The IDF created a YouTube channel in order to combat the usual wave of anti-Israel press from the world’s objective journalists.  The most popular one showed some Hamas terrorists being delivered directly to Allah while they loaded Katyusha missiles into the back of a truck.

The video was removed.  I’ll give YouTube the benefit of the doubt and say this was an automated, user generated removal, spawned by anti-Israel viewers clicking on the “Flag” button. 

However, the IDF feels it may be a conscious decision by YouTube:

We are saddened that YouTube has taken down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. As the State of Israel again faces those who would see it destroyed, it is imperative that we in the IDF show the world the inhumanity directed against us and our efforts to stop it. It is also worth noting that one of the videos removed had the highest number of hits (over 10,000) at the time of its removal.

As it stands now we are working on opening up new channels on alternative sites, when we are done we will post the addresses here.

Commentary says that the most viewed video has been taken down and describes it as “a group of Hamas goons being blown up in an air strike as they loaded Katyusha missiles onto a truck.”

Here’s that video:

Image via Wikipedia

Who saw this coming?  Now that Bush has forked over $17 billion to GM and Chrysler, the UAW says it is going to fight against giving up any salary concessions and will just renegotiate the terms of the bailout:

In agreeing to provide federal assistance to General Motors and Chrysler, the White House demanded the firms cut worker compensation to the levels paid at the U.S. divisions of Toyota, Nissan and Honda. But Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Auto Workers, said earlier this week that he would seek to remove the wage-reduction provision of the loan, calling it “an undue tax on the workers” who have already made “major” sacrifices for the benefit of the auto industry.

What were they?  Show me the “major” sacrifices.  Did you close down the jobs bank?  Nope, you suspended it.  What were the sacrifices?  You refused to concede, resulting in the bailout to die in the Senate, then turned around and blamed the Republicans.

The bailout changes nothing and solved nothing.  Because of people like Ron Gettlefinger, we will be hearing from the Big Three again, and not because they wanted to repay those loans early.

With all the reams of news and analysis that has been written about Iraq since the United States and a few reluctant allies invaded in 2003, you would think we would know who we were fighting, whether we have “won” the war, and if not, who did?

As of November 30, 2008 the number of U.S. dead was 4,205. The amount of money the U.S. has poured into Iraq as the result of the invasion exceeds $500 billion. Also at the end of November, the Iraqi parliament voted on an agreement that would have the bulk of the U.S. military depart by 2011. The agreement, though, leaves plenty of wiggle room for Iraqis to request U.S. military to stay on.

So, who won? The answer is Iran.

I have read a dozen or more books that have been spawned by the Iraq War, but if you really want to know the truth, you need to hear from the people who actually fought the war there. I am talking about the kind of book that soldiers write for their comrades in arms, cautionary tales that say, “Look, this is what we did wrong and here’s why we should not keep making the same mistakes.”

One such book is Steven K. O’Hern’s “The Intelligence Wars: Lessons from Baghdad.”

($25.98, Prometheus Books) In 2005 O’Hern served as the director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate of the Multi-National Force in Baghdad, Iraq. He served as the senior military intelligence officer in Iraq while overseeing the work of counterintelligence offices and their sources.

O’Hern is presently a retired Air Force colonel, an attorney in Overland Park, Kansas, and what he does not know about the magical arts of intelligence gathering and analysis is probably not worth knowing. The bulk of his book is about the need for “HUMINT”, the kind of intelligence you can only get from humans, not technology.

We begin, though, with the obvious fact that “After the invasion of Iraq, the United States and its allies were facing an insurgency in a country adjoining Iran.”

“We knew that Iran had demonstrated the willingness to attack via proxies in the past at the marine barracks in Lebanon, Khobar Towers (in Saudi Arabia), and in the Lebanese Hezbollah war against Israel in 2006,” says O’Hern. “Yet we didn’t treat Iran as a threat. We failed to take a long view of a long war.”

