More Halloween 2011

Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

What Is A Cuban Exile?

This story appeared one day ago in the Miami Herald.  It was written by Tania Mastrapa of Tania@MastrapaConsultants.com Tania Mastrapa is the secretary of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE). The opinions expressed here are her own.  Two Sisters From The Right are happy to bring this explanation which seems so clear to the Cuban community and so dificult for others to understand.
Two Sisters

Forget The Year of Arrival, All Cubans are Exiles

by Tania Mastrapa

for

The Miami Herald

Recently there has been much ado about the validity of Sen. Marco Rubio’s status as a son of exiles. The controversy mistakenly suggests that to be pro-freedom a Cuban must have left the island within a specific time frame. My family history, like Rubio’s, demonstrates otherwise.

In 1956, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s policemen dragged my mother’s stepfather, Justo, from his workplace and jailed him. He was brutally beaten and later released. He was warned that their next encounter would result in his death. The regime mistakenly believed he was part of the revolutionary movement.

He left the island on a boat to Nassau, Bahamas hoping to return when it was again safe. Police arrived at my family’s home at 3 a.m. They overturned every item in the house looking for Justo’s supposed weapons cache. They found nothing. My then 4-year-old uncle pretended to shoot at the policemen with a toy. One of them hit my uncle on the head and threw him on his bed, threatening to kill both him and my grandmother. No official apology was issued for the egregious error.

In 1958, when it was clear the political situation would remain unstable, my grandmother and uncle left Cuba to Miami where Justo was waiting for them.

At the time of these events my mother was in Spain where my grandfather lived. His life savings were in Cuban banks. His brothers oversaw the family properties on the island. He planned to return to Cuba to live once my mother completed her schooling. Then the new Cuban state imprisoned and executed political opponents, deported the clergy, seized bank accounts and confiscated private property from its citizens and foreigners. After the deception and failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, he sank into a deep depression and retreated to our country home in the mountains, later dying from a massive heart attack. His story was not unique. As a permanent U.S. resident, my grandmother claimed her daughter and in 1962 my mother left Spain and entered this country. My mother joined the legion of others affected by the Castro takeover.

In 1957, two Batista secret police agents knocked on my paternal grandfather’s door at 7 a.m. and demanded that he join them. He was taken to military barracks where his younger brother was waiting inside an office. Together they were interrogated and threatened for several hours. The police claimed that either my grandfather or great-uncle was a revolutionary. In fact, they were shown a picture of a man who possessed an uncanny resemblance to the virtually identical brothers.

The secret police also claimed that they would have shot my grandfather the day before had he not been with my then-12-year-old father. A family contact pulled strings and arranged for the brothers’ release. Immediately my family applied for passports to leave the country. Their passports never arrived.

In January 1959, the family reapplied, fearing the Castro regime that had mercilessly bombed their eastern region and murdered myriad Cubans. Their attorney discovered that their original 1957 applications had been blocked and were sitting in a drawer. The Batista agents were bitter that their authority had been overridden at the barracks. In 1960, my father’s family finally fled Cuba and arrived in Miami, where they would wait to go back home.

Most of our families had migrated to Cuba from around the world seeking economic opportunities, freedom, social mobility and a better life in a Caribbean paradise. Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents left behind Armenia, Austria, China, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Spain and many other homelands to establish themselves in the tropics. For most, there was no valid reason to leave Cuba and no desire to do so.

For many, the Batista tumor was unsavory, but the Castro cancer was indigestible. They fled to the United States and other countries seeking temporary lodging until the fall of the regime. It simply has not yet fallen. Date of arrival, visa type and place of departure are irrelevant. Together we continue to wait for freedom because we are all Cuban exiles.

