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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, May 6, 2012

This Week With Alan Caruba

By Rich Kozlovich

May and June are to the pest control industry what November and December are to the retail market. I will not be posting daily because I’m too busy. The work isn’t in the posting….it is in the reading, and I haven’t had time to read those sites I visit daily, and when I have, I have been too tired to do anything with the information.

However I wanted to share “This Week With Alan Caruba”. Alan’s work stands the test of time well and is always profound. This week he has outdone himself, if for no other reason than the number of different issues, but the depth of these postings. Please enjoy Alan’s week of news and opinion.


Let's start with Alan's

Followed by the video

Is Fast and Furious the Next Watergate?
By Alan Caruba

When suspects in a crime are interrogated, they often develop memory loss. When the crime is running guns to drug cartels on both sides of the border, the crime involves the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol officer, Brian Terry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jaime Zapata, and countless Mexican citizens.

Katie Pavlich has written an extraordinary expose, “Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover-Up” (Regnery Publishing). Pavlich, a reporter with extensive contacts within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) she has meticulously documented a story that should result in contempt of Congress action against Attorney General Eric Holder and possibly Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano as well.....


Playing God with "Endangered Species"
By Alan Caruba

According to Wikipedia, “A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance although some species, called living fossils survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinctions have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.” The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973 at the height of the period in which Congress became enthralled with any legislation purported to save the planet and to regulate anything and everything that had to do with the environment. It is a complete failure. In 1999, Jamie Rappaport Clark, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FDS), told a congressional committee that “…in 25 years of implementing the ESA, we have found that designation of ‘official’ critical habitat provides little additional protection to most listed species, while it consumes significant amounts of scare conservation resources.”.....

Bush and Obama, Both Wrong About the Middle East
By Alan Caruba

President Obama has managed to match President Bush’s “Mission accomplished” assertion with “The tide has turned” in his recent visit to Kabul, Afghanistan. Predicting the end of armed conflict in the Middle East is a fool’s game because the horizon keeps receding in a region that is more famed for warfare and revolution than anything else. World leaders have always tried to influence events and trends with rhetoric. It rarely works. Recall, Chamberlain’s return from the 1938 Munich conference that gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler, proclaiming he had achieved “Peace in our time.” Trying to make deals with despots is always a losing proposition and the Middle East is chockablock with despots. Obama’s claim that the killing of Osama bin Laden diminished al Qaeda’s power in the Middle East is one of those fantasies that will lead to more bloodshed. As Seth Jones, a Rand Corporation analyst noted in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion, “”With a number of regimes teetering from the Arab Spring, al Qaeda is pushing into the vacuum and riding a resurgent wave as its affiliates engage in a violent campaign of attacks across the Middle East and Africa.”....

Our National Day of Prayer
By Alan Caruba

A very wise cleric once said to me, “Sometimes the answer to your prayer is no.”

For someone who has not stepped into a house of worship for a very long time, except to attend the occasional funeral, it may seem inappropriate for me to be writing about prayer, but the fact is that I pray every day, if by prayer one means a brief conversation with God. For me prayer has always been a great solace, a confirmation of my belief that there is, indeed, a greater power. I take this on faith, but so does everyone, other than atheists. Thursday, May 3rd is the National Day of Prayer and thus it a good time to examine the power of prayer. Enacted in 1952 by the U.S. Congress, it is traditional for the President in office to issue a proclamation each year recommending prayer.

Its origins date back to George Washington who referred to God repeatedly throughout his public and private life. Just before the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, he told his assembled forces, “The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.”...

Big Brother, the Internet, and Your Right of Privacy
By Alan Caruba

Most Americans assume that they have a right of privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and, while several of the Bill of Rights imply this right, it is not specifically expressed.

However, it is understood. In a Supreme Court case, Meyer v Nebraska, 1923, Justice McReynolds perhaps said it best: "While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

So, yes, a right of privacy does exist, but it may not exist for long. ....

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