The mayor should expect a few slashed tires and maybe a brick thrown through his window.

(Reuters) — The mayor of a Wisconsin town said on Tuesday a local labor council would have to reimburse the city up to $2,000 for a Labor Day parade if organizers exclude Republican lawmakers from attending.

The move in Wausau, Wisconsin, came after a county labor official said last week that Republican politicians were not welcome at the event due to their party’s stance against collective bargaining when state lawmakers voted to curtail it earlier this year.

Wausau Mayor Jim Tipple told Reuters on Tuesday that the decision to exclude elected Republicans “flies in the face of public policy.”

“This is not a political rally, it’s a parade, for God’s sake,” Tipple said, noting that taxpayer money is used by the city to pay for staging the event. Tipple’s office is nonpartisan, and he claims no affiliation with either political party.

He said the annual cost of the parade, including insurance, setting up and taking down a stage, and police personnel, runs anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 each year.

The Republican-backed collective bargaining limits made Wisconsin the center of a battle over union power this year.

The fight propelled the state to the forefront of a wider national struggle as Republicans who took control of many statehouses in last year’s midterm elections moved aggressively to shrink government and made reining in public unions a top priority.

“It should come as no surprise that organizers choose not to invite elected officials who have openly attacked workers’ rights or stood idly by while their political party fought to strip public workers of their right to collectively bargain,” Marathon County Labor Council President Randy Radtke said in announcing the decision.

Not buying it.

(ABC News) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” is out Tuesday, and it’s full of criticism and attacks on his Bush administration colleagues — from describing Condoleezza Rice as “tearfully admitting” he was right on the war in Iraq to revealing private conversations with George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq war.

He reserves much of his ire for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and now Powell and his longtime aide and chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, are attempting to set the record straight. In no uncertain terms. Cheney, Wilkerson told ABC News, “was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration” and “fears being tried as a war criminal.”

Before serving as Powell’s chief of staff while Powell was Secretary of State, Wilkerson worked in the first Bush administration as a special assistant to Powell, who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Cheney was serving as Secretary of Defense. He’s known Cheney for decades, but says now, “I simply don’t recognize Mr. Cheney anymore” and calling him a “very vindictive person.”

“I think he’s just trying to, one, assert himself so he’s not in some subsequent time period tried for war crimes and, second, so that he somehow vindicates himself because he feels like he needs vindication. That in itself tells you something about him,” Wilkerson told ABC News, explaining that Cheney may have “angst” because of receiving deferments instead of serving in the Vietnam War like Wilkerson and others in the administration.

“He’s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as ‘exploding heads all over Washington’ because that’s the way someone who’s decided he’s not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let’s get out in front of everybody, let’s act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him,” Wilkerson said alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.

(IPT) — The Mufti of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMZ], a central Asian affiliate of al-Qaida, has called on Pakistani scholars to declare war on the nation’s government. In published remarks to Pakistani scholars, the Mufti highlighted how suicide teenage bombers had empowered the movement but the militant scholars had yet to join the fight.

“Our small brothers and youth, his age is 16 . . . 15 years, he wraps his body and chest with this powder and blows himself up against the malignant cursed Pakistani army. So why don’t you Ulema [scholars] speak,” asked Abu Zar, Mufti of the Islamic Movement, in his meeting with a group of Pakistani scholars. “Five years ago we began this jihad, so O’ Ulema we ask Allah that you be with us, be with the truthful.”

“Every year more than one thousand Ulema [scholars] graduate from the Madrassas. But going to the battle, you will only find one Alim [scholar] that is good for the mujahidin,” he said. “That’s why I ask you, I hope from you to be with the mujahidin, to be with the fighters in combat. And urge your students in your universities, mosques and Madrassas.”

Keep reading…

Moonbat training camp.

(TheDC) — Back in the day, if students wanted easy credits, they signed up for underwater basket-weaving. Now they just need a political cause.

The University of California, Berkeley is offering students college credit to work for an expressly political organization fighting for affirmative action and immigrant rights.

This semester, the African Studies department at Berkeley is offering a two-credit class called “Fighting to Learn, Learning to Fight: Building the Movement for Public Education and Equality.”

The class is sponsored by BAMN — The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrants Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary — and advertises itself to students who want “to increase underrepresented minority enrollment, restore affirmative action and overturn Prop. 209 and pass CA DREAM Act 131 and a UC-Wide DREAM Act.”

According to its website, the class will focus on four main tenants of BAMN’s program: “the promise of public education and its role in American society, the centrality of fighting racism and the ‘New Jim Crow,’ the importance of building an independent, youth-led movement and our responsibility to fight for our own liberation as leaders.”

