http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3275/al-qaeda-spain The arrests in Spain, however, indicate that al Qaeda continues to pose a serious threat and that Obama’s triumphalism may be premature. Three suspected al Qaeda terrorists arrested in Spain in early August were allegedly plotting an airborne attack on a shopping mall near Gibraltar, the British overseas territory on the southernmost tip of […]
http://www.rightsidenews.com/2012080616805/editorial/rsn-pick-of-the-day/propagandist-at-washington-times.html
If nationalists win an election in Serbia, it follows that there will be an article in Washington Times by the paper’s resident Croatian-supremacist Jeffrey T. Kuhner. And so there was, as usual angling for a new war against Serbia – by making the argument that Serbia wants it. (“Did Serbia Vote for War: New ultranationalist president promotes instability – May 24)
“Mr. Nikolic’s victory means the Balkans may be plunged into ethnic violence again,” Kuhner writes.
Thanks for that NGO/State Department stock sentence. As if it’s not violence while only Serbs (and Roma) are being picked off (in Serbia’s Kosovo) or targeted for war crimes prosecution, which becomes persecution.
Kuhner continues, “The 60-year-old former cemetery manager is a neo-fascist, who wants to restore a ‘Great Serbia.’”
That Greater Serbia project that didn’t exist last time and doesn’t exist this time, and which was reluctantly but repeatedly disproved at the Serb-hostile Hague. Either there aren’t any fact-checkers atThe Times, or Balkans facts are still expendable in America. Kuhner, who has internalized the truly fascist-spun version of the 1990s Balkans, brandishes the “neo-fascist” label that is so popular to use against Serbs. This from a champion of the nation that still reminisces about its Hitler-bestowed Independent State of Croatia, and still holds Mass for its fuehrer Ante Pavelic.
Nor is Kuhner concerned with the Albanian nationalism which not only started a NATO-assisted terrorist insurgency to wrest 15% of Serbian land (is it “nationalist” to have a problem with that?), but which also employed organ-harvesting, jihad, and human- and drug-trafficking in its service. He likewise isn’t bothered by the fundamentalist Muslim president of Bosnia who insisted on war to begin with. No, Kuhner wants to keep readers eternally fixed on Serbs. This is a man with a chip on his shoulder, and he’s weighing his paper down with him.
In time for Memorial Day Weekend, Kuhner gave a slap in the face to thousands of WWII vets, tracing Serbianationalism™ to “Drazen” (sic: Draza) Mihailovich and his Chetniks, the royalist guerrillas who fought not only the Nazis, but also the Communists (Tito’s Partisans were simultaneously working for Soviet domination of the region). It’s something for which Ronald Reagan singled Serbian heroism out and for which President Truman bestowed a posthumous Legion of Merit upon Mihailovich. (“The ultimate tragedy of Draza Mihailovich cannot erase the memory of his heroic and often lonely struggle against the twin tyrannies that afflicted his people, Nazism and Communism.” — Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1979)
It was articles like Kuhner’s, calling the Serbs and Chetniks “racist” and “far-right” — inverting the documented, Axis-aligned fascism and continuing supremacy of Croats, Albanians and Bosniaks — that were so hard for American WWII vets like the aging Chetnik-rescued Richard Felman to take in the 90s, when the West was angling for the next betrayal of the Serbs. He was aghast to see Axis propaganda being printed in American newspapers at the turn of the millennium. And here we are more than a decade past, still repeating it.Richard_L_Felman_USAF
Richard L. Felman U.S.A.F.
Kuhner has the Chetniks “slaughtering tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Kosovar Albanians.” As any Jewish library can show, one-third of Croatia’s Serb population was liquidated by the Croatians’ Hitler-aligned Ustasha regime which Kuhner is covering for with his inversions; and Kosovo Serbs (plus 400 Jews) were rounded up by those “Kosovar Albanians” , who also fought the Partisans, in their fez-capped Nazi uniforms.
I won’t go into Jewish Holocaust survivor Cadik Dannon’s experience with a Bosnian Muslim working at a Croatian concentration camp, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t the Croats, Albanians, or Bosniaks whom the Germans had to threaten to kill by the hundred for every dead German soldier; it was the Serbs. And this of course affected the attack plans of Mihailovich’s Chetniks. An obscure term to Americans, which the writer hisses like a true partisan of one of the sides in the Balkan wars. (WARNING: BELOW FILM DEPICTS EXECUTIONS NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL AUDIENCES)
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/14/why-ryan-terrifies-the-left/print
Paul Ryan terrifies the American Left.
