick J. Buchanan American Conservative

“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in The Washington Post.
The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted.
The Post’s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression.

“Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this week, 435 were members of minority groups. It’s the most racially diverse class in the nation’s 164-year history. Academy leaders say it’s a top priority to build a student body that reflects the racial makeup of the Navy and the nation.”

Who can be against diversity?

What the Post gets around to is that 22-year English professor Bruce Fleming objects to a race-based admissions program that was apparently used to create a class that is 35 percent minority.

According to Fleming, who once sat on the board of admissions, white applicants must have all As and Bs and test scores of at least 600 on the English and math parts of the SAT even to qualify for a “slate” of 10 applicants, from which only one will be chosen.

However, if you check a box indicating you are African-American, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian, writes Fleming, “SAT scores to the mid 500s with quite a few Cs in classes … typically produces a vote of ‘qualified’ … with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in and given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.”

If true, the U.S. Naval Academy is running a two-tier admissions system of the kind that kept Jennifer Gratz out of the University of Michigan and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

“Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s and Cs and Ds also come, though after a year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.”

If true, this is a national disgrace. It would represent a U.S. Naval Academy policy of systematic race discrimination, every year, against hundreds of white kids who worked and studied their entire lives for the honor of being appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy and becoming career officers in the Navy or Marine Corps.

If true, what Annapolis has done and is doing is worse — because it is premeditated and programmed racism — than the cowardly act of the New Haven city government in denying Frank Ricci and the white firefighters the promotions they had won in a competitive exam. At least New Haven could say it acted out of fear of being sued.

Yet, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead and the Superintendent of the Naval Academy Vice Adm. Jerry Fowler seem quite proud of what they are doing.

Fleming quotes the CNO as saying that “diversity is the number one priority” at the academy. Fowler says he wants Annapolis graduates who “looked like” the fleet, where 42 percent of enlisted personnel are nonwhite.

The diversity midshipmen, says Fleming, who teaches them, are over-represented in “pre-college lower track courses, mandatory tutoring programs and less-challenging majors. Many struggle to master basic concepts.”

Thus, though unqualified for college work, these students will be operating the most sophisticated and complex weapons systems ever built — aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers, nuclear submarines.

“First of all, we’re dumbing-down the Naval Academy,” charges Fleming. “Second of all, we’re dumbing-down the officers corps.”

Supporting Fleming’s claim, 22 percent of incoming plebes in 2009 had SAT scores in math below 600, compared to 12 percent in 2008.

If the facts are as Fleming states — the academy is accepting dumber and dumber students to get its racial composition right — who can deny that the price of diversity is deliberate acceptance of a less able and competent United States Navy?
“Diversity is our number one priority,” Roughhead is quoted. Can one imagine Adm. Chester Nimitz or “Bull” Halsey making an insipid statement like that? Can one imagine what Adm. David “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Farragut would have thought of such a policy?

Whatever happened to the Hyman Rickover-Jimmy Carter motto for the Naval Academy and U.S. Navy: “Why Not the Best?”
Consider. If hundreds of black and Hispanic kids who applied to the academy had been rejected though they had higher grades and SAT scores than those admitted, this story would not have been in the Metro section of the Post. It would have been bannered on page one. And Roughead and Fowler would be explaining to a congressional committee why they should not be relieved of their commands.

Fleming, who still teaches at Annapolis, and has likely had some unpleasant moments since he blew the whistle on his superiors, has shown considerable moral courage.

Hopefully, Congress will show the same moxy and investigate this outage. Hopefully, some of those white kids, cheated out of their life’s dream of attending the Naval Academy — while less qualified kids were admitted — will sue the academy, just like Frank Ricci and those gutsy firefighters sued the city of New Haven.

The Taliban deserved to be killed

Obama Hints at Bush Era War Crimes

Any doubts as to what this is about or where this is going? Obama is not fit to be President of the United States of America. Obama had better not even dare try and turn over anyone to the Hague. Forget about having a robust intelligence agency or special ops with steel teeth.

__________________________

Obama orders review of alleged slayings of Taliban in Bush era

(CNN) -- President Obama has ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.

"The indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention," Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview during the president's visit to Ghana. The full interview will air 10 p.m. Monday.

"So what I've asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known, and we'll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all of the facts gathered up," Obama said.

