Obama Advances Judge, James E. Graves, Who Seems to Have a Racist Agenda

This article is by Hans A. von Spakovsky at Pajamas Media.  Title:   “Obama Renominates Judge with Record of Racial Double Standards.”

“In a further demonstration of the Obama administration’s hypocrisy on racial policy, the president recently renominated James E. Graves for a federal judgeship. Those who have followed the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation scandal at the Holder Justice Department know that his administration’s political appointees have exhibited a blatant racial double standard — they are not interested in prosecuting minority defendants for civil rights violations. Graves apparently has a similarly skewed view of race, which raises further grave concerns that such race-conscious approaches to the law are not only acceptable, but seen as worthy of lifetime appointments by those at the very top of the administration.

Graves, a black justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court, was nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by the president last year. His nomination died when the Senate failed to act on it before the 111th Congress ended. But Graves was one of several judges that President Obama renominated on January 5.

This despite the fact that Graves’ votes in three different disciplinary cases involving Mississippi judges show that he looks at alleged misconduct differently depending on the race of the perpetrator. While Graves strongly condemns racist and other discriminatory attitudes and language by white judges, he tolerates and finds acceptable the very same type of distasteful and sordid attitudes and language by a black judge. He apparently believes that while the First Amendment protects black judges, it has its limits when it comes to white judges.

In 2004, the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed disciplinary proceedings against state judge Connie Glen Wilkerson, who is white. After reading an article about the extension of certain legal rights to homosexual partners, Wilkerson sent a letter to a local newspaper stating his opinion, based on his religious beliefs, that homosexuals belonged in mental institutions rather than having such laws passed on their behalf. He expounded on those views in an interview, saying that homosexuality was an illness that merited treatment, not punishment. The judge was charged with violation of judicial ethics for conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The Mississippi Supreme Court justices pointed out that there “are millions of citizens who believe Judge Wilkerson’s religious views are exactly correct. There are still millions more who find his views insulting.” Regardless, a majority found that his actions were protected by the U.S. Constitution, because he had engaged in “religious and political/public issue speech,” which “occupies the ‘highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.’” Justice Graves disagreed, joining a dissent by Justice George Carlson that found that Wilkerson’s opinion was not protected speech under the First Amendment.

In 2008, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that another judge could be disciplined for statements made at a National Drug Court Institute training conference. State court judge Nicki M. Boland, who is white, was frustrated because she was not getting support from her fellow judges or county commissioners on establishing a drug court in her county. She apparently got into an angry tirade in which she said that “African-Americans in Hinds County can go to hell for all I care.”

The Mississippi court did not consider this protected speech, as it had in the Wilkerson case, because it was not religious or political speech. Instead, it was language that “was an insult to individuals in the community in which she worked as a justice court judge.” Such willful misconduct was prejudicial to the administration of justice.

Justice Graves joined a concurring opinion that not only found that Boland had no First Amendment right to engage in such speech, but that specifically reaffirmed the prior dissent in the Wilkerson case. In other words, Graves was of the opinion that the comments made by the white judges in both cases were not protected speech and should subject them to disciplinary proceedings.

But then Justice Graves seemed to suddenly have a change of heart. Less than a month after the Boland decision, the Mississippi Supreme Court decided another disciplinary proceeding against state court Judge Solomon C. Osbourne, who is black. Osbourne, while speaking to “a predominantly African-American political organization” and criticizing a white mayor and his African-American political appointees, said:

White folks don’t praise you unless you’re a damn fool. Unless they think they can use you. If you don’t have your own mind and know what you’re doing, they don’t want you around.

The Mississippi Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Judge Carlson who had dissented in the Wilkerson case, also found that this statement was not protected by the First Amendment. As in Boland’s case, Osbourne’s language did not concern a political or public policy issue. His “public inflammatory, derogatory statement” on whites and blacks “in his jurisdiction is not worthy of being deemed a matter of legitimate political concern in his reelection campaign, but merely an expression of his personal animosity.”

But Justice Graves disagreed, joining a dissenting opinion that found that Osbourne’s insulting and racially derogatory remarks were constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment, unlike the racial insults made by Judge Nicki Boland or the criticism of legal rights for homosexuals by Judge Wilkerson.

Whether or not one agrees with the Mississippi Supreme Court’s view of the First Amendment is irrelevant to the issue concerning Justice Graves’ nomination to a federal court. A majority of the Mississippi court, not including Justice Graves, acted consistently in these three cases, finding that personal insults and racially derogatory language by two state judges was not protected speech, but opinions about a public issue such as the legal rights of homosexuals by a third judge was protected speech, whether or not one agreed with the opinion.

The only difference between the three cases is that Judges Boland and Wilkerson, who Graves thought had no First Amendment rights, were white, whereas Judge Osbourne, whose racial insults Graves believed were protected speech, was black. Contrast Graves’ behavior with that of Justice Carlson, who consistently took the position in all three cases that the judges’ language was unacceptable, whether they were black or white.

Graves has since told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he voted differently because “Osborne was a candidate for judicial election” while Boland and Wilkerson were not. But the Supreme Court has never held that you have different levels of free speech rights, depending on whether you are running for office or just giving your opinion on a religious, political, or other public policy issue. In fact, the very idea that your rights should vary depending on such circumstances should be enough to alarm anyone who believes in the First Amendment.