Halloween 2011

Copyright Michael Ramirez, Political Cartoon

...In A Dangerous Place by Rich Carroll

The following article was written by our good friend and frequent contributor to Two Sisters From The Right, Rich Carroll.  Rich is a veteran of the VietNam war and he wrote "Orphaned Heroes" a book about his command there.  Since his retirement from Reader's Digest, Rich has been a free lance writer.  He is a well known op-ed writer whose articles often appear in Two Sisters From The Right and other conservative blogs.  His book "Terrorists' Crossing" available through Amazon.com is about our southern border with Mexico.  One critics review reads as follows: 

"This novel should jar the complacency out of all Americans, including politicians, who minimize the urgency of controlling the borders of the United States. The scenarios presented in this story could pose very real dangers to our country and should frighten anyone who doubts our vulnerability to the infiltration of enemies who want us dead. I found the book captivating from beginning to end because the horrors are probably more in motion than any of us dare to think."

Today we are delighted to bring Rich Carroll's latest op-ed piece.  Rich has quite a following among the readers of Two Sisters From The Right. 
TWO SISTERS

...In A Dangerous Place

by Rich Carroll

A winding dangerous road in America

My country is $14 trillion in debt; a sum unfathomable in size and scope but a sum that puts Americans in financial bondage to foreign powers we neither like nor trust. We are in this dangerous place because the politicians from both parties we trusted have been the irresponsible parents,

signing checks for things we could not afford.

Each of us faces a foreboding future because of politicians who have forsaken our country and our God and our partnership with Israel to put American citizens in the precarious position of sliding into an existence of third world poverty. We face a not-too-pretty future because we, individually and collectively, took our eye off the ball and devoted our attentions to cults, silly self-aggrandizing pursuits and self-consumed sloth. As a result of our voting for charismatic speakers instead of hard-nosed business people with a record of results, we must now reduce our military to a readiness level lower than pre-Pearl Harbor because we can no longer afford to stay strong and free. We are forsaking our military heroes and can no longer afford to take care of their long-term illnesses and injuries because we have a foreign administration that would rather spend these monies for the care and feeding of illegal immigrants. “We” have no one to blame but ourselves for being in this defeated position, staggering to stand upright in the high winds of one global government. “We” are only as great as our weakest links, who have become bigger and weaker because we didn't keep the main thing the MAIN THING and allowed our children to be dumbed down in socialist experimentation laboratories called public schools. The collective “we” were too busy working or partying or watching television to pay attention to our children's curriculum.

Each day we grow less able to take care of our aged; our parents and grand parents. Financial bondage creates a terrible chain of events to include 47 million Americans using food stamps, a number that will continue to grow in leaps and bounds in the coming years.

We will have to forsake our God because people to whom we owe vast sums of money will want to impose their religion of Islam (and the accompanying Sharia law) upon us.

We will lose our credit rating, and our global prestige. The United States will be one giant “fire sale” for foreign bargain hunters. Your home is now worthless. Office buildings will soon be worthless. Your grand children and great grandchildren will no longer learn about our founding fathers because the new foreign powers who will control us will re-write their history books.

Are you sorry now you removed God from your life, your children and their schools and instead worshiped at the altar of cultural diversity?

What will your dollars be worth when exchanged for a “one world currency,? Thirty-cents on the dollar?

It would appear that the United States in all our glorious history and remarkable achievement(s) will fade away like the ending of a Eugene O'Neill play as a place of seething resentments, aching desires and family tragedy where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. We are at that disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that was simmering beneath. We are at that place in O'Neill's poem “Freedom” when he said: “I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; but I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, where the rainbows play in the flying spray, Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.”

Are we to survive what lies ahead, each American will know the stiff sacrifice from the altar of excess. Read your history on the depression era and be prepared and hopeful that THIS will be the worst we endure and not as slaves under the whip of Allah. The American spirit CAN survive. We have done so in the past and with God's help we shall again.

Yes we are there. Start today asking for God's guidance.

