It's Time For Freedom For Iran

Great article about Iran from Roger Cohen:

The world is watching, and technology is connecting, and the West is sending what signals it can, but in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.

It's true. We sit on the sidelines, watching from a distant. But it's out of our hands. The United Nations, nor the United States will help. The words of leaders of all Nations can wash across the planet and make an impact though. If nothing else, they can at least let the people of Iran know they are not alone.

We watch, we pray, and we hope that the blood and pain that the Iranian people are enduring will lead them to freedom.

It's an old saying, but it still rings true...Freedom is never free. It's bought and paid for by the brave willing to sacrifice to have it.

Dads and Daughters

My Dad passed away 25 years ago, and still hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized what a truly incredible man he was. I learned from the other girls I met there that not all fathers were like him. I learned that some fathers didn't care, or weren't there, or couldn't be bothered.


My Father came from poverty, born of teen mother. His father left him when he was 12 years old. If you have been reading my blog for long you know his story.

When I think of my Dad, beyond the love that I remember, I remember having such respect for him. I knew that he would always do what was right. He took a tattered childhood and built a life of success and respect. Everyone who knew him respected him.

I learned how to be a loving mother and a lady from my mother, but my self confidence and self esteem came from my Dad. A Father's role in a daughter's life cannot be measured. It defines how she sees herself and how she lets men treat her.

John Mayer wrote a beautiful song called "Daughters." His lyrics say it all:

Fathers, be good to your daughters

Daughters will love like you do

Girls become lovers who turn into mothers

So mothers, be good to your daughters too


Ooh, you see that skin?

It's the same she's been standing in

Since the day she saw him walking away

Now she's left cleaning up the mess he made

................................



On behalf of every man

looking out for every girl

You are the guide and the weight of her world

So fathers, be good to your daughters

Daughters will love like you do



Today I want to wish all Fathers a Happy Father's Day, but I want to say more to the fathers of daughters. Your daughter sees herself through your eyes. How you love her and treat will forever mark how she loves and treats herself. She will inevitably find a man like you. Are you the kind of man you want her to find? You need to be.

Be good to your daughters, daughters will love like you do.

Filming of another student shot in Iran

It's only getting worse. Scroll through Gateway Pundit's pics and video,especially this one where a young girl is shot dead:



From the video:

"Original source - Facebook: Basij shoots to death a young woman in Tehran's Saturday June 20th protests At 19:05 June 20th Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st. A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim's chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes. The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St. The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me. Please let the world know."

"Troubling," as Obama says, indeed.

Affairs. It just never turns out well.....

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.

It's interesting that some politicians can get away with affairs (see Bill Clinton and Rudy Guiliani) and others (see John Edwards) cannot. I don't see Sen. Ensign as one of those who get away with it. He's already lost his Republican leadership position, and after reading this letter, I think he may lose more.

"No Comment" Is Not an Option"

Excellent read at the WaPo by Paul Wolfowitz.

"Juneteenth"

From the Project 21 Black Leadership Nework:


On the occasion of "Juneteenth," the oldest and most recognized annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, members of the Project 21 black leadership network suggest the civil rights-themed holiday be used to celebrate freedoms that have been won and as a warning of how easily freedom can be threatened by an overbearing government.

Project 21 members have called attention to the Juneteenth since 1999, urging black Americans to use Juneteenth to embrace their inherent talents and strengthen their ties with family and community.

Now, when the Obama Administration and Congress are increasing government intervention into the lives of all Americans, Project 21 members suggest that people reflect upon how this expansion of power can reduce the threaten individual freedom.

"The liberties we enjoy today came at a tremendous cost and after a lot of suffering," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "Today historically marks the day of the opening of the door to opportunity for blacks to seek 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' We should take advantage of this liberty to strive to improve our lives and build upon the sacrifices of those who fought for freedom."

"It's important to remember that Juneteenth is rooted in our achieving our freedom. It is the growth of an activist government intent on regulating most - if not all - aspects of our lives that is now threatening that freedom," said Project 21 member Bishop Council Nedd II. "There's a lot at risk should politics be allowed to take precedence over the protection of individual rights. Environmental regulations, for instance, already substantially affect private property rights and the ability for many to conduct legitimate business. Just think of what might happen to our independence if we are forced to rely on a partisan government for health care, to determine if we can buy a car or how we can worship without offending perceived sensibilities? This is something we need to consider as we mark Juneteenth this year.

