Video: O'Reilly - CIA Agents Safety at Risk by Left Wing Group

Obama heckled by GOP during speech: 'You lie!'

By LAURIE KELLMAN

AP - WASHINGTON – A South Carolina Republican lawmaker shouted "You lie" at President Barack Obama as he addressed Congress on Wednesday. The congressman later apologized for his "lack of civility."

In his speech in the House chamber, Obama was telling lawmakers that the Democratic plans for health care overhaul do not cover illegal immigrants.

"The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," Obama said.

"You lie!" Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shouted from his seat, jabbing a finger in the air.

In a statement, Wilson said later that he regretted the incident.

"This evening I let my emotions get the best of me," Wilson said. "While I disagree with the president's statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility."

Wilson's outburst caused Obama to pause briefly and say, "That's not true." ....

Patriots to storm Washington, target out-of-control spending

By Chelsea Schilling

Just one day after President Obama plans tries to recapture the initiative in the health-care debate with a speech to a joint session of Congress, thousands of taxpayers plan to storm Washington, D.C., in a three-day event to take their fight against excessive spending, bailouts, growth of big government and soaring deficits to the front door of the U.S. Capitol.

In a major movement unaffiliated with – but inspired by – Fox News' Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project, called the National Taxpayer Protest, thousands of Americans are answering the call and traveling to make their voices heard at Capitol Hill. Sept. 10 marks the kickoff of the three-day march on Washington. ....

Somali court amputates thieves' hands

(Associated Press) An eyewitness said that kitchen knives were used to amputate a hand off each of the screaming men on a large table ... as Islamic justice gains ground. Sharia

Muslim prayers to surround U.S. Capitol

By Julia Duin

On Sept. 25, Dar ul Islam, a mosque in Elizabeth, N.J., is slating a massive Friday "jummah" prayer event at the west front of the U.S. Capitol; on the very site that President Obama gave his inauguration speech not so long ago. This is not a joke. Click on this site and the strains of the sonorous Islamic call to prayer (which will be heard at the Capitol, I am guessing), will flow from your computer's loudspeakers. The mid-day summons to Allah will echo amongst Washington's most august monuments, the site says "for the sole purpose of prayer." And "the peace, beauty and solidarity of Islam will shine through the America's capital."

Solidarity? America's Muslims have such on-and-off mosque attendance statistics, it's impossible to get a realistic count of how many of them there are in this country. Methinks a lot of other religious groups aren't going to be happy about this jummah rally. "A Day of Islamic Unity," the event is called. Well, I guess if Louis Farrakhan could preach from the same spot during the Million Man March nearly 14 years ago, so can these folks. They're talking about reserving 500 buses and talking about 50,000 attendees, so this could be one big clump of folks who head for lunch at Union Station afterward.

The Star-Ledger in Newark came out with the story about all this on Thursday. The idea, according to organizers, is to celebrate Muslims already being an integral part of American society.

Well, if you can have giant menorahs on the White House lawn each December, you can have Muslims praying about one-quarter mile to the north. So if Islamic muezzins will chant out the "adhan," the call to worship, to folks kneeling on prayer rugs on the west front lawn, does that make the Capitol dome a minaret?

New York's tax-funded ex-terrorist

(Analyst's note: An absolutely must read item.)

by Phil Kerpen

VAN Jones resigned as White House green-jobs czar after the public got a look at his history of radical activism, including his time building the so-called Apollo Alliance -- a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around the green-jobs concept. But another, even more radical Jones (not related) is leading Apollo's New York state activities.

Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late '60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the '70s -- yet now he's a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded group.

Jones was a fugitive from justice for 11 years. His own account at his Web site says: "As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."

With Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers, Jones in 1969 co-founded the radical Weatherman, which orchestrated the violent "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago, and later undertook an anti-government bombing campaign. Three of its members died when a bomb they were constructing to attack Fort Dix accidentally detonated in Greenwich Village.

And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities -- saying as recently as 2004: "To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do."

Now, Jones is back to revolutionary organizing -- but with taxpayers footing the bill. He's the director of the Apollo Alliance's New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group.