Copyright Rich Carroll October 2011

Two Sisters From The Right

Ramirez Toon

Michael Ramirez Political Cartoon

Contributed by Bornicus

Fox's Roger Ailes: The George Soros of The GOP

Roger Ailes President of FOX News



Until a few months ago, those of us who have been faithful viewers of FOX News never really knew the name Roger Ailes.  We didn't know who he was, and we certainly had no knowledge of his reputation as GOP "king maker."    As the GOP presidential campaign got into full swing, those of us who consistently watched FOX News because we believed that its coverage of all the news was indeed "Fair and Balanced" suddenly began to feel a nagging sense that something had changed. 

Allow me to clarify here that this writer did not interpret Fox's claim to be fair and balanced to mean that they would report only the news that I as a conservative would want to hear.  Rather, I took the claim very literally:  Fox news journalists would be fair and balanced in reporting all the news, even if the news would reflect unfavorably on conservatives.  What I never expected was for those same journalists to be complicit in a plan to attack and discredit conservatives, as in the case of some GOP presidential candidates, in order to change their national image.  That, is not by any stretch of the imagination fair or balanced.

Many Fox viewers, as we once were, began the day with Fox and Friends and the television stay tuned to that channel all day until after Special Report with Bret Baier.  Honestly, for many of us the day wasn't complete without hearing the panel discussion that followed the news?  If it was confirmed on Fox news, we believed it.  No other journalists, in our opinion, had the integrity, the honesty, and the courage to cover the news fairly as did those who worked for the Fox network.  When we began to see  people who had previously worked for NBC or CNN join the FOX news staff we simply believed that they too were men of integrity who'd grown tired of the biased media tactics practiced by  their former employers. 

Gradually, however, as the changes became more apparent  we began to  wonder, "Were the new staff additions an attempt to  change the tone of Fox News?" After months of watching the metamorphosis that Fox was undergoing we wondered "Why?"  "What had happened?"  Did it have something to do with the telephone hacking scandal in England? Later we read that word had come down from on "high", presumably Roger Ailes' throne, that FOX was indeed to change its tone to a more "moderate" one.  FOX had apparently been accused of leaning to the right, and being too conservative from people such as Al Gore to some obscure Saudi billionaire.  To Fox's credit, any pressure they ever felt was not apparent to the viewers.

That of course was in the past.  The recent changes are very obvious to the regular viewer.  Although we were perplexed,  we were unaware that the not so subtle changes we were observing were all due to Fox President Roger Ailes' insuring that Fox's ratings remained at the top.  After Obama's election as president, and his obvious socialist stance, Fox appeared to lean to the right.  Ailes' hired the rhetorical  Glenn Beck, and capitalized on the growing popularity of The Tea Party to raise the network's viewership and ratings.  But although Glenn Beck initially boosted the ratings, he gradually became too out of control to suit Ailes and the more moderate viewers.  In July of 2011, Beck left the network in not very good terms with Ailes. Writer Howard Kurtz confirms that  Ailes also saw the influence of the Tea Party fading and decided that Fox should become more mainstream. 

Roger Ailes' influence on the changes taking place at Fox News  is very apparent.  According to The Daily Beast:

"First, Ailes dialed back the Tea Party talk. Now he’s turning the GOP race into a political X-Factor—and steering the election agenda one more time."                                   

For those of us who who have wondered about Fox's coverage of the debate, Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast provides some needed answers:

It was part political spectacle, part American Idol, part YouTube extravaganza, a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel.

Hours before the presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?”

The sight of Fox news anchors grilling the Republican candidates without mercy was all a part of Roger Ailes' plan.  It surely pleased the White House who has been extremely vocal in its complaints about Fox news, specifically Barack Hussein Obama and his spokesman White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. It might have pleased more of the centrist viewers, but it was a shock to the conservative viewers who had expected to see the candidates given an opportunity to present their platforms to the American people instead of having to be defensive against the very media people they too trusted.

Sadly, we've discovered, that the reporters at Fox on whom we had come to rely to tell us the news as they were happening, are nothing more that a bunch of marionettes dancing to Ailes' tune as he pulls their strings.  We can't think of many disappointments as impacting as this.  As common citizens we are left wondering who we can trust when we read reports such as this. 

