Open Thread

I’m leaving for the weekend in about a half an hour, although as always, I’ll be taking my laptop with me.

I didn’t have time, today to develop the story I wanted to do about the Obama administration and Israel, but here are some links, that I gathered. You can click away, and connect the dots, yourself.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/30/power-to-nsc/

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=376A8A3B-62DD-407F-8D48-F38B2A63B96E

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Nuclear-Weapon-From-Iran-Within-A-Year-Expert-Says-Country-Will-Have-Enough-Uranium-For-Warhead/Article/200901415211260

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/26/world/main4753652.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_4753652

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=86610

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=87454

Related:

A recent day in NYC.

Tell me what you think…I’ll see you in a few hours.

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Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst #54

Caught on video: shameful cover-up of the crescent-topped Tower of Voices

Background

For three years, the Flight 93 Memorial Project has been relentlessly dishonest, publicly denying damning facts like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent while making excuses for these facts in private.

Example:

Before the 2007 Memorial Project meeting, Project Partner and Flight 93 family member Patrick White was asked by the press about claims that the giant Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca. He said that all of the claims about what is in the design had been thoroughly investigated and been found to be untrue and “preposterous.”

In private conversation at the meeting itself, White acknowledged the Mecca-orientation of the crescent and made excuses for it, arguing that the almost-exact Mecca orientation cannot be seen as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

It is difficult enough to comprehend how Flight 93 family members can know that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca, as critics are claiming, and still be okay with it. But White and the other Project Partners are going even further. They are knowingly covering up this damning information, and even flat lying to the public about it.

Whatever the explanation, this is what we are up against. Memorial Project participants know that the press will only cover our denunciations of the crescent design in those rare instances where we are able to mount a substantial public protest. Since the press never checks the facts, Project partners just issue whatever denials will get them through that news cycle, no matter how dishonest.

The above video

An example of this shameless misdirection was caught on video at last summer’s Memorial Project meeting. Alec Rawls, who made the trip to Somerset PA along with Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr.), directed public attention to the crescent-topped Tower of Voices. A full-color advertisement in the Somerset newspaper showed the public what the Memorial Project and the press would not: that the Tower of Voices is topped with an Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes:

Tower of Voices top

At the meeting, Patrick White castigated Rawls for showing the meeting this artist’s rendering of the crescent topped tower, even as this very same graphic was on display by the Memorial Project itself just outside of the courtroom where the meeting was taking place.

White angrily denounced any suggestion that the approved plans for the memorial were indicative of what would actually be built, clearly implying that the crescent topped tower is no longer part of the planned memorial. Yet White had asserted exactly the opposite just three months earlier, when he and other family members involved with the Memorial Project declared that they would fight to build the design as approved:

Commission Chairman John Reynolds said he anticipated that people who opposed the memorial design would present a petition to throw it out.

But family members yesterday said they will work tirelessly to have the monument completed according to the design by the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

“We’re standing up and saying, ‘Enough.’ We’re proponents of the winning design,” said Patrick White, whose cousin, Louis “Joey” Nacke II, died on Flight 93.

Mr. White said his group rejected any wholesale change to the design but allowed that it would have to be modified as it shifts from paper to reality.

However, Mr. White added, “They’re not going to be changed based upon the idea that someone sees crescents everywhere.”

This was shortly after our blogburst group started hitting hard on the crescent-topped tower, which the Project Partners are known to have been angry about. In effect, White was directly insisting that the Tower would not be changed just because people were upset about its crescent shape.

The press ignored White’s implied denial that the crescent shaped tower will be built

If the crescent shaped tower is actually to be removed, or changed to some other shape, that is a significant concession, and should have been widely reported, at least by the western Pennsylvania press, but it was not mentioned in any newspaper.

Has the blatant Islamic-Supremacist symbolism of the crescent-topped tower actually penetrated the thick skulls of Patrick White and his cohorts? That is doubtful. When they only faced blogosphere pressure over the crescent-topped tower, their response was angry insistence that the design would NOT be altered. The difference in August was that everyone they had to deal with face-to-face had just seen the crescent topped tower in the local newspaper. The difference was exposure.

