Blog Heap of Links for the day 7 August 2011

The Obama administration, at the highest levels, and likely Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama themselves, authorized the sale of at least 2,000 high-powered rifles and other sophisticated weapons to the "Sinaloa" Mexican drug cartel. As bad as that is, it doesn't stop there. It is now learned through sworn affidavits in U.S. District court that the U.S. government, at very high levels, "negotiated" to allow tons of Sinaloa cocaine into the country, supposedly in exchange for information about other drug gangs.

After Bin Laden was killed, Robert Gates was insistent that nothing be revealed about the unit that accomplished the deed. But one man could not keep his mouth shut: Joe Biden... Further irresponsible leaks from the Obama administration revealed the unit involved, causing the unit members to fear for their safety and that of their families... Gates specifically talked about the fear of potential retaliation... Today, that retaliation may have come to pass.... an important reminder why it's not just comedy relief to have cynical glory-seekers and complete buffoons at the highest levels of government....

Hours before the tunes started pumping and the booze started flowing at the White House, the Dow shed over 500 points, over fears of a Eurozone meltdown. Worries over a double-dip recession are reaching a fever pitch. Unemployment remains miserably high, even as hundreds of thousands of workers abandon the labor force. The national debt is pulling even with GDP. Growth has ground to a halt. And we may be on the brink of a wrenching national credit downgrade. Despite this gruesome economic backdrop, the President of the United States decided it would be a wise move to host an extravagant, star-studded birthday party for himself -- during which he led a conga line of celebs and other revelers through the White House.

Lucy Nashed, Deputy Press Secretary to Texas Governor Rick Perry, commented that the drug traffickers have become "increasingly confrontational in protecting their lucrative criminal enterprises ... It is an affront to suggest our border is secure as innocent lives on both sides continue to be threatened due to ongoing drug cartel violence. This administration's comments prove that they either don't understand or don't care about the turmoil occurring along our border." Arizona Assemblyman John Kavanagh was of the same opinion as Sheriff Larry Dever who warns that the "the tentacles of the drug cartels reach far beyond the border. They have a network throughout the entire country. Every community throughout the US is at risk. Those of us on the border fight the battle every day. These communities will be the first to state when they feel safe and their livelihood is protected." The drugs do not stay on the border as evidenced by Arizona Assemblywoman Peggy Judd's statistics: "Drugs coming across the border are worth $9/lb., in Tucson they are worth $400/lb., in Phoenix $600/lb., and in Washington DC $1000/lb."... The American public should wake up and realize how badly this problem is out of control. If it wants to address the problem effectively, the Obama administration needs to realize that superficial directives will not stop the cartels and that the federal government needs to make the border safe and secure to ensure America's sovereignty. [Alas, this is not what the Obamanation wants. Exactly the opposite.]

When discussing or debating the Birther issues with a newbie, in addition to a transfer education in law, the Constitution, the jurisprudencial system, and history, I frequently am a witness to the real-time acting out of the Kübler-Ross behavioral model of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.... Discussions with actual politicos, such as direct talks with Congressman Brian Bilbray, are particularly revealing, in that one presupposes that once the facts are discussed, there is a presumption that the revelation of truths will result in a commensurately engaged moral action. But this is not so. ... In the end, Birtherism would not be a big deal at all, if it weren't for the fact that we have nearly an entire executive branch engaged in the office of running guns to drug cartels in Mexico -- arguably an act of war, starting and perpetuating a war in Libya without congressional consent, "borrowing" billions of funds from the Federal Employees Pension Fund so as not to violate a debt ceiling that is already being violated, running election campaigns out of the White House, not enforcing polling place protection laws from Panther thugs, circumventing fed fund restrictions to abortion clinics, arranging Wall Street payouts to unions for stocks created out of thin air -- and probably more.

Ann Barnhardt: The so-called "right" or "Tea Party" in this republic is being so thoroughly rolled and defeated that I am struggling to come up with an adequate violent submission metaphor that does not involve prison rape . . . and they honesty think that they're "winning." Really? You call this winning? - Obama gets over $2 Trillion to spend before the 2012 election - There are no real spending cuts - There is a massive tax increase effective January 1, 2013.... Obama is going to embezzle considerably more than the entire economic output of Canada, India or Russia to his cronies before the 2012 election -- and that is just counting this round of spending. This doesn't include the other $5 Trillion he has already burned through since 2009.... Obama is a Marxist-Communist usurper and puppet front for a cabal of Marxist-Communists who are actively trying to destroy the United States of America. Everything they have done, are doing, and will do has the single goal of collapsing and destroying the U.S. economy, military, constitutional government and culture. What part of "Marxist Revolution" do you not understand? ...

