Palin Rising

by Matt Patterson

I have in the past been a skeptic of Sarah Palin. Not of her political talent, which is considerable, but of her grasp of – and even interest in – substantive policy issues.
When she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska on July 3rd, I wondered if she simply hadn’t the stomach for national politics. And the rambling, disjointed speech she gave that day left me wondering if she even knew why she was making such a momentous and potentially career-crippling decision.

But then a funny thing happened: In November, Mrs. Palin debuted her memoir “Going Rogue” with great sales, which was not a surprise, but also with a luminous and successful press tour, which was. The interviews she gave in promotion for her book (at least the ones that I saw) were much improved from those given during the 2008 presidential campaign. Palin seemed to speak about both herself and national issues with greater verve and confidence.
Other stars are aligning for Palin:

Several of her potential rivals for the 2012 Republican nomination find themselves suddenly, perhaps fatally, compromised by recent events.
Mitt Romney, for example, is watching the national health care debate work against his presidential ambitions, as the tortured and torturous Senate bill resembles more and more the regime he helped institute in Massachusetts – not something that will endear him to conservative primary voters enraged at Democrats’ health care offensive.
And there is Mike Huckabee, who charmed his way into a television hosting gig at FOX News after the campaign. Revelations that a man suspected of shooting and killing four police officers in Washington state had been granted clemency years ago by Huckabee, then governor of Arkansas, are widely believed to have seriously damaged his future electoral chances.
As a result, should they decide to run again both Romney and Huckabee will certainly find their respective tenures as governor under renewed and perhaps unwelcome scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Palin appears to be having a ball, trading comedic blows with William Shatner on the Tonight Show, receiving throngs of adoring fans at bookstores across the heartland, and weighing in on global warming in the pages of The Washington Post.
Could she be preparing, in a serious way, to become a serious candidate? It certainly looks that way to this amateur Palin watcher. If she can convince independent voters that she understands the issues, has thought them through and come to reasonable judgments about possible courses of action…if, if, if.
A lot of stars have yet to align for Palin’s path to the presidency to be illuminated. But that no longer seems impossible to me. In fact, I can now quite clearly imagine that someday, someone may say the words “Madam President,” to a moose-hunting mom from Alaska.
Wouldn’t that be something?

Big Government

NY Lawmaker Wants Ethnic Profiling of Terror Suspects

‘Underwear Bomb’ Packed Enough Explosive to Bring Down Flight 253

Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by U.S.

Former Guantanamo Prisoners Believed Behind Northwest Airlines Bomb Plot; Sent to Saudi Arabia in 2007

By BRIAN ROSS, JOSEPH RHEE and REHAB EL-BURI

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans. American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials. ABC News described their enrollment in the art therapy program in a January report. Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.

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Both Saudi nationals have since emerged in leadership roles in Yemen, according to U.S. officials and the men's own statements on al Qaeda propaganda tapes.

Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.
In its Monday statement claiming responsibility for the Northwest bombing, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a "hero" and a "martyr" and lauded him for beating U.S. intelligence.
The two-page written claim included a photo of Abdulmutallab and boasted of Al Qaeda's success in designing "advanced explosive packages" that can pass through airport screening undetected.
The statement also asks for attacks upon Americans in the Arabian peninsula, and promises further attacks on the American people.

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger...

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

(ABC News)

Abdulmutallab: Northwest Airlines Bomb Suspect

The suspected bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told FBI agents he was trained for his Christmas Day mission in Yemen by top leaders of al Qaeda who provided him with the explosive materials.
"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees.
Saudi officials concede its program has had its "failures" but insist that, overall, the effort has helped return potential terrorists to a meaningful life.
One program gives the former detainees paints and crayons as part of the rehabilitation regimen.

A similar rehabilitation program in Yemen was stopped because so many of the detainees quickly joined with al Qaeda or its affiliates, the official said.
The increased role of al Qaeda in Yemen, which joined with the Saudi al Qaeda unit, has underscored the problem of how to best handle the repatriation of detainees at Guantanamo.

By ABC NEWS

How Dems Caused the Crash

Posted by Nikitas3 (Profile)

Saturday, December 26th at 9:01AM EST

This is an encore editorial about the economic collapse, outlining the myriad ways in which the Democrats and their policies, listed below, caused the financial meltdown in the first place. Please feel free to print out this page and distribute it to your liberal friends.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, passed by a Democrat Congress and signed into law by Democrat president Jimmy Carter, forced banks to make mortgage loans to “low-income” people and forbade banks from ‘redlining’, a practice in which banks would not loan money in certain neighborhoods seen as risky areas. CRA eventually led to mortgages not only for “low-income” people but for “low- and moderate-income” people, which is the way that socialism always expands itself… incrementally. Most of these loan recipients had little, poor or no credit history, had poor employment histories and prospects, and eventually had high rates of default on loans. None of them should have owned homes in the first place, but should have remained renters.