Since the press went on to cover up what we worked so hard to expose, there is no reason to think that the Memorial Project will change the design at all. They managed to sneak their cover-up through one more news cycle, which is all they have ever cared about.

Not that any tweaking of the design could ever make it anything but a terrorist memorial mosque in any case. The Tower, for instance, will still be a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial, regardless of any change to the Tower’s profile. (The Memorial Project knows about this too, and makes utterly dishonest excuses for it.)

Better stand up and fight America, or there WILL be a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site.

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Stimulus Test: How Stupid And Gullible Are Americans?

According to the Soros funded Americans United For Change, very.

They’re running new radio ads in several cities featuring Rush Limbaugh with the goal of turning GOP votes in favor of Obama’s stimulus plan.

Here is the text of the 60-second ads:

NARRATOR: Listen to what Rush Limbaugh said about President Obama’s Agenda and his Jobs Package.LIMBAUGH: I HOPE HE FAILS!

NARRATOR: The Obama Jobs bill overwhelmingly passed the House…. But not one Republican voted yes. Every Republican member of the House chose to take Rush Limbaugh’s advice. Every Republican voted with Limbaugh….and against creating 4 million new American jobs.

We can understand why a extreme partisan like Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama’s Jobs program to fail….but the Members of Congress elected to represent the citizens in their districts?… that’s another matter.

Now the Obama plan goes to the Senate…. And the question is:

Will our Senator, _____ ,side with Rush Limbaugh too…

LIMBAUGH: I HOPE HE FAILS!

NARRATOR: OR will he reject the partisanship and failed economic policies of the past,

and stand up for the people of _____

Bwahahahahaha!  Weak….As, I’m sure they know…Rush wants Obama’s far left goals for America to fail. So do many Americans.

Meanwhile, this haughty Americans United For Change spokeswoman recently appeared on the Neil Caputo show, where she repeatedly dismissed the “red herrings” (what you and I call pork) in the bill:

I’m thinking the fish barriers may be needed for all of those “red herrings”.

Maybe Republicans can make that interview into their own  ad for radio stations in swing states. I think it would be more effective than the anti-Limbaugh drivel.

Nancy Pelosi gave us some great material, too:

These ads just write themselves…come on Republicans!

Hat tip: Hot Air

Cult Watch: 1st Graders Forced To Pledge Allegiance To… Obama?

obama_flags

This is just beyond the pale :

A parent in the Clark County School District of Las Vegas, Henderson area reported today that his son, who is in 1st grade, came home yesterday saying that he didn’t want to go back to school anymore.

When asked why, the boy said that during the Pledge of Allegiance the teacher put up a large image of Obama next to the flag.

Thinking that the boy might be exaggerating, the man asked his son if he was sure, and suggested that by “large” he might mean an 8×10 photo of the president. The boy apparently said “No, it is a large picture of Obama and when we are done, the teacher turns off the image.”

The same thing was not done for President Bush last year.

After investigating this morning, the other parent reported that what the boy said was true.

At least three of the five classrooms have an overhead projector and as the children stand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the teacher turns on the classroom overhead and a full body image of Obama, with six U.S. flags behind him, comes up about 4 feet away from the flag that hangs on the wall. The screen is apparently around five feet by six feet.

Huh. I thought libs were all about taking God OUT of the pledge.

Seriously  though, the vice principle has said, he’ll “take care of it”, and another report is due out tomorrow to see how that goes.

I never complained  about this, because it seemed petty….but on inauguration day, at our elementary school, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades were corralled into to library to watch BHO being sworn in, live.

I don’t remember that happening when George Bush was inaugurated in 2000, or 2004. My older kids don’t remember it, either.

Via: Doctor Bulldog and Ronin

Hat tip: Jawa Report

*UPDATE:

This story is being called a hoax by some in the blogosphere, although it is not at all clear that it is. Geoff tells me that the original post for the story appeared at The Tree of Liberty.

From there, he says,  “the story went to InfoWars.net, and was finally picked up by News Blaze, which is just a blog. The News Blaze fellow promised an update the next day and didn’t deliver, so it’s possible that the story is fabricated. If Ed Driscoll’s unsourced claim that Clark Country officials have checked with all schools in their jurisdiction is true, then that conflicts directly with News Blaze’s claim that they talked to the VP”.