While Fox reporters ply their trade under Ailes’s much-mocked “fair and balanced” banner, the opinion arm of the operation has been told to lower the temperature. After the Gabrielle Giffords shooting triggered a debate about feverish rhetoric, Ailes ordered his troops to tone things down. It was, in his view, a chance to boost profits by grabbing a more moderate audience.

Our suspicions proved to be correct.  We were not imagining the change in Fox's approach to the news and the subject matter.  It remains to be seen if FOX news can win the ratings war as easily with their newly found "more moderate audience" as they did with the conservatives who followed them so faithfully.  To think that reporters whom we have come to admire such as Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, and the folks during the daytime news programming can be so easily manipulated is a journalistic catastrophe. 

We still suspect that the telephone hacking incidents that took place in England have given impetus to Roger Ailes' plan.  It appears to us that Rupert Murdoch has become more dependent on Roger Ailes handling of Fox news.  This was made quite obvious by their joint recent appear on Fox and Friends and the nauseating fawning and gushing that went on during the segment.  Andrew Laughlin of Digital Spy Media reports that FOX owner Rupert Murdoch is now facing pressure from News Corporation investors and stockholders.  In an upcoming meeting in Los Angeles, the call is out for Murdoch's sons James and Lacham to resign.  The phone hacking scandal resulted in the closure of News Corps' Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, and the withdrawal of its bid to acquire the 60.9% of Sky that it does not already own. [1]

Investors want Murdoch to step down too and are calling for a separation of the positions of chairman and chief executive, which are both held by Murdoch.

"The purpose of our resolution is to ensure that an independent voice with an independent view is leading News Corp," said Tanner.

"As the company's shareholders, including CBIS, and the rest of the world have seen, ethical lapses appear to be endemic to News Corp and not just a single, isolated incident.

"This resolution seeks to restore responsibility at the top of News Corp and ensure the company operates in accordance with the highest standards of corporate governance and transparency, which at present are sadly lacking."

Although it appears that Ailes decided to appeal to a more moderate audience after the Giffords' shooting incident, the telephone hacking incident in the U.K. has also had a great effect.  It has certainly produced winners and losers.  Among the winners one can count Roger Ailes who is now,  more than 40 years after helping to elect Richard Nixon, more in demand than ever as the man to see for Republicans with designs on the White House. [2]

The losers are the faithful FOX viewers who once believed the "fair and balanced" shtick that Roger Ailes made famous.  Bret Baier's added "and unafraid," we now know is a sham.  They are all afraid of the man's power.  In the meantime, we hope that Ailes' presumed power to elect the new Republican candidate goes the way of his negotiations with Glenn Beck (The Elephant In The Green Room)   - we hope his scheme blows up right in his face.
TWO SISTERS

Roger Ailes
Photo-illustration by Darrow 

In The News: The Rise of Islam

As we become engaged in following our domestic news - the presidential campaign, the OWS, missing children, and the World Series, to name a few, we cannot divert our focus from the one ever present danger that looms in our nation's horizon - The Threat of Islam. 

Some months back we witnessed what came to be known by the somewhat romantic name of "The Arab Spring."  We were told that the young people out in the streets, holding signs, and protesting against the government in power were "hungry for democracy" and wanted to do away with dictatorships and the tyranny of their leaders.  Some of us were skeptical, especially when we saw the spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood begin to insinuate itself in the demonstrations.

One by one, the "new" leaders of those countries are publicly announcing that they are embracing Sharia Law and putting its tenets in place.  There is no way that a country which is ruled by Sharia can lay claim to democracy.  In some cases the old Sharia rules regarding banking and marriage are being put into effect.

As we watched the demonstrations, especially in Egypt, we saw young women out in the crowd, expressing their opinions and exerting their rights.  We wondered then, and we know now, that those rights will soon vanish.  Under Sharia Law women have no rights.  Rather than advancing forward into the 21st century, they are taking steps back to the days when a woman's opinion did not count.  Under Sharia law, women are relegated to second class citizen status and do not enjoy the same freedoms or rights which men do. 