The inquiry stems from the deaths of at least 1,000 Taliban prisoners who had surrendered to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in late 2001.

The fighters were in the custody of troops led by Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a prominent Afghan warlord who has served as chief of staff of the country's post-Taliban army.

Dostum, a former communist union boss and militia leader who fought against the U.S.-backed mujahedeen in the 1980s, is known for switching sides as Afghanistan's political conflict has evolved. When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Dostum sided with the Americans and received military and CIA support to battle the Taliban.

The allegations against him first surfaced in a 2002 Newsweek report, which cited a confidential U.N. memo saying the prisoners died in cramped container trucks while being transported from their Konduz stronghold in northern Afghanistan to Sheberghan prison, west of Dostum's stronghold at Mazar-e Sharif.

At the time, the Boston, Massachusetts-based group Physicians for Human Rights said it found a mass grave in nearby Dasht-e Leili, where witnesses said the bodies of Taliban prisoners were buried. The finding prompted U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Afghanistan, to support an investigation into the allegations.

But The New York Times, citing government officials and human rights organizations, reported Friday that the Bush administration "repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode."

State Department officials recently have tried to derail Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the newspaper reported, citing several senior officials who suggested the administration "might not be hostile to an inquiry."

Dostum, a key ally of Karzai, was reportedly living in exile in Turkey until last month, when he was reinstated to his post as defense minister. He had left Afghanistan over allegations that he had kidnapped Akbar Bai, a former ally turned political rival.

When asked by CNN about whether Obama would support an investigation, the president replied, "I think that, you know, there are responsibilities that all nations have, even in war. And if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of laws of war, then I think that, you know, we have to know about that." Watch part of CNN's exclusive interview with the president »

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, on Sunday praised Obama "for ordering his national security team to collect all the facts in the Dasht-e-Leili massacre and apparent U.S. cover-up."

"U.S. military and intelligence personnel were operating jointly and accepted the surrender of the prisoners jointly with General Dostum's forces in northern Afghanistan," Sirkin said earlier in the week.

"The Obama administration has a legal obligation to determine what U.S. officials knew, where U.S. personnel were, what involvement they had, and the actions of US allies during and after the massacre. These questions, nearly eight years later, remain unanswered."

Cheney hid a Secret from Congress. God Bless Dick Cheney

The first Chaney (Lon) Phantom.

The Democrats and their ladies in waiting, MSM, are doing their best to change the subject about the worsening economy and falling support for OB-One. They are dragging out the the always scary, always evil Phanton of the Opera Absurda, Dick Cheney.

I have a hunch I know what this is about, probably the dismissing of some rather unpleasant enemies.

Just a couple of thoughts. In defense of liberty and freedom, tough men must make tough decisions. Some in the US Congress, illiterate of the laws that they past, are not to be trusted with keeping state secrets. The system does not allow the minority of the truly loathsome to be separated from the otherwise sane and loyal members. Too bad that cannot be changed, but it can't.

In a way this is similar to the Honduras situation. There are some times when you have to do the wrong thing to do the right thing. Brave and noble men do and are prepared to pay the price for doing so.

______________________

Cheney 'ordered CIA to hide plan'

BBC

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney gave direct orders to the CIA to conceal an intelligence programme from Congress, US media reports say.The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and even now its nature is not known.

CIA director Leon Panetta is said to have abandoned the project when he learnt of it last month.
He has now told a House committee that Mr Cheney was behind the secrecy, the unnamed US sources say.
There has been no comment from Mr Cheney.

War of words

The claims come amid an increasingly bitter row between the CIA and Congress over whether key information was withheld about other aspects of the agency's operations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that the CIA misled her about interrogation methods including waterboarding, while other senior Democrats have quoted Mr Panetta as admitting that his agency regularly misled Congress before he took office.

Panetta is said to have closed the programme when he discovered it

Details of the newly-revealed secret programme have still not been divulged, but sources say it did not relate to the CIA's rendition programme, interrogation methods or a controversial domestic surveillance project.
Officials quoted by the New York Times say the programme was launched by anti-terror operatives at the CIA soon after the 2001 attacks, and involved planning and training but never became fully operational.
Another unnamed official told AP it was an embryonic intelligence-gathering effort, aimed at yielding intelligence that would be used to conduct a covert operations abroad.

