Archive for August 2010
Reserved to the States or to the People
"I consider the fundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possessoin of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition....The states can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore... never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market." - Thomas Jefferson
Added by Dave Edwards
Published on August 31, 2010 at 1:55 pm | Permalink
Monday Night Campaign Meeting at BiGranni's Coffee
Come join us every Monday night at 7:00 at BiGranni's Coffee on Wade Hampton across from Denny's!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH8y0iIWVuY
Added by the Webmaster - Dave Edwards for Congress
Published on August 23, 2010 at 11:55 pm | Permalink
Federal Spending
As a former accountant and small business owner, I know how to control my spending, cut waste, and make a profit. Here is a great video from the Heritage Foundation on federal spending:
Added by Dave Edwards
Published on August 19, 2010 at 12:35 pm | Permalink
Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero (Part 2)
The Constitution and Shariah law are incompatible. Basically, the political strategy is to try and keep the incompatibility a secret. This will be ruinous to our Constitutional liberties. Let us examine the facts:
*Muslims and liberals want to build a mosque in a building hit by the landing gear of a plane that collided with the Twin Towers. They want this 13 story building two blocks from Ground Zero from which they are still exhuming remains of victims.
*Cordoba House plans to open on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
Who is Feisal Abdul Rauf?
*The mosque's leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, refuses to declare Hamas a terrorist organization. He explained that "the issue of terrorism is a very complex question." When pressed further he responded "I am a peace builder. I will not allow anybody to put me in a position where I am seen by any party in the world as an adversary or as an enemy."
*According to former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, Rauf is a prominent member of the Perdana Group, which sponsored the flotilla violence in Israel.
*In 2006, Rauf organized a Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference in Copenhagen where he hosted such radical Muslims as Yasir Qadhi
*On September 30th 2001, on 60 Minutes, Rauf suggested that Muslim terrorists did kill thousands on 9/11, but "United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened."
*Speaking to Islamic media in March of this year, Rauf, speaking of the phrase "Religious Dialogue," says:
"This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian. The image of Muslims in the West is complex which needs to be remedied."
*In May, Rauf said, "Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more than just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Sharia that are required [For Muslims] to govern. It is known that there are sets of standards that are accepted by [Muslim] scholars to organize the relationships between government and the governed [emphasis added]."
*Rauf leads "The Shariah Index Project," which charts the “Islamic-ness” of countries, and provides a way for Muslims to check “Islamification” progress.
*What is the meaning of Cordoba?
The Cordoba center is named for Cordoba Spain which was the capital of a Western Islamic Caliphate and the place where a Christian cathedral was converted into a mosque. According to Fredrick Schweitzer and Marvin Perry's book "Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present" Cordoba was the site of Muslim initiated pogroms that killed thousands of Jews and subjugated Christians and Jews both to second class status and repeated persecution.
* Cordoba is a perceived metaphor for Islamic victory in the West.
Who is funding the project?
*Rauf claimed to American news outlets that the 100 million dollar mosque would be funded by American Muslims alone. However, when speaking with a London-based Arabic paper "Asharq AlAwsat," Rauf asserted that the funds would be collected by American Muslims along with donations from Arab and Islamic countries.
*Rauf founded The American Society for Muslim Advancement. This is the group spearheading the Cordoba Initiative. The ASMA is funded by The Saudi Arabian Xenel Corporation. Xenel is implicated on the "Golden Chain" list. The list includes 20 or so top Saudi Business men. Xenel CEO Abdullah Alireza sits on the board of DMI, a bank in Switzerland. He is accompanied on the twelve member board by Osama Bin Laden's half brother. DMI is a defendant in a lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 victims. They are accused of having "conspired with Al Qaeda and the other defendants to carry out terrorist attacks."
*The Center for American Islamic Relations has condemned the Jewish Anti-Defamation League's opposition to the Cordoba Mosque and asked them to retract their opposition. The deputy leader of the Islamic Extremist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Habib, confirms a relationship between CAIR and the Egyptian Brotherhood.
*CAIR has its origins in the U.S. Hamas infrastructure.
According to the Left, what are we to believe?
- Sharia-advancing-Islamists, who don't allow religious freedom in Islamic nations, are motivated to build a mosque near Ground Zero by an uncharacteristic ecumenical spirit of religious dialogue.
- Ground Zero is the only place where the aims of Muslim outreach can occur.
- Opponents--who do allow the Muslims the right to worship at any of the many mosques in NY-- are bigoted racists bent only on the oppression of Muslims. However, a Muslim imam who freely associates with radicalized Muslims and who refuses to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization is a pillar in the temple of multiculturalism.
Cordoba House's nearness to Ground Zero is less critical to a mission of interfaith outreach and more critical to a triumphalist memorial at the expense of the tragic victims that died on 9/11. The attack on 9/11 was a national attack. Therefore, this is a national issue. One on which the President and Congress have been largely silent. We ought not to allow the 10th anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11 to be marred by a morale booster to terrorists and what amounts to an “end zone dance” by progressive West-hating elites.