Just today the transitional Libyan  government leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil set out a vision for the post-Gadhafi future with an Islamist tint, saying that Islamic Sharia law would be the "basic source" of legislation in the country, and that existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. These laws include the practice of men taking more than four wives.  

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "met with NTC Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril and Finance Minister Ali Tarhouni, offering funding and technical support. She said afterward that Libya should be governed by “the rule of law, not the whims of men,” and should have a “transparent and fair judicial system.” [1]

The Journal "The Hill" stated: 

NATO did not intervene to see the installation of Shariah law in Libya. Is the U.N. political mission being set up in Tripoli going to help the transitional authorities implement Islamic law, which can provide for punishments such as stoning and amputations? Its application often discriminates against women. Did Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) realize that this would be the outcome of his strong support for the Libyan rebels.

This is a truly important time in our history.  We are facing an election that can either help us restore this great nation to its former glory, or if the unthinkable should happen and Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected, we will have to face the danger of an unbridled Obama at the head of our government.  This could present a critical situation from which we may never recover.  However, we must not lose track  of occurrences in the Muslim world which, as we've already experienced, presents our homeland security with a truly dangerous threat.
Two Sisters

UPDATE 7-Huge turnout in Tunisia's Arab Spring election

By Tarek Amara and Christian Lowe - REUTERS Africa

TUNIS, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Tunisian voters poured into polling stations to vote on Sunday in their country's first free election, 10 months after vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in an act of protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings.

The leader of an Islamist party predicted to win the biggest share of the vote was heckled outside a polling station by people shouting "terrorist", highlighting tensions between Islamists and secularists being felt across the Arab world.

Bouazizi's dramatic suicide, prompted by despair over poverty and government repression, provoked mass protests which forced President Zine al-Abidine to flee Tunisia. This in turn inspired revolts in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria.  READ MORE HERE

Libya NTC head Jalil pledges to uphold Islamic law

by Dina Zayed

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Libya's National Transitional Council leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil kneeled in prayer after taking the stand in a celebration of liberation on Sunday after 42 years of one-man rule by Muammar Gaddafi and promised to uphold Islamic law.

"We as a Muslim nation have taken Islamic sharia as the source of legislation, therefore any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified," he said.

Jalil thanked the Arab League, the United Nations, and the European Union for supporting the uprising which ended with Gaddafi's death Thursday.  READ MORE HERE

U.S. "warms to idea" of Pakistani negotiations with Haqqanis

by Jihad Watch

Who benefits? The Pakistanis, who would obtain a tool for buying time indefinitely, saying they need to see the "dialogue" through, and that now is not the time (it never is) for firmer action that could upset a delicate situation. They don't need to do much to look busy.

Who else benefits? The Haqqanis, who can also buy themselves time and an air of legitimacy, playing to false hopes that there is a "pragmatic" element that can be split off and a working relationship established through "engagement." All the while, they will continue fighting and plotting attacks, and they will use the prospect of cutting off talks as an instrument of blackmail.  READ MORE HERE

Goodbye Iraq

by Jazz Shaw

I first saw the news breaking from Jake Tapper on his Twitter account, and then at ABC. (In a close tie with James Joyner.) Assuming there isn’t yet another round of backtracking and “clarifications” over the coming weeks – a possibility which can never be ruled out in politics – Barack Obama will be removing all troops from Iraq by the end of the year with the exception of a small marine force at the embassy who will oversee the transfer of military equipment and security for the diplomats. Many questions remain, such as what will happen to the tens of thousands of civilian contractors and others who have existed under our wing there for some time.

