Back on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, an attack that left 2380 dead (including 68 civilians), and 1178 injured. Nine ships of the U.S. fleet were sunk and 21 ships were severely damaged in a sneak attack that brought the United States into World War II.

Never forget!

rochesterconservative.com was well represented this past Saturday at the 9/11/2010 Ground Zero Mosque Protest by RC co-founder, Freedom Fighter, and here’s a presentation of her photos that she took while there. She was right up front and reported:

I do know there were more than 2000 at our rally. We were packed in like sardines. I couldn’t even move my feet! The people went back for at least two blocks.

It doesn’t even matter what the media reported anyway. All you have to do is look at the photos. They’re never going to report fairly.

I waited three hours at the front line. I’m so glad I did!! All the speakers were great but Geert was the most meaningful because of what he’s going through himself. He mentioned the words to the song “Have you Forgotten”. I love that song!

Every few minutes there were chants of “No Mosque Here!”. It was great!

The “Geert” that Freedom Fighter speaks of is Geert Wilders. I posted his video, Fitna, here on rochesterconservative.com back on March 29th, 2008, after it was just released.

Speaking of Geert Wilders, here’s a few of photos of him!

Atlas Shrugged blogger, Pamela Geller, introducing Geert Wilders:

More photos of Geert Wilders speaking at the GZM protest:

Freedom Fighter reported that there were many other great speakers at the rally. Here’s some photos of them.

Robert Spencer, the owner of Jihadwatch.org.

The guy next to me was from Philly. Another guy was from Alabama. I met a couple from Florida. There was a Cuban immigrant behind me. They were from everywhere. It’s resonating and I hear Imam Rauf is reconsidering or something like that.

Here’s a photo of some guys who flew over from England. They’re members of the English Defence League (EDL). They’ve been going at it with the Muslims in England who spat on returning soldiers there. The media there makes them out to be members of the KKK but it’s not true. Look them up on Youtube to see some of their videos.

Here’s some candid crowd shots the Freedom Fighter caught, showing that there were many different nationalities participating in the GZM protest..

BTW, the most telling contrast of photo’s of the day were the following.

Here’s a photo of the GZM protest rally:

and here’s a photo of the pro GZM supporters:
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No Ground Zero Mosque!

Anyone with a pulse and their wits about them has heard through the Old Media that a mosque has been proposed for Lower Manhattan, mere feet from Ground Zero. While this is certainly controversial, and brings to the surface emotions perhaps some have not had in some time, there’s quite a bit in Imam Rauf’s background which should give even the most casual observers, even supporters of the mosque, some pause.

Imam Rauf has close ties with the Obama Admin., in fact he recently boasted about writing President Obama’s Cairo speech, and he’s traveled on State Dept. junkets across the world, all paid for by we, the taxpayers. Essentially, he’s your typical, smooth-talking type who loves to lecture others about perceived “insensitivity”, particularly when it pertains to the West and its dealings with the Muslim World. Basically, political-correctness, Islam-style, with a soft, candy-assed shell.

Hat tip to 5TownsJewishTimes for cluing folks into a Human Events article about the taxpayer-subsidized Slumlord Imam:

Ground Zero Imam a Taxpayer-Subsidized Slumlord

by Connie Hair

08/30/2010

The elitist, media-generated grand illusion of the Ground Zero mosque imam has begun to collapse under scrutiny.

New reports from The Record out of Hackensack, N.J., reveal Feisal Abdul Rauf, the would-be Ground Zero imam, owns taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings in Hudson County where the tenants have made municipal health complaints including rat, roach and bedbug infestations, seeping toilets, leaks, urine-soaked hallways, no heat and no hot water.

Despite millions of dollars in government subsidies, Rauf has trouble maintaining several small apartment buildings in North Bergen, Palisades Park and Union City.

From the NewJersey.com report:

Page after page of municipal health records examined by The Record show repeated complaints ranging from failure to pick up garbage, to rat and bedbug infestations and no heat and hot water.

Cynthia Balko, 48, of Union City — a longtime tenant of Rauf’s — said she’s had to live with rats, leaks and no heat: “I don’t have anything nice to say about the man.”

Despite having received over $2 million in public funding for renovations, Rauf’s tenants were forced to file municipal health complaints to seek relief. One such single mother living in a Rauf-owned apartment in Union City said Rauf has not answered complaints.

From an additional story in The Record:

To understand her perspective, you need to go to a forlorn corner on the Jersey side — to 22nd Street in Union City and a four-story apartment building owned by Rauf. The locks on a front door are broken and the hallway leading to [Melba] Lopez’s two-bedroom apartment smells of urine.

Looking east on 22nd Street — back across the Hudson — the Empire State building pokes the sky. On that side of the river, New York’s mayor speaks of Rauf as a symbol of religious freedom and last week invited the Imam’s wife, Daisy Khan, to dinner at Gracie Mansion to honor the Islamic celebration of Ramadan.