Apollo unifies the three most powerful elements of the political left -- environmental groups, labor unions and street organizers like ACORN -- and points them toward a common goal that enriches all of them under the banner of "green jobs." (Van Jones was an Apollo board member until he joined the White House staff.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently credited Apollo with helping write the stimulus bill and getting it passed. Yet the stimulus' "green jobs" provisions funnel federal tax dollars to unions, green groups and community organizers -- that is, the organizations that make up Apollo.

Green jobs serve a political purpose, but not an economic one. The evidence from Spain and elsewhere is ample -- each green job created destroys more than two other jobs elsewhere in the economy.

Jeff Jones counts among his consulting clients (along with Apollo) a half-dozen state and local environmental groups and the Workforce Development Institute (WDI), a union-controlled organization ("developed in partnership with the NYS AFL-CIO," it says) that works with state and local government and universities.

WDI's mission is to support union influence on state and local governments. It gets state tax dollars to do it -- to the tune of $4.8 million in this year's Education, Labor and Family Assistance budget bill.

WDI is so tightly integrated with Apollo that it features a full page of Apollo information on its Web site (wdiny.org), which appears to be the primary Web presence of Apollo's New York branch. WDI encourages its members and program participants to attend Apollo Alliance events.

As a consultant to WDI, Jones is helping write the grant proposals for federal stimulus funds -- funds authorized in the bill Apollo helped write, presumably ensuring that taxpayer dollars end up in the hands of groups that share Apollo's political agenda.

Anyone should be entitled to spend his or her own money on political organizing, but Apollo and WDI are spending taxpayer dollars to organize a coalition of extreme environmentalists, labor unions and social-justice street organizers.

That's bad enough in itself, but to have the effort spearheaded by an unrepentant domestic terrorist is a true outrage.

U.S.: Al-Qaeda funding disrupted

By Ken Dilanian

WASHINGTON -- U.S.-led international efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda's sources of money have left the terrorist network in "the worst financial position they've been in three years," and the Obama administration is trying to put the same pressure on the Taliban, the Treasury Department's top terrorism fighter says. sharia

"We've got al-Qaeda under significant stress," Stuart Levey, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, tells USA TODAY. "The U.S. and its allies have applied a lot of pressure and successfully disrupted most of their facilitation networks."

The details and methods of that pressure are largely secret, but Treasury records show the department has designated hundreds of people and institutions as terrorists, seeking to bar them from the international banking system.

Under presidential order, Treasury freezes the assets of accused terrorism financiers and forbids Americans from doing business with them. Other governments, and private banks, often follow suit.

Since January, Treasury has taken those steps against Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani terrorist group responsible for the November attacks in Mumbai that killed 166; Abdul Haq, accused by Treasury of planning unrealized attacks against the 2008 Beijing Olympics; al-Qaeda in Iraq member Abu Khalaf; and several al-Qaeda supporters in Iran, including Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad bin ....

Intelligence company says terrorists forced to shift focus to easier targets

(Analyst's note: This is troubling report, especially for those who travel.)

AP - WASHINGTON - .... Al Qaeda is changing from a centralized organization with global goals to regional “franchises’’ with more parochial aims and strong grass-roots support, according to a report yesterday from STRATFOR, a Texas-based online intelligence publisher also known as Strategic Forecasting. These smaller cells get less training and less money, so they set their sights lower. ....

According to STRATFOR, the number of attacks on hotels has more than doubled since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when compared with the eight years before. Injuries and deaths caused by those attacks have increased six times over the same comparison period.

A hotel is the ultimate soft target for Islamic extremists: a fixed location, lots of human traffic, and shallow security perimeters. Hotels also attract many Westerners, giving militants high probabilities of killing or injuring large numbers of them in a single attack, according to the report.

Although hotel security guards try to monitor suspicious people and activities, extremists know the way around it is to check in as a guest, giving them full access to the grounds. As an example, the report said, the bombers who carried out the July 17 twin suicide attacks at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia, had registered two days earlier. ....

EMP A Weapon That Could Create A New Dark Age

(Analyst's note: This is a must read article.)

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

With hurricane season upon us once again, the recent anniversary of one of the most deadly and destructive in our nation’s history — the mega-storm called Katrina — was an occasion for remembering what can happen if we are unprepared.

Unfortunately, what was arguably the most important lesson of that hurricane has still not been addressed: the truly catastrophic vulnerability of all of the infrastructures upon which our society critically depends to interruptions of the electrical grid.

