EckerNet.Com

Ok so we caught at least one of the suspects of the attempted New York Times Square bombing, great, keep looking, and keep investigating.  But what really distresses me is we have those that are actively advocating overlooking his Constitutional protections as an American citizen.

Senator McCain :

It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

Rep. Peter King :

Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, wants to know whether the Justice Department consulted with the intelligence community before they decided to hold his trial in civilian court.

That is a mistake, a huge mistake, for a whole variety of reasons.

Yes, if he is the guilty party his crime is heinous and extremely serious, perhaps the most serious thing you can be accused of.  However, bottom line….he\’s a US citizen, that is accused of a crime on US soil, and was arrested by US authorities.  There is absolutely NO GREY AREA here…he deserves every Constitutional Protection to which every other US Citizen is privileged.

The minute we start overlooking Constitutional protections for our short-term convenience, we all lose our Constitutional protections.  Liberals with an agenda may try to draw parallels to Gitmo, but the parallels are poor and stretch way past the point of breaking….this isn\’t a foreign fighter, of foreign citizenry, captured on a battlefield on foreign soil.

It absolutely terrifies me that we have Congressmen and Senators, shrugging their shoulders at the protection granted us by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The Declaration of Independence, which preceded those two documents, was written because of abuses of power, which while not similar in degree, are at least similar in spirit to what McCain and King are advocating here.

That all said, with great privilege (and US Citizenry is!) comes great responsibility.  I would have absolutely no qualms about Mr. Shahzad being charged with treason and if after due process he is found guilty, put to death.  But he deserves his rights as a US citizen.   If the least of us can\’t depend on those protections, then even the best of us have reason to fear their loss.

Via Instapundit, yet another example of the system working

A Waupaca woman finds herself in the middle of a major security investigation at Cleveland\’s airport.

Kimmy Janke had gone through security. In fact, she was in a secure part of the terminal when she stopped to go to the bathroom before making her connecting flight.

That\’s when she found a loaded handgun.

\”A little kid could have grabbed that. The wrong person could have grabbed that. You never know,\” Janke said.

Turns out it belong to a federal custom agent, who was allowed to retire without any discipline or reprimand or even a token slap on the wrist.  If any of the rest of us had done half as much you\’d have TSA agents probing orifices you didn\’t know you had….and I\’m guessing you wouldn\’t get so much as dinner&movie before.

What really bothers me about this is how elementary this error really is.  You don\’t need to be a \”highly trained federal agent\”, as she is described, to know how to handle a firearm in a public restroom.  This is a topic that\’s handled in the most elementary of firearms courses relating to carrying in public.   Basically ANY carry permit course/book/pamplet/business card/etc is probably gonna touch on this subject and how to handle it.  Yet a trained federal agent messes it up….it\’s the details that are important when it comes to national security, because it was messing up the details that caused the feds to completely miss the Eunuch Bomber.

It\’s actually pretty simple.  I\’ve heard more best practices on bathroom behavior than I really care to admit, even if it does relate to firearms.  Everyone has their preferred method, because nothing wants to be the cause of the dreaded \”CLUNK! Clatter, Clatter, Clatter\”.

One popular method is the shoe….take off your shoe, put the firearm in it, do your business.  The idea being nobody is going to forget walking out without their shoe.  I\’ve never been a fan of this method due to the simple observation that public restroom floors appear to be scientific experiments dedicating to evolving life all over at the cellular level.  Plus it makes your firearm very visible in the next stall.

Another method is to adopt something akin to Larry Craig\’s patented \”wide stance\”, which prevents your pants from dropping to the floor.  So the firearm on your belt remains up by your knees.  It\’s still attached to you, it\’s not visible.  Simple.  I was a big fan of this method until the US Senate\’s singular contribution that fateful year was to inform me that this was a way to proposition US Senator\’s in neighboring stalls.  Having been screwed over by enough politicians as it is, I\’ve since abandoned this method.

Another popular method, is the \”Is that a gun in your crotch….\” in which you place the firearm in the crotch of your pants.  You can\’t pull up your pants and not remember your firearm.  It\’s secure and away from the view of neighbors.  Pretty simple.

Now that\’s probably more information than you care to hear.  But the point is that these are all pretty simple.  If you ask any responsible permit holder, he/she can probably tell you what method they use if you care to ask.  Because they\’ve all thought it over ahead of time so they don\’t make this boneheaded mistake, because not being part of the privileged elite, they would get in trouble otherwise.

