Duncan Hunter Should not be Excluded from Debates
Jan 10, 2008 Political
I wrote a post earlier about Ron Paul being excluded from a debate. Duncan Hunter was also excluded and I commented that anyone who is still in the race deserves to participate in any process associated with the election including the debates. Fox News has decided that they will exclude candidates based upon polling results but they also rely on polling data that excludes certain candidates from the process. Duncan Hunter is such a candidate. If one were to look at Fox’s site he is not listed as a candidate and Real Clear Politics does not list him in their polls, polls which Fox uses when making its determination.
Duncan Hunter is being excluded from the South Carolina debate based upon criteria that Fox set but which Hunter could never hope to obtain if he is not included in the actual polls. Hunter paid $25,000 to be on the SC ballot and until such time as he withdraws from the race he deserves to participate like any other candidate.
The election process requires the people of this country to collect information about candidates and determine which one best defines their beliefs and goals. Part of this process is to have debates which pit the candidates against one another so that we the people can get an idea of where they stand and what they will do as president (or whatever office they are running for). The media should not be filtering these candidates and presenting only those deemed worthy by them.
Duncan Hunter is an honorable man who served this country in the military, who serves in Congress and who supports our men and women in uniform. He has strong positions on ILLEGAL immigration and he is a true conservative. To exclude him from the public forum is to do a great disservice to those who will make an important decision about who leads this country. The election process belongs to the people and not the media.
I say this with regard to any candidate from any party and I feel just as strongly that excluding Kucinich and Gravel (whoever that is) was wrong. There have been low polling people in the past who have not been excluded. Imagine the uproar that would occur if Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson had been excluded when they made their bids. Of course that is hypothetical because the media would never do something like that and offend the race hustlers, but I digress.
Fox News and any other outlet that sponsors a debate should include ALL candidates so long as they are still actively part of the process. To do anything less is an affront to the political process and truly un-American.
For a news organization that claims to be “Fair and Balanced” Fox’s actions appear to be anything but.
Shame on you Fox and shame on you SC GOP for allowing this censorship to take place.
Tags: censorship, debates, duncan hunter, fox news, SC GOP
Hillary Quote of the Week
Jan 10, 2008 Political
This is from Hillary Clinton as she was mustering up a few fake tears for the folks:
“I just don’t want to see us fall backwards.â€
Some might believe she meant the country or its people in the “collective” us but in reality she meant that she did not want to see “us Clintons” fall backwards. She was lamenting on the powerful political machine losing a few steps as a result of Iowa and seeing the dreams of both her and Bill being shattered. She was talking about the grand plan unraveling before her eyes, the inability to pull out the last step in the plan they have both worked on for decades. his turn and then hers.
She is part of the entitlement crowd and she believes she is
New Quarterback for the Packers…
In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense. A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.
New Quarterback for the Packers…
In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense. A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.
Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you? Well, Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State. When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, Dick Morris stated “so has the pastry chef.
oes this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you? Well, Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State. When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, Dick Morris stated “so has the pastry chef.
Big Dog Salute to DB.
Think about it America. Do we want another 4 or 8 years of the Clintonista crime family running this country?
Hillary is Satan.
Related item:
The New York Times
Others with similar posts:
Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary’s Thoughts, The Random Yak, Adam’s Blog, Right Truth, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, third world county, Allie is Wired, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Tags: clinton crime family, Hillary, Obama, sobbing
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 1-9-2008
Jan 9, 2008 Flight 93
Blogburst blockbuster: Professor who white-washed the Crescent of Embrace was Paul Murdoch’s classmate at UCLA
An excerpt from the Park Service investigation into the Flight 93 memorial identifies one of their consultants as a scholar from MIT who “wishes to remain anonymous.” Another document identifies this person as a religious scholar or a professor of Islamic architecture. MIT does not have a religion department, and they only have one professor of Islamic architecture: Professor Nassar Rabbat, who has confirmed that he is the Park Service consultant.
A check of Rabbat’s background shows that he was a classmate of Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat did a masters thesis titled: “House-form, climactic response and lifestyle: a study of the 17-19th century courthouse houses in Cairo and Damascus.”
This connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself orchestrated the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. Rabbat denies knowing Murdoch, but given the blatant dishonesty of what he told the Park Service, that denial cannot be trusted.
Rabbat lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows
Rabbat’s first “major talking point” (from the Memorial Project’s White Paper, towards the bottom) is a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service should not be concerned about the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. Rabbat assures the Park Service that because the Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is inexact, it can’t be seen as a mihrab:
Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.
Absolutely false, and Rabbat certainly knows it. This goes to the most basic principle of mosque design: that all mosques are expressions of Muhammad’s prototype.
