World News

From the Wall Street Journal.  In dueling speeches Thursday morning, President Barack Obama sought to reassure lawmakers and the public about his national-security decisions, while former Vice President Dick Cheney defended Bush-era policies.  Here is a point-counterpoint, compiled by the Journal’s Jonathan Weisman:

More recently still, CAIR has demanded that Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner step down, for the "crime" of co-hosting a conference on free speech at which Mr.Wilders spoke. Lawsuits charging "defamation" continue to plague people who speak out against radical Islam and terrorism, including ongoing cases against Iranian-American researcher Hassan Daioleslam, Americans Against Hate founder Joseph Kaufman, and Hawaii Free Press Editor Andrew Walden. By and large, these events, and others like them, have not made the front page of any major newspaper, or been featured on broadcast television, if mentioned at all.

(Today's Star-Bulletin Editorial properly Fisked by your beloved Editor) 

Legislators' near-unanimous approval of a resolution creating an Islam Day in Hawaii was greeted with anger by many people who mistook it as siding with terrorists.  (Why would they think that?  Just because it honors Sept 11 in the old Julian calendar but corresponds with exactly nothing in the Islamic calendar?  Or is it because of the 'magnificent' 7% below....)

In response to the www.HawaiiFreePress.com article “Hawaii ‘Islam Day’ secretly marks September 11” UH Manoa Department of Religion professor James D. Frankel today writes:

“Andrew Walden has uncovered no secret or nefarious conspiracy to honor the deplorable terrorism of September 11, 2001. The 12th day of Rabi ul-Awwal will fall on September 24, 2009, but will be on September 13 next year and September 2 the year after that.”

Frankel is dead wrong -- and has exposed an utterly stupendous ignorance of his own field of study.

Had Professor Frankel bothered to look at an Islamic calendar he would have discovered that the Islamic lunar calendar’s “12th day of Rabi ul-Awwal” fell on March 9, 2009 and will next year fall on February 26, 2010.

The word "al-Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing or disguising one's beliefs, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions, and/or strategies at a time of eminent danger, whether now or later in time, to save oneself from physical and/or mental injury." A one-word translation would be "Dissimulation."

I was one of those Ron Paul supporters employed in Rep. Pine’s office.  Your comment implies that I am in favor of government getting involved with religion.  I do not.  I believe government should have no place in supporting any religion.  On the other hand I do not support government officials equating Islam with terrorism.  Equating Islam with terrorism shows the ignorance of some people who refuse to take off their blinders. 

HCR 100, the Islamic Holiday Resolution passed by the State Senate (22-3) on Thursday, May 7, is insensitive to patriotic Americans of all religions, outrageous, and an embarrassment (once again) for the State of Hawaii.

This resolution (which does not have the force of law) proclaims September 24 as Islam Day in Hawaii. How insensitive, no matter what the original intent, can anyone get, selecting a holiday just 13 days following the 911 Islamic terrorist attack on America? Is it just me that feels the stunning inappropriateness here?

From email distributed by the Islamic Information Office of Hawaii:

Islam day HCR100 Resolution was on the agenda yesterday (Wednesday). Senator Hemmings (Republican) gave a hate speech in opposition talking about the 10% of Islamic terrorists who want to kill Americans. The gallery was filled with the red shirts that are opposing HB444, the Civil Unions bill who all stood and applauded in support of Senator Hemmings speech against this Resolution. It was disgusting.

Hawaii has no Christianity Day, no Judaism Day, and no Buddhism Day--but Hawaii's Democrat Legislators have decided to violate the "establishment clause" of US Constitution -- for Islam. 

Affirming that their desire to submit to Islam supercedes their adherence to the sacred principles of the US Constitution, by a 22-3 vote the Hawaii Senate approved House Concurrent Resolution 100 which designates September 24, 2009 as Islam Day.  The State House had earlier approved the measure.

Left: Sun at peak of warming,1998.  Right: Sun after 10 years of cooling, 2008.

The capital of Pakistan was under threat last night after Taliban fighters threatened to overrun the volatile country and came within 60 miles of Islamabad.  It is feared the state is on the brink of collapse as Taliban fighters get closer to the nuclear powers of the country.

There's a new bogeyman lurking in the closet, and this one isn't imaginary. Us. One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up, while more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath (or at least a very unpleasant place to live), according to a new survey.

Does terrorism work?

The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. "Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class," Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, "and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected."

Some public figures are using England's plaintiff-friendly laws to go after books they don't like. New York and Illinois have come to the defense of U.S. writers. Congress and California should too....

As Pan Am Flight 830 descended toward Honolulu and passengers finished their breakfast, a blinding burst of light washed over them. And then, "BOOM!"

Flight plan filed by North Korea shows missile heading straight for Hawaii. 

Plus latest updates from Japan, Korea, and NORAD....

BBC: North Korea had "ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations", Barack Obama said in a written statement.  (And he stamped his feet....)

