Monday, May 2, 2011

Can you spot the sniper?

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Your eyes would not be jumping like the camera, but worthwhile. I do remember in basic, when we were in the field, that we were shown something similar and the only sniper was one standing in full view all the way to the left of the field proper, perfectly camouflaged, and no one identified him.

Banksters Covered 26 Million Silver Oz Short Position

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"The CFTC released it’s commitment of traders report for the last Monday’s Silver Smack Down. And it shows the big guys used the raid to cover -5,209 short contracts (each contract is 5,000 oz. of silver) which is a little more than 26 million ounces of short silver. I wonder how much they covered with a much larger raid last night? This is a huge development. As soon as these guys either cover their shorts or they fail to deliver the physical metal it will be game over. (Remember we have less than 38 million ounces in the registered inventory of the CRIMEX. World wide silver production is 735 million ounces and the banks are still short 258 million ounces or 51,644 contracts. They have a long way to go.)

The big question is"

The American Soviet

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Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

The security forces of Bashar Assad — a thug whom Hillary Clinton deemed a “reformer,” and with whom Barack Obama was determined to restore diplomatic relations — are slaughtering hundreds in the streets of Syria’s major cities. I know that the Turkish government will express no outrage. It will not help to sponsor a flotilla of private ships to sail into the port of Latakia to protest the government-sponsored barbarity. European “human rights” activists will not fly into any Arab city to board a freighter, Gaza-style, that would bring humanitarian assistance by sea to those being blown apart by the Assad regime. I know that.

Recently, Palestinian teenagers, in service to a Palestinian terrorist organization, massacred — in the literal sense of the word — the Fogel family of Israel, a savagery replete with the throat-slitting of toddlers and infants. The Palestinian police authority — U.S. trained and equipped — just shot down Jewish worshippers at Jacob’s Tomb. This comes amid the Palestinian Authority’s commemoration of the 2002 Passover Massacre of 30 Israeli civilians, apparently a national moment of honorific reflection on the West Bank. Yet I know that no one in Europe and few in America will protest to the Palestinian Authority, which the West subsidizes, that it seems to commemorate butchery in its midst.

This week President Obama ordered Predator drone attacks against Libya, as NATO and American forces began re-targeting the Qaddafi clan personally. I know that there will be no outcry that the U.S. is a party to targeted assassinations of a foreign leader and his family, an act once deemed illegal for an American administration. I also note that the use of Predator assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased fourfold since January 2009, and that we have blown up five times more suspects in the last 27 months than we did in the prior 96 months. I know that the UN and the Arab League are both praised by the Obama administration for authorizing us to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and ignored by the administration when we must go far beyond a no-fly zone to end the Qaddafi regime, which we seek to destroy even as we declare that is not our aim. And I know there will be no outcry from the American Left over a third Middle East war against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation (even though this one posed no threat to the security of the United States), over the complete bypassing of the US Congress in launching that war, or over the efforts to blow up a foreign leader and all in his vicinity. I know that.

The past week a sensationalized video of a transgendered female in extremis went viral on the blogosphere. Two young African-American women beat her senseless at a McDonald’s restaurant. The African-American staff is shown in the clip as mostly passive bystanders to the brutality. Yet I know this nationally viewed abhorrence is not a teachable moment about much of anything. Unlike the Professor Gates mix-up, this public spectacle will not be used by the president to warn us about the wages of incivility or the need for a new racial tolerance and understanding. Nor will there be, among the homosexual community, much of a national Matthew Shepard moment seeking to present the public beating as a symbol of a wider hatred of the sexually ambiguous among us. There is about as much chance of a Hollywood movie about the incident as there is of a sequel to Rendition. At best, we are to accept such violence as inevitable, as the powerless sometimes thrash out against the more privileged classes and races; at worst, these are the tragic wages of prior oppression that must be contextualized and constructed in the proper narrative of the centuries.

So what are we to make of the past week’s news?

It Still Wasn’t Worth It, and Is More War Coming?


By Anthony Gregory

"As was predictable, the death of Osama bin Laden doesn’t mean the war on terrorism is over. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stresses that al-Qaeda’s message “might have even greater resonance” now that bin Laden is dead.