Most Americans think we have been fighting Iraqi insurgents in Iraq. We have, in fact, been fighting people whose leaders have strong links to Iran, that were equipped for battle by Iran, and short of massed Iranian troops in the field we have been at war with Iran.

“After the US invasion of Iraq, Iranian investors and intelligence officers had spread out across the country with orders to buy as many as five thousand apartments, houses, stores, and restaurants in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, and Karbala.,” says O’Hern. “These locations would be used as living quarters and command centers for Iranian agents and militias loyal to Iran.”

O’Hern’s experience is pre-surge and that has since changed the dynamics in Iraq to a considerable degree. It is entirely likely that much of the surge involved hunting and killing insurgents whose names and addresses were known to the U.S. military by then, thanks to effective intelligence.

The politics of Iraq is an impenetrable maze to outsiders, but it helps to know that the present prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is from the Islamic (Shia) Dawa Party, known to be closely allied with the Iranians in much the same way his opponent Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Militia, and who heads the United Iraqi Alliance is closely allied with the Iranians. The result is that “People and organizations with very close ties to Iran gained control of much of the government.”

Al-Maliki has been asserting himself, reaching out to Sunni politicians, military men, and others to widen the base of the Dawa Party. However, there are more than 400 political parties registered in Iraq with more than 150 just in Baghdad. In the coming provincial elections, more than 14,600 candidates and some 36 or more coalitions will be vying for power.

It can be argued, however, that it doesn’t matter who runs Iraq because, in the end, Iran will run Iraq and it just needs to patiently wait until 2011 when most U.S. forces are scheduled to leave. There remain many obstacles to overcoming a three-way split between the Kurds in the north, the Shias in the south, and the Sunni area of Anbar. In the meantime, Iran can work on developing its own nuclear weapons.

What men like General David Petraeus know is that we are now into what is called “fourth generation” warfare. As O’Hern points out, “Nations such as the United States will face tribes, clans, religious groups, and criminal societies that may operate in several nations and that are immune to sanctions and attacks against their host nation’s economy or infrastructure.”

We are now fighting ghosts, a phantom army that does not put on a uniform, form up ranks, or has an arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, surface ships, submarines, and the other accoutrements of war, although you can be sure that Iran has all of that. And, soon, it will be able to put nuclear warheads on top of its missiles. When that day arrives it will alter the balance of power in the Middle East and South Asia.

What the United States has is some of the fanciest technology ever brought to bear on a battlefield. What it needs is more HUMINT, the most essential element of intelligence, the eyes and ears of people who know what is going to happen next.

“Even as early as 2005,” O’Hern notes, “the second-highest-ranking officer in Iraq wrote that HUMINT was needed because technology-based tools were ineffective in Iraq, a theatre where developing actionable intelligence was difficult.” The intelligence community’s devotion to technology-based information gathering will remain an obstacle for a long time to come though the military has learned since 2005 how essential HUMINT is.

Clearly the decision to invade Iraq a second time underestimated or misunderstood the nature of the enemy we would engage. One thing is known, though, the U.S. lacked an adequate number of troops to initially get the job done. The demands put upon our volunteer military were met with bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

The refusal for the longest time to recognize or admit that the enemy was Iran cost a lot of lives to the weapons being manufactured and brought into Iraq from Iran.

To this day, American policy has been reticent to identify the enemy that the whole of the Middle East knows is pulling the strings, whether it is Hezbollah in Lebanon or some of those running Iraq these days.

There is, however, an unknown factor. In general, Arabs and Persians are adversaries. The whole of the Persian Gulf these days bristles with Arab fear of Persian intentions. And, finally, Iraqis despite everything they have been through have a sense of their own nationality and may resist being an Iranian satellite state.

The American public, impatient with long wars, wants to leave. Iran may give them cause to leave even sooner than 2011. These are, after all, Persians, the descendents of the people who invented the game of chess.

