A description of the armed protest at the Washington state capitol building.
By Kit Lange
Patrick Henry Society
Mark Twain once wrote that the two most important days of your life are the day you’re born, and the day you figure out why. I remember reading that as a child, and not truly understanding it. Today, however, as I stood next to some of the bravest patriots I’ve had the pleasure to know, I understood his words at my very core.
Today 100 patriots, led by two state representatives, put the governor and the legislature of our state on notice by demanding a redress of grievances—armed and in person at the Capitol.
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[AmericanThinker] President Obama released his new national security blueprint on Friday that was rehash of most of his previous policies. He cited progress against the Islamic State and identified Russia as a major concern.
But foreign policy experts are raising an eyebrow over the president's call for "strategic patience" and warning against American "overreach." And, with apologies to Robert M. Pirsig, "The Zen of Golf Cart Maintenance."
[DAWN] IT is an impressive figure -- 10,616 individuals tossed in the calaboose Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! in 14,886 raids conducted across the country since Dec 24 under the National Action Plan. Which only makes the mystery even bigger: with thousands upon thousands of individuals arrested in anti-terrorism raids, how come nothing has been heard from any of the arrested, their families or their lawyers? Usually, when someone is detained and charged with crimes as in the anti-terror scheme of things, there is some statement by the arrested, a protest by family members perhaps or even a news conference by legal representatives. But the interior ministry, which passed on the latest data to the Prime Minister's Office which made them public on Friday, appears to have found 10,616 of the rarest of individuals in Pakistain: those who are amenable to being arrested and charged with presumably serious crimes without so much as even trying to go public with their side of the story.
There is of course a much more likely explanation. The arrested are overwhelmingly drawn from a pool of the usual suspects -- hard boyz and bully boyz who are used to being periodically arrested or detained and then, after a suitable pause and easily dodged legal troubles, simply cycle back to active duty. There is no need for them to create a ruckus and they know the rules of this semi-formal game well enough to realise that there is no real danger of lengthy incarcerations or convictions that will stand on appeal. The government may well challenge this notion. It has the easiest of routes available to it to do so -- simply list the names of the individuals, state where they were arrested and by whom, name the groups they are alleged to be affiliated with and explain what crimes they are believed to have committed and are to be charged with. Much as the government wants to be seen to be serious about implementing NAP, there are also pre-existing duties that it owes to the public, and even the individuals arrested. Transparency and accountability are at the top of that list. The interior ministry's various law-enforcement and intelligence arms are overwhelmingly operating in the country's cities, towns and rural areas, not in Fata war zones where different rules apply. The public has a right to know not just which murderous Moslem groups and hard boyz are operating among the citizenry but also what the state is doing against individuals in the name of security. More transparency, please.
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02/09/2015 00:00 ||
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And here I thought the headline referred to Gerbil Worming..
[DAWN] THE outrage is over, the perceived hurt has healed and the piece of mischief that caused the furore in the first place has taken its place in the dustbin of history. The world has moved on -- except for Pakistain, which stubbornly refuses to come to terms with the realities of the age of information, and in doing so, continues to deprive its citizenry of internet freedoms. We refer, of course, to the blockade on access to the file-sharing site YouTube. Imposed on Sept 12, 2012, this was originally an ill-thought-out fire-fighting measure, but more than two years later, matters stand exactly where they did that September. If anything, the issue has calcified: the site cannot generally be accessed from this country; those with the ability have found means of bypassing the ban; and the government is still casting about for ways and means to block content it considers blasphemous on the site. Most recently, on Friday, Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman told the Senate that as a result of the Supreme Court ordering the Pakistain Telecommunications Authority to block all offending material, the matter had been reviewed several times but there was no way to do this other than by imposing a blanket ban on the site. The irony here is that it was Ms Rehman who, soon after taking office, promised the restoration of the site.
Leave aside the issue of offensive content, what this sorry story speaks volumes for is the state's attitude towards citizens' right to attain information -- apparently, it really could not care less. In trying to ensure that access to selective content is restricted, it has completely shut down a site that is the gateway to information and entertainment for millions of people. While other nations factor in and meet the challenges thrown up by the internet and a globalised world -- including Moslem countries -- Pakistain penalises its citizens under the pretext of protecting them from material they might -- might -- find offensive. Today it is YouTube; tomorrow it might be the internet in its entirety. And, the acerbic would argue, why stop here?
