http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-gaza-war/ The rockets falling on Israel have their origin not just in their Gaza launchers, but in the election results of November. It is no coincidence that the explosions we are seeing now on the evening news began after the election. Like so many in the Middle East, Hamas leaders were holding their breath to […]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9687187/Not-a-single-penny-more-for-the-EUs-begging-bowl.html
Not a single penny more for the EU’s begging bowl
The demand for a budget increase amid such an abuse of public funds is outrageous, says Boris Johnson
There are decisions in politics that are agonisingly tough. Sometimes you have to wrap a cold towel round your head and try to balance the outcomes. You might even sit down, scratch your chin and write a list of the pros and cons. And sometimes the choice is such a no-brainer that you can’t see how any reasonable person could disagree. That, surely, is the position on the EU budget, and the Commission’s amazing demand for an increase.
When David Cameron goes to the EU summit this week, I have absolutely no doubt that he will veto this package, and not only will he have every sensible person in this country — and in the rest of Europe — cheering him on, he will be right politically, intellectually, morally and on just about every ground that you can imagine. Herman Van Rompuy is asking for an increase in spending by Brussels of between 5 and 6.8 per cent, at a time when the whole of the Community has been enduring cuts in public expenditure.
You will be familiar with what is happening in Greece, where the cataclysmic result of euro membership is that GDP has fallen by 7.2 per cent in one year. Cancer patients are being deprived of drugs; the suicide rate has soared; youth unemployment is stratospheric and much of downtown Athens looks like a war zone after repeated rioting against the “austerity” measures demanded by this very same EU Commission. To a greater or lesser extent, the symptoms of the euro tragedy can now be seen not just in the Mediterranean countries, but even in Germany, where the collapse of export markets in the euro-Zollverein is starting to affect the output of the EU’s most powerful economy.
Here in Britain — the second biggest net contributor to the EU budget — we face continuing pressure on spending of all kinds. Welfare is being capped; we face difficult but necessary reforms of health care; and across the country there will be essential reforms to police and fire services. We have just seen cuts to school sports programmes — which you might have thought were an essential element of a sporting legacy from the 2012 Olympics — and this is the moment when the Commission seriously thinks it can come to the British taxpayer and ask for billions more in subsidy. My message to M Van Rompuy is donnez moi un break, mate.
The people in Brussels must have been out of their tiny minds. It is like giving heroin to an addict. It is like handing an ice cream to the fattest boy in the class, while the rest of the kids are on starvation diets — and then asking them to pay for his treat.
This is a budget so riddled with fraud and malpractice that in 18 years it has never been given a clean bill of health by the European Court of Auditors. Bear in mind, moreover, that this Court is itself an EU institution, with nothing like the resources it needs to invigilate the local politicians, farmers, business people and all-purpose crooks who are in receipt of funding from us all.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/petermullen/100190323/finally-the-bbcs-pro-palestinian-propaganda-machine-has-swung-into-action/
The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal.
The BBC has been slipping up recently. No – I don’t mean to refer to unpleasant recollections of Savilegate and McAlpinegate. Let us just leave them conveniently on the Corporation’s CV. Instead I am wondering why it took the BBC so long to get into its full propaganda mode in its reporting of the war between Israel and Hamas. I don’t say there was ever anything distantly approaching even-handedness. You never get that with an ideological pressure group as committed to its own unassailable self-righteousness as the BBC. But at least for the first few days of the war there was the pretence of objectivity.
But true colours will inevitably show themselves and, sure enough, over the weekend the Corporation began to screen its horrific and heart-breaking accounts (with pictures, of course) of the Gazan children slaughtered by the nasty Israelis. What is never explained – because propaganda aims not to explain but to seduce – is the fact that Hamas stores its rockets and high explosives in schools and hospitals, and those leaders who are not so far up the pay scale that they are allotted their personal bunkers are obliged to live in their own houses with their families. And even the most meticulously targeted airstrike cannot distinguish between a terrorist and his three-year-old son when they are sitting in the same front room.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Once upon a time it was the objective of the military to win wars. Now the objective of the military is to avoid incidents.
An incident happens when civilians are killed, prisoners mistreated or some other event that is photographed, videotaped and then flashed around the world. This results in an Incident, capital I, that triggers much artificial soul-searching by the media which spends the next two years beating the incident to death and flogging its corpse across television programs, newspaper articles, books, documentaries and finally, if it’s a big enough incident, a real life movie version that is based on the book, which was based on the article, where the idealistic reporter/lawyer/activist who uncovered the truth about the incident will be played by Matt Damon or George Clooney.