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a left-wing activist group that has accessed huge amounts of money from the federal government. Besides engaging in massive fraud in voter registration, ACORN has used pressure tactics like on-site protests and legal filings against banks that ACORN has claimed were not loaning enough money to “the poor”, leading banks to make trillions in bad loans to people who could not pay the loans back. Obama was closely associated with ACORN in the 1990s.

The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac) are government-sponsored agencies founded, run and staffed by Democrat liberals. These agencies for decades purchased the risky loans that the CRA and ACORN were forcing banks to make. Since these agencies were buying the loans, banks felt comfortable making the loans because the government (the taxpayers) then was assuming the risk when it purchased the loans. Trillions in bad ‘subprime’ loans are the spark that caused this whole financial crisis to explode.

President Barack Obama, who as a United States senator from Illinois voted in 2005 against a Republican plan to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because he was receiving large campaign contributions from both.

The Clinton administration in the 1990s started to agitate for more home loans for poor people even after CRA. Between 1997 and 2001, Andrew Cuomo, Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advocated a system where poor people needn’t even have had an income nor a job (No Income No Job or NINJA loans) to get a bank loan that then would be purchased by Fannie and Freddie. Andrew Cuomo is the son of Mario Cuomo, the liberal former governor of New York state and a big-time Democrat activist.

Democrat US representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Democrat US senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, two of the most powerful people in Washington both said in public statements over several years that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sound institutions. Frank said so as recently as July 2008. Yet both agencies went into conservatorship in September 2008. Meanwhile Republicans John McCain and George Bush warned repeatedly in public statements that Fannie and Freddie were not sound. Dodd also got a sweetheart mortgage deal for his personal mortgage from Countrywide Financial.

Robert Rubin, a director and senior counselor from 1999 to 2009 at Citigroup, one of the biggest banks in America. Rubin was Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999 and is considered one of the most prominent Democrats of the last 25 years. He urged Citigroup to begin investing in risky instruments, leading to its almost-collapse. In January 2009, he resigned from Citigroup saying he was “tired of it”. In other words, he wanted to get away from the mess that he himself had created. Rubin got more than $126 million in salary and bonuses during his tenure at Citi.

Bernard Madoff, the $50 billion financial scammer who ran the biggest ponzi scheme in American history, is a big-time New York City liberal and Democrat party donor. And who was supposed to be regulating Madoff? The Securities and Exchange Commission, a Washington regulatory agency populated overwhelmingly by Democrat party functionaries, who dominate most of the Washington bureaucracy. Madoff’s niece Shana, who worked in his company, married SEC compliance official Eric Swanson. And you can rest assured she did not marry a Republican conservative who was going to look into Uncle Bernie on behalf of George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh.

R. Allen Stanford, an $8 billion Texas financial ponzi schemer, was close to the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat party. He financed a special event at the 2008 Democrat convention in Denver. Vice president Joe Biden’s brother and two sons have all been closely associated with Stanford business dealings.

Richard Fuld, a big-time Democrat donor, headed Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers and ran it into bankruptcy and collapse.

AIG, the crippled insurance giant, was founded by ultra-liberal New York businessman Maurice Greenberg. In 2005, ultra-left Democrat Eliot Spitzer, then attorney general of New York state, acting on his own personal anti-capitalist crusade against big New York financial interests, drove Greenberg out of AIG with false accusations of wrongdoing. Greenberg since has been cleared and has maintained repeatedly that the people who took his place did not know anything about running AIG, leading to its collapse.

Democrat US senator Charles Schumer of New York caused a ‘run’ on deposits at IndyMac Bank in California, leading to the bank’s collapse. Schumer publicly released a letter he had written questioning the bank’s liquidity, causing depositors to panic.

Warren Buffett, the richest man in America and an Obama voter, is a liberal who has supported all these left-wing initiatives like CRA. Ditto many left-wing multimillionaires and billionaires in Hollywood, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Aspen, Santa Fe etc.

Franklin Raines, Bill Clinton’s budget director, was chairman of Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2004 when he took “early retirement” after being accused of cooking the books to the tune of $6.3 billion. Raines left Fannie Mae with $90 million in accumulated compensation and bonuses based on the falsified figures. Democrats in Congress are declining to investigate or prosecute Raines.

James Johnson, Daniel Mudd and Jamie Gorelick, all big-time Democrat operatives, drew more than $50 million in salaries and bonuses out of Fannie Mae.