With the economy sputtering, Democratic political operatives view former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as the main Republican threat to President Obama's reelection, according to this week's National Journal Political Insiders Poll. Democratic Insiders see Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has not yet declared whether or not he will run for president, as the second strongest against Obama. A separate poll of Republican insiders, released Thursday, also showed Perry as Romney's main GOP challenger.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre say Eric Holder must resign over the fast and furious scandal that sent thousands of weapons to Mexican cartels. ... Law-abiding Americans were blamed for drug crime and murder in Mexico, meanwhile, our own government was putting guns in the hands of known Mexican drug cartels. Now, more than 150 Mexicans and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry are dead as a result of this criminal enterprise. ... Either Holder is truly incompetent and had no idea about the massive, illegal gun-walking operation that was taking place right under his nose, or he's lying to protect the Obama administration. Either way, he must cease to be our nation's top law enforcement official immediately.

a Cuban man who immigrated to this country 50 years ago to get away from socialism. While all of them took offense at being labeled as terrorists, the man from Cuba says he's seen this playbook before and he never thought he would see freedom in jeopardy here in America (video)

We have the apparent sale by a State Department directorate of some very serious firepower to a nest of cutthroat bushwhackers that go by the handle of "Las Zetas", flown out of an Airport in the Dallas area that just happens to be the same airport used by DEA Flight operations. ... What the map lays out are the routes used to airship the weapons to the border, where they are staged for ground shipment into Mexico.... "Phil Jordan, a former CIA operative, told the El Paso Times that the Zetas drug organization might be planning to disrupt Mexico's 2012 elections or use the weapons to fight other cartels...." CIA analysts say the weapons, which are purchased from the U.S. Government according to captured Zeta leader Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar, aka. El Mamito, are being stockpiled throughout Mexico for a potential upcoming overthrow of the Mexican government in 2012. ... So just where is all this leading? We have several either rogue agencies or at least rogue elements within said agencies ( I really hope it's the latter) delivering military grade weapons to narco-terrorists such as the Zetas that may be planning to disrupt elections and overthrow the Mexican government. The Zetas are capable of doing this, their core cadre are ex-Mexican Special Forces, more on them here. If I were a Conspiracy Theorist I would be tempted to say, that it just may be that the next "Crisis not to waste" will be a full blown civil war along our southern border.

Rep. West has come under criticism for supporting debt bill while fellow Tea Party favorites Michele Bachman and Ron Paul voted against it. (video)

U.S. federal agents allegedly cut a deal with the Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to traffic tons of narcotics across the border, in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to documents filed in federal court. ... The allegations are made by Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a top ranking cartel boss extradited to the U.S. last year on drug charges. He is a close associate of Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and the son of Ismael "Mayo" Zambada-Garcia. ... the deal was part of a 'divide and conquer' strategy, where the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel, through Operation Fast and Furious, in exchange for information that allowed the D.E.A. and FBI to destroy and dismantle rival Mexican cartels. ... "from time to time, the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel was informed by agents of the DEA through Loya that United States government agents and/or Mexican authorities were conducting investigations near the home territories of cartel leaders so that the cartel leaders could take appropriate actions to evade investigators- even though the United States government had indictments, extradition requests, and rewards for the apprehension of Mayo, Chapo, and other alleged leaders, as well as Mr. Zambada-Niebla."

The failed federal anti-gunrunning program known as Operation Fast and Furious got so out of control in November 2009, it appeared the U.S. government was single-handedly "arming for war" the Sinaloa Cartel, documents show, even as U.S. officials kept lying to fellow agents in Mexico about the volume of guns it helped send south of the border. ... At one point, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives say guns sold under the program took just 24 hours to travel from a gun store in Phoenix to a crime scene in Mexico. ATF agents there pleaded for help but were told nothing about Fast and Furious, which was intended to let guns "walk" in order to track them to higher-profile traffickers. Meanwhile, the report claims the agents' superiors in Washington met every Tuesday, to review the latest sales figures and the number of guns recovered in Mexico.