But in Union City, Lopez, a single mother, has another way of describing the man who has time to promote the so-called Ground Zero mosque, but does not seem to have time to answer her complaints about leaks in her toilet.

Lopez said in the report she has never met the would-be Ground Zero mosque imam but she says she has met Rauf’s wife Khan.

Lopez said she remembers Khan telling her that she and her husband did not have enough money to fix her leak and other problems in the building. What Lopez did not know was that at the same time, Rauf and Khan were trying to raise money for their mosque project on the other side of the Hudson

According to the new reports, Rauf has a long history of taxpayer subsidies and grants for slum properties. There’s even a new revelation of a lawsuit settled in June over what the report terms a suit alleging fraud.

From the link:

[T]he suit alleged Rauf and Khan transferred ownership to another firm they owned and then obtained a $650,000 mortgage on the same building from a bank. After the building was damaged by fire in February 2008, Rauf and Khan stopped making mortgage payments to Cockinos, a former key executive at Daibes’ Mariner’s Bank. When Cockinos tried to foreclose, he discovered Rauf and Khan had switched ownership and filed suit alleging “fraud.”

The case was settled shortly before a June 28 trial, with Rauf and Khan agreeing to pay off the mortgage to Cockinos within the next few years, said the couple’s lawyer, Richard Rosa of Hackensack.

There is much more on Rauf and Khan’s current financial woes at the link.

The New York Post reported the site’s developers owe hundreds of thousands in back taxes:

The mosque developers are tax deadbeats.

Sharif El-Gamal, the leading organizer behind the mosque and community center near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show.

El-Gamal’s company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.

Sounds like a good time to raise $100 million for a mosque.

Reuters is reporting New York is considering granting the group a reported $70 million in public funding.

So, there ya have it. A smooth-talking imam, not unlike any other smooth-talking type who is not a real holy man, just another shyster who seeks to bilk millions out of the taxpayers’ pockets, both for his slum properties and a mosque/”community center” mere feet from Ground Zero. Same as any other dime store shakedown artist who hides behind his religion. I’d bet dollars to donuts he and his people, to include the deadbeat owner of the property, made all this noise so they could get more private funding. The fact that Bloomberg supports this is a shame, and a slap in the face to the survivors and victims’ families of the September, 11th, terrorist attacks.

Thanks go out to my friend in Montreal who sent me one of the articles.

A fair warning, this post is a rant about the barbaric and ignorant Taliban who murdered the 10 medical missionaries in northeastern Afghanistan. From npr.org:

the bodies of 10 members of a medical team – six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton – were flown to Kabul from the northern province of Badakhshan, where they were gunned down three days ago at the end of a humanitarian mission. The Taliban claimed responsibility and accused the group of spying and seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The Taliban animals butchered doctors and nurses who were providing needed medical care to the people of Afghanistan! They were also Christians and for that they were robbed and shot, one by one.

I had an interesting conversation with my niece’s boyfriend, who served three tours of duty in Iraq. He doesn’t think that the situation in Iraq or Afghanistan can ever be totally stabilized due to tribal in fighting.

With incidents such as the murders of the medical missionaries and the mounting death toll of US troops and those of our allies, I’ve come to change my stance about us staying there until the situation is stabilized. At this point, I doubt it will ever be stabilized in a “Western manner” as a good portion of the people are incapable of ruling themselves and are too divided by religious and tribal loyalties to ever be able to cooperate in a civilized manner.

It’s time for us to pull our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and leave them with a warning that if terrorists originating from those countries attack the US or US interests, we’ll go medieval on them with nukes.

The New York Times met with the Obama Administration and reviewed the Afghan War information they obtained from WikiLeaks. I didn’t know about this until RC Forums member SMZ brought this up yesterday and tired_of_it provided the link to the salon.com article on it. Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet reports:

I did in fact go the White House and lay out for them what we had,” Baquet said. “We did it to give them the opportunity to comment and react. They did. They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.

I do give the NYT credit for disclosing what they had to the Obama Administration. What I found upsetting about this was the reported reaction of the Obama Administration.

The Times redacted some information in the name of “national security” and protecting the safety of individual soldiers, but the White House doesn’t seem to have told the Times that publishing stories based on these documents would in any real way harm our troops.

If this in fact was the true, “behind the scenes” reaction of the Obama Administration, they are at the least, naive to believe that the leak of these documents will not harm our troops and/or at the worst, they are complicit for not being more forceful in preventing the secret documents from being published.