Sources have told a number of US media outlets Mr Cheney personally instructed the CIA to withhold information about the programme from Congress. Mr Panetta - who took over directorship of the CIA under President Obama's administration - is said to have learnt about the programme only on 23 June. The next day he called an emergency meeting with congressional intelligence committees to tell them about its existence and to say that it was being cancelled, the reports say.

Veto threat

The allegations come as the Democrats in Congress are trying push through new rules that would increase the number of members of Congress who are told about covert operations.The White House is threatening to veto the bill, fearing that operational secrecy could be compromised. The CIA has not commented on the reports of Mr Cheney's role.

"It's not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing," said spokesman Paul Gimigliano.

"When a CIA unit brought this matter to Director Panetta's attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect."

A CIA spokesman insisted earlier this week that "it is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress."

The World's toughest national anthem

John Holdren, Obama Appointee, makes Nazis look like boy scouts.

Hat tip: Zombie Post

HOLDREN CONFIRMED AS DIRECTOR OF OSTP March 20, 2009

Pledges openness, high ethical standards, and respect for scientific integrity

The Senate voted unanimously last night to confirm John P. Holdren as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President. Holdren also serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Prior to this appointment Holdren was the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He served concurrently as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and as Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center.

With advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics from MIT and Stanford, Dr. Holdren is highly regarded nationally and internationally for his work on energy technology and policy, global climate change, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he brings to the new post exceptional connections across the scientific and engineering communities.

President Obama has called Holdren “one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time”



Executive office of the POTUS
______________________________________

John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet Zombietime.com

Hat Tip: Rufus

Book he authored in 1977 advocates for extreme totalitarian measures to control the population

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

Impossible, you say? That must be an exaggeration or a hoax. No one in their right mind would say such things.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it is no hoax, no exaggeration. John Holdren really did say those things, and this report contains the proof. Below you will find photographs, scans, and transcriptions of pages in the book Ecoscience, co-authored in 1977 by John Holdren and his close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. The scans and photos are provided to supply conclusive evidence that the words attributed to Holdren are unaltered and accurately transcribed.

This report was originally inspired by this article in FrontPage magazine, which covers some of the same information given here. But that article, although it contained many shocking quotes from John Holdren, failed to make much of an impact on public opinion. Why not? Because, as I discovered when discussing the article with various friends, there was no proof that the quotes were accurate -- so most folks (even those opposed to Obama's policies) doubted their veracity, because the statements seemed too inflammatory to be true. In the modern era, it seems, journalists have lost all credibility, and so are presumed to be lying or exaggerating unless solid evidence is offered to back up the claims. Well, this report contains that evidence.

Of course, Holdren wrote these things in the framework of a book he co-authored about what he imagined at the time (late 1970s) was an apocalyptic crisis facing mankind: overpopulation. He felt extreme measures would be required to combat an extreme problem. Whether or not you think this provides him a valid "excuse" for having descended into a totalitarian fantasy is up to you: personally, I don't think it's a valid excuse at all, since the crisis he was in a panic over was mostly in his imagination. Totalitarian regimes and unhinged people almost always have what seems internally like a reasonable justification for actions which to the outside world seem incomprehensible.

Direct quotes from John Holdren's Ecoscience

Below you will find a series of ten short passages from Ecoscience. On the left in each case is a scanned image taken directly from the pages of the book itself; on the right is an exact transcription of each passage, with noteworthy sections highlighted. Below each quote is a short analysis by me.

Following these short quotes, I take a "step back" and provide the full extended passages from which each of the shorter quotes were excerpted, to provide the full context.

And at the bottom of this report, I provide untouched scans (and photos) of the full pages from which all of these passages were taken, to quash any doubts anyone might have that these are absolutely real, and to forestall any claims that the quotes were taken "out of context."

Ready? Brace yourself. And prepare to be shocked.

Page 837: Compulsory abortions would be legal

I

ndeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Page 786: Single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or they could be forced to have abortions

One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.

Page 787-8: Mass sterilization of humans though drugs in the water supply is OK as long as it doesn't harm livestock

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Page 786-7: The government could control women's reproduction by either sterilizing them or implanting mandatory long-term birth control

Involuntary fertility control
...
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
...
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.

Page 838: The kind of people who cause "social deterioration" can be compelled to not have children

If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.

Page 838: Nothing is wrong or illegal about the government dictating family size

In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

More here with all backing documents