Graves’ views are very troubling. But President Obama’s renomination of Graves is worse. It shows that the president also apparently sees nothing wrong with such a racial double standard. That attitude should concern Americans who believe in a color-blind society that protects all of its citizens equally under the law.

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

What are the Communists up to in America These Days?…..

……Well, let’s check in on Van Jones, chief Communist formerly in the Obama administration in charge of enviornmental matters.   By the way Mr. Jones doesn’t hide his Communist devotions….

Like all dictators, it is my view Mr. Jones is a budding boss, he is windy. 

But,  who do you think  the “They” might be who according to Communist Jones, took away so much freedom expecially in 1968?    Click on below to hear Comrade Van Jones discuss America:

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/03/van-jones-we-will-not-live-on-an-economic-plantation-run-by-the-koch-brothers/

The opponents of democracy, the opponents of justice and really the opponents of liberty, which I’m going to get to. The opponents of those three values–justice, democracy and liberty–when you hit them…they get mad. When they hit us, we get sad. Cause we’re decent people. We’re kind people. We’re compassionate people. And we sometimes can find ourselves shocked again and again by how hard the other side fights…

We are in the middle of the biggest economic catastrophe in the history of our country since the great depression and the American people deserve to have a partner in America’s government during a crisis like this. America’s government should not be missing in action. We shouldn’t be struggling to figure out if we’re going to re-up the unemployment benefits for people who’ve been out of work. It’s time for us to go from talking about an unemployment program to an employment program in America. People need jobs. People need to be able to work. People need to be able to put food on the table.

Why is the government missing in action? Why are they having food fight politics in Washington DC as opposed to helping the American people put food on the table?  Because our political process has been hijacked. Our political process has been hijacked by people who are only interested in their own game. Who are only interested in their own profit. And who are willing to tell any lie and spend any amount of money to prevent America’s government from coming to the rescue of the American people. And we are here to put a stop to that kind of treachery against our country.

I hear a lot of talk now about liberty. There is a movement in our country that has grown up and it has raised the question of liberty. And I say thank goodness…I’m glad to hear that someone is concerned about liberty. But I think that what we have to be clear about is that liberty always has two threats…one is the threat of excessive concentration of political power…the totalitarian threat to liberty. And that is a threat to watch out for. But there is another threat and it is in our country the greater threat and that is the threat of excessive concentrations of economic power…

What we have to remember is that our Republic is founded not just on the question of liberty but also democracy and justice. It is when the predatory, monopolistic dimension of the economic system starts to gain momentum then the question of justice and democracy has to come forward too. Not just liberty and property rights but justice and human rights and democracy and the people’s rights to be free from economic tyranny and economic domination. We will not live on a national plantation run by the Koch brothers. We’re not going to do that. We refuse to do that.

If you want to know which side to bet on, big money mean people or little people with the truth on their side, look over there in Egypt.

Voice: We need Egypt here!

Look back at your own struggles for democracy…See the difference between what’s going on in Egypt and what’s going on here is that’s a dictatorship.

Voice: This is a dictatorship.

You get to speak on the next panel brother…

Obviously the comparison of conservatives in general and the Koch brothers in particular to slave owners is offensive, but let’s put that aside and look at what he’s trying to say here. If I had to boil it down, here’s where I think Van Jones completely misses the boat: On the federal scale of things, the Koch brothers fortune is insignificant. The debts being racked up to support the “little guys” Van Jones wants the government to partner with far outstrip the coffers of the mega-rich. In fact, it’s not even close. In 2009, the federal payment to California for unemployment was about 12 billion dollars. Extend that amount through 2010 and the two-year total would come close to the combined fortunes of the Koch brothers. And that’s just unemployment and just for California.

Let’s take another example. Exxon Mobil is the largest public energy company in the world. It’s either #1 or #2 on the Fortune 500 (depending on the year). In 2008 Exxon made $45 billion in profit on nearly half a trillion in revenue. Wow, that’s a lot of money. At least it sounds like it until you compare it to our Social Security program. There are 36 million Americans receiving checks from Social Security nationwide. We’re spending $700 billion a year on this one program. That’s far more than Exxon’s total revenue. And guess what, we spend slightly more on Medicare than we do on Social Security.

I don’t think Van Jones gets that the scale of federal spending is titanic even when compared to the largest industries in the world. Yes, $45 billion in profit is incredible, but if you assume Exxon could maintain that level of profit in perpetuity and you devoted all of it to paying down the US debt, it would take more than 300 years to pay off what we owe today. With that in mind, how can anyone counsel further government “partnership” i.e. more spending?

This is the message of the Tea Party that Van Jones doesn’t seem to understand. We can’t keep spending the way we are and remain economically free. Eventually, and the day is drawing nigh as we speak, the bill for all the spending will come due. When it does, we can all end up facing excessive taxation which will drive our economy further off a cliff or, most worrisome of all, we could wind up enslaved (to use Jones’ metaphor) to the nations who own our debt. These are real possibilities that don’t seem to concern, or even occur to,Van Jones.

Mr. Jones needs to stop worrying about the threat posed by a couple of libertarian septuagenarians (who’ve fruitfully employed a lot of people in this country over the years) and start worrying about the threat posed by the debt collectors who may start calling at odd hours of the night if we don’t keep up with the bills.

*Note: Ellipsis above represent minor, omitted language. In each case it is repetitious or incidental to the point.

How Do Common Cause Leftists in Brains and Style Compare with Tea Party Folks?

