09/24/15

Our Weasel Of The Week!! – 09/24/15

Yes, once again, It’s time to present this week’s statuette of shame, The Golden Weasel!!

Every Tuesday, the Council nominates some of the slimiest, most despicable characters in public life for some deed of evil, cowardice or corruption they’ve performed. Then we vote to single out one particular Weasel for special mention, to whom we award the statuette of shame, our special, 100% plastic Golden Weasel. This week’s nominees were particularly slimy and despicable, but the votes are in and we have our winner… the envelope please…

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1891267.1407178691!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/bergdahl5n-3-web.jpg

Major General Kenneth Dahl

JoshuaPundit: I found it difficult whom to nominate for this one, as it’s really shared between Terrence Russell,an official with the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, attorney Eugene Fidell,and Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the senior officer who carried out an investigation of Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion case. They’re all doing their best, no doubt at the Obama Administration’s orders to get Bergdahl off with a slap on the wrist. But I’m going with Dahl because even as an Obama promoted General, he ought to know better and have some sense of honor.

The new narrative? The Washington Post plays the despicable lachrimae. You see, poor Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl was fed up with the mission in Afghanistan and of course, his leaders. So he decided, just as a harmless protest to desert his post and go AWOL.

Looking to make a stand, Bergdahl hatched a plan: He would run away from his platoon’s tiny outpost in Paktika province late on June 29, 2009. He would stay away from the Army a day, maybe two, and then reappear about 19 miles away at a larger installation and demand to air his grievances with a general.

And then of course, poor Bergdahl was captured by the Taliban and ‘subjected to brutal captivity’ according to General Dahl. Of course, we don’t know that and neither does General Dahl. He only knows what Bergdahl told him, and Bowe Bergdahl has proven again and again to be a serial liar.

Not that it matters but this new story directly contradicts the note Bergdahl left for his unit saying he was deserting. ” leaving to start a new life.” It also ignores the 2010 Pentagon report that declared unequivocally that he deserted and the Taliban’s account that he was intoxicated when they picked him up. Bergdahl’s original BS, that he was captured while lagging behind on patrol was such flagrant nonsense that he dropped it fairly quickly.

Meanwhile. Our Dear Leader released five dangerous Taliban commanders for this creep, and the word is out to get Bergdahl off, even though six far better men died trying to find him.

General Dahl knows that very well. But he has apparently decided to click his heels, salute and follow orders.

General Dahl is obviously just another symbol of what President Barack Hussein Obama is doing to ‘recreate’ what’s left of our Army. After all, the general owes this president his promotion, so who cares what this does to the rank and file’s moral. Who care’s really about the families of the men who died trying to find this deserter, or the casualties suffered from the activities of the five top Taliban commanders the president released to bring him back? Bergdahl getting justly punished for what he did embarrasses the regime politically, so the Pentagon has it’s orders to pull out all the stops, paint Bergdahl as a victim and get him off with a slap on the wrist.

I sent General Dahl’s Golden Weasel to his office, together with a short citation showing what he got it for. He can put this with the rest of his military awards.

Well, there it is.

Check back next Tuesday to see who next week’s nominees for Weasel of the Week are!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

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09/24/15

With Pope’s Help, U.N. Bypasses Congress on Global Socialism

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Pope Francis didn’t make the list of “Eminent Persons” assembled by the U.N. Secretary General to plan the “global development framework” for the world beyond 2015 and culminating in 2030. But the pope didn’t need to be on the list. After all, the Vatican hasendorsed the anti-capitalist “sustainable development” agenda that is being voted on by the nations of the world at the U.N.

However, the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing this new global agenda which President Obama will implement without the input or approval of Congress.

John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama, was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe.

The world body’s sustainable development goals promise the end of poverty, education, clean water, justice, good health and well-being, jobs for all, decent shelter, and a life of personal dignity. “These are lofty goals,” says Patrick Wood, a commentator on global issues, “but are they for real? Or do they sound like a bait-and-switch scheme that contains a potentially dangerous payload?”

Wood, who has covered global institutions for decades, argues that Pope Francis, the most visible religious figure in the world, has been called upon by the global community to deliver a U.N. address on September 25 “to minimize any possible resistance” to a plan that constitutes nothing less than the overthrow of global capitalism and the destruction of the American way of life.