Worse yet, there are both looming man-induced and far more devastating natural means of precipitating such interruptions that we have not begun to address. Should these eventuate, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will look like, well, a day at the beach.

It is no exaggeration to say that the effect of one or the other of these assaults on our electrical grid could be to engender what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called “a world without America.”

As Katrina demonstrated, if the electricity goes off for any protracted period, a cascading ripple-effect takes down the means by which we communicate, get food and water, access financial resources, receive medical services, dispose of sewage and move from one location to another. The longer the time without electricity, the more difficult it is to bring such other infrastructures back on line.

If some of the roughly 300 transformers that are the backbone of our electrical grid are damaged or destroyed, the interruption to the electrical grid will not be brief. Today, we have few backups in place. These large and complex pieces of equipment are all produced overseas and it takes at least a year to take delivery of even one, let alone many.

William R. Graham, President Reagan’s science adviser, estimates that, if the electricity is off in large sections of America (far more than the relatively small area afflicted by Katrina) for as long as a year, the effect will not simply be on the quality of life here. He says as many as 9 in 10 of our men, women and children will die from starvation, disease and/or exposure.

Mr. Graham knows whereof he speaks. He has served for years as the chairman of a congressionally empaneled commission made up of many of the most knowledgeable scientists in the United States. Their job has been to examine in detail a phenomenon known as electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) that could be used by our enemies like Iran to effect such devastation.

The Graham panel has come to be known as the EMP Threat Commission and it has developed a particularly worrisome scenario. A nondescript freighter off one of our coasts could launch with no warning a relatively short-range ballistic missile. Were that missile armed with even a relatively small and crude nuclear weapon that was detonated in space high over the United States, it would unleash large quantities of gamma rays.

As those rays interact with the upper atmosphere, the effect would be to create an immense burst of electromagnetic energy. Any electrical or electronic device -- including the grid's transformers -- not shielded against this pulse would be, at best, taken temporarily off-line. More likely, they will be made permanently unusable.

It turns out, however, that other assaults on our grid might have a similar effect:

Radio-frequency weapons could be used to go after critical nodes of the electrical infrastructure in a more tactical way.

Cyber-warfare has increasingly been waged against the computers that control the grid and other vital parts of our economy's electronic underbelly. The perpetrators have not been positively identified, but those responsible for protecting against such cyber attacks suspect Chinese and Russian sources.

Then there is the mother of all threats to the electrical grid: a naturally occurring phenomenon known as geomagnetic solar events. These intense solar flares were observed by a British scientist named Richard Carrington back in 1859.

Scientists say we are overdue for another of these sorts of super solar storms. The destruction they could cause to the world's unprotected grids could run to the trillions of dollars to repair and the loss of countless lives.

The good news is that there are things that can be done to make our electrical infrastructure less vulnerable to these sorts of Katrina-on-steroids assaults. That is especially true now, as the stimulus package enacted earlier this year makes billions of dollars available to effect long-overdue and much-needed upgrades in the U.S. grid.

The question is: Will we take those steps in time, before hostile forces or further natural phenomena devastate this country?

This week a large number of Americans determined to take such preventive action now are convening in Niagara Falls, N.Y. -- a community that knows something about hydro-electric power and its importance for the country.

This meeting will be the first-of-its-kind on this subject, a large conference open to the public and aimed at educating the rest of us about these threats, and impelling the adoption of prophylactic measures.

Presentations will be made by Newt Gingrich and several key serving legislators, as well as many of the country's most knowledgeable scientists, security policy experts and industry leaders.

Organized by a new group, EMPAct America, this meeting represents the best opportunity to date to translate the warnings of the EMP Threat Commission into action. The time has come to do just that.

Audio - Next stop for 'evil' Gitmo detainees?

(Analyst's note: Troubling at best. Click on the title above to hear this well-done interview.)

Congressman Hoekstra questions Obama's refusal to allow fact-finding trip to Gitmo facility

Shariah Islamic Law in America and Europe: What the West Needs To Know

(Analyst's note: Click on the title above to view an absolutely must read - 6 minute video overview of Shariah Islamic law, narrated by our former Wall Street trader and Shariah analyst, Joy Brighton. Among other things you’ll learn that many on Wall Street AND al Qaeda are both pushing for Shariah finance. Shouldn’t that be a tip-off that something’s wrong? ....