That will all be sorted out in the months to come, for better or worse. But, as I said, barring a major reversal the end appears to be in sight. I would raise a glass to “celebrate” this, but it would be bitter indeed. This is more than nine years overdue.  READ MORE HERE

The Arab World: It Ain't Switzerland

By Rusty Shackelford, PhD

Here's the problem I'm having with some of my friends who point out that Islamists make up a portion of the opposition of [insert name of Arab country here], therefore any show of support for the opposition is de facto a support for Islamism.

Ummmm, okay.

Look, we are not talking here about the choice between Dictator X and liberal reformer Y. The choices in the world just aren't that clear cut.

I'd love for those to be our choices, but they're not. Given the choice between a dictator like Ghaddafi with American blood on his hands and an imperfect opposition movement, I choose the opposition.

Further, if the choice is between the enemy of my enemy spilling blood or my own troops, I choose the enemy of my enemy.

No, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. He's my ally.

Better they die in a mutually beneficial cause then us. READ MORE HERE

As Libya takes stock, Moammar Kadafi's hidden riches astound

By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times

New estimates of the former leader's assets — more than $200 billion — are called 'staggering.' If they prove true, he would rank among the world's most rapacious leaders.

Reporting from Washington— Moammar Kadafi secretly salted away more than $200 billion in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, about $30,000 for every Libyan citizen and double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected, according to senior Libyan officials.

The new estimates of the deposed dictator's hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are "staggering," one person who has studied detailed records of the asset search said Friday. "No one truly appreciated the scope of it."

If the values prove accurate, Kadafi will go down in history as one of the most rapacious as well as one of the most bizarre world leaders, on a scale with the late Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire or the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. READ MORE HERE

Clinton warns Iran not to exploit US Iraq pullout

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, Oct 23 (Reuters) - The United States pledged on Sunday to maintain a strong security relationship with Iraq for years to come despite the scheduled pullout of all U.S. troops and warned Iran not to try to exploit the situation.

"No one should miscalculate America's resolve and commitment to helping support the Iraqi democracy," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on the NBC program "Meet the Press." "We have paid too high a price to give the Iraqis this chance."

No one should doubt American commitment to Iraq, in particular its neighbor Iran, Clinton added.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed confidence Iraq would be able to deal with any threat from Iran-backed militants after the U.S. withdrawal.

After months of negotiations with officials in Baghdad failed to reach an agreement to keep possibly thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq as trainers, President Barack Obama announced on Friday he would stick to plans to pull out the remaining force of 40,000 American troops by year's end.  READ MORE HERE

Sharia über Alles versus Western Justice

By Andrew G. Bostom

How is it that intelligent people cannot see the lesson of history when sharia enters a non-Islamic society, step by step? Yale Assistant Professor of religious studies Eliyahu Stern's 9/2/11 NY Times op-ed ("Don't Fear Islamic Law in America") vilifies those who seek fair, rational legislative remedies to the encroachment of Islamic law (Sharia) in America as "stigmatizing Islamic life". Stern's vitriol is directed specifically at SB 1028, a bill which was recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly, and includes this straightforward language regarding sharia:

This bill defines "sharia" as the set of rules, precepts, instructions, or edicts which are said to emanate directly or indirectly from the god of Allah or the prophet Mohammed and which include directly or indirectly the encouragement of any person to support the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States or Tennessee Constitutions, or the destruction of the national existence of the United States or the sovereignty of this state, and which includes among other methods to achieve these ends, the likely use of imminent violence. Under this bill, any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising directly from the extant rulings of any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Ja'afariya, or Salafi, as those terms are used by sharia adherents, is prima facie sharia without any further evidentiary showing.

Michael Nazir Ali was the first bishop of Raiwand in Pakistan's West Punjab (1984-1986), who emigrated to become the initial non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England. READ MORE HERE

On The Home Front

A Serious Plan for Prosperity and Peace

By Bruce Walker - American Thinker

This recent speech by Rick Perry on energy policy and this article by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal discussing Harold Hamm's analysis of our nation's oil and gas potential ought to constitute a bigger story in the presidential campaign. Hamm, who grew up in rural Oklahoma as the son of sharecroppers, has roots like Perry's, who grew up in rural Texas as the son of sharecroppers.