The main objective of the military in most civilized countries is to prevent this chain of articles, programs, books, documentaries, dramatized plays and Matt Damon movies from coming about by making sure that no Incident can ever happen. And the best way to do that is by not fighting. And if the enemy insists on fighting, then he must be fought with razor sharp precision so that no collateral damage takes place. And if someone must die, it had better be our own soldiers, rather than anyone on the other side whose death might be used as an Incident.
Incidentism isn’t derived from a fear of Matt Damon movies, but from the perception that wars are not won on the battlefield, but in the minds of men. And that perception has a good deal to do with the kind of wars we choose to fight.
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/11/19/say-no-to-susan Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, is reportedly being considered as a possible replacement for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is believed to be leaving soon to spend more time with Bill (i.e., to start her 2016 presidential campaign). Because of Rice’s central role in the Obama administration’s attempt to […]
BRIDGET JOHNSON: JOHN McCAIN’S LOONY IDEA: “HAND MIDEAST CRISIS TO BILL CLINTON”….PULEEZ!!! SEE NOTE
BILL CLINTON? YOU MEAN THE ONE WHO AS PRESIDENT HAD YASSER ARAFAT OVER TO THE WHITE HOUSE MORE TIMES THAN ANY OTHER FOREIGN “OFFICIAL”?….THE ONE WHO COULD HAVE NABBED BIN LADEN IN KHARTOUM BUT DID NOT?….THE ONE WHO IGNORED THE BOMBING OF THE COLE? WHO BOMBED SERBIA INDISCRIMINATELY WHEN MILOSEVIC HAD ALREADY PACKED HIS BAGS? WHO SPOKE ADMIRINGLY OF IRAN’S “ELECTIONS”????? McCAIN IS AN ASS AND CLINTON SHOULD FADE INTO HISTORY….RSK
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/11/18/mccain-recommendation-hand-the-mideast-crisis-from-obama-to-bill-clinton/?print=1
He was summoned to save President Obama’s re-election campaign, and now Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has suggested summoning Bill Clinton to step into Obama’s shoes to salvage any hope of peace in the Middle East.
“Remember, the president’s first priority in 2009 was the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Obviously, there was no progress there. And there are various reasons for it. We won’t waste the time,” McCain said this morning on CBS’ Face the Nation.
“I would find someone even as high-ranking, frankly, as former President Bill Clinton to go and be the negotiator,” he said. “I know he’d hate me for saying that, but we need a person of enormous prestige and influence to have these parties sit down together as an honest broker. But we have a lot of work to do to regain some credibility because we’re crumbling all over the Middle East.”
McCain noted that al-Qaeda is “on the comeback” with new footholds in Mali and western Iraq, Kurds and Iraqis are fighting, and Iran barrels toward nuclear weapons capability.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/11/18/state-dept-official-to-attend-oic-meeting-today-on-banning-defamation-of-islam/?print=1 After the disaster of trying to blame an obscure YouTube video for the attack on the CIA operation in Benghazi and Obama’s prophecy at the UN that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” Hillary Clinton’s State Department appears to be taking another run at the First Amendment […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/hamas_renews_its_annihilationist_jihad.html Tuesday, 11/13/12, after participating in a remarkable conference on the Benghazi debacle in Washington, D.C., I was privileged to brief Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), his staff, and other interested parties, highlighting salient points from my recently published book, Sharia Versus Freedom. This briefing took place against the backdrop of ongoing rocket fire by jihad […]
Click here: Stand With Israel Rally – Maggie’s Farm
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/21014-Stand-With-Israel-Rally.html
Stand With Israel Rally
About 1500 Jews and Christians attended a rally today in San Diego to Stand With Israel.
A group of about 25 pro-Palestinians showed up and tried to interfere with their vile chants of hate through a loudspeaker. The leader of the chants read them off a phone. When the leader stopped for a moment their crowd stopped, like the puppets they are. — As I and my family were leaving, a guy shouted his curses in my ear. I flipped him off and told him to come on and try me. He backed off as I called him a “xxxxx” (begins with f and ends with t). Pro-Pal punks.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/is-rush-limbaughs-country-gone/?hp&pagewanted=print
The morning after the re-election of President Obama, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners:
I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.
The conservative talk show host, who had been an upbeat, if initially doubtful, Romney supporter throughout the campaign, was on a post-election downer:
In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America. In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated.
Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it – that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” – as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent.
You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, for example, annually calculates an “Index of Dependence on Government,” which grows every year:
Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trends-higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs-that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.
William Bennett, conservative stalwart, television commentator and former secretary of education under President Reagan, complained on the CNN website that Democrats have been successful in setting
the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue as predominantly about gender, race, ethnicity and class. This is the paradigm, the template through which many Americans, probably a majority, more or less view the world, our country, and the election. It is a divisive strategy and Democrats have targeted and exploited those divides. How else can we explain that more young people now favor socialism to capitalism?
In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:
