Twin City Screening for the Movie, “Iranium” Can Be Seen Here

 

View the film, Iranium, here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/213052/iranium

Minnesota premiere information:
Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Time: Two screenings, the first at 6pm and the second at 8pm.

Location: AMC Theater on 12575 Elm Creek Blvd, Maple Grove (i.e. AMC Arbor Lakes 16).

Ticket Price: $4 regular $2 Students/Senior Citizens

The Iranium movie premiere is a special one day PRIVATE event; meaning you must pre-purchase the tickets online at the Iranium website. Tickets in Minnesota are highly subsidized and will NOT be available at the box-office.

To purchase tickets, please click: ( http://e2ma.net/go/6954005617/208458000/219517648/36043/goto:http://www.iraniumthemovie.com/minnesota-premiere/ )

About the film:
Irans nuclear program presents a threat to international stability. Yet successive American administrations – Republican and Democratic alike – have misread the intentions and actions of the Iranian regime.

How dangerous is a nuclear Iran, even if it never detonates a weapon? What are the guiding principles of the Iranian leadership? To what lengths would the regime go to carry out its agenda? How far have Irans leaders already gone to fund the worlds most powerful terrorist organizations? And why have American leaders failed to gain the upper hand in relations with Iran during the past 30 years?

In approximately 60 minutes, Iranium powerfully reports on the many aspects of the threat America and the world now faces using rarely-before seen footage of Iranian leaders, and interviews with 25 leading politicians, Iranian dissidents, and experts on: Middle East policy, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.

I hope you can join us.

Sincerely,

Ilan Sharon, Executive Director
Minnesotans Against Terrorism

Frank Rich Worries About Arab Life in America…..National Witch Hunt on the Horizon?

I am always interested in what the highly paid Leftwingers at the New York Times have to say about current affairs.  Frank Rich is one of the countles among the Times staff.   In an article which rambles in all directions titled, “Wallflowers at the Revolution”, he complains about American’s not getting a moment by moment account of Egyptian happenings in its news media.   Worse Americans, expecially the conservative variety  are mean  and unfair to Arabs and continues with the following paragraphs:

“Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.”

Further comment:   The American Left has allied itself behind the general  muslim community attempting to absorb it into its collection of  tribes of the victimhoods to shore up  voting populations for Democrats. 

In Europe, England,  and in Canada the Frank Rich Lefty  politicos,  hook up  with  Islamic  jihadis  persecuting those who even criticize their  racism and sexist practices by prosecuting them in court……suppressing free speech.

Maligning Mubarak

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen questions the maligning Mubarak business of pundits and newspeople in his article, “Nothing Learned” reprinted here:

“There are two, and only two, credible sources of power in Egypt, at the national level. One is the army, and the other is the Muslim Brotherhood. The former seized power in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, overthrowing the royal dynasty of that extraordinary Albanian, Muhammad Ali, which had ruled Egypt and Sudan (with unwanted British help) since 1805.

For history buffs, there is one parallel between 2011 and 1952, when King Farouk was bundled off to Italy, via Monaco. (A big bundle, for he had become in his Khedival office a very fat man.) And that was the strenuous operation behind the scenes, of Western powers including the CIA, to pull the rug from under him. Then, as now, the West plotted to deliver the country into the hands of our own worst enemies.

Farouk had alas become insupportable. The publicity attached to his European shopping trips made very poor foreground “optics,” against the background of a country that was not rich. But what really sank him was the humiliating failure of Egyptian and allied forces to prevent the formation of Israel, in 1948. There is nothing more destructive to the authority of an Arab ruler than to appear ineffectual; unless it is to appear to lack allies.

The Western powers very slowly grasped that they had contrived to replace a narcissistic fool with a socialist madman. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, almost whimsically; in the course of provoking another disastrous war with Israel in 1956; then another in 1967; while enmiring his country in dysfunctional authoritarian bureaucracy. As the West declined to support him any further, he manoeuvred into the Soviet orbit. But such was his charisma, and the resonance of Israel as his rhetorical bete noire, that he was able to embody pan-Arab nationalist aspirations, so well that we remember that defunct ideology as “Nasserism.”

