World will act if Gaddafi violence continues: NATO

on March 8th, 2011

The world will not allow the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to continue attacking anti-government forces without trying to stop him, NATO’s secretary general has said.

NATO has so far played a cautious role in the events in Libya, asking its generals to draw up a plan for possible military action in the country, but insisting that it would only use them if given the explicit backing of the UN Security Council.

“The international community monitors the situation closely, and if Gaddafi and his military continue to attack the Libyan population systematically, I can’t imagine the international community and UN standing idly by,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday.

The fledgling Libyan opposition movement has already called for world powers to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent air forces loyal to Gaddafi from launching bombing raids against them.

Rasmussen called for caution, saying that such an operation would require “a wide range of military assets”. The last time NATO operated a no-fly campaign, over Kosovo in 1999, it flew more than 38,000 sorties in 78 days.

At the same time, “I assume that any NATO operation would take place in accordance with, and pursuant to, a UN mandate, and I take note of the fact that the current UN mandate doesn’t authorise the use of armed force”, he said.

The US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, told reporters on a conference call a no-fly zone would have a “limited effect” on countering low flying helicopters used by Gaddafi’s forces. He added that Libyan air activities have decreased since last week.

“The overall air activity has not been the deciding factor in the ongoing unrest,” Daalder said. “Other things are really determining what’s happening on the ground.”

NATO was stepping up its surveillance of events in Libya with AWACS aircraft, increasing operations from 10 hours daily to 24 hours to get a “better picture of whats really going on in this part of the world”, Daalder said.

NATO defence ministers are due to meet in Brussels Thursday and Friday. The meeting was planned months ago to debate reform issues, but is now expected to discuss the Libyan situation.

“They will consider how NATO can do more to help our partners in North Africa and the wider Middle East during this period of transition – if they so wish,” Rasmussen said.

Opposition: Gadhafi Working On Deal To Step Down

The leaders of Libya’s uprising say they are considering a conditional offer from Muammar Gaddafi to step down, sources have told Al Jazeera.

Libyan state television on Tuesday denied reports that the Libyan leader tried to strike a deal with opposition forces seeking his removal. An official from the Libyan foreign ministry described the reports as “absolute nonsense”.

However, a spokesman for the opposition National Council in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi confirmed that a representative had sought to negotiate Gaddafi’s exit.

Gaddafi was reported to have sent a representative to Benghazi on Sunday night to discuss a conditional plan to step down, Al Jazeera learned. The offer was provided on the condition that Gaddafi would be able to keep his assets and avoid prosecution.

The Libyan leader is said to be willing to step down in return for dropping war crimes charges against him and guaranteeing a safe exit for him and his family. He also reportedly wants guarantees from the UN that he will be allowed to keep his money.

Abdel Jalil Mustapha, the head of the opposition National Council, rejected the idea until Gaddafi actually leaves but said the council “may” consider a deal after his exit.

“We rejected this (deal). We are not negotiating with someone who spilled Libyan blood and continues to do so. Why would we trust the guy today?” Mustafa Gheriani, a media officer for the council said.
On Monday evening, a leading member of the government appealed to rebel leaders for dialogue, another sign that Gaddafi may be ready to compromise with opponents challenging his rule.

Jadallah Azous Al-Talhi, a Libyan prime minister in the 1980s, appeared on state television on Monday reading an address to elders in Benghazi, asking them to “give a chance to national dialogue to resolve this crisis, to help stop the bloodshed, and not give a chance to foreigners to come and capture our country again”.

The appeal did not detail any concessions that Gaddafi’s administration would be prepared to make. The rebels said they will settle for nothing less than an end to Gaddafi’s four decades in power.
The fact that Al-Talhi’s appeal was broadcast on tightly-controlled state television indicated that it was officially endorsed.

Until now Gaddafi and his entourage have shown little public appetite for dialogue, describing the rebels as armed youths under the influence of drugs who have been manipulated by al-Qaeda and foreign powers.
Tripoli last week appointed an envoy to take humanitarian aid to Benghazi but it was not clear if the envoy had a mandate to negotiate with the rebels.