This piece of absurdity has to come to an end. Of the various potential solutions that have been thrown up during these two years, the most feasible might be the one suggested by Google itself but which the government does not seem to have pondered over much: the display of interstitial warnings on pages that contain objectionable material. This, as the Lahore High Court observed last year while hearing a petition on the issue, would pin liability on the user who "consciously and deliberately ignore[d] the warning page" before accessing content that is offensive or in contravention of local laws. The approach Pakistain has taken so far is not just laughably ineffective, it is indicative of just how out of touch the state is with technological realities.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/09/2015 00:00 ||
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The problem with Islam in a nutshell:
"...the Supreme Court ordered the Pakistain Telecommunications Authority to block all offending material, ... but there was no way to do this other than by imposing a blanket ban on the site."
Pretty much everything is offensive. That's the problem with the Left as well.
The author notices Short Attention Span Syndrome...Whoa! Was that Elvis?
Wait -- I thought it was only Americans who suffer from that particular problem, because we are such a young nation, and a mongrel nation at that.
[DAWN] "IT'S easier to convince people of something, but hard to keep them convinced ... the crowd is won over by appearances and final results ... and the world is a crowd," Machiavelli had counselled. Let's not hold our breath for final results because if appearances after Shikarpur are anything to go by, our post-Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. moment of hope and resolve has dissipated. It is becoming evident that our civil-military elite hasn't given up its policy of prevarication on terror, ie some manifestations of it, like Shikarpur, are acceptable and others, like Peshawar, are not.
Over at Mosaic Magazine, former Bush aide Michael Doran claims that the Obama administration has had a secret strategy to engage Iran from the time it took office. Heâs right, but he neglected to mention that George W. Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, adopted the same strategy from the same source in November 2006, after the Republicans got crushed in the 2006 congressional elections. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, Vice President Dick Cheney got benched, and ârealistâ Robert Gatesâthe co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iranâtook over at Defense. Michael Doran reports all of this, all, that is, except Gatesâ central role in the plan. That would place a good deal of the blame at Bushâs doorstep.
...the 2006 congressional report was a carbon copy of the Council on Foreign Relations report of 2004, written under the supervision of Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carterâs national security advisor.
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McBama and the Weird Sisters–Iran-born Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power–harbor a deep emotional antipathy to the United States, and a deep sympathy for anti-imperialist movements. They believe that the United States is a main instigator of the world’s evil.
Not certain if the author draws the correct conclusions in ref to the Iraq Study Group, but he's spot on with his 'Weird Sisters' assessment.
Kevin D. Williamson has become one of National Review's best writers. A taste of his latest:
The Left’s last big idea was Communism. When Lenin turned out to be the god who failed, the Left undertook wide exploration for another grand unifying idea: environmentalism, multiculturalism, economic inequality, atheism, feminism, etc. What it ended up with was an enemies’ list.
That and a taste for brute force.
The enthusiasm for coercion and the substitution of enemies for ideas — Christians, white men, Israel, “the 1 percent,” the Koch brothers, take your pick — together form the basis for understanding the Left’s current convulsions. The call to imprison people with unapproved ideas about global warming, the Senate Democrats’ vote to repeal the First Amendment, the Ferguson-inspired riots, the picayune political correctness and thought-policing that annoys Jonathan Chait, the IRS’s persecution of conservative political groups, Barack Obama’s White House enemies’ list, the casual violence against conservatives on college campuses and the Left’s instinctive defense of that violence — these are not separate phenomena but part of a single phenomenon.
The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time. More at the link
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The left is a disease that eats away inwardly on any country they happen to be in until that country is gutted. They are hard on the country, easy on its enemies.
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I wonder if there hasn't been a "left" in every country throughout history. Communism just brought them together under one roof with quotable nonsense and propoganda that helped them seem smarter than they are.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[DAWN] IT is an impressive figure -- 10,616 individuals 