Nasser was no “Islamist,” and for broader reasons the Egyptian army has long been consciously identified with secular rule. It has remained the only effective bulwark against the expanding influence and demands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under Anwar Sadat, a heroic attempt was made to permanently settle the conflict with Israel, and to pilot out of the Soviet orbit, back into the American — while accommodating Muslim religious aspirations within Egyptian society. It should be mentioned here that this society was intensely conservative to begin with, and that the principal achievement of the Muslim Brotherhood has been, through preaching, to move that conservatism towards “Salafism.” That is, to identify Islam itself with its own most puritanical and aggressive faction.

Peace with Israel was relatively easy, for Israel wanted peace. The Islamists could not be accommodated, however, and they were behind the assassination of Sadat in 1981.

For 30 years since, Hosni Mubarak has tried to advance his country in the direction Sadat pointed, while fully aware that he was straddling a volcano. Those who judge Mubarak by the standards of western constitutional democracies must tinge every observation of Egypt with fantasy.

Mubarak’s greatest difficulty has been securing reforms which have included the gradual replacement of incompetent (and usually army-managed) state enterprises with free markets, and the “normalization” of relations with Israel, from behind a rhetorical cover. His very survival in office has been an extraordinary accomplishment, to which Egypt owes what peace and prosperity it has had.

Any way we look at it, Mubarak is gone. The man is old, and reputedly not well; nature would take care of him, were it not for the mobs. He has been a hard realist all his life; there is every reason to believe he is trying to make the best possible accommodation for the future of his country, under the conditions suddenly presented. The army, at this point, is making its own calculation, of whether it is better positioned with or without him still in office.

In Mubarak’s interview with Christiane Amanpour of ABC News this week, I think we glimpsed the reality. Amanpour herself seems to have been deeply impressed, and to have learned something from the encounter. At the least it was a surprise to her, as to the rest of the media, to discover that Mubarak’s son, Gamal, universally reported to have fled the country, had not. (That son was, incidentally, behind many of the free market reforms, and has been mischaracterized to the point of slander. He was trying to be Egypt’s Rajiv Gandhi.)

“Apres moi, le deluge.” As connoisseurs of this expression will know, it is always worth considering. And just as some paranoids have real enemies, some third-world dictators have good reason to warn what will happen if they relinquish power.

It is said that Mubarak has learned nothing in three decades. Perhaps so. But by trying to bundle him off, as if he were King Farouk, we in the West show that we have learned nothing in six.”

Comment:  I, as so many of you, have watched the last week’s episodes of Egyptian agony on television.  It is natural for most of us Americans to root for the underdog, and in this Egyptian case, to  root for a bloodless coup against the Mubarak regime.

I am not fond of American reporters….not that they might not be nice people, some of them are.  They blab to fill space.  They are not very well educated, for they a journalists.  Only a few are…..John Burns, for one.  They are of single politics and have an ability to put a sentence together.  Some even have a convincing gift of gab….but as a group, when they begin pontificating about conditions, history, personalities of a particular region, well, they could be writing about a new brand of snow shoes just now put on the market more accurately than their perceptions about real issues and problems, let say, of Egypt. 

Yet, nearly every television reporter after a few days  into the turmoil in Cairo began to describe the government as Mubarak thugs doing this and Mubarak thugs doing that, done by habit, not by evidence.   They assumed themselves to be informing accurately.  

In the traditional  Marxist uprisings  of the last century,  rebels routinely would attack  their own  strikers in front of western news cameras for propaganda purposes, relying on the western press to damn the defenders in their writings back home.   This is not to say there weren’t thugs sent out to cause ‘trouble’ in Cairo from the Mubarak government.  It is to say there are thugs in Cairo on all sides and some of them are paid for their work.

