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January 2012

DAVID GOLDMAN: SANTORUM? ROMNEY?…A MIXED REPRT CARD

antoronomics — A Mixed Report Card Posted By David P. Goldman
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/01/15/santoronomics-a-mixed-report-card/

Rick Santorum is magnificently right about tripling the individual tax credit, and doubly right to warn about demographic winter in America. But he’s wrong to propose a special tax break for manufacturing. As an admirer of Santorum, I offer some friendly criticism.

It’s encouraging that Rick Santorum emerged as the leading conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. Unlike the mercurial Newt Gingrich, a man whose contributions to political life are manifold but who is temperamentally unsuited to the presidency, Santorum is a truly nice guy. And as my one-time mentor Jude Wanniski liked to say, the American people want a nice guy in the world’s most powerful office. As a prominent Orthodox rabbi of my acquaintance put it, it says something about American faith that the frontrunners are, respectively, a devout Mormon and a devout Catholic, and exemplary husbands and fathers.

Full disclosure: I have contributed to both Romney’s and Santorum’s campaigns, to the former because I think Romney is the best man to face Barack Obama in the general election, and to Rick Santorum because I like him.

ANOTHER DISGRACEFUL APOLOGY FRENZY: BRUCE THORNTON

Another Disgraceful Apology Frenzy Posted By Bruce Thornton

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/another-disgraceful-apology-frenzy/print/

Two recent news stories about Afghanistan reveal the delusional mentality of those conducting our foreign policy. The first is about some Marines who urinated on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Such behavior, of course, is mild compared to the sort of brutal treatment of both the living and the dead typical of all wars ever fought. Nonetheless, this act is contrary to the rules of war and the professional code of the Corp, and as such should be punished. That’s all our official spokesmen need to say about the matter, for it concerns a violation of our military’s high standards that have helped make it the most professional, lethal, and ethical force in the world.

The foreign policy establishment, however, has fallen all over itself issuing solicitous apologies. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her “total dismay,” a reaction stronger than her comments about the Egyptian military slaughtering Copts. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta phoned the utterly corrupt and duplicitous beneficiary of our power and money, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, to assure him that those responsible would be found and punished for such a “deplorable” act. Of course, this is a part of the world where brutal violence against civilians is routinely used as a tool of politics, and where torture and mutilation of the living, let alone the desecration of the dead, are standard operating procedure. Yet we cede the moral high ground to Karzai, who said the soldiers’ behavior was “inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms,” something I don’t recall him ever saying about the terrorists murdering our soldiers. Even more risible was the response of the Taliban, who condemned the “inhuman act of wild American soldiers,” one “in contradiction with all human and ethical norms.” This from a group that when it ruled Afghanistan, used a European-built soccer stadium to bury non-shari’a-compliant women up to their necks and then stone them to death, and to machine-gun and behead other miscreants.

HUMBERTO FONTOVA: WHAT MASS MURDERERS DRIVE…..MERCEDES DIARIES?

Mercedes-Benz: What Mass Murderers Drive Posted By Humberto Fontova

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/mercedes-benz-what-mass-murderers-drive/

The top act at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week featured Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche peddling his company’s new gadgetry under a huge picture of Che Guevara, who sported the Mercedes logo on his beret. “Viva la Revolucion!” beamed the cheeky Herr Zetsche while unveiling his brilliant ad campaign.

In other words: to sell cars in the U.S., Mercedes-Benz is relying on the mass appeal in the U.S. of the mass-murdering Stalinist who craved to destroy the U.S.

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” once raved Mercedes-Benz new U.S. sales icon. “Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ [Americans] very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy [Americans] must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm! If the nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The solutions to the world’s problems lie behind the Iron Curtain. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

The Saga of the 60s Radicals Attempting to Rewrite History: Patrick Dunleavy

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11230/pub_detail.asp
Time can often erase the memory of the past and in the case of convicted domestic terrorists of the 60’s seek to re-write it entirely.