No one should be surprised that the war will continue. The mission creep in Libya, for example, foreshadowed this.

But there is irony to behold, given that Obama, to great liberal fanfare, announced the end of the war on terrorism in August 2009. Then, in case people forgot, Obama declared the end of the war on terror once again in May 2010.

Of course, this would have seemed odd to those who followed the news. For Bush had ended the “global war on terror” back in the summer of 2005. See Bob Higgs’s insightful comments about that marketing ploy.

It can easily be countered, however, that none of these developments meant the actual tangle of policies together described as the “war on terrorism” would come to an end – nor that the very approach of U.S. foreign policy post 9-11 being conducted as a crusade directed against the abstraction of “terrorism” rather than a more definitive enemy was meant to be reversed. Not in 2005, 2009, nor 2010 did the Bush or Obama administrations actually mean there would be an end to the U.S. government’s preventative wars, its occupations, its counterinsurgencies, its drive toward greater hegemony in the Middle East, its claims to have executive jurisdiction, tempered by neither international law nor domestic checks and balances, over every last one of the planet’s inhabitants on every square foot of land and sea. And, presumably, now that Osama bin Laden – whose activities supposedly justified the U.S. policy of perpetual war for the last decade – is gone, it would be unreasonable to expect that would mean such a policy should cease.

When will the policy end? Perhaps when all “terrorists” everywhere are vanquished. Even then, the job will not be done. Three days after 9/11, Bush said the U.S. must “rid the world of evil.” Thus is the U.S. war on terrorism – whatever we call it – a quest far more ambitious than the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy and the war on recession combined. For thousands of years, all the clerics, all the governments, all the social activists and all the philosophers have struggled even to define evil precisely. Almost none has claimed the capacity to eliminate it altogether. This was the cornerstone of Bush’s humble foreign policy: the mere vanquishing of all evil. And although Obama would probably hesitate to use such hyperbolic language, there appears little sign of any actual shift in foreign policy since he took office.

Now we know for a fact that the war on terrorism is not just about finding bin Laden, although neither Bush nor Obama ever really implied that it was. However, in Obama’s speech last night, he focused on the one act of violence against Americans that united about ninety percent of the population behind the government ten years ago, and continues to bring life in people’s minds to the “evil” that our government is supposedly out to destroy:

It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory — hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.

And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.

This is no mere abstract discussion of evil. It is as concrete as it gets. We are talking about a delineated, specific atrocity – 9/11 – whose principal perpetrator, as we have been told for a decade, was Osama bin Laden, a man that we are told is now dead. The war on terror is about 9/11, for without the memory of this specific event there is no rationale for the wars, the invasions of our personal liberty, the mass bloodshed and huge expenditure of resources. And yet, paradoxically, the war on terror is not just about avenging the deaths of 9/11, or bringing to justice the man behind it. No, it is about fighting extremists who, as Clinton says, may be emboldened by the very act of killing bin Laden.

Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it could be argued that this alone does not negate the justice of killing bin Laden. But what of the many others who were killed since 9/11? The many, many thousands directly slaughtered by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere? The many children who were killed? One would think that this, too, might embolden the enemy, and because they, unlike bin Laden, did not have any justice coming to them, we might wonder if the war on terrorism is a policy that, by circumstance if not by deliberate design, cannot help but increase the threat of terrorism far more than it does anything to subdue it.

This raises other uncomfortable questions about U.S. foreign policy. Lost in today’s jubilation is the issue: Why did bin Laden’s goons attack Americans in the first place? Clinton gives a hint. They are actually motivated by what the U.S. does to people abroad. But killing bin Laden, one would logically assume, is no less controversial than, say, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions, propping up an apostate regime in Saudi Arabia, or financing Israel’s scandalous policies of expansion and occupation. You might find these three policies defensible, but they are certainly no more defensible than the killing of Osama bin Laden himself, an event our Secretary of State says might make the terrorist problem worse. Is it so strange to think that the killing of innocent Muslims might also make the terrorist problem worse?

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, the U.S. has less excuse than ever to continue warring against terrorism. But we are offered no sign that the warring will subside. At least when Osama was said to be on the lam, there was hope that his capture would mean and end to the madness. At this juncture, no such hope can be found."