In the meantime, The New Blaze has updated its post with this:

Update Jan 29th: The teachers at the school today talked to the children about flag etiquette and the meaning of the flag and why the pledge is said. The lights were left on, so the flag could be clearly seen and the children were told that they should face towards and look at the flag. The parent spoke to the Principal and the child’s teacher. The Principal said they would not show the image of the president at the same time as the pledge tomorrow. The Principal apologized for causing offense. The parent and Principal and teacher left on good terms.

I’ve emailed The New Blaze to see if they can provide  more specifics, like the name of the school, and the name of the Principle the parents spoke to.

There are definitely a lot of Internet rumors out there,  concerning Obama, so you do have to be careful.  Another  that has come out recently, is this one, which has been picked up by many blogs, and is almost certainly a hoax.

The problem with wild stories about BHO and his followers…is you just can’t dismiss them out of hand because so many horrendous rumors have turned out to be true.

Who would have ever believed that American children would be trained to sing songs of praise to Obama while he was still a candidate, or that 15 pages would already be devoted to him in middle school history books. Not to mention the absolutely startling numbers of products glorifying his name appearing all over America. Who would ever have believed that American flags with his face printed on them would be de rigueur at the inauguration? Or that the benediction at his inauguration would turn out to be a race-baiting mother goose rhyme? I feel like I’ve been conditioned to expect  mind-numbed cultlike Obama worship at every turn.

I’ve stopped being appalled, and have come to expect it.

UPDATE II:

Alan Gray, the Editor in Chief of NewsBlaze emailed me back with this message:

Hello Debra.

The name of the school was purposely not given out,
in order to give this a chance to be resolved without causing a major issue
and so the school would not be inundated with calls.

The Principal has stopped the simultaneous display of the image and the reciting of the Pledge
and apologized for the problem it caused.

He also enclosed his update which I already posted, above.

I am inclined to believe that the school made an honest mistake, and corrected it. The persons involved didn’t want it to become a huge national story, and it didn’t.

Incidentally, the photo above is a picture of Obama standing in front of some flags. It was never meant to be taken as the picture being used in the classrooms.

Duh.

UPDATE III:

Here is the conclusion to the story, as given by the source.

The school only wanted to honor Obama. Did this same school honor President Bush in the same way?

Google Corrects Obama “Miserable Failure” Search Algorithm

Via The American Thinker, Google explains:

Though the spirit of change may be in the air in Washington, some things apparently stay the same. Yes, the old online prank called “Googlebombing” returned for a brief while recently, when Google searches for the words words [failure] and [cheerful achievement] returned President Obama’s biography as the top result.
You may remember this issue from a few years ago, when the query [miserable failure] led to the biography of President Bush. For some reason, all those links pointing to the Bush bio were redirected to Obama’s. Some people have asked in the past whether these results are a sign of political bias on Google’s part, and we’ve explained that this isn’t the case.
Rather than edit these prank results by hand, we developed an algorithm a few years ago to detect Googlebombs. We tend not to run it all the time, because it takes some computing power to process our entire web index and because true Googlebombs are quite rare (we joke around the Googleplex that more articles have been written about Googlebombs than there are actual examples of Googlebombs).
After we became aware of this latest Googlebomb, we re-ran our algorithm and it detected the Googlebomb for [cheerful achievement] as well as for [failure]. As a result, those search queries now return discussion about the Googlebombs rather than the original pages that were returned.

Kudos to Google for springing into action so quickly. These childish internet pranks are ridiculous; just ask George W. Bush, who endured the prank for six and a half years before Google decided to re-run their algorithm.

Hat tip: Moonbattery

Video: Protesters Greet Bill Ayers With “Go To Hell” At St. Mary’s College

What in God’s name was Bill Ayers doing at a Catholic college? What possible benefit could there be to subjecting young, impressionable minds to Ayers’ dishonest self-apologia?

Melanie Morgan lead a large, rambunctious protest outside of the college:

“People aren’t perfect”? Oh honey…….

Shame on St. Mary’s college.