You can see the Dems expected the media to parrot their recalcitrant-Republican talking point, while ignoring their choice to not pass a temporary extension because it included $16.5 million in cuts to a pork-rich rural airport program. Instead they were shocked and angered when ABC's Jonathan Karl asked some pointed questions. You've got to watch this video.

after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O'Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn't call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they "acted like terrorists." Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.) And yet you know the next time there's the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing's rhetoric. [h/t to Cuz BD]

The liberal penchant for referring to everything but terrorism as terrorism continues to mystify. ... they're worried that we won't believe whatever they tell us about the economy. That's why the full-scale hyperbole offensive has been launched by the Left. ...

These aren't pillow fights

Recently, reports surfaced of Iranian assistance to rebels fighting American forces in Iraq. In his first visit to Iraq as defense secretary, Leon Panetta stated, "[W]e're very concerned about Iran and the weapons they're providing to extremists in Iraq. We cannot sit back and simply allow this to continue." Yet thus far the United States and the rest of the world continue to sit back and wait -- wait for something to draw us into the inevitable. On October 14, 1962 President John F. Kennedy addressed the world: "It shall be the policy of this nation, to regard any nuclear missile, launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere, as an attack, by the Soviet Union, on the United States." We can only hope that it will not take a nuclear attack for this country to realize that we are already at war.

a mob of young people attacking innocent fair-goers at the end of the opening night of State Fair, with some callers claiming a racially-charged scene. Milwaukee Police confirmed there were assaults outside the fair. Witnesses' accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.

Four young men with gang ties were arrested Wednesday night for an alleged attempted mugging and mugging in separate incidents on the east side, Madison police reported. Police said that brings to 18 the number of suspects arrested since April for a string of strong-arm robberies, batteries and disorderly conduct cases involving weapons, as officers crack down on street violence.

I mean, really: parents having any say about schools? How regressive a notion is that?

"bizarre" is too mild a word to describe San Francisco's latest outburst; even from my pro-choice perspective, the city's attempt to essentially banish any counseling center which doesn't encourage or perform abortions is simply beyond belief.

One in every 31 U.S. adultsis in the corrections system, which includes jail, prison,probation and supervision, more than double the rate of aquarter century ago.... "Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which produced the report.

Interestingly, that congressional inquiry went on to state that the Founding Fathers "did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation, the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy." And make no mistake, there are no better words to describe a lawsuit to obliterate the 9/11 cross than "revolting spectacle."

Quite a whopper of a claim -- human actions rivaling the asteroid strike that waylaid the dinosaurs. The "Humans as Gods" belief is a nice carryover from the global change wars that raged for decades. ... The upshot is that scientists are speculating based on very incomplete data and records. This is what passes for modern doomsday science. But gloomy scientists have an ace up their sleeve. They're citing Haiti as a prime example of humans' ability to devastate the animal kingdom. ... Never mind that Haiti is a grossly dysfunctional, poverty-wrenched society occupying a portion of a small Caribbean island. And never mind that frog species on Haiti's side of the island are dying off in no small measure due to a fungus brought by African frogs. Haiti, suggest biologists, is the world's future. Hubris, thy name is modern science

[The New Yorker's description of "what [might have] happened that night in Abbottabad, by Nicholas Schmidle]

The stock market is highly perceptive, and what it's perceiving now is that (1) the mediocre recovery of the last two years is stalling out and (2) our leaders in Washington haven't the vaguest idea of what to do about it. A big part of this pathetic recovery has to be laid at government's doorstep. Our top elected and appointed officials try to blame it on everyone else, but it's their incompetence that has brought us low.

Ann Coulter - A front-page story by James Risen in The New York Times on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, reported on a "troubling trend" of sexual assaults committed by American employees of military contractors in Iraq. The centerpiece of his story was Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been brutally gang-raped in 2005 while working in the Green Zone. ... But no one jumped on Jones' story with more self-righteousness than Sen. Al Franken. He used her story to jam through a grandstandy "anti-rape" amendment to an appropriations bill prohibiting defense contractors from including mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts, thus depriving mountebank trial lawyers like John Edwards from collecting massive damages awards from illiterate jurors. The 30 Republican senators who voted against Franken's pro-trial lawyer amendment were promptly denounced as "pro-rape" across the Internet, on liberal talk radio and in mass phone calls to their offices. ... And then a few weeks ago, the Times ran a microscopic, one-paragraph Associated Press story on page 13 of a Saturday paper, reporting that a jury looked at the facts and found that ... Jones made the whole story up. ... Maybe the Republican senators should have sponsored a no-false-rape-allegation bill for defense contractor employees.

