http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/gaffney020613.php3 On her way out the door, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the unspeakable, literally. Until last month, when she repeatedly warned in congressional testimony concerning the Benghazi debacle that we confront a “global jihadist threat,” the Obama administration did not allow the use of the words jihad and threat in the […]
Why is the GOP dividing itself alike an amoeba into weaker and less viable sections? My friend Daniel Greenfield sums this up today:
“First, they will nuke their own grassroots by raising money to attack deviant Tea Party candidates and protect true conservatives who support amnesty, tax shelters and tax hikes. Considering that the Tea Party was responsible for the first Republican victories since 2004, spending money going after it is bound to attract voters and improve prospects for more victories in 2014.”
Why recycle bores and losers? Granted there were some real flops but so what?There is so much talent out there in the GOP…..check out the governors and check out some stellar people in Congress….Jeb Hensarling from Texas, Paul Ryan (yes!! Paul Ryan), Chris Gibson in NY, Sem Ted Cruz in Texas…. and I am just listing a handful.
Did you ever meet Rob Astorino the Westchester County Executive? I did and he is a super star with ambitions for higher office….stay tuned.
The worst thing the GOP can do now is to recycle the old guard.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3384
Taking moral relativism to immoral heights
As soon as the findings of a three-year study on Palestinian and Israeli textbooks were released on Monday, it became clear why the powers that be in Ramallah were as pleased as punch. In one fell swoop, decades’ worth of proof that Palestinian children are taught to deny the existence of the State of Israel and to commit jihad against the Jews was erased.
The study was initiated by the Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and conducted by political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, director and cofounder of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University, and professor of psychiatry Bruce Wexler of Yale University.
Given the title of the study (“Victims of our own narratives?”), one need not have waited three years to read the conclusions of the “experts” whose goal is achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians through education. Indeed, as its name suggests, the study finds that, while neither Israel nor the Palestinians are guilty of “dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other,” each side presents “the other as a violent enemy bent on destroying or dominating the self-community …”
One example of the latter is that Israeli textbooks depict Palestinians “negatively” by linking them to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (How this particular piece of history could be portrayed otherwise without rewriting it is beyond me.)
It is no wonder, then, that the Israeli Education Ministry decided not to cooperate in the study at its outset and now denounces its outcome. Just like the infamous 2009 Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Israeli government realized that this was going to be yet another “balanced” document equating the democratic Jewish state with its hostile counterparts.
Nor is it entirely surprising, as was reported in the Jerusalem Post, that many members of the Scientific Advisory Panel set up to review the study, and the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, say they were not shown final drafts of the document prior to the press conference announcing its release.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/oldest-republican-club-in-the-nation-to-honor-pamela-geller?f=puball The Queens Village Republican Club, will be honoring Pamela Geller as the “American Patriot of the Year” at its 138th Anniversary Lincoln Dinner on February 10th. Ms. Geller is an author, investigative journalist, activist, captivating speaker and founder, editor and publisher of Atlas Shruggs.com a breaking news blog, and executive director of American Freedom […]
http://jcpa.org/two-years-of-the-arab-spring-reflections-about-democracy-in-the-arab-world/
During a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and several American senators, Rabin was asked how he could envisage signing a peace agreement with Arab regimes that did not profess democracy, but rather acted as oppressors of their own people. Rabin responded: “If we have to wait till democracy prevails in the Arab countries, then Israel will have to wait for a hundred years at least.”
Since its very first days, Israel has been surrounded by authoritarian regimes where there is no freedom of speech, no personal freedom, or freedom of any kind. The citizens of the surrounding countries live in a world where many things are forbidden, where they must guess what is acceptable and suitable in order to survive. Instead of speaking their mind, they let their rulers hear what they want to hear and kept the truth to themselves, deep inside.
In the years following the end of Western colonialism, the Arab world was divided into monarchies and dictatorial regimes based on sectarian divisions, with the sole exception of Lebanon as a sectarian republic. In a later phase, the Arab world lost some of its monarchies to military juntas and dictatorships that further deepened the sense of lack of individual freedoms. This process did not spare other Arab regimes where military rebellions alternated with civilian regimes.
In any case, the result was the same: the core of the Arab world was ruled by the military, whereas the rest were ruled by hereditary monarchies supposedly chosen by Allah. In either option, the concept of Western democracy was never implemented since it could never be accepted by Arab rulers and was a concept foreign to Islamic tradition. The closest concept to Western democracy in Islam is the Shura institution, which is a sort of advisory board with no real powers, since authority is vested in the ruler himself. The adoption of Western institutions such as parliaments only mimicked the West, while in fact the authority and power to decide remained in the hands of the ruling junta.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islamist-spring-christian-winter?f=puball Nina Shea and Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom spoke at Washington, DC’s Institute of World Politics on January 28 at “The Rise of Islamists: Challenges to Egypt’s Copts.” The pair described a bleak future for Christians in Tadros’ native Egypt and the wider Middle East under an aggressive and […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-economy-is-a-lot-worse-than-you-think Most Americans know the economy is in bad shape even if a majority voted to reelect the man most responsible for making a bad economy worse. And, no, it was not George W. Bush who is responsible for the 2008 financial crash. It was the government with its housing programs that encouraged giving mortgage […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578260023200841756.html?mod=hp_opinion
JFK’s dream of replacing state mental hospitals with community mental-health centers is now a hugely expensive nightmare.
