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October 2012

BIDEN’S STRATEGY: BE A JERK….SELWYN DUKE

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/bidens_strategy_be_a_jerk.html

Is there a human being on this Earth more obnoxious than Joe Biden? It appears that the following was his strategy in the vice-presidential debate:

“Okay, I’ll smile wide like a used-car salesman, shake my head, and laugh while Paul Ryan is talking. This will give all watching the idea that everything he says is nonsense. The only other option is to actually support my side with real ideas, sound reasoning, and appeals to virtue. I can’t do that!

“The other thing I need to do is make myself look assertive, like a real alpha male, by interrupting my opponent continuously. Hey, then if TOTUS and I lose the election anyway, I may still be able to take a leaf out of Bob Dole’s book and do commercials for male enhancement — of course, in my case it would be testosterone booster.”

You know, as is so often the case in these debates, the arguments in the VP contest were a bit policy-wonkish. So most viewers probably couldn’t know exactly what was true and what wasn’t. Given this, will the electorate’s judgment as to who won come down to likeability? If so, I can’t imagine that undecided voters wouldn’t have found Biden disrespectful and his personality thoroughly unappealing.

If Barack Obama’s problem in Denver was bad altitude, Biden’s was bad attitude. So while we’ll have to see what polls tell us, I myself just had the strongest urge to wipe his obnoxious smile off his face with a scouring pad and harsh detergent.

DAVID GOLDMAN: AMERICA WON’T SURVIVE ANOTHER FOUR YEARS OF OBAMA

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/10/11/america-wont-survive-another-four-years-of-obama/

Be afraid. Be very afraid. The America of 2012 is not the America of 2008. If Barack Obama wins this election, the America of 2016 will resemble the beaten and bankrupt countries of Western Europe more than it will the America we grew up in. This isn’t Chicken Little speaking. Take a hard look at the trends, and then drop everything else you had in mind for the next four weeks, and make sure everyone you know votes for Romney-Ryan. We have one last chance to save the republic.

1) Dependency on government handouts: As Dick Morris points out in his latest book Here Come the Black Helicopters!, 20% of Americans received some kind of means-tested government check in 2008, when George W. Bush left office. Now 32% of Americans get some kind of means-tested support — food stamps, disability, welfare, and so forth. That’s a third of the country. Transfer payments are now fully one-fifth of personal income, as I observed in an essay last year. Obama’s arbitrary and perhaps illegal changes in welfare work requirements create a cycle of dependency, as the Romney campaign has warned. They also create a built-in majority for the welfare state. Morris observes that the shift to dependency gives the Democrats a majority on paper. The only question now is turnout. Give this another four years, and the number of Americans who have a stake in economic growth will be a minority of the population.

2) Religious commitment: The Pew Institute’s bombshell survey released this week showed that the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion rose from 15% in 2007 to almost 20% in 2011, and that the unaffiliated are much likelier to vote Democratic (63% of unaffiliated lean Democratic vs. 48% of all registered voters).

This prompted rejoicing in the liberal camp. Writing in the London Guardian, Sarah Posner argued that

Russia’s Constant Interference in Ukraine by WARNER TODD HUSTON

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/russias-constant-interference-in-ukraine

America is in need of allies in Eastern Europe. Two states there are excellent choices for the U.S. to cultivate. One, Poland, is already a fast friend. But the other, Ukraine, is a fairly new friend, and one the U.S. should work harder to cultivate. One thing is sure, Russia is doing her utmost to meddle in the Ukraine and we must be aware of that fact in our dealings in the region.

One of the stumbling blocks to U.S. understanding of the situation in Ukraine is the recent arrest and conviction of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the success that Russia’s version of the story has achieved here in the U.S. Too many in the west imagine that she was arrested by a Ukraine backsliding into a Soviet-styled police state where all opposition leaders are squelched. This, however, just isn’t the case.

Unfortunately, the U.S. senate recently pushed a resolution threatening sanctions against Ukraine for the arrest proving that the Senate has fallen for the overly simplistic narrative that Tymoshenko was arrested on “politicized” charges.

But the truth is, Tymoshenko was tried on the quite legitimate charges of contempt of court and corruption. Tymoshenko was involved in corruption that was aimed at returning Ukraine to the control of the Russians, or if not Russia’s direct control, at the very least Russia’s heavy influence.