America rose to superpower status in large part through the genius and grit of its oilmen. In the Second World War, our nation produced much more oil than all the rest of the world put together -- more than 80% of Allied oil production. It is hard to imagine how we could have won that war, which required huge amounts of oil to sail our warships, fly our aircraft, fuel our tanks and trucks -- and to fill that need for our allies -- without our incredibly productive oil industry.

Domestic production of oil and gas declined because the cost of production in nations like Saudi Arabia allowed OPEC to become a cartel that could underbid American producers. Leftists in America collaborated. Drilling for oil was proscribed in many areas that likely had vast reserves.

Moreover, the left hated every practical American energy resource. Coal mining was hobbled with environmental regulations. Nuclear power plants could not be built even though France has safely produced vast amounts of electricity through nuclear power for decades, much of which is exported. READ MORE HERE

Marco Rubio: My family's flight from Castro
By SEN. MARCO RUBIO  Commentary  POLITICO 

 

Marco Rubio and his mother

The Washington Post on Friday accused me of seeking political advantage by embellishing the story of how my parents arrived in the United States.

That is an outrageous allegation that is not only incorrect, but an insult to the sacrifices my parents made to provide a better life for their children. They claim I did this because “being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion.”  READ MORE HERE

Fears and Smears

Islamophobia is not an irrational fear, nor is it the fear of Islam.

By Andrew C McCarthy - National Review

‘From a purely academic point of view, this translation is superior to anything produced by orientalists in the way of translations of major Islamic works.” Taha Jabir al-Alwani was writing about Reliance of the Traveller, the English version of Umdat al-Salik, the classic manual of sharia (“Islamic Sacred Law,” as the cover of Reliance puts it). Alwani is no lightweight in these matters. His specialty is fiqh — Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he has been a member of the Islamic Fiqh Academy in Saudi Arabia and is renowned among orientalist scholars in the West as president of the Fiqh Council of North America.

More significant, he was writing in his capacity as president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Headquartered in Virginia, IIIT is an Islamist think tank created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s.  READ MORE HERE

Krauthammer down on Herman Cain: ‘He is winging it’

by Jeff Poor - The Daily Caller

Say what you want about former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain’s presidential bid and his missteps along the way, but one can’t argue with the results. He has an edge in the average of the major polls and even picked up a straw poll victory in Nevada on Friday.

Nonetheless, that isn’t impressing Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. In his regular appearance on the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Friday, Krauthammer castigated Cain, mainly for his confusing response on the abortion issue on “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network earlier this year.

“[I] saw him on ‘Stossel’ on abortion – entirely incoherent,” Krauthammer said. “On one hand, people ought to have choice. On the other hand life is sacred from the beginning and abortion ought to be illegal. This isn’t a complicated issue. It’s one or the other. It can’t be both. Stossel was simply stunned. And if you combine it with the ‘9-9-9’ stuff, it is not that he just hasn’t thought it out. He is winging it. And that is a real problem.”      Watch:

Senate Blocks First Piece of Obama Jobs Bill

By MICHAEL WARREN - The Weekly Standard  

In a 50-50 vote last night, the Senate voted down the first piece of a promised series of bills designed to pass President Barack Obama's jobs bill piecemeal. This first measure was a $35 billion state aid package for education and first responders. A separate Republican-sponsored jobs bill was defeated by the Democratic majority last night. The Hill reports:

The first measure, a piece of President Obama’s larger jobs package, failed in a 50-50 vote after two Democrats and Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) joined Senate Republicans in voting against moving to the measure.

Democrats Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) also sided with Republicans.