Added by Zach Franzen - Dave Edwards for Congress Campaign
Published on August 12, 2010 at 8:29 am | Permalink
Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero (Part 1)
Those looking for an example of the amazing alliance between West-hating secular-Leftists and West-Hating Muslim-Supremacists should pick up a newspaper. Within its pages you will find that the greatest indicator of bigotry is an unfashionable curiosity about the financing, mission, and sensitivity of the Cordoba Mosque and Cultural Center.
Ironically, secularists who believe that a nativity scene is a violation of Church and State also find that the first amendment grants a right to build a mosque anywhere you want! Also, in order to distract from legitimate questions, journalists increasingly write belligerent and intellectually bankrupt statements like this one by Hamdan Azhar in the Christian Science Monitor:
"The entire controversy has in large part been fabricated and perpetuated by Islamophobic extremists who make money by fomenting suspicion and intolerance toward the 'other.'" (“Ground Zero Mosque: Islamophobic extremists are fueling the controversy” - CSMonitor.com)
Maybe we should learn a lesson or two from the tolerant response by Muslims when the Salvation Army decided to build a Youth Camp in Mecca. Oh wait, that never happened! Why? Because non-Muslims can't build camps in Mecca. In fact non-Muslims can’t even enter the city! (talk about intolerance toward the "other")
Tragically, the civic authorities in NYC are unwilling to withstand the name-calling tactics of Pro-Sharia intimidation groups. They failed to give the Burlington Coat Factory building landmark status even though less culturally significant and architecturally similar buildings have previously received such status. Politicians like Mayor Bloomberg display a tendency Alexander Solzhenitsyn once described well: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barbarity, except concessions and smiles."
Like progressivism, Islam advances most speedily on the wheels of deceit. Whereas Islamists authorize deceit by Muslim scholarship, Progressives authorize deceit through leftist scholarship.
Here's how it happens in Progressive thought:
1. Truth gives way to truths.
2. Truths in turn become preference statements.
3. These in turn become manipulation tools.
4. When language lacks the power to be truthful, it must settle for being useful.
5. Voila, dishonesty wheels! Let's roll!
An obligation to truthfulness instead becomes an opportunity to say what is expedient in order to get what you want, which is why Sherilynn Dodd, Dean of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, can manage aggressively dishonest spin like this:
"The name Cordoba House…is particularly fitting -- an evocation of the rich interactions of Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval Spain. Medieval Spain was not often a paradise of tolerance and peace. But where peoples lived together, the understanding spawned by that coexistence gave the lie to the notion that Muslims, Jews and Christians must by nature be opposed, and created a more cohesive, fecund, peaceful and plural society." (Nothing New about Mosques in New York - CNN.com)
Apparently, Ms. Dodd’s expertise on "minorities in pluralistic societies" doesn't include the fact that some of those rich interactions included organized killings of thousands of Jews, and the perpetual 2nd class "dhimmi" status of Jews and Christians under sharia.
As the late critic Leslie Fielder remarked,
“The final conclusion would seem to be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions and providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense."
Islam abolishes truth somewhat more directly than the leftists, they both disguise their deceitful ends by fictitious means. The Quran writes Muslims a blank dishonesty check that they can cash whenever they feel the need to hide their motives.
"Anyone who, after accepting faith in Allah, utters Unbelief, except under compulsion, his heart remaining firm in Faith - but such as open their breast to Unbelief, on them is Wrath from Allah, and theirs will be a dreadful Penalty." Surah 16: 106
Basically, you can deny Allah externally as long you don't deny Allah internally. Put another way, the ends (Sharia in America) justify the means (pretending to want interfaith dialogue). This is called Taqiyya.
Cordoba House is not yet open, but it is already encouraging interfaith dialogue. Here’s how the dialogue goes:
Cordoba Promoters: We want to heal wounds caused by 9/11 by building a memorial mosque near the ruins of a terrorist attack.
Jews, Christians, Hindu’s & agnostics: Please don't. A mosque here pours salt in the wound and will cause more harm than good. Please build it somewhere else in Manhattan.
Cordoba Promoters: Shut up!
[End of Interfaith Dialogue]
The only mutual understanding that the Cordoba mosque has brought about thus far is between Islam and the media. Their shared love for power and their hatred for the West seems to overcome their seemingly incompatible social priorities.
Decades before the Huffington Post, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:
"The media in themselves have no power, any more than nuclear weapons have; both have power only to the extent that they can influence and exploit the weaknesses and wretchedness of men--their carnality which makes them vulnerable to the pornographer, their greed and vanity which delivers them into the hands of the advertiser, their credulity which makes them so susceptible to the fraudulent prospectuses of ideologues and politicians; above all, their arrogance, which induces them to fall so readily for any agitator or agitation, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, which brings to their nostrils the acrid scent of power."
