One of the most outrageous lies said during the Ground Zero Mosque controversy was told yesterday by Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, on the O’Reilly Factor:

A few very well orchestrated agitators have created a situation where we now see tea party people going after Jewish American elected officials. Mayor Bloomberg, myself, the speaker of our assembly Sheldon Silver.

Shame on you Mr. Stringer!

America knows that those who disagree with Mayor Bloomberg on the MosqueGate are doing so not because of he is Jewish, but because he is misleading the public on the issue from day one.

Mayor Bloomberg and other NYC officials are refusing to take responsibility for the scandal by pretending it is a Freedom of Religion issue. It is not.

Mosques like churches, synagogues are buildings and are subject of property and zoning regulations. The constitution is not making the NYC zoning plans. Mayor Bloomberg and his administration do. NYC officials are trying to shift the blame on the Founding Fathers instead of taking responsibility for the mess.

Mayor Bloomberg is a good mayor. Who cares if he is Jewish? Only Scott Stringer does. On the mosque, however, Bloomberg is wrong and people have to point that out. NYC administration decided that the building on Park 45-51 is not a landmark.

Well, it is! Looks like some radical creeps are getting hard-on from the fact that the building was the resting place of Mohamed Atta’s missile airplane landing gear.

What has no value for the pinhead NYC bureaucrats is like treasure for the Islamic extremists.

Maybe Imam Rauf and friends are just smart entrepreneurs who saw the potential of making money from a mosque on Ground Zero as a tourist destination for all the world crazies that want to come to the place where Mohamed Atta landed. They just want to make money on the back of the suffering of the community.

America disagrees equally with President Obama (not Jewish as far as we know) for the same reason. The Constitution gives freedom of religion to people not buildings. Churches and mosques and all other houses of worships are subject to zoning regulations, like all other buildings.

The Chicago zoning committee has rejected building a mosque (a tax-exempt institution) in the commercial district that is supposed to produce revenue for the city. The community in Chicago has the right to do it.

The only reason why today Imam Rauf and his greedy friends have right to build a mosque on Ground Zero is not because of freedom of religion, but because Mayor Bloomberg and his administration allowed it.

Blaming it on the Constitution is ridiculous and misleading.

The biggest auditor in the world Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu came up with opinion piece recently on how to deal with ‘The Gap’:

Western societies have over-committed their current and future resources… Money has been spent that hasn’t been earned, and promises have been made that cannot be fulfilled.

The Gap is popular known as ‘the trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities’ in social services created over decades of piling up entitlement programs and hefty pensions and benefits.

Deloitte authors agree with Big Bureaucracy that just raising taxes and cutting spending is not going to be enough to take us out of the ditch (although it is more like a crater).

Structural changes in government and bureaucracy are needed:

In a world of mobile capital, trans-border exchange, heightened competition, and exponential technological change, many governments are mired in bureaucratic-age thinking. In order to close their fiscal gap, governments will also need to address the associated performance gap…

The bureaucratic barriers to change in the public sector greatly exceed those in the private sector — not due to mal-intent, but due to a culture of risk aversion and program protection, and as a systemic consequence of the way government has been organized since the early twentieth century…

Reform of the executive branch is needed and the goal is to produce better public value.

It is common sense: tax-payers want more for their money. Americans dig slogans like: pay less, get more. The private sector is always striving to achieve that goal. It is time for the career civil servants to follow.
For example, the DHS has a budget bigger than the Defense Department and yet half of the folks in the USA have to pay thousands of dollars for health insurance on the top of the taxes that feed to the bureaucratic monster.

The Obama Care just added over a hundred new bureaucracies to DHS. The result: the tax revenues will feed more government in hope that the new agencies will come up with ‘cutting the costs’ solution while costing billions of dollars to operate.

Instead of making the over-bloated DHS structure leaner the ObamaCare just loaded the monster with more bureaucratic weight. The US Department of Health and Human Services is so big it should be proclaimed as one of the wonders of the world: the most obese health bureaucracy on the planet.

Unfortunately the Deloitte paper does not give us any details on how and what specific bureaucracies should be transformed. It is basically an elitist blah, blah, blah. Also it is a bit creepy. It looks like the folks at Deloitte who know everything about the way the world runs are not ready to share details with us while talking about transforming the Western democracies.