On Feb. 5, 1963, 50 years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress on “Mental Illness and Mental Retardation.” He proposed a new program under which the federal government would fund community mental-health centers, or CMHCs, to take the place of state mental hospitals. As Kennedy envisioned it, “reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolations will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability.”
President Kennedy’s proposal was historic because the public care of mentally ill individuals had been exclusively a state responsibility for more than a century. The federal initiative encouraged the closing of state hospitals and aborted the development of state-funded outpatient clinics in process at that time.
Over the following 17 years, the feds funded 789 CMHCs with a total of $2.7 billion ($20.3 billion in today’s dollars). During those same years, the number of patients in state mental hospitals fell by three quarters—to 132,164 from 504,604—and those beds were closed down.
From the beginning, it was clear that CMHCs were not interested in taking care of the patients being discharged from the state hospitals. Instead, they focused on individuals with less severe problems sometimes called “the worried well.” Federal studies reported individuals discharged from state hospitals initially made up between 4% and 7% of the CMHCs patient load, and the longer the CMHC was in existence the lower this percentage became.
It has now become politically correct to claim that this federal program failed because not enough centers were funded and not enough money was spent. In fact, it failed because it did not provide care for the sickest patients released from the state hospitals. When President Ronald Reagan finally block-granted federal CMHC funds to the states in 1981, he was not killing the program. He was disposing of the corpse.
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/israel-isnt-isolated-7989
“While there is no doubt that Europe, the Obama Administration, and the mainstream media have an ingrained indisposition towards Israeli settlement construction, Israel’s international diplomatic, military, and economic standing in the world have only been strengthened over the past two decades. Perhaps this conundrum is best exemplified by the July 2012 visit to Israel of José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who, in the same speech in which he expressed concern over continued settlement building, said it best [23]: “a continent such as Europe, that invests heavily in innovation, needs to have close links with a ‘start-up nation’, like Israel.”
Following the reaction to Israel’s bevy of construction announcements late last year, one would assume that Israel’s right-wing, settlement-crazed government had, once more, managed to thumb its nose at the world and deepen Israel’s already-perilous pariah position. It had just received international support during Operation Pillar of Defense and the Obama administration’s backing in opposing the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. Yet Israel not only announced construction in East Jerusalem and the large settlement blocks, but also advanced zoning plans in E-1, a barren, 4.6 square mile area that connects Jerusalem to Maale Adumim.
Condemnation was instant and global. Israeli ambassadors were upbraided across Europe. The Swedish Foreign Minister went so far as to say that [3] “what the Israelis did on E1 has shifted opinions in Europe,” while the Obama administration said the construction would be “damaging” to a two-state solution and that it shared the same sentiment as its European allies, which had condemned Israel vociferously. Meanwhile, Time magazine dubbed [4] 2012 “The Year of the Israeli Settlement” and the New York Times called [5] Netanyahu’s plans “disturbing,” saying that it furthered Israel’s isolation.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2650/success_in_politics_a_view_from_the_right
What should be obvious is that, leading up to the elections for Israel’s 19th Knesset, the majority of the public identified with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to present Israel’s legitimate case before the world. They supported his moves in Jerusalem and tolerated, to a large extent, Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.
In poll after poll over the last two decades, we see a dichotomy: Israelis desire peace very much and are willing to offer much to obtain it, but they do not believe that a peace agreement is achievable and they believe even less that the Arabs would preserve that peace.
Confident in Netanyahu’s handling of Israel’s external threats, Israeli voters felt able to vote based on their lack of confidence in their day-to-day lives. Thinking Netanyahu was already confirmed as Prime Minister, some voters presumed they had a virtual ‘double-ticket’ and sought out someone else.
The voters were dissatisfied with his domestic social programs, or lack thereof, not his foreign and security policies. They were convinced by promises of cheaper housing, less expensive utilities and a fair share of the burden of military service, and, drawn by their desire to be ‘the middle class’, some abandoned the Likud.
Israel’s voters have a history of searching for a secular saviour outside the usual party groupings. In 1977, the Dash Movement for Change obtained 15 seats. In 1999, there was the Center Party with six. In 2003, Yair Lapid’s father, Tommy, broke out with 15 seats for Shinui. In the end, they all dissipated, either disappearing or merging into other frameworks.