Which precisely explains the tones of hysteria coming from the Obama White House.
The real question is why the Chicago Thugs have suffered such a public meltdown over Mitt Romney’s choice of the young Wisconsin Congressman to be his vice-presidential running mate.
And there is an answer. Three specific answers, actually.
• Ronald Reagan: President Reagan today is an American hero. Poll after poll has Americans placing him in the pantheon of great American presidents, and occasionally at the top of the list.
The admiration for Reagan has become such a part of American historical bedrock that even President Obama and likeminded professional leftists have essentially given up the ghost. When they mention Reagan at all, it is generally to play a sly game of casting Reagan as a moderate, pretending to salute him while taking a shot at some Republican for not being more like Reagan. Obama played this game four times in one speech back in April, effusivelypraising Reagan while casting Mitt Romney as some sort of wild-eyed extremist.
No one is fooled.
Ronald Reagan was and remains the Left’s worst nightmare.
Why?
Because it was Ronald Reagan who both understood conservative philosophy and was repeatedly turning it into effective policy. It was Reagan who began the massive historical deconstruction of a century’s worth of the Left’s ideas on everything from economics to national security — repeatedly proving them as unworkable as they were dangerous. Not to mention that he trounced Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and, through his vice president in 1988, Michael Dukakis. Three consecutive political landslides in which Reagan so changed America that by 1992 Bill Clinton ran as a “New Democrat”– essentially portraying himself as Reagan-lite.
As the assaults on Romney and Ryan abruptly escalate, it’s more than worth a look back to put all of these attacks in perspective. To understand that the visceral nature of the attacks on Mitt Romney and now Paul Ryan is old news — decades old in fact.
Recall that when Reagan’s hand went up to take the oath of office in January 1981, liberal economics had, by the end of 1980, produced:
– An inflation rate of 13.58%
– An unemployment rate of 7.4% that was climbing steadily on the way up to 9.6%
– A prime interest rate of 21.50% — an all time high.
Reagan’s answer to this mess — as is Paul Ryan’s today — was a combination of tax cuts and budget cuts along with regulatory reform. His critics instantly derided this as “Reaganomics.”
And as today with Ryan and his “Path to Prosperity” — aka “The Ryan Budget” — the leftists in Congress and the media were merciless in savaging Reagan and his “Reaganomics.”
What did they say?
Steven F. Hayward has detailed the response to Reagan in his superb book (one of two) The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989.
In the lead was Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat who described himself as “an old-hat FDR Democrat.” O’Neill made no pretense where he was coming from, saying: “I’ve been one of the big spenders of all time; it’s true, I am a big spender.” At one point, says Hayward, O’Neill boasted that he had gone out of his way to spend government money on a project to make dwarfs six inches taller.
O’Neill had no reluctance in showing his disdain for Reagan. He derided the new president as a “matinee idol,” deliberately mispronouncing Reagan’s name during the campaign as “Reegan.” Uneasy at the size of Reagan’s 1980 victory, O’Neill decided it was good strategy to give Reagan enough policy rope to hang himself and the GOP politically, believing this would eventually kill Reaganomics dead. Every moment he could find, O’Neill was not only warning that Reaganomics would be a dismal failure — he frequently attacked the President in sharp personal terms. On one occasion O’Neill took to ABC’s Good Morning America to say this to host Charlie Gibson:
“He [Reagan] has no concern, no regard, no care for the little man in America. And I understand that. Because of his lifestyle, he never meets those people. And so, consequently, he doesn’t understand their problems. He’s only been able to meet the wealthy…. We [liberals] are the party of the people. And we’re their guardians.”
At a later date O’Neill snapped of Reagan’s policies and administration, both of which he consistently predicted would fail:
“Let’s face it. This is a callous, right-wing administration, committed to repealing [LBJ’s] the Great Society, [JFK’s] the New Frontier, [Truman’s] the Fair Deal, and [FDR’s] the New Deal. It has made a target of the politically weak, the poor, the working people.”
Still later O’Neill would declaim of Reagan:
“The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.”
This, mind you, was par for the course as liberals of the day dealt with Ronald Reagan. As one liberal media critic wrote in the day, the battle was between “FDR versus Darwin” — almost exactly the lame line being advanced today by Obama and company.
Liberal mayors were apoplectic at the Reagan budget cuts, predicting riots in the streets (there were none). The liberal Governor of New York, Hugh Carey, insisted “there will be social upheaval in the country by October because of the Reagan Administration’s budget cuts.” Oops. Wrong again.