Resist we much!

(Breitbart) — Using his now familiar bumbling, bewildering and bombastic delivery, Al Sharpton premiered his brand new show on MSNBC, “Politics Nation” with an attack on the GOP presidential candidates saying they want to bring the country back to pre-1960’s segregationist times. He also promised that this was what his show was going to be about.

Considering Mr. Sharpton’s entire career up to this point has been defined by making loud accusations of racism through a bullhorn, we should not be surprised that this will be the content of his NBC News program. Lean Forward, indeed.

Try and contain your shock and amazement, but the judge was appointed by Bill Clinton.

(LifeNews) — In the latest skirmish in the battle between Kansas and Planned Parenthood, a judge has ordered the state to send taxpayer funds to the abortion business following complaints from it that it lost state public funding.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten ruled today that Kansas must fund the abortion business even though it did not cancel an contracts with the agency that were in effect at the time a new state provision went into place denying taxpayer funding via the family planning program to any agencies that do abortions.

Marten, in his ruling, also rejected the state’s request to only give Planned Parenthood taxpayer money on a monthly basis while its lawsuit moves forward rather than in a quarterly lump sum covering three months. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Western Missouri had complained earlier today that it would have to close its Hays, Kansas abortion referral clinic by Friday if the judge did not order the stand to fork over tax money to fund it.

“The court finds no injury to the defendants in maintaining the prior payment schedule, as they will be providing funding in a manner consistent with prior practice between the parties, and to an organization which has consistently provided satisfactory family planning services,” he wrote. “Defendants shall resume funding in accordance with this order immediately and shall continue such funding until further order of this court or the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit modifying this order.”

Keep reading…

Judicial activism strikes again.

(AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday struck down key provision of Texas’ new law requiring a doctor to perform a sonogram before an abortion, ruling that the measure violates the free speech rights of both doctors and patients.

The law — one of dozens of anti-abortion measures that advanced through state capitals across the United States this year — was set to take effect Thursday.

A New York-based reproductive rights group had sued to block the law.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said in his ruling that requiring a doctor to show women images from the sonogram and the sounds of the fetal heartbeat violates the First Amendment rights of doctors.

So in less than two years we can discriminate against Obama?

(Huffington Post) — President Obama said during a Tuesday radio show that hiring discrimination against the jobless “makes absolutely no sense” and that he supports legislation to ban the practice.

Sybil Wilkes, a co-host of the “Tom Joyner Morning Show,” asked the president about long-term unemployment and businesses that tell applicants, “If you’re unemployed, we don’t want to hear from you.”

Obama noted that the long-term unemployed have a tougher time landing jobs and said a stronger overall economy would make employers less choosy. “But we have seen instances in which employers are explicitly saying we don’t want to take a look at folks who’ve been unemployed,” the president said.

“Well, that makes absolutely no sense, and I know there’s legislation that I’m supportive of that says you cannot discriminate against folks because they’ve been unemployed, particularly when you’ve seen so many folks who, through no fault of their own, ended up being laid off because of the difficulty of this recession.”

Self-awareness minus zero.

(WaTi) — A fierce legal battle on free speech and family values is brewing about Internet filters used by school administrators to block students’ access to gay educational and advocacy websites.

Gay rights groups say school systems cannot impose blanket bans on gay-related informational and cultural websites on school computers, while values groups warn that the absence of the blocking filters could leave children exposed to sexually explicit material.

“There is no legitimate reason why any public school should be using an anti-LGBT filter,” said Joshua Block, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) Project and leader of the “Don’t Filter Me” campaign.

The ACLU has sent warning letters to many school districts, including Prince William County Public Schools in Virginia, advising them that Internet filters blocking nonsexual gay websites are unconstitutional and must be removed to “avoid any potential litigation.”

But David Cortman, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which defends traditional values organizations, counters that “school districts shouldn’t be bullied into exposing students to sexually explicit materials.”

Keep reading…

The families of those buried in mass graves in the Libyan desert beg to differ.

In a Thursday NPR interview, CNN’s openly-gay anchor Don Lemon lumped discrimination against gays and lesbians in with atrocities committed in Libya.

When asked why audiences should be interested in gay and lesbian issues, Lemon answered that “people are glued to what’s happening in Libya, because it affects us. Any atrocity that’s committed against one person affects us all and we are becoming more of one society, of a global society.”

Lemon was attending a four-day event by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, and was a keynote speaker there along with NBC’s Ann Curry.

Keep reading…

Toilet paper.