Click on the video below to review the brains and style exhibited by the Common Cause folks, the folks who are admired by the American mass media for the good that they do in American leftwing life.  In the meantime, read the article below by Ed Morrissey at HotAir about Common Cause:

“Among Common Cause’s, well, common causes, are campaign finance reform, net neutrality, outlawing the filibuster, promoting cap and trade, and in this particular case, herding a mass of protesters outside a nearby hotel to yell at Charles and David Koch for being conservative and rich.

Unfortunately several “haves” have missed the memo that you’re not to be both rich and conservative at the same time, and that bankrolling your pet causes is an extra no-no if you’re conservative—thus exempting left-wing billionaire philanthropists George Soros (from whom Common Cause has received $2 million over the past eight years) Peter Lewis, John Doerr, Julian Robertson, Nicolas Berggruen, and many others from being yelled at too.

At the morning panel event featuring UCI Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, activist Jim Hightower, Center for American Progress journalist and “Koch Brothers expert” Lee Fang, California Nurses Association co-president DeAnn McEwan, and President Obama’s former green jobs czar Van Jones, we were forewarned of the impending demise of both the environment and democracy at the hands of corporate lobbyists and their government shills.

There was eerily no mention of GE, AEP, Goldmann Sachs, Pfizer, Aetna, Alcoa, Xerox, Google, Motorola, IBM, or several other corporate giants who profit at taxpayer expense via their K Street connections to the Obama White House as well as the very economic and regulatory policies they lobby that these Common Cause panelists commonly endorse. But I’m sure that’s only because no one wanted to point out the obvious. Right?

Will the media cover the violence inherent on the Left with the same passion they pursued those non-existent connections between the Tucson shooter and Sarah Palin?  Will the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the “Rage on the Left” and label Common Cause a racist hate group?

Update: RB at The RightSphere makes my point more eloquently:

How long have we heard the steady mantra: “The Tea Party is racist”? Since day one. Nearly every Leftist pundit, columnist, and “journalist” on the planet has at some point or another implied or flat out stated that the Tea Party movement is racist. Congressmen have even accused Tea Party / Anti-HCR protesters of using the “n word” and spitting on them during rallies. To this day many still claim this happened despite the lack of evidence.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/03/video-koch-protests-include-calls-to-lynch-clarence-thomas/

Let’s just imagine if the video above was taken during a Tea Party rally and several participants stated that a sitting US Supreme Court Justice should be sent “back to the fields” or “strung up”. Picture the news coverage. Predict what Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann (if he still had a show) would be saying right now and over the next few days. It would be non-stop. Democrat Congressional members would be using the tape as “proof” of what is really behind the opposition to ObamaCare or any other piece of legislation they want to get passed.

“The racist Tea Party.” That’s all you’d hear.

The Aljazeera Influence on Arab Turmoil

Lawrence Pintak at Foreign Policy wrote the following about the present unrest in today’s Near East:

“As darkness fell on Tahrir Square the night of Feb. 1, a giant makeshift TV screen broadcast Al Jazeera’s live coverage of the Egyptian uprising to the enthusiastic crowd. The channel would later transmit Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s speech, in which he announced that he would not stand for reelection but would stay in office for the remainder of his term; below the screen, the protesters chanted their displeasure at what they viewed as this insufficient concession.

It was a moment that spoke volumes about the unique link between the Qatar-based channel, the uprising in Egypt, and the Tunisian revolution that was its inspiration.

It also underscored the new reality facing Arab regimes: They no longer control the message.

Since Jan. 28, Al Jazeera has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Mubarak regime, which knocked it off the government-controlled Nilesat satellite, shut its bureau, seized its transmission equipment, and arrested some of its staff.

But over the weekend, at least 10 other satellite broadcasters in the region began replacing their own programming with Al Jazeera’s feed, foiling the Egyptian regime’s efforts to prevent its citizens from watching the channel that has become its chief nemesis.

“We have been working round the clock to make sure we are broadcasting on alternative frequencies,” Al Jazeera said in a statement on its website. “Clearly there are powers that do not want our important images pushing for democracy and reform to be seen by the public.”

And therein lies the reason Al Jazeera has emerged as such a central player in the drama now unfolding in the region. Unlike the bland, state-owned Egyptian station, or its more conservative, Saudi-owned rival Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera has captured the hopes of the crowds gathering on the streets of Cairo.

“The genius of Arab satellite TV,” Abderrahim Foukara, Washington bureau chief for Al Jazeera, once told me, “is that it [has] captured a deep-seated common existential pain called Arab sensibility and turned it into a picture narrative that speaks to something very deep in the Arab psyche.”

Put another way: There is no chance that the world would be watching these extraordinary events play out in Egypt if Egyptians had not watched the Tunisian revolution play out in their living rooms and coffee shops on Al Jazeera.

The media is by no means the only force at play in the continuing upheaval in Egypt, the Tunisian revolution, or the copy-cat demonstrations going on elsewhere in the Arab world. At root is a raw anger fed by decades of political, intellectual, and economic stagnation that has led to a powerful convergence of the region’s three main political trends — pan-Arab nationalism, nation-state nationalism, and Islamism.

However, Arab media have been at the vanguard of articulating this new and explosive development. Arab satellite television, such as Al Jazeera — and the increasingly aggressive ethos of Arab print journalism exemplified by newspapers like Egypt’s Al-Masry Al-Youm and Tunisia’s crusading Kalima Tunisie — have fueled a sense of common cause among Arabs across the region every bit as real as the “imagined communities” that are at the core of the concept of nation.