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And the War Goes On, and On, and On

The First Annual Lynchburg, VA Civil War Gun and Relic Show


Going Home — Mort Künstler
======================

Verbatim post from Old Virginia Blog

Presented by The National Civil War Chaplain’s Museum and The Garland – Rodes Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp #409

Where:
The Shilling Center,
Liberty University
1971 University Blvd
Lynchburg, VA 24502

When:
Friday, May 20, 2011 – 12pm-7pm, Dealer Setup
Saturday, May 21, 2011 – 8am-9am, Dealer Setup
9am-5pm, Open to Public

Featuring: Civil War Artifacts, Relics, Memorabilia, Books, Art, Weapons, and much, much more

Special Feature: Bring a personal heirloom for a free appraisal

Admission:
$5.00 per person
$3.00 all students with ID
12 and under free

For More Information Contact:
Exhibitor’s – Rusty Hicks – (434)944-2304 or rwhickscpa@aol.com
All other – Kenny Rowlette – (434)841-6235 or kgrowlette@liberty.edu

For Application Visit: www.garland-rodes.com

Medal Of Honor 2010



Via T

Drew Dix, CMOH Winner with his and my friend NAGO




Drew Dix
*Awarded The Congressional Medal OF Honor
On January 16, 1969 For Conspicuous Gallantry
And Intrepidity In Action At The Risk Of His Life
Above And Beyond The Call Of Duty In Which
"NAGO" Was A Big Part

........Another words,Drew Dix is not just a hero, but one who unselfishly gives credit to those who were with him at the time. An individual mentioned to me that after reading the book, that it was hard for him to believe that it actually happened. I stated that no, that wasn't my problem, but that I thought it difficult to believe that he wasn't hit once the entire time.

NAGO is the one on the far left in the picture. The book is excellent, but ends with a sad note. One of his warrior's, Bao, went into the hills to continue fighting the Communists after the end. Years later, the Communists told Bao's sister that if he and his men turned themselves in, then they would grant them amnesty. Unfortunately, he believed them, and when he came to Chau Doc to surrender, they immediately took him to the marketplace and promptly executed him.Drew Dix ends his book with the follow words.

"It was a humiliating way for a warrior to go and I often think of him."

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*Citation and more with kind words from Drew about NAGO at the above link.

T jogged my memory.

LA Times! "Yes, SEALs were in on the raid, but aides hail Obama's office bravery."

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According to another one of those White House briefings of reporters designed to suck up all available credit for good news, President Obama's homeland security advisor reveals that it was a really tense time in the air-conditioned White House as unidentified U.S. Navy SEALs closed in on the world's most wanted man after midnight a half a world away.

"Minutes passed like days," says John Brennan, who bravely stood with press secretary Jay Carney before reporters and TV cameras today chronicling his boss' weekend heroics.

The heavily-armed commandos flying in a quartet of darkened Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters more than 100 miles into Pakistan were probably listening to their iPods and discussing the NFL draft.

"The concern was that bin Laden would oppose any type of capture operation," said Obama's Sherlock Holmes. So U.S. troops were prepared "for all contingencies."

In fact, this weekend was such a tense time in the White House that Obama only got in nine holes of golf. But he still managed to deliver his joke script to the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner Saturday evening. Via

Sunday was, Brennan revealed to his eager audience, "probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of times in the lives of the people assembled here." Poor poor bureaucrats. Extra Tums all around. Did someone order dinner?

Ex-ISI Chief Hamid Gul: CIA "Choreographing" Osama Assassination Hoax

This is worthwhile.
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Via Weasel Zippers

Ron Paul downgraded to F on immigration

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RON PAUL'S NEW BOOK COMBINES WITH LACKLUSTER RECORD IN CONGRESS TO PLUMMET HIM TO AN 'F' IN IMMIGRATION GRADES

The biggest problem with Rep. Paul's (R-Texas) latest comments on immigration is that they are NOT just some ad hoc thoughts tossed off carelessly at some speaking event. These are engraved in a brand new book.

Until the release of the book, Liberty Defined, Dr. Paul had a mixed record in Congress and the fact that he had taken the NumbersUSA "No Amnesty" pledge at the end of his Presidential campaign in 2008.