We’ll see in the coming days what sort of stories come out of the WikiLeaks Afghan War documents but I don’t see anything good coming from this. Hard decisions are made by our troops in combat situations and sometimes wrong targets are hit and civilians end up getting killed. This is especially true when fighting Islamic Jihadists, whose cowardly tactics include using civilians as human shields. When trying to root the Jihadists out, civilian casualties are inevitable due to those tactics. Will our brave troops be depicted as blood thirsty baby killers as the liberal MSM painted them during the Vietnam War? If so, I’ll hold WikiLeaks, the NYT and the other MSM outlets who received the documents and also the Obama Administration, for their non-action, responsible for repeating the sins of the past and allowing our troops to be maligned and vilified!

Rush Limbaugh was all over Clinton appointee, Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling that ripped the guts out of the Arizona immigration law sb1070. From RushLimbaugh.com:

The Associated Press, partisan political operatives, and the Democrats are just doing handstands. They are ecstatic. Susan Bolton, the judge, “has blocked the most controversial sections of Arizona’s new immigration law from taking effect tomorrow, which is a major victory to opponents of the crackdown. The law is still gonna take effect but without many of the provisions that angered the opponents, including sections that require officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws.” The cops cannot do that now. Why not? Now, this is just until the courts resolve the issues. This is a temporary injunction, pending a trial to have final adjudication on this. But this is just flat-out amazing. Who is going to enforce immigration law if the Feds are not going to do it?

I mean, there are states that already do this, cops that already determine this. What about raids in states that are hiring illegals and they’re found and they’re deported? “Yeah, Rush, but those are federal agents doing that.” No, not entirely. Local police in Rhode Island are enforcing federal immigration law, but now a judge has said that that cannot happen in Arizona, pending the results of a trial. By the way, if this gets all the way to the appellate court that’s the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals that will decide this, which is to say they will uphold her. So if this ends up as far as they go there’s going to be a trial with this and be after that then it will get to the Ninth Circus. So local cops will no longer be able to go after kidnappers. I mean, that’s a federal offense. This is absurd. This is patently absurd, and I’m going to tell you something.

All of you Democrats, all you liberals, you think you’ve won something here. This is just gonna add to your defeat, the size of your defeat come November.

Polls are showing that 55% of Americans support Arizona sb1070. That’s a similar percentage that was opposed to the Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill that was shoved down our throats. You can be sure that Obama ordered Holder to file this lawsuit that goes against the will of the American people and the people of Arizona and lackey Judge Susan Bolton followed the party line with her ruling that yet again went against the will of the American people and enforcement of the rule of law.

Americans will Remember in November!

This thrust of this piece is not for the patriot, the American that is vigilant of government, the individual that is actively working to restore our constitutional republic, or the man or woman that clearly views a threat to American freedom and liberty in our nation today.

Then who should learn about this rant? Every American that each of us can contact through our email lists, blogs, letters to editors, organizations we belong, candidate forums, et al., with the warning that America’s future is precarious if “we the people” ignore our responsibility and right to vote November 2, 2010 or make wrong choices.

There can be no doubt all America is aware, but may not comprehend, the bizarre and potentially fatal method the Obama Administration and Congress is governing America .

From ruling by czars, radicals in government, to fiscal insanity involving bail-outs, bank takeovers, fascist automobile industry interference, to socializing healthcare, encouraging immorality, demonizing America abroad, 2nd Amendment threats, ignoring sovereignty issues, suing a State Governor for taking measures to protect her citizens, condoning voter intimidation, encouraging racial confrontation in America, attempting to degrade the United States military, putting two wars on the back burner, to name a few serious issues. When viewed together, a destructive path emerges for America , if not peacefully reversed quickly.

If….the millions of Americans who are not registered to vote do not get registered; the millions who are registered and rarely vote, fail to vote in November; those that have been complacent with the attitude “let someone else do it” , fail to get energized to vote; those that excuse their duty to vote with a “my vote won’t count” and fail to seriously evaluate the threat to America and come to realize how critical every vote is; and if “we the people” do not ensure a free ballot box, the result will be America reflecting an attitude of surrender.

Our prayer must be that a free people will still have a choice and the courage in November 2010 to make right decisions. To reverse the threat to America we must select conservative, constitutional committed, Founding Father visioned, morally courageous candidates, with unwavering support for principles embedded in our Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

Failure of Americans of every color, race, ethnic background, political persuasion, gender, religion, to peacefully vote for right principles November 2, 2010 will signal continuation to those of the Marxist/socialist/communist ideology who are presently destroying over 200 years of freedom and liberty in America .

If the above failure occurs, I believe it will generate a massive, painful, bloody revolt in America . The overwhelming majority of Americans understand and abhor the thought of conflict in our beautiful land…but blood will flow before surrender to a dictator or socialist, communist regime. God help us keep our knees bent to Him, not a dictator.

Oliver North had an article on the McChrystal Resignation published in TownHall.com today. Here’s an excerpt:

McChrystal’s firing has been likened to President Abraham Lincoln’s replacing George McClellan during the Civil War and President Harry Truman’s sacking Douglas MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War. Not accurate.