 

Tommy Robinson Versus John F. Kerry

Which man would you trust telling the truth about anything?      A.  Senator John F. Kerry  

Finally, here’s a computer-generated photo that never happened, but designed by John Kerry for campaigning:

The Kerry Campaign has been very upset that political opponents have laughed at the photos, making it an even bigger deal than it might have been. The way they should have handled it would be to simply laugh at the photos themselves. There’s really a serious point here — why is it that liberals cannot laugh at themselves? What is missing from their character?

OR,

Tommy Robinson, the  person being interviewed on British television ? (please click below)

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b95_1292186443

Which is the phony, folks.  Which one relies on the truth of what he sees and experiences as a basis for his political concerns?   Which man would have enough dignity to work at McDonalds?

A Word or Two about Rush Limbaugh…..and a Thought about Tommy Robinson

…….in three words and much more, Rush Limbaugh is an extremely talented “political entertainer”, is what I term him.   I am so glad he is on our conservative side…..for the best reason, and there are many reasons, is that although he exaggerates by word and tone, he sets himself aside from liars. 

His humor and sarcasm come from a truthful base…..unlike the vast majority of today’s national Democrat Politicians who bend and manipulate facts and truth in their performances there is no truth left in their utterances.  It is all performance.   John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Charlie Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi are so programmed into performance, if you’ve seen one of their acts, you have seen them all.

One can disagree with Rush’s politics.   One can be critical of his style….as I am.  I much prefer Dennis Prager as my political “entertainer”.   Whereas Rush is by far the best political entertainer ever, ever, and ever to reach so many people, he is primarily an entertainer….and etertainer who teaches.

Dennis Prager is also primarily an entertainer.   He would prefer to be called a mentor or teacher….well, he is both.   He is an entertainer teacher…in that order…as host to his radio show.  But he is without competition, the best political  conservative American to enumerate and explain the reasons for American exceptionalism.  His own exceptionalism is itself a standard for human intellectual discourse.

He practices….at least in public…..what he preaches.

Both communicators come from the stock of honesty.   They are without sleaze, a characteristic which clothes the vast majority of the Obama buddies and bunnies of today’s Left.   They cannot sell an honest product.  

After all, Marxism and its diminishment of the human being collectively and individually, reduces the citizen to drone status of equal misery.   One cannot sell that.   One sells the Party instead with lies, indimidation, and false hope.

Scott W. Johnson wrote a article today at PowerLine about Rush.  I have taken a bit from the writing to share with you:

Referring the Rush’s skills:

“There are countless examples of his judo skills at work, but perhaps the most spectacular was the one in the fall of 2007, in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sought to humiliate Limbaugh only to have the humiliation returned to him threefold. Limbaugh had a caller who complained that the mainstream media would not interview “real soldiers” in Iraq but instead sought out the disgruntled. Limbaugh, in agreement, cited the case of Jesse MacBeth, an Army enlistee who had failed to make it through boot camp but lied about his lack of real military service in order to speak credibly at anti-war rallies. Limbaugh called MacBeth, accurately, a “phony soldier.” But his statement was quickly pulled out of context by Media Matters, one of the Democratic groups that monitors Limbaugh’s every word, and was reframed as a swipe at all soldiers who had misgivings about the war. Limbaugh was denounced in the House for “sliming” the “brave men and women.” Reid used the occasion to address the Senate and deplore Limbaugh’s “unpatriotic comments” for going “beyond the pale of decency” and then wrote a letter to Limbaugh’s syndicator demanding that the talk-show host be repudiated.

But Reid overplayed his hand. Far from running from the controversy, Limbaugh embraced it. He read Reid’s letter on the air, revealing it for the dishonest and bullying document it was, and then, in a stroke of pure genius, announced that he would auction it on eBay and give the proceeds to a military charitable foundation. The letter was sold for $2.1 million, and Rush matched the contribution with his own $2.1 million. Reid could only express his pleasure that the letter had done so much good. He had been flipped onto his back.

Professor McClay recounts the birth of political talk radio with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. It was Rush who seized on the opportunity presented by the new freedom. What did he have to offer:? Here Professor McClay explains:

[W]hat he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali-like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

At the heart of the phenomenon McClay sees a revolt against the elites:

[A] problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.”

Further comment:   Indeed it is a revolt against the elites….and so is the Tea Party….this is democracy in action.   The same phenomenon is occuring in Britain in reaction to Islamic hate and violence in the name of the “peaceful” religion, with the developing English Defence League and its leader, Tommy Robinson.

Tommy Robinson asks:  “Why is it left to us THE UNEDUCATED WORKING CLASS to save our country from Islamic fascism?”    And in his beautiful ‘uneducated ‘ language with his bright mind behind it, explains, “We aren’t hooligans.   We are normal people!”

It shocks the left that such ‘uneducated’ have feelings about the dignity of life  ”all on their own” without the benefit of university professors correcting their every throught.  “How dare they…..this low class rabble!”  the Left snears.

(I am still from that part of America who have never been ashamed at working at McDonald’s.  It is a dying breed.)