Author: Alan Caruba

Originally published at WesternFront America

[source]

From Mises:

Mr. Farber was faced with a dilemma felt by teachers across the country. His supplies budget was cut by the district, which meant that if Farber wanted to give his students the much-needed practice tests that would prepare them for later placement tests, he would have to find funding elsewhere. Many teachers either would have paid for the additional expense out of their own pocket or deprived their students of the requisite practice tests. Farber estimated that, had he paid for the copies out of pocket, it would have cost him almost $200.

Unwilling to shortchange his students or to pay for the copies himself, the visionary teacher found an alternative: he began to sell advertisements on his test papers. According to USA Today, he charged $10 per ad on quizzes, $20 per ad on chapter tests, and $30 per ad on semester finals. Within a few days he had over 75 email requests for ads! Farber has already generated $350 in ad revenue. The article also states that approximately 67% of the ad sales are inspirational messages, paid for by parents. Others are from local businesses.

It makes me wonder what would happen if we removed all government funding from the schools, and relied on donations from the community to fund local education.

David Spade comes through for the Phoenix Police Department.  Spade use to live there, and after hearing that the police were forced to buy their own rifles, he donated a little jack to buy some weaponry:

Phoenix Police Sgt. Alan Hill says the rifles will be given to patrol officers and that the agency was grateful for the gifts.

“These guys need to be able to do their jobs and I am just happy I could help,” Spade said in a statement released by his publicist.

The Phoenix Police Department is outgunned, mainly because of the Mexican drug cartels presence in the city.  Earlier this year, the drug cartels carried out a hit in Phoenix with what were suspected former members of the Mexican military.

Cato at Liberty, where I found this story, suggests this wouldn’t be an issue if we were not fighting a losing battle in the War on Drugs.  That’s possible, but Cato is also an open borders advocate. 

If we secured our borders the way we should, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue either.

Oregon is a very blue state.  And being blue, they are very concerned about global warming.  One way the eco-Marxists say the average Joe can fight the scourge of climate change is to drive more fuel efficient cars, therefore using less gasoline.

But there is a drawback to that.  The government rakes in less revenue from gasoline taxes.  So, in order to fix that, the governor of Oregon suggests adding a device to the cars in the state to track the amount of miles they drive and tax citizens based on mileage:

“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax.

The governor wants the task force “to partner with auto manufacturers to refine technology that would enable Oregonians to pay for the transportation system based on how many miles they drive.”

One question comes to my mind:  if they can track how much you drive, can’t they track where you drive.  I don’t want to get all tinfoil hat on you, but it seems to me that this type of thing could be used by Big Brother if they wanted.

I hope you will excuse me for not wanting the government to know where I am going at all times.

Photo Credit:

• nateOne

Remember this:

Nixon appointed the three-person investigation team, which he says is independent, that is probing e-mail retention in Blunt’s office.

The team filed the suit Monday accusing the governor’s staff of refusing to comply with numerous open-records requests and of ordering the destruction of backup tapes containing e-mails sought by the team and the news media.

The team has cleared Gov. Blunt of any wrongdoing.

“Finally, after making false accusation after false accusation and wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, the e-mail team brings this political case to a conclusion two days before Christmas,” said Gov. Blunt’s spokeswoman Jessica Robinson.  “After falsely accusing many the only real outcome is that the governor’s office was telling the truth.  This agreement comes just as the office was seeking to question an official in the Attorney General’s office over his destruction of e-mails.  One can see why they would be embarrassed by the result of their 13 month long legal fiasco and would seek to bury the story during the week of Christmas.”

Now here is the most ironic, but typical part of the whole non-scandal.  Jay Nixon created the team, but isn’t participating in e-mail retention:

Gov.-elect Jay Nixon is not using Missouri’s new comprehensive, e-mail archiving system that makes easy to find and provide e-mails in response to public records requests.

The reason, essentially, is it would be inconvenient for Nixon’s transition team to start using it before he becomes governor.
Under normal circumstances, the computer servers used to send and receive e-mails by an incoming governor might not be an issue.