Tens of thousands of liberal university graduates and liberal business school graduates have joined the financial system, bringing their politics with them. (Chelsea Clinton works for a New York hedge fund.) These are the people who urged banks and Wall Street investment firms to become institutions of social engineering that hardly asked any questions before loaning people money, causing the housing bubble that burst. Because to liberals, everyone deserves credit, no questions asked. Had “conservatives” been in control of the banking and financial systems, this crisis never would have happened because most of these bad loans never would have been made in the first place. But the media and the universities have demonized conservatives for the last 50 years. Thus this crisis.

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan set interest rates far too low in response to 9/11, feeding a housing bubble. This shows the danger of allowing the government to set nationwide policies, rather than allowing the broad free market to set rates. Easy credit is actually worse for the economy than hard-to-get credit. George Washington said specifically that business must be regulated, but that the government never should set either wages or prices. Greenspan essentially was setting the “price” of loan money.

Labor unions have milked massive amounts of wealth out of the Big 3 car companies, driving Chrysler and General Motors to insolvency.

Democrat-dominated states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Vermont and New York had the worst, least productive economies in America even before the economic crisis hit. Meanwhile, the state with the best economy before and after the crisis hit is… George Bush’s conservative Texas.

Worldwide socialism in places like Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia have weakened those economies, leaving them with high unemployment and low growth and unable to help the world economy in the wake of the US crisis.

Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi and thousands of other elected Democrats nationwide adhere religiously to the ideology that created this collapse.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Al-Qaida group says it was behind jetliner attack

By EILEEN SULLIVAN and LOLITA C. BALDOR
WASHINGTON (AP) - Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula on Monday claimed responsibility for the attack on a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, saying it was retaliation for a U.S. operation against the group in Yemen. Federal authorities met Monday to reassess the U.S. system of terror watchlists to determine how to avoid the type of lapse that allowed a man with explosives to board the flight in Amsterdam even though he was flagged as a possible terrorist.

In a statement posted on the Internet, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula said 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab coordinated with members of the group, an alliance of militants based in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Yemeni forces, helped by U.S. intelligence, carried out two airstrikes against al-Qaida operatives in the country this month. The second one was a day before Abdulmutallab attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land in Detroit.
The group said Abdulmutallab used explosives manufactured by al-Qaida members. "He managed to penetrate all devices and modern advanced technology and security checkpoints in international airports bravely without fear of death," the group said in the statement, "relying on God and defying the large myth of American and international intelligence, and exposing how fragile they are, bringing their nose to the ground, and making them regret all what they spent on security technology."
The group also released what it said was a photo of Abdulmutallab, smiling in a white shirt and white Islamic skullcap, overlaid on a graphic showing a plane taking off. In a second version of the same photo, he is shown with the Al-Qaida in Arabian Peninsula banner in the background.
The claim of responsibility was dated Saturday but posted on Monday on a Web site frequently used by militants to disseminate their messages.
The Obama administration has ordered investigations into how travelers are placed on watch lists and how passengers are screened, as critics and administration officials questioned how Abdulmutallab was allowed to board the flight. A senior U.S. intelligence official said authorities were reviewing the procedures that govern the lists, which could include how someone is placed on or moved between the various databases.
"Why wasn't he flagged at a higher screening level?" Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "How did he get an explosive substance on to the plane? All of those are serious questions that we are now looking at."
Passengers have faced stiffer boarding measures since Friday. Authorities warned travelers to expect extra delays returning home from holidays.
The intelligence official said the review will look at what adjustments could be made to avoid the type of gap that allowed Abdulmutallab to fly into Detroit even though Britain had refused to grant him a student visa in May. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal review.
Congress is already starting to weigh in. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said Monday that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee would hold hearings on the incident in January. Lieberman is chairman of the committee.
Abdulmutallab is accused of trying to detonate an explosive device hidden on his body as the plane approached Detroit on a flight from Amsterdam last Friday. Law enforcement officials say he tucked below his waist a small bag holding a potentially deadly concoction of liquid and powder explosive materials. The device burst into flames without exploding, according to authorities, and Abdulmutallab was subdued by passengers. The plane landed safely.
His name was one of about 550,000 in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, known as TIDE, which is maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. Inclusion in that database does not trigger mandatory additional airport screening. TIDE is the largest collection of names, with about 550,000. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement as well as trusted allies can nominate "known or suspected terrorists" for this database.
Napolitano conceded Monday that the aviation security system failed, backtracking from a statement Sunday in which she said the airline security system worked. She said her words had been taken out of context.
"Our system did not work in this instance," she said Monday on NBC's "Today" show. "No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way."
Harold Demuren, the head of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, said Abdulmutallab paid cash on Dec. 16 for the $2,831 round-trip ticket from Lagos, Nigeria, to Detroit via Amsterdam. He said Abdulmutallab's ticket came from a KLM office in Accra, Ghana.
Demuren said Abdulmutallab checked into his flight with only a small carryon bag.
Officials said he came to the attention of U.S. intelligence last month when his father, Alhaji Umar Mutallab, a prominent Nigerian banker, reported to the American Embassy in Nigeria about his son's increasingly extremist religious views.
In a statement released Monday, Abdulmutallab's family in Nigeria said that his father reached out to Nigerian security agencies two months ago. The statement says the father then approached foreign security agencies for "their assistance to find and return him home."
Abdulmutallab had been placed in a U.S. database of people suspected of terrorist ties in November, but officials say there was not enough information about his activities to place him on a watch list that could have kept him from flying.
In Britain, Abdulmutallab was placed on a standard watch list of people whose visa applications were rejected, but he was not flagged as a potential terror suspect, British officials said Monday.
Abdulmutallab, who graduated from a London university last year, had his subsequent visa application denied in May 2009. British officials said the school on his application form was not a government-approved institution.
___
Associated Press writers Calvin Woodward, Matt Lee and Devlin Barrett in Washington; Pamela Hess in New York; Ed White in Detroit; Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria; and Donna Abu-Nasr in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.