John Kerry, The Most Dishonest Man in Washington, Seeks Hillary’s Job to Head State Department

   The  office of Secretary of State of late seems to be a repository for Democrats bearing the skill  of being above commanding   interest in differentiating fact from fiction.  the following article was written by Jazz Shaw at HotAir:

“With presidential primary speculation sucking all the air out of the room, it’s only fair that we take a moment and look at some of the equally useless rumors floating around concerning other high profile positions. This weekend the Boston Globe opens up the guessing game with yet another rumor that not only is Hillary Clinton thinking of moving on to bigger and better things, but that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is angling for her position at Secretary of State.

AS EGYPT battles over its future, Senator John Kerry is negotiating his own.

The Bay State’s senior senator is running an unofficial campaign to become the next secretary of state. For once, he looks artful, as well as ambitious.
…
Secretary of state is the spot Kerry wanted when Barack Obama won the presidency. He lost out to Hillary Clinton and Obama’s “team of rivals.’’ But his fallback position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee provides a powerful platform to press his case.

Kerry’s office quickly moved to squash the rumor in the most forceful manner possible.

“I don’t know what else we can do to stop the parlor game speculation about who’s coming and who’s going,” the statement began. “Lord knows we’ve knocked it down a thousand times over, and at a time of such challenge for American foreign policy the punditry is especially unwelcome and unhelpful.”

“So one last time: the only job John Kerry is contemplating, or considering, is the one job he already has, and he isn’t looking elsewhere. Sometimes in politics, no really means no, and sometimes the best place to be really is the place you already are, end of story.”

In a way I kind of feel sorry for Kerry on this one. If he says nothing it would immediately be taken as an acknowledgment that he was angling for the job. If he says no – as he did – armchair quarterbacks will simply declare that obviously that’s what somebody would say if they were considering such a move. You don’t want to look like you’re campaigning to kick out a high profile member of your own party.

But what if things did play out this way? Rumors continue to circulate that Hillary is thinking of moving on, though Bill Richardson is frequently mentioned as her replacement. And it was one of the worst kept secrets in Washington two years ago that Kerry wanted the cabinet position at State until Clinton got it as a peace offering to her disgruntled supporters.

If Kerry left, Massachusetts would find itself in need of another senator. Not only did Republican Scott Brown win a shocking victory there after Ted Kennedy passed, but he is still considered the most popular political figure in the state today. (Though it’s worth noting that some conservatives are mulling a primary challenge to him next time out.) Are Bay State voters possibly still in the mood to elect a second Republican to fill Kerry’s shoes in an effort to shed their image as Taxachusetts?

Anything is possible, but they’d have to find a candidate who is effectively a clone of Brown. We’ve seen nothing to indicate that MA has suddenly become Georgia North and would elect a pro-life, war hawk conservative firebrand. Still, it could make for a very interesting political theater if it came to pass. As little as five years ago, how many of you would have even considered it possible that you’d live to see the day the GOP took both senate seats in the home stomping grounds of the Kennedys?”

Added Comment:   John Kerry of Massachusetts built his reputation on deception and lies running across the country at the height of the American Cultural Revolution era appearing on televisions everywhere as the poster boy for the Leftwing’s claims of wide spread atrocities in Viet Nam.   He had himself filmed in faked war scenes which he used to sell his phony heroism at the same time he was degnigrating the authentic heroism of real American combatants.

He immediately returned to Massachusetts carrying this foul deceit into his policial life.

I found him the most disgusting American then….a traitorous one at that…..He has done nothing since to damage this reputation.  The State Department might be a good fit for this suit without a man.