The latest case in point is that of Judith Clark a member of the Weather Underground currently serving 75 years to life in prison for the shooting deaths of police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and also armored car guard Peter Page during the botched Brinks Robbery in Nyack, NY in 1981.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article by reporter Tom Robbins readers are told the story of the transformation of a terrorist who’s only mistake was to drive a getaway car during the robbery attempt. We are then led through a myriad of accomplishments that Ms. Clark has achieved while in that dreaded belly of the beast, prison. She has obtained college degrees, mentored and counseled other inmates, and become a model of the rehabilitative process. Her greatest regret is the separation from her daughter, although she does see her during visits and talk to her on the prison phone regularly. According to her version of the events that led to her arrest we are asked to believe that her complicity was inadvertent and singular to this one crime. In her website, where readers are urged to write to the governor on her behalf, she states the following regarding her actions,

“She was sitting in a get-away car. She was neither a shooter nor a robber.”

AMIL IMANI:ISLAM DETOXIFICATION

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/pub_detail.asp?id=11228

Detoxification is the physiological or psychological removal of toxic substances from a living organism. Let me use a metaphor to help an understanding of this process. Islam is a type of dependence inducing “potion.” In the same way that; let us say, alcohol is. Millions and perhaps billions imbibe alcohol. A great majority of these consumers qualify as moderate and social drinkers. Drinking alcohol may do them some psychological good but may also exact some physical health problems and a monetary price. Yet, a vast number of human beings find enough “comfort” to put up with the monetary, health, relationships, and other costs of their drinking.

A certain number are the heavy drinkers who are severely dependent and reliant on the drug. And there are those who are infrequent drinkers. They may have some wine at Christmas or on their birthday. And finally, there are those who are teetotalers. They never touch the stuff. So, you have a kind of what statisticians call a normal curve that people distribute themselves along the drinking dimension as a bell-shaped function. Some are on one extreme, some on the other, and the great majority between the two extremes.

JED BABBIN:BANE CAPITAL AND THE GOP’S DARK NIGHT

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/16/bane-capital-and-the-gops-dark#commentcontainer

Newt’s bad narrative has made a mockery of this presidential race.

The media always has an established theme — a narrative — into which the coverage of political stories is shoehorned. Sometimes that results in important stories being ignored because they just don’t fit. That’s okay with the media bosses this year because they’re not in the news business. They’re in the business of helping Obama get re-elected.

The narrative is important because it shapes the flow of information voters get and thus defines the political debate. If the narrative controls what the voters hear, read, and see — and it usually does — then the voters are thinking and deciding on the basis of the information to which they’re exposed. Were it not for conservative talk radio and publications such as the Spectator, the media would be pretty much in total control of that information flow leading up to the election.

Before the Iowa caucuses, the media narrative of the Republican primaries was pretty much a personality contest about who was more electable, who was more conservative — or, as the media phrase it, more radical — and who was going to score in Iowa’s beauty contest in which social issues usually play a disproportionate role.

The Irony Lady: Israel And The Arabs…On The Balance Sheet THE IRON LADY….ISRAEL AND THE ARABS….ON THE BALANCE SHEET: GERALD HONIGMAN ****

John Campbell’s biography of Great Britain’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990), has just hit the big screen. Meryl Streep is already being talked about for another academy award for her portrayal of the Iron Lady.

Like her nation’s overwhelming centuries’ old imperial past, there are multiple ways of viewing Prime Minister Thatcher’s own actions.

Ask people which empire in all of recorded history was the largest, and see if they know…

To save you the task of researching this (and as if you haven’t already guessed), the British Empire beats them all by far, at one time comprising nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth and about a quarter of its population up until the post-World War II era in the last century.

Name the location…all North America; British West Indies; Egypt, and much of the rest of the Middle East and elsewhere in North and sub-Saharan Africa; Australia and New Zealand; Hong Kong; the former Burma, Ceylon, and the Indian sub-continent and its environs; islands off of South America; etc. and so forth… not to mention the earlier forced acquisition and consolidation of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish peoples’ lands.