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Embracing the Ground Zero mosque? The vacationer-in-chief is puzzling the world. Why is all this self-destructive behavior from Barack Obama? Here is an idea: maybe it is about giving a chance to democrats in conservative districts to distance themselves from the President without offending the liberal base.

Remember Rev. Wright? The radical pastor’s sermons were about to cost candidate Obama the democratic primary in 2008. The wannabe president then gave a major speech on racial relations explaining how difficult for him is to disown Rev. Wright. Unfortunately the electorate did not seem to buy the whole ‘he is like uncle to me’ excuse.

Then something interesting happened. Rev Wright scheduled appearance in the National press-club. The commentators, journalists, reporters sat down and the circus began. The pastor stood up in front of the cameras and microphones and made sure the judges from the mainstream media give him the ‘insanity verdict’. Rev. Wright masterfully worked the audience throwing at them ridiculous stereotypes, mixing it with beeb-bop-boom-boop sounds and helicopter/airplane hand movements.

It reminded me of the mafia comedy ‘Analyze That’ where Robert De Niro was a mobster trying to get out of jail singing ‘You’re so pretty’ and enduring the pain of the needle pinned in his leg just to get a note from the psychiatrist Billy Crystal. Robert De Niro received his note; despite the fact that both the psychiatrist and the authorities knew he was faking it.

And so did Rev. Wright. The media gave him the insanity label for the charade and the candidate Obama was free to distance himself from his mentor without offending his African-American base. You can’t blame Obama for throwing his pastor under the bus: Rev Wright told the world that the black people are wired differently.  That’s crazy stuff. From that moment on the ‘Rev. Wright issue’ was over for Obama and he proceeded to claim the Oval Office.

Fast forward to 2010. The few special elections this year proved for Democrats that the winning strategy for those of them running in conservative districts is to run as far away from Obama as possible.

Democrat Mark Critz won the PA 12 House seat. Critz ran on conservative platform. Being a former John Murtha district director he just buried the old snake skin somewhere in the woods and came up fresh, hissing and biting the Obama agenda. Somehow Critz was so convincing in his act that everybody forgot the fact: each one of the “blue dog” democrats marched in sync with Pelosi and Reid to pass half a trillion in Medicare cuts and half a trillion in new taxes in ObamaCare.

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On September 11, 2001 the world changed. The US government realized they had all the pieces of the puzzle before the attack on America but did not see the whole picture: the warning sign of the terror to come.

President Bush tried to reform the federal bureaucracy dealing with the national security. Unfortunately instead of improving communications between the existing departments he created a new bureaucracy: the Department of National Security that was composed from agencies taken away from various departments.

The US spent over 7 billion dollars on accommodation of the new Department. Instead of spending those money on communication improvement the federal government wasted it on new office desks and draperies, drawing pictures for new department seal and medals and all kind of construction and design activities.

Was it worth it?

Let’s see how the DHS performed during the second attack on US soil since 9/11: the Christmas Day bomber. Abdul Mutallab’s father told the name of the terrorist to the US embassy in Nigeria almost a month before the attack. The embassy sent the name to the State Department. If Bush didn’t create the DHS, the State Department would have been responsible for revoking the terrorist’s US visa. However Bush added a new layer of bureaucracy and Hillary Clinton’s people sent the message to the Department of Homeland Security and there nobody acted on it. Somebody mumbled that Mutallab’s name was misspelled in the process. No kidding!

Even the kindergarteners know that the more people in the chain when you play ‘broken phone’ the funnier the message is at the end.

After Abdul Mutallab was mirandized in Detroit, four different chiefs of agencies responsible for the War on Terror sat in front of Congress (including Janet Napolitano the DHS boss)and confirmed that none of them was even consulted before the Attorney General Eric Holder took the decision the read the rights to Mutallab. Talk about communication problem! Or is it the issue of ‘too many’ chiefs?

The two biggest public relations disasters for the White House were Katrina (for Bush) and the BP oil spill (for Obama). Nobody ever examined the possibility that it has something to do with moving the Coast Guard and FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security.

Both with Katrina and with the Oil Spill the Coast Guard did their job wonderfully, but the public perception was that the government reaction was too slow. The communication was not there.
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President Obama’s personal approval rating is much higher than the approval of his policies. No word from the pollsters yet how much the political correctness distorts the results.

Somehow Michelle Obama (who is trying to make us stop eating cup-cakes and reduce our carbon footprint while she is burning fuel vacationing in Spain) has personal approval over 50%. Really?

