Blog Heap of Links for the day 26 April 2012

...the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House. The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus. The memo is crystal clear on that point. ...

President Obama’s new campaign pitch is that Americans should have his back. He’s released posters via his campaign for African Americans for Obama; campaign email after campaign email has asked Americans to get Obama’s back. ... We shouldn’t have Obama’s back because he hasn’t had ours. ... And there’s another implication to the “get my back” routine – the notion that somebody has to protect Obama from evil people who want to harm him.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) released this video today. In the video, an Obama EPA official promises to “crucify” potential foes of the EPA who disagree with the agency’s war on fossil fuel.

Breitbart News has discovered a letter sent by Obama to [radical Critical Race Theory professor Derrick] Bell in February 1995 in which Obama asks Bell to review--and to blurb--an early version of Obama’s autobiography, then entitled Dreams of My Father.

The sentence came naturally. I assume it was unplanned. But it carried the weight of a freight train. “You know when Castro took power, none of us knew he was a Communist”.

We sat stunned. He continued, “Yes, we all thought he was a patriot, a nationalist. Before the revolution he didn’t sound like a radical.”

The comparison at this point was easy, and I interjected, “You mean just like Barack Obama?”

He responded; “Yes, just like Barack Obama.”

Iran is recruiting a hacker army to target the U.S. power grid, water systems and other vital infrastructure for cyberattack in a future confrontation with the United States, security specialists will warn Congress Thursday. [War News Updates editor comments:] Iran is not the only country preparing for cyberwar against the U.S. .... off hand I can thnk of Russia, China, North Korea, etc...

FreeMarketAmerica released the video in response to Earth Day, which “fizzled badly” this year, in part because of the continued revelations regarding the hysteria rhetoric of Gaia catastrophists, and in part, I’m guessing, because people have other things to worry about, such as how to scrape together the money to pay for their mortgages, pay off their student loans, buy gas for their climate-destroying automobiles and oh my God will you freaking people please shut up? Because it went viral, I saw no need of posting it here . . . until Michelle Malkin and others were notified by the creators that YouTube has suspended their account ... Whether this was a matter that YouTube took up on its own volition, or whether it succumbed to lefty pressure is impossible to know without more information. Until I’m presented with evidence that this was an internal decision generated without any outside pressure, I’m inclined to give YouTube the benefit of the doubt.

Breitbart News has discovered previously unknown handwritten notes from Elena Kagan to radical professor Derrick Bell, sent to Bell as Kagan worked on his seminal 1985 article on Critical Race Theory in the Harvard Law Review

On Sunday night Huntsman equated being dis-invited by the Republican Party from a Florida fundraiser in March after he floated the idea of a third party to "what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script," according to political blog BuzzFeed. On Monday, the former Utah governor, who served as U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama, blamed blogs for taking a sentence out of context but repeated the sentiment.

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

“It’s a deterrent factor,” Armendariz said, explaining that the EPA is following the Romans’ philosophy for subjugating conquered villages.

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

“It’s a deterrent factor,” Armendariz said, explaining that the EPA is following the Romans’ philosophy for subjugating conquered villages.

Lovelace had a talent for popularizing sexual attitudes and for being at the center of the storm when change was occurring. Never a deliberate trendsetter, she nonetheless had an impact on what became normal in our bedrooms. She’s also one of the most misunderstood icons of the 1970s.

At the heart of this great argument lies the assumption on the part of the anti-religion camp that this is a battle between reason and obscurantism, between rationality on the one hand and knuckle-dragging ignorance and prejudice on the other. And of course, that anti-religion camp is on the side of reason, and thus of intelligence, science, progress and freedom; whereas religious believers would undo the Enlightenment and take us all back to the dark ages of credulity, superstition and the shackling of the mind.

Now add to that three more potentially dangerous faults in the Bellingham Basin, a tectonically active area along the coast of Washington, near the Canadian border. A team of researchers has discovered active tectonic faults in this region nearly 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of any previously known faults. ... capable of triggering magnitude-6.0 to -6.5 earthquakes ... "...if they ruptured again along their entire length, some of that rupture would be out in the water, and there might be a tsunami hazard related to that...."

Environmentalists have persuaded the Department of the Interior to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. These dams not only provide clean, green energy to the Klamath community, they sustain area ranches and farms with continual access to water. An environmentalist’s dream, right? But the fish! We must always put fish ahead of people!

...starved to death after embarking on a spiritual diet that required her to stop eating or drinking and live off sunlight alone. ... unnamed Swiss woman in her fifties decided to follow the radical fast in 2010 after viewing an Austrian documentary about an Indian guru who claims to have lived this way for 70 years. ...

There are quite a few hasty methods of illegal restraint, and zip ties are a method that’s available to any would-be kidnapper. A few of the other methods seen are duct tape, rope and phone cord, but with a little education you’ll see that all of these methods can easily be defeated. [Several articles, videos]