"Project 21 member Ak'bar Shabazz added: "As our nation advances rapidly away from embracing personal responsibility towards government protection and oversight, we should keep in mind that these freed slaves wanted only the opportunity to be free and control their own destinies. Their attitudes towards freedom contrasts greatly from today, as many people look for more government control over their lives."

Juneteenth commemorates the anniversary of the June 19, 1865 arrival of Union soldiers in Galveston, Texas. The soldiers carried the news that the Civil War was over and that President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had abolished slavery two-and-a-half years earlier.

The annual commemoration became known as Juneteenth and quickly became a stabilizing as well as motivating presence in the lives of black Americans in Texas, who faced many uncertainties associated with newly-acquired freedom. The observance quickly spread from Texas to be recognized across the United States.

Juneteenth is celebrated in many ways, but education and self-improvement have been consistent themes at commemorative community gatherings and picnics in recent years. In 1980, Juneteenth was made an official holiday in Texas. According to the National Juneteenth Holiday Campaign, 25 states currently recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday.



Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization supported by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992. For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21's website at www.project21.org/P21Index.html.

"Push America"

(Media Credit: Natasha Sankovich)

A while back I asked all of you to consider giving to "Push America," a charity benefiting people with disabilities. I asked you to do this through this handsome young man who is riding across America this summer for "Push America." Read all about it here.

Thanks to many of you, Matt met his goal and his journey has begun. Keep up with him here. He is blogging as he goes with video and pictures.

I want to thank all of my readers who gave.

Twittering a Revolution

On Saturday, after the "re-election" of President Ahmadinejad, I watched Christiane Amnapor of CNN do a live report from Iran with no video. She mentioned unrest. Unrest? Calling what was happening in Iran unrest is like calling the Superbowl just another football game.

I was surprised because anyone paying attention to political things on twitter knew that there was a revolution erupting. We also knew that atrocities were taking place. We knew at least a day before the news reported it, that Iran was shutting down all social networking. But the brave souls inside Iran were finding proxies and were getting around the censorship.

Our media was ordered to stay in their hotels by this time. But video kept coming from twitter and Youtube. We watched a revolution given to us, not by the media, but by the very revolutionaries themselves.

The most amazing thing was the outpouring of support the Iranian tweeters were getting from Americans. Most of us turned our avatars green in support of the Iranian people. It wasn't much. But appreciation flowed back to us.

We on twitter saw the pictures of the river of people protesting first. We also saw the pictures of students shot. We received updates of people being brought to hospitals. The iron fist of Iran couldn't suppress the voice of the people. It was an historic thing to be a part of, even if it was only as an observer.

We here in America are not naive. We understand that in foreign policy Mousavi is not that much different from Ahmadinejad. We understand the Mullahs rule the land. But freedom fought for and tasted, even for a moment, can change a world. We in American understand that. This may only be a tiny ripple, but when information flows, minds open. Whatever happens in Iran, nothing can change the fact that Iranians and Americans reached out to one another. Knowing each other is the first step to trusting one another. It is the first step to understanding one another.

When Americans, so different from Iranians, can (and I know this sounds silly) twitter together. It means we can talk. It means we can get to know one another in a way never possible before.

This isn't about the leaders of our countries anymore. This is about the people of America and Iran, supporting a common cause, that the voices of the Iranians not be suppressed. We offer our comfort and our support. We are cheering them on from a distant land, we are praying with them...... on twitter.

A twitterevolution.

It's worse than we imagined...

NRO:
From a Hospital Somewhere in Iran [Michael Ledeen]

I am a medical student. There was chaos last night at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help—I'm sure it will even be worst tonight.

What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?

This issue is not about cheating(election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people.

Micheal Ledeen: The president says he doesn't want to "meddle." Aside from the fact that he unhesitatingly meddles in Israel, how can any American remain aloof from this sort of thing?

Charles Krauthammer’s take from last night's Fox News:

I find the president's reaction bordering on the bizarre. It's not just little and late, but he had a statement today in which he welcomed the Iranian leader's gesture about redoing some of the vote, as you indicated.

