If you haven't heard anything inspiring this week, and you could use some encouragement and a reminder as to why we're in the fight for freedom worldwide, please take five minutes to listen to this profound and inspiring speech. It's from Illinois' own freshman Congressman Adam Kinzinger on the U.S. House floor this week. A profound quote to remember: "The greatest disinfectant to terrorism is freedom."

Joseph Iosbbaker is an SEIU Leader. The sheepish Chicago Media went weak in the knees when Mr. Iosbaker and SEIU used the closing of the Republic Windows factory several years ago as a forum for disgraced Governor Blagojevich. Now,  Iosbaker is being investigated in a terrorist plot.

The Chicago media is following the lead of what they are told and tasked. SEIU is disappearing from the news reports on Iosbaker and his wife Wright College instructor Stephanie Weiner. They may be linked to anti-Israeli and Columbian FARC terrorism and that is what the Federal Bureau of Investigation is . . .investigating.

Read more at With Both Hands

image sets of Scrub Brushes (to scrub the references to th SEIU from the media)

Ayers, who has served as an education professor at UIC since 1987, is celebrated on campus for his academic contributions, particularly in the area of school reforms, said UIC education Dean Vicki Chou.

“He’s been really a very good colleague here,” Chou said. “He has hundreds of students who really cherish that they’ve had the experience of being taught by him.”

“(But) over the years, you just roll with it because we know who he really is, and the good far outweighs any negative press,” she said

Read more at the Chicago Tribune

After that reportage we were told about the Russian spies in New York and New Jersey, something I still haven’t been able to figure out. What were they spying on? What valuable information were they getting? They seemed live average American suburbanites. Some of their kids didn’t even know they weren’t Americans. And for whom they were traded? It didn’t seem to cause any commotion whatsoever. This was no Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg situation.

Then two weeks ago the Washington Post did a big three part expose on our espionage operation replete with huge budgets, numerous facilities, not easily knowing who reported to whom and for what. A week later the New Yorker ran a long think piece congratulating the Post.

More yawns.

I’m all for having sufficient intelligence; but I’d like it to be rational and useful. I’d also like to share it with our allies, even Russia and China, so we can save money and avoid duplicating. We have to assume in the age of Google and GPS that everyone knows pretty much about everything, and that there isn’t enough time to digest all the information we harvest.

Our enemies are terrorists, who engage in or want to be able to engage in nuclear, biological or chemical warfare. I don’t blame these UFOs if they come from distant solar systems to leave us alone. Maybe they’ve decided to be content with DVDs and coffee table books, and not get involved with our noodnik escapades.

I think we’re getting to the point where we don’t know what the answers are because we don’t know the right questions.

Please forgive me for being confused and if anyone can enlighten me without going ballistic ideologcally with ultra pejorative language I really would appreciate it.

Employment and Unemployment

I’m not sure if employment or unemployment are adequate terms. I do know that everyone needs the ability to sustain themselves and their families in terms of providing for shelter, food, clothing, education, health care, vacations, entertainment, etc.

I also know that it takes many fewer people to provide everything we need than it did 100, 200 or 300 years ago, and that we have the benefits of central heating, flushtoilets and antibiotics that Kings and Empresses did not have in the `1700′s. Bluntly, I’d rather be me than Napoleon.

Taxation and Fairness

I’m not a capitalist, communist or socialist. I don’t believe that taxes should be confiscatory or punishing. I believe in rewarding hard work, talent and inventiveness.

At the same time I believe in paying bills, living within ones means, having fair interest rates, and accepting the idea that rights call for responsibilities.

Several months ago I hear of a comparatively shocking situation. People living in public housing were way behind in their rents but still managed to be able to hire maid service. Is there something wrong there?

I’m getting tired over all of the liberal/conservative debate. What we seem to be missing is well balanced common sense.

Pretty soon the election debates will begin focusing; not just on personalities or ideology but results oriented policies and programs.

I’m looking forward to that, but this weekend I’m looking even more forward to a five days in the North Woods with the real loons.