Tommy Robinson interviewed:  http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b95_1292186443

Sam Tadros: “Story of the Egyptian Revolution” ……..

at the American Thinker is an excellen resume of the events leading up to today’s standoff between the government and the rebels.   Below is the windup of the background Mr. Tadros as developed in his review.   Where is Egypt at this point in this pricey drama?   He summarizes:

 

“Today the Egyptians are scared. They have been given a glimpse of hell and they don’t like what they see. Contrary to Al Jazeera’s propaganda, the Egyptian masses are not demonstrating anymore. They are protecting their homes and families. The demonstration last night had 5,000 political activists participating and not 150,000 as Al Jazeera insists. At this moment, no one outside of those political activists cares less now if the President will resign or not. They have more important concerns now; security and food.

 So where are we today? Well the answer is still not clear, yet a couple of conclusions are evident.

 1.      The Gamal inheritance scenario is finished.

 2.      Mubarak will not run for another Presidential term. His term ends in October and either he will serve the rest of his term or will resign once things cool down for health reasons, which are real. He is dying.

 3.      The army is in control now. We are heading back to the “golden age” of army rule. The “kids” are no longer in charge. The “men’ are.

 4.      Until the economy fails again, the neo-liberal economic policies are over. Forget about an open economy for some time.

 Immediately the task of the army is to stabilize the situation and enforce order. The security forces have been ordered to reappear in the streets starting tonight. The next task will be to deal with the political activists and the Muslim Brotherhood which now dominates the scene. It is anyone’s guess how that will be done, but in a couple of days the Egyptians will probably be begging the army to shoot them. Third stage will be to return to normal life again with people going back to their jobs and somehow food being made available. Later on however will come the political questions.

 The long term challenges are numerous. First you have a huge economic loss in terms of property destroyed. The minute the banks will be reopened, there will be a run on them and capital flight will be the key word in town. It is of course quite natural that for some time no one in his sensible mind will invest in Egypt.

 Politically, the army will aim at returning to the pre-Gamal ruling formula. People will be appeased by raising salaries and increasing subsidies with the hope of silencing them. Will it be enough? That is doubtful. The Egyptians have realized for the first time that the regime is not as strong as it looked a week ago. If the army did not stop them, how will they ever be silenced? Moreover they are greatly empowered. Egyptians today feel pride in themselves. They have protected their neighborhoods and done what the army has failed to do. This empowerment will not be crushed easily.

 Security wise the situation is a disaster. It might take months to arrest all those criminals again. Moreover no one has a clue how the weapons that were stolen will ever be collected again or how the security will ever regain its necessary respect to restore public order after it was defeated in 4 hours. More importantly, reports indicate that the borders in Gaza were open for the past few days. What exactly was transferred between Gaza and Egypt is anyone’s guess.

 You seem to wonder after all of this where El Baradei and the Egyptian opposition are. CNN’s anointed leader of the Egyptian Revolution must be important to the future of Egypt. Hardly! Outside of Western media hype, El Baradei is nothing. A man that has spent less than 30 days in the past year in Egypt and hardly any time in the past 20 years is a nobody. It is entirely insulting to Egyptians to suggest otherwise. The opposition you wonder? Outside of the Muslim Brotherhood we are discussing groups that can each claim less than 5,000 actual members. With no organization, no ideas, and no leaders they are entirely irrelevant to the discussion. It is the apolitical young generation that has suddenly been transformed that is the real question here.

 Where Egypt will go from here is an enigma. In a sense everything will be the same. The army that has ruled Egypt since 1952 will continue to rule it and the country will still suffer from a huge vacuum of ideas and real political alternatives. On the other hand, it will never be the same again. Once empowered, the Egyptians will not accept the status quo for long.

 On the long run the Egyptian question remains the same. Nothing has changed in that regard. It is quite remarkable for people to be talking about the prospect for a democratic transition at this moment. A population that was convinced just two months ago that sharks in the Red Sea were implanted by the Israeli Intelligence Services is hardly at a stage of creating a liberal democracy in Egypt. But the status quo cannot be maintained. A lack of any meaningful political discourse in the country has to be addressed.  Until someone actually starts addressing the real issues and stop the chatterbox of clichés on democracy, things will not get better at all. It will only get worse.”

ObamaSleaze: Providing ObamaCare “Health” Waivers to Political Friends…

……but let’s not advertize it….because you know ObamaHealth Law is so great!

Graft will run Washington until the people elect representatives who will dare to be honest about the political products they are selling.   Obama is trying to sell Marxism…..after all, he is a “Progressive progressing to Marxism” and its most powerful leader at the moment….except for George Soros.

The following article is another writing to remind the public of this Obamagraft being doled out to friends.   It is written by Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

“We already have more than 700 waivers to the requirements of ObamaCare in place, with 40% of those affected being in unions.  Now we see waivers beginning in another area of the Obama administration’s key policy areas — greenhouse gas emissions.  In January, the administration began enforcing new EPA rules on new or expanding power plants, and within just a few weeks, announced the first waiver of those rules:

The Obama administration will spare a stalled power plant project in California from the newest federal limits on greenhouse gases and conventional air pollution, U.S. EPA says in a new court filing that marks a policy shift in the face of industry groups and Republicans accusing the agency of holding up construction of large industrial facilities.

According to a declaration by air chief Gina McCarthy, officials reviewed EPA policies and decided it was appropriate to “grandfather” projects such as the Avenal Power Center, a proposed 600-megawatt power plant in the San Joaquin Valley, so they are exempted from rules such as new air quality standards for smog-forming nitrogen dioxide (NO2).

Hey, you know what else Barack Obama did in January?  He picked GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to lead his new jobs commission.  Does that sound like a non-sequitur to you?  Let Timothy Carney explain the details of the Avenal Power Center:

The proposed Avenal Energy project will be a combined-cycle generating plant consisting of two natural gas-fired General Electric 7FA Gas Turbines with Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) and one General Electric Steam Turbine.