Big Goverment

2010: Year of the Citizen

by Carol Platt Liebau
Certainly, 2009 is not ending on the note that Obama supporters – or the President himself – expected. Iran develops a nuclear arsenal unchecked, spitting in the eyes of the United States and the rest of the world. As evidenced on Christmas Day, Al Qaeda adherents still plot to murder innocent Americans. Notwithstanding his campaign pledge to slow the rise of the oceans, President Obama will find it difficult to execute at home the climate-change promises he made abroad.

And that’s just foreign policy. At home, the “stimulus” rushed through Congress with the promise of a quick economic recovery and more jobs has shown no results – except trillions in new deficits, high unemployment and a continuing story of payoffs to key Democrat constituencies. Health care “reform” – intended as the apotheosis of liberal, big-government do-gooderism – has degenerated into a political disaster for the Democrats, with significant majorities of Republicans and independents opposing new congressional legislation so misbegotten that even its supporters characterize it as “flawed.”

Yet even as Obama’s partisans have been surprised, perhaps his political adversaries have been astonished, as well. Given the uncritical coverage of the new President by the media during last year’s campaign – and the warm embrace extended to him by the overwhelming majority of Americans last January – the magnitude of the burgeoning, spirited (but non-violent) repudiation of his brand of big-government liberalism has been heartening, and amazing.

Too often over the years, all the political passion (and public demonstrations of it) has seemed to come from groups on the left seeking an ever-larger role for government in American life. Students, unions, actors, community organizers and such have made most of the noise, not coincidentally because they’ve been the ones with the time and the inclination to do it. Those on the other side – small business people, the self-employed, stay-at-home moms and the like – have traditionally worked to succeed within the status quo, rather than constantly trying to change it. Often they’ve been so busy, in fact, that they’ve failed to notice when little bits of their liberty have been incrementally chipped away.


It took the shock of a year of unchecked Democrat rule to change all of that. Suddenly, regular Americans – the ones usually too busy or too complacent to protest – have come to realize that, like Frankenstein’s monster, big government has taken on a life of its own. The federal government (led by a man who never held a private-sector business job) has taken over Chrysler and General Motors. Government appointees decree how much (and how) certain businesses can pay their own employees. And through environmental taxation and regulations, bureaucrats are seeking to seize control of virtually the entire private sector.

Suddenly, the liberty and free enterprise most of us have taken for granted seem to be in the greatest jeopardy of our lifetime. Worse yet, Democrat politicians have ignored the public outcry, ramming through unpopular legislation that would put one-sixth of the economy (and every American’s health care!) under government control. Regular Americans – the ones more inclined to watch sports or go shopping than to organize protests – have taken notice. They’ve also taken umbrage.

By overreaching and arrogantly ignoring the widespread public discontent with them and their policies, Democrats from the President on down have succeeded in awakening a sleeping giant – regular Americans. They are people who may often take their freedom for granted, but who don’t intend ever to let it be taken away.

They are the male and female heirs to the Sons of Liberty of Revolutionary times, the people who understand the danger of a government leviathan, and who insisted on “No taxation without representation.” After watching the politicians they voted into power last year ignore the common good, instead seeking only power and political advantage for themselves, they’re appalled – and perhaps even a little frightened.

Certainly, 2009 was a dark and disheartening year for lovers of economic and individual liberty. But if next year shapes up in accordance with current trends, the tide is about to change. With a growing recognition of the preciousness (and fragility) of liberty and a renewed appreciation of our founding principles, America is poised for a rebirth of freedom. Hail 2010: The Year of the Citizen.

 Townhall