Added by Zach Franzen - Dave Edwards for Congress Campaign
Published on August 8, 2010 at 3:17 pm | Permalink
Repeal Obamacare
Dave Edwards tells a story of how Obamacare is already affecting families.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEScI_SCmnQ
Added by the Webmaster - Dave Edwards for Congress
Published on August 6, 2010 at 2:01 pm | Permalink
The Threat from Islam
There are elements of our Government willing to accept on unsupported authority that terrorists are merely politically-motivated criminals and that Islamic allegiances are inconsequential. They are, however, unwilling to accept the great amount of evidence linking Islam with Terrorism. Such politically expedient self-deception is extremely dangerous, and intentional ignorance of any such enemy will have devastating consequences for our nation and our way of life.
Last November, Nidal Hasan walked into a crowded medical processing center, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and opened fire, killing fourteen people, including an unborn child, and wounding thirty others. Nidal Hasan was a Major in the United States Army, who vocally believes that America has teamed up with the Jews in order to keep Muslims poor, oppressed, and unhappy. He made business cards that labeled him a soldier of Allah. In 2007, he gave a PowerPoint presentation entitled The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military. The presentation consisted of fifty slides. On one slide, Hasan describes the presentation's objectives as identifying "what the Koran inculcates in the minds of Muslims and the potential implications this may have for the U.S. military." This was not a man seeking to fly under the radar, but a pro-Islamic psychiatrist clearly articulating his beliefs. Yet neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Justice wanted to raise suspicions against him. They preferred 14 people dead to honestly examining the connections between his Islamic belief and his move toward terrorist action.
I own and have read sections of the Quran, attended Friday prayers at a mosque, gone to Islamic seminars, conducted personal academic research, visited Muslim countries, and lived for a decade and a half in a country which shares its border with Indonesia—the largest Muslim population in the world. What I say here is not out of ignorance or prejudice.
I see two distinct and very different Islamic threats. There is, of course, the obvious physical threat of continuing Islamic terrorism, which remains of utmost concern. However, perhaps even more dangerous and holding the potential to be ultimately far more destructive than the first, is the very well-organized, “under the radar” effort by Islam to undermine and destroy the American system from the inside. This potential has been thoroughly documented by individuals like Andrew McCarthy, who was one of America’s top federal prosecutors. McCarthy was “decorated with the Justice Department’s highest honors” and was directly involved in the prosecution of the original (1993) World Trade Center truck bombers. He also “helped launch the 9/11 investigation.” McCarthy perceptively explains:
“It is called jihad by dawa…Dawa is the missionary work by which Islam is spread. But don’t be fooled by the term ‘missionary.’ Dawa no more resembles the Western connotation of ‘missionary work’ than Islam resembles the Western notion of religion. Just as Islamism aspires to domination rather than a place at our ecumenical table, dawa is not mere proselytism…Islamists have shrewdly adapted to the enemy’s—to America’s, to the West’s—incoherent posture of obsessing over terrorism while turning a blind eye to terrorism’s animating ideology. U.S. experts stubbornly maintain, regardless of the evidence, that Muslim hostility to the West is a result of poverty, Israel, resentment, Israel, misinformation, Israel, or whatever other excuse we are using this week. Meantime, the Brotherhood methodically proceeds with its grand jihad-by-sabotage, and the unabashed (Muslim leader) Qaradawi openly proclaims, ‘We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawa.”
It is already happening in Great Britain, and such efforts are already well under way here in America. The CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and a number of other Muslim groups and individuals are already working with and influencing U.S. government departments and policies, with a view to moving America in a very different and extremely ominous direction. Like Great Britain, there is a very real possibility of future legal changes and accommodations to Sharia law in our country. Sharia law is contrary to our Constitutional liberties and freedoms.
I am an unapologetic advocate of the U.S. Constitution, and I unreservedly support freedom of religion. However, I also recognize the grave danger Islam currently poses to the United State of America. While there are obviously many law-abiding Muslims, I am fully convinced that Islam is at its core not a religion of peace. I am committed to exposing and opposing the dangers of Islam, doing everything I can to protect America’s Constitutional liberties.
Added by Dave Edwards
Published on August 5, 2010 at 9:40 pm | Permalink
Conservatism Is “Show Me”, Not “Trust Me”
Each day we must stand up for our conservative and Constitutional principles at the local, state, and federal level. The conservative battle over ideas must continue because conservatism is based on a shared set of principles, not a shared set of personalities. The least conservative idea for a candidate to say is “trust me”. This falls outside the scope of conservatism.
Ronald Reagan was correct in stating, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
The preference for principle over personality also explains the gap between conservative celebrities and liberal celebrities. Conservatives become celebrities based upon their policy analysis, while liberals analyze policy from the platform of their celebrity. It explains Nancy Pelosi's exasperating remark "But we have to pass the healthcare bill so that you can find out what is in it", and it explains the broader liberal desire to pass legislation without close scrutiny.
Every campaign has four resources: money, time, people, and ideas. Our money is tight, supporters are growing, and time is short. Our greatest resource is our ideas. I have plenty to share.
I, like many of you, prefer “show me” to “trust me.” Consequently, voters can know clearly where I stand on twenty-two major issues.
Take a look here
Added by Dave Edwards
Published on August 3, 2010 at 10:21 am | Permalink