Osage County officials seized 81 cats and dogs in a Tuesday raid on the home of an alleged animal hoarder. ... "a bunch of cats and dogs in cages outside." ... many did not have water and most of the animals had upper respiratory infections. ... "We also found three horses had minor problems with their hooves.... Most of the cats and dogs were in cages with wire bottoms, one kitten had its eyes matted shut and a lot didn't have water." ... eight dogs were left at the residence because they were not in a condition that they could be seized. ... "You can't leave animals chained in pens like that in this heat.... Most of the water bowls were bone dry and some had dust in them."

Dinsmoor's concrete sculptures soar over visitors' heads, silhouetted against the Kansas sky. From grieving widows to a conquering Goddess of Liberty, scoundrels and grafters of society to sweetly sentimental portraits....

Wreckage from shuttle Columbia was uncovered in East Texas this week, the result of a prolonged drought lowering water levels in a lake. The spherical tank, which is about four feet in diameter, is stuck in the mud alongside Lake Nacogdoches. ...part of Columbia's power-producing fuel cell system. ...thought to be either a liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen tank.

The Moon's highlands, long a mystery, may have been thrown up billions of years ago by a slow-motion collision with a smaller companion moon knocked off its orbit.... At least one such mini-moon, about a third the diameter of the one we see today, could have been suspended between the gravitational pulls of the Moon and Earth for tens of millions of years, they calculated. Eventually, however, it would have lost its moorings and crashed into the Moon.... "According to our simulations, a large 'moon-to-Moon' size ratio and a subsonic impact velocity lead to an accretionary pile rather than a crater," Jutzi and Asphaug concluded. This scenario would also help explain why the farside's crust is so much thicker, and why certain minerals are concentrated there

American conservatism, the philosophy of smaller, Constitutionally-oriented government is extremely fragile in a world where a surprise event can "reset" the government to its 50-year default position of progressivism, socialism, and top down control.

Of all current or former governors among the leading candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, no one's record of dealing with his or her state's debt and unfunded liabilities compares with that of Sarah Palin during her three fiscal years at the helm in Alaska.

The problem for Perry, in the blinding light of the national stage, is that he may ultimately be seen as the swaggering rooster who believes the sun came up because of all that crowing. Texas was a conservative, small government, pro-business state long before he was in charge, and Texas will remain so long after he's gone. Americans may conclude that Texas jobs would have materialized whether Perry was governor or not, and it might just be to Texas business' credit, not Perry's, that they did.

the ONLY reason Perry keeps getting re-elected is because his challengers ALWAYS suck worse. ... Basically He's Mitt Romney light, a big government guy. ... Besides Gardasil, which Perry went around the legislature and issued an Executive Order trying to get in place, there was the Trans-Texas Corridor fiasco. ... more on Gardasil. It seems Perry and some of his cronies got big donations from the drug maker, Merck. ... There's a LOT more. Rick has sucked up to LULAC and La Raza (The Race) for a decades. He signed our version of the DREAM act, which, as RomneyCare was the blueprint for ObamaCare, serves as the blueprint for the federal version of the DREAM Act. Oh, and here's a lovely photo of Rick and his buddies from ACORN circa 2008....

President Obama delivered a high-profile speech to NCLR last week, letting the radicals know he plans on giving more to them than just cash. ... the NCLR is a radical racialist group — too many members have absolutely no respect for the United States, most especially not for our immigration laws! (This was evident when the NCLR crowd urged Obama to violate the Constitution during his speech and unilaterally grant amnesty.) Moreover, this is the same organization that supports "radical Chicano" groups that seek to conquer the American Southwest by force or by ballot box and return it to Mexico. ... No matter the reason why Obama is pushing his illegal immigration strategy — whether it's a deep-seated belief or a ploy to attract the Hispanic vote — his polices are downright dangerous and flagrantly unconstitutional.

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign. ... a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system. ...