DOUGLAS DAVIS:A storm of massive proportions is brewing in the MidEast ****

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1774/a_storm_of_massive_proportions_is_brewing_in_the_mideast
The region is splitting apart and ready to explode out of its largely artificial boundaries along two major fault lines, ethnic and religious, writes a former senior editor of the Jerusalem Post

“The Arab Spring, which was hailed – wrongly – in the West as signalling the birth of democracy in the Middle East, is more likely to be the prelude to a regional and global convulsion. If so, it is time to prepare for epochal change.”
Europe’s political and media classes are missing the point. Lazy, ignorant or both, they persist in reading from a clapped-out, 30-year-old script – if it was accurate even then – when they declaim on Middle East affairs. As if the “occupation”, the “settlements”, the “tunnel”, the “wall” and other “crisis issues” are the cause of the all world’s ills; as if the birth of Palestine holds the key to tranquillity and peace, perhaps even utopia. Solve the Palestinian problem and you solve the problems of the world. Or at least the region. Wrong then, wrong now, according to a senior Arab political source. “Make no mistake,” he told me earnestly over dinner last week, “We are on the brink of a catastrophe. And it has nothing whatever to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

He added:

“The Palestinians have never been among the top-10 priorities of any Arab government. Arab leaders don’t give a damn about the Palestinians. They have simply used the Palestinian issue to divert attention from their own failures – to cover up their ineptitude, inadequacies and corruption. Their oppressive security measures were never meant to combat ‘Zionist aggression’ but to suppress the anger of their own people. It’s been an exercise in cynicism, pure and simple. And even Western governments swallowed it.”

Now, he says, the Arab world – and the wider Islamic world – is facing reality. It is a reality that has nothing to do with the Arab Spring, democracy, freedom and liberty. Nor does it have anything to do with rage-fuelled violence supposedly incited by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, conspiracy theories about Western imperialism, Jewish influence-peddling, crusader aggression, insulting cartoons or YouTube videos (though such pretexts are often used to justify pre-ordained spasms of violence).

WHAT A TRAVESTY…. THE EU WINS A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: ROBIN SHEPHERD ON HOW FARCICAL THAT IS

EU Nobel Peace Prize is more farcical than Obama’s The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in what can only be described as a travesty and a complete farce

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1795/eu_nobel_peace_prize_is_more_farcical_than_obama_s

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was April 1st. It’s not. It’s just another one of those sad moments in the decline of Western civilisation.

Today, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to one of the least democratic institutions in the Western world: The European Union.

Mired in decades of waste and hypocrisy that impoverish the world (see the Common Agricultural Policy), the European Union, it is a travesty to award the peace prize to the EU. The award, if one was going to be attributed to a supranational body, should have gone to NATO for saving millions of Libyans from a grizzly end at the whim of Colonel Gaddafi last year.

But instead, in all their Obama-fawning wisdom, the Nobel Committee has this year decided that the EU has turned Europe from a continent of war into a continent of peace. Funny, we thought that honour should have gone to the Allies during the Second World War. This kind of revisionism should of course be objected to across the board, as the Nobel committee’s decision to pre-emptively award Obama the prize in 2009 was. Since the award three years ago, Obama has presided over a grizzly few years in Afghanistan, kept Guatanamo Bay open, invested in drone warfare and ‘extra-judicial’ killings and has also, through his failure to assert a dominant foreign policy, allowed the Middle East to become even more unpredictable for the US and wider world.

The Nobel Peace Prize is continuing to delegitimise itself in this manner, and frankly acting as nothing more than a public relations firm for Left-leaning individuals and institutions. This trend is increasing.

Once noted as a fair and independent arbiter of peace in the world, the Nobel committee has recently awarded the peace prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore (2007) and the Hamas-excusing Jimmy Carter in 2002. The European Union is therefore in good company. As an organisation that hesitated over the Balkans conflict, that fails to recognise Hezbollah as a terrorist entity, and of course with a gross democratic deficit – there is genuinely no cause for it to be awarded such an ‘honour’.But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? The Nobel Peace Prize is no longer an honour. It’s a farce.

THE ALAWITES AND THE FUTURE OF SYRIA: HAROLD RHODE

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3394/alawites-syria Assad and the Alawites cannot give in. They are fighting for their very existence. The only way to end this civil war is to let them have control over their destiny — ether as an autonomous region in Syria or as an independent entity. The Alawites are a small, historically oppressed people, whose political […]

SARAH HONIG: POPULIST FEVER

Populist fever If Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu hadn’t moved up the elections to early 2013, we’d be voting in late 2013. Sooner or later, the race must be run next year. But the difference, in political terms, of when we go to the polls is huge. It matters cardinally to what’s best for the country […]

ISRAELI SETTLERS: WE ARE HERE TO STAY!!!!! BY REBECCA COLLARD….SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.voanews.com/content/israeli-settlers-here-to-stay-/1524714.html

THANKS TO YISRAEL MEDAD WHO LIVES AND WRITES IN SHILOH…..