But Nixon’s situation is far from usual. Special investigators for his current office of attorney general are suing the outgoing occupant of his new office – Gov. Matt Blunt – to determine if the governor’s e-mail practices have complied with Missouri laws.

There is a term for this:  hypocrite.  Jay Nixon is demonstrating one of the primary rules of being a Democrat, that the rules that apply to everyone else, don’t apply to him.

Photo Credit:

• KSHB-TV

This article, by Anne Bayefsky, originally appeared in Forbes.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, a native of Durban, South Africa, is on a mission. She is the secretary-general of the U.N.’s latest “anti-racism” extravaganza, known as “Durban II.”

Durban I was the 2001 U.N. world conference on racism, most famous for spreading anti-Semitism rather than defeating it. Pillay is engaged in a frenzied attempt to silence critics of round two.

Now in high gear, her office is penning opinion pieces and letters to major news outlets from Jerusalem to Sydney, as well as circulating press releases around the globe courtesy of the U.N.’s vast public relations machine. In an article published on Forbes.com on Dec. 4, Claudia Rosett detailed the disturbing lead-up to Durban II, which is scheduled to take place in Geneva in April 2009. Taking umbrage at Rosett’s account, Pillay issued a response on Dec. 18 via Rupert Colville, her spokesman.

The facts matter because the decision to attend Durban II will be one of the first major foreign policy decisions of President Obama. The U.N. is making every effort to hype U.S. participation as a key yardstick for judging Obama’s multilateral bona fides. Given the wild inaccuracies of Pillay’s pitch, however, concerns that the U.N.’s anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-democratic playbook is about to be rewound are more justified than ever.

No doubt the Durban I conference was an unmitigated PR disaster for the U.N. Guest speakers included such human rights luminaries as Yasser Arafat. The U.S. and Israel eventually walked out, refusing to sign on to its final outcome–”The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” Since the first objective of Durban II is “to foster the implementation” of that declaration, Pillay knows that to sell Durban II, she needs to resurrect the reputation of Durban I. So begins her historical revisionism.

Durban I had two parts, a non-governmental forum and a governmental conference. Pillay claims that the bad guys were all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the white knights were U.N. member states that protested anti-Semitism. In her words: “The controversy that tainted the 2001 Durban Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance … was caused by the anti-Semitic behavior of some non-governmental organizations at the sidelines of the conference. Yet the document that emerged from the conference itself, the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), transcended divisive and intolerant approaches.”

I attended both the NGO and governmental conference, including the drafting committees, as a representative of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. The “transcendent” text of the governmental declaration claims that Palestinians are victims of Israeli racism. This is the only country-specific accusation of racism in a document that purports to address racism and xenophobia around the world.

Durban’s racist Israel mantra is the 21st century version of the old General Assembly “Zionism is racism” canard. But it doesn’t bother Pillay; elsewhere in the declaration she retorts there is a mention of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Indeed, the twinning of these two themes is not accidental. In the closing days of Durban I, the European Union cut a deal with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to allow provisions on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in exchange for also including the charge of Israeli racism.

The formula permitted Durban I participants to profess concern for Jews who died 60 years ago but avoid caring about the anti-Semitism killing Jewish Israelis today. Pillay defends this U.N. “framework” for driving a wedge between the Jewish people and Israel as “thorough” and “wide-ranging.” But as a victim of apartheid herself, her feigned ignorance of the significance of the racism charge is hardly credible.
Regardless of the substance, maintains Pillay, the Durban Declaration was “agreed by all the states present at the end of the 2001 conference.” Not true. On closing day, Canada said that the parts of the Declaration on Israel were “outside the jurisdiction and mandate of this conference” and “the Canadian delegation registers its strongest objections and disassociates itself” from that text. Since then, U.N. authorities have consistently ignored the Canadian reservations. In January 2008 Canada became the first country to declare it had no intention of going to a second conference dedicated to implementing the subject of its objections.