Security forces loyal to Gaddafi have strengthened their military position in the last few days, squeezing rebel-held towns in the west and checking the advance of rebel militias westwards towards the capital, Tripoli.

There has also been fierce fighting in the eastern city of Misurata, located between Tripoli and Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte, with reports of at least 18 people killed.

Families residing in Ras Lanuf began heading eastward in an apparent attempt to flee the fighting in that strategic port town, our correspondent there said. Several people were reported to have been killed in battles a day earlier, including a family trying to flee the fighting.

Gaddafi supporters moved eastward on Tuesday in an effort to push the rebels back and recapture fallen towns, with reports emerging that they have taken the central Libyan town of Bin Jawad.

Valerie Amos, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, said in a statement that the Benghazi Red Crescent reported that Misurata was also under attack by government forces again.

“Humanitarian organisations need urgent access now,” she said. “People are injured and dying and need help immediately.”

Witnesses also told Al Jazeera that Az-Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, was under heavy attack by government forces.

For now, the Gaddafi government has managed to halt the rebel advance that began last week when fighters ventured beyond the opposition-controlled eastern half of the country.

The rebel forces say they will be outgunned if the government continues to unleash its air attacks on them and are pleading for the international community to impose a no-fly zone to prevent this.

“We don’t want a foreign military intervention, but we do want a no-fly zone,” rebel fighter Ali Suleiman told AP.

“We are all waiting for one,” he said. The rebels can take on “the rockets and the tanks, but not Gaddafi’s air force”.

The US president said on Monday that the US and its NATO allies were still considering a military response to the violence even as Britain and France were drafting a UN resolution that would establish a no-fly zone.
Barack Obama said the US will stand with the Libyan people as they face “unacceptable” violence. He also sent a strong message to Gaddafi, saying he and his supporters will be held responsible for the violence there.

William Hague, the UK foreign minister, said Britain is “working closely with partners on a contingency basis on elements of a resolution on a no-fly zone”.

However, a British diplomat at the UN clarified that the draft resolution is being prepared in case it is needed but no decision has been made to introduce it at the Security Council.

The six US-allied Gulf Arab nations on Monday said they back a UN-enforced no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians. The Gulf states also condemned the killings by pro-government forces in Libya as “massacres”.

Abdul Rahman Hamad al-Attiyah, the secretary general of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), said “the massacres committed by the regime” in Libya against its own citizens amount to “crimes against humanity”.
The protection of Libyan citizens is an “absolute priority,” al-Attiyah said. He was speaking late Monday at a meeting of the oil-rich group in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.

Hundreds if not thousands of people have died since Libya’s uprising began on February 14 in an effort to end Gaddafi’s more than 41-year rule, although tight restrictions on media make it near impossible to get an accurate number.

More than 200,000 people have fled the country, most of them foreign workers. The exodus is creating a humanitarian crisis across the border with Tunisia.
(Source: Al Jazeera)

It was 40 Years Ago Today…

Posted on Mar 8, 2011 12:54 pm
By Alex Belth

A few months before I was born, two previously undefeated boxers, Muhammad Ali (31-0)and Joe Frazier (26-0) fought for the heavyweight title in the so-called “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden. That was forty years ago today. It was not their greatest fight–that would be the Thrilla in Manila–but it was possibly the biggest spectacle in boxing history.
Here is our man John Schulian, writing for the Library of America’s website:

The two of them had been friends before their violent Garden party. When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship in 1967 for refusing induction into the military and found himself wandering the college lecture circuit, Frazier loaned him money. It was a fitting gesture, for Frazier now wore the crown that had been Ali’s. But he vowed he would give the deposed champ a chance to win it back, and when Ali was allowed to return to the ring in 1970, Frazier did something that isn’t standard practice in the cutthroat world of boxing. He kept his word.