That had earned him a C-minus on our 2012 Presidential Hopefuls Immigration Stances Report Card. Not impressive, but the third best (behind Rep. Bachman with a B-minus and Gov. Tim Pawlenty with a C+) of all the Hopefuls.

PAUL NOW 2nd WORST OF ALL HOPEFULS ON IMMIGRATION

In the graphic below
, you will see how we have had to rate Dr. Paul on the 12 most important immigration categories.

The ratings add up to an overall stance that just barely misses warranting an F-minus and squeaks through just better than Pres. Obama. It is significantly worse than the grade of former Speaker Gingrich who had previously been the worst of all Republican Hopefuls on immigration.

Osama is Dead, Obama is American-born

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
--Thomas Paine
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We are told Osama Bin Laden is dead by a “president” who is an infamous liar. If Osama is dead, Obama was the wrong man to announce it.


Osama Bin Laden: buried at sea?

Such an event as the death of Osama Bin Laden might deserve some attention. His name is synonymous with serial mass murder in the name of bigotry and prejudice. It would seem appropriate that all lovers of freedom and human dignity should rejoice. An instant crowd of prepared celebrants outside the White House for Obama’s announcement? That seems orchestrated, like another clown’s chorus for the grand minstrel residing there. It looked like another campaign show. (Mabye Barry was so late in his announcement because he was waiting for the crowd to get full.).......

And is this what America has come too–that we can’t believe our eyes? We can’t trust the most simple gestures? Is this what the lying Democrats and white oedipal liberals have accomplished? Is fraud so ubiquitous that reality seems illusory?

The “Barak Hussein Obama” online birth certificate has just been analyzed by a professional, Ivan Zatkovich of Tampa-based eComp Consultants. The 28-year veteran geek declared “The multiple layers in the PDF document are a result of changes made to the image.”

Could one giant fraud be followed by another, even more colossal? It is possible that Osama Bin Ladin is quite alive, even as Barry is quite alien?

Tickerguy Flips A-A [A-A-K-x-x Board] (Birth Certificate)

One of my first thoughts.

"Now about that forensic analysis we should have done on the alleged document that allegedly is in the files at the Hawaii Registrar's office in order to see if it's really 50ish years old..... This is the only way we are going to get the truth. Will the American people, Congress, or someone (e.g. a judge) demand defensible truth on this topic? We damn well should."
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You knew I had pocket rockets, right? How often have you seen me come up with something on The Ticker without a fairly-decent set of evidence behind what I had to say?

It's time to call the curtain on this game and then go back to economics.

Find me one typewriter in the world, anywhere, that can perform kerning and I will believe this "certificate" is real.

For the uninitiated, "kerning" is the process of manipulating the spacing of letters to make the appearance more pleasing. Here's an example from this Ticker itself:

 by genesis

This process, of course, requires that you know what the next letter is. With a computer this is pretty easy, since the computer can retroactively go back and adjust, and it also can typeset the current letter with knowledge of what the previous one was.

A typewriter, on the other hand, is a mechanical device. It does not know what the next letter is that you will type, nor does it know what the last letter was that you typed. It thus has a typeface that always leaves physical space between the boundary of each character and the impression. It has to, lest letters run together and look like utter crap.

Typesetters (offset printing machines and similar) perform kerning - in fact, it's part of typesetting. But typewriters do not, cannot, and never have.

This, of course, is why the typed Birth Certificate has kerned text in it.

Review: Atlas Shrugged Part 1 The Movie

atlas shruggedHaving just returned from seeing Part 1 of Atlas Shrugged my advice to all who haven’t seen it is, pay no attention to the terrible reviews. It is very clear why the movie calls forth such venom. The message is simply unacceptable in today’s dominant political culture.

The movie opens in 2016. We see an America where nothing works, not the machines and not the people. The streets are lined with homeless people and derelict automobiles. The airports are littered with wrecked planes.

The Middle East has imploded and no oil is being shipped. We learn that gasoline is $37 something a gallon. (Not mentioned in the movie is that Washington’s drilling phobia has left the nation vulnerable to just such a scenario.)

The remaining railroad is run by a smug James Taggart who is ruining the company he inherited, but is very good at articulating concern for those “who need our help.” He depends upon his Washington connections to keep the company afloat. He condemns his sister, Dagny, for wanting to save the firm the old fashioned way, by making it profitable.

