Mid-Week Post

It’s the mid-weekiest!

This just in: Dick Clark has passed away. 

Some terrible news about The Band's Levon Helm....

Omar Khadr- and his family- should never be allowed in Canada. Discuss.

North Korea threatens everyone.... again:

A bristling North Korea said on Wednesday it was ready to retaliate in the face of international condemnation over its failed rocket launch, increasing the likelihood the hermit state will push ahead with a third nuclear test.

Retaliate for what? They screwed it up!

They're like the Taliban guy who turned himself in. How the hell is it that we are still fighting these inbred twits?

Mohammad Ashan, a mid-level Taliban commander in Paktika province, strolled toward a police checkpoint in the district of Sar Howza with a wanted poster bearing his own face. He demanded the finder’s fee referenced on the poster: $100.

Afghan officials, perplexed by the man’s misguided motives, arrested him on the spot. Ashan is suspected of plotting at least two attacks on Afghan security forces. His misdeeds prompted officials to plaster the district with hundreds of so-called “Be on the Lookout” posters emblazoned with his name and likeness.

When U.S. troops went to confirm that Ashan had in fact come forward to claim the finder’s fee, they were initially incredulous.

“We asked him, ‘Is this you?’ Mohammad Ashan answered with an incredible amount of enthusiasm, ‘Yes, yes, that’s me! Can I get my award now?’” recalled SPC Matthew Baker.

A biometric scan confirmed that the man in Afghan custody was the insurgent they had been looking for.

“This guy is the Taliban equivalent of the ‘Home Alone” burglars,” one U.S. official said....

Officials have guessed at what the unusual details of Ashan’s arrest might tell us about the state of the insurgency — its desperation, its lack of resources, its defiance of law and order.

But, for now, the consensus has landed on the singularity of Ashan’s act, and the intellectual calculus that led to it.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford makes the unconscionable decision to be with his family instead of being forced to watch naked guys in body paint.

Back away from this, professional gays. No one likes a bully. You're worming your way into schools for that very reason.

Speaking of schools, bullies and other stupid things, the Bluewater District school board beefed up security... for nothing:

 The Bluewater District school board has voted to ban free handouts of Gideon Bibles.

Public school trustees in the southwestern Ontario region voted 8-3 Tuesday evening to bar the distribution of any non-instructional religious materials.

The vote, which came after months of emotionally charged debates, follows the example of several other public school boards across Canada.

However, the board chairwoman said multifaith content strictly for educational purposes will continue for more than 18,000 students in the region.

Those opposing the ban were accusing trustees of betraying both their Canadian and Christian heritage. Several trustees received threats and hate mail, prompting the board to hire extra security for the vote.

Jan Johnstone starts off the April 17 meeting with really dry blather about the Charter. She also sends greetings to someone in a sunny place (glad to see they're working for the kids). Start at the 24:25 mark and watch the total nothing happen (check out the flake at 35:12 if you're still not shaking your head. Is he the guy they beefed up security for? I don't know).

You know what would have spiced this up? Jan Johnstone reading one those threats. With screencaps.

I look forward to the unanimous passage allowing the distribution of the Koran or sexually explicit material.

Why is there no Jordan Apartheid Week?

More than 1,000 Palestinians who fled from the violence in Syria and were hoping to find temporary shelter in Jordan, have been stranded along the border between Syria and Jordan for the past few weeks. The Jordanian authorities have been refusing to allow them into the kingdom.

The Jordanian authorities have set up a makeshift refugee camp along the border with Syria, where the Palestinians are being held in tents, with poor sanitary conditions.

Jordan's treatment of Palestinian refugees is not uncommon for an Arab country. Lebanon and Egypt have also refused to grant asylum to the fleeing Palestinians. This is also not the first time that an Arab country keeps Palestinians waiting on the border. In the past, Palestinians have also been denied entry into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya.

Arab support for the Palestinians has been largely rhetorical over the past two decades, forcing the Palestinians to become almost entirely dependent on American and EU taxpayers' money.

Meanwhile, an additional 100,000 Syrians, who have fled their country in the past year, have been permitted to enter Jordan.

The Jordanians are worried that if they allow a few hundred Palestinians to settle in the kingdom, that would create a precedent and pave the way for 500,000 Palestinians living in Syria to run away to Jordan.

As Jordan's King Abdullah already has a problem with the 80% Palestinian majority in his kingdom, he does not want the Palestinians in the kingdom. They pose a demographic threat to the Jordanians.

The decision to ban the Palestinian refugees from entering Jordan coincided with reports that the Jordanian authorities have begun revoking the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinians which they had previously been given.

Because the Palestinians pose a demographic threat to the Jordanians, hundreds of thousands of them living in Jordan will lose their status as Jordanian citizens.

Watch Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn be awesome.

History repeats itself.

The price of being a Christian in Somalia:

Somalia’s Islamist terror group al Shabab wants to rid the Muslim country of all Christians and is specifically targeting Christian converts from Islam.

Al Shabab recently joined with al Qaeda and wants Sharia law implemented in the country.