Which isn\’t to say that the fate of the country\’s national security rests on the bathroom habits of our customs agents, but it does indicate a rather lackadaisical attitude towards the details.  And as we all found out on Christmas, details matter.

I haven\’t been much of a fan of Senator Graham for, well ever, as near as I can remember.  However, he summoned intelligence, foresight and outright cleverness in completely destroying Attorney General Holder in committee.  There really is no other word for it.

Holder\’s lack of intelligence and/or preparation are laid bare for all to see in this exchange.  And quite simply it is adequately demonstrated that as much as Holder likes to claim otherwise, there was little to no research done before decided that KSM would be tried in federal court instead of military court.  Having demonstrated that the only explanation for this reversal is that this was purely a political ploy….but one that may have dangerous implications for our national security, both none and in the future.

In the meantime we get to watch and snicker at Holder.  Although to be quite honest I almost feel a little bad for him about halfway through.  Graham knows he\’s got him and just keeps piling on.

I think he might be trying to pull off the \”thoughtfully contemplative\” defense.  You know it, or at least you\’ve seen it, when you or someone else is sideswipped with a question you weren\’t expecting and you pretend to be deep in thought to stall for time in hopes of a miracle.  It\’s also a ploy that Obama frequently uses in speeches to give him a intellectual aura.  Obama pulls it off, Holder just looks dumb.

Chicken Little rides into town on his trusty weasel crying out, \”The Militias are coming! The Militias are coming! We\’re all going to die!\”

For those of you that think you\’ve seen this story already, you\’re right.  In the 1990s it was a standard hand-wringing topic of every pundit and newscaster worth their salt.  Behind every compound was another militia just waiting to put on a flaming showdown with the federal government.  Everyone was in danger!!  Except it didn\’t really turn out that way.  The militia movement was largely overblown, except for a few isolated cases, mostly where the government types needlessly provoked militias.

And now according to some, the movement is back.  Sparked by the reign of a black messiah, supposedly militias are back and again nobody is safe.  It may just be a matter of time before your children are killed by rampaging militias.  Or so some would have you think.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has released a report entitled The Second Wave : Return of the Militias, where they attempt to make a case for the return of the militia movement.

And a poor case they make for it, starting with their very definition of militias, which apparently include Birthers and those attending Tea Parties. In fact, the report admits that these groups make up the largest and most energized portions of this movement.  Got that?  The new militia movement is mostly people that think they might be paying a lot in taxes.  Scared yet??

Throughout the document is the unsupported assumption that racism is a basis for all of this.  As \”evidence\” of this, the report cites the fact that there are black people in every branch of government.  Ignored is the fact that that has been true for decades, including during the decline of militias.  As further supporting evidence, the report cites the immigration debate.  Apparently the only way someone can be for the enforcement of our laws, is rampant racism instead of belief that the law should be…..well, the law.

Further supporting their stance as scary militias is the fact that many of them protested being called \”right wing extremists\” in the much lampooned (and eventually retracted) Department of Homeland Security April report.  Because we all know that nobody but militias would take offense to being called right wing extremists.  Innocent people wouldn\’t do that, therefore they must be militias!!

Still, they are militias and militias do scary things right??  Right?? Well buried between scary tales of militias past is the admission that the latest resurgence of militias hasn\’t come close to the levels of the 90s (and we all remember how bad that was right?).  In fact, mostly the movement has taken up the tactic of using YouTube videos to distribute their message.  That\’s right instead of car bombs and mass shootings, these scary militias have chosen the same \”weapon\” as the \”Leave Britney Alone\” guy.  Sure the guy was annoying beyond belief, but he hardly qualified as a national security risk.

As further proof of how scary and insidious the militia movement has become, is the fact that it\’s become \”mainstream\”.  Politicians, media pundits and all sorts of organizations have latched onto some of the claims of these scary militias, which remember include border enforcement activists, birthers and Tea Party activists.  This is apparently proof of how devious this movement is, rather than an indication that perhaps these aren\’t kooks without legitimate concerns.

Yes, this militia movement has certainly returned and it\’s scarier than ever.  It\’s always scary when citizens start sitting up and paying attention to what their government is doing and how badly it is being run.  It certainly unforgiveable that citizens would think they are paying too much in taxes and would prefer to keep their hard earned wages.