And the president has said "I have seen in Iran's initial reaction from the supreme leader." He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution.

So he uses that honorific, and then says that this supreme leader -- it indicates that he understand that the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election. Deep concerns? There is a revolution in the street.

And it is not about elections anymore. It started out about elections. It's about the legitimacy of a regime, this theocratic dictatorship in Iran, which is now at stake. That's the point.
What we have here is a regime whose legitimacy is challenged, and this revolution is going to end in one of two ways -- suppressed, as was the Tiananmen revolution in China, or it will be a second Iranian revolution that will liberate Iran and change the region and the world.
And the president is taking a hands-off attitude. Instead of standing, as Reagan did, in the Polish uprising of 1980, and say we stand with the people in the street who believe in democracy. It is a simple statement. He ought to make it.

And it is a disgrace that the United States is not stating it as simply and honestly as that.

Obamacare must be stopped

Read a few examples of what Doctors have gone through with Medicare here.

Sen. John McCain says the bill should be scrapped:

McCain pointed to a nonpartisan cost estimate of $1 trillion over ten years for the major portion of healthcare reform suggested in a bill floated by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health Committee and said the cost was too high for American taxpayers, especially since the nonpartisan review foresaw $23 million would lose their current insurance plans under the proposal.
.............................................

McCain called for giving all Americans a $5,000 tax credit to purchase insurance on the open market. And he suggested lifting bans intended to protect some state health insurance quality requirements that keep people in one state from buying health insurance sponsored in other states.

Doctors booed Obama on Monday when he met with them at a American Medical Association Meeting because they know he sides with trial lawyers in support of malpractice lawsuites without caps.

Obama told the Doctors what they wanted to hear. All the usual pretty words. But this is socialized medicine. It just is. I blame Republicans for putting us in this situation. Healthcare should have been addressed by Republicans long ago.

If this passes, we will all suffer.

Rich Lowry has more here.

Iranian guards shooting innocent protesters

It's just interesting to me how careful Pres.Obama is with words. I understand that. A President has to be. But explain to me why Pres. Obama was "outraged" by abortionist Tiller's killing and merely "deeply troubled" by what is happening in Iran?

via Gateway Pundit

Sen.Lieberman has this right: We should “loudly and clearly” stand with the people of Iran

A Lesson Not Learned

This White House loves the unions. No question about that. Biden slobbers over the unions. Obama told the Union Bosses at a White House ceremony, “Welcome back to the White House.”

Consider this:

Nearly 93 percent of America's private-sector workforce has not chosen to unionize, so union officials hope to leverage these federal funds in a full court press to corral millions more workers into forced-dues-paying union ranks.

It is beyond irony that at the same time Obama and Biden are pushing for more union workers, we see the end result and failure of what unions do to a company.

I give you GM.

Unions, like welfare, are a well intentioned idea gone horribly wrong.

GM long dominiated the car industry. A great powerful and producing company for decades upon decades. What brought this great company down? Many things, but the union is at the top of the list.

From The Week:

The company, which in the 1980s employed over 800,000 people worldwide, brought labor peace by giving it's unions lavish pay and benefits packages that earned it the nickname, "Generous Motors." But those labor contracts crippled the company's ability to cut costs.
..................................

They resisted the closure of unneeded factories and pressured GM to create a "jobs bank" that paid laid-off workers up to 95% of their salary and benefits.
...............................

The United Auto Workers, meanwhile, resisted every attempt to shrink the company to match it's declining sales. It refused to renegotiate health benefits for its current members and the 377,000 retirees, even though they cost GM about $1,200 per car, putting the company at a sizable cost disadvantage to Japanese rivals.

So here we are with proof in the pudding of how harmful unions can be to a great company, and we learn nothing. We have an administration that embraces unions and works to require more and more workers to join unions.

Iran

Check out these incredible photos of the protests in Iran.

I'm still following several people from inside Iran on twitter and I am still just fascinated in how Americans and Iranians are reaching out to each other despite the government crackdown on social networking. There is just such a feeling on twitter from of all of us, left and right, that here in America we are cheering them on and hoping for the best for the Iranian people. Let us all pray for a peaceful solution.

If you want to follow real time tweets about the election and tweets from Iran also, Go here.

Has Obama Betrayed the Gay Community?

It looks that way.

