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January 2012

TODAY IN HISTORY

An e-pal bltaverna reminds me:

Day in history
13 January 1898

Acting on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus, French influential novelist Emile Zola issued his famous “J’Accuse” letter in Clemenceau’s paper L’Aurore condemning the French establishment in the Dreyfus Affair.

In 1894 French Captain Dreyfus was falsely accused of spying for Prussia and convicted of treason in 1895. He was publicly degraded at the Military School Honour Court in front of 20,000 people and deported to Devil’s Island.

The conviction was exposed as an anti-Semitic plot by activists such as Zola.

Finally, in 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated of his charges and allowed back in the army.

http://www.ejpress.org/digest/news/

PEARL HARBOR, RONALD REAGAN AND TODAY’S POLITICS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CRAIG SHIRLEY BY ROGER ARONOFF

An Interview with Author Craig Shirley
In an interview last month with Accuracy in Media, historian Craig Shirley described how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and World War II marked a transition for this country, and in doing so, he offered insights that are very relevant today.

“This is a story about a country that goes from being a country of the past to becoming a country of the future, and all the things that spring out of it, big and small,” said Shirley. “The big, obviously, is that we become a permanent internationalist country. We never again retreat to isolationism, as we did after the Spanish-American War, and as we did after World War I. After we defeat Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, we then rebuild them and make them into allies under the Marshall Plan and Douglas MacArthur. We establish military bases around the world—that was unthinkable five years before, that we would have military bases all around the world. We had military bases in the Philippines, and several other locations, but those were the exceptions, not the rule.”

ONE SINAI COMPLETE: DAVID ISAAC

One Sinai – complete By David Isaac

http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=849&Source=email

Message from High Commissioner for Palestine Herbert Samuel. Will Israel receive one Sinai – complete?

When the first High Commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel, took over the administration of Palestine from Sir Louis Bols of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, he signed a note which read: “Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols K.C.B. — One Palestine, complete.”

Now that the Islamists are set to dominate Egypt’s legislature, will Israel receive one Sinai – complete? That’s the question Caroline Glick asks in a recent Jerusalem Post column. The Egypt-Israel treaty “is effectively null and void,” she writes. “Will the U.S. act in accordance with its role as guarantor of the peace and demand that the new Egyptian government give Sinai back to Israel?”

U.S. guarantees, as the past shows, are not worth the paper they’re written on – when they can find the paper, that is. As Shmuel writes in “The world is full of empty promises” (The Jerusalem Post, April 30, 1993):

In June 1967, when the neighboring Arab states prepared for their again-advertised plan of genocide against the still tiny and vulnerable Israel … U.S. president Johnson could not find the 1957 document which recorded a pledge to aid Israel if Egypt closed the Tiran Straits, which it had done on May 23. …

In her day, Prime Minister Golda Meir said (in reply to the suggestion of guarantees by an American diplomat): “Guarantees? You speak of guarantees? By the time you got here, we wouldn’t be here.”

HOT PICKS FROM FSM

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp 1. VIDEO: Obama Plays Footsies with Our Enemies! 2. VIDEO: Brave Afghan Girls Take to Gym, Practice Boxing in Defiance of Taliban Threats 3. VIDEO: Al Gore: Global Warming Not Being Campaign Issue Puts ‘Civilization At Risk’ 4. How many have to die? With Syria toll rising, Obama’s choice to stay out is arbitrary […]

JIM KOURI: ANOTHER “LONE WOLF” MUSLIM EXTREMIST ATTACK

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11222/pub_detail.asp
In yet another “lone wolf” Islamic extremist attack, a young man claiming to be a Muslim allegedly shot and broke the windows of businesses in Gadsden, Alabama, Sunday morning. The motive for the vandalism was to ambush any and all responding police officers, killing as many of them as possible

Twenty-One year old Luis Ibarra-Hernandez, a resident of Albertville, Alabama, was officially charged in court on Tuesday with attempted murder, according to a report released by the Gadsden Police Department.

Gadsden police officers had responded to the Sunday morning alarm calls for glass breakage after the glass doors shattered from the suspect’s gunshots.

FRANK SALVATO: RAIDING THE TREASURY TO BRIBE THE IRRESPONSIBLE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11223/pub_detail.asp

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/4174)
A little publicized political story, if played out to the satisfaction of California Democrats (read: Progressives), would not only set the stage for a politically motivated raid on the US Treasury, it would afford President Obama, his administration and political operatives plausible deniability in any “coincidental” benefit to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. And if you don’t think that has David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe salivating, you haven’t been paying attention for the past three years.