GE: They bring good waivers to life!

The Obama administration seems very eager to impose regulation on everyone except their bestest buddies.  If these policies are so bad that Obama’s friends and political allies need waivers to get around them, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in place at all.  And perhaps the Obama administration should learn something about the rule of law, rather than the rule of whim — or as the rest of us call it, The Chicago Way.”

Meet a Hero…..His Name is Tommy Robinson. He is Leader of the English Defence League

Smeared, threatened, attacked, arrested, and a little rough around the edges, and bright.  His EDL  name is Tommy Robinson.

Despite his many enemies, his friend is free speech.  His leading abusers are the fascistic Marxists who call themselves ”United Against Fascism”.     In America they are the ‘tolerant’ who attend university

Tommy Robinson is his EDL name.  “We aren’t hooligans.  We’re normal people.  Why is it left to us uneducated working class to save freedom in our country?” he asks. 

The British Press denounces him as a racist.   We conservatives are certainly used to that Media noise.

Click on here for one of his television interviews…this guy is good!  Listen for yourself.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b95_1292186443

Click on here for just an ordinary  bloak of the  EDL interviewed:  http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=518_1260765576

Is Egypt another Iran? Michael J. Totten Revisits the Iranian Revolution ……Read it and YOU decide.

Abbas Milani, like most educated Iranians, detested the Shah’s tyrannical regime that ruled over his homeland until it was overthrown in 1979 by a coalition of liberals, leftists, and Islamists. Unlike the vast majority of the liberals and leftists, however, Milani knew in advance what the Islamists were up to. The Shah had cast him into the dungeon at the notorious Evin Prison and for six months his cell mates were the ideological and physical brutes who later would found the Islamic Republic.

Today Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His new book The Shah was published a few weeks ago by Palgrave MacMillan. I sat down with him in his office at the Hoover Institution to talk about what’s happening right now in Egypt.

MJT: So why, when you published a piece in The New Republic a few days ago, did you compare the upheaval in Egypt to the Iranian Revolution 31 years ago rather than to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that toppled Ben Ali less than 31 days ago?

Abbas Milani: Iran and Egypt are very similar. They have been, along with Turkey, the key bellwether states in the region. What happens in these three places has shaped what happens in the Middle East for a hundred years.

Tunisia—in terms of size, history, and trajectory—is far less like Iran than Egypt is. Egypt is the most important center of Sunni learning while Iran is the most important center of Shia learning. And the two countries have been very much in competition with each other for hegemony over the Islamic world. The Shah spent his last days in Egypt. There is a fifty year connection between the Pahlavi dynasty and Egypt.

Look also at the events themselves and the way the United States has tried to position itself. What’s going on right now in Egypt is eerily reminiscent of the events in Iran in 1979. The United States supported Pahlavi and Mubarak overtly. In both cases there was behind-the-scenes pressure to democratize and open the system. The Shah resisted, claiming a communist threat. Mubarak resisted, claiming a Muslim Brotherhood threat.

After a while the Shah became impervious to American pressure because he had oil money. He had more money than he knew what to do with. During those very crucial years the Iranian middle class mushroomed. The educated class was increasing. These were the years when pressure for democracy was most urgent, but the Shah was impervious to it.

MJT: How big was the middle class in 1979?

Abbas Milani: It depends on how you define it. If you look at the income, the amount of urbanization, the number of educated people, the number of people who lived in their own domicile, the number of people who could travel outside the country—all these grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the push for industrialization that began in the early 1960s. It began before the oil money came in.

We had a class of brilliant Iranian technocrats, many of them educated in the United States, including right here at Stanford. They put into effect a remarkable process of industrialization that by 1970 was bearing fruit. These people demanded political rights, and the Shah, instead of opening the country, clamped down with the one-party system.

I am absolutely convinced that in 1975, when he was at the height of his power, if the Shah had made just a third of the concessions he later made in 1978, we would be looking at a very different Iran today.

MJT: It was too late in 1978.

Abbas Milani: What Mubarak and the Shah both failed to understand is that if you make concessions when you’re weak it just increases the appetite for more concessions. If they would have made concessions when they were in a position of power, they could have negotiated a smooth transition to a less authoritarian government.

In Egypt, when the US pressured Mubarak to announce that he would not run again, that he should come out publicly and say he has cancer and that there will be a free election soon, he instead tried to create a monarchy.

MJT: He wants his son to succeed him.

Abbas Milani: The reverse happened to the Shah. He also had cancer, but he hid it from everybody. He had a son who was then eighteen years old. If he had given up the throne and created a regency in 1977, as some had advised him to do, instead of making concessions under pressure in 1978 when all hell was breaking loose, I could easily imagine a different Iran.

I went back to Iran from the United States in 1975. I had just gotten my PhD and was part of the opposition to the Shah. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that change was coming, but Islamic revolution was absolutely not inevitable. This was partly the Shah’s fault for only allowing the clergy to organize. Not to give him credit, but in context this was the Cold War. Everybody was worried about communism, and he completely clamped down on everyone but the clergy.

In my book about the Shah I chronicle a very interesting period in 1973.