Nelson and Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.) were the two Democrats to vote against the president's full "jobs" package last week. Tester voted yes on Thursday's measure. READ MORE HERE

Mitt Romney and the defense of federalism

by Rich Stowell

SACRAMENTO, October 22, 2011—Mitt Romney is on defense from both his flanks. Liberals, including most of President Obama's supporters, fear him and are trying to discredit him, oddly enough, by associating him with Obama. From the Right, the former Massachusetts governor is doing his best to beat back charges that his state health care plan makes him a de facto liberal. The conservative wing of his party are uncomfortable, to say the least, with one of its best known features– the individual mandate. READ MORE HERE

We hope you have gained valuable information from the articles above.  We'd like to end today's edition with a submitted cartoon which does detail what is currently happening "On The Home Front."

Two Sisters

"Useful Idiots" Occupy America

A conservative commentary so excellently expressed, we could not wait to bring it to out readers.
Two Sisters

Obama's useful idiots 'occupy' America

by Doug Patton - Hernando Today

Vladimir Lenin is reputed to have coined the phrase "useful idiots" to describe those in the West who acted as apologists for the political brutality and economic failure of Soviet Communism. The phrase kept coming to mind as I watched the so-called "occupiers" marching in various cities across the country.

Direct references to Lenin's use of the term are scarce, the most authoritative being lawyer, newspaperman and author Ernest Cuneo, who wrote in 1969 that Lenin, in his farewell to his followers, said: "Take your example from the good housewife who finds use for even a broken shoestring. A good Communist finds use for everything, and nothing is more useful than a useful idiot."

Cueno went on to opine: "The number of useful idiots who have unwittingly served the Communist cause since then speaks well for the diligence of Lenin's disciples."

Indeed. Consider a few of Lenin's other choice quotes:

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."

And my personal favorite:

"The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses."

And there it is, direct from the pen of the original practicing Communist himself:

Crush the bourgeoisie (soak the rich); debauch the currency (create inflation by printing money with nothing to back it); and use the media (as propagandists, agitators and organizers).

Encouraged and coordinated by the campaign to re-elect the master of community organizing himself, the nation's mainstream media outlets are beside themselves trying to revive the glory days of the 1960s protest marches. Comparisons between the tea party movement and the Occupy Wall Street "mobs" (as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor so aptly dubbed them) have been promoted by the same useful idiots Lenin was describing.

The Tea Party was born of a dire concern on the part of decent, hard-working, patriotic Americans whose only desire was to preserve the Constitutional Republic given us by our Founders. They have called for nothing more than fiscal restraint, constitutionally limited government and sane tax policy.

The "occupiers," on the other hand, are communist agitators, hardcore anarchists and a garish array of useful idiots consisting of brainwashed union members, idealistic college students and old hippies reliving their misspent youth. They call themselves the 99 percent, but most of them have no idea what they want beyond redistribution of other people's money.

Barack Obama and his handlers are fully aware that he cannot be re-elected on his disastrous record. His only chance is to divide Americans against each other, to turn us into a balkanized people with disparate values. His party has very thoroughly laid the groundwork for this class envy over the last century, provoking us to hate our fellow American because he has more than we do. Now Obama, the community agitator, is playing us against each other as no one before him has ever done.

Barack Obama is the most divisive president since Abraham Lincoln. The difference, of course, is that Lincoln was trying to preserve the Union, while Obama is clearly trying to destroy it. He was taught to hate America by his Marxist-Muslim father, who abandoned him; by his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who became his surrogate father figure; by his philosophical hero, Saul Alinsky, whose "Rules for Radicals" helped to solidify his hatred; by his friend, the terrorist Bill Ayers, in whose home Obama started his political career; and by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose anti-Semitic, anti-American rants Obama claims never to have heard in 20 years.

Twelve men have held the presidency in my lifetime. I can personally remember eleven of them. Some have been competent; some have not. One has been great. However, until now I have never actually feared my president. Barack Hussein Obama is frightening. Like Lenin, he disdains his useful idiots, but he despises and wants to destroy those who oppose him.

Can you imagine the depth of that hatred if he gets a second term?

Doug Patton is a former speechwriter and public policy adviser who now works as a freelance writer. Readers can e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net .