They would each make $2.5 million and fight in front of a Garden crowd that overflowed with celebrities. Burt Lancaster, Sinatra’s co-star in From Here to Eternity, did the radio commentary. But the only thing that really mattered was the hatred that had erupted when Ali called Frazier an Uncle Tom and a tool of good-old-boy sheriffs and Ku Klux Klansmen. In a lifetime filled with kindness as well as greatness, it was a low moment for Ali. He knew full well that Frazier, the thirteenth child born to a one-armed North Carolina sharecropper, had traveled a far harder road than he had. By comparison, Ali was a child of privilege, raised in relative comfort in Louisville, his boxing career bankrolled by local white businessmen. But he got away with it because he was handsome, charming, funny, all the things Frazier was not.

And here’s Mark Kram from his book “Ghosts of Manila”:

Ali was the first in the ring, in a red velvet robe with matching trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. He glided in a circle to a crush of sound, a strand of blown grass. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands–punch, size, speed, intelligence, command, and imagination–he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find or a Mozart who failed to die too early. If that is an overstatement, disfiguring the finer arts by association with a brute game, consider the mudslide of purple that attaches to his creative lessers in other fields, past and present; Ali was physical art, belonged alone in a museum of his own. I was extremely fond of him, of his work, of the decent side of his nature, and jaundiced on his cultish servility, his termopolitical combustions that tried to twist adversaries into grotesque shapes. It never worked, excerpt perhaps on Liston, who came to think that he was clinically insane. It did work on himself, shaped the fear for his face and general well-being into a positive force, a psychological war dance that blew up the dam and released his flood of talent. The trouble was that, like Kandinsky’s doubled-sided painting of chaos and calm, it became increasingly difficult for him to find his way back from one side to the other.

In a green and gold brocade robe with matching trunks, Joe Frazier almost seemed insectile next to Ali in the ring, and he was made more so as Ali waltzed by him, bumped him and said: “Chum!” Far from that slur, Joe was a gladiator right smack to the root conjurings of the title, to the clank of armor he seemed to emit. Work within his perimeter, and you courted what fighters used to call “the black spot,” the flash knockout. He was a figher that could be hit with abandon, but if you didn’t get him out of there his drilling aggression, his marked taste for pursuit and threshing-blade punches could overwhelm you; as one military enthusiast in his camp siad, “like the Wehrmacht crossing into Russia.” I was drawn to the honesty of his work, the joy he derived from inexorable assault, yet had a cool neutrality to his presence. In truth, with a jewel in each hand, i didn’t want to part with either of them, thus making me pitifully objective, a captial sinner in the most subjective and impressionistic of all athletic conflicts.

Frazier won the fight, of course, in front of a celebrity-studded crowd. Dali, Elvis, Woody and the Beatles were there. Burt Lancaster did the color for the closed-circut broadcast and Frank Sinatra was there taking pictures for Life Magazine.

In the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, Richard Hoffer has a nice little piece on the fight:

While it promised sufficient sporting spectacle and mystery (could Ali reclaim the grace of his youth and now, nearing 30, reclaim the title that many thought was still rightfully his?), the fight also operated as a social ballot box. Ali, who’d been a sort of political prisoner, commanded the support of every freethinker in the country and beyond, striking his revolutionary stance. In addition, he somehow cast a fight between two black men as a racial referendum, a puzzled and comically outraged Frazier now a stand-in for the status quo and the white man as well.
All this was accomplished with the primitive promotional platforms at hand: newspapers, radio and talk shows. The intrigue was still enough to make the fight the hottest ticket of a lifetime, possibly the most glamour-struck event ever. The excitement was overwhelming, even far beyond the Garden, but can you imagine what it might have been like if Ali, the ultimate pitchman, had, say, a Facebook page? If we’re so eager to exploit celebrity that a semifamous athlete like Chad Ochocinco has his own reality show, then you can be certain Ali would have had his own network long before Oprah.