One after another, the High Commissioner’s Office belittles the obvious criticisms. There is no problem having a Libyan chair for Durban II’s Preparatory Committee, claims Pillay. Libyan Najat Al-Hajjaji is just a functionary and “not in a position to push [her] own country’s agenda.”

Having been at both sessions of Al-Hajjaji’s committee, this distortion is astounding. She has interrupted my NGO statements on the subject of anti-Semitism four times alleging they were irrelevant; together with the Iranian delegation she concocted delays that successfully denied participatory rights to a Jewish and Israel-advocacy NGO; she has manipulated the schedule to minimize NGO speaking opportunities; and she contrived to slow down the drafting process so as to ensure the General Assembly coughed up more funds for more meetings of her committee in 2009.

Pillay is not annoyed that a Libyan was appointed to chair a U.N. human rights executive committee. Nor has she voiced any objection about other members of the committee like the Cuban rapporteur, Iranian vice chair, or human rights stalwarts Russia and Pakistan. What really bothers her is that Rosett doesn’t focus on other members, whose “votes and views have equal weight.”
The move is a mathematical sleight of hand. Pillay knows full well that this executive group is supervised by the full Durban II preparatory committee. Having the same composition as the UN Human Rights Council, regional blocs hand the balance of power on this committee to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Islamic control goes a long way to explain Durban II. Currently under consideration by the drafting committee is a provision accusing Israel of apartheid, genocide and crimes against humanity. Pillay sloughs it off, on the grounds that the “condemnatory language” is not part of a “draft declaration,” just a “compilation.” In fact, however, the words are included in a recent UN publication entitled “Draft Outcome Document of the Durban Review Conference.”

In addition to demonizing Israel, Durban II’s draft outcome document contains: eight condemnations of “Islamophobia,” four more worries about Islam, 12 worries about Muslims, 11 criticisms of the defamation of religions (i.e. Islam), along with a few phrases like “Calls upon States to pay attention to the serious nature of incitement to religious hatred such as anti-Semitism, Christian-phobia and, more particularly, Islamophobia.” What was that again about “equal weight”?

Perhaps most revealing is the high commissioner’s ridicule of any suggestion of a linkage between hate and terrorism. In her article, Rosett said Durban II is “a vehicle for the kind of hate that leads to such horrors as the slaughter in Mumbai, or for that matter, Sept. 11.” Having witnessed both Durban I and Sept. 11, I find the claim to be self-evident. But Pillay’s inability to connect the dots between fanning the flames of xenophobia and the fires driven by such hate, make it even more obvious why Durban II is su
ch a threat. Terrorists are enabled when the villains are encouraged to believe they are the victims. Durban II is the enabler. If President Obama chooses to legitimize Durban II by an American presence, he will be an enabler too.

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor and director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at the Touro Law Centre in New York.

We’ve been fans of Brand of the Free t-shirts for a while. On their website it says “Cheap merchandise does not justify sweatshop labor”. That’s a position we can support pretty easily.

For those of you who wear t-shirts, I encourage you to check out Brand of the Free. They sell about a dozen shirt designs, as well as a handful of tote bags. Their products are made in the United States using 100% organic cotton. When you buy a shirt from Brand of the Free, you’re supporting a company that pays an American a fair wage and you’re being environmentally conscious which isn’t a bad thing either.

Brand of the Free has some pretty cool shirt designs. The “Lasting Liberty” shirt is my favorite, but they have some other neat designs. Definitely worth checking out if you’re a t-shirt aficionado, or even just someone who likes to support decent American small businesses.

Next time you’re at Old Navy looking at that table full of ultra-cheap t-shirts, keep in mind that the reason they’re so cheap is because someone in India or Mexico earned next to nothing working in slightly better than slave labor conditions to make it. I hope you’ll vote against that with your dollars, and instead support American small businesses like Brand of the Free.

I want to thank Brand of the Free for voting for us with their dollars by dropping a $5 donation into our tip jar. It’s nice when a company that we’re a fan of supports our efforts too.