Both McClellan and MacArthur vocally opposed the stated policies and strategies of their presidents. That’s not what happened here. In announcing he had “accepted” his battlefield commander’s resignation, Obama acknowledged that he and McChrystal “are in full agreement about our strategy.” This week’s firing was simply political theater designed to enhance Obama’s stature as a “leader” in the eyes of his supporters and critics.

Obama suffers from decision-deficit disorder. He routinely is described as detached, disengaged, ambivalent and uncertain in everything from the economy to securing our borders to the Gulf oil spill to the war itself. He has been unable or unwilling to name our radical Islamist enemies or define victory. He is the only commander in chief to announce a deadline for withdrawing troops while committing more Americans to combat.

McChrystal was relieved because a thin-skinned president couldn’t take criticism in the press and needed to prove he’s the boss. The intemperate published remarks made by McChrystal and his staff in Rolling Stone provided an opportunity for Obama to show his left-wing base that he is in charge.

That left a mark!

It’s become clear that Obama is not executive material. He is detached and indecisive and uncomfortable in his role as Commander in Chief. Obama dithered for months on McChrystal’s request for more troops and when he did approve, it was with fewer troops than McChrystal requested and he set a deadline for withdrawal. I didn’t realize he’s the first American CiC to do this, a terrible precedent to set.

North points out that the McChrystal/Rolling Stone situation “provided an opportunity for Obama to show his left-wing base that he is in charge” and his sycophants in the media have been crowing about this as witnessed in an editorial in yesterday’s D&C OPINION page, Obama was right to remove McChrystal, undoubtedly penned by Obama propagandist, James Lawrence. He wrote:

With such high stakes, President Barack Obama is right to put his foot down and remove Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the top U.S. commander.

Let’s not forget that it was the Obama Administration that appointed Gen. McChrystal, who admitted that he voted for Obama. Gen. McChrystal was Obama’s man and he saw through the rhetoric and as the Rolling Stone article reported, “never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”

As was expected, Obama accepted General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation. In a surprising move, Obama appointed General David Petraeus to fill the position of Commander of the Afghanistan operation.

Flash back to September 2007, during the Senate confirmation hearings on the Surge in Iraq, when Obama beat up on the same General David Petraeus. Just as a reminder, here’s the video of it. Obama did not let General Petraeus get a word in edgewise!

“We have now set the bar so low that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation’s considered success, but it’s not. This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake.”

–Senator Barack Obama

If you recall, then Senator Joe Biden was also very critical of General Petraeus and his “surge” strategy.

“Well, what I, uhh, I saw heard and learned is a little bit what you heard, uhh, from the general just a moment ago. Uhh, there’s a big disconnect between, uhh, the truth of the matter and the reality. I mean the truth of the matter is that, uhhh, the America — this administration’s policy and the surge are a failure and that, uh, the surge, uh, which was supposed to stop sectarian violence, uh, long enough to get political reconciliation… There’s been no political reconciliation.”

and

“I expect him to say that. I think he’s dead, flat, wrong. The fact of the matter is is that, uh, this — this idea of these security gains we made have had no impact on the underlying sectarian dynamic. None! None whatsoever! Can anybody envision a central government made up of Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurds, that’s going to gain the trust and respect of 27 million Iraqis? It’s not going to happen.”

Both Obama and Biden tore General Petraeus a new one, proclaiming that the Surge was a failure and both of those clowns were wrong. Now they’re in charge and are turning to the very man that they so wrongly abused to save the Surge in Afghanistan. I can only hope that they let General Petreaus do his job in eliminating the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, just as he did in defeating the insurgency (and also Al Qaeda) in Iraq.

Toby Harnden of telegraph.co.uk is reporting that General Stanley McChrystal has tendered his resignation to Obama:

A senior Capitol Hill source tells me that General Stanley McChrystal had tendered his resignation to President Barack Obama and that the White House is actively discussing a replacement who could be quickly confirmed by the Senate.

The source said that among the names being touted as possible successors are General James Mattis, the outgoing head of the US Joint Forces Command and due to retire after being passed over as US Marine Corps commander, and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of Nato’s Training Mission in Afghanistan.

Of course, offering to resign is not the same as actually resigning and it remains to be seen whether Mr Obama will accept the resignation.

Although McChrystal probably shouldn’t have criticized the Obama administration in such a public way, his opinion mirrors what more and more people are feeling about him.

There’s been talk on some blogs that this was a calculated move by McChrystal, meant to embarrass the Obama administration and make a statement to the nation.

What effect will this have on the morale of the troops? I can’t imagine if it will have a positive effect. There’s been open rebellion amongst the Joint Chiefs of Staff over Obama’s decision to lift the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. This can’t be good.