According to a report by The Hill.com:

“A long list of California Democrats is urging President Obama to name a new housing regulator using a controversial recess appointment.

“In a letter to the president, more than two dozen House members said the temporary head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Edward DeMarco, simply hasn’t done enough to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure. The lawmakers are pushing the president to name a permanent director ‘immediately.’

THE OBAMA LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BOYZ IN THE TERRORHOOD:STEPHEN BROWN

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/13/the-obama-brotherhood-love-affair-heats-up/

It’s official, now. The Obama administration’s admiration for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is indisputably mutual.

The Egyptian English-language newspaper, Daily News Egypt, reported on Wednesday that the MB “hails” its new ties with the United States after a meeting between the head of the MB’s political arm, Mohamed Morsi, and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the MB’s Cairo headquarters. After the Wednesday meeting, Morsi said relations between their two countries “must be balanced” and, in apparent reference to Israel, stated past US behavior has been “biased and not in its interest.” The MB, Morsi maintained, wants Washington to adopt “a positive position concerning Arab and Muslim causes.”

“It [the meeting] was an opportunity to hear from and to reinforce our expectations that all major parties will support human rights, tolerance, rights of women and will also uphold Egypt’s existing international obligations,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

DEROY MURDOCK: ON ECONOMIC LIBERTY WE ARE NUMBER TEN

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288008/we-re-number-ten-deroy-murdock Good news! On economic freedom, America is in the global Top 10.Bad news: America is No. 10 — one blond hair ahead of Denmark. According to the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released Thursday by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong enjoys the earth’s freest economy. The Chinese Special […]

PAMELA GELLER: THREE JIHADIS

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/three_jihadis.html

It is almost every day now. Jihadi attacks in America. This past week there were three attempted jihad attacks. And what does the media consider the problem? Racistislamophobicantimuslimbigots, of course.

On Saturday, a Muslim named Sami Osmakac was arrested in Florida on charges of plotting to go jihad on nightclubs and the Tampa, Florida, sheriff’s headquarters. “We all have to die,” Osmakac said, “so why not die the Islamic way?”

Osmakac is from Kosovo, making his jihad another thank-you for U.S. involvement in Bosnia. And the U.S. still supports an independent Kosovo state, a militant Islamic state, in the heart of Europe. That is our policy. America refuses to own up to the terrible mistake we made in Europe — worse still, we continue to prosecute the Christian Serbs.

Media reports said that Osmakac, a devout Muslim, was “self-radicalized.” You have to wonder if Western dhimmis stay up nights thinking up new terms for jihad. Pathetic. Soon after his arrest, video emerged that showed how pious and violent Sami Osmakac really was, as he attacked and bloodied Christian street preachers. The pious Osmakac, who was completely the aggressor, then cried victim to the police, saying that he had been “insulted,” the same fictitious narrative that we are bombarded with daily by Islamic groups and Muslim Brotherhood organizations like the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

DAVID P. GOLDMAN: PRIVATE EQUITY AND CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/01/12/private-equity-and-creative-destruction/?print=1

Private Equity and Creative DestructionPosted By David P. Goldman

Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world. If managers did a lousy job, outside investors could raise money (a lot of it from trade union pension funds as well as university endowments) and kick them out.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry should be ashamed of themselves for bean-counting Bain Capital’s record on job creation. Any investment firm operating over decades of rapid employment growth will be able to show that the companies it bought added jobs over time. That’s what the academic studies on private equity show in any event, as Jordan Weissmann reports at The Atlantic. More relevant is the alternative. We’ve been there, done that, and don’t want to do it again. Corporate America in the 1950s and 1960s coasted on the postwar monopoly enjoyed by American companies after the destruction of European and Japanese industries. Detroit in the late 1960s had African-American neighborhoods stretching for miles with well-kept single-family homes and manicured lawns; by the end of the 1970s it had turned into a moonscape. The rust belt still hasn’t recovered from the laziness of American capital a generation ago.

Private equity takes money from institutional investors who otherwise would passively invest in public securities, and gives them the chance to exercise direct ownership of companies whose management fails to exploit their potential. It creates competition where no competition existed before. As in every business, there are ten wannabees for every visionary. A lot of the success of private equity derives from the fact that equity values rose steadily from1983 through 2000, and anyone who had a chance to own equity with borrowed money did exceptionally well. One can argue that many of the players who got rich during the boom years simply rode the big wave. (Bain Capital, though, was one of the first in, and throughout one of the smartest, and one of the least reckless about using excess leverage.)