Then again, how could our digital applications improve upon the analog beauty of their struggles that night, an eye-popping brutality that Frazier narrowly won, a contest of such evenly matched wills, such equal desperation that the words Ali-Frazier have come to signify a kind of ruinous self-sacrifice? The old ways are not necessarily the best, but once a generation, anyway, they’re good enough.

Ali taunted and humilated Frazer time and again in the press and Frazier has never forgiven him for it. From Bill Nack’s great 1996 piece on Smokin’ Joe:

He has known for years of Frazier’s anger and bitterness toward him, but he knows nothing of the venom that coursed through Frazier’s recent autobiography, Smokin’ Joe. Of Ali, Frazier wrote, “Truth is, I’d like to rumble with that sucker again—beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus…. Now people ask me if I feel bad for him, now that things aren’t going so well for him. Nope. I don’t. Fact is, I don’t give a damn. They want me to love him, but I’ll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Lord chooses to take him.”

Nor does Ali know what Frazier said after watching him, with his trembling arm, light the Olympic flame: “It would have been a good thing if he would have lit the torch and fallen in. If I had the chance, I would have pushed him in.”

Nor does Ali know of Frazier’s rambling diatribe against him at a July 30 press conference in Atlanta, where Frazier attacked the choice of Ali, the Olympic light heavyweight gold medalist in 1960 and a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, as the final bearer of the torch. He called Ali a “dodge drafter,” implied that Ali was a racist (“He didn’t like his white brothers,” said Frazier) and suggested that he himself—also an Olympic champion, as a heavyweight, in 1964—would have made a better choice to light the flame: “Why not? I’m a good American…. A champion is more than making noise. I could have run up there. I’m in shape.

And while Frazier asserts at one turn that he sees “the hand of the Lord” in Ali’s Parkinson’s syndrome (a set of symptoms that include tremors and a masklike face), he also takes an eerily mean-spirited pride in the role he believes he played in causing Ali’s condition. Indeed, the Parkinson’s most likely traces to the repealed blows Ali took to the head as a boxer—traumas that ravaged the colony of dopamine-producing cells in his brain—and no man struck Ali’s head harder and more repeatedly than Frazier.

“He’s got Joe Frazier-itis,” Frazier said of Ali one day recently, flexing his left arm. “He’s got left-hook-itis.”

Check out this cool photo gallery of “The Fight of the Century” over at Life.com.

Iran Security Forces fire teargas at opposition supporters

Rafsanjani loses key post


In another development Ayatollah Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, Loses Key Post in Iranian Religious Assembly.
A powerful Iranian clerical body appointed a candidate backed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as its new chairman on Tuesday to replace the former president Rafsanjani, state media reported, strengthening the hand of hardliners seeking to silence dissent.

While the maneuver is unlikely to have a far-reaching practical effect, it will nonetheless bolster those around Ahmadinejad who have moved persistently and forcefully to quash opposition that surfaced in huge demonstrations after disputed presidential elections in 2009.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a former president and Parliament speaker, was widely perceived as having tilted toward Mir Hussein Moussavi, a challenger to Mr. Ahmadinejad, in the 2009 vote. Within Iran’s complex and secretive elite, Rafsanjani’s relationship with Ahmadinejad remains strained.

The setback for Mr. Rafsanjani came in a vote for the leadership of the Assembly of Experts, a body of religious scholars entrusted with monitoring the country’s supreme leader and choosing a successor at his death, offering it potentially wide power to mold Iran’s political direction.

Iranian government owned Press TV said 63 members of the 86-member assembly voted in favor of Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, 80, to replace Rafsanjani.

Reuters, NYT

Drive to recall Wisconsin GOP senators gaining steam

Posted on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 by Paddy

As always, Greg has his ear to the ground with the good news.

So how’s the drive to recall Wisconsin GOP state senators going? If these new numbers the Wisconsin Democratic Party shares with me are accurate, it’s already exceeding expectations in a big way.

Graeme Zielinski, a spokesman for the party, tells me that activists working on the recall push already collected over the weekend 15 percent of the total necessary signatures needed to force recalls in all eight of the GOP districts Dems are targeting. He says that the party — which is helping to coordinate and keeping track of outside efforts to gather signatures — set itself a goal of 10,000 signatures for the weekend, and has already exceeded it by 35 percent.