The ultimate irony — and since there was no Fox or talk radio in the day, it was an irony unmentioned — was that O’Neill and his fellow liberals were supported in their visceral anger at Reagan by none other than the Soviet Union. Longtime Soviet spokesman Georgi Arbatov dismissed Reaganomics by saying it was nothing more than an attempt “to cure the entrenched ills of the late 20th century simply by returning to the ‘good old practices’ of 19th-century capitalism.”
Thus the American and the Communist left in the Soviet Union were in perfect synch: Reaganomics was evil, not to mention that it would never work.
And so it went.
All of which explains the absolute fury by liberals as one-by-one, everything they insisted would happen — never happened. Reagan didn’t simply prove them wrong, his policies humiliated their policies. Hard core liberals were furious — absolutely furious.
By the time of Reagan’s re-election in November of 1984, interest rates were down more than a full 9 points, from 21.50 to 12%. The unemployment rate had peaked at 9.6% and stood at 7.5%. (By the time Reagan left office in 1989 the unemployment rate was down to 5.5%.) And inflation? By 1984 — Reagan’s re-election year — inflation had dropped like a stone, from 13.58% in 1980 under the liberal Carter’s tax-and-spend policies to 4.30% under Reagan.
Reagan took note of a curious silence, saying with a smile: “They don’t call it Reaganomics anymore.” Which is to say, Reaganomics — once used by liberals like O’Neill and company as an epithet — had become synonymous in the mind of Americans with economic success. So — liberals stopped using the term.
Everything once being said about Ronald Reagan is now being hurled at Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The reason for the intensity of it all (Romney murdered a guy’s wife, Ryan wants to push grandma over the cliff) is that in primal recesses of the liberal mind, liberals look at Romney and Ryan as the return of Reaganomics.
The New York Times yesterday predictably branded Paul Ryan as — really — “the most extreme of vice-presidential possibilities.” (Glad to know Sarah Palin is now a moderate in the eyes of the Times. Congratulations Governor Palin. You have officially “evolved.”)
On November 2, 1980, the New York Times made a point of re-endorsing liberal Jimmy Carter by saying — really — that Carter’s liberalism “offers better goods.”
Better goods.
Which is to say, liberals really don’t care if there’s high unemployment (as there is now with Obama’s 8.3%) hurting Americans. Or, in the case of 1980, if liberalism was producing 21.50% interest rates and 13.58% inflation. Liberals, you see, are all about “caring” — even if the liberal version of caring in fact translates to a ruthless un-caring that ruins American lives every single day. The primary concern of liberals has for decades appeared to be all about feeling good about themselves — not helping others.
Which is to say: Reaganomics began the successful dismantling of the failed liberal idea of a government-run command — socialist if you will — economy. An economy that was built not on the original American idea of equal opportunity but rather based on government arranging outcomes. An idea that failed miserably by 1980.
Paul Ryan is the very symbol of Reaganomics.
Or, if you will, he is Reagan’s heir. The return of the left’s worst nightmare — in which all or most of the classes into which they love to divide America voted overwhelmingly for Reagan and against liberalism’s standard bearers Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis. Not to mention launching a Reagan-lite Clinton presidency in a fourth and fifth election in 1992 and 1996. And, when Clinton wasn’t Reaganesque enough in his first two years? The Reagan Revolution still had the clout to launch Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America revolution in 1994 — forcing Clinton back to the center.
Which brings us to Paul Ryan’s mentor (and, full disclosure, my own boss at the Department of Housing and Urban Development):
• Jack Kemp: Jack Kemp, as was noted in this space back in January of 2009, was arguably the most important man in late 20th century American politics who never became president.
Usually that importance is attributed, understandably, to his role as what one might call the Godfather of Reaganomics. It was Kemp who took the arguments of Art Laffer and the Wall Street Journal’s Jude Wanniski, and, using his role as a congressman, persuaded Ronald Reagan into adopting supply-side economics. (Which in fact was not a new idea, having provided the backbone of tax-cut policy for both Republican Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s and Democrat John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.)
Kemp’s role here was in fact historic.
But Jack Kemp has one other serious political achievement to his credit aside from being the “Godfather of Reaganomics.”
Jack Kemp began doing something that was long overdue: de-compassionating the Left.
Which is to say, as that Tip O’Neill quote about liberals being “the guardians” of working people and the poor illustrated, liberals have long connected the role of government to moral superiority.
Jack Kemp would have none of it. Not for a moment would he yield the moral high ground to socialism much less Marxism.