Do you know anybody who tells you all the time: ‘you are too fat and drive too much’? Most likely, by the time they say: ‘you are too fat’ their approval rating is down to 10%.

Barack Obama will be a world-wide celebrity regardless of his actions in office. His Presidency was deemed ‘historical’ for the mere fact of his skin color. Since his skin color will never change the ‘historical’ label will stick with him even if he plays golf and does nothing else for the next two years.

Take for example Nelson Mandela. Hollywood made a movie about him just this year. As a president Mandela was a complete disappointment. He was responsible for thousands of deaths in South Africa because he refused to acknowledge the spreading of HIV in the country. Mandela was sticking to his talking points about his people suffering from malnutrition while they were dying of AIDS. But if you point that out you will be labeled a racist, so you better make a movie about Mandela and sports.

And talking about sports – clubs and organizations all over the world are trying to find the politically correct way to ban the vuvuzela out of their events. The horn with a sound from hell flooded the globe after the World Cup Soccer in South Africa, but you can’t just say the truth: we hate that noise. There will be somebody to deem you a bigot immediately.

Instead sports clubs and organizations called scientist to measure the noise, they call police to research it, and they issued statements twisting and spinning words to find the politically correct way to ban the vuvuzela out, but to let the Brazilian band in without being called a racist.

The International Track and Field Federation just got over the scandal with the South African woman athlete accused of being a man. There is nothing racist about it. The woman has testicles. And because she has the cohones and the IAAF officials don’t vuvuzelas will politically correctly haunt the fans at the track and field events. After insulting South Africa once they will have to live with tinnitus to avoid insulting them twice. Better stock-up on Quietus.

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USAID encourages cash donations because they allow aid professionals to procure the exact items needed (often in the affected region); reduce the burden on scarce resources (such as transportation routes, staff time, warehouse space, etc); can be transferred very quickly and without transportation costs; support the economy of the disaster-stricken region; and ensure culturally, dietary, and environmentally appropriate assistance.

The most effective way people can assist relief efforts is by making cash contributions to humanitarian organizations that are conducting relief operations. A list of humanitarian organizations that are accepting cash donations for flood response efforts in Pakistan can be found at www.interaction.org.

Working with mGive, Americans are contributing to Pakistan flood relief by texting the word “SWAT” to 50555. Each text will result in a donation of $10 to the UNHCR’s Pakistan Flood Relief Effort, helping to provide emergency aid to displaced families.

More information can be found at:

- USAID: www.usaid.gov/pakistanflooding/

- The Center for International Disaster Information: www.cidi.org or (703) 276-1914

- Information on relief activities of the humanitarian community can be found at www.reliefweb.int

When the Americans say the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero will be in the shadows of the World Trade Center they are correct. Here is the evidence: on the picture the buildings on Park Place 45-51 are photographed in the shadow of the Twin Towers – still under construction. The original image is copyrighted by Time Inc. and you can access it here

Watching Sarah Palin’s guided tour at Alaska’s ANWR brought memories.

I’ve seen the flat land covered in snow and ice 9 months a year, but not in ANWR, but across the North Pole in the former USSR on a school trip above the Arctic Circle. At the time Vorkuta was a ‘closed city’ – that meant no foreigners were allowed. They made an exception for me (I was 15 at the time) but performed background checks on my family before they got me cleared.

Vorkuta is a coal mining center – build exclusively by labor of the GULAG camp-prisoners. It was always expensive to do coal mining beyond the Arctic Circle, but Soviets did it anyway considering it a national security issue. Vorkuta was the only supplier of coal for the blockaded Leningrad (St. Peterburg) during the World War II. So the Soviets always thought it is a good idea to keep energy producing centers all over the country and in the most weird places – just in case.

Thousands of Soviet prisoners laid the railroad my friends and I traveled on to reach Vorkuta. From the train you can see nothing but white snow covered planes. Just as in ANWR: night and cold most of the year.

The city was pretty nice comparing to the most of the cabin villages in the Northern Russia. They had a good supply of food. It was the Gorbachev’s Perestroika and there were supply shortages in many places.
We visited youth community center where amazingly they were showing Tom and Jerry cartoons. It was the time of Glasnost.