The oil money was coming in. He was beginning to reach the height of his power, and he was starting to worry about succession and the political process. He brought in one of Iran’s most respected technocrats and told him to create a viable political party. They worked for six months establishing the parameters of this political party. We have the minutes from their discussions. And then, just as the party is about to take shape with ten of the best technocrats lined up as the founders, all of a sudden the price of oil quadrupled. The Shah then pulled the plug on this party.

Mubarak keeps missing these moments. If he would have announced last week that he was not going to run, one can imagine a different trajectory. These things catch like wildfire.

MJT: Right. No intelligence agency can see events like this coming. They’re spontaneous. None of these people knew they’d be in the streets a month ago, so how could anyone else know?

Abbas Milani: They couldn’t imagine it.

MJT: Mubarak couldn’t imagine it either.

Abbas Milani: But what I think they could have imagined, and should have imagined, is precisely this: in today’s day and age when people are connected with the Internet, satellites, Al Jazeera, and CNN, you cannot rest your stability on fear. Governments could do this in Stalin’s time, but today, at any moment, the fear can dissipate.

Six months before the June uprising in Iran I wrote an article about the coalition that became the Green Movement. I said it was already in existence and ready to challenge the regime. But even I didn’t predict that three million people would come out into the streets overnight. I can tell you right now, though, that the minute people in Iran believe that the apparatus of terror has lost its capacity to terrorize people, we will see another three million.

MJT: For a total of six million, you mean?

The June uprising in Iran

Abbas Milani: Yes, absolutely. We will see six million people. Overnight. We will see a huge outpouring of protest because people resent the fact that they are oppressed. Governments can no longer rely on fear alone. It’s much easier now to break through it than it used to be.

MJT: Jimmy Carter often gets blamed for Khomeini coming to power in Iran. Do you think that’s fair? What could he have done to stop it?

Abbas Milani: I don’t blame the revolution on Jimmy Carter, but I think he does bear some responsibility. He could not develop a cohesive policy. He wasn’t paying attention to Iran. He was preoccupied with Camp David. He couldn’t bring Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski into a cohesive position. He kept vacillating from one extreme to another. This only exacerbated the American inability to understand what was going on.

The failure to understand what was going on dates back to the Lyndon Johnson years. The Johnson administration succumbed to pressure from the Shah to cease all contact with the opposition inside Iran. The US remarkably even agreed not to contact a former prime minister because the Shah didn’t trust him. The Shah even created a diplomatic row when a former Iranian ambassador was invited to a party. Not to a secret meeting, but to a party.

Because the US was involved in Vietnam and had listening centers in Iran monitoring Soviet activities, and because Iran was flush with cash in 1972 and was willing to sign contracts with American companies, the US agreed to cease contact. Yet the CIA predicted an Iranian revolution as early as 1958. And what they said would happen is almost exactly what happened. They said Iran’s rising technocratic class, the teachers, and the new urbanites are all disgruntled and that if the government doesn’t open up the system they’ll find any leader they can and topple the Shah.

The Kennedy administration pressured the Shah to make changes that were based on the standard modernization theory. You modernize the infrastructure, you educate the people, you create a better economy, and you open up the system politically. Kennedy pushed the Shah toward this and the Shah complied. He himself wanted to make changes. He wanted to make Iran a better place. The Kennedys hated the Shah. Bobby Kennedy absolutely despised him. John Kennedy disliked him, if not outright hated him.

But just as the economic changes were bearing fruit, making political change more necessary, the oil price shot up. Nixon came in and made the decision to cease pressuring the Shah. The Shah had stopped listening anyway because he had all the money he needed.

Carter came in and renewed the pressure for democratization, but he renewed it at the worst possible time, when the economy was diving. Iran was borrowing money that year. The Shah went from giving away a billion and a half dollars to borrowing 700 million from Chase Manhattan. So the economy was diving, the Shah’s health was deteriorating, and suddenly the suppressed opposition felt that the Shah was fair game because Carter was talking about human rights.

MJT: But what should Carter have done instead? Are you saying he was he wrong to talk about human rights?

Abbas Milani: No, he should have talked about human rights, but he also should have understood that you have to go step by step. Concessions need to be made in a timely fashion from a position of power. Carter should have made it clear that he was for change, but not for change at any price. Brzezinski understood this much better than anyone else in the administration but didn’t get his way. And on the other side we had the Shah undergoing chemotherapy and his endogenous paranoia, depression, indecisiveness and vacillation. The result was disaster.

And lurking around the corner was Khomeini who cleverly understood what the Americans wanted. The Americans wanted a more responsive democratic government, and Khomeini promised it to them. I have found evidence of his contacting Americans.

MJT: Who in the US did he contact?

Abbas Milani: The American Embassy in Paris. He also sent a letter to Carter. His allies in Tehran were also in contact with the American Embassy. They were saying Khomeini was not as bad as the Shah was making him out to be. All of them were helped by Iranian intellectuals who have a great responsibility in all this.

MJT: What did you think about Khomeini at the time?

Abbas Milani: I was an opponent of the Shah. I spent a year in prison. For six months I was in Evin Prison. The future leaders of the Islamic Republic were my cellmates.

MJT: You knew these guys?

Abbas Milani: I knew all of them. I spent six months with them. I knew they were bad news. I knew that what they were going to deliver was not democracy.