Muhammad’s original mosque in Medina was not oriented precisely on Mecca. It was built to face Jerusalem. Later in his career Muhammad changed the direction that Muslims were to face for prayer (their qibla direction). Instead of facing north from Medina to Jerusalem they were to face south, towards Mecca (Koran 2.142-145). To effect this change, Muhammad just started using the southerly wall of his mosque as his “qibla wall” instead of the northerly wall, even though this wall had not been built to face Mecca.
In the abstract, Muhammad held the qibla direction from Medina to be “south.” But Mecca is not quite due south from Medina either. Thus both in practice and in the abstract, Muhammad was not particular about an exact orientation on Mecca, and in Islam, what is good enough for Muhammad has to be good enough for everyone. He is the model.
This leeway to face only roughly towards Mecca for prayer is not some obscure bit of doctrine. Every practicing Muslim knows that qibla orientation does not have to be exact because they all have to avail themselves of this allowance pretty much every day as they seek walls that are oriented not too far off of Mecca which they can face into for their frequent prayers.
Rabbat just flat out lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows, and this is an expert in Mosque design. He knows better than anyone the historic leeway afforded in Mecca orientation.
Is Rabbat the source of Patrick White’s foolishness?
Rabbat’s dishonest report to the Park Service may explain an amazing argument made by Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93. At the July 2007 public meeting of the Memorial Project, White argued in a private conversation that the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”
At the same time as White was privately making excuses for the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent, he was telling the newspapers that the Mecca orientation claim was false and preposterous, so he certainly cannot be absolved. But it is possible that he himself was misled about how Muslims would regard an inexactly oriented mihrab.
The Memorial Project received Rabbat’s comments about a year earlier, and Patrick White certainly had access to them. It seems likely that when White said that an inexact orientation on Mecca would be “disrespectful to Islam,” he was following Rabbat’s “can’t be off” lead.
The crescent design also includes an exact Mecca orientation
If Nassar Rabbat actually read the information that Alec Rawls sent to the Memorial Project, he would know that in addition to the physical crescent, the Crescent of Embrace design also includes a thematic crescent, defined by architect Paul Murdoch himself. The upper tip of this thematic crescent is the point where, in Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle. If this thematic or “true” upper crescent tip is used to define the orientation of the crescent, then the crescent points exactly to Mecca.
If Rabbat really thinks that exactness is what matters, he would have been alarmed to see that this thematic crescent is oriented exactly on Mecca. Instead, he ignored it.
The Park Service already knew about the Mecca orientation of the crescent
The Park Service’s other Islamic scholar, Kevin Jaques, did the same thing as Rabbat. He admitted the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab, then concocted a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service shouldn’t be concerned about it. Jaques assured the Park Service that there was no reason to worry because no one had ever seen a mihrab this big before:
Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.
If Jaques and Rabbat were willing to engage in such blatantly dishonest excuse-making, why did they start out by admitting that the giant crescent was geometrically close to a perfect mihrab? Because the Park Service already knew that the giant crescent was oriented almost exactly on Mecca, and that a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is the central feature around which every mosque is built.
Advisory Commission member Tim Baird would admit this explicitly in 2007, but it was obvious much earlier. What the Park Service wanted when it conducted its internal investigation in the spring and summer of 2006 was excuses not to be concerned about these damning facts, and that is what Jaques and Rabbat provided. Similarly for the egregious Daniel Griffith, the “professor of geospatial information,” who told the newspapers that “anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round.”
The Park Service knew this was all fraudulent. Griffith’s “anything can point to Mecca” and Rabbat’s “it has to be exact” were complete contradictions of each other, but the Park Service gladly embraced both as excuses to pretend that there was nothing to worry about.
If these government functionaries were this desperate for a cover up, it is certainly plausible that they would accept any help they could get from Paul Murdoch. Not that it is hard to find radically dishonest, America-hating academics, but these three frauds are outliers even by worst standards.
More dishonest excuse-making from Rabbat
Rabbat’s next talking point is more of the same dishonest excuse-making:
Besides, in the US, a debate has been going on as to which is the right Mecca orientation: the one going through the North Pole or the one that follows a flat representation of the globe.
The orientation “through the North Pole” (55.2° clockwise from north, to be precise) is the great-circle direction to Mecca. This great circle direction to Mecca is the orientation of the Crescent of Embrace (almost exactly), and it is the direction in which almost all Muslims pray.
A few dissenters pray in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca (the direction of constant compass heading, which spirals down the globe in an east-southeasterly direction from North America). Rabbat pretends that the existence of these few dissenters somehow makes the whole matter of the Mecca oriented crescent a non-issue.
If anything, the debate over qibla direction shows the flexibility of the qibla direction, giving the lie to Rabbat’s earlier assertion that mihrab orientation “can’t be off.”