Wood’s new book, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, argues that an elaborate scheme of social engineering will be used to bring into being an anticipated new worldwide utopian system.

In his speech to Congress on Thursday, Pope Francis once again demonstrated his pro-Marxist tendencies, hailing the work of Dorothy Day, an American convert to Catholicism who never renounced her pro-Marxist views but has been described by the media as just an activist for “social justice.” She was a founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and was the subject of a 581-page FBI file for her connections to communists and communist groups.

Carol Byrne, author of The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis, documents how Day made common cause with communist-led movements during the Cold War.

Virginia State Senator Richard H. “Dick” Black (R), a Vietnam veteran, has opposed efforts by the American branch of the Catholic Church to make Day a saint, saying that “Vatican archives are filled with reports of Christians martyred under the regimes that Dorothy Day supported.”

While the media pay great attention to the pope, little if any coverage has been given to the involvement of the Vatican in the U.N. “sustainable development” agenda that could radically affect the individual lives of ordinary Americans. Thestated purpose of the Podesta panel’s report is to “transform economies through sustainable development.”

It would be nice if the media asked Hillary about the involvement of her campaign chairman in developing this global socialist scheme.

In addition to destroying the American system, the recommendations of this so-called high-level body, especially on the matter of “climate action,” could also have a dramatic impact on the lives of people around the world, including the poor, who need access to energy and real economic development to escape poverty.

Wood notes that Podesta, founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and member of the elitist Trilateral Commission, went to work for President Obama as a senior policy consultant on climate change. A liberal Catholic, he has an affiliation with Georgetown Law School.

The work of the so-called “high-level panel” was delivered to a “High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development” that met this summer from June 26 through July 8 and produced the final document that nations will endorse.

“In simplest terms,” Wood explains, “Sustainable Development is a replacement economic system for capitalism and free enterprise. It is a system based on resource allocation and usage rather than on supply and demand and free economic market forces.”

The U.N. has been quite open about replacing global capitalism.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said last March that “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” She added, “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

Wood said the proposed “transformation” of the world’s current economic system “for a completely untried and untested one” is “dangerously absurd” and could make life worse for the people in the world that the U.N. and the Roman Catholic Church are supposed to help.

He adds, “Any honest economist would instantly balk at such Pollyannaish promises of utopia, and the American public should do so as well. The fact is that these wild promises of prosperity for all are merely the candy coating to deceive the world into going along with its own economic destruction.”

Nevertheless, at the White House on Wednesday and appearing with President Obama, Pope Francis specifically reaffirmed his support for the U.N.’s “sustainable and integral development” model from his “Laudato Si” encyclical.

In a pitch for global socialism, masked in flowery language, Francis, who insisted on his way to the U.S. that he was not a liberal, said, “I would like all men and women of good will in this great nation to support the efforts of the international community to protect the vulnerable in our world and to stimulate integral and inclusive models of development, so that our brothers and sisters everywhere may know the blessings of peace and prosperity which God wills for all his children.”

The pope says nice things about the poor, but the practical result of ditching capitalism for socialism will be more poverty, suffering, and death.

09/24/15

Bosnisis? Kosovosis? What a Shocker. Thank US-IS. A Summer-to-Summer Roundup Shows it ISUS

By: Julia Gorin
Republican Riot

How many times has it been said or written sarcastically of us Balkans heretics that “The place she wants you to worry about for terrorism is not in the Middle East or Pakistan, but in the Balkans. She wants you to think that Bosnia/Kosovo is the next Afghanistan.”

Well, over the past three years more and more people have gotten the memo that ISIS is setting up its Great White Hope in Bosnia and Kosovo, while recruits from both continue topping the numbers, proportionally speaking.

It has something to do with the fact that the West created Afghanistan-like potential “in the heart of Europe,” as the Balkans are again emphatically being called, this time not to dramatize some desperately concocted genocide “in the heart of Europe,” but to underscore the juxtaposition of the Middle East making its way into Europe, which is happening thanks in large part to that early help from media and governments in concocting that genocide and the wars they justified with it.