He never hesitated, for example, to challenge the idea that the American Left somehow had a moral claim to leadership in civil rights. He would remind, as he always called them, “our friends on the Left” that they had been “mired in Reconstruction mentality, (and had been) implicit defenders of white supremacy, the Solid South and the Ku Klux Klan.” In a speech at Harvard he looked his liberal audience straight in the eye and said of his pro-growth, pro-capitalism policies that they were a “moral obligation” to our fellow Americans.
A Jack Kemp speech wasn’t complete without describing left-wing policies as “paternalistic” or “condescending” or “elitist.” “Manic egalitarians” as he once called leftists. He believed passionately in free markets and economic growth as a pillar of a moral society. “You can’t enrich poor nations by impoverishing their people,” he would say in a 1990 speech to “The Wealth of Nations” Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Typically direct in addressing both American and international leftists Kemp added:
“The key to wealth and prosperity is allowing people freedom –freedom to work, to save, freedom to own their own property and homes, to succeed, and yes, to fail, but try again. The ultimate cause of the wealth of nations, and indeed, the wealth of cities, is people.”
It is thus no surprise to hear Paul Ryan confront his critics directly, just as Jack Kemp once did, to look them in the eye and challenge the morality of big government liberalism. In a speech at Georgetown University in April of this year, Ryan took on President Obama exactly in the style of his former boss Kemp. Challenging Obama on what Ryan called the “moral implications” of Obama’s policies Ryan noted that:
“He [President Obama] does not seem to understand that he can’t promote the common good by setting class against class, or group against group.
Saying as well:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2405
PA is part of the problem, not the solution
The worse Israel’s security situation becomes, the more its citizens grasp at any straws they can that offer droplets of delusion provided by pacifist-leaning pundits.
This makes some sort of psychological sense. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that, although much improvement had been made in the preparedness of the homefront, the far greater and more immediate concern to all of us was the Iranian nuclear threat, the public started becoming nervous. In the last two days alone, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people approaching the designated stations to pick up their gas mask kits. And talk of locating or cleaning out bomb shelters — as well as loading up on canned goods and other supplies — is in the air.
Furthermore, it does not seem at all clear which type of missiles we are on the verge of having to escape, or from which direction. Though the origin of all can be traced to Iran, Israelis make a distinction between Hamas or Hezbollah rocket attacks and a full-fledged war with the Islamic republic. To add a new — albeit expected — twist to the mix, Egypt is now officially Israel’s enemy again, and Syria is amassing chemical weapons.
Such a situation is not conducive to calm — other than the misleading kind found in the eye of a hurricane. Netanyahu’s response is to warn the country’s foes, and assure the populace, that he is willing and able to be proactive on Iran, while hinting to the mainly pro-Israel U.S. Congress that he may need to take military action before the presidential election in November.
Rather than rally around the prime minister, Israelis are afraid that he is being both too easy on the trigger and irresponsibly loose-lipped about it.
This does not mean that they prefer passivity, however. On the contrary, being sitting ducks for events beyond their control is antithetical to the Israeli mindset.
The trouble is that when such an unpleasant sensation is aroused, the tendency is to turn to liberalism for solace. It is comforting, after all, to imagine that there is something Israel can do diplomatically to reverse regional processes that pose military threats. The alternative is to accept that a lot of people are likely to die in the near future if Netanyahu means what he says. That the idea behind this is to prevent a much higher death toll in the longer run doesn’t seem to register.
What does gain traction is the notion that Israel can and should take action, by doing anything it can to create a Palestinian state. As senior fellow at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs Alon Ben-Meir writes in Monday’s Huffington Post, “Those inside the Netanyahu government who suggest that now is not the right time to seek a peace agreement with the Palestinians because of the regional turmoil and the existential threats that Israel now faces are both misguided and disingenuous. On the contrary, given the threats from Iran and its surrogate Hezbollah and the potential consequences of a failed state in Syria, it is a particularly critical moment for Israel to forge peace with the Palestinians.”
http://times247.com/articles/forging-ahead-on-the-birther-controversy
Detective Michael Zullo is surprised to say the least. He is chief investigator for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse looking into the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate. At a recent press conference, he presented his evidence, which he says points to forgery. He expected the media to follow up with questions about the evidence. What he got was unabashed hostility.
“I really didn’t expect them to come out of the gate attacking us as they did,” Mr. Zullo said.
Nearly a month has passed since a July 17 press conference where Mr. Zullo presented evidence which he says proves that Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate is a fraud. “They didn’t pick up on anything. They just don’t want to know about this,” he said. “We presented the most compelling stuff that we know we can prove. That’s the other side of it. We can prove this. This isn’t speculation anymore.”