An al Shabab video that swept the Internet in September 2008 shows the brutal beheading of 25-year-old aid worker Mansour Mohammed. His crime? Mohammed converted to Christianity in 2005.

One year ago, a Muslim convert to Christianity was awakened in his home by al Shabab soldiers. CBN News agreed to protect his identity, giving him the name “Abdi.”

“They ransacked my house, searched my bag, and found several pages from a Bible,” he told CBN News. “They had crosses on them.”

Abdi was taken away, imprisoned, and tortured.

“I was blindfolded and they put me in a dark, underground cell. They beat me up with a wooden baton,” he explained.

“They wanted to know where I got the Bible pages and if I knew of any others like me,” he continued. “When they finally took the blindfold off, I noticed three dead bodies in the room. They placed them there just to frighten me.”

Abdi’s torturers said they were going to kill him. But late one night, he and two cellmates made a daring escape.

“The guards thought they had locked our cell door, but it wasn’t locked. We opened it, ran to the wall, and started climbing,” Abdi recalled. “The guards opened fire on us. Bullets killed one of my cellmates, but the other prisoner and I jumped over the wall.”

Abdi reunited with his family and is now living in a safe place. He said he still suffers physical pain from the torture he endured. But spiritually, he said he feels closer to God.

“I was happy to go through all this because now I am stronger spiritually,” Abdi said. “People prayed for me to escape. Their prayers are what saved my life.”

Somali Christian leaders estimate fewer than 200 Christians exist in this country of 10 million.

Secret believers, like one woman who asked that we call her Fozia, often suffer punishment and humiliation for refusing to conform to Islamic law.

Fozia said as a Christian, she could not bring herself to abide by al Shabab’s requirement that women wear a burka. While Fozia dressed modestly, she did not want her face fully covered.

Al Shabab Sharia police, similar to those seen on patrol in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, noticed Fozia walking in public without a burka.

“They said the clothing I was wearing was unacceptable. They said I was naked,” she explained.

Fozia received a public flogging — 30 lashes — as her punishment. Afterwards, she inched her way home despite debilitating injuries.

She told CBN News that a female neighbor came to her house to wash her wounds.

“I was bleeding; my flesh was peeling,” Fozia recalled. “It was extremely painful.”

Fozia said it is too risky to own a Bible, so she listens to nightly Christian radio broadcasts from neighboring Kenya.

No word on whether the Bluewater District school board beefed up security for them.

(with thanks)

A voice is crying out in the wilderness… and no one is listening:

But we don’t have to look to the future to feel the pain of Obama’s energy policies. Look at our current gas prices. The Obama administration is locking up federal lands to drilling. The EIA reports that production and sale of fossil fuels on federal lands dropped by 6% last year under Obama. Other studies show a 12% decline. When you hear the president boast of all the “new” drilling going on, he’s talking about production on private and state land that was in the works long ago and is not under his control. He doesn’t tell you how his administration has done everything in its power to strangle resource development with regulatory red tape and foot dragging on the permitting and leasing process. We hear his endless claims that we only have “2% of the world’s oil” — sometimes he adds “reserves” to that — but know that the White House is playing games with semantics. The Obama administration is using a subset of “proved oil reserves” to make it sound like America is energy poor! They’re deliberately distorting the true picture of our massive recoverable oil resources — most of which is on federal land that the government has locked up to responsible development. In short, the president is deceiving the public. As I’ve said before, the energy production “facts” and numbers President Obama repeats are skewed, deceptive and downright Orwellian.

Enjoy the darkness, American electorate.

I do wish Sarah Palin would appear on The Source with Ezra Levant, her Wonder Twin.

That’s my fantasy episode.

Speaking of Sun News, they celebrate one year on the air.  And you know what that means-

CAKE!

... and hard-hitting news and political discussion.

“Lead them unto me….”:

“I am so in,” Michelle Obama said toward the end of her remarks. “I am going to be working so hard. We have an amazing story to tell. This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.”

Do we need any more reasons to eject this idiot from public office? Do we? Really?

Oh God! NO!

Think about it. A gender-neutral race of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, high-cheekboned, joyless automatons listening to an endless loop of ABBA songs while manufacturing difficult-to-assemble furniture. It’s either a dystopian sci-fi nightmare scenario or the recipe for the future master race. It’s possibly both.

And now, celebrate Canada’s freedom with ice cream!

The Hagersville ice cream emporium, half an hour south of Hamilton, has been a roadside institution on Highway 6 in rural Haldimand County for 50 years.

Its new flavour "1812 Cannonballs" was concocted for kids and is admittedly "morbid," says general manager Christine Rohrbach. The green vanilla base symbolizes a battlefield, the chocolate candies are the cannonballs, and the red strawberry ripple suggests "a gory swirl of blood."

"Kids concentrate on what cool things are in ice cream and what it looks like," Rohrbach says.

For grown-ups there is "Redcoat Rations," a flavour that incorporates foods that would have been eaten during the war in the Haldimand area.

"So that's how we came up with a Dutch apple pie base, maple syrup ripple and pieces of oatmeal cookie," says Rohrbach.