**
Phil Krone is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer

A letter to that effect was written and signed by the deputy head of mission at the London U. S. embassy, Richard LeBaron. It was sent to the Scottish First Minister. Its release has been fought by the Obama State Department which has maintained that the memo should be treated as confidential to protect the integrity of communications between the U. S. and other nations. But the memo from LeBaron says flatly that if the bomber must be released “from Scottish custody the U. S. position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be far preferable to prisoner transfer which we oppose.”

This memo from an Obama State Department official changed the decade-old agreement between Britain and the U. S. that anyone convicted of the bombing would serve that sentence in a Scottish prison. That soft-headedness really rubs it in for the families of the 243 whose loved ones flying in a Boeing 747 were blown out of the sky over Lockerbie Dec. 21, 1988 on a flight from Heathrow (London) to JFK International in New York. On January 31, 2001 Abdel Bastel al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years in prison in Scotland. He was released by the Scottish Justice secretary on compassionate grounds…grounds Obama seemingly opposed but which his State Department gave a tacit “o.k” to via the memo from LeBaron.

If this doesn’t become a major issue in the 2010 campaign I’ll be surprised.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

Andrew Joseph Stack III also set fire to the home he shared with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, who recently split because he had been acting strangely of late.

Stack, who worked free-lance in computer technology, had issues with the IRS. Imagine that! Otherwise, according to all his friends and neighbors he was just the sweetest guy—no one would ever think he was capable of such an act. It’s always that way, except when it’s not.

Apart from damaging the building, which was not owned by the IRS, he killed one and seriously injured two workers, but since he died instantly he never got to know whether he had achieved his sick revenge.

Meanwhile the deep thinkers were having a field day asking each other whether this was a terrorist act—akin perhaps to Timothy McVeigh’s blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City back in 1995, killing nearly 200 people.

But a lone-wolf terrorist act was not really on the cable-babblers’ minds in this post-9/11 world. They were thinking capital-T terrorism, the kind generated from afar, like the Middle East.

“There’s no doubt,” said one great mind, “that if his name was Muhammad instead of Stack, that this would clearly be a terrorist act.”

I don’t know whether the speaker was making a witticism or a self-styled profundity, but in the popular mind he was right. The rest of the report was devoted to photos and charts and maps showing how easy it would be for a capital-T terrorist to replicate Stack’s action. His Piper plane took off from a field minutes away from his target. There would simply be no defense against such an act—and the plane could be loaded with gasoline or other flammable that would extend the damage.

Remember the light plane that landed on the White House lawn when Bill Clinton was a resident? What if that had been a malign rather than goofy act?

The answer to the terrorism question is complicated. First, unless the FBI learns something very new and different, this was simply the individual act of a diseased, frustrated, paranoid mind that finally snapped. And, yes, by choosing his target so carefully he was making a public statement with this suicide attack. It was, like several past incidents, intended to terrorize the IRS and perhaps us.

Oddly enough, it followed that bizarre multiple murder by an even more diseased mind, University of Alabama neuroscientist Amy Bishop, who shot and killed three colleagues and wounded three more because she was angry at not being granted tenure. There’s a motive for you.

In Bishop’s case we learned quickly that she was long considered a weirdo by colleagues and students. Look deeper and there’s an arrest record and—oh yes—killed her brother with a shotgun. Beyond weird, but not a terrorist.

Compare her case to another recent multiple murderer, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born army psychiatrist who slaughtered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Texas again. With a name like that, there was little doubt this was an act of capital-T terrorism—even before we learned that he attended a mosque in Virginia at the same time as two 9/11 terrorists.

He was also a follower of Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda-supporting preacher who works at radicalizing American Muslims. Hasan was a willing subject. He grew increasingly concerned and spoke out against our wars in Muslim countries. His fellow doctors were concerned, but none dared question his state of mind, most likely out of political correctness.

Did this psychiatrist also have a diseased mind? Or was he acting rationally according to his beliefs? He’s still hospitalized so we won’t learn more for a while.

I once thought psychiatrists would be the most rational of beings, but then Radovan Karadzic, the genocidal Serbian war criminal, is also a shrink. So much for preconceptions.

Terrorism has many faces and many definitions. We must learn to draw distinctions because it will be with us in many forms for a long time to come.

Then we can get back to the important stuff, like Tiger Woods apologia.

**

Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer

Who wouldn’t go to a poetry showy?

