Category: The Opposition

Excellent analysis of the mainstream media’s abysmal coverage (or no coverage!) of the Tea Parties

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update just a few moments later:   See Mark Steyn’s column (linked there) and other excellent commentary on this same subject by our good friends over at the Blue Ridge Forum, here.

 

Kyle-Anne Shiver, the author of this excellent piece at American Thinker on how the mainstream media apparently purposefully and maliciously missed the real message of the Tea Party story, is an expert on the Alinsky School (Obama!) of community organizing.*   I suspect she gets some particular amusement at seeing the results of genuine and spontaneous outrage by citizens at the Tea Parties as opposed to the orchestrated demonstrations put on by the Radical Left (using the Alinsky method of manipulation) in recent years.

So without further ado, here is how she begins.  Please read the whole excellent column!

In all my years of watching news coverage in America, I don’t believe I have ever witnessed more condescending, amateurish, purely politicized reporting than what just transpired among the liberal MSM covering America’s Tax Day Tea Parties. The Tea Parties represented a very significant news event.

Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that’s NEWS. Yet, many local newspapers – even the Boston Globe for crying out loud! – pettily refused to even cover their local protests. When every news channel – except the only one thriving on the block, Fox – finally decided to cover the events, it was with derision, mockery and elitist condescension. 

Note to MSM: This is why you’re going broke.

Dirty jokes!   I laughed when I read this next paragraph, because I too polled my friends to see if they knew what the disgusting reference was to “tea-bagging” and none did (I still don’t know and don’t want to know).  But, it tells you what kind of people Obama has on his side, doesn’t it!

The puerile, vulgar humor of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, targeting the most clean-cut, rancor-less groups of protesters possibly ever assembled in the U.S.A., was the kind of thing one would expect on an adolescent playground when the teacher isn’t listening. I personally polled 16 friends and relatives, aged 23 to 66, and not a single one of them had ever even heard the sexually perverse phrase regarding tea bags, which peppered Maddow’s and Cooper’s primetime rants.

Regular readers know that Judy and I demonstrated proudly and with gusto last Wednesday at our local Tea Party.

* We have discussed the Alinsky School of community organizing that inspired Obama’s career in that field at length in our Community Destabilization category.  And, here, is a link to a post in which I mention Kyle-Anne Shiver.

SEIU saves the crew of the Maersk Alabama, huh?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you before that I signed a petition some months back demanding a halt to all Muslim immigration to the US.   Well, within a few days I was receiving e-mails from the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), the Union all tangled up with Obama and Blago,  thanking me for signing up for their cause. They even took my name (they said) to Capital Hill in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.   I was furious at the cheaters, but their e-mails give me some insight into the cheating mind-set of this Union that is busy organizing Somalis.

Well, this past week I received an e-mail alert from them bragging about how unions, and by extension SEIU, were behind the brave action of the crew of the Maersk Alabama in their fight that ended in the annihilation of three black Somali Muslim teens.  Entitled Unions 1, Pirates 0, here it is.  Note that only with passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will such acts of bravery be possible.

I wish I could find it now, but I saw a photo of Somali SEIU lackeys demonstrating somewhere in the last few months.  The Somalis were all carrying SEIU signs.  The image came to mind when I watched that film clip of a crew member of the Maersk Alabama bragging about defeating the Somali pirates, and I wondered how the Somali Americans feel about that humiliation of their kin.

In my wandering around the web this morning to see what else I could find about Somalis being organized by SEIU, I found a couple of interesting nuggets.

Take Action Minnesota, a community organizing network to which SEIU belongs, is helping Somalis organize politically in that state.  Just last month they held their first Somali Day at the Capital.

(St. Paul, MN) March 12, 2009 – On Thursday, Minnesota’s Somali-American community gathered at the State Capitol in their first-ever “Somali Day on the Hill.” Hosted by Somali Action Alliance of Minneapolis, the all-day event was developed to introduce leaders from Somali communities from around Minnesota to the state legislative process and to provide initial contact with legislators on important issues such as education, headwear in driver’s license photos, racial justice, health care and jobs.

We have written extensively in our community destabilization category about how important it is for the hard Left to create disunity among groups of people so as to fuel the battle of the ‘have-nots’ vs. the ‘haves’ and bring about a socialist form of government.  Not to mention the fact that Unions need dues-paying members!  Since they were running out of unhappy Americans, they had to move on to organize and agitate immigrant groups to demand stuff.  That is where the Somalis fit in, they are lackeys for the Radical Left.

Ending on a humorous note (another humorous note, since the first is that Union membership saved the crew of the Maersk Alabama), Michelle Malkin reported last month that the SEIU had to dump some of its own workers and those workers went out and used their training to picket the SEIU!  I didn’t see that in the mainstream media, did you?

Is RRW a suspicious web site? Ask Janet Napolitano.

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Talk radio and conservative blogs — and even the mainstream media — have been abuzz with reports and commentary on a paper from the Department of Homeland Security, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” You can see the whole thing here.   

I’m not going to do a thorough commentary on the thing; many others have covered it, including Power Line. I want to point out how the government is targeting people like me and Ann, who have done nothing but exercise our free speech by writing this blog.  A disclaimer at the beginning says that the government has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are planning acts of violence. (Unlike leftwing ones such as radical animal-rights and environmentalist groups, which actually have carried out such acts.) But that’s okay, it’s the possibility that counts. Here’s one:   

Rightwing extremists were concerned during the 1990s with the perception that illegal immigrants were taking away American jobs through their willingness to work at significantly lower wages.  