France appears like it\’s trying to push a terror attack as the potential cause of the Flight 447 crash.

Two names on doomed Air France Flight 447\’s passenger list also appear on a list of radical Muslims considered a threat to France, according to French investigators.

French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.

Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.

I\’m all for due diligence and yeah, explore the option but I would be highly skeptical of any suggestion that a terror attack was responsible for the crash.  That should have been obvious before the wreckage was even found, when after days (now almost two weeks) have gone by, nobody has claimed credit for the attack.

Terrorists exist to….well, terrorize (cue quotes from Jeff Dunham\’s act).  If a terrorist terrorizes in the middle of a forest and nobody is around, is anyone scared??  Well no.  So there really is no benefit to performing an attack and then not taking credit for it.  And terrorists organizations have not been shy about claiming credit, it\’s a win-win for them.  They get to terrorize but also raise their profile and it serves as a recruitment tool.  And finally achieving a successful attack on a Western airline would certainly be a coup for them.

Plus blowing up an airline over the middle of the Atlantic doesn\’t exactly sounds like the preferred way of blowing up an airliner.  Lessens the collatoral damage and a lot less visible.

So by all means pursue all leads, but if this is one that is seriously opined as a possible cause, I\’ll start suspecting ulterior motives.  Like protecting the image of both your nation\’s airline and it\’s largest airplane manufacturer by diverting blame.

A couple of months ago, who would have believed that of all the people Obama has appointed (admittedly there are few) that the biggest screwup would NOT be Geithner.  Which isn\’t a compliment towards Geithner, he\’s floundered in his job, but Napolitano is making him look like a genius.  Which is fairly sad as Homeland Security is a fairly straight forward position, with nowhere near the subtle complexity of Treasury or State.

Of couse it would probably help if she even knew what her job consisted of.  Certainly one of her responsibilities is border enforcement, but she doesn\’t even realize that illegal immigration is a crime.

Napolitano : And yes, when we find illegal workers, yes, appropriate action, some of which is criminal, most of that is civil, because crossing the border is not a crime per se. It is civil. But anyway, going after those as well.

But according to 8 USC Sec. 1325 it actually is a crime.  But heh, how would she know that?? She\’s just the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.   But heh, immigration is just part of her job, keeping terrorists out of the United States is important too.  Well apparently she\’s not too hip on that, because she pissed off our neighbor to the north by saying the 9/11 terrorists came in through Canada….a myth that was debunked on about 9/12/01…so it\’s understandably she hasn\’t been filled in yet.

Ok so anything originating outside the country isn\’t her forte, she\’s probably been concentrating on internal threats.  She\’s got those nailed down I\’m sure.  Her department put together, by her own admission, a half-assed report which she insisted be released against the warnings of her own lawyers.  That report tagged veterans serving out countries and conservatives utilizing the First Amendment as threats to our country. She\’s had to slowly roll back to the point of admitting it shouldn\’t have been released and basically it was completely wrong.

In fact I can\’t seem to find a single aspect of her job she has not completely botched in the short time she\’s been head of DHS.  I realize that Obama\’s standards aren\’t exactly high for his staff, a cursory look at his other appointees faults bear that out, but even by those paltry standards surely Napolitano is a big failure.

It\’s time to start taking over/under bets on when she\’s canned.

What do you get if you combine guns, bacon and beer?? I mean besides being labeled as a terrorist according to the new criteria set forth by our incompetent omniscient Department of Homeland Security.  Well you get something so incredibly awesome that both my synapses and my arteries utterly collapse in either joy or despair, respectively.

The BACON GUN….specifically the BA-K-47!!!

And it gets my mind racing in ways that only beer, bacon and firearms can…..racing right towards the other thing that gets my mind racing.  So it occurred to me that with the BA-K-47 we could make the ultimate army to defeat Al-Qaeda.  We combine their hatred/fear of pork with their hatred/fear of scantily clad young women.

Outfit every cheerleading squad in the United States with a skimpy bikini and a BA-K-47 and set them loose on Al Qaeda.  Osama will surrender faster than France.

Heh, worse case scenario, if it doesn\’t work, set this army loose on me, I\’m willing to sacrifice for the cause.

You can play along at home by answering these easy questions…

– Are you concerned about illegal immigration?
– Are you concerned with increasing federal power?
– Are you concerned with current/future restrictions on firearms?
– Are you concerned about abortion?
– Are you concerned about the loss of US sovereignty?

