Video: Who Brought Us Swine Flu? Illegal Alien Terrorist Mexicans

Related Post: Swine Flu (and The Daily Show) Bringing You “The Last 100 Days”

Related Post: How Swine Flu Started - Nationalised Medicine, Poor People, Democrats

Hours ago, we posted "expert" opinions blaming Swine Flu on national health services, poor folks, and the Democrats.

That ain't nothing. Michelle Malkin is sure that the cause is "uncontrolled immigration", but it's radio talk-show host Michael Savage who puts the vital question, "Could this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus and planted it in Mexico?"

And at this point, I am lost for parody (especially when Joshua Holland observes, "In the middle of the 14th century,...a terrified and confused population blamed the Jews -- aliens in their midst -- for bringing the "black death" upon them):

:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHCO_trqhM[/youtube]

Beyond Roxana Saberi: Javed Iqbal Jailed in US for Al-Manar News Broadcasts

This week Javed Iqbal, a Pakistani citizen and US resident, was jailed for six years for carrying the broadcasts of al-Manar, the television channel affiliated with the Lebanese political movement Hezbollah.

Iqbal, through his New York-based company HDTV Ltd, broadcast al-Manar for several months between 2005 and 2006 to paying customers. For prosecutors, this made him "Hezbollah's man in New York City". A second defendant connected with HDTV Ltd, Saleh Elahwal, has pled guilty and awaits sentencing.

Al-Manar is an established broadcaster in the Middle East, and its footage has been used by other outlets such as Fox and CNN. (I have been interviewed for their English-language programmes and follow their news output closely.) However, US authorities added al-Manar to its list of terrorist organisations in 2004, warning that that anyone who "solicits funds or other things of value for al-Manar" would be prosecuted. Other countries, including France and Canada, also imposed a ban, although the channel is easily accessed via the Internet.

Apart from a brief article by Adam Liptak in The New York Times in October 2007, there has been no attention to the case in the US.

Video: Waterboarding Fox's Sean Hannity for Charity - Will You Help?

There are so many ways to play this story, both serious and satirical, that I'm going to lay it out straight through the two videos below.

On Thursday night, Fox's macho-posing Sean Hannity was getting a bit of grief from actor Charles Grodin on Thursday night --- "How much mascara do you have on right now?" --- when the subject turned to that day's news:

GRODIN: Would you consent to being waterboarded?

HANNITY: Yeah. Sure.

GRODIN: And we can waterboard you. Are you busy on Sunday?

HANNITY: I'll do it for charity.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2I6qRYJfYg[/youtube]

Hannity may not know that Christopher Hitchens had already tried out waterboarding, lasting 11 seconds, or may think that it's just a Sunday night swim. In either case, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann took up the charity offer, offering $1000 to charity for each second that Hannity could last:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sm8Os3mXv8[/youtube]

For those who want to support a good cause, a Facebook group has been set up, proposing to give any proceeds to Fisher House, which provides lodging for the families of US troops.

Combating Somali Piracy: How Many People Can We Afford To Kill?

Related Post: After the Rescue: What Now with Somalia?

“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates” – Mark Twain

You don’t have to be a serious news junkie to know that there is currently a lively debate ongoing in the media on the issue of combating Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. Commentators from across the political spectrum have laid out countless detailed plans for fighting the pirates both at sea and on land, and some such as CNN’s Jack Cafferty and Rick Sanchez have even put the question directly to their audiences. However, all of the solutions presented seem to involve some level of military force used against Somalia, specifically US military force, and the major differences between the plans are over questions of financial cost and political willpower. To put it bluntly, the real question at hand is how many Somali people we really feel like killing right now.

But why do we insist on making this debate so narrow and yet still complicated when it doesn’t have to be either? Unlike the conventional wisdom of US military violence and nation building, which has an atrocious rate of success, there is a myriad of solutions available which have not yet even been attempted with Somalia, yet are far more likely to produce the desired long-term stability. Given the huge challenges facing the United States from its two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global financial crisis, isn’t it time we explored some of these other options?



The conventional wisdom is very simple. While they all agree that the Navy SEAL snipers killing the pirates was really cool, the generally liberal, realist, soft power crowd is pushing for an increased naval presence, that is ships with weapons, in the Gulf of Aden, the hawkish, bold-faced imperialist folks are asking for air strikes and special forces strikes against pirate sanctuaries in Somalia, and the population at large is especially craven, calling for public hangings of pirates and shoot-on-sight rules of engagement for US Navy ships in the region. Typically when presented by experts and commentators, these plans will also feature a data set debunking the other side’s plan, which means that when put side by side, they cancel each other out with no shortage of irony.

The consequences of these plans are also simple. The end result of all of them, no matter whether they succeed or fail, is that the US is going to kill a lot of Somalis. None of the plans even attempt to address the root causes of piracy in the gulf, like hellish poverty, illegal over-pollution, and the absence of basic human services in Somalia. So in order for these options to succeed, you’d have to believe that these desperate, armed-to-the-teeth gangsters from an apocalyptic-level failed state will be so incensed at the sight of a dead body that they’ll permanently abstain from the only profession that brings their family any shred of dignity and sustenance. Amazing logic, right? If you knew how much people were paid to come up with ideas like that, your head would explode.