But Mr. Zullo says the mainstream media have turned to bloggers with names like The Fogbow and Dr. Conspiracy to refute the Arpaio team’s findings. “The media seem to gravitate toward these people as if they are the sound voice in this matter and they are anything but. They will give them special homage as far their technical information, but they will not report on ours with any real accuracy,” he said.
The birth certificate controversy has dogged the president since the 2008 Democratic primaries. Then, when Mr. Obama battled against presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, rumors swirled that he was not a natural-born U.S. citizen. Mr. Obama released his short-form birth certificate to quell the controversy.
Iran dismisses threat of Israeli attack
The Times of Israel
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
News
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters at a weekly press conference that Tehran is unconcerned by the threat of an Israeli attack on the country. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23WJwqOUe
Obama asks court to uphold racial preferences
Politico
Monday, August 13, 2012
Blogs
The Obama administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to uphold the use of race in the University of Texas’s college admissions process, saying the practice advances an essential government interest. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. filed the amicus brief in Fisher v. University of Texas. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23WKEYoC2
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The moderate solution is deeply seductive for Republicans, who see their opposition sliding to the extreme left and believe that they can sweep up the middle by just moving a little to the left. All they have to do is moderate their position on X, Y or Z, and they will win over all the unaffiliated voters who are a natural fit for their common-sense policies.
This seems like such a no-brainer that high-profile Republicans keep earnestly and then angrily pushing for a surrender on one point or another as the key to becoming the moderate mainstream party. But no matter how many times the Republican Party plays this game, it never stops being the “extremist” party that is out of touch with whatever the new normal is.
Like Lucy’s football, the moderate identity is a paradox. The more you pursue it, the less likely you are to reach it. Our current political grammar, which leans heavily on ideas such as moderation and extremism, was crafted by the left. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, the meaning of such words is relative and varies unpredictably. That relativism has given us the moderate Taliban and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. Before long, it might give us the moderate Al-Qaeda member.
“Moderate” and “Extremist” are words that are used with an absolute air, as if what they refer to is clear and fixed. Actually, the value of each is relative to the other. If the range of views among Muslims is such that the Taliban are actually somewhere in the middle, then they are indeed moderate. This does not mean that they are decent people or that we can reason with them. It just means that the spectrum of Muslim views is bad enough that, within that spectrum, the Taliban fall in the middle, rather than on the extreme end.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/gnostics-of-our-time/?print=1
A perhaps surprising relation exists between a branch of ancient Christian theology (or anti-theology) and a modern secular political movement, that is, between Gnosticism and Left-Liberal progressivism. In tracing this oddly creedal linkage, it will be helpful to begin with a brief and broad-stroke analysis of the Gnostic doctrine before appraising its application to the political sensibility of the Left. These two phenomena share a similar psychological matrix and both are fueled by the paradoxical theory of what we might call “pastoral insurgency.”
The term Gnosticism refers technically to various heretical sects of the first six Christian centuries that taught that knowledge (Greek: gnosis) rather than faith was the key to salvation. But such knowledge was, in effect, a putative and esoteric insight into the nature of the Creation which understood the existence of evil not as a product of man’s free will but as a flaw inherent in the very origin of the cosmos. Mankind has got things backwards. The fault lies with the Creator. The snake is our misprized benefactor who comes with knowledge of salvation, wisdom, and healing, as we now find its remedial emblem on the medical caduceus. Which is to say that mankind has been the victim of a diabolical stratagem, seduced by a devious “cosmocrator” into seeing what is evil as good and what is good as evil.
As I understand it, the essence of Gnosticism is this: the natural is regarded as unnatural. The laws of nature — aging, suffering, death, competition between individuals, groups, and species for resources and living space — are perceived as the consequence of a Divine mistake or a Demonic usurpation. Something went wrong at the moment of Creation, violating the immanent design latent in the “singularity.” The world is not as initially intended and is therefore repudiated as unnatural, an aberration.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-biggest-d-c-spy-scandal-you-havent-heard-about-part-one/?print=1 Two years ago, the executive director of the Kashmiri American Council [1] (KAC), Ghulam Nabi Fai, was riding high in Washington, D.C. circles. In March 2010, he hosted a pricey fundraiser in his own home for Rep. Dan Burton [2] (R-IN), the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia […]
http://www.myrightword.blogspot.com/ Economic situation in the West Bank and Gaza and positive Israeli measures towards the PA:- 3. Facilitation of the movement of people and goods • The number of roadblocks was reduced from 44 in 2008 to 10 in 2012, most of which are normally open. The most recent roadblock to be removed, in the […]