This European Middle East we facilitated is precisely what the Caliphate had pinned its hopes on for infiltrating Europe more expeditiously. How many times have we few tried to explain this, and in how many different ways, in response to criticisms that we were mischaracterizing the vast majority of secular, European, moderate, pro-American “Kosovars” and “Bosniaks,” as if that were the point.

As we peruse the following year-in-review about Bosnian and Albanian jihadis (and these are just the ones I haven’t had a chance to chronicle yet on this blog), let’s keep in mind that old pals U.S., UK and Germany brought us all of this. That’s who’s made this world for us, and so more of our children have to die, starting with the soldiers who are sent by the same devils to face the enemy proliferated by us (UsIS?). And still they want us to believe that it was a bigger deal that some Serb paramilitaries in the 90s executed up to a thousand Muslim soldiers (”8000,” as they call the same figure), and so everything we’re dealing with now is justified by it.

Inside Kacanik, Kosovo’s jihadist capital (UK Telegraph, Aug. 23, 2015, by Colin Freeman)

Tiny town boasts only 30,000 people, yet two dozen local men have gone to fight jihad in Iraq and Syria

Nestling in a wooded valley that its citizens laid their lives down to defend [sic: seize], the town of Kacanik in southern Kosovo is fiercely proud of its war dead.

Well-kept cemeteries include nearly 100 victims of Serb-led ethnic cleansing [sic] in 1999, while in the town centre, a statue clutching an RPG honours fallen members of Brigade 162 of the Kosovan Liberation Army [what?].

But a decade and a half on from the war that brought about Kosovo’s independence, there is rather less pride in Kacanik’s new crop of warriors.

In the last three years, some 24 local menfolk have gone to fight for jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, giving the town of just 30,000 people an unwanted reputation as the jihadist capital of the Balkans.

Not in any way predicated on the first crop of violent, Christian-host-society-delegitimizing-and-slaughtering domestic terrorists, of course, those “Kosovan” Liberation Armyfolk.

…”[Lavdrim] Muhaxheri [the jihadi who last year beheaded a Syrian teen] has given Kacanic a name as the most radical city in Kosovo, if not the whole Balkans,” said Musli Verbani, a local imam, who claims that hardliners forced him from Kacanik’s Islamic Association four years ago. [More than a “claim,” as reporter Freeman could havechecked.] “I warned that this kind of thing was coming, but no-one listened.”

…For a nation [sic] of just 1.8 million people, [Kosovo] now punches well above its weight in terms of the number of citizens joining Isil. The interior ministry estimates that some 300 Kosovans have followed in Muhaxheri’s’ footsteps, making Kosovo Europe’s biggest contributor per capita. [Syria alone has 300 from Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia.] Along with neighbouring Albania, which has fielded around 200, and nearby Bosnia, which around 160, it is now seen as a potential launch pad for Isil in its bid to establish a new front against Europe in the Balkans.

What’s this? Albania-Kosovo-Bosnia as some sort of jihadi hideout/transit point and launching pad for the Caliphate into Europe? Not like we were warned a million times over or anything. Wow, so the enemy found some utility in our pro-American Muslim projects? Who would have thunk?! But wait — before you go second-guessing those projects — The Telegraph wants to keep you on-program via the following image:

Captain Andy Phipps from the British Army holds his head in hands as he looks over the site of a possible mass grave of nearly 100 ethnic Albanians in southern Kosovo Photo: Reuters

What also alarms Western security officials, though, is why any Kosovans would join Isil’s fanatics at all.

Continue reading →

09/24/15

Washington Post Comes to Bowe Bergdahl’s Defense

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The U.S. military “threw the book” at Bowe Bergdahl, charging him with “misbehavior before the enemy,” which could result in life imprisonment. Yet the mainstream media have clearly chosen sides before the case is decided. Members of the media have once again elected to skew their coverage of the Bergdahl case in order to place the Obama administration in a favorable light.

The swap of Bergdahl for the Taliban Five was met with considerable controversy. “This was a bad deal, all around,” we commented last year. “The administration tried offering the release of one terrorist detainee at a time. Apparently the Taliban turned it down. And two years earlier, President Obama was close to releasing the Taliban Five for nothing, except the right to claim he was once again advancing the cause of peace, this time with the Taliban.”