(TPJT) — Last week my PJM colleague Barry Rubin noted that Egyptian shiekh Dr. Salah Sultan had issued a fatwa earlier this month at a Muslim Brotherhood rally in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo authorizing that “every Muslim who meets a Zionist is entitled to kill him.” He also noted that I have written extensively on Sultan. Why so much attention paid to this individual, you may ask?

Because he used to be my neighbor.

That’s right. Prior to Sultan being denied U.S. citizenship and later being denied reentry into the United States because of his advocacy of violence against the U.S., he lived in my own hometown of Hilliard, Ohio, not a mile from my own house. In fact, he still owns his home and some of his family still reside here. His oldest son, Mohamed, is the president of the Ohio State Muslim Student Association.

When I wrote my first article about Salah Sultan in April 2006, noting his close association to Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi and his many public statements promoting anti-Jewish blood libels, I was attacked by my own hometown newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, as a racist, bigot and Islamophobe in an article written by religion reporter Felix Hoover.

Several prominent Islamic organizations and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio launched a smear campaign attacking me, including the Islamic school in Hilliard that had employed Sultan as their religious director, enlisting the Dispatch to defend the school and portraying Sultan as a peaceful moderate, not the racist, terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric that I claimed he was.

Two weeks after the Columbus Dispatch article was published defending Sultan, he appeared on Saudi Al-Risala TV where he defended designated Al-Qaeda terrorist and Osama bin Laden mentor Abdul Majid al-Zindani, and claimed that the U.S. was behind the 9/11 attacks in order to launch a war against Muslims. Even though I forwarded the information to the Dispatch editors, they never made mention of the “peaceful moderate” cleric’s statements.

(more…)

(Politico) — Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) says that a new Pew Research Study shows the need for continued congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, after the poll found 21 percent of Muslims have observed support for extremism in their communities.

“I don’t rely on polls, but the fact that 21 percent have seen extremism in their communities reinforces the need for the hearings,” King told POLITICO. . . .

King’s office told POLITICO that he intends to hold further hearings over the next year, but none have yet been scheduled.

However, he said he was alarmed at the fact that only 43 percent of those surveyed viewed the country’s ongoing anti-terrorist efforts as “sincere.”

“I’ve always said that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are good Americans [but] I’m concerned that only 43 percent of Muslims see anti-terrorism programs are ‘sincere’. I don’t know what world they’re living in. . . it’s very disappointing,” King said.

Keep reading…

He better hope not or he’s going to lose badly.

(The Hill) — President Obama said Tuesday that he expects continued “resistance” from Republicans that will turn the months leading up to the next election in 2012 into a struggle.

“This next election very well may end up being a referendum on whose vision of America is better,” Obama said in a radio interview with “The Tom Joyner Show.”

Obama said that his strategy, if faced with continued resistance in Congress, would be to mobilize the American people by “going on the road and talking to folks” directly in order to best communicate his plans and his vision.

“If [the American people] see one side not willing to work with the other to move the country forward, then that’s what elections are all about,” Obama said.

“This [resistance] has been a problem for two and a half years now,” he said. Obama named several policies that his administration has been able to push through despite Republican opposition, including the healthcare reform bill, more money for the Pell Grant program and attempts “to fix the financial system.”

“These folks so far have not been very responsive to public opinion . . . which is why they are very unpopular right now,” Obama said, without specifically naming Republicans in Congress.

Time for this troll to crawl back under his bridge.

Markos Moulitsas: 9/11 was a “political opportunity” not a disaster for Republicans. . . “because they were able to take that and use it to stifle their domestic critics, push through a radical agenda, try to silence anybody who opposed him. It essentially won him another term in 2004 based on 9/11 because he wasn’t popular on any other matter. So, for Republicans, even today, 9/11 is the gift that keeps on giving. The fact that 3,000 people died is incidental to them. They don’t care about that. What was there was a political opportunity and he took it.”

Via RCP

JOS, Nigeria, August 28 (CDN) — Muslim extremists with the alleged help of Nigerian army personnel killed 24 Christians this month in central Nigeria’s Plateau state, area sources said.

The attacks started Aug. 11 in Ratsa Foron village, where assaults that day and on Aug. 15 left six Christians dead; also on Aug. 15 in Heipang village, Muslim extremists killed nine members of one Christian family along with another Christian, the sources said.

“They were in army uniform. I even know some of them; they came along with the Muslims to attack us,” said a tearful Nnaji John, who lost her family in the attack. “I can swear to God Almighty that the attack was carried out with the support of the soldiers; I saw them.”