Congress Defeats Obama’s Business-Killer 1099 Mandate of ObamaCare Law

This article is an opinion piece found at the Wall Street Journal titled, “Health Care:  The 1099 Repudiation”

“Democrats now claim that the infamous 1099 business reporting mandate that the Senate repealed this week was an accident, as if they were as surprised as everyone else to learn that this destructive provision had crept by itself into law. The truth is that the 1099 rule emerged from the same core ideology as ObamaCare, and its overwhelming repudiation by Democrats may be an important inflection point in the health-care debate.

The 1099 rule is the first of the ballast to go over the side, and Democrats hope that such “improvements” will be enough to ride out the public storm. Then again, they also claimed that voters would learn to love ObamaCare once it had been stuffed through Congress, among many other misjudgments. The political history is revealing and instructive.

Less than a year ago, liberals couldn’t see how anyone could possibly object to a rule requiring businesses to file 1099 tax forms with the Internal Revenue Service every time they spent more than $600 with a single vendor. Yes, this would result in a vast new paperwork and accounting burden for 30 million businesses and hit start-ups hardest, not to mention farms, charities and churches. But Democrats saw IRS surveillance of nearly all business-to-business transactions as merely an exercise in good government.

The point was to close the “tax gap,” the largely mythological difference between the estimated taxes due under the business tax code and what the IRS actually collects. During the Bush years, Democrats and more than a few Republicans convinced themselves that businesses were cheating the government out of revenues through deliberate under-reporting and various tax shelters.

This notion prevailed at the Senate Finance Committee under both Democratic Chairman Max Baucus and Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley. Budget Chairman Kent Conrad was another evangelist. In its first budget, the Obama White House promised “robust” tax compliance enforcement “to narrow the annual tax gap of over $300 billion,” in contrast to the lethargy of its predecessor.

The 1099 ObamaCare footnote thus received no scrutiny at first because it was so mundane. Everyone in Washington agreed that corporations were stealing billions of dollars every year that rightfully belonged to Congress to spend. (The issue only blew up when the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, followed by the GOP and the business lobby, made it a priority last summer.)

In the same Washington mindset, the 1099 mandate doesn’t impose any more of a reporting burden than a European-style value-added tax. And it doesn’t create any more of a drag on economic growth than the higher income tax rates that liberals believe don’t matter either. As recently as September, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius were still defending the 1099 rule as a good-faith “bipartisan provision to close the tax gap.”

At that point, the White House was attempting to head off out-and-out 1099 repeal, and the duo did endorse arbitrary carve-outs for the smallest businesses—but these only made the provision more complex and onerous. House and Senate leaders tried similar gambits, while tying such half-measures to other business tax increases to scare off Republicans and give Democrats a way to tell voters they’d supported repeal.

The day after the election, President Obama deflected questions about the role health care played in the rout by offering the 1099 sacrificial lamb. He called it “counterproductive” and something “I think we can tweak and make improvements on the progress that we’ve made.” He also mentioned it in the State of the Union, and total repeal sailed through the Senate on Wednesday, 81 to 17.

The mystery is the 17 Democrats who continue to think this is a good idea—even authors Messrs. Baucus and Conrad voted to heave it over the side. One of the 17 is Tom Carper of Delaware, which is home to thousands of small businesses. Does he think Christine O’Donnell is going to be his 2012 opponent? And what about New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand?

The larger political question is whether voters will be satisfied by this or that “improvement” to ObamaCare. The White House is trying to outflank public opposition with a controlled burn, but wildfires often move in surprising and unmanageable directions.”

Comment:   Obama’s devotion to enlarging government by  hiring more than one million new bureaucrats to manage citizen lives is exposed by the stealthful slipping of this 1099 provision in ObamaCare government  takeover of the American health industry.   Where would the politicians get the money to payroll all of these cogs in running our lives?  Government is not capable of creating wealth.

Why Aren’t We Drilling Our Own Oil?

 The editorial at Investers Business Daily reads:  “White House’s Contemptible Drilling Ban.”

 ”Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad.

The Obama administration’s trouble with the courts has continued with a judge’s ruling last week that the Interior Department’s reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt.