(No word on how close it came to Hawaii or Alaska)

ED NOTE: Front Page Magazine today posted the Hawai`i Free Press article "Barack Obama, born in Hawaii"--debunking conspiracy theories swirling around Barack Obama's Hawaii birth certificate.  The following was posted by an anonymous commenter "DadBode" in the comments section and we thought it was so spot-on and funny that it deserves wider exposure.  For readers working in State offices who have taken birth-certificate-related phone calls, this should be of special interest. 

America's top military officer said on Friday that a rocket North Korea plans to launch next month has a range that could possibly reach Hawaii.

Asked if the North Korean rocket could reach the US states of Hawaii or Alaska, Admiral Mike Mullen told CNN: "In some cases, yes, they could probably get down to Hawaii."

Unlike Earth Hour, the purpose Human Achievement Hour is to salute the people who keep the lights on and produce the energy that helps make human achievement possible.  Many organizations and average folks around the world will show their support for human achievement by simply going about their daily lives. 

Polling research finds that a substantial minority of Palestinians, about 20 percent, is ready to live side-by-side with a sovereign Jewish state. Although this minority has never been in charge and its voice has always been buried under rejectionist bluster, Hillel Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has uncovered its surprisingly crucial role in history.

34 teams representing 24 Hawai‘i high schools from O‘ahu, Maui, Kaua‘i and the Big Island, eight teams from the mainland (California, Louisiana and Wisconsin) and two international teams from Mexico and the Philippines who will converge on the UH Mānoa campus to compete in what is called the “varsity sport of the mind.” The winning teams will advance to the FIRST Championships – called the “Super Bowl of Smarts” – in Atlanta, Georgia, April 15 -18.

On Thursday afternoon March 5, Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar legal aid Foundation, and its programme coordinator, John Paul Oulo, were shot at close range in their car less than a mile from President Kibaki's residence. The two were on their way to a meeting at the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. Both had been investigating extrajudicial assassinations by the Kenyan Police.

President Obama's rise caps forty years of building new 'nations' from one America, as America's left adapted to the rise of civil rights, and built a power base from fanning discontent.

Newsweek cheers, "We are all socialists now!"  MSNBC's Jim Cramer calls Barack Obama's budget a "radical agenda" and points out "This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a President."  None of this should be a surprise to anybody who was paying attention to Obama's Hawaii links to the Communist Party, USA or his years of Chicago work with the Democratic Socialists of America.  But many voters -- and most of the media -- aggressively avoided paying attention.  Now they are literally paying the price. 

One Obama mentor who did get some media attention was ex-Communist Saul Alinsky.  Alinsky, a harsh critic of Johnson's "War on Poverty," is not usually tied to gigantic federal spending proposals such as Obama's mis-named ‘stimulus' package.  Alinsky's claim to fame stems from gritty street-level community organizing.  His books on the subject guided a generation of leftist activists. 

But there is a connection.  Alinsky died in 1972.  Towards the end of his life, American society changed in ways which tore apart the stable communities necessary to Alinsky's community organizing model.  For Democrats these changes necessitated the use of federal power to create the entirely new forms of consciousness-based ‘nationalism' which now envelop American culture. 

The range of North Korean ballistic missiles has increased five-fold since 1990.  The two-stage Taepodong-2 missile, if successfully developed, could travel thousands of miles to strike Alaska, Hawaii and "parts of the continental United States," intelligence experts estimate.  By testing and perfecting a third stage, the North Koreans could reach anywhere in North America with a nuclear warhead.

In an effort to make Hawai‘i’s state government as efficient and effective as possible, I have asked each state department to develop new and innovative ways of delivering critical services and upholding their responsibility to the people of Hawai‘i. The Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) has responded with a comprehensive plan that reinvents how it cares for Hawai‘i’s land and ocean recreational spaces.

Acts of staged controversy or public relations campaigns manipulating otherwise innocent events may be an aspect of Islamist group strategy to Islamize society. Authorities dealing with such incidents should assess the behavior as an aggregate. Their responses should address the root of the problem, rather than potentially allowing such incidents to compel a response that supports the Islamist agenda.

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs....

It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender-- and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb-- dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles-- might be enough to get us to surrender.

Jihad vs. McWorld is the name of a March, 1992 essay and a 1996 book published by Benjamin Barber. Barber, a social democratic “third-roader,” argues that both tribal warfare “jihad,” and what he sees as the “threat” of globalism, equally endanger democracy in the post-cold war world. Now, nearly a decade and a half after Barber’s essay appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, it appears that leading anti-globalization activists worldwide have stopped equivocating and decided that globalism is the greater threat. They have teamed up with jihad.

A Tokyo-based newspaper reports in its Friday AM edition that North Korea’s failed Taepodong-2 missile was aimed at an area of the ocean close to Hawaii.

The day after Iraq’s stunning December 15 election success, the New York Times wrote, "Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the …(National Security Agency) has monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible ‘dirty numbers’ linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications." ... the local media, and The New York Times all chose not to mention that President Bill Clinton asserted his authority to conduct physical searches "for foreign intelligence purposes" without a warrant in Executive Order 12949, dated Feb. 9, 1995, during the Bosnia War.