Attacks on Aug. 21 in Kwi, Loton, and Jwol villages killed six more Christians, said the sources, who added that Nigerian army soldiers participated in the assaults or at least accompanied the assailants.

In the community of Chwelnyap in Jos on Aug. 14, Muslim extremists killed two Christians and injured one woman, the area sources said.

Chollom Gyangof Chwelnyap confirmed that the Aug. 14 attack on his neighborhood was carried out with the support or tacit approval of Muslims in the army’s Special Task Force (STF), a unit designed to stop sectarian attacks.

“The attackers were the very soldiers deployed to the area to ensure protection of the people,” Gyang said. “One of the victims received a call from the STF men in the area to come out and assist, only to get gunned down by them as he stepped out from his house.”

Gyang said area residents found identification cards of Muslim soldiers, berets and other pieces of their uniforms in the villages that were attacked.

Keep reading…

There’s a reason the truthers love this guy.

(The Hill) — The U.S. hasn’t learned much in the 10 years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) argued Tuesday.

Paul, the libertarian-minded Republican presidential candidate, voiced criticism of U.S. foreign policy just days before the tenth anniversary of the coordinated terrorist attacks that resulted in almost 3,000 deaths.

“I don’t think we’ve learned a whole lot because our foreign policy hasn’t changed,” Paul told a guest host on Lou Dobbs’s radio show.

Paul’s long been a critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq undertaken in the years following the attacks. Republican President George W. Bush initiated those wars, which have extended into President Obama’s term. Obama has sought to set timetables for withdrawal from moth engagements.

He cited the work of two University of Chicago professors, Robert Pape and James Feldman, who produced research arguing that U.S. occupation of foreign lands are the biggest driver of terrorist attacks (rather than religious extremism).

“The statistics are overwhelming that this is the case,” the Texas congressman argued. “They also show that when you leave, suicide and terrorist attacks against us are dramatically diminished.”

Bill Nye “The Propaganda Guy” would be more appropriate.

(CBS News) — We tend to avoid outright politics here on SmartPlanet, but Bill Nye — known as “The Science Guy” after his popular television show on PBS — recently visited the Fox Business channel’s Freedom Watch to explain to host Charles Payne and his viewers the intricacies of drawing a line between Irene’s destruction and climate change as a whole.

The conversation, while expectedly argumentative at times, was interesting if only because Nye took great pains to simplify the science in a way that’s understandable to the layman.

For example, his first response to Payne’s question of whether Irene was proof of global warming:

I don’t think the word “proof” is what you’re looking for. “Evidence,” or “a result of”? Yeah. Yeah. Now here’s what the people will tell you who run these climate models. Now everybody, the word “model” in this usage is a computer program, a very sophisticated computer program. So you take data from satellites about the thickness of clouds and the extent of cloud cover over the sea. You take data about the temperature of the sea surface. You take data about the existing weather in let’s say, North America or the Gulf of Mexico, as the storm moves into it, then you compute how much rain fell out of it, how much energy must have been put into it to create that much rain and it takes many months to analyze an event like Irene. Now, climate colleagues that I have will tell you that they cannot tell you today that Irene is evidence or a result of climate change, but check in with them in about March, next year, after they have a few months to collect all these millions and millions of data from weather services and satellites and compile them and run a climate model and show that Irene was a result of the world having more energy in its atmosphere.

Keep reading…

One of the EPA rules alone could cost the U.S. economy up to $90 billion, and these are the administration’s numbers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says his administration is considering seven new government regulations that would cost the economy more than $1 billion each a year, a tally Republicans will pounce on to argue that Congress needs the power to approve costly government rules.

In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Obama lists four proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules and three Department of Transportation rules estimated to cost in excess of $1 billion. One of the proposed EPA rules — an update to the health-based standard for smog — is estimated to cost the economy between $19 billion and $90 billion.

The letter, dated Tuesday, comes as the Republican-controlled House prepares to consider legislation that would require congressional approval for any new regulations that would impose a significant cost on industries.

The four environmental regulations, which target air pollution and coal residue primarily from coal-fired power plants, have already been attacked by House Republicans, who have said they would kill jobs and harm the economy.

A federal court ordered the Obama administration to propose two of the four environmental rules.

And while the regulations would be expensive to comply with, EPA officials say they will save billions of dollars in avoided health care costs each year by reducing asthma and other illnesses, such as cancer. In some cases, the cost savings are greater than the upfront expense, according to EPA figures.

Obama’s letter was in response to a Boehner request last week for more details from the president on the proposed costs of the most expensive regulations under consideration by his administration. Obama’s administration has identified 219 proposed regulations this year with a cost to the economy of more than $100 million.