But there are other options available. Rather than falling back on the usual tool of military violence, they instead focus on the seeds of instability and piracy in Somalia.

Seemingly the most obvious idea would be to ask the Somalis themselves what to do about piracy.  Are they asking for food, money and an end to illegal toxic waste dumping in their fishing grounds? Or are they asking for 200lb JDAMs to be dropped on their villages? You could ask even the most destitute, illiterate among them, and I’m sure they’d have an opinion either way. However, I’ve yet to see one actual Somali in the mainstream discussion, it’s mostly the usual suspects in the media foreign policy elite whose opinions are deemed worthy of consideration. At the very least they could lay out a clear, concrete set of grievances to be acknowledged in whatever response the US eventually chooses.

Instead of special forces, why not deploy diplomats to Somalia? The European Union would be the most desirable, as the catastrophic circumstances of Somalia would require the most skilled negotiators available. Director of the Global Governance Initiative Parag Khanna writes of their prowess, “Charlemagne’s efforts to resurrect the Roman Empire have been succeeded, over a millennium later, by the multipronged armadas of Brussels Eurocrats steadily colonizing Europe’s periphery, in the Baltics, the Balkans, and, eventually, Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Eurocrats’ book is not the Bible but rather the acquis communautaire: the 31 chapters of the Lex Europea, which is rebuilding EU member states from the inside out.” Great, if they can do all that, why couldn’t they handle building a state in Somalia?

Provided they are dispatched with the same resources and support as their military counterparts are, these diplomats could succeed in laying some framework for a sovereign Somali government. Aid agencies and other NGO’s have shown they are capable of operating in extremely hostile environments with only a hint of a functioning state, such as Rwanda and Sudan. It’s possible that a skilled diplomatic mission could assist the Somalis in creating enough of a foundation of statehood for these aid agencies to join with humanitarian assistance.

However, the idea of using a European solution to an American foreign policy problem is almost unthinkable, and multilateral coalitions are, at best, frowned upon. That doesn’t mean the US only has to use its military might though. It has other powerful, untapped resources at its disposal. Namely, the massive organized Peace Movement.

The Peace movement, as with any organized political movement, comes complete with its own elite policy wonks, its own intelligentsia, and even its own media and social systems with which to organize and direct broad and diverse groups of people. The American Peace Movement also has the added benefit of never being allowed into mainstream political debate, and is therefore free of the corrupt hypocrisy and institutional apathy that typifies other foreign policy sects. Likewise, it also means that they’re not currently tied up with other issues like Iraq and Afghanistan like the rest of the foreign policy elite.

The price of utilizing American peace activists would be dramatically less than any of the other options currently up for debate. While the cost of US military power is in the trillions, and even skilled EU bureaucrats can charge exorbitant salaries, peace activists have shown they are capable of operating highly effectively with little to no funding available.  Given a small amount of funding and protection, the results they could achieve in Somalia might be quite groundbreaking. Perhaps its time to constructively engage them in the task of stabilizing Somalia. They may have some very interesting ideas particularly as it concerns mobilizing Somali citizens into a coherent bloc capable of projecting statehood.

Of course these options are very vague and untested, nowhere near as precise as the options laid out in the mainstream debate. Some might even find it absurd or ridiculous to suggest dispatching a phalanx of European diplomats or appointing Cindy Sheehan as Special Envoy to Somalia, but my point is only to show that there may be other options worth exploring and debating besides the standard military response.

President-is-a-Muslim Coverup: CNN Replaces "Obama Bow" with White House Dog

Related Post: Obama ‘Bowing Down’ to Saudi King? But Conservapedia Fails To Deliver.

Enduring America can exclusively reveal that CNN, well-known propaganda arm of the Obama Administration, bumped the very important story of Obama's bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for in-depth coverage of the White House arrival of Bo, the Portuguese water dog.



David Corn of The Nation had Twittered this week that he was going to be discussing the controversy. So how did Kurtz open Reliable Sources on Sunday?

I never thought I'd be leading off this program with a dog story. All right. It's not just any dog. It's the new Obama family dog. But it's also about White House media manipulation.

Media manipulation? Quite right, Howard. For several minutes, guests Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times, Tara Wall of The Washington Times, and David Corn pondered how "all the CNN people...were saying, 'Oh, look at the dog. It's so cute.'"

Post-dog story, Kurtz did put up Obama's statement, "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation." He even played the criticism of Fox's Sean Hannity, "We're an arrogant country and we're not a Christian nation and we bow before the Saudi king."

But did CNN show the bow? It did not.

Instead, Kurtz let Freeland --- who is quite clearly not an American and quite clearly works for a left-wing British newspaper --- bury the incident, "[Obama's comments] were picked up by some of the more shrill right-wing critics of the president, but what I thought was really interesting about those remarks...was how smoothly that went over in the U.S."

Now some readers may think we're making too much of a fuss of this obvious conspiracy between the mainstream media and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to keep the real news from us. But please consider....

What was the closing world-shattering story, even more important than Bo the White House Dog, that Kurtz and Reliable Sources pondered?

The father of Bristol Palin's baby speaks out on the television circuit, but do we really need to feast on the uncomfortable details of a teenage breakup?