A pretty good perception, seeing that it’s backed up by academic studies like this one from the Center for Immigration Studies. (That’s just one of many.) Here’s their disclaimer; are you convinced that anti-immigration groups are not being monitored?    

Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.
 
This isn’t too serious a threat, though: 
 
DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremist groups’ frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence. If such violence were to occur, it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets.  
  
Another potential threat comes from Americans who “perceive recent gun control legislation as a threat to their right to bear arms.” They’re stockpiling guns and ammunition. No, really? Why would anybody feel threatened by gun control legislation? Check us off on that, Janet; we perceive that threat too.   

  

Then there are the New World Order paranoids. DHS is a little behind the curve on what the perceived threat is. Many of us are deeply concerned about the apparent willingness of the Obama administration to cede parts of our sovereignty to world bodies, and the eagerness of some judges to apply foreign laws and legal decisions to domestic cases. Pretty extremist stuff, to want American judges to follow the American Constitution rather than Zimbabwe’s, huh?    

Okay, I’ve gotten off the main topic. Just wanted to make sure Ann and I got on the list, if they’re making a list. When I was on the radical left a long time ago, the FBI had a file on me; I got it through a Freedom of Information Act request in the 1980s. Will I get a new file now?     

CAIR wants legal protection for students questioned by FBI

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Minnesota is demanding protection for students being questioned in the Somali missing youth (former refugees) investigation on-going in Minneapolis and other US cities, here.

An Islamic-relations group says high schools, colleges and universities need to do more to protect the rights of Somali students.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-MN, says it’s received an increasing number of reports from students who say they have been interrogated by the FBI on Minnesota campuses.

The group says the interviews focus on allegations that Somali men have left Minnesota to go to Somalia and fight in that nation’s civil war.

Although CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land terrorist funding case, it continues to flex its muscle and scare law enforcement, and additionally in this case schools, into doing its bidding.

CAIR-MN Civil Rights Director Taneeza Islam said, “Students’ legal rights need to be upheld and they aren’t currently being afforded the only true legal protection they have when talking to the law enforcement-an attorney.”

In a letter sent to area high schools, colleges and universities, CAIR-MN called on administrators to “develop initiatives that protect students’ rights and provide them with a safe environment.”

Here is the irony, back in February CAIR attended a press conference on the missing youths and chastised law enforcement for not doing more to solve the case.   You can’t win for losing!     Don’t investigate and you are criticized, do investigate and they try to tie your hands!

Unfortunately the link for the press conference is not available, but this is what I excerpted at the time:

Kashif Saroya, outreach director for the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate and resolve the appearances (disappearances) as soon as possible.

For new readers, the US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

Update April 11th:   Ms. Islam had more to say to the Voice of America, here.

But as the FBI continues to search for answers, Taneeza Islam says it needs to change its methods.

“The challenge is how do you build a relationship with a community when you’ve already started interrogating in ways the community is already fearful of,” she added.

Here is my question for Ms. Islam, what is the proper method for interrogation?   As I said above, you can’t win with these people.  This is all a big PR strategy on their part to undermine law enforcement.

Can’t Grover Norquist stick to taxes?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Goodness knows with the Obama Administration taxing everyone everywhere wouldn’t you think Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, had enough to keep him busy that he wouldn’t have to get into promoting Islamic causes.   As a matter of fact,  I was just saying to a fellow real conservative the other day that Mr. Norquist has been conspicuously absent in the battle to rein in government spending during this period of arguably the worst attack on taxpayers in our nation’s history.  Now I know why.

Our interest in Norquist’s activities go back to August 2007 when he and fellow conservatives were drumming up support for the Kennedy bill to expand Iraqi refugee numbers entering the US (here).

So, now what is he up to?  From Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna last week:

Grover Norquist is a conservative activist and the president of Americans for Tax Reform. He is also well-known in Washington D.C. circles as a friend of Islam. Since the 1990s he has held weekly “Wednesday meetings” in which he briefs fellow conservatives and helps plot strategy for the Republican party.

Pushing appeasement:

According to several attendees who were present at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting, the participants — presumably including members of Congress — were offered paperback copies of the “Changing the Course” document (pdf), which outlines the steps needed to help the United States achieve reconciliation with the Muslim world.

Unfortunately for non-Muslims in the United States, this prescription involves more engagement and more appeasement. It calls for yet more dialogue with and respect for Islam, and includes a special emphasis on removing Hamas and Hezbollah from the list of terrorist groups so that they can be recognized as legitimate negotiating partners.

The involvement of Mr. Norquist’s group raises questions about of the extent of Islamist infiltration throughout the conservative NGO groups.

Mr. Bodissey then goes on to connect the dots and point out that at the country’s largest gathering of conservatives in Washington in recent memory, there was no discussion of Islamic terrorism, save the privately sponsored speech by Geert Wilders which Judy and I attended, here.

If anyone is curious why this year’s CPAC — which has just folded its tents — didn’t have a single panel on radical Islam or the war on terror, remember that Grover Norquist is on the board of the ACU, which sponsors CPAC.

In July 2008 we told you more about Mr. Norquist to help explain why a supposed tax reformer was busy promoting the resettlement of large numbers of Iraqi Muslims to the US, not exactly a fiscally responsible thing to do.  Incidentally Norquist’s group also lobbied for amnesty for illegals.   In that same July post we  told you about an extraordinary charge by normally mild-mannered Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

Grover Norquist has been responsible, more than any other individual, for the infiltration of Islamic supremacists into the highest levels of the U.S. government. See here the seminal expose by Frank Gaffney of the immense damage Norquist has done.

It’s a great mystery to me, why don’t conservatives recognize the elephant in the living room?