The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that resulted in the spill of more than 4.1 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

In June, Martin Feldman of the Eastern District Court of Louisiana struck down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s original moratorium, saying it was overkill based on flawed reasoning. “If some drilling equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are?” Feldman asked in his ruling. “That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed and rather overbearing.”

Feldman further asked: “Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines?” The administration’s answer still seems to be yes, as offshore oil rigs find their way to other shores, and communities dry up along with the oil business that sustained them.

So the administration went back, rearranged a few words and a few deck chairs, and reissued its moratorium. That one was officially lifted in October, although the permitting process, which mysteriously includes shallow-water wells, has had the effect of continuing the moratorium.

Feldman was not amused. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” the judge said in his ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second moratorium . .. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt.”

Feldman even accused the administration of outright lying, pointing out that “at the hearing on the first moratorium, in response to a question by the court, the government’s answer then was wholly at odds with the story of the misleading text change by a White House official, a story the government does not now dispute.”

As we have noted, now-departing climate czar Carol Browner’s office edited a May 27, 2010, report to President Obama by a panel of experts brought together by the administration to review offshore drilling safety. The report was altered to make it seem like the panelists supported the administration’s six-month drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico when they did not.

It is not so much that the Obama administration differs with the law, but that it considers itself above it — even above the Constitution. Successive smack-downs by the courts on ObamaCare’s health insurance mandate as unconstitutional are a result of its overreach. It’s also being challenged in its use of EPA regulations to go around the will of Congress and the sovereignty of the states.

We remember last year’s State of the Union address in which Obama lectured the justices of the Supreme Court sitting in front of him that they had “reversed a century of law” by lifting restrictions on corporate and union spending in federal elections. Justice Samuel Alito visibly shook his head and mouthed the words, “Not true.”

As Feldman noted in his original ruling, the drilling moratorium was groundless on both the law and the facts.

The moratorium is driven by ideology and not safety. Its purpose was to further the administration’s war on domestic energy production, including a seven-year ban on offshore drilling off both coasts and the eastern Gulf.

It includes putting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge off-limits and designating oil- and gas-rich Alaskan waters as critical polar bear habitat in the face of an exploding bear population.

It continues to place energy-rich lands in the West off-limits in a nation starved for energy and jobs.

In 2012 the American people should also hold the Obama administration in contempt.”

Comment:   It is the dogma of the left which is crippling the present American economy.  The most obvious example is the power the Democrat Party has had in Congress for 30 to ban the nation to develop  the energy resources it has at its disposal.   Instead we shore up the finances and policial powere of OPEC and its mullah emissaries selling Islamic peace to the world.

Wall Street Journal Market Watch: “Labor Market is Still Terrible”

By MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — If ever there were a time to advise against overanalyzing a piece of economic data, this would be it.

The January jobs report was a muddled mess, providing us with very little reliable information about the economy, and a whole lot of confusion. It’d probably be best just to ignore it and wait until the February report for clarification. Read our complete coverage of the January unemployment report.

The key take away from the report should be that the labor market is still terrible, but slowly improving. Just as it has been for a year.

For those who wish to dig deeper, here’s a guide to the statistical minefield that is the January employment report.

According to the workplace survey, nonfarm payrolls rose by 36,000 in January, about a third of the average monthly growth over the past year.

But bad weather might have depressed employment significantly, with more than 850,000 workers saying that it had kept them from working during the second week of the month, when the employment survey is conducted. The weather impact was about twice as large as in the typical January.

The unemployment rate fell unexpectedly to 9% in January from 9.4% in December, according to a separate survey of households. But because of the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics introduces annual adjustments to the population’s size and composition, the December and January data can’t be directly compared.

Between the weather and the new statistical controls, we can’t really say with much confidence how much the employment situation improved between December and January, or if it improved at all. We can be pretty sure, however, that the unemployment crisis isn’t over, not by a long shot.