From AMERICAblog (Just about the most liberal blog out there btw):


Obama defends DOMA in federal court. Says banning gay marriage is good for the federal budget. Invokes incest and marrying children.

by John Aravosis (DC) on 6/12/2009 09:44:00 AM

UPDATE: Former top aide to President Clinton says DOJ had a choice, they did not have to file a brief in favor of DOMA.

UPDATE: Mormon Bush holdover helped write and file anti-gay DOMA brief.

UPDATE: Gay groups rip Obama.

UPDATE: Are gay politicians going to continue hosting gay pride fundraiser for Joe Biden?

UPDATE: Obama spokesman caught lying to Politico.

Joe and I have been trying since last night to get a copy of the government's brief just filed in this case. This is not the GLAD case that we've written about previously, it's another in California.

We just got the brief from reader Lavi Soloway. It's pretty despicable, and gratuitously homophobic. It reads as if it were written by one of George Bush's top political appointees. I cannot state strongly enough how damaging this brief is to us. Obama didn't just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn't motivated by any anti-gay animus. He argued why our Supreme Court victories in Roemer and Lawrence shouldn't be interpreted to give us rights in any other area (which hurts us in countless other cases and battles). He argued that DOMA doesn't discriminate against us because it also discriminates about straight unmarried couples (ignoring the fact that they can get married and we can't).

He actually argued that the courts shouldn't consider Loving v. Virginia, the miscegenation case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to ban interracial marriages, when looking at gay civil rights cases. He told the court, in essence, that blacks deserve more civil rights than gays, that our civil rights are not on the same level.

Read the whole thing here.


This is the thing. Obama doesn't care about you in the gay community. Obama cares about getting re-elected. He doesn't want to seem to backtrack on his being against gay marriage. What Obama knows is that you have no where to go. He knows you will vote for him against a Republican no matter what. He takes you for granted, just like the Democrats take the black vote for granted. I guess you feel pretty silly slamming that poor Carrie Prejean now, don't you? You might should have used your energy to go after Obama. Carrie said that she and Obama had the same stance on gay marriage, but Obama clearly had the power to work against your agenda.

Who looks silly now?

The "Stimulus Bill" has failed.

From Powerline:

The Obama administration projected what unemployment would be if the bill was passed, compared to what would happen if there was no "stimulus" package. Unfortunately, reality has taken a quite different turn--unemployment is much worse than the predicted "no stimulus" scenario. In fact, looking at the trend line, it seems obvious that the $800 billion bill has had no impact whatsoever--no positive impact, anyway. Click to enlarge.

What does the administration say? Ooops, we guessed wrong. Sorry.

Biden tells "Meet the Press" that "everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.

Protest Against Letterman

I've said before that Republicans aren't too good at protests because we are just too polite, but maybe it's time we stepped up to the plate EACH time anyway. Maybe we can stop this leftwing hate machine. From Conservatives4Palin:

There will be an anti-Letterman protest in NYC this coming Tuesday, June 16th. The details can be found here - we're reprinting them to help spread the word:

DATE: Tuesday, June 16th

TIME: 4:30 PM

PLACE: Ed Sullivan Theater, 1697 Broadway, New York City

PURPOSE: To protest disgusting sexual jokes made against Governor Palin and her teenage daughtersNeed help with a couple of things - RAM spoke with John Ziegler today, and he suggests that one or more attendees should webcast the protest live. If anyone here has the technology to do that, or knows someone who does, please contact us at editor@conservatives4palin.com.Alternatively/additionally, we are looking for people willing to videotape/photograph the event, and upload the video/photos as soon as possible after the event.One more thing - we're attempting to contact the organizers of the NYC Tea Party Protests to see if their membership will be willing to provide support and assistance. As a reminder, Governor Palin is a Tea Party supporter; Andrew Breitbart even basically called her the candidate of the Tea Parties. If any of our readers can put us in touch with New York Tea Party organizers, please let us know!

Emotional Testimony from Chrysler Dealer

"My grandfather paid for Carlisle Chevrolet from his labors. My father paid my grandmother for Carlisle Chevrolet through his efforts. It took me nearly 20 years to pay my parents for Carlisle Chevrolet. It took GM and Chrysler a mere 24 hours to take Carlisle Chevrolet from me."