THE AUTHOR HERE IS SO BIASED …KAHANE IS DEAD, ASSASSINATED BY AL QAEDA IN NEW YORK, KACH IS PRETTY MUCH UNDONE….BUT THE SETTLER SPIRIT LIVES AMONG THE PATRIOTIC AND BRAVE PIONEERS WHO HAVE RESTORED ISRAEL IN SPITE OF THE OPPROBRIUM OF THE LEFT AND THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA. THE SO-CALLED ARAB SPRING HAS UNRAVELED BUT THE TOWN OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA THRIVE AND GROW….MORE POWER TO THEM…..RSK

KFAR TAPUACH, — The walls of Daniel Pinner’s home in the Israeli settlement of Kfar Tapuach are lined with books. Among the political, cultural and religious texts are books by the late Meir Kahane, an American-Israeli rabbi who preached the idea of a “greater Israel” — one that includes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Kahane’s political party, Kach, also promoted the idea of expelling the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived in the captured areas, a position that prompted the Israeli government to outlaw it in 1988 as a racist organization. Kahane was assassinated in New York two years later, but many of his ideas are still popular among some Israeli settlers, including Daniel Pinner.

“The final status is obviously going to be restoration of Jewish sovereignty from the Mediterranean shore to the River Jordan,” says Pinner, echoing Kahane’s position and firmly rejecting any idea of a sovereign Palestinian state on the captured territories.

“We have much more claim to Ramallah than to Tel Aviv,” Pinner explains, referring to the West Bank town Palestinians now use as their administrative center. “Tel Aviv only goes back 104 years, but ‘Rame,’ what the Arabs call Ramallah, goes back 4,000 years as a Jewish town.”

OVERCOMING OBAMADDICTION: CRAIG KARPEL’S BOOK REVIEWED BY WILLIAM BIGELOW…SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/10/11/Overcoming-Obama-Addiction

CRAIG KARPEL IS MY FRIEND…SO I READ IT AND I LOVED IT AND IT SHOULD GO ON EVEN AFTER THE ELECTION UNTIL EVERY ONE OF THE KNEE JERKERS HAS GONE IN FOR DETOXIFICATION OF LIBERAL CANT….RSK
In a pointed but funny new book, The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter, Craig S. Karpel, a former leftist community organizer who has become a political conservative, asks the salient question:

Why are so many voters in non-battleground states intent on voting to re-elect Barack Obama despite his dismal performance?

Karpel answers his own question this way; these voters are suffering from an Obama addiction. Thus he asserts that only a 12-Step program will heal them, and urges these voters to host and attend Alcoholics Anonymous-type meetings to “work the steps” by confessing their addiction and committing to go through “Democratic detox” and “Republican rehab.”

The book begins:

“My name is Craig K., and I’m an Obamaholic. Welcome to what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault — it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”

The series of confessions includes:”Obama’s election was the triumph of biography over achievement. We allowed ourselves to become Obama-news junkies, in the grip of lack-of-substance abuse.”

“Outside of technical fields — proverbially, brain surgery and rocket science — academic credentials are an indication not of achievement, but of promise. Thus it is that government agencies are staffed mostly with failures who were once considered promising, while the business world is full of unpredicted successes.”

“There’s a dangerous downside to the fact that the United States is not a constitutional monarchy: Because we have no powerless nobility to invest with charisma, we look for it in candidates for the country’s highest office, running the risk of attributing magical qualities to an unworthy president, who, unlike Britain’s ineffectual royals, can cause real trouble.”

BENGHAZI’S REAL SCANDAL: UNCLE SAM JOINED THE JIHAD

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2264/Benghazis-Real-Scandal-Uncle-Sam-Joined-the-Jihad.aspx

Imagine, pre-9/11/12, that you were responsible for arranging the defense of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Would you have considered American interests and personnel best protected by bringing in a local security outfit called the February 17 Martyrs Brigade?

The question has yet to come up in House hearings, but I think it holds the key to the Obama administration’s betrayal of the American people in “Benghazi-gate.” To an American with common sense not subverted by advanced degrees, the thought of putting Islamic “martyrs” in charge of American “infidels” in Benghazi – which, fun fact, literally means “city of holy warriors” – would trigger the inevitable “heck, no.” And that’s without even knowing what is significant about Feb. 17.

But I’m talking about Washington, D.C. Here, placing the lives of Americans in the hands of a thug-army linked to multiple atrocities and drawn from jihad-epicentral eastern Libya disturbs no collective brain wave. No matter that Benghazi and nearby Derna sent more men, per capita, to Iraq to kill Americans than anywhere else in the world. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, putting local boys in barracks inside the consulate compound was a great idea. Why not? President Obama’s ambassador, the late Christopher Stevens, was, as they say, “reaching out” across the jihad spectrum on official business.

Meanwhile, Ansar al Sharia (“Supporters of Islamic Law”), the al-Qaida-linked militia believed to have led the consulate assault in September, is a spinoff of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, but that didn’t scratch the lacquered political surface, either. And even as reports remind us of ties among February 17 Martyrs Brigade leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood and the web of jihad-poison spun by Qatar’s Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Libya’s Ali al-Salabi – the latter having been tapped by the Qatari dictatorship to distribute $2 billion to Libyan “rebels” – the focal point remains elsewhere.