Rabbat certainly knows that the great-circle direction to Mecca is the dominant qibla direction. (It won out over the rhumb line direction for the very good reason that a person facing in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca is not actually facing Mecca, since the rhumb-line follows a curved path.) But don’t worry about a little thing like the crescent facing in the dominant qibla direction. Rabbat has plenty of lame excuses why you don’t need to care.
Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional investigation
The Park Service won’t say how they came up with Griffith, Jaques and Rabbat so we have to force them. A lot of People must be forced to answer these and a lot of other hard questions, and the only way to do it is to heed Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional Investigation.
What to Expect Next from the Clintons
Jan 9, 2008 Political
The next few weeks will be very interesting with regard to the Democratic Primary race. John Edwards has vowed to stay in and he will continue to pester Hillary. Obama, who must be somewhat stunned to lose after a “10 point lead” was predicted a few days ago, will probably take off the gloves and start striking Hilary. I think he learned from the pros this past week when the Clintonista mafia gang spread nasty stories about Obama and abortion just before the vote leaving little time for rebuttal. No matter what anyone thinks about the Clintons, they are a political machine and they know how to get dirty, very dirty. So what should we expect to come from them next?
Playing on the perceived strength of their action not talk remodeling, they will continue to attack Obama as a man who talks a good game while Hillary has lived that game. If this were their only plan it would fail but I expect we will be hit with a softer side of Hillary where she feigns a few tears every once in awhile and where Bill cries for his beastly wife like he did last evening. Bill will go around biting his lip (as opposed to biting the lips of his rape victims) and will tell us how hard Hillary works and how proud he is of her. He will also tell us lies about her record.
There will also be a healthy dose of the word comeback. The Clintons will try to get comeback into everything they can because it will wax nostalgic for the retread hippies who supported him as president. It will also bring back memories of the drug induced euphoria the Clinton supporters felt during his time in office. The Clintonista gang will use comeback quite a bit to make Hilary look like a fighter while she musters up a few tears to seem human. Make no mistake, her tears were as phony as a three dollar bill and she will use them if she thinks they provide an advantage.
I expect that Obama and Clinton will be in through Super Tuesday. I doubt Edwards will last that long but as long as he is in he will harass Clinton and Clinton, the “comeback kid” will harass Obama while turning on her tears of a clown. I was hoping she would lose yesterday and meltdown so that she could drop out and we could finally be rid of the vermin known as Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is Satan.
The Hillary Beast Lives Another Day
Jan 8, 2008 Political
The New Hampshire Primary is now in the books and while the votes are still being counted the major networks have called this one for Hillary Clinton. It would appear as if all the pundits were wrong on this one as they (I included) were predicting Clinton would lose this race by 10 points. There were two things involved here and they probably combined to change things a bit. Remember when Bill Clinton lost this race and went on to be the “comeback kid”? Well he remembers it too and he has mentioned it since Iowa.
It is likely that the polls in NH were exaggerated to show Obama with a huge lead so that if she came close or won she could be dubbed the second comeback kid. The people and the media of NH have always been Clinton friendly so it is not beyond reason that some things were exaggerated to help her out.
I think what was involved more than anything is that John McCain energized the Independent voters so much that he siphoned them away from Obama. In NH the Independents are allowed to in which ever primary they wish but only one). I believe that early polling showed Obama ahead and much of it was the Independents who were committed to voting for him. Then Hillary went on the attack over the weekend when she did Hillary redux and had her millionth make over. Her attacks made people wary of Obama but they also realized that there was no way in hell they could vote for Hilary so they migrated to John McCain who has always had great support in the state.
It is likely that some combination of these two events took place. However, while the Clintons probably played with the polls and the news to some small degree, it is much more likely that the voters in NH were in favor of Obama until Hillary counter punched and then they became worried about him and abandoned him for McCain.
If this is the case it shows that the Independent voters are afraid of Obama and will not vote for Clinton. This should make little difference in the upcoming primaries because I don’t think there are other states that allows Independents to vote for members of other parties. In this respect, Hilary and Obama will be fighting it out head to head while staying strictly in their party. They also cannot discount John Edwards. As long as he stays in he will split someone’s votes (he might have done a little of that tonight).
Where this issue of going for McCain hurts Democrats is in the general election where people can vote for any party they want. Conservatives will come out in droves to vote against Hillary. We have seen tonight the possibility that Independents will vote Republican rather than cote for the Democrats.
This could spell disaster for them in the general election. However, I am looking forward to Hillary getting knocked out of the primaries so we do not have to deal with her in the general election.
She is Satan.
Tags: comeback, Hillary, independent, new hampshire, satan, winner