Basically what this boils down to is, are you conservative to any degree?

If you answered yes to any of the above, congratulations, according to the Department of Homeland Security you\’re officially a \”right-wing extremist\”!! Bob, tell them what they\’ve won!!

That\’s right John, our contestants win further intrusion upon their lives by the federal government. And you potentially get a lifetime supply Rice-A-Roni, the San Fransisco treat, lovingly prepared by fellow inmates in one of our delightful federal prisons.

Some tongue-firmly-in-cheek humor there, but it\’s based on a study by the Department of Homeland Security, the very same department that last we heard was letting us know they couldn\’t provide homeland security, yet has no need for a budget increase to take on the herculean task of quelling border violence.

Apparently if you\’re more conservative than Meghan McCain (probably 60% of the US), you quite possibly may be a \”right-wing extremist\” according to our wonderful DHS. If you\’re a veteran returning from war, you got two strikes against you, as you are quite clearly a Ted Kaczynski just waiting to happen! Supposedly the catalyst being the poor economic conditions and potential restrictive legislation being passed by the new Administration.

Now I\’m poking fun at the DHS a bit here. I understand they are attempting to do a job. And to be sure, each of the issues listed above is an issue that provokes enough passion, that in some it might lead to irrational acts. We\’ve heard of attacks on abortion clinics. Or the war vet that is having issues adjusting to life back home. Or the firearms enthusiast that decides to go Waco. But in every single instance, it has always been isolated incidents.

What I take issue with is that only right-wing extremists appear to be possible. The DHS isn\’t concerned with the rise of \”extremism\” due to bad economic conditions, they are concerned with \”right wing extremism\”, even though left wing extremism is just as common. We\’ve all heard of animal rights activists attacking scientists who use animals in experiments. We\’ve heard of environmentalists burning down buildings. We\’ve heard of gay rights activists threatening those they perceive as against their cause (i.e California in the last election). We\’ve heard of anarchists rioting and attacking police. And in the left wing examples I gave, you have liberal organizations openly endorsing those actions.

So then wouldn\’t it be more prudent for the DHS to be worried about extremism in general?? Certainly bad economic times leads to greater stress and tougher times for everyone. Wouldn\’t all be effected equally? I mean besides the Al Gore and George Soros of the world.

The right wing hardly has a monopoly on extremism, and for the most part, unlike the left, we\’ve closed our franchises. So the fact that the DHS would put out a study extolling the dangers of \”right wing extremism\” indicates more of a political agenda, than a real (or perceived) danger to public safety. And for a department that can\’t afford to play politics, they should be ashamed.

Israel and Hamas declare a cease-fire…

Israeli troops, some smiling and dancing, began to withdraw from Gaza Sunday after their government and Hamas militants declared an end to a three-week war. But neither side achieved long-term goals, and the burden of consolidating the fragile calm fell to world leaders.

Bottom line…it won\’t last.  Hamas will be launching rockets again within 48 hours.

This is a cease-fire Israel should not have agreed to.  They already had a cease-fire with Hamas, who launched rockets at Israel on a daily basis.  How is this any different?

Israel was making progress.  Killing militants, killing Hamas leaders and not taking significant losses in the process.  Hamas promised to drive Israel out and turn Gaza into a cemetary for Israeli forces…neither happened.  Israel had overwhelming support for the war at home, Arab nations were lukewarm in their opposition to the conflict, and the rest of the world reluctantly acknowledged there were good reasons for it, if not outright supported it.  Conditions are not going to get better than that.

Declaring a ceasefire and negotiating with people that don\’t at least agree to your right to exist is pointless and unfortunately Israeli\’s will pay the price.  This ceasefire will be very temporary.

However, there can be a silver lining for this.  Iran was pushing for this conflict because it needed a distraction from it\’s nuclear weapons program.  And it needed Israel occupied so it could not strike it\’s nuclear weapons facilities.  That distraction no longer exists.

Hamas leaders in the Gaza strip are going to be reluctant to start another conflict with Israel, after seeing many of their fellow leaders fall victim to a mild cause of violet death.  Hamas leaders in Iran are going to be pushing to restart the conflict, using the existance of Jews as an excuse.  How long this ceasefire lasts will depend on how much each group holds sway with the bottom rank of militants.

Like I said above, I\’d wager on less than 48 hours and hope I\’m wrong.