Henry Reardon, the protagonist, is a steel tycoon who also disdains Washington. Instead, he concentrates on developing high strength steel that will transform the industry, and help put the country back to work.

Two known lies in two days out of the Obama administration

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Apparently we are going to have to take the U.S. government's word for bin Laden's death:

After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.

I'm not saying that Osama bin Laden isn't dead. For all I know, he's been dead since 2001, if not before. But it strikes me that if you wanted to make your own words more look suspiciously incredible, you would be hard-pressed to top the recent actions of the Obama administration.

"Hey, here's an ineptly produced computer file that clearly isn't a simple copy of the document that supposedly no longer existed in the first place!" "Hey, we killed the bad guy, but we had to ditch the body before anyone else could take a look at it and confirm it's actually him. Maybe if we just wave our hands and talk about DNA that nobody else has, someone will buy it."

Army Staff College History Professor On The War

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Infantryman71: May 1, 2011 12:05 p.m.

Having taught graduate history for a number of years to mid-level and senior officers at the Army's staff college, I find that those who criticize the Confederacy and Confederates do so not out of reasonable convictions, but total ignorance. Many recent polls (USA Today, Pew, etc.) consistently show that most Americans (not "many" but "most") with a college education have only a nominal understanding of our own history.

This results in emotional arguments based on "sound bytes" of historical knowledge. As an example, one of the surveys asked what caused WWII and a large number of responses cite "the attack on Pearl Harbor". Really? That caused the war? What a simplistic and gross misunderstanding of history. The same can be applied to the Civil War when people claim that "slavery" was "the cause". If that is true, my examination of dozens of Union recruiting posters have yet to find one that encourages enlistment to free the slaves. They mostly state that men should join to "Save the Union" if they give a reason.

It is important to remember that not a single Confederate, including Jefferson Davis, was ever convicted of treason against the U.S. In fact, Chief Justice Taney warned Lincoln not to try the Confederates as the possibility of legal secession might well be validated. Taney was no pro-Confederate. He was a Lincoln appointee.

What I find fascinating is that the foreign officers I teach overwhelmingly consider the Confederates and their cause just and that of the Federal government unjust. They have no bias as we Americans do so their views as disinterested observers adds an interesting perspective to this argument. Consider what the commander of the Union Armies, General Grant, said: * I thought for a single minute that this war is being fought over slavery I would but turn in my sword and join the other side".

Wars are complex. Slavery was a contributing factor to the Civil War. Attributing the war's cause solely to slavery is intellectually dishonest and just plain ignorant. While the war was a terrible event, the people of the South sought remedy for a Federal government that they thought had over-stepped its bounds leaving no other remedy than by force-of-arms. The fact that they lost doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong as I tell my students in our Vietnam classes.

(*I have been unable to document this famous quote. BT)

Like rats deserting a sinking ship........



Hizballah is deserting the Assad regime, or at least hedging their bets. They are pulling all of their heavy missiles from Syrian safekeeping now that they believe he has a serious chance of being deposed. From Debka:
Last year, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to store Hizballah's incoming Iran-made Fatah-110 surface missiles and its Syrian equivalent the M-600 and the mobile SA-8 (Gecko) anti-air battery which holds 18 warheads with a maximum range of 12 kilometers. Tehran paid for the upkeep of the Hizballah hardware on Syrian side of the border after Israel threatened to bomb these potential game-changers if they crossed over.
Deployed at Hizballah bases in Lebanon, the Fatah-110 and M-600 would place almost every corner of Israel within range of bombardment, while the SA-8 would seriously restrict Israeli Air Force operations over southern Lebanon and Galilee.
However, as the uprising against Assad rolls ever closer to Damascus, Hizballah see a very real threat of it infecting the Syrian army and has decided that now might be its last chance to get hold of the core arsenal it has standing by for war with Israel before events get out of hand in Syria.
But as is always the case with all military operations, logistics is a bitch:

Guns, Cars and Girls in rural Virginia 1960

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The county was forested, abutting on the Potomac River, with muddy Machodoc Creek, catfish rich—in that part of Virginia, three-quarters of a mile wide is a creek—emptying into the river. At sixteen we sailed along winding wooded roads at night in ailing jalopies that remembered compression as an octogenarian remember the ardors of youth. We had guns, fishing poles, deer and, blessedly, almost no adult supervision. We parked endlessly in the deep woods with the nicest girls on this or any other planet, and…again…no supervision! Adults assumed we had sense enough not to kill ourselves. Rather to our surprise, we did have it.