Zielinski also claims that recall forces over the weekend put more than 2,000 volunteers on the street to collect signatures. He also says volunteers have collected 26 percent of the signatures required in one district, and 20 percent in another, though he wouldn’t say which ones, because Dems want GOP senators to fret that they are the ones in question.

If these numbers are close to accurate, they are a surprising sign of the power of the grassroots energy uncorked by Scott Walker’s union-busting proposals. Under Wisconsin law, a recall requires a number of signatures totaling 25 percent of the number that voted in the last gubernatorial election.

The next Republican gambit: nixing college voters

It has been true for at least a generation that the Republican party mostly appeals to a segment of the American population that is declining in numbers, relative to the entire population: white, frequent (Christian) churchgoers over 50. So what do you do when your party’s core is shrinking? You do what you can to shrink the other side.

Republicans have been very clever about pumping up the excitement of their shrinking base, from the Nixon-era “southern strategy” to Lee Atwater’s “new Southern strategy” for Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. in the 1980s, when Republicans used the specter of “welfare queens” and Willie Horton to frighten white voters to the polls …

Read this: The disappearing Republican voter

Atwater tutee Karl Rove boasted that the campaign drew out some 4 million new evangelical voters for George W. Bush in 2000 by spooking them about gays and abortion (and by promising constitutional amendments that never materialized.) And they successfully used the fear of 9/11-style terrorism and the ghosts of Vietnam to help get Bush re-elected in 2004.

Thos strategies proved unsuccessful against Bill Clinton, and against Barack Obama, both of whom were elected in the aftermath of recessions under Republican presidents. But in 2010, when as normally happens in midterms, the Democratic base – younger voters, Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, formed a smaller share of the electorate, and disgruntled liberal voters turned out in smaller numbers, while union households split their votes, the GOP seized the day. Organizations like Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-funded groups (and non-Koch Astroturf outfits like Rick Scott’s Conservatives for Patients Rights) worked to scare the hell out of white seniors and upper middle class voters on healthcare.

They ironically reaped the outrage from the Bush bailout of Wall Street” to create the tea party movement, which also trades on soto voce racial/ethnic issues like immigration (which the Bushies once thought could be used to build a larger GOP base, before a Western backlash killed those plans) conspiracy theories over Barack Obama’s birthplace and even the fictional march of Sharia law. The tea party strategy paid dividends for Republicans in 2010 (though now, elected Republicans are struggling to live with the consequences.)
With 2012 looming, and voter anger at government decreasing according to the polls, Republicans are adjusting their strategy. Rather than focusing mostly on ginning up white voters, including on social issues (Republicans have been surprisingly muted on things like DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal) … and with healthcare losing altitude as a potent election issue - they’re seeking ways to diminish the impact of the Democratic coalition at the polls.

Having already taken down ACORN, which had been a key voter registration and mobilization vehicle among low income minority voters, newly elected Republican governors and state houses went after unions. That strategy seems to be backfiring horribly, but there’s no mistaking its purpose: hobbling the biggest contributor of money and manpower to Democratic campaigns.

And just as the Karl Rove crowd used ballot initiatives opposing gay marriage to help George Bush in 2004, Republicans are returning to such initiatives to open up a new front in 2012: they’re going after the college kids.

From today’s Washington Post:

New Hampshire’s new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They’re “foolish,” Speaker William O’Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group.

“Voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do,” he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack “life experience,” and “they just vote their feelings.”

New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state – and effectively keep some from voting at all.

One bill would permit students to vote in their college towns only if they or their parents had previously established permanent residency there – requiring all others to vote in the states or other New Hampshire towns they come from. Another bill would end Election Day registration, which O’Brien said unleashes swarms of students on polling places, creating opportunities for fraud.