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples of media bias toward Bergdahl, and thereby the administration, can be found in a September 20 Washington Post front-page article entitled, “Disillusioned and self-deluded, Bowe Bergdahl vanished into a brutal captivity,” which emphasizes both Bergdahl’s mental health state and his brutal torture at the hands of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.

“Emotional testimony has underscored the relentless brutality that Bergdahl had to endure, as well as the chaos caused by his disappearance and the lingering resentment of some of his comrades,” wrote Dan Lamothe for the Post.

Tales of Bergdahl’s maltreatment and torture evoke sympathy and horror. But the trade for the Taliban Five made the situation worse—both for future soldiers who risk kidnapping, and for the rest of the world, which must bear the brunt of future evil acts that could potentially be influenced by the Taliban Five’s leadership and reputation. At the very least, this was a propaganda victory for Islamic extremists worldwide.

The Post article devoted only two lines to the arguments made by Army prosecutor, Major Margaret Kurz, who, Lamothe writes, asserted “that Bergdahl’s actions hurt the Army, his fellow soldiers and the mission in Afghanistan, and he must be punished.”

“One does not just walk away into the Afghan wilderness…and then return as though nothing happened,” said Kurz, according to the Post. These two lines, so inconvenient to the media’s narrative, were buried at the end of the article—where they were less likely to be read.

While breathless news reporting has covered every new revelation regarding Bergdahl’s mental health status, according to the Associated Press, “Military officials and prosecutors [have] downplayed or disputed those mental health claims.” By emphasizing Bergdahl’s psychological health, reporters hope to distract from this soldier’s deliberate act of desertion which endangered the lives of many of those with whom he served.

Last year, Time magazine cited the six soldiers who it said died hunting for Bergdahl. Yet the administration, according to Lamothe, would now like America to believe that these deaths are not connected to Bergdahl’s desertion. Newsweek was one publication that questioned whether or not those deaths were directly attributable to the search for Bergdahl.

Bergdahl’s motives were laid out quite clearly in last year’s Rolling Stone article.According to Tim Dickinson:

‘He wanted to be a mercenary, wanted to be a free gun,’ says [Jason] Fry. ‘He had a notion he was a survivalist, claimed he knew how to survive with nothing because he grew up in Idaho…. Before we deployed…him and I were talking about what it would be like,’ Fry recalls. Bowe looked at his friend and made no bones about his plans. ‘If this deployment is lame,’ Bowe said, ‘I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.’

Fox News reported back in April that “two senior sources” had told former military intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer that a 2009 investigation which forensically examined Bergdahl’s computer indicated that he had contacted the Russians before leaving his post.

“He was going to go off to Uzbekistan,” Shaffer told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, describing the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation. “He had made contact with local Afghans and wanted to be moved to Uzbekistan and then made contact with the Russians because he wanted to talk to Russian organized crime…”

“‘He left deliberately, knowingly,’ Kurz said, and with a plan that took weeks to prepare: mailing his Kindle and laptop home, attempting to have his pay diverted to a relative, packing local clothing as a disguise, leaving his gun and other belongings on his cot,” reported the Los Angeles Times on September 17.

By characterizing Bergdahl not as a deserter but an unwitting victim, and even a whistleblower, the mainstream media hope to salvage President Obama’s damaged reputation for his outrageous decision to trade one soldier who abandoned his post for five high-ranking Taliban terrorists who would kill again if given the chance. Two of the five were wanted by the United Nations for crimes against humanity. And on top of that, Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, said at the time of his release that Bergdahl had served “with honor and distinction.” President Obama, meanwhile. took great credit for this trade as an example of his determination to leave no American “men and women in uniform behind.” He even brought Bergdahl’s parents to the White House for acontroversial televised announcement of the release.

Discussions of why Bergdahl abandoned his post serve only as a weak explanation, a distraction from how this awful deal remains a stain on Obama’s reputation, and a foreshadowing of his administration’s future negotiations, such as the Iran nuclear deal. But the media are once again content to ignore the details and context of this story, along with other enduring Obama scandals.