Hosted by McHenry County College

Showcasing terrorist’s emotions and knowledge

Be prepared  to be charmed when you go

to hear Marc Falkoff present “Poems from Guantanamo”

And hear the tales and lore

at 7 p.m. Feb. 4

If it is a mullah’s wisdom that you seek

Come hear the former detainees speak

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 22, 2009.

**

So Gitmo was supposed to close last Friday… anyone notice a big rush of terror-tourists in Thomson, Illinois??

I speak here of the magical power of incantation.

Soon after the underpants bomber proved himself no more skilled than the shoe bomber of yore, the recent ex-vice-president snarled with his most ferocious, fang-baring snarl that Barack Obama has made us less safe because he never uses the ex-v-p’s favorite phrase, “the war on terror.”

Quickly the right-wing echo-chamber was bubbling and seething with the sentiment. Congresspersons, broadcasters, tea-sippers and similar great minds explained that we can never defeat the terrorists unless we keep chanting and incanting about a global war on terror—or at least a plain vanilla war on terrorism. Only these words would show how serious we are and therefore will make the bad guys be gone.

Some of those great minds even averred—incorrectly—that Obama never ever used the word terror, terrorism or terrorist. Unfortunately for them, a series of television news clips showed he used all those words many times, as a candidate and as president. But no, he did not use the phrase “war on terror,” and with good reason.

He doesn’t say “war on terror” because there is no such thing. As numerous commentators, from former Senator Bob Kerrey of the 9/11 Commission to famed cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski point out, terrorism is a tactic used by left and right alike. How can you declare war on a tactic?

One might as usefully declare war on drive-by shootings, kidnappings or booby-trap bombings—all related instruments of terrorists. Sarah Palin might speak of Bill Ayers as a terrorist, but would she or her sympathizers brand the people who bomb abortion clinics or murder doctors as terrorists? They are, you know.

Here in the USA a terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan thrived for a century, often with the tacit support of local governments, but the word was not used about them. Maybe a few people got wise that Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist, as were the DC snipers. Is our euphemistic war on their ilk as well?

Of course, Obama’s immediate predecessor, whose administration originated the phrase, mouthed the term time and again—sometimes half a dozen times in the same speech. Somehow, however, no matter how often he repeated the incantation, he did not manage to win the war he declared. Perhaps he was not a good enough incanter—though Brzezinski observed that the ex-president spoke of terrorism in “vague, semi-theological terms.” Brzezinski hit a deep truth.

No one denies there are terrorist organizations out there that are dangerous and have every intent of damaging the United States and spreading terror. That’s their goal, knowing they cannot defeat us militarily. The ex-president, however, never named the enemy by name, preferring the incantation of a war on terror rather than a war on Al Qaeda or on radical Islamists.

Obama, however, had no problem saying explicitly that we are at war with Al Qaeda—a network with many incarnations and locations, as we are learning. He stopped short of saying we are at war with the Taliban, perhaps harboring some hope of separating “moderate” groupings within that network.

Obama also separated himself from a large part of his base by escalating the war in Afghanistan—in part to prove he was not “soft” on terrorism. Nevertheless, his opposition insists on the incantation—as if the ex-president’s incantations protected us from all evil.

Fact is, some of ex’s cohort are now trying to erase history through the use of further magical incantation. In recent days we heard Rudy Guiliani incant, “we had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” Oops—remember 9/11 Rudy? New York? You were mayor?

And he was not the only incanter. Earlier we heard similar sentiments from pundit Mary Matalin and ex’s last press secretary Dana Perino who incanted “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”

All you gotta do is believe!

Rudy now acknowledges he slipped and meant no attacks after 9/11, still forgetting the shoe bomber and the still at-large anthrax killer. Is this dementia or incantation? If we keep repeating these magic words will they become reality?
Ah, if magic words would only do the trick, I have a perfect strategy for the Republican incantationists:
Persuade Osama bin Laden to change his name to Rumpelstiltskin.

**
Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer

image Merseberg Incantations

Spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa was one of several the agency has revoked since the Dec. 25 incident as the result of a review into security procedures ordered by President Barack Obama. Crowley would not say when the decision on Abdulmutallab’s visa was made or how many others had been withdrawn.

HT James Taranto