You’d think Tom and Jerry guarantee there is fun in the room. Wrong. For my Soviet friends this was the first time they saw the legendary cat chasing the mouse. They were outraged. The teenagers started complaining that the Americans stole the idea from Nu Pogodi!

Everybody who grew up in Eastern Europe knows the Soviet cartoon Nu Pogodi! (Well, Just You Wait!) It is like Tom and Jerry only it is about a wolf chasing a rabbit. So instead of enjoying the video we started hissing at each other as I was insisting that the Soviets stole the idea from the Americans. Glasnost is not always fun. Eventually everybody shut up and hatefully watched the imperialist cat chasing the imperialist mouse.

Years later I checked the facts:

- starting at 1969 ‘Nu Pogodi!’ had a total of 16 episodes during the Soviet era.

- between 1940 and 1958 Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote and directed 114 Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Here you go: I told you so!

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates hinted again that he plans to retire from his position in the Obama administration sometime in 2011.

The war in Afghanistan is in its most important stage. American troops and NATO allies with Afghanistan forces tagging along are trying to smoke the Taliban out of their last strongholds. The surge is on in Afghanistan. By the end of the year we will likely know the fate of the Kandahar operations. The impatient American public wants a wrap-up of the war. It is likely by the time Gates will retire we will know if the surge in Afghanistan is a success as was the final push in Iraq.

Bipartisanship is a hype word in Washington DC nowadays but very few people really served this great country in a nonpartisan way. Robert Gates is one of them – a true lion of the US government who was part of the administration of seven US Presidents.

He served on the National Security Counsel of five of them — George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. You can see them on the picture. Each one of them depended in some way on Robert Gate’s expertise. He was there to clean up after Watergate, he warned the presidents about the aggressive Soviet policies in the Third World, he worked to prepare the Camp David agreement, and he supervised the covert operations in Afghanistan. Gates started at entry level position at CIA and became a Director of the Agency in the years 1991-1993 to preside over the crash of the Soviet Empire and the democratization of the Eastern Europe.

At first, CIA tried to train me to be a spy. However, my efforts were less James Bond and more Austin Powers – and I don’t mean that in a good way. One of my first training assignments was to practice secret surveillance with a team following a woman CIA officer around downtown Richmond, Virginia. Our team wasn’t very stealthy, and someone reported to the Richmond police that some disreputable-looking men – that would be me and my fellow CIA trainees – were stalking this poor woman. My two colleagues were picked up by the Richmond police, and the only reason I didn’t get arrested was because I had lost sight of her so early.

I – and CIA – concluded pretty quickly that I wasn’t cut out to be doing operations in the field, and instead I became a CIA analyst – one of the people who assess and interpret the information that comes in. And that led me into a career that allowed me to witness amazing moments in American history. So it may take you a few missteps and even embarrassments before you find the thing you’re really good at. But, keep at it.

Whatever the party, whatever the President’s name Robert Gates was there working for the advancing of the national security interests.

Gates left the government in 1993 to become director of the Texas A&M University. I can’t blame him for that. Just take a look at the Picture of Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.

A serious person can only take so much. Gates stayed away from the government that chose to ignore the dangers of the post Soviet world.

After the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan the attention and the resources of the Government were directed to Eastern Europe. The tribal country was left without sufficient support to rebuild after a war that claimed millions of lives. The orphans in Afghanistan grew up in poverty and insecure environment. They had the arms and they had the Koran and they had nothing to do but to look for somebody to blame for their devastation of the land of violence, corruption and poppy fields. The terrorism was turning its face to America and the US was not paying enough attention to it.

The US and allies led covert operations that supplied weapons to the mujaheddin and drove the Soviets out of the country and into bankruptcy. Today Gates and the USA have to fight the ghost of that war that they won 23 years ago.

We are not going to abandon Afghanistan like we did in 1989

This is the promise Robert Gates keeps repeating this days. It is a message he hopes will go through to the folks in the region and give the US a chance to establish a relationship of trust. It is all hope as are the wheat fields that were supposed to take the place of the poppies.

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The quote of the day comes from FOX News Sunday:

There is a saying in communication that if you are explaining you are losing.

Well if you’re having to explain the clarification, then I don’t know what you are doing.

You might as well grab a couple of beers from the cooler and jump on the slide off the plane.

- Dana Perino, former Press Secretary for President George W Bush, analyzing the White House explanation of the clarification that President Barack Obama gave on his statement in support for the Ground Zero mosque.