The measures in New Hampshire are among dozens of voting-related bills being pushed by newly empowered Republican state lawmakers across the country – prompting partisan clashes akin to those already roiling in some states over GOP moves to curb union power.
Backers of the voting measures say they would bring fairness and restore confidence in a voting system vulnerable to fraud. Many states, for instance, do not require identification to vote. Measures being proposed in 32 states would add an ID requirement or proof of citizenship, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“I want to know when I walk into the poll that they know I am who I say I am and that nobody else has said that they are me,” said North Carolina state Rep. Ric Killian (R), who is preparing to introduce legislation that would require voters to show a photo ID at the polls.

Democrats charge that the real goal, as with anti-union measures in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, is simply to deflate the power of core Democratic voting blocs – in this case young people and minorities. For all the allegations of voter fraud, Democrats and voting rights groups say, there is scant evidence to show that it is a problem.

“It’s a war on voting,” said Thomas Bates, vice president of Rock the Vote, a youth voter- registration group mounting a campaign to fight the array of state measures. “We’d like to be advocating for a 21st-century voting system, but here we are fighting against efforts to turn it back to the 19th century.”

Democrats appear to be ready for it – and it’s no coincidence that these battles will be fought in states that went to Obama in 2008, including Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Rep. Alcee Hastings Hit with Sexual Harrassment Lawsuit

 

 

 

NEDRA PICKLER,Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former aide to Rep. Alcee Hastings filed a lawsuit Monday claiming he repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances and threatened her position when she refused him, allegations the congressman denied as "ludicrous."

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch is representing Winsome Packer in her sexual harassment claim against Hastings, a Florida Democrat, and the Helsinki Commission that he chaired. Packer served as the commission's staff representative in Vienna and said much of the harassment occurred when Hastings was in Europe on business for the commission, which advises on U.S. policy about security, human rights and other issues involving Europe.

Packer's suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, said Hastings kept asking to stay at her apartment or get her to visit his hotel room, hugging her and making sexual comments including asking her what kind of underwear she was wearing.

Hastings, a 74-year-old serving his 10th term in the House, issued a written statement denying Packer's claims.

"I have never sexually harassed anyone," the statement said. "In fact, I am insulted that these ludicrous allegations are being made against me. ... I will win this lawsuit."

New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith, the current chairman of the commission, said Packer was told under Hastings leadership that laws protecting congressional workers do not apply to commission staffers like her.

"I absolutely will insist that all of the current protections afforded to every other congressional employee, in like manner, apply to the people on the Helsinki Commission," Smith said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I have a zero tolerance policy (toward sexual harassment) in my own office and now as chairman of the Helsinki Commission as well."

Packer had been a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, but lost her job after Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 election. Her suit claimed that Hastings, who knew her through a friend of hers who worked in his office, invited her to apply to the commission but soon after her hiring made it clear he wanted a personal relationship.

Packer said she complained to her supervisors in Washington, the commission's counsel and aides to Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the commission's co-chairman. Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitski said she couldn't comment on the case. Packer also complained to the House Ethics Committee. The panel did not act on her complaint, and she resigned as, she said, she developed stress-related health problems.

"What happened to me was no secret," Packer said at a news conference at Judicial Watch headquarters. "I was let down by the commission and the Congress."
___
Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

VIDEO: NPR Execs Love Radical Islamists, Hate Conservatives/Tea Party

Undercover video maker James O'Keefe has struck again. This time he had his crew pose as members of a radical Islamic group that wanted to donate $5 million to National Public Radio (NPR) and during the lunch NPR execs said that they loved the radical Muslim group and hated American conservatives and Tea Partiers.

Remember, folks, we are supporting these terror-loving anti-Americans with out tax money...


Speaking of tax money, another very, very interesting bit of this video is that these NPR execs admitted that they really didn't need the federal tax money that they are given every year. They admitted that they'd easily get by if it disappeared.

But imagine. Your tax money is going to support an American media outlet that hates half of America and finds themselves disposed to easily side with enemies of America that are responsible for terrorist attacks against us.

Yep. time to defund them NOW!

Dave Weigel