MSNBC correspondent accidentally tweets 'Obama' killed



msnbc norah

In an attempt to release the news of Osama bin Laden’s death quickly late Sunday night, MSNBC correspondent Norah O’Donnell accidentally reported on Twitter that “Obama” had been “killed” instead.

“Obama shot and killed,” Norah O’Donnell posted on Twitter, citing NBC Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski as her source.

NCFIRE Alert

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NCFIRE
North Carolinians For Immigration Reform and Enforcement
Secure Our Border-Enforce Our Laws
www.NCFIRE.info

1) NCFIRE directly calls upon the Speaker of the House, Representative Thom Tillis and the President Pro-Tempore of the Senate, Senator Phil Berger, to use their position and political influence, to move immigration enforcement legislation out of their respective committees. If these bills are not acted upon within the next couple of weeks, they will die and the desires of our citizens will have been ignored once again.

NCFIRE urges its' membership to contact these two elected officials and demand something be done.

Phil.Berger@ncleg.net
919-733-5708

Thom.Tillis@ncleg.net
919-733-3451


2) Also, The North Carolina Illegal Alien Crime Report has been posted for the month of April. 54 pages of continued death and destruction perpetrated upon the citizens of North Carolina by illegal aliens in our state. The report can be viewed here: www.ncfire.info/april2011.pdf

Enough is enough! It is time to put a stop to this insanity in our state.

James Johnson
President-NCFIRE
North Carolinians For Immigration Reform and Enforcement
www.NCFIRE.info
www.Facebook.com/NCFIRE
NCFIRE@ncfire.info
NCFIRE Hotline: 1-888-885-0879
cell # 910-286-3022




NC Vietnam Green Beret Finally Returns Home

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Donald M Shue
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Shue was last seen alive in Laos in November 1969. He was with two other Special Forces soldiers and was wounded. At the time, Special Forces ran secret missions inside Laos and Cambodia, gathering intelligence on the North Vietnamese who were sneaking into South Vietnam through the Ho Chi Minh trail.

A few days after Shue went missing, two Green Berets visited her home. The family was devastated, but none more so than their father. He died two years later.

"I think he died of a broken heart," Jones said. "He just loved that boy."

The Coming Obamacare-driven Doctor Shortage

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[W]e have already seen the start of this process in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney’s health care reforms were nearly identical to President Obama’s. Romney’s reforms increased the demand for health care but did nothing to expand the supply of physicians. In fact, by cracking down on insurance premiums, Massachusetts pushed insurers to reduce their payments to providers, making it less worthwhile for doctors to expand their practices. As a result, the average wait to get an appointment with a doctor grew from 33 days to over 55 days.

Promising universal health coverage is easy. But what does universal coverage mean if you can’t actually see a doctor?


NRA Vows to Take Down Obama in 2012

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The National Rifle Association is gearing up for a major campaign push to defeat President Barack Obama, who leaders say is just one Supreme Court justice away from a liberal majority that could sweep aside Second Amendment rights.

Christopher Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told attendees at the association’s annual gathering this weekend in Pittsburgh that the Supreme Court decided the landmark District of Columbia vs. Heller case by a vote of 5 to 4.

“What if he appoints just one more anti-gun justice to the U.S. Supreme Court and we go from one-vote victories to one-vote defeats for generations to come?” he told one audience. “My friends, praying for the health of five Supreme Court justices is not a strategy you want to stake your freedom on.”

Travel Alert Worldwide

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The U.S. Department of State alerts U.S. citizens traveling and residing abroad to the enhanced potential for anti-American violence given recent counter-terrorism activity in Pakistan. Given the uncertainty and volatility of the current situation, U.S. citizens in areas where recent events could cause anti-American violence are strongly urged to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations. U.S. citizens should stay current with media coverage of local events and be aware of their surroundings at all times. This Travel Alert expires August 1, 2011.