But most people had never read any of Khomeini’s writings because they were banned. The Shah, instead of making them mandatory reading, banned them. In the 1960s and 70s Khomeini had already talked about almost everything he did. Even in 1944 he talked about how evil democracy and modernity are, how evil the rule of law is. He talked about the establishment of Velayat-e faqih, the rule of Islamic jurists. These books could have been an absolutely clear indication of where his regime would go, but they were banned. Even those who were willing, like me, to actually read this stuff, we dismissed it because we were under the Age of Enlightenment illusion that religion is the opiate of the masses and that there is an inverse correlation between reason and science on the one hand and religion on the other. We believed that Iran was too advanced for these ideas.

MJT: What about the guys running it now? There is all this talk about how they’re no longer as dangerous as they used to be, that they’ve renounced violence and want a democracy. I don’t really buy it, but some people insist this is the case, that the Muslim Brothers have gone mainstream and we have nothing to worry about………………

Abbas Milani: I don’t know the Egyptian scene as well as Iran, so let’s look at the Iranian case. If you look at the whole Islamic movement you can see that there were moderate forces in the early part. There were quietist ayatollahs who took part in the revolution, including some who were senior to Khomeini in clerical status. They had an enormous popular base. They were truly moderate and they truly understood the dangers of Khomeini.

Within this movement was also Fadayan-e Islam, the Islamic terrorist group founded by Navvab Safavi who was very much enamored of the Muslim Brotherhood. He even met with Sayyid Qutb. If you look at how this vast network, that included moderates and radicals, evolved once the revolution came, it was the radicals who won. Because they were the most ruthless. They were the most brutal.

Everything I’ve seen indicates that there are moderate Muslim Brothers, but if the society goes into a protracted struggle, I have no doubt that the radicals would win.

Almost every radical group in the Middle East is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

MJT: All the Sunni Islamist groups are, right? I mean, are there any that aren’t?

Abbas Milani: Here’s an interesting fact. Three of the major works that Khamenei translated before the revolution were written by Sayyid Qutb. That’s how much cross-sectarian pollination there is.

In 1975 I took a group of students on a tour of Iran as a professor.

Half of them were leftists and half were Islamists. All were opponents of the Shah, as was I. When the tour ended the Islamist students gave me two of Qutb’s books as a gift. I had never heard the name before, but my eyes were opened to this incredible world that was lurking there in Iranian society. It was right in front of everyone’s eyes, but nobody was watching.

SAVAK was obsessed with the left, and the intellectuals were obsessed with themselves. They thought they were the only game in town. If you look at the intellectual critical discourse in Iran, almost nothing was written about the Islamists. Almost nothing. I worry that the same thing might be happening in Egypt.

MJT: You’ve looked closely at mistakes the United States made in the 1970s in Iran. Based on that, what would you say to President Obama if he asked you what he should do about Egypt?

Abbas Milani: I would tell him he has to make it absolutely clear where he stands. He has to make it clear that he supports a peaceful and gradual democratic transition. He has to make it very clear to the Egyptian people that the US has, in fact, been pushing for this behind the scenes.

There is a whole subtext to American foreign policy, what happens behind the scenes, that very few people pay any attention to. When you look at Wikileaks you can see a lot of very interesting work behind the scenes that isn’t getting reported.

In the case of Iran, I can say with some certainty that the US consistently, with the exception of the Nixon era, pushed for more openness in the system. The Americans were telling the Shah that he was getting himself into serious trouble. They weren’t picking a fight with him publicly, just as they weren’t with Mubarak. But even in the case of Mubarak, the Americans pushed. Condoleeza Rice gave a remarkable speech in Cairo. But then they backed down because Mubarak pushed back. Mubarak held an election.

MJT: And he gave the Muslim Brotherhood 20 percent, or however much it was.

Abbas Milani: Yeah. And he said, look, do you want these guys to take over?

I would say to President Obama that he must make it clear to Mr. Mubarak that he must clearly and categorically say he won’t run again and that his son won’t run, that he will turn over the daily affairs of the state to a coalition of opposition parties. There might be a chance for a gradual transition and the absorption of the elements of the Muslim Brotherhood that really are moderate.

If this doesn’t happen, if Egypt goes into a protracted period of lawlessness, or if there is a Balkanization of the society, Mubarak will do a tremendous disservice to Egypt, to democracy, and to the United States. He’s going to put the United States in a very difficult situation.

The most important lesson that needs to be learned is that the United States must push its allies to make concessions when they are in a position of power, not when they are in peril.

The majority in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran once accepted the notion that enlightenment, democracy, modernity, reason, and the rule of law were good things, that the West has used these things to good purpose, and that we in the Muslim world should find our own iteration of them and catch up. Now the radical fringe is much stronger and directly challenges this. They say they do not want reason, they want revolution. They don’t want laws, they have the Koran. They don’t want equality because the Koran says there is inequality and they abide by the Koran. They say they don’t want democracy, that it’s a trick of the colonial Crusaders.

Thirty years ago people laughed at these ideas. Now they’re being said more and more often and openly. If the Muslim Brotherhood wins, or if Egypt becomes democratic…

MJT: It’s a big deal either way, isn’t it?

Abbas Milani: It is. Because it is Egypt.

Abbas Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His new book The Shah was published a few weeks ago by Palgrave MacMillan.

Notice to Dennis Prager fans from Glenn H. Ray;   Mr. Totten is not a paid New York Times Fifth Avenue Leftwinger….Please consider a thank you for this terrific interview with Abbas Milani by sending a check to Michael.   If you would like to donate,  please consider sending a check or money order to:

Michael Totten

P.O. Box 312

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Many thanks in advance.